Cat, Deputy Editor

Applesauce season has finally come, but for siblings Faith and Peter, it’s a bittersweet arrival. It’s the first year they’ll harvest the apples without their Aunt Lucy, who planted the apple tree when she was a little girl. They’re not even sure Uncle Arthur will come at all, and when he does, he’s lost the twinkle in his eye.

Gentle Faith and clever Peter are here to help, and slowly Uncle Arthur—who can tell a great story better than anyone—finds his twinkle. Throughout Applesauce Weather, the three characters remember Aunt Lucy, in particular reflecting on the love story of Lucy and Arthur. (Are these tales fact or fiction? The kids may never know!)

In this charming novel-in-verse, it becomes clear that young and old understand each other much better than they realize.

What inspired you to write Applesauce Weather?
My grandmother grew up on Prince Edward Island and moved to Minneapolis with a group of friends and relatives. Among this group was a couple who never had children of their own, but were beloved by the children and grandchildren of others in the group. We called them Uncle Arthur and Aunt Lucy, though they were not blood relatives. Uncle Arthur was missing a finger and would never give us a straight answer about what had happened. That was the seed of the story, and for many years I tried to write it as a picture book. But as many editors told me, it was not a picture book.

After letting it sit for awhile, I decided to try rewriting it as a novel-in-verse for children a little older than “picture book age.” This opened up many possibilities, including what became so central to the story—the intergenerational love of the family, focused on their missing Aunt Lucy.

Several voices contribute to this story. Which came first? Which spoke loudest to you? Which was hardest to write?
At first it was Faith, then Uncle Arthur, the two of them back and forth together, telling the story. Then Peter’s voice came in, expressing the skepticism that balances Faith’s eager-to-believe delight in life.

As I wrote, the voices seemed well-balanced, none speaking more loudly than the others, and each of them actually quite easy to write, which is not usually true for me. Uncle Arthur’s grief paralleled a grief of my own at the time I was writing, and that was hard in a way, but also comforting, as he could ask some of the questions I wasn’t quite ready to ask myself.

Not all children grow up on a farm, but this book has great reverence for a child’s relationship with growing things (from Aunt Lucy all the way to Faith). What are some ways kids can forge this relationship with the earth, even if they’re not growing up on a farm?
Whether in a small garden, a window box or an old boot filled with dirt, children can plant seeds and watch them grow. If they live in a city, they can pay attention to what’s going on in the parks or curbside plants. Schools can often find a patch of earth for a garden, in which students can grow food they enjoy eating or perhaps sunflowers to fill birdfeeders, or milkweed and parsley to attract butterflies.

Children everywhere can be encouraged to know where their food comes from, and what the growing season is for the food they eat.

“When we are grieving, nothing is more comforting than to know that our love is shared and our loved ones are remembered.”

When a family member is grieving, what are some ways a child can feel like they’re helping?
I love this question. Children can help in a very particular way because they are the ones who will carry memory farthest into the future. When we are grieving, nothing is more comforting than to know that our love is shared and our loved ones are remembered. So children can say, I’ll never forget how she . . . or Remember when we. . . . In Applesauce Weather, this kind of remembering happens naturally through the things the family does together, more than through words.

While we feel Aunt Lucy’s absence, her voice is so powerful through her songs and her apple-tree traditions that she feels both missing and present, all at once. What do you hope young readers will learn about love and loss from Aunt Lucy’s voice?
Exactly what you are describing here—that a loved one can be present, even in absence, through the things we love and remember about them. In missing them, we hold our loved ones close and in that way we keep them alive for one another.

What do you think is the key to talking to young people about death and grief?
As Lucille Clifton so beautifully reassures us at the end of Everett Anderson’s Goodbye: “…love doesn’t stop, and neither will I.”

Did you grow up celebrating the arrival of applesauce weather? What other traditions did you have as a child that you looked forward to with as much anticipation as Faith?
When I was Faith’s age, I lived in a small town in the Midwest, and watched the seasons change in many ways that are still part of my life. Certain fruits ripen at the same times: blackberries and apples, blueberries and peaches, strawberries and rhubarb. Applesauce weather follows shortly after blueberry-and-peach jam weather, which follows strawberry-rhubarb cobbler weather, which follows maple-syrup weather, which alerts us to the end of winter, much as ripening apples signal the end of summer.

Perhaps I should add that not all my memories are about food. For example, when I was a child, we lived in a big house with no air conditioning, and it was quite a project to change the storm windows for screen windows every spring, and then back again in the fall. I always looked forward to those days, even though they were a lot of work. Another memory: My father was a basketball coach, and my sisters and I loved going with him to put posters of the basketball schedule in all the small towns.

So many ways of marking the changing seasons.

What do you love most about writing for children?
It’s different for each book. In this book, I love bringing memories from my childhood into a new time and place and seeing how they emerge as a story for today’s children to enjoy. It’s a way of expressing several loves at once—for poetry, for story, for people I miss and for children.

It will be fun to share this book with children. I’m sure I will be asked, “What really happened?” To which I will invite, with a twinkle in my eye, “You tell me and we’ll both know.”

Author photo credit Chad Thompson.

We spoke with Printz Honor-winning author Helen Frost about her tender, profound novel for young readers.

Children's & YA, Picture Book

Children's & YA Picture Book

Mac Barnett and Adam Rex made a book about making a book

Interview by Cat, Deputy Editor

by Cat, Deputy Editor

From the creative process to production, Mac Barnett and Adam Rex follow a book’s preposterous and hilarious journey—but at the end, what really makes a book is that moment when a reader dives in. We spoke with Barnett and Rex about this laugh-out-loud, wholly original book.

What inspired this book?
Mac Barnett: The first time I was on a book tour—and this was with Adam, actually, for our book Guess Again!—a kid asked me how a book was made. There was a big whiteboard behind me, and I started diagramming the process. I’m not really interested in straight answers or nonfiction, and so the story pretty quickly went off the rails—pirates, beards, crying. (The tears, though, they were nonfiction.) Over the years, the demonstration became something I did again and again. One day a girl raised her hand afterward and told me that I should make that story, the story of how a book is made, into a book. And guess what: That girl grew up to be Lena Dunham.

Adam Rex: She’s great.

What is your favorite part of the book-making process? What is the most mysterious part?
MB: My favorite part is when the illustrations are all done, and I can see how the thing actually works as a book. The most mysterious part is what’s taking Adam so long to make all those illustrations?

AR: I actually feel pretty bad about how long I keep people waiting. It’s not uncommon for picture book illustrators to be booked a couple years in advance. And then the actual art takes me three or four months, which I think also surprises people—I once asked my twitter followers how long they thought a single average page of a picture book took to illustrate, and everyone who wasn’t an illustrator guessed too low. One person guessed “an hour,” which in my case is only off by about 20 or 30 hours.

But my favorite part of that process is probably when I break a manuscript into pages and start thumbnailing out a plan for the whole thing. Tiny sketches so messy and impressionistic that I can still see in them the promise that this book will be the best thing I’ve done or will ever do.

Do you ever play tricks on each other during the book-making process?
AR: Well, as I alluded to in my last answer, I did agree to illustrate Mac’s manuscript and then proceeded to not do anything for three years. It was like a doorbell ditch.

What do you think of the book’s portrayal of you?
MB: I’m much less self-impressed than the way I write myself, and much more handsome than the way Adam draws me.

AR: The portrayal of me is more or less accurate.
Why is the book printed in Malaysia?
MB: Globalism.

Once the book goes to print, that’s when things really take off, with pirates and astronauts and eagles and more. Why does the fantasy ramp up at this point in the book?
MB: Well, I arm wrestle a tiger on page two, so I might dispute the premise of this question.

What are you most excited about for young readers to discover about your new book?
MB: If you read the book backwards, it reveals the location of a buried treasure (Adam’s backyard). Get digging, kids!

AR: WE TALKED ABOUT THIS AND I SAID NO.

Is it possible to go any deeper? Dare to discover even more secrets about the making of a book? Check out the making of How This Book Was Made in the book trailer:

Sketches and interior illustrations copyright © Adam Rex, used with permission from Adam Rex.
Barnett author photo credit Sonya Sones.

Mac Barnett and Adam Rex expose the greatest mystery of the universe with their latest picture book, How This Book Was Made.

Science Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, YA, YA Fiction

Science Fiction & Fantasy YA Fiction YA Science Fiction

Sharon Cameron: Memories run deep, truth runs deeper

Interview by Cat, Deputy Editor

by Cat, Deputy Editor

Just prior to The Forgetting book launch event at Parnassus Books in Nashville, we spoke with author Sharon Cameron about her thrilling new sci-fi adventure, its questions of memory and truth, and what it’s like to belong somewhere you never expected.

First of all, I have to say that I loved this book and am still thinking about it. And I felt like my writer’s review sounded like he was thinking about it long after finishing the book as well.
I personally love books that make me think, so I naturally gravitate toward writing a book like that, one that’s going to make someone think and make me think. I had a really funny review on Goodreads, where someone had given me a five-star review that said, “This book really made me think, and I liked it anyway.” I was like, “Yes!”

Amazing. Reluctant thinking. You’re going to sit down, think about it, and you’re going to like it.
That’s right. (laughing)

What was your inspiration for The Forgetting?
There’s not one [inspiration], but I think the main one is that I do think a lot about the past. History is absolutely my thing. I am very into genealogy and heritage, and that’s how I started writing. I wrote my very first novel about the family history that I had been researching. I love getting into the basement of a courthouse, and all the dusty records—all that stuff makes me really happy.

I think the past is something I have spent a lot of time thinking about, not only what is different about the past but what’s the same, and what links us to the past. It occurred to me at some point that what really links us to the past is memory, and there’s so much we’ve forgotten. There was so much in my family history that were incredible stories that had been completely forgotten. It’s almost like that erases it out of existence until you know it again. . . . When I was thinking about all the things that the world had forgotten, it made me think about people who have actually really forgotten everything, and how much of our identity is wrapped up in those memories, and how much of our experience makes us who we are, and remembering those experiences makes us who we are. That’s where it blossomed out from, and I started thinking, what would a group of people do if they did not have their identity, if they had no history, if they were going to lose it again?

This makes me think of an interview with Billy Collins we just did—it’ll be in the October issue of BookPage—where he talks about humans’ ability to dwell in the past, how we find pleasure in nostalgia. It’s OK to indulge in our memories sometimes.
I don’t think you have to be defined by them, either. I think it’s great to know and understand what those things are, but you don’t have to be defined by them.

When you’re reading The Forgetting, it’s inevitable that you consider your own potential loss of memories. It’s what I was thinking about the whole time while reading it. In the vein of, if your house is on fire and you have one suitcase to take with you, if you faced the Forgetting, what would be your suitcase of memories if you were allowed to choose what not to lose?
That is such a hard question, because how can you choose? (laughs) I’m going to think beyond the obvious, which is your family and your emotional ties. That was something with the book that I gave a lot of thought to, how much of our emotions are tied up in our memories. If those are gone, a lot of those emotional ties are cut. Whether they would be there or not be there in some deep way was a question that I explored. So I’m going to skip over all of that, because that’s obvious. You don’t want the trauma of losing your emotional ties.

I would not want to forget the first time I read The Lord of the Rings. I would never want to forget that! That was so magical to me, and that was a real eye-opening experience. I was probably 11 when I read that and already a reader, but I think that book really showed me how you can be transported and how your imagination can take you to a whole other place. I would not give up that experience. Actually, I keep trying to relive it by rereading it. (laughs)

I would not give up a lot of what I know about my heritage. I would not give up knowing where I came from, the good parts and the bad parts.

I would not want to give up my first trip to Scotland. I think Scotland is probably my spiritual home and I love it there very, very much. It was almost, I felt very connected to that place in a really deep way. I would not give up my memories of that, I don’t think.

I think those are some good ones, right?

This is completely off-topic, but I’m fascinated by the idea of places where you “have” to go, places that you call your “spiritual home,” like Scotland for you. I was just talking to a painter whose “place” was Uganda, and she keeps going back there. What do you think that is? Where do you think that comes from, that draw to a certain place?
I think it’s DNA, personally. I think that there’s a lot—and I don’t want to say too much because I’m writing another book about this—I think there’s a lot that we remember almost chemically, through our DNA. There’s been a lot of research on this lately, and a lot of stories have been coming out about how memories can be passed down. That’s what instinct is, that’s why we have phobias of certain things. We’re naturally afraid of a spider—these are memories that are being chemically passed down through your DNA. I think there can be a place memory. I really do. I just think it must be true. There’s some place memory where you are drawn. . . .

I tend to be a very logical, practical person, and I don’t know how that’s true, but I still believe it. I had the experience of stepping onto a piece of ground and just feeling like my feet sank a foot into the soil. I felt like roots grew. This is my spot. It was very strange, and it was the whole reason I started writing my first book, which was about Scotland and isn’t published.

Do you think it ever will be?
Yeah, I do. And I’m so glad, actually, that it’s not published. I was still learning then and I had no ambitions to be a writer at that time. I was learning at that point, but that story is so meaningful to me, and I can do it so much better now. I got an agent based on that book. It’s how I completely started, but we ended up going another direction first. I’ll go back to it.

Actually, my husband did DNA tests—there’s all kinds of Scottish surname projects where people connect through DNA—and he actually turned out to be directly descended from all the characters in my book. It was crazy. . . . I feel like I was meant to to do it, even though I didn’t know for many years.

Going back to The Forgetting, you’re toying with the notion of truth, how what you believe to be the truth can be twisted as much as memory. What do you hope young readers will take away from the book?
Your truth really can’t be twisted. It is what it is. That doesn’t mean that a person can’t develop and change and reinterpret their life. It doesn’t mean, again, that you have to be define by those things. But I think [it’s necessary to accept] things that are just true about yourself: These are my faults, these are the things I’m good at, this is where I came from, this is where I didn’t come from. I think happy people are the ones who have made peace with those truths and acknowledged them, and learned to use them and live with them.

What do you most enjoy about creating new worlds like this one for adults?
My other books have been very historically based. I really like that because I’m a history person, and I love the groundedness of that, of being able to go, “Yes! People acted like that.” But this book was much more of a branching out for me. It could really be anything, and I was very surprised at how freeing that was, that I could really make anything be that I wanted to be. If the sun didn’t need to set for 80 days, it could be 80. If I needed the sun to set in 70 days, it could be 70. I could really make it be what I wanted it to be, and that was actually really fun. It gave me lots of scope.

Do you think you’ll continue with this style?
I don’t think I’ve ever done anything that’s completely the same, yet. I would never say that I’m not going to do something. I like not being limited.

The book that I’m writing right now is a companion to The Forgetting. It’s not a sequel, but it’s the same world, different time period, different characters, sort of opposite questions.

What’s something your readers might be surprised to know about your writing process?
I’ll tell you what I was most surprised to discover about my writing process, and that is that I never know what I’m doing. (laughs) I never have the feeling that I actually know what I’m doing or anything that I’m writing is any good. When I first started to write, I viewed published authors—and I’m sure other people feel this exact same way—as, And I figured that I would get two or three books out, and I would have this confidence of, Oh, yeah, I know how to write a book. I’ve never felt like I knew what I was doing at all. I’m always so surprised when it turns out well. (laughs)

This book had a very short deadline, so I was really having to write quickly. I’ve never had to push myself quite that hard to write quickly, and I was consumed with self-doubt on this book. I didn’t know if I could do it. Be fast and be brilliant! No pressure. I saw Margaret Peterson Haddix when she was here. She’s a friend, and we were having dinner together. I was telling her these things, and she said, “Well, I have 20-something books out”—I can’t even remember the number she used, and she said, “I never know if I can write a book or not.” It made it alright, and it gave me the confidence to doubt what I’m doing and keep going.

As a local author, what’s your favorite literary event in Nashville?
I’ll give you two things. My very favorite thing that goes on for writers and anyone who loves kid lit is SCBWI’s conference, which is happening next weekend. . . . That is the most fabulous group of people—supporting writers, supporting people who love books. They are vibrant and amazing and my best friends in the world, and I love to spend a weekend with them. There is nothing more rejuvenating and wonderful that spending a weekend with the SCBWI Midsouth people. I get to give a keynote this year, and I’m super excited because I went to that conference for the first time 10 years ago. I had written one chapter and had never written anything before in my life. What I knew was zero! I went into that place, and I came out thinking, Yes, I can do it. I can absolutely do this. It’s a very special thing for me.

And who cannot love the Southern Festival of Books? That’s also a thing of beauty and wonder!

Questions and answers have been edited for length.

Children's & YA, Middle Grade

Children's & YA Middle Grade

Booki Vivat

Interview by Cat, Deputy Editor

by Cat, Deputy Editor

Reluctant middle schoolers, meet Abbie Wu. Not only is she dreading middle school, but she’s also a middle child, which means she really knows how much it stinks to be stuck in the Middles. But as she bemoans her situation and gripes about each day, her friends begin to find their own passions and hobbies. Will our neurotic young hero find her “Thing”? It turns out that Abbie has far more talents than just being Frazzled.

We spoke with publishing veteran and author Booki Vivat about the Middles, impending doom and more.

How much of worrywart Abbie Wu was inspired by your own middle school self?
Abbie is very much a reflection of who I was when I was young and, to some extent, who I am now. Although our circumstances may be different, our worries still stem from the same place. Who am I? Where do I belong? What is my Thing?

It’s been a long time since I’ve been in middle school, but I think that frazzled kid will always be a part of me. There’s just something about middle school that sticks with you—for better or worse. It almost feels inevitable that so many aspects of Abbie’s story are rooted in my own personal experiences. As I was writing, I felt like I was both excavating my past for inspiration and working through my own unresolved feelings about growing up.

Did you face the same pressure to define yourself at such a young age?
The pressure to define yourself often extends far beyond middle school, but for me, it certainly started there. Middle school was when everything shifted. All of the sudden, I was expected to know who I wanted to be and what I was going to do with my life—but I didn’t know what I was doing in the present, let alone what I wanted my future to look like. The worst part was that it seemed like everyone had it figured out but me. Sometimes I feel that way now, even as an adult!

What is the most frustrating part of being in middle school? Of being a middle child?
To quote Abbie Wu herself, “The worst part about middle school is the fact that it is MIDDLE school.” There’s nothing quite so frustrating as “The Middles,” the in-between places and the gray areas of growing up. Middle school embodies this confusing transition period between childhood and adulthood. How someone actually gets from one to the other is kind of unknown, and there’s so much fear associated with the unknown—especially for kids! It’s something that is out of their control and impossible to fully prepare for, but also completely unavoidable.

Being a middle child has a different set of frustrations. Growing up, I was technically the oldest, but I spent a lot of time around our older cousin, so I still identify with a lot of those middle child feelings of being overlooked and underappreciated. Being a middle kid, there’s sometimes this idea that you need to prove you belong, to work harder and do better in order to be seen. Part of Abbie’s journey in this book is realizing that, even though she’s worried about middle school, she can still survive and find a place there. She has the power to carve out a space in the Middles that is her own.

What is there to look forward to?
Though it is undeniably intimidating and scary, middle school often marks a shift towards independence and access to more opportunities than ever before. For me, it was the first time I felt like I was making significant decisions about what I wanted in life, rather than just allowing teachers or parents to choose for me. Middle school is one of the first stages in growing up where kids can begin to really express their opinions and distinguish themselves as individuals. That comes with a lot of pressure, but there’s also an exciting element to it.

Do you cope with your worries by doodling? How did they help shape this book?
I started keeping a planner a few years ago to get my life in order, but over time, doodles of my feelings and emotions took over every page! My planner became more of a creative outlet and visual record of my life. Drawing became a way, not just to remember, but also to work through my experiences and emotions.

The idea for Frazzled actually came from a very dramatic personal doodle I drew that said: “I live my life in a constant state of impending doom.” I didn’t know it at the time, but that drawing was the beginning of Abbie Wu. I started writing about this hilariously dramatic kid who always felt like she was living on the brink of impending doom—just like me. Because the idea for Frazzled came directly out of my doodling, that set the tone for the book and established a foundation for the rest of Abbie’s story to unfold.

What advice do you have for young worriers? How can parents and teachers help ease worriers’ anxieties?
I think it’s important for worriers to know that their feelings and emotions are normal. Everyone worries, and it’s not necessarily bad to worry about things. Abbie has a lot of fears, but one of her biggest is the idea that everyone has things figured out except her. Over the course of the book, she realizes that it’s actually okay not to know what you’re doing or to feel uncertain about doing it—just as long as you don’t let those fears stop you from actually doing things!

As a parent or teacher, I think the best thing to offer is support and encouragement. That can mean anything from nurturing curiosity and creativity as an outlet for expressing these feelings or channeling them into something like a sport or activity. For me, writing and illustrating this book was a way to personally process through my worries. Everyone deals with their fears in different ways. Helping ease a young worrier’s anxiety might not necessarily be about finding a definitive solution, but rather supporting and empowering them to figure out what works best for them.

What’s it like to publish a book after working in publishing for so long?
One of my first thoughts when I saw the finished book was, “Did I really make this?” It’s so surreal to think of people reading this thing that I made, this thing that is so much a part of me. Because I work in publishing, I’m used to seeing other people’s stories at various stages on the journey towards becoming a real book, but it was an entirely new thing for me to experience this for myself. I’m very aware of how much goes into getting a book published, so to now experience that from the other side as an author is really special.

Will there be more episodes for Abbie Wu?
Flannery O’Connor has a great quote that basically says if you’ve survived childhood, you have enough to write about for the rest of your life. Middle school is such a formative time in a person’s life. There are a lot of experiences and emotions to explore with Abbie now that she’s in the thick of it. This is definitely not the last you’ll see of Abbie Wu! She still has a long way to go before she makes it out of middle school.

Author photo credit Kamolpat Trangratapit.

We spoke with Booki Vivat about the Middles, impending doom and more.

Children's & YA, Middle Grade

Children's & YA Middle Grade

Isaiah Campbell

Interview by Cat, Deputy Editor

by Cat, Deputy Editor

In 1944, 11-year-old Max Larousse has been relocated with her mother (and her ferret, Houdini) to Camp Barkeley in Abilene, Texas, where her father is in charge of a Nazi POW camp. Jewish Max, an aspiring magician, is not at all pleased about it, and she’s got the smart mouth to match her attitude. At least she can practice her illusions on the German prisoners—until several escape after her vanishing act grand finale.

Complete with illustrated “Houdini Presents” guides to Max’s magic tricks, AbrakaPOW is a thrilling blend of adventure and history that middle grade readers will gobble up. The best part is that it’s based on a true World War II story. BookPage contacted author Isaiah Campbell to learn more.

What is the true story that inspired this novel?
It all started when I was an 11-year-old magician in west Texas during World War II. Just kidding. I’m not quite that old.

So, when the United States entered the Second World War, it wasn’t very long before the military realized they would need somewhere to keep all the captured soldiers they were collecting, particularly from the warfront in Africa. In 1942, they decided they should open two POW camps inside the United States to house what they estimated would be a max of 3,000 soldiers (they thought they were overestimating, since the war surely wasn’t going to take THAT long, right?). By the end of the war, there were over 500 POW camps inside the U.S., housing 425,000 POWs (well within the original margin of error, right?). One of those camps was Camp Barkeley, located just outside of Abilene, Texas.

At Camp Barkeley, the 800 POWs comprised two factions of German soldiers, the Anti-Nazis and the Black Hand, who (surprise!) were Nazi loyalists. Obviously, the Anti-Nazi prisoners got along much better with the Americans than did the members of the Black Hand, and eventually the hostility between the two groups grew nearly unbearable. This all came to a head in 1944 when 11 members of the Black Hand dug a tunnel using broken dishes stolen from the mess hall and then scrambled to get to Mexico and, from there, back to the war. The FBI came and assisted the Army in hunting down the POWs, and amazingly, all 11 were recaptured within just a few days without a single shot having to be fired. (I can neither confirm nor deny the involvement of any amateur magicians in this process.)

“I enjoy learning about lives and events that I previously had little knowledge of, because it makes me feel like the Indiana Jones of research. I love to uncover forgotten stories and lost lessons. Plus I rock the fedora and bullwhip like a boss.”

What’s the most interesting thing you discovered while researching these events?
What I found the most fascinating was how well the POWs were treated while they were in the states, especially by the average citizen. The POWs were allowed to get jobs working the farms and factories in the communities, and many of them cultivated friendships with the locals around the country. In fact, there are many examples of these relationships that continued long after the war was over. Some of the POWs even immigrated to the United States because their experience was so positive. Way to be a good host, Uncle Sam!

It’s pretty intense for a young Jewish girl to be performing for Nazi POWs. Why did you decide to write this story, and what do you hope young readers will take away from it?
It really is, isn’t it? This was a story that evolved as I wrote it, and the more I found its center, the more I realized just how intense and scary the themes I was exploring really were. One thing that made me feel like this story could work and inspired me to give it all I had was reading about Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, the creators of Captain America. They were both Jewish Americans, and when they created Captain America, they did it as an act of opposition both against Nazi Germany and against the anti-war movement in America. Their bravery and courage in using their talents to change the cultural view of the conflict in Europe really altered the trajectory of history in a big way.

It was that idea that became what is truly the core of AbrakaPOW and the pivot point for Max’s motivations. While she initially is looking to fulfill her selfish ambitions, she eventually realizes that she can be both great (the absolute best at stage magic) and good (using her talents to accomplish something for the betterment of those around her). It’s that sort of mindset I hope readers of this book will take from it, that it isn’t enough to be “the greatest,” you should also strive to be the best you can be for those around you.

Maxine is certainly smart-mouthed and pushy, and can even be a grump, but she’s also headstrong and a clever go-getter. What do you love most about Max?
I think my absolute favorite thing about Max (besides her wisdom in adopting Houdini, the greatest ferret the world has ever known) is when we get to see glimpses of her vulnerability. There are a few moments in the story when she’s scared or sad and stops trying to hide it behind a wall of smoke and mirrors. To me, it’s those moments that prove how strong she really is. In a book that’s all about “things are not quite what they seem,” the magic of Max is that she truly is incredibly strong, even when she’s trembling inside.

What insight do the excerpts from her diary provide?
Since I wrote this book in the third-person voice (as opposed to the first-person voice of my Johnny Cannon books), I had to find a way to make sure that we experienced the world through Max’s own eyes and in her own voice. Especially since Max is all about playing things close to the vest, it was really important to establish that additional layer so that she didn’t seem shallow or less than human. The diary gives us glimpses at her private insecurities, her hidden joys and even her opinions that she might not let most people hear. It also helps keep the timeline of the book on track and builds in a bit of a countdown, which heightens the intensity. I hope. Fingers crossed.

What do you love most about writing historical fiction for young readers?
First and foremost, it’s incredibly self-gratifying. I enjoy learning about lives and events that I previously had little knowledge of, because it makes me feel like the Indiana Jones of research. I love to uncover forgotten stories and lost lessons. Plus I rock the fedora and bullwhip like a boss.

When I’m done satisfying my own selfish ambitions, I love to see how my readers digest the stories. It’s awesome when I go to schools, and students are shocked both by the fact that things haven’t always been the way they are and also by the fact that there are some things that have never changed about the world. I like to believe that those moments are seeds which will inspire students to seek change in their world because they finally believe it can happen and also because they are convinced that it should.

You were a young magician like Max, once upon a time. Can you still do any magic tricks?
Oh yes, I have studied the dark arts most of my life and David Copperfield pays me $80,000 a month to keep his secrets safe. Just kidding. I picked up a book of coin tricks when I was around Max’s age and spent every waking moment practicing every trick in the book. That started something for me that never really went away. I read every book of magic tricks and biography of magicians that the Sweetwater Texas Public Library had in its collection. Admittedly, my repertoire is pretty limited to cards and coins, and my skills pale greatly compared to Max, but I do still perform whenever I get a chance. Like if there happens to be a deck of cards sitting out. Or if I have to distract someone when I’m losing an argument.

What are you working on next?
Right now I’m working on several ideas that are a lot of fun. I seem to have been bitten by the World War II bug and I’m discovering that, even with the plethora of stories from that time period that have already been told, there are still plenty of forgotten tales to be mined. So I’m feverishly researching and synopsizing on a couple of novels that, I think, will be pretty exciting.

A young magician gets caught up in little-known Texas history.

YA, YA Fiction

YA Fiction YA

Justine Larbalestier

Interview by Cat, Deputy Editor

by Cat, Deputy Editor

In the latest young adult novel from Justine Larbalestier, 17-year-old Australian Che has just moved with his family to New York City, where he struggles to keep both eyes on his 10-year-old sister, Rosa. He knows what she’s capable of, and her concerning behavior is beginning to increase beyond manipulation and stealing. Through conversations with Rosa, his parents and an incredibly diverse cast of new friends, Che confronts questions of morality, goodness, gender, sexual orientation, religion, his preconceptions as a young white male and so much more. My Sister Rosa is as provocative as it is creepy and entertaining.

BookPage contacted Larbalestier to learn more about this standout YA novel.

What inspired this story?
Tayari Jones did. She’s one of my favorite novelists so I follow her on Twitter. One day she was tweeting about William March’s The Bad Seed, a wonderful novel about a mother who slowly realizes her child is a psychopath. It occurred to me that it would be cool to tell that story from the point of view of an older sibling.

Talk to me about Rosa. Why do you think Che is able to love her unconditionally, while knowing what she’s capable of?
There’s something magical about holding a newborn baby in your arms. Che bonded with Rosa as soon as he held her, and became almost a third parent to her. I’m not sure there’s anything Rosa could do that will truly undo that. I’m pretty sure Che will always love Rosa. I don’t think he likes her though.

However, he is fascinated by her. He wants to be a doctor, and here he is living with a 10-year-old psychopath. She teaches him a lot about how complicated human nature is. He learns how to deal with a psychopath. After all, she does keep her promises to him. It’s just that she tends to find loopholes. . . . Basically, he’s living with a malevolent child lawyer who loves making tricksy interpretations of the rules. I suspect he also can’t help be captivated by how honest she is with him about her own lack of empathy. There’s something intoxicating about being trusted like that. Even if the truths you’re being told are disturbing.

Rosa and Che’s penetrating conversations explore a number of topics, most of which pivot around the definition of morality. How do you explain to someone what it means to be “good”?
It’s tricky to answer that question because it’s one of the central questions of the book. If someone doesn’t believe anyone but them matters, it’s very hard to explain to them why other people are as important as they are. Whether psychopaths can be treated, i.e. taught to be empathetic, is debated by those who study them. Some believe there’s nothing you can do but lock them up, which is hugely problematic for many reasons.

Che (and his parents) grows more and more concerned about violence in his life, and whether that violence is something he can control—or is even aware of. Regarding Che’s violence and Rosa’s cruelty, what do you think is the line between nature and nurture?
There is no line between nature and nurture. When I was researching this book I read a great deal about the current thinking on what causes psychopathy. It seems to be a very complex interaction between environment, brain morphology and genetics. But those aren’t as distinct as you would think. Your environment can affect the structure of your brain. And it turns out your environment can affect your genes, too. The new field of epigenetics is showing us our genes are not as fixed as we thought, in that your environment can affect the expression of genes. The old nature/nuture binary is dead.

Tell us about the writing process for this book. What was the easiest part? The hardest?
Disturbingly writing Rosa’s dialogue was by far the easiest part. If I had written the whole book from her point of view, it would have been a piece of cake. But instead I wrote it from Che’s. I found it very hard to write from the point of view of someone who is that nice, that good, that compassionate. (Not because I’m a terrible person—at least I hope not—but because we readers have been trained to find good people boring and anti-heroes fascinating.)

Che says Rosa has made him cynical, but every time he meets a new person he does, in fact, assume the best of them. It was so hard to write his voice without him being so cloyingly nice he became annoying. It took many, many drafts to get there. He’s the point-of-view character—the whole book is filtered through Che’s gaze—so nothing was working until I got his voice right.

On top of that, there’s a lot Che is oblivious to. Trying to communicate important things Che is unaware of while not having him seem so clueless that readers turn on him was another challenge. I came very close to giving up.

There was no light-bulb moment where I finally figured Che out. I just kept writing and rewriting until I found his voice. I deleted close to 100,000 words in the process. Some books are much harder than others.

Do you ever get creeped out by your own books/characters?
I have some attempts at ghost stories I never finished because I got too scared. I suspect the technical challenges of writing My Sister Rosa, i.e. the fact that finding Che’s voice was so hard, contributed greatly to it not creeping me out.

This book manages to be extremely diverse while starring a white male lead. You explore racism, gender equality and other necessary issues from this point of view of a white male—and it works. Why do you think it works?
I’m not sure that’s a question I can answer. But I’m pleased you think it worked. Thank you! One of the things I’ve been trying to do while writing novels full of the many different kinds of people that are in my worlds is to explore whiteness itself.

In NYC I live in a neighborhood that has folks from all over the world: black, white and brown. You can walk a block and hear 10 different languages. The way people dress is super diverse. No matter what I wear when I go out no one is going to stare at me. Be it a fluorescent ballgown or a bathrobe.

I wanted to show that wide range of being human in My Sister Rosa. I wanted to show why I love my NYC so much. While My Sister Rosa is a creepy thriller about a 10-year-old psychopath, it’s also a love letter to the East Village, the Lower East Side and everyone who lives there.

You’ve written on your blog that you “only write white protagonists” as a way to help with the lack of diversity in YA. It’s a complicated endeavor to write a book about a community not your own, but is the solution to stick to your race? (For you, specifically, as well as more generally.)
Eek! That’s not actually what I’ve been saying. It’s kind of a complicated point, which I’m obviously not making clearly, as you are definitely not the first person to think that.

Let me try again: What I’m saying is that white authors writing PoC and Indigenous characters does not help change the overwhelming whiteness of young adult literature. For many years now white authors have written from the points of view of folks from different cultures and it has changed very little. The problem of lack of diversity extends far beyond the race of the characters in the books. It’s a systemic problem.

For the genre to more accurately reflect the world we live in there has to be more Indigenous authors and more authors of color; more editors, publishers, sales and marketing people, publicists, booksellers, librarians, reviewers etc. Publishing right now is more than 90 percent white, which is why not nearly enough books are published by PoC and Indigenous authors.

We white authors need to buy more books by PoC and Indigenous authors. We need to talk up those books that we love wherever possible. (Love Is the Drug by Alaya Dawn Johnson! Allegedly by Tiffany Jackson! The Tribe series by Ambelin Kwaymullina!) We can also help by blurbing these books and by mentoring and recommending PoC and Indigenous authors to our agents, etc.

In short, the best thing we white authors can do to make YA publishing more inclusive is to give PoC and Indigenous authors the same leg up many of us were given at the beginning of our careers.

As for my personal decision about my own writing, I’ve never said I will only write white protagonists. That would be a lie as my first six novels all have PoC or Indigenous narrators. What I said is that I will write white protagonists when I’m writing a novel from a single point of view, such as My Sister Rosa. (The events of Rosa are told from the point of view of white boy, but many of the other characters are PoC. It’s not a white book set in an all-white world.)

I have other novels I’m working on that have multiple points of view. They all have PoC narrators as well as whites. I don’t live in an all-white world, so I won’t write all-white worlds.

However, writing from points of view outside your own culture is a huge undertaking that can hurt the people of those culture. I’ve written in detail about that process here.

My personal decision to write more white protagonists is not about making YA more inclusive; it’s about dealing with my own blind spots. One of the reasons I wrote from PoC and Indigenous points of view was because I thought that was the only way to write about race. I was operating under the delusion (unfortunately it’s a common one among us white folk) that white people don’t have a race and are unaffected by race. In Razorhurst and now My Sister Rosa I’ve started writing about race from a white point of view.

Hmmm, that makes it sound like I’m writing essays, not novels. If I’m doing it right, my readers get caught up in the story. From reading my reviews, it’s clear not all readers notice the technical and theoretical aspects of what I’m trying to do. That’s fine. Novels should work on multiple levels.

What do you hope readers will take away from this book?
I hope they’re freaked out! Every reader who’s let me know how disturbed they were by My Sister Rosa has absolutely made my day. I aim to have readers looking at their family and friends suspiciously and asking themselves, is Uncle Steve actually a psychopath?!

Just kidding.

Maybe.

What are you working on next?
I’m always working on multiple books, but the one that’s getting the lion’s share of my attention is a book from the point of view of a psychopath. OMG. It’s so much easier than it was writing from nice guy Che’s point of view. I’ve decided that’s not because I’m evil (I hope!) but because psychopaths have a limited range of emotions and think they’re right about everything.

Most of us have doubts. We get confused. We worry. Not psychopaths. When you write from their point of view everything is clear. They never say to themselves, “Argh! Why did I just say that? What is wrong with me?”

A psychopath’s thoughts are straight lines, not endless branching trees. It’s refreshing to write from such a straightforward point of view. Also scary. Very scary.

Author illustration by Patrick Thicklin.

Seventeen-year-old Che has just moved with his family to New York City, where he struggles to keep both eyes on his 10-year-old sister, Rosa. My Sister Rosa is as provocative as it is creepy and entertaining.

Children's & YA, Picture Book

Children's & YA Picture Book

Icebreaker: Deborah Blumenthal

Interview by Cat, Deputy Editor

by Cat, Deputy Editor

BookPage Icebreaker is a publisher-sponsored interview.

In her new picture book, Fancy Party Gowns, award-winning journalist Deborah Blumenthal shares with young readers the little-known story of African-American fashion designer Ann Cole Lowe. Driven by an unyielding passion for her work, Lowe designed one-of-a-kind gowns for society women from the 1920s through the ’60s, including the dress for Jacqueline Bouvier’s wedding to future president John F. Kennedy in 1953. Nothing could stop Lowe—not prejudice, not segregation at design school, not even a water leak that destroyed all the dresses for Jackie’s wedding party.

Cat: I have to say, I just dived into information about this woman after reading this book. And that’s the goal of picture book biographies, I think—so, congratulations. Ann really was incredible.

Deborah: Yeah, I know. It’s just this story that hasn’t been told, so I was riveted when I heard about her.

When did you first learn about her?

I guess it was about two and a half years ago. It was interesting because it came through Facebook. A woman who I’m friends with on Facebook put up a post about Ann. My friend is very interested in women’s history and active in politics, and she often posts about different people who never got their due in terms of recognition. She had a post about Ann and about the fact that she designed Jackie Kennedy’s wedding gown. Immediately I was interested! And then I realized that no one had heard of this woman. I thought, oh, my history/background was rusty. You know, I spoke to a bunch of people I knew—history buffs, one woman who’s a feminist historian—and no one knew her name. Of course I really became intrigued then, and I started looking into her story. I was really captured, and that led to the book.

I was reading an interview with her from a 1966 issue of Ebony magazine, later in her life, and she really is as indomitable as your book portrays her. She only had one eye from glaucoma, and she’s cracking jokes about her second husband leaving her because she sketched dresses too much, and making plans for 15 new gowns, sort of brushing past the fact that she has no money to do so. She really was unstoppable, wasn’t she?

Right. I think like many artists, she just loved the work. She didn’t seem all that concerned about financing. That wasn’t her strong suit, but she just loved designing and loved making beautiful gowns. And she loved designing for society women, those were the women she wanted to design for. I think that’s what kept her going in the face of a lot of adversity that she had to deal with. I found it a truly inspiring story to write.

We could spend a lot of time talking about her hats, let alone her achievements.

Right!

“It gave her great joy to work with fabric and design and look at flowers and recreate them in fabric. I think she just blocked out a lot, and that saved her.”

The whole story’s made all the more remarkable by the fact that she was born and raised in the Jim Crow South. She came from a mother and a grandmother who were seamstresses in Alabama, and so she had a strong background, but she also had this drive that was all own. How do you think the era shaped her determination?

The impression I got was that she was able to block out what she wanted to block out. She was one of the people who was fortunate enough to, at an early age, find out what she loved to do. Most of us don’t have that, our passion, that early in life. She had this focus, this laser focus on what she loved to do. It gave her great joy to work with fabric and design and look at flowers and recreate them in fabric. I think she just blocked out a lot, and that saved her. Just doing work she loved, and it kept her going.

One of the most memorable moments in the book is when Ann is studying in a segregated design school in a classroom, all alone. And you write, quite simply, “And life wasn’t fair.” And then you echo that same line later when you’re talking about when she didn’t receive credit for Jackie’s dress. It felt like you were channeling Ann at that moment. It’s such a pragmatic response to something that is so unfair, you should righteously angry about it. The reader gets righteously angry. But she’s just unflappable.

She didn’t let the anger paralyze her. Because it can! I had one line in the book—“Ann thought about what she could do, not what she couldn’t change.”

It becomes a type of refrain.

Yeah, it’s like a survival instinct. You do what you love and you forge ahead. That’s the most inspiring part of the story, I think, and that’s what the takeaway is for readers: to find your passion and run with it when you do.

It’s such an incredible lesson, this power of small changes to influence the world. Do you sew?

No! No is the immediate answer. Have I sewn in the past? I took sewing in school. I was terrible at it. But you know what I do remember is, when I was sewing, you block out everything else. It really is a great escape from things. You’re so fixated on the fabric and stitching and working that it really is a great way to block out things. Was I good at it? No! But I didn’t really continue with it, so maybe I would’ve been!

Do you have a favorite gown of Ann’s?

I love the one she did for Olivia de Havilland with the roses. I love that. There is a show right now—I haven’t seen it, it just opened—at FIT, of some of her gowns.

Yeah, I was going to ask about that. I felt the show ties into one of the most striking quotes from Ann in the book, which is that she didn’t want to get rich or famous from design, she wanted “To prove that a Negro can become a major dress designer.” I was reading about this show at FIT, and the curators acknowledge that there’s a problem with using race as a lens to view art or craft. There’s a pigeonholing problem of grouping together artists just because of the color of their skin, but Ann really wanted that distinction.

At the time, it was very important. There weren’t a lot of people doing what she was doing, and she wanted to break through that. Obviously she did! Her work was clearly recognized for the quality, but she didn’t get the public recognition. She had clients and her work was in demand, but no, they didn’t recognize her publicly, which is the sad part.

I’d love to know what you think she might’ve meant by that, because she did become a major dress designer. Do you think she was happy with being known throughout the social elite that she was the one to go to, or do you think she did want that public acknowledgement? Not necessarily fame, but to be publicly named as the designer.

Well, I think both. Clearly, she was happy that she had all these clients, but I think she did want the recognition. And I think she hoped that, after she did Jackie’s wedding gown, she would get recognition, and I think it was a big disappointment to her that she didn’t. She was always hoping for that. It came in dribs and drabs a little later on in her life, but that was her greatest achievement, doing that gown, and clearly, everyone should’ve mentioned who designed it! There was only one mention in the Washington Post! I mean, how sad is that? Nine Hyde in the Washington Post said that “the dress was designed by a Negro, Ann Lowe.” They had to qualify it. It’s heartbreaking.

Is it still the most photographed wedding gown in American history?

I think it is.

Am I correct in saying that she didn’t just change the fashion industry for black designers, she kind of changed the whole dressmaking tradition? She was part of this transition from countless unnamed black dressmakers to the modern conception of the American designer.

I think she really was one of the first great couture designers. Well, I’d have to qualify that: I don’t know that she was one of the first in terms of couture designers. She was certainly one of the first in terms of black couture designers. In the business of designing one-of-a-kind gowns, she was up there with the best of them.

You’ve written in a number of genres, and I’m sure you gain inspiration from true stories and fiction alike. But as far as writing nonfiction, do you get more out of the research or the writing?

For me, nonfiction is the stepping stone for how I conceptualize [the story]. It gives me a lot of material to draw from, but I don’t think of this as a biography per se. It’s biographical, but I’d like to go one step further and digest all this information and spin a book out of it. I don’t think of it as a definitive work about Ann Cole Lowe, but I tried to draw enough information to take it to the next step, if that makes sense.

Well, sure. This is a person’s life. She lived through the Great Depression. Was there anything you had to leave out that you were especially sad to not see in the book?

No, I didn’t really leave out anything. Clearly there was a lot of suffering on her part, financially, and some very tough times. I’m sorry she wasn’t around to interview. It would’ve added a huge dimension to the book. . . . For me the most dramatic part of the story, actually, was her designing the gowns [for Jackie’s wedding party] and then having them destroyed by the [water] leak.

That was unbelievable.

Yeah! And then delivering them to Hammersmith Farm and being told to use a back door! I can barely tell that without tearing up. To me, that was the most dramatic moment, maybe in her life. So astonishing, so disturbing.

If you had had the opportunity to interview her, is there anything you wish you could ask?

The one thing I would’ve done, probably, is sat there and studied her, how she looked. She was obviously a great icon of style. There are very few pictures of her, but there’s one picture of her, which I’m sure you’ve seen, in the black hat and leaning to the side—

So much attitude!

Yes, and you just know that some women, they have it. They just know. I can probably count the number of women I’ve seen in my life, walking down the street, and you feel like saying, “Could you just stand still for a minute so I can analyze what you’ve done, how you look that good? Because I could never do that.” So I think I’d want to do first, a half-an-hour thing, “Why’d you decide on that hat? Why that hem length on that dress, because it’s so right?” I would’ve loved to have lunch with her and talk to her about clothes and her feelings about clothes and putting together a wardrobe. And then I probably would’ve said, “What do you think of my outfit?” [laughs]

Did you know the illustrator, Laura Freeman, beforehand?

No, I didn’t know Laura. I always say, when you write a picture book and then your editor hands it to an illustrator, it’s like giving up your child. And when you get it back a year or two later, you have no idea what it’s going to look like. I had no clue how the book would evolve, and I was just thrilled when I saw the art. She did such a good job. It’s filled with emotion.

The whole thing looks like textiles and fabric swatches.

She really got what I was trying to do, and I think she just did a super job.

Maybe the most prominent moment of fantasy is in the endpapers, where Ann’s designs are modeled by illustrated women of different skin colors. Ann is a self-described snob—she wanted to design for the top social tier, which at the time had to have been mostly white women, if not all. Do you think Ann ever had the opportunity to design for women who weren’t part of this white social elite class?

That’s a good question. I think primarily those were the women. I’ve certainly never seen any pictures of women of color wearing her gowns.

Which is why I so appreciated those endpapers, for this moment of playing dress-up with history, putting all these women in her beautiful gowns.

Absolutely.

Deborah Blumenthal, author of Fancy Party Gowns: The Story of Ann Cole Lowe, talks with Associate Editor Cat Acree.

Children's & YA, Middle Grade

Children's & YA Middle Grade

Kelly Barnhill: Stories are the maps of the heart

Interview by Cat, Deputy Editor

by Cat, Deputy Editor

“It’s an odd little thing,” author Kelly Barnhill told us last summer, when we interviewed her for the release of The Girl Who Drank the Moon. “I’m kind of surprised that people are enjoying it. I really thought I would be the only one.” We assumed Barnhill would be even more surprised when her magical middle grade received the 2017 Newbery Award. We were right.

What was the first thing that went through your head when you found out you won the Newbery?
Honestly? I assumed they had the wrong number. I can’t exactly remember what I said to the committee—probably a lot of garbled nonsense, as I had been woken from a dead sleep and was just generally flabbergasted by the whole notion—but I’m pretty sure I said something along the lines of, “How is this even possible?” over and over and over again.

Who was the one person you couldn’t wait to tell about the award?
A group of someones, actually: my writing group, The Black Sheep (Steven Brezenoff, Kurtis Scaletta, Karlyn Coleman, Christopher Lincoln, Bryan Bliss and Jodi Chromy). They were there when I wrote the book, then erased the book, then wrote it again and erased it again, lost hope, found hope and so forth until I finally sent the thing to my editor.

Do you have a favorite past Newbery winner?
Well, The Tale of Despereaux will always be a touchstone book for me, as with Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH and A Wrinkle in Time. Also, from the point of view of a teacher, two of my favorite memories from my teaching days were with the books The Watsons Go to Birmingham and Holes. Both of those books are magic in a classroom.

“Kids have to be data collectors, experimenters, analysts, scientists, memorizers, cartographers and psychologists. They literally have to write the whole universe with every moment they move through the world. This is why stories are so important.”

What’s the best part of writing books for a younger audience?
I have a profound respect for the inherent dignity and courage of children as a group, and for childhood as a concept. It is not easy being a child: The world is confusing and incongruous and conflicted and sometimes scary. The rules are constantly in flux. Kids have to be data collectors, experimenters, analysts, scientists, memorizers, cartographers and psychologists. They literally have to write the whole universe with every moment they move through the world. This is why stories are so important. Stories are their memory banks, their scripts, their translators. Stories are the maps of the heart and the maps of the mind and the maps of the world. They illuminate, bridge, shelter and blur the rigid line between the I and the Thou. Stories allow children to be more than themselves. This is true for all of us, of course, but frankly, kids are more fun, and far less boring, than grownups. This is well known.

What kind of reaction have you gotten from your readers about this book?
When I visit classrooms, I get a lot of hugs from kids. I mean a lot. This book has meant more to my readers than I could have possibly imagined or guessed. This has been a gratifying experience for me, for sure, but I remain surprised by it.

Have you read or listened to past Newbery speeches? Are you excited (or worried!) about your own speech?
Oh my gosh! Don’t even ask me this question. I’ve read lots, and I don’t know how I’m going to make anything that can even stand in the same room as those speeches. I’m really worried about it. Good heavens. But I’m reading lots of fun texts on the purpose and power of the imagination and the use of fantasy and how allegory forces us to cast a clear eye on aspects of the world that we have allowed ourselves to obscure and minimize. I’m not sure what I’m going to write about, or if it ends up being useful or relevant to only me, but it’s allowing me to sit in some interesting places in the Mind, so that is pretty fun.

What’s next for you?
Do any of us really ever know? Are we not always standing on that next wild, wondrous shore? I think we are. I know I’ll be working on my next book The Sugar House for the next few months, and after that will be diving into the next project, Dispatch from the Hideous Laboratories of Dr. Otto Van Drecht. Other than that, who knows? Perhaps I’ll sail to a distant land, slay a dragon, save a city and become King. Or perhaps I’ll finally learn to knit. The world is wondrous and strange, and I am currently open to all possibilities.

Author photo credit Bruce Silcox.

Checking in with the 2017 Newbery Award winning-author.

Children's & YA, Picture Book

Children's & YA Picture Book

Javaka Steptoe is sharing what he loves about the world

Interview by Cat, Deputy Editor

by Cat, Deputy Editor

One extraordinary artist honors another in Radiant Child, winner of the 2017 Caldecott Medal and the Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award. To introduce readers to his picture book about Jean-Michel Basquiat, Javaka Steptoe turned our November issue’s Meet the Illustrator interview into a vibrant collage unlike anything we’ve ever featured in BookPage. The collage-on-wood illustrations in Radiant Child are both a fitting homage to Basquiat’s life and work and a brilliant translation of art that many young readers (particularly those who live in major cities) exist within. We checked in with Steptoe to hear more about his experience of winning the Caldecott.

What was the first thing that went through your head when you found out you won the Caldecott?
Honestly, I’m not sure anything went through my mind. When I picked up the phone, the woman who called said her name and that I had won a Caldecott. There was this pause, and I was waiting for more, because all I could think was that she was going to go on to say that I had won a Caldecott Honor. But suddenly there was all this cheering and I realized what she meant. It was overwhelming.

Who was the one person you couldn’t wait to tell about the award?
My friend Trina. She works at Brooklyn College and she’s been my number one supporter. She’s been saying that the book was going to win a Caldecott for a long time, so I called her as soon as I could after the committee told me that I had won.

Do you have a favorite past Caldecott winner?
I’d have to say Jerry Pinkney’s The Lion and the Mouse, which won the medal in 2010.

What do you wish you could say to Basquiat himself?
I think I would just smile and hope that he was happy with the book. I hope that he would appreciate what I had created.

What’s the best part of writing and illustrating books for a younger audience?
The best part is sharing the things that you love about the world with children. They’re very receptive and interested in hearing what you have to say. They get excited. They want to know more.

What kind of reaction have you gotten from your readers about this book?
I’ve received really heartfelt responses, people saying, “We knew you could do it” and “You deserve it.” It’s really nice to know that people were rooting for me and that they love the book so much.

Have you read or listened to past Caldecott speeches? Are you excited (or worried!) about your own speech?
Yes, I’ve heard past speeches. I’m not worried about my own, but it’s going to take awhile to figure out what I’d like to say. I’m still trying to process that this happened and everything that’s happened since, and I want to think about what it means to me. This is an opportunity that allows me to be the artist I want to be, to spend more time thinking about my art and what I want to share with the world.

Author photo credit Gregg Edwards.

We checked in with Steptoe to hear more about his experience of winning the Caldecott Medal.

YA, YA Fiction

YA Fiction YA

Icebreaker: Chelsea Sedoti

Interview by Cat, Deputy Editor

by Cat, Deputy Editor

BookPage Icebreaker is a publisher-sponsored interview.

High school senior Hawthorne Creely is stubborn, kind of angry and often rude—but also endlessly imaginative and wholly original. But when a girl disappears in Hawthorne’s small town, she begins to obsess: Why would the beautiful Lizzie Lovett vanish? Did she choose to leave it all behind? Did she become a werewolf? Is she happy somewhere?

Chelsea Sedoti’s debut, The Hundred Lies of Lizzie Lovett, is far from a traditional mystery, as Hawthorne’s coming of age soon eclipses the story of who Lizzie was or wasn’t. In her search for answers, Hawthorne becomes entangled with Enzo, Lizzie’s older boyfriend, risks ruining her friendship with her best friend and starts to open her eyes to the people in her life: the hippies (friends of her mom’s) who are camping in her backyard, including wise Sun Dog; her cool older brother; her cool older brother’s confusing friend; even the old man who spends every day at the diner where Hawthorne works (Lizzie’s old employment, naturally).

Cat: Hawthorne is such a wonderfully frustrating character, but I truly enjoyed her whole experience. But before we even talk about Hawthorne, who I’m very much looking forward to talking about, I do have to ask: Did you always intend to have a title that is a bit of a fake-out? It’s not really about Lizzie, and she never really lies to us, so much as she is a focus of so many fantasies, stories told by the town and the people who think they knew her.

Chelsea: Two things on that. First of all, with having Lizzie’s name in the title, this is actually something that I love, because Hawthorne has become so real to me since I started this book. I just imagine her sitting there, looking at this book cover, thinking, “This book is about me, and I don’t even get my own name on the cover.”

That is amazing.

Everything is always about Lizzie to her. And I feel like she would be so infuriated, and I sort of love that about it. I love that it reflects Hawthorne’s obsessive mind state with Lizzie.

There aren’t a series of lies that Lizzie told, per se, throughout the book, but in a way, everything about her is a lie. Not just lying to other people, but lying to herself about who she is. Lizzie is basically a facade, which Hawthorne comes to find throughout the course of the book. It’s so much about perspective, and so many of the people that we meet, we never really see through them, except for the people that we’re closest to, and even then, who knows. In a way, Lizzie’s whole life is a lie, not necessarily because she was maliciously lying, but because she kept so much of herself secret, and I think that that’s really Hawthorne’s biggest discovery through the book.

Hawthorne’s aversion to high school runs deep, and she’s targeted, but I never felt like she was a victim. She fires back for everything that’s thrown at her, and she’s hyper-aware of every attempt by every other person to fit in. But she doesn’t get Lizzie, and she doesn’t get herself. It’s like a specific blindness to herself and this person that she’s trying to understand.

Yes, absolutely. And I think that Hawthorne likes to think of herself as a victim in so many ways. You know, she’s not as beautiful as someone like Lizzie, she’s not as popular—even her relationship with her brother, she’s thinking, “Oh, he doesn’t like me because I’m different, and he’s one of the cool kids.” Or with Michelle, who Hawthorne considers a bully, but really, when you look at it, Hawthorne is not being very nice to Michelle either. Hawthorne likes to think of herself as the one that’s sort of being persecuted, and “I’m an outsider and I’m a misfit,” but then in her interactions with other people, she’s sometimes not the nicest or the most open-minded.

She’s terrifying, sometimes, yeah.

Yeah! [laughs]

I’ll admit Hawthorne reminded me a bit of myself in high school, and my reviewer related very strongly with her, too. But the thing that maybe most fascinated me about Hawthorne is how far she could take this desire that she’s playing with, stepping into Lizzie’s life, trying to be part of something that matters. She doesn’t go so far as to steal an identity, but she starts to edge past the point of where we’re comfortable for her. Do you think she goes too far?

Oh, absolutely. And that was one of the most fun parts about writing it. One of the things that I love about writing is that I can make these characters do things that I would never do in real life, because at a certain point, most people stop themselves and say, “I need to step back, this has gone too far, this situation is getting inappropriate,” and with Hawthorne, she really doesn’t have that same kind of filter. She just barreled in full force.

At the book’s opening, it seems like she’s given up on people. Do you think she has? I mean, she starts to give people a chance throughout the book here and there. But why do you think she has given up at the beginning? And do you think it was by stepping into Lizzie’s life that she started to open up?

I think that high school is a very difficult time for a lot of people, and you just don’t have that perspective yet to figure out how the world really works, and what it’s going to be like once you get out of this very close-knit environment. Especially with Hawthorne, because she lives in a small town and she’s known these people most of her life, I do feel like she’s probably given up and she’s already made assumptions about people. She’s very stubborn and isn’t really willing to look past those assumptions.

Over the course of the book—which is fully by accident; she certainly didn’t set out to have any kind of revelation—she ends up learning more about people and looking at them in different lights. She understands by the end that the world that she sees around her isn’t necessarily the real world. I think that when she gets out of high school and goes off to college, and when she starts experiencing new things and meeting new people, I’m pretty sure she’s going to go into it with a much more open mind.

Did you go to a high school like this or grow up in a town like this?

I didn’t. My family is originally from Ohio. I based the town that Hawthorne lives in off of the town that my family is from. I go back there and visit all the time, so I’ve seen what life is like there, but I’ve been in Las Vegas since I was 4. So I’m used to being in a city where you’re not going to run into the same people all the time.

You didn’t encounter the same kind of stifling stagnation of living in a tiny little Midwestern town.

Right. I did go to a small elementary and middle school, though, so it was the same 30 kids from kindergarten to eighth grade, and so I did have that sense of these people—I mean, you can’t date or anything, you can’t switch friend groups because these are people that you’ve known since you were 5. It would be too weird, but luckily, by the time I got to high school, I went to a much larger school where there was a lot more diversity, and people were able to find themselves a little bit more and not be stuck in these roles that were decided when they were kids.

How did this story get started for you?

Well, I had a Hawthorne moment of my own. There was an article in the paper about a girl in my area who had gone missing. And for some reason, I just latched onto the story, I have no idea why, because I didn’t know the girl, and it seemed like she’d run away. There wasn’t anything especially weird or mysterious about her disappearance, but I was just really fascinated by it, and started checking for updates all the time and going online and seeing what people were saying on message boards about this disappearance. At one point I had that filter that Hawthorne doesn’t have, and stepped back and said, “OK, why are you so into this? You need to let this go, you’re just getting obsessive about this random stranger.” So I made myself stop being weird about the missing girl, but the story stuck in my head, and I started thinking, “Well, what if there was a character who was in a situation like this, but couldn’t pull herself back? And who just let her obsession grow and grow and she just fed the obsession until it just got incredibly inappropriate?” That’s how Hawthorne was born.

Yeah, I love that. You introduce the concept of the dual nature in all of us through a tattoo on Enzo’s arm, of the Anima/Animus. The book seems to be exploring this push and pull between inventions and reality—Hawthorne’s, Lizzie’s, even the whole town’s.

One of the important things that Hawthorne realizes is that nobody is ever just one thing. Lizzie isn’t just the popular cheerleader, Hawthorne isn’t just the outcast misfit, and people are complex and that’s what makes people so fascinating. Everyone has more than one side of their personality, and every story has more than one side.

Which ties in perfectly with Hawthorne’s theory that perhaps Lizzie is a werewolf. She uses the shapeshifter myth to try and figure out what’s going on with Lizzie and with herself. I also felt like there was real-life shapeshifter in her life: Sun Dog. Talk to me a little bit about Sun Dog, because he’s really blunt about how he left his former life behind.

Sun Dog is one of my favorite characters, and I loved writing him so much. I might have actually stolen some of his lines from some hippie people I have met in real life, because he says some things that are very ridiculous but I have actually heard, which I love. I think what I like about Sun Dog is that, for a good portion of the book, Hawthorne does assume that Lizzie just left and started a new life, and that she’s somewhere being perfect and happy and having this ideal existence. Sun Dog is actually the one who has done that. Not many people can actually do that, wake up one day and say, “I’m unhappy with my life and I don’t like where this is going, and I’m going to start over.” I don’t know if Sun Dog’s choice to do that and to live for himself was noble or if it’s terrible.

Exactly.

He falls into a moral grey area, and I liked being able to give an unexpected character that role, because Sun Dog becomes, in a very strange way, a mentor to Hawthorne. He’s so about acceptance and inner peace, and just walking away from his family is actually horrible and goes against what you would think from his personality.

Was it particularly difficult to write the scene when Enzo gives Hawthorne the painting, and at first she’s so flattered, and then she has that heartbreaking moment where she looks at it again, and suddenly hates how he thinks she views the world. She looks at it and sees it as naive and childish, and suddenly she hates something that she originally was so flattered by. It seemed like it would be particularly heartbreaking to write that scene.

As a whole, writing Hawthorne and Enzo’s relationship was difficult—not just that scene, but the entire thing, because it’s inappropriate for multiple reasons. He’s grieving, he’s not the greatest guy anyway, he’s way too old for Hawthorne. Their friendship and what it turns into was wildly inappropriate from the start, and I don’t particularly love Enzo. He’s kind of a jerk, but at the same time, I had to be in Hawthorne’s head and understand why she would be intrigued by him, and why she would cling to him, and why she would try to push this relationship between them farther. It was very difficult t sort of balance that out, or as I was writing, remember that I needed to see Enzo at all times through the Hawthorne filter.

There are so many things that, as the reader, we can look at Hawthorne’s life and see that they’re wrong (like Enzo), but there are opportunities that she’s oblivious to at first, and they certainly gave me hope for her as I was reading her story. What gave you hope for her as you were writing her story?

Enzo has made lots of bad choices in life probably, and he doesn’t have a lot going for him, and I don’t necessarily know that he cares that he doesn’t have much going for him. I see him 10 years after the story ends being in the same place that he’s in now. Whereas with Hawthorne, she never struck me as that way. I think that there are people who let themselves get stuck, or there are people who become so set in their ways that they won’t allow themselves to change, and with Hawthorne I never felt like she had already developed her forever personalty.

I think that so much of her mindset as the story takes place has to do with her environment, and I think that she always had the capacity to change. She’s very young, and she’s very immature for her age. Her flaws, to me, were things that were largely to do with her youth and her immaturity, and I always knew that once she lives a little more, and had more experiences and started to grow up, that there will be a shift, and that this would be a moment in her life, you know. Hawthorne is always going to be weird, and she’ll be a 40-year-old, and she’ll be strange and she’ll have an overactive imagination. I think that there’s a part of her that’s never ever going to grow up, but I also think that a lot of that selfishness and how self-absorbed she is, how she lets her imagination negatively impact the people around her—I think that’s something that is definitely going to drop off the older she gets, and already has started to for sure.

I certainly hope that we’ll have more novels from you that will feature characters as complex and strange and individual as Hawthorne, because she was a real delight to get to know.

Thank you.

Chelsea Sedoti, author of The Hundred Lies of Lizzie Lovett, talks with Deputy Editor Cat Acree.

YA, YA Fiction

YA Fiction YA

Icebreaker: Julie Buxbaum

Interview by Cat, Deputy Editor

by Cat, Deputy Editor

BookPage Icebreaker is a publisher-sponsored interview.

Three things to know about high school junior Jessie, the protagonist of Julie Buxbaum’s debut young adult novel, Tell Me Three Things:

1) It’s been barely two years since her mother’s death.
2) She doesn’t fit in at her fancy new Los Angeles private school, which she must attend since her father has eloped with a woman he met online.
3) She’s lost and confused—but from page one, she’s oh-so-wry and funny.

The list of things Jessie doesn’t know is far longer: Who is the person emailing her as “Somebody/Nobody” (SN for short), who claims to be a male student at her school and offers kindness and advice? Why would her father uproot her like this? What’s the deal with her new study partner, who recites “The Waste Land” from heart, wears the same shirt every day and always seems so tired?

Readers discover the answers in this heartfelt, tender novel about love and loss. Like Jessie, Buxbaum (whose next YA novel, What to Say Next, comes out in July) lost her mother when she was much too young. She’s written about grief in her previous adult novels, but her first book for teens is the most vulnerable story she’s ever told.

Cat: I wish, more than any other interview I’ve probably ever done over the phone, that we could be doing this face-to-face. It’s such a personal story, and I feel like the only way to talk about it is as friends or at least as someone who has met you! Have you found that readers are comfortable talking to you about Tell Me Three Things?

Julie: Yeah. I feel like the author-reader relationship has changed in recent years. Readers are super comfortable, actually. People think they get a glimpse into your brain when they read your book, and so they’re more comfortable asking questions.

I also think that your voice for Jessie is so frank, right off the bat talking about zits and sex and being comfortable with awkwardness and weirdness. That helps strip away any distance between you and your reader.

Thank you! It’s funny: My husband calls me Full-Disclosure Buxbaum, FDB [laughs]. Maybe I should change what I said earlier—I don’t know if that author-reader relationship has changed. I know that I am a full-disclosure person. I’m an open book in my personal life and out in the world, and maybe that comes through in my writing. Maybe it makes people comfortable asking me questions. I don’t know.

I definitely think that you’re probably onto something, considering the wonderful interactions between authors and readers we see everyday online. An author’s popularity can have as much to do with their book’s ability to connect with readers as the actual author’s ability to connect.

We have all these different ways for people to get in touch with us, and they get glimpses of our lives. I’m on Instagram, and you see pictures of my kids and how I blew up an egg in my microwave [laughs].

You blew up an egg?

I blew up two eggs, recently! It’s sort of a funny story. We’re going way off topic, but yeah, I’ve been eating a lot of hardboiled eggs, which I hate, but I eat them anyway. I recently blew one up in the microwave when I heated it. So the next day, I put one in the microwave—it was already cooked—but I put it in the microwave for less time, thinking, if I put it for less time, it won’t blow up. But then I took a bite and it blew up in my face.

Oh my gosh!

[Laughing] It was like a bomb. I had yolk shrapnel burning my lips. It was ridiculous. My son screamed. It was literally an explosion. I looked it up later. Apparently this is a thing, that ophthalmologists think should be [included on] warnings on microwaves. The heat gets trapped in the spaces of the egg, so if you don’t pierce it like a potato, they explode. PSA: Be careful if you microwave your hardboiled eggs.

I am totally derailing this interview. See? There you go! Full-Disclosure Buxbaum.

There it is.

Strikes again!

“I was writing to that version of me that didn’t get to go to the bookstore and see myself reflected on the page.”

To move back to a more sobering subject, you’ve written about loss before in your two adult novels, but this, your first YA novel, is clearly your most vulnerable. How did writing this story begin, and did you always know that you would tell this story—about first loss and first grief and its aftermath—from the perspective of a young person?

As sort of an aside, I’ll tell you, yeah, I have written a lot about loss. I wrote my first book [The Opposite of Love], which is about a girl who loses her mother. In my second book [After You], I killed a mom, which is when you’re like, Julie, go to a therapist. [chuckles] My third book, Tell Me Three Things, again, all about mother-loss. And so when I sat down to write What to Say Next [coming July 11 from Delacorte Press], I told myself I was not going to kill any more moms. It was getting embarrassing. And then of course, on page two, I killed the dad [laughs]. So clearly, I am working through some grief issues with my fiction.

Tell Me Three Things, to get more sober for a moment, was the first time I felt comfortable actually going back to the time when I had lost my mom. Everything else is sort of from a distance. All of my other writing was from the perspective of an adult looking back and having some emotional space from the loss. I think I wrote Tell Me Three Things when my mom had been gone 22 or 23 years. So it took me a good 20 years, at least, to feel comfortable to go back and revisit that particular time, which I think was a different experience for me. There’s comfort in writing from a distance. When I had to go back and unpack the feeling of being 16 and my mom had just died, and I was living the life of a teenager and feeling all those fresh feelings—that was much tougher. I think it took me a really long time to feel comfortable to go back.

You’re obviously addressing your teenage self through this story, but at what point did the story become about your readers? When did you realize Jessie’s story wasn’t just about you, but about sharing yourself with your reader?

When I was creating Jessie, I purposefully didn’t write a character who was 16-year-old me. I wrote the character that 16-year-old me would want to see in a book, which is a really important distinction. If I wrote a character like 16-year-old me, she’d be definitely more of a disaster [laughs]. I didn’t experience half of what Jessie did. My dad didn’t quickly remarry a woman he met on the internet. We didn’t move halfway across the country. I did not have to start over with a new stepfamily. I had a brother who’s a great support system. I had totally different circumstances.

Jessie deals with her loss with such grace that I definitely did not have, and I thought it was important to see that modeled. When I was 16, there wasn’t this huge YA section where you could easily pick up a book about this stuff. I was writing to that version of me that didn’t get to go to the bookstore and see myself reflected on the page.

“When something that weird and wonderful and magical happens in real life and you’re a fiction writer, you use it.”

You’ve said you were also inspired by an anonymous email you received. What was that?

I’ve been talking about this book for a year, and I get asked this question all the time, and I never have a short, easy way of answering it. It’s a long, complicated story. But the gist of it is, I once received a secret admirer-type email, and it came at the time I needed it the most. I had just graduated from law school and started working at a law firm. I was working 80 hours a week. I had put on a ton of weight. I felt disgusting, not because I had put on weight, but because it was my first dose of real adult life. I felt completely overwhelmed and depressed. It just wasn’t a great period in my life, and out of nowhere, an anonymous email showed up in my inbox.

It wasn’t asking for anything. The person said that they lived in a different city, but we had gone to law school together. It was just a sweet email in which they mentioned that they always noticed me across the room. I had never, ever, ever thought of myself as someone that someone would notice across a room. It was so beyond the bounds of what I imagined my existence in the world to be like, that it completely changed my perception of myself. It was this great gift that was given to me, and when something that weird and wonderful and magical happens in real life and you’re a fiction writer, you use it.

Speaking of feeling noticed and being noticed, this is absolutely a book about grief and change, but it’s also about family and first love and, my personal favorite, navigating friendships with other young women—and when all these different pieces come together, it really is about being noticed. It’s about finding hope and sanctuary where you least expect it. SN is the obvious example of that, but there are others, like Jessie’s stepbrother, Theo, who’s this totally surprising character who she can confess really dark things to, like wishing that the living parent was the one who had actually died. And then Mrs. Pollack, the teacher, who’s just this wonderful person who pops up. Talk to me about being noticed as a young person.

That’s the seed of the idea. When I sat down to write this book, I was thinking, what would 16-year-old me want more than anything else? And it wasn’t just circumstances. Obviously I didn’t want my mom to have gotten sick. [It wasn’t that I wanted] a boy to notice me. It’s more about, at the core, I wanted someone to see me and recognize me. I think that’s a universal feeling of adolescence, or even adulthood. We all want to be recognized. We all want to feel that we’re not invisible in this world. It’s a huge theme in my first book as well, which is sort of a late coming-of-age story, set during her late 20s. It’s always something that I’m fascinated by, the ways in which other people see us and whether they recognize what makes us, us.

So I love the idea, first of all, of an anonymous email noticing her, but also all those opportunities for connection where we recognize shared feelings or emotion. Like that scene with Theo [you mentioned], they both have in common the loss of a parent, and they’re able to get past this sort of awkward, weird, artificial family dynamic to talk about that, and recognize their own grief in someone else.

“We all want to be recognized. We all want to feel that we’re not invisible in this world.”

There are a couple turning points for Jessie, but one of my favorites involves Ethan. We don’t, as a reader, necessarily trust him. We don’t understand him because we don’t have the access to him that we have with Jessie. We can’t see him. But there’s a moment during one of their “Waste Land” discussions, when he pushes through any potential awkwardness, is straightforward about her mom and apologizes for Jessie’s loss. And it’s a moment when he goes from being a crushable character to being an actual human. But even before and after that, you don’t make their connection easy. Why not?

I don’t love stories of insta-love, where two characters who look at each other across the room, and that’s it. Done. I mean, Ethan recognizes something in her, which is why he reaches out, but I think true connection takes time and it takes sharing. It’s funny—whenever I write a book, I don’t always know what it’s about until later. I mean, I knew what it was about in the sense that I wanted her to feel noticed and to satisfy that need of 16-year-old me. But my husband and I, when we first started dating, he got the flu. So for the whole first month we were dating, our conversation were all on the phone or online. We had met already, but that initial growth period was all over the phone, where we didn’t have to look at each other. I think it really helped to build our relationship. I don’t even know if we’d married now if that hadn’t happened.

You know, you mentioned that you would prefer to have this conversation in person, but I’m one of these people who is so much more comfortable writing than anything else, and then secondarily on the phone and third in person. When you’re in person, you have to figure out how to hold your body and how to make eye contact. There are all these other distractions, but when you’re on the phone or writing, it’s just pared down to the basics.

Why did you frame their friendship through “The Waste Land”? Why was that their project?

I love the poem, first of all. I think it was the perfect opportunity for them to dig in and talk about some of the grief. The language lends itself to that. Also, I love a good English project [laughs]. Obviously there are a million poems to choose from, but that’s the one that stuck for me.

My grandma was an English teacher. She used to quote “The Waste Land” to me all the time.

That’s intense.

And so I’m assuming, it stuck that way. It’s funny how things just come up in your fiction that mean something to you, but you don’t know why or how. In fact, it didn’t even occur to me until just now how much my grandmother love “The Waste Land” until you asked.

I imagine it’s always really surprising and maybe a little unsettling when someone, some reader, connects strongly with something that seems very personal to you, like “The Waste Land.”

When you write a book and put it out into the world, at least I’m of the belief that it’s no longer yours. It belongs to the reader, and so they bring whatever feelings and emotions and experiences to your book that they carry with them. That’s what’s so magical about the process. I don’t want to dictate how anyone feels about anything when they read my book.

You did mention your next book coming out, What to Say Next, which is the perfect title for a next book. What are you saying next?

The book is about two people who don’t know what to say next, and that’s why it’s called What to Say Next. It’s about two people who unexpectedly connect and find the person they need the most in the person they least expect.

And I have to ask the obvious question last: Tell me three things your readers might not know about you.

You know what’s so funny? Every time I get asked this question, something different comes up and I always fear what’s going to come out of my mouth. Full-Disclosure Buxbaum! It’s an embarrassing affliction I have [laughs]!

OK, things people might not know about me: I spent 12 hours yesterday fighting a pantry moth infestation. So that was fun.

Bummer.

It really was. It’s disgusting and horrible. So that’s number one. Number two, I have the world’s worst handwriting. I never learned to hold the pencil properly, so my handwriting is atrocious. And number three, I married my first love.

Julie Buxbaum, author of Tell Me Three Things, talks with Deputy Editor Cat Acree.

YA, YA Fiction

YA Fiction YA

Icebreaker: Melanie Dickerson

Interview by Cat, Deputy Editor

by Cat, Deputy Editor

BookPage Icebreaker is a publisher-sponsored interview.

Bestselling, award-winning Christian romance author Melanie Dickerson returns once again to medieval Germany for the latest installment of her Medieval Fairy Tales series, The Noble Servant. In this retelling of the classic Grimms’ tale “The Goose Girl” (with a bit of “The Prince and the Pauper” mixed in), Lady Magdalen travels to Wolfberg Castle to marry Steffan, the Duke of Wolfberg. But her own maidservant turns on her and forces her to trade places—and meanwhile at Wolfberg Castle, Steffan’s uncle has gone to great lengths to replace the rightful duke with his own son. By working together, Steffan and Magdalen may be able to restore themselves to their rightful places.

Cat: Before we talk about fairy tales and fairy-tale adaptations, I’d love to hear about your fascination with the medieval era. It’s a time when marriage is at the forefront of young women’s lives, and learning to read isn’t always allowed, and violence is commonplace. Why do you love this setting?

Melanie: I think it was the castles and the knights, just the clothing and everything about it. I’ve always loved the medieval times. I spent one summer in Germany in a town, and I modeled my fictional town after that town. Hagenheim is in several of my books in my first series. When I was there, I fell in love with the architecture, because they still have all these medieval buildings, churches. It was really exciting to me to see a part of history that was, you know, from medieval times! When I decided to do a fairy-tale retelling, I knew that I wanted to set it in the same sort of setting as that town that I spent that summer in.

Also, I’m fascinated with the idea of growing up in a time when most people don’t know how to read and don’t have access to the things that we do. Everyone during that time, pretty much everyone believed in God and had a fear of God and a reverence. It was just a different time than now, when people see science as competing with religion, and you know, people take sides. Back then, it was just very different. I wanted to explore just the thought of not knowing how to read or being one of the few people who knows how to read, and how that would affect your life and your views and your faith. Growing up in a time when everyone did believe in God, what would that do to your spiritual life and your faith?

With Magdalen, she does know how to read, which seems to bolster her faith as well as her independence as a young woman. How do you balance an independent female character with the realities of a medieval setting?

It is a challenge to make them independent and self-confident in a time when women were, I guess you could say, [had] a different role than women do now. With Magadalen, she is the daughter of a baron, so she had the benefit of an education. She knows how to read. She’s probably very well read for her time. And I like to bring out the fact that she is interested in things that maybe other people aren’t interested in. She loves rocks and collects rocks, and she’s interested in her dad’s mines, the mining that her people need to make a living. She cares about her people. I tried to bring out different things in her personality that make her strong and show the ways that she is strong.

And that historical setting works really well for a fairy-tale retelling because there are always so many misunderstandings and mistaken identities in Grimms’ tales. It works well when people can’t read. There’s no evidence of who you are.

It does make it more fun! They can’t put your picture on the 5 o’clock news because they didn’t have pictures of most people back then. How does anyone know who you are? How do you prove who you are? You don’t have a driver’s license! That part was really fun. I did try to stay very true to the time period as much as I could, and to the historical setting and the way the characters would have been brought up. But I feel like, even in medieval times, there were plenty of strong women—people who were confident or who asserted themselves for what they believed in. I don’t think that ever changes completely. So I really try to stay true to the time period but also try to make my heroine believably strong.

This is the latest in your Thornbeck series, which are all blendings of fairy tales, not just standard retellings. This is obviously mostly “The Goose Girl,” but there’s an element of “The Prince and the Pauper.” Why did you mix these two tales?

I wanted both the hero and the heroine to have their identities taken away, and they’re having to become servants. For her, it’s “The Goose Girl” retelling. She’s the Goose Girl. But for him, I thought, I could do a play on “The Prince and the Pauper” because he gets his place, his identity taken away, too. I wanted to do something a little different with this series, and so I did take two different fairy tales or legends or popular stories and mix them together.

I read a version of the original “Goose Girl” story, and it’s as strange as any Grimms’ tale you might read. There’s a talking, severed horse head that helps reveal the princess’ identity—it’s bizarre! Obviously that’s not included in your story, but I would love to hear about your process of transforming that totally wacky tale into a Christian romance. What elements did you feel most passionate about keeping? Which areas did you feel most free to veer away from?

I always try to think, if this really happened, what could take the place of, for example, the horse’s head? To take the place of that, I used Lenhart, a secondary character, and he’s mute so he can’t speak. He ends up helping save her at the end because he was able to write down what happened. He was the only eyewitness, and just like the horse at the end tells the truth and tells what really happened, Lenhart ends up doing that. And the only reason he knows how to write is because of Magadalen. She taught him. So in a way she saves herself, but he is a part of what helps them get out of their mess. There were a lot of other things, too, but I thought that was fun. I like to take those outlandish parts of the fairy tales and change them, use something else to represent that.

With the original Grimms’ tale, it’s like the truth can’t be told by one of the real human characters who are wrapped up in the conflict. The truth had to be told by something mythical, above them, outside the realm of understanding. With your story, the truth can be told through the ability to read. The human characters have more agency in your story.

Yeah. I like making it realistic. What would this story have been like if it had actually happened? I try to tell a story that maybe would have morphed into the weird Grimms’ tale.

Yeah, I see that. It could come full circle. Now, in this story, you have two wealthy teens, and they’ve been reduced to servitude. Another question of balance—how did you balance the resentment that would come from losing their status along with their identity? They are very humble, all considering that they were raised in wealth.

With Magdalen, I think, she had been treated badly by her mother all her life, and so even though she is a privileged kind of person and always had everything she needed, she had never been prideful. She had this mother who was constantly pointing out her shortcomings and things like that, so in a way she was already a very humble person. I think she did—there was some anger. In her dialogue, she was talking about how unfair it was.

And Steffan, he had more anger about the situation because he was an independent guy, and he had always been able to deal with whatever problems came up to him. He had always lived a very privileged life and had servants who took care of him and who he could boss around. He naturally had more anger, but essentially, even he felt a lot of responsibility toward his people. He had been taught they were his responsibility, and he should care for them and make sure he made their lives better if he could.

Both are in positions of power, but neither one is interested in squandering or abusing that power. It’s so often that power corrupts, and these two characters are totally good to the bottom of their hearts.

Yeah. I felt like I made the contrast with Lord Hazen. He was the one who was corrupted by the power and the greed for more power, while Steffan was more focused on helping his people. And I think that’s realistic [laughs].

I have to ask, have you spent a lot of time working with geese?

No! I didn’t know anything about geese, and so I started trying to look things up on the internet. This may sound silly, but if I want to know something and I’m not finding it on the internet, I can just ask my Facebook friends! There’s always a bunch of them. There were several who came back and told me things about geese, experiences they’d had because they’d raised geese or were around geese. I learned a lot that way. And also, I called my uncle who had been around geese. He had worked on a farm, and he’d had a chance to observe geese year-round. So I asked him some of my questions, too. I don’t know anything about geese, other than that!

And lastly, are you someone who believes in happily-ever-after?

Yeah, of course! I’m a big romantic person [laughs]. Romance is fun and exciting, and it’s something that I enjoy. I feel like, as a Christian, we get a happily-ever-after, no matter what!

Melanie Dickerson, author of The Noble Servant, talks with Deputy Editor Cat Acree.

Children's & YA, Middle Grade

Children's & YA Middle Grade

Icebreaker: Travis S. Taylor and Jody Lynn Nye

Interview by Cat, Deputy Editor

by Cat, Deputy Editor

This BookPage Icebreaker is sponsored by Baen.

Set nearly 100 years in the future, Moon Beam finds a group of brilliant kids called the Bright Sparks on an adventure of a lifetime. They have been handpicked by celebrity scientist Dr. Keenan Bright to join him on the moon and undertake their own scientific projects—while being watched by an earthbound audience. Sixteen-year-old farm girl Barbara Winton is the newest Bright Spark, and when she and her new friends are sent to build a radar telescope using an entire crater on the far side of the moon, the threat of coronal mass ejections will force the Bright Sparks to use all their smarts to survive.

Along with being the author of many sci-fi novels like the Tau Ceti Agenda series and Warp Speed series, Dr. Travis S. Taylor has worked on various programs for the Department of Defense and NASA, and he’s also the co-creator and star of National Geographic Channel’s series “Rocket City Rednecks.” Jody Lynn Nye is a prolific author of sci-fi and fantasy as well, such as An Unexpected Apprentice, Applied Mythology and much more. This is the first time Taylor and Nye have collaborated on a book, and their individual talents combine for a real-life science-laden adventure fit for readers ages 10 and up.

Cat: I’m a bit of a science and space nerd, but a casual one. I wanted to become an astronomer as a kid, but reading sci-fi is the closest I can get. And if this casual science nerd can retain a tiny fragment of what can be learned from Moon Beam, I’ll be happy.

Jody: Terrific!

Travis: I hope you enjoyed it.

Cat: I genuinely did. And I kept picturing myself in a classroom while reading it. I could see myself reading the book alongside a science textbook.

J: That’s not a bad idea.

C: It checks so many STEM boxes, and you could pull out different scenes to teach it along with a science lesson. Did you have classrooms in mind when you started writing this book?

J: We wanted this book to be in school libraries. I’d love it if someone taught the book. That would be cool.

T: When I’m writing hard science fiction, I always want there to be—I don’t want to be preachy, but I like to add stuff in there that’s real hard science that most people don’t get to be exposed to. Because I’m exposed to it on a daily basis, I like to let people feel the experience that I get from getting to see it all the time, and let them see how interesting and fun and exciting it can be.

J: And how applicable it is to their own world! We want kids to be encouraged to think of science as a normal part of their lives.

T: Because it is, whether they know it or not.

C: Tell me about the science in your non-writing lives. Travis, I know a little about yours. But both of you: How are you involved in scientific fields?

J: In a way, it’s all through my family. I come from a family with a hard science background: My mom’s a psych nurse; my uncle’s a psychiatrist; my brother was a biomedical researcher; and one of my uncles worked for the GTL jet propulsion lab. So it’s been around me all my life.

T: And I am a scientist. I wanted to be a scientist since third grade. My dad—while I was being conceived, I reckon—my dad was working on the Apollo rocket. He was a machinist on the Saturn V. I was born in that same timeframe.

J: So Travis is a second-generation rocket scientist and influenced obviously in utero.

“We want kids to be encouraged to think of science as a normal part of their lives.”

C: And then you’re both really prolific authors. I’m just astonished by how much you have both published on your own and with other co-authors. But this is the first time you’ve worked together. How did you two get connected?

T: Jody and I have been trying to put a project together for almost three years now, I think. Because of our scheduling, and because we started on one project that was going to be based on one of my previous TV shows, and then that show got cancelled and we stopped that project. For a while, we’ve had the interest and finally found the right project.

J: Our publisher is one of the few that encourages their authors to work together. Baen Books is extraordinary for its innovation. They have been at the forefront of eBooks and many other projects, but they don’t mind having more than one person working on an idea, and they’ve had some terrific things come out of that. Of which, I count us as one of them!

T: I hope so, Jody! [laughs] I’d like to think so. Jim Baen told me before he died that he wanted to consider that all his authors were going to the Jim Baen School of Famous Authors for Famous Authors. And then he said the process of that was cross-pollinating the authors, together in collaboration so they can learn each other’s Famous Author tricks. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed writing with Jody, and certainly every time I get the manuscript back from her and it’s my turn to write, I learn something—a different technique, new technique, or she does things different than I do. It gives me a new perspective on how I write. I think I’ve improved through the experience.

J: And so have I.

C: It’s like having a built-in writer’s workshop.

J: Oh, it is. On-the-job training, the kind that no one else has ever really been able to have, and that I feel privileged to have.

C: Let’s talk about the specifics of the science in Moon Beam. It all felt very real to me, but again—casual science fan, not nitpicky. Is it all theoretically possible?

J: Technically, yes. That’s our intention—not to have any black boxes or magic wands to solve problems. These kids have to take into account real science, real chemistry. This is where Travis’ education and experience comes in, as he is able to present things that we can actually say, “If you know the science, you might have an inkling as to how to work out the solution.”

T: I have two Ph.D.s in technical fields, and the last Ph.D. I got was about using lunar craters and craters on other moons in our solar system as a radial telescope or a communications antenna dish. I studied it in great detail—even picked out various craters on the moon that were potential candidates for the experiment—and so I thought, how great would it be if the first time it was actually done it was some kids, the first kids living on the moon?

C: That is so cool. And then there are the sensory details about the moon, which are very sharp and vivid in the book. Are all those realistic as well? Are any of those more subjective?

J: I think we know enough about how space travel affects people that we can actually bring forward those details of the experiences of people living in space and on the space station, and who have had experiences in shuttlecraft. I think we’re pretty close.

T: I spent a good bit of time over the years studying the environment of the lunar surface, from the Apollo missions and various lunar reconnaissance orbiters that we’ve done. I’ve worked on projects where we talked about landing particular experiments on the moon, and studied in great detail what the environment would do the equipment and what it did to the astronauts’ suits and so on. I think we got really close, as close as anyone can get. I’m not saying we nailed it, because no one’s going to get it exactly right until you go do it.

J: Space medicine is one of my interests, and reading on what kind of effects [space travel] would have [on the body]. Travis brought out the CO2 problem [when the Bright Sparks are trying to survive the coronal mass ejections], and the kids go through hallucinations, they start to get drowsy. . . . It’s not the lack of oxygen, it’s the buildup of carbon dioxide that prevents oxygen from affecting the lungs and starts to slowly suffocate neural processes. And [it builds more] tension in the story: Having done everything right, could they still die?

T: That’s what a lot of people think, that you’re going to run out of air. Air, of course, is very important, but even worse than that, you’re going to build up too much carbon dioxide wherever you are. It’s sort of a silent killer—it’s going to get you before you realize. You’ll start getting loopy and groggy and lethargic, and if you don’t catch it before it’s too late, you’ll be too lethargic to even do anything about it. It was a big problem on Apollo 13, actually. Their CO2 scrubber died on them, and they had to rebuild it from stuff they could find inside the cockpit of the lunar command module. One of the astronauts had to take his sock off and stick it in it as part of the fix.

J: It’s that kind of innovation—on the spot—that we wanted to bring out, to show how kids could innovate at the spur of the moment to save their lives.

T: These are the kind of kids that will be smart enough to do that innovation. They’ve had training, they’re really smart, and hopefully they’ve got a level head in a bad situation.

J: And this is where our prime character comes in, Barbara, because she does have a level head. She’s a farm girl, grew up in a rural setting. Everything on a farm, in a way, is life and death because you’re growing crops, you’re going to feed people with it, but it’s also running close to being low on budget frequently. And she’s got natural leadership qualities, which I don’t think that she knew about until she was in this situation.

C: I really appreciated the comparison you drew between the farm technology and space technology. Obviously the farm tech is futuristic, but I thought it was nice to bring it back home, literally.

J: It also means that she’s not afraid of technology. A lot of people are afraid to touch the innards of things because they’re afraid that if they touch it, it will fail or it will break. She knows that things have a little bit more strength and stability than that. NASA builds things with tolerance and so that it has double and triple and sextuple redundancies. Dr. Geoff Landis said when they were working on the Mars lander mission, the Sojourner project, nobody wanted their part of the project to fail first. I thought that was an interesting mindset. Everyone wants things to work in the best possible fashion, but you still have to leave room for people to say, if this goes wrong, what do we need to do? And it brings out the best in people.

C: And that’s the making of the “self-rescuing princesses” idea, which is how the Bright Sparks describe themselves. It requires a lot of them to consider themselves that, but they’re so admirable and inspiring for their individual abilities.

T: The one thing missing is a Great Dane that can travel around with them on the moon.

J: [laughs] Ruh-roh!

T: We just couldn’t figure out how to get one up there and keep him fed and keep him out of trouble.

C: You know, I really love the idea of these kid scientists as celebrity figures. We’ve got a couple celebrity scientists—the big ones obviously being Bill Nye and Neil Degrasse Tyson—but this Moon Beam world is obsessed with science. Everyone’s logging on and everyone cares so much about the Bright Sparks. Sure, we’ve got reality TV, but Dr. Keegan Sparks’ show is so positive, so inspiring. Is there any way our world could ever be like that? Obsessed with scientists on this level?

T: The thing about the reality scientists that we’ve had for kids in the past is they’ve all taken the path of being goofy. Really, really young kids may get a kick out of that. But most kids have a little bit of a serious nature themselves, as long as it’s fun seriousness. You go to space camp, and that’s a serious endeavor, and the kids eat it up. It’s my opinion that we just haven’t had the right Dr. Bright show yet. It would be something that kids and grown-ups would watch, because it’s not pandering to anybody. It’s just doing the cool thing.

J: We want them to feel like the sciences are for them, that kids could do what the Sparks are doing. That’s one of the reasons we took a positive approach instead of the dystopian. I hate the cynical attitude of a lot of media. It’s as if people are saying, yes, we know you’re interested in this, ha-ha, you’re such nerds. But kids like to be challenged in such a way that really matters. That’s why books like The Hunger Games are popular. But you don’t have to have a dystopia in order to have real challenges. The trouble with today is, things are a little easy. Teens don’t feel as if anyone needs them or their talent, and that’s wrong. We need them. They are the future. And if Travis and I can encourage them to think about the sciences as something they could do, then I think we’ve done a lot of our job.

T: Let me give a perfect example of that. I just came back from Serbia. Last week I filming a new TV show that I’ve been working on. The kids there, by the time they’re 4, they start teaching them English. By the time they’re teenagers, they speak at least three languages, and that’s about 75 to 80 percent [of the population]. My kids are bright kids, but by the time they were 4 years old, we were excited they could read The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham by themselves. Look at the extreme dichotomy between our first-world country and then pretty much a third-world country in their education processes. It is possible, no matter what your background is, that you can do these things. If 4-year-olds in Serbia can learn a foreign language, it’s not hard to believe that a 15-year-old in Iowa could learn how to be an astronaut.

J: We want them to see it as possible. One of the reasons that we made our protagonist a girl is that girls are influenced by what they see, what already exists in a situation—the same goes for any child from any background, any nationality. Most scientists are men; girls may not see themselves in that role, or might not feel welcome there because they don’t see as many women [scientists]. We present girls and women in science as a given, with no apology or neon sign saying, “Look! Look! Females in science!” They are there, accepted as a vital part of the team.

T: The best athlete starts in the game. We never talk about—unless it was the first woman on Mars, or something like that—but it’s not a big agenda or anything. It’s just accepted—that’s the way things are. Nobody doesn’t accept that these people are the best athletes for the job.

“If 4-year-olds in Serbia can learn a foreign language, it’s not hard to believe that a 15-year-old in Iowa could learn how to be an astronaut.”

C: Even on social media, no one following the Bright Sparks is downplaying the fact that Barbara is a girl. It’s so positive. It’s certainly something to hope for.

T: Part of what we do with [science fiction] isn’t just to hope for a better future—it’s an intent to create a better future. If we display what the future could be like, and more and more people say, I want that future—

J: It’s a model for an ideal future.

T: Yeah, and hopefully, people see that it’s possible—even if it’s an unconscious, subconscious or conscious effort—to build the world that way.

Travis S. Taylor and Jody Lynn Nye, co-authors of sci-fi adventure Moon Beam, talk with Deputy Editor Cat Acree. Sponsored by Baen.

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