Cat, Deputy Editor

There are words for the vampire in nearly every culture: “Vampyr in the Netherlands, upir in the Ukraine, vrykolaka in the Balkan region, penangglan on the Malay Peninsula.” It is a myth so saturated with literature’s many variations, it might seem impossible to add another, yet with her new young adult novel, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, Holly Black proves that the vampire—and the vampire myth—is still immortal.

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown has all the gore and terror of classic vampire fiction but brings the myth into the 21st century. The days of ancient, hidden vampires are over. Vampirism has swept the world like a plague, leaving new vampires to inherit the earth. Walled cities called Coldtowns quarantine new vampires, infected humans and humans desperate to be infected. From inside Coldtowns, streaming video broadcasts the decadent and depraved parties, the gore and the violence to the rest of the world.

A girl named Tana awakes after a vampire attack to find her ex-boyfriend, bitten but not yet turned, trapped in a room with an injured vampire. She decides to drive them both to Coldtown and finds herself sucked in deeper than she ever could have expected.

BookPage caught up with Holly Black at the American Library Association’s annual conference this summer. Sitting in the lobby of her hotel in Chicago, low lighting turning her scarab earrings gold and pink, Black chatted about vampire folklore and her fictional world’s obsession with the beautiful monster.

BookPage: I’m about halfway through, and I have to say, I’m really enjoying it.

Holly Black: Oh, I’m so glad. I had a lot of fun writing it. I really got back to my middle grade, early high school true love of vampires and vampire fiction. My eighth grade research paper was on vampire folklore. I was obsessed, and I had kind of forgotten about all of that stuff, so I got to put all of this stuff I really loved into the book.

It’s obviously influenced by Anne Rice. It’s very much a nod to Interview with the Vampire, especially concerning the relationship between the vampires Lucien and Gavriel, maker and progeny.

[Laughs] I must’ve read that book every night when I was a kid. At night, I would fall asleep reading Interview over and over again.

It’s almost impossible to talk about vampire fiction in YA without mentioning Twilight because it just exploded. But there’s something very sustainable about vampire fiction. It’s been several years since Twilight, and there’s some room again.

You know, I had for a long time thought I would never write a vampire book because there’s so many great vampire books. There’s so many beloved vampire books that it’s this big sort of intimidating genre, and as much as I really loved reading them, I thought, do I have anything to say?

Also, it is hard because it feels like vampires are always in a state where there are so many books that you’d be crazy to write one. Or no one can ever imagine wanting to read a vampire book ever again. And I realized there’s never going to be a time when that wasn’t true. In my life there’s never been a time when vampires weren’t either so big that you couldn’t write one, or so “over” you couldn’t write one. I thought, all right, I’m gonna write the book and see what happens.

You introduce your own version of the mythology, which I think is the hardest part, creating a new story that will mesh well with the established myth. Personally, I think that’s where Twilight ran into some troubles. The sparkly vampire often didn’t sit well with people who have loved the vampire myth their whole lives.

People have very traditional ideas about how vampires work.

Definitely, but you introduce the idea of going “Cold.” When a vampire bites a person, that human becomes “Cold” and has 88 days to sweat out the infection. If they drink human blood during those 88 days, they become a vampire. It allows the ability to come back from the brink of death.

I think it’s different, but I think it has a relationship to some vampire stories we’re familiar with. If we look at Dracula, for instance, there’s a whole period where Dracula comes in and harasses Mina and Lucy in the night, biting them and also feeding them his blood. They are in a liminal state that you could say is an “infected” state, where they’re susceptible to him, where he can influence their minds. It’s not the same as being infected in The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, but it has . . . some folkloric precedent.

“Vampires are kind of our best and worst selves. They’re ourselves eternally young, living forever with all the potential knowledge, all the potential strength, power.”

I think it also makes it more possible for that sustainable worldwide vampire state that you were trying to achieve.

I think the idea that you didn’t have to taste the vampire’s blood to become infected was the reason why you can have basically a plague narrative. This is a plague narrative. We are overrun. It’s really hard to halt it because when you have new humans being infected and then becoming vampires, not knowing how to prevent themselves from spreading the infection further, you have a problem. You have your sort of old school, original vampires doing pretty well at keeping infection from breaking out, but now you have no control at all over what’s happening with these idiot new vampires. It’s like, “Vampires these days! God!”

What was it like going back to your roots and getting in touch with a former self?

I sat down and reread all of the old books that I had loved. I reread Tanith Lee’s Sabella. I reread Poppy Z. Brite’s Lost Souls and all the Sonja Blue books and the original, the first two Anne Rice books to try and remember what this stuff was really like, how much of my memory was close to what it really was, and so that was part of what I did. Then I just tried to think, what are the parts I really love? I think infection is a big part of ‘90s vampire fiction, the fear of infection.

There is a very established literature surrounding the vampire myth, but YA in particular has really latched onto it. Why do you think that is?

There’s something about the vampire that really catches us. I think part of it is the way vampires are kind of our best and worst selves. They’re ourselves eternally young, living forever with all the potential knowledge, all the potential strength, power, fabulousness, good clothes. They’re also our most horrible selves, our most base, our most bloodthirsty, our most cruel. I think in that juxtaposition we find endless amounts of stories.

With vampire folklore, we start out with the vampire as a villain, as the creature we fight, the truly terrifying thing, closer to a zombie. In our current incarnation, we have embraced the vampire and brought them from antagonist to protagonist over the course of our literature. But it’s a cycle. You can put them right back to antagonist, and then you can have your antihero, and then you can go to protagonist again, and I think that cycle too keeps us really interested.

It’s also more complex than just your typical monster. There’s an intelligence to the vampire.

We think of the vampire as our most sophisticated monster. They’re our aristocracy of monsters. We think of werewolves as our blue-collar monsters. [Laughs] I’m not sure why. We have set up the vampire as our aristocrat. Our ruling class. I think there is something to that—the elegance versus the real crudeness of what they’re doing, which is, you know, drinking blood.

There’s a great moment in The Coldest Girl in Coldtown when Tana is on her way to Coldtown with her infected ex-boyfriend and the vampire Gavriel. They stop at the Dead Last Rest Stop and meet an elderly lady headed into Coldtown, a migration typically dominated by teenagers. The old lady says, “What? You think dying is just for the young?” Throughout the book, the obsession with death does seem reserved for the young.

I feel like there is a spirituality to being a young person and trying to figure out how the world works, not just the seen world but the unseen world. I feel like as I’ve gotten older, I’m much more obsessed with the day-to-day. I remember really being fascinated with mysteries of the universe and thinking that perhaps there was a way that things could become knowable.

There’s also something about teenagers that makes it so easy to obsess.

The things I loved when I was younger, I have loved more than anything. They meant more to me. And I think it was, at least for me, because I was defining myself at that point. I was learning what I liked, and by learning what I liked, I was learning who I was. And maybe that’s also why it was important for me to think about the mysteries of the universe, because if I figured out what I believed, I figured out who I was.

The kids in this book are defining themselves by being obsessed with death, which is such a dangerous obsession. With this book, you’re exploring how far that obsession can go. There is a point of no return.

I was thinking a lot about reality television and a lot about the way that we both blog and livestream, and I was thinking about how bad things often are the things that get people famous. People are often famous for the truly embarrassing thing that happened to them online, or that truly terrible thing that someone recorded them doing. [It’s interesting how we] tune in to that, and we experience . . . a mixture of envy—like, look, this person is out there, they are doing this thing, they are experiencing life, they are doing whatever—and also, “Haha! Look! A terrible thing has happened to them.” And it’s sort of the balance between our desire to experience something like that and our feeling that we would make it—cause they sure didn’t. It’s part of the pleasure of watching, and I thought it would be interesting to have it writ larger and darker.

You definitely took it to an extreme. You put death on reality television.

You’re watching it and you’re going, “Wow I hope they make it, and I sort of hope they don’t.”

Put yourself in your book. What would you do if this happened to the world?

I would like to say that I was not the person that would watch this on livefeeds, but I’m sure I would.

Would you go to Coldtown?

No. No, I’m old. [Laughs]

Would your younger self go to Coldtown?

Probably. The desire for something to happen and something to change is, to me, the defining thing I remember about being a teenager, just wanting something to happen. Anything happening would’ve been better than the nothing happening that I felt like was omnipresent in my life.

Is this a book you’ve been waiting to write?

This is a book I never knew I wanted to write until I started writing it. It’s funny, because I started writing it, and my husband—who’s known me since I was pretty young—said, “You know, I always thought you were going to write a vampire book.” I didn’t! I didn’t know. But it was a ton of fun.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Coldest Girl in Coldtown.

There are words for the vampire in nearly every culture: "Vampyr in the Netherlands, upir in the Ukraine, vrykolaka in the Balkan region, penangglan on the Malay Peninsula." It is a myth so saturated with literature’s many variations, it might seem impossible to add another,…

Children's & YA, Picture Book

Children's & YA Picture Book

Poems and prayers of gratitude from Katherine Paterson

Interview by Cat, Deputy Editor

by Cat, Deputy Editor

Katherine Paterson is a living legend of children’s literature. She has won the Hans Christian Andersen and Laura Ingalls Wilder Awards—as well as multiple National Book Awards and Newbery Medals—and is the author of such classics as Bridge to Terabithia and Jacob Have I Loved.

Following 2011’s picture book Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Paterson and illustrator Pamela Dalton once again join forces for Giving Thanks, a collection of prose, poems and songs of gratitude. In between these inspirational snippets and Dalton’s paper-cutting designs, Paterson shares meditations and personal stories that illustrate thankfulness in her own life.

Giving Thanks includes prayers, proverbs, poetry and wisdom from many different religious and cultural traditions. Tell us why this is important to you.
I believe that the one I call God is infinite and therefore far beyond my finite comprehension. I need the vision of the Infinite from other religions and cultures to broaden my parochial vision.

What does being gracious mean to you?
It means opening my mind and heart to the gifts and the needs of others.

It’s so easy to feel overwhelmed by daily obligations and distractions. How do you remind yourself to stop and give thanks?
This may sound self-serving, but actually I have been greatly helped by the book Giving Thanks that Pam, our editor Christopher Franceschelli and I did together. I have been going through a particularly difficult period of my life with the serious illness and then death of my husband. Doing the text and then rereading it with Pam’s wonderful illustrations has reminded me over and over again to give thanks for people and things that come to me every day in the midst of hard times.

You share many personal stories throughout Giving Thanks, which encourages readers (and listeners) of all ages to share their own stories while delighting in the poems and prayers here. What advice would you give a family that hopes to make the sharing of personal stories a regular part of their lives?
In order to share stories, we have to take time to do so. In our full and harried lives we forget that a vital part of growing together as a family means we need to listen to each other and tell each other things of importance. This happened best for our family around the dining room table or in the car on the way somewhere. But you have to think to do so and consider this sharing of as much importance as shopping or texting or posting on Facebook.

Do you have a favorite poem or proverb from this collection?
I think the alphabet prayer on the frontispiece is perhaps my favorite in the collection. It reminds me of St. Paul’s words, that we do not know how to pray as we ought but that God’s spirit intercedes for us “with sighs too deep for words.”

What are three things you’re thankful for this year?
I have so many things to be thankful for that it is hard to limit myself to three, but I am particularly grateful for the years my husband and I had together and for the last week of his life that was a time of many blessings. I’m grateful for my children and grandchildren’s loving care and the support of so many friends. And incidentally, for my dog who is a great comforter in a small body.

Do you have any special Thanksgiving traditions in your family?
Growing up the child of a minister and then as wife of one, the actual going to church for a service of Thanksgiving took precedence over the turkey or the football game, but, of course, they had their important roles in the celebration.

Displaying tremendous grace after the passing of her husband, Paterson spoke with BookPage about her gorgeous new book and inspired us yet again.

Children's & YA, Picture Book

Children's & YA Picture Book

Chris Raschka: Booky books for the littlest readers

Interview by Cat, Deputy Editor

by Cat, Deputy Editor

Two-time Caldecott winner Chris Raschka certainly knows how to make very little readers giggle, and the giggles continue with Abrams Appleseed’s revitalization of Raschka’s Thingy Things picture book series, originally published in 2000 by Hyperion.

Toddlers meet four Thingies on April 8—original cast members Lamby Lamb and Whaley Whale, and newcomers Cowy Cow and Crabby Crab—and four more this fall. A whale hides in plain sight; a lamb gets dressed despite the narrator’s protestations; an unabashedly clever cow shares a few great ideas; and a crab has one heck of a bad attitude. It’s comedy gold for anyone who thinks peek-a-boo is a riot.

How fun to reunite with Lamby Lamb and Whaley Whale! Plus, refreshed editions of Moosey Moose and Doggy Dog are coming this September. Which of these four original Thingy Things is your favorite?
Well, I admit a soft spot for Moosey Moose. This one came first and seemed to me then, and still seems to me now, to have captured my son in his contrariness, whimsy, moodiness and delightfulness all at once. It set the tone for all the following books.

Not all of them came directly from him, of course. For instance, Goosey Goose (“If you mess with Goosey Goose, uh-huh, uh-huh”) was taken down by me almost verbatim, surreptitiously, from a girl hanging on the monkey bars at the Dinosaur Playground at 97th Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan circa 1999. When I heard her, it felt like gold falling out of the sky. What a musical genius that girl was.

The Thingy Things books are so great due to their utter simplicity. How are you able to tap into what toddlers will want to read again and again?
Yes, the text must remain simple, although not all the words themselves are terribly simple—“Gluten-free oatmeal raisin cookie,” for example. Then, the words should almost have a chant-like quality to them, that you can easily call out and have repeated back to you. Each page must have a little zinger, a little sting of the unexpected, even if it is as simple as changing “will not” to “won’t” within a basically repetitive line. And finally, the payoff has to be just big enough to warrant our attention for the course of the 24 pages.

It interests me that in Whaley Whale, which in some ways is the most simple and obvious of the texts—it is a telling of hide-and-seek where Whaley Whale is pretty much in plain sight throughout—works as well as it does. I’ve never read this to a toddler who said, “This is stupid, Whaley Whale is right there.” No, toddler readers seem to love it precisely because they are given the chance to be in on the joke from the beginning and get to have the big payoff of saying, “Boo!” to a grown-up reader by the end. Boo!

These silly stories’ word repetition and simple sounds are perfect for children just learning to read. What was the first book you learned to read on your own?
You know, I may actually have learned to read with Dick and Jane. I certainly read those books in first grade. And liked them, what’s more. But there were a couple of books that came before, as I think back. My first school experience was in Germany, in kindergarten and first grade—my family lived in Marburg, Germany, for a year, my father taking a year-long sabbatical there. The very first books I loved were Die Steinzeit-Kinder—The Stone-Age Children—books I still have. I certainly learned to read them, so presumably they were the first.

At that time, the German school year began in spring, so I had half a year of first grade there, and then started again with Mrs. Erickson in first grade in a school in suburban Chicago. I remember old—and she was old—Mrs. Erickson saying to me on the first day, “Do you understand what I’m saying, Christopher?” And I thought, why is she saying that to me? An early instance of what came to be my usual wondering what in the world my teachers were talking about, what is it that I’m not getting?

Cowy Cow and Crabby Crab are the newest members of the Thingy Things bunch, and they’re even funnier than the original cast. How have you changed as an illustrator since you wrote the first Thingy Things books?
My quick answer is I’ve gotten worse. I could really paint back then. No, that’s not true. The difficulty always has been for me to find the right voice for each book. Since I do a pretty broad spectrum of books, this problem can puzzle me for a long, frustrating time. Sometimes I’ve done books over and over, completed them over years, only to do the finished, totally different, final art in about three weeks.

That being said, for some reason, the style for the Thingies presented itself to me right away. As in most of my books, I like to be fairly gestural, which can be hit or miss. I remember once being in the middle of a big brushstroke when the phone rang, and I thought, I should not answer this. And then almost to dare myself, I took the phone and kept painting. I think it helped the tone. I think Saul Steinberg often painted on the phone. Maybe I should start doing this again, to keep me from getting too precious, too worried. Unfortunately, I don’t have a good phone for under the ear anymore, and I’m certainly not going to put one of those robot things on my head. I’ll have to think about this.

Crabby Crab has a bad attitude about nearly everything—but we still love him. What makes you crabby?
See the answers to question four. I make myself crabby. I hate everything I do in the instant just after doing it, so I become too quick to let go of things. Or I try to get a hold on something that came freely and just right at one time, and then I just can’t get it again six months later. This makes me the crabbiest.

September 2014 also brings two new Thingy Thing titles, Buggy Bug and Clammy Clam. What can we expect from our two new friends?
Buggy Bug tells the quintessential toddler joke. It’s very, very, very, very, very funny if you’re 4. Clammy Clam gets shy in the face of adult cajoling and clams up.

Like Cowy Cow, you probably have 100 fun ideas for young readers. What are a few ideas readers can look forward to?
You know, the best idea I have right now, and it may sound rather corny, but as young readers get older you may, if you are like me, just keep finding more and more books you want to read. You really will. I know, I know, it sounds like an obvious and hopeful thing for a writer to say. But I wasn’t always a writer, and I wasn’t always such a reader. There will be movies. There will be TV and video games. But there will also just be more and more books you want to read, books you’ve never heard of and then someone will say, “Hey! Read this.” My brother gave me a book I’d never heard of before. He’d bought it for himself and didn’t really like it but thought I might. It’s called Titus Groan, written by an English illustrator, Mervyn Peake, in 1946. Somehow I never knew Mervyn Peake. How wonderful to find someone new to read. How could I not have heard of him? At the same time, my wife and I are reading George Eliot’s book Middlemarch aloud. Now that’s a fun idea. Reading a big, enormous, 900-page book aloud is fun. Obviously, reading Harry Potter aloud is about as good as it gets.

As to any fun ideas I might have about my own books, I have a few: a book about two rats, one who lives along the Hudson River and is a great surfer, and the other who lives at the base of the statue of Giuseppe Verdi at 72nd Street, and is actually afraid of water. And there’s a hurricane. Or a book about all the residents of a big old elm tree, from the basement to the penthouse. And I had an idea on Monday about a man who owns a cactus store.

I’d better get to work.

For more Thingy Things fun, check out the animated trailer from Abrams Books:

Thingy Things illustrations reprinted by permission of Abrams Books for Young Readers.
Author photo credit Sonya Sones.

Raschka shared with BookPage the secret behind the Thingy Things' simple appeal, the artistic inspiration that came via telephone, plus a few great ideas.

Children's & YA, YA, YA Fiction

Children's & YA YA Fiction YA

Deb Caletti

Interview by Cat, Deputy Editor

by Cat, Deputy Editor

In National Book Award finalist Deb Caletti’s new novel, The Last Forever, a teenager tells the bittersweet, achingly honest and often funny story of finding hope in an ever-changing world.

Following her mother’s death, Tessa and her pot-smoking father take an impromptu road trip—for escape, for healing, for whatever it is they need. But her father doesn’t just take Tess to the Grand Canyon; he drags her all the way to a small coastal town in Oregon and abandons her with his mother, a woman Tess barely knows. (He promises to return . . . eventually.) And on top of all that, Tess brought her mom’s rare pixiebell plant with her. It’s her last connection to her mother, and it’s beginning to wilt.

As she struggles to save the pixiebell and cope with her mother’s death and her father’s disappearance, Tess forms a bond with her grandmother and meets Henry Lark, her first love. Needless to say, Tess’ trials and sadness do not stop with the loss of her mother—life doesn’t work that way. But she is able to get through these moments, bit by bit, with the love from friends and family—and the sanctuary of the library.

The Last Forever is a moving and surprising book, with a heroine that is at once fragile and resilient. Tess might have an edge to her, but she is never a cynic. She has hope; she falls in love. She finds new life after devastating loss.

The Last Forever has elements we’ve seen in your work before: multigenerational road trips, first love, heartache and loss. In what way does The Last Forever stand out to you?
I think the themes are larger. This isn’t really a boy-girl-love book, and if a reader comes to it looking for that, they’re likely to be disappointed. It is about love, yes, but in the greatest sense of the word—deep love, the lasting kind, between parents and children, lifelong friends, family, partners. It’s about our beginnings, endings and the whole big beautiful mess in between. Like most of my novels, it’s a gentle, “human condition” book, but this one touches on a more timeless subject—the way we continue on. And then there’s the vault. A wedge of steel, hidden in the farthest corner of the arctic, built to house millions of seeds so that we might begin again in the event of global catastrophe—definitely one of my most unusual locations.

I’m familiar with the Victorian language of flowers, but for The Last Forever, you create your own language, the language of seeds. Every chapter opens with a fact about a remarkable seed, which matches up with what’s going on in Tessa’s adventure. Not to mention, seeds become a powerful metaphor for the relationship between parent and child, among other things. Do you have a favorite seed? What does it mean to you?
I was fascinated by all of the seed research I did. Who knew that each seed had its own unique qualities, quirks, and history, much like we do? My favorite was the seed of the Fireweed, which is known for its ability to both survive in and transform the most desperate locations. This seed will choose locations destroyed by fire and oil spills and war, blanketing them in no time with new color and life. I love that. Now there’s resilience and triumph, for you.

Tessa narrates this story after the fact, giving us little previews of events to come, things she didn’t know when she was actually on this adventure. Even the opening sentence reveals a small peek of plot points much further down the road: “In those early months, when the beautiful and mysterious Henry Lark and I began to do all that reading . . .” But the reader never really meets this storytelling Tessa. Who do you picture as this older, slightly wiser Tessa?
I just picture Tessa as herself, maybe in college now, after a few years have passed. It can take some time after the large events of our lives to really gain perspective. After a while, you say, “Oh, so that’s what all that meant.” As a writer, I liked the thoughtful quality that the “looking back” brings the narrative; I imagine Tessa penning the story from Jenny’s sunny porch on Parrish Island, Vito sleeping in a spot of sun nearby.

Tessa’s foreshadowing elements provide the sense of foresight that few people (not just teens) have when we are mired in the darkest points of our life. The ability to look ahead comes with age and experience, and often requires a reminder from friends and family. What advice would you offer teenagers—or perhaps, your own teenage self—who can’t see so far ahead?
I would advise anyone struggling to hold on, because you never, ever know what a new day will bring. Teens won’t likely have seen that old classic movie, The African Queen, but there’s a scene in it I’ve thought of frequently during my own darkest times. Remember when the boat is stuck and stuck and stuck forever in that jungle swamp? Just before Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn are about to give up, the camera pans upward, and we—the audience—see what they can’t, that they are only a few feet away from freedom. They’ve just fallen asleep in exhaustion from their plight, but we can see the wide, open space that is waiting for them as soon as they wake up. Looking back on hard times, I realize just how close I was to change, even if I didn’t know it right then. Fate has plans for you. Believe it.

“Libraries have been an essential and sustaining fact of my life since I was a child. I saw the magic immediately: dinosaurs and planets and girl detectives; adventure and escape, all in a setting of order and safety.”

One of my favorite moments in the book is when Tessa finds the library right after her father ditches her. Books are “knowledge in the face of confusion.” What comfort has the library brought to your life?
The Last Forever is my little love note to libraries, librarians and book lovers—could you tell? Everyone who knows me knows how I feel about the library. Libraries have been an essential and sustaining fact of my life since I was a child. I saw the magic immediately: dinosaurs and planets and girl detectives; adventure and escape, all in a setting of order and safety. From then on, like Tessa and many other characters in this book, I was the library-goer who needed the library—for sanctuary and for a sigh of relief, and because all the answers were in that place. I ate lunch in there sometimes when I was a teen and needed a reprieve from being a teen. As a young mother, I trolled the aisles dripping babies and book bags as I tried to learn how to be a writer. And later, I hid in Self Help as I tried to understand—and leave—my abusive marriage.

That’s another thing: librarians keep your secrets. Between those walls and those covers there is all of life, the whole record of us poor old souls doing what we can to get through it, and librarians know this. Libraries and the books within them brought me to the life that was mine. It’s still my favorite cure for a bad day, and I’ve never lost the thrill that I can actually bring all those books home.

This book would be an obvious choice to a teenager (or anyone) who had recently lost a parent, but for those who are fortunate to not have experienced this loss, what do you hope they will take away from this book?
I hope that they’ll laugh a little, maybe cry a little, and find comfort in the idea that, in a world where everything is constantly changing, there are always people we can count on.

At the heart of The Last Forever (the title is a big giveaway) is the hope for forever in a world where death is inevitable. Do you have a “last forever,” something that gives you that kind of hope?
Well, this is a corny answer but an honest one. I believe that the real, deep and often flawed connections we have with all of our beloveds is a powerful, powerful thing. The thing. If anything can last forever, it’s love.

Caletti spoke with BookPage about the power of love, her fascination with seeds and the library’s ability to keep all your secrets.

YA, YA Fiction

YA Fiction YA

Julie Kagawa: A dark end to the Blood of Eden trilogy

Interview by Cat, Deputy Editor

by Cat, Deputy Editor

In the final book in Julie Kagawa’s popular dystopian vampire Blood of Eden trilogy, kick-butt heroine Allie Sekemoto finally gives in to her monster side following the death of her love, Zeke. She’s on a mission to hunt down psychopathic vampire Sarren, and her journey takes her to the last vampire-free zone remaining—Eden.

Without spoiling anything for fans, what are you most excited about in The Forever Song?
This is the finale. The end of Allie’s story. I guess what I’m most excited about is the final battle, watching everything that has been building since book one come to a head. There’s a desperate race against time, lots of fighting, that moment when everything seems lost and, of course, sacrifice, heartache and death. Who will come out of it alive? You’ll have to read the book to find out.

There are so many great vampire books. What drew you to share your own vision of the vampire myth?
Funny story: Back at the beginning of my writing career, I told myself I wasn’t going to write a vampire story. I felt there were already so many great ones out there, and I didn’t have anything new to add. I was actually discussing the idea of a post-apocalyptic world with my agent when she asked me what I thought about writing a vampire book. That’s when I got the idea of combining the post-apocalyptic world with the vampire mythos, and from there the Immortal Rules was born.

“And while it’s difficult and bittersweet for me to say goodbye to Allie and co., I’m satisfied with how their story came to a close. I know I left them in the best place I could.”

What’s the hardest part about finishing a trilogy? Is it difficult to say goodbye to these characters?
The hardest part of finishing a trilogy—any series really—is giving the readers an ending that is satisfying but still stays true to the book and the characters. They’ve been through a lot with your heroes; you don’t want to leave them feeling cheated or that there were too many things left unanswered. You want them to close the book with the knowledge that, even though there were some unexpected twists, turns, heartbreak and losses, the story couldn’t have ended any other way. And while it’s difficult and bittersweet for me to say goodbye to Allie and co., I’m satisfied with how their story came to a close. I know I left them in the best place I could.

Of all the many books you’ve written, who is your favorite character and why?
Oh goodness, I don’t think I can answer that. I love them all in different ways; I honestly couldn’t choose a favorite. Though the most entertaining character, from the Blood of Eden series anyway, would have to be Jackal. I love his snark and his sarcasm, and the way he says exactly what’s on his mind, regardless if you want to hear it or not. He’s ruthless and selfish and violent, and makes no excuses for it. He knows he’s a monster, and he’s perfectly fine with that, but he’ll occasionally have moments of wisdom and nobility that shock everyone. He was one of the most interesting and surprising characters I’ve written about, and I love the arrogant bloodsucker to pieces.

If you could take one of Allie’s traits for yourself, what would it be?
Her mad katana skills? I don’t think I need to be more stubborn, lol.

What’s next?
My next series is one I’m super excited about. It’s called Talon, out in November 2014, and it’s about modern-day dragons and their secret war with the Order of St. George.

It might be the end for Allie and the gang, but Kagawa won't keep fans hanging for long. We checked in with the author about the trilogy's finale and what she's up to next.

Fiction, Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Mystery

R.J. Ellory on the emotional hooks of ‘Saints of New York’

Interview by Cat, Deputy Editor

by Cat, Deputy Editor

R.J. Ellory’s standout new novel, Saints of New York, is our July 2014 Top Pick in Mystery. Past and present storylines are equally compelling in this vast and beautifully written novel.

The characters in Saints of New York—from the corrupt cops to the good cops—are all extremely flawed. They’re also surrounded by a world that is extremely dark, and even the “saints” are far from saintly. Was this a difficult book to write?
I think it’s an honest book, and I try to imbue every book I write with that kind of analysis and exposure of the human condition. I do not want to write material that strains someone’s believability. I understand that we have to suspend disbelief, but I am of the opinion that if you create strong, realistic characters, characters that people can really identify with, then the situations you place those characters in become all the more credible and acceptable. It is people that I am interested in. Emotions, the internal world, the subjective, the relationships and mistakes and passions and aspirations of people . . . all this kind of thing. People are flawed, each and every one of us, and some quite dramatically flawed. I just wanted to write a book that portrayed a real person dealing with real situations, and even though his life is something like a car crash, he does have this one true thread of decency and humanity as an innate part of his own make-up, and this is the thing that keeps him together. The unsettling realities in the book are nevertheless realities, and as one character says, ‘Just when you think you’ve seen the worst that one human being can do to another, someone goes and does something worse.’

Perhaps my favorite parts of the book are when Frank is describing in detail the history of the New York Mafia. What kind of research did you do, and how much of this history is based in truth? (Essentially, are you in danger of getting whacked?)
I would hope that I am always in danger of getting whacked! From exposés of the CIA in A Simple Act of Violence to the government-sanctioned actions of the Mafia in A Quiet Vendetta to anything I have ever written about the police and organised crime, I think that you can’t escape telling the truth. Inevitably, some people are not going to appreciate the truth being told, but if you can’t upset a few people, then what’s the point of writing this kind of book in the first place? As for research, I am a research junkie, to be honest. The information is out there, and people will talk. Using the Internet—not as a source in itself, but as a means by which you can find credible and reliable sources—makes life a lot easier. I tend to operate with the journalistic tenet: Find a source, confirm it twice.

“Inevitably, some people are not going to appreciate the truth being told, but if you can’t upset a few people, then what’s the point of writing this kind of book in the first place?”

You’ve described your writing style as being very organic—no outline or synopsis—which means your thrillers have the potential to surprise even you. Without giving too much away, what was surprising to you about Saints of New York?
I think the realness of it—the way in which I sort of pushed the characters forward only so far, and then they ran with the ball themselves. That may sound odd, but sometimes it really does feel as though the characters become so substantial as people that they influence the direction a novel takes. Speaking of working with no outline or synopsis, the first thing I decide when I embark upon a new book is What emotions do I want to create in the reader? or When someone has finished this book and they think about it some weeks later, what do I want them to remember? That’s key for me. Those are the books that stay with me, and those are the books I am constantly trying to write.

There are a million books that are brilliantly written, but mechanically so. They are very clever, there are great plot twists, and a brilliant denouement, but if the reader is asked three weeks after reading the book what they thought of it they might have difficulty remembering it. Why? Because it was all very objective. There was no subjective involvement. The characters didn’t experience real situations, or they didn’t react to them the way ordinary people react. It was more of a mental exercise, a puzzle-solving exercise, than a real emotional rollercoaster. In fact, some of the greatest books ever published, the ones that are now rightfully regarded as classics, are those books that have a very simple storyline, but a very rich and powerful emotional pull. It’s the emotion that makes them memorable, and it’s the emotion that makes them special. Character is everything for me, so a book should be filled with the blood of the character, at least figuratively speaking!

In writing this book it changed along the way, as all my books do, and—as I said—they change because the characters become that much more real, and thus they actually begin to inform and influence the direction of the story. I don’t want that to sound pretentious, you know, but I am always working against an emotional barometer. If I don’t feel it, then the reader won’t. Personally, I have a major issue with central characters who are always right, who leap to the wildest conclusions about things, and are then proven right. People are not like that at all. They make mistakes constantly, and investigators and police are the same.

You’re born and bred British but write great, moody American crime. Why the fascination with the United States?
I think I grew up with American culture all around me. I grew up watching “Starsky & Hutch,” “Hawaii Five-O,” “Kojak,” all those kinds of things. I loved the atmosphere, the diversity of culture, the fact that every state is entirely different from every other, and there are 50 of them. The politics fascinated me. America is a new country compared to England, and it just seems to me that there was so much colour and life inherent in its society. I have visited many times now, and I honestly feel like I’m visiting my second home.

And I believe that as a non-American there are many things about American culture that I can look at as a spectator. The difficulty with writing about an area that you are very familiar with is that you tend to stop noticing things. You take things for granted. The odd or interesting things about the people and the area cease to be odd and interesting. As an outsider you never lose that viewpoint of seeing things for the first time, and for me that is very important.

Also many writers are told to write about the things they are familiar with. I don’t think this is wrong, but I think it is very limiting. I believe you should also write about the things that fascinate you. I think in that way you have a chance to let your passion and enthusiasm for the subject come through in your prose. I also believe that you should challenge yourself with each new book. Take on different and varied subjects. Do not allow yourself to fall into the trap of writing things to a formula. Someone once said to me that there were two types of novels. There were those that you read simply because some mystery was created and you had to find out what happened. The second kind of novel was one where you read the book simply for the language itself, the way the author used words, the atmosphere and description. The truly great books are the ones that accomplish both. I think any author wants to write great novels. I don’t think anyone—in their heart of hearts—writes because it’s a sensible choice of profession, or for financial gain. I just love to write, and though the subject matter that I want to write about takes me to the States, it is nevertheless more important to me to write something that can move someone emotionally, perhaps change a view about life, and at the same time to try and write it as beautifully as I can. I also want to write about subjects—whether they be political conspiracies, serial killings, race relations, political assassinations or FBI and CIA investigations—that could only work in the USA. The kind of novels I want to write just wouldn’t work in small, green, leafy villages where you find Hobbits!

What books have been the most influential to your work?
That’s a big question, but I would have to cite Conan Doyle, also Lovecraft, Poe, Ambrose Bierce, a whole host of British and American mystery and horror writers that I read as a child and a teenager. And then on through Steinbeck, Hemingway, Capote, Carson McCullers, Mailer, DeLillo, Annie Proulx, Tim O’Brien, Cormac McCarthy. I am a huge fan of the different ways in which writers defy the “rules’ of writing.” Language is so powerful that you can twist it and turn it and still have it hold fast. Nowadays, I spend a great deal of time looking for and reading writers who make me feel like a clumsy and inexperienced writer.

“Language is so powerful that you can twist it and turn it and still have it hold fast.”

What’s next?
Well, we have just released the 12th title in the UK, called Carnival of Shadows. I am currently close to competing the 2015 book for the UK, meanwhile working on numerous and varied music-related projects. I am releasing a graphic novel in France based on a trilogy of short stories called Three Days in Chicagoland, and starting the many and varied tours that happen during the summer and fall. I will be at Bouchercon in Long Island in November, and as for the title that is next to be released in the U.S., I am uncertain. We shall have to wait and see!

We chatted with the British author via email about his masterful new work.

YA, YA Fiction

YA Fiction YA

Rachel DeWoskin

Interview by Cat, Deputy Editor

by Cat, Deputy Editor

The last thing Emma saw before going blind was the bright, spinning colors of fireworks—and then it all went dark. In the sensitively rendered and beautifully written Blind, Emma shares her story of courage and resilience as she comes to terms with a world that is forever changed. And when her insular hometown is shaken by a local teen’s suicide, Emma’s own tragedy is placed in sharp relief.

Rachel DeWoskin’s first young adult novel draws from her experiences while working with the Chicago Lighthouse for the Blind, where she learned braille and was inspired by the determination and warmth of her visually impaired and blind friends. DeWoskin’s ability to draw readers into her blind character’s mind seems effortless, and the story is full of details—such as comparing voices and words to smells and colors—that reveal Emma’s mind to be far from the lonely, dark place she initially fears it will be.

What was your greatest challenge in writing a story narrated by a blind character?
I wanted Emma to be a resilient warrior, but not a saint. To find herself in an impossible context, but not to become that context—or to become a victim or symbol. For me, Blind isn’t a book meant to be about blindness, or even a blind girl—it’s a book about being a girl in the world in general, about figuring out how to make meaning in (and of) your life, no matter how difficult the hand you’re dealt. How to survive and live in a way that’s meaningful and joyful.

What was the most surprising thing you learned about blind and visually impaired teens while working with the Chicago Lighthouse for the Blind?
I learned a lesson that I kept finding fascinating even as I learn it again and again in my grown-up life, which is that kids are unbelievably resilient. And, at their centers, so similar to one another, no matter what differences appear to define or set them apart from each other. I think part of what gives them what to my mind is amazing bravery and grit is actually a childish and useful ability to juxtapose (and experience) life’s most profound difficulties and joys with its most daily matters. To go from the zero of a social interaction at school to the infinity of our socially unjust world, or of a life-changing accident, of a death even—in mere seconds. And, importantly, to come back. In the visually impaired kids I met and talked to, this quality is particularly inspiring, because they’ve had to recalibrate how to live in a world designed for people who are sighted. And many of them have done so with quite incredible creativity, grace and humor. They play baseball with a ball that beeps; they read in the dark after bedtime; they wrap rubber bands around their eyeliners so they can tell black from blue. They are creative and funny and imaginative about ways to be their most engaged and best selves.

“For me, Blind isn’t a book meant to be about blindness, or even a blind girl—it’s a book about being a girl in the world in general, about figuring out how to make meaning in (and of) your life, no matter how difficult the hand you’re dealt.”

When the novel opens, there’s a romantic element to some of Emma’s descriptions of blindness (“Words have vivid edges and colors now, and listening to Leah is like being inside a book with glistening pages . . .”). But as the story progresses, the reality and the fear becomes palpable as Emma recounts what it’s like to lose her sight. Was this an important shift to you?
Why? I think when we make progress in our lives, it usually happens in a backwards and forwards motion, becomes a liquid process, even. When Blind opens, Emma has moved past the worst, most shrieking moments of her accident and its aftermath, partly because I didn’t want the novel to capitalize on the shocking value built into a scene like that. I didn’t put that first, and I didn’t want to build up to it and make her disaster the climax of the book. But as she’s not in the first moment of it, she has to remember it and figure out how to live with it. And sometimes remembering, which I think is work we all have to do if we’re going to create palatable narratives from the substance of our lives, can drag you back under the water of your own most difficult moments. Emma lives on a wide spectrum, and she’s trying to figure out how to think of / understand what happened to her, how to be truthful about it with herself. And both versions—the one that features her heightened ability to feel a world she used to be able to see and the one that features her gutting loss—are true stories for her. She figures out a way to live between (and with) them.

Stories of teens with mental and physical disabilities seem to be flooding the young adult industry, and Blind stands out for its tenderness and realism. Why do you think novels like this are important for teen readers? And why do you think they’re gaining in popularity?
Thank you. I don’t know about popularity, but all my books, both the adult ones and this one, are about sameness and difference. About girls and women on the peripheries of their societies or social groups or worlds. I’m interested in how we communicate with (and betray and forgive) each other, across whatever chasms divide us. Sometimes those are cultural and linguistic; sometimes they’re political and generational.

Lately, I’ve been writing some about physical difference; my most recent novel, Big Girl Small, is about a teenage little person who wants to be Judy Garland but feels forced to identify with the “munchkins” of our cultural media world. Blind is the furthest reach of that question for me, an exploration of ways we see the world, no matter who we are. I wrote it in a fit of wonder about what it would feel like to have to change, to have your perspective and identity made irrevocably different both from what it was and from those around you. And how a tough heroine (I always write with my daughters and mama and mama-in-law and an army of my best girlfriends in mind, thinking, how would we keep each other afloat, no matter what the circumstances?) can get through almost anything.

What do you admire most about Emma? If you could give her any advice, what would it be?
I love Emma, because she is a kind of forward-imagined version of my two little girls, who are 9 and 6. My favorite thing about Emma is her thoughtful ability to hold contradiction in her mind, to know that there’s a worst version and a best version, and to find her way to an angle of repose between them. I like that she’s going to be okay. That’s what I want for my girls, the fiery core that allows for navigating the world in a feisty, inspired, courageous way.

Do you know if Blind will be translated into braille?
It will be! And the audio version comes out this month.

What’s next for you?
My next YA book is a novel set in Shanghai in the 1940s, about a Jewish girl and her father who escape from Poland to China and live out the war in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, where by 1940 there were 20,000 Jewish refugees! Needless to say, it’s another look at some of the central themes that always drive and inspire me: foreignness, bravery, feminism and difficulty. Like Blind, it’s about learning to let go, even as we hang on.

We caught up with the author to talk about her blind character, coming to terms with tragedy and much more.

YA, YA Nonfiction

YA Nonfiction YA

Lucy Mangan

Interview by Cat, Deputy Editor

by Cat, Deputy Editor

Featuring excerpts from early drafts, movie stills and behind-the-scenes photographs, early illustrations and so much more, Inside Charlie’s Chocolate Factory is like a wondrous boat ride down that chocolate river, but with journalist Lucy Mangan at the helm. We spoke with Mangan via email about the beloved classic, its lasting impact, candy and (naturally) squirrels.

Looking back 50 years, what do you think is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s greatest contribution to our culture and to children’s literature?
It’s made contributions to the language—a “Golden Ticket” now describes anyone who gets an all-access pass to anything, and “a bit of a Willy Wonka” describes anyone who is crazily innovative and inventive—and it seems to be almost infinitely adaptable. It’s been made into two films, an opera, stage plays, a musical—and now the 1971 film is used a lot for Internet jokes, gifs and memes. Wonka/Wilder’s mercurial nature lends itself to them very well—all his expressions just seem to cry out for captioning!

In terms of children’s literature, I think Dahl showed that you could break with tradition—and that was something he learned on the job, so to speak, because his first (surviving) draft is a relatively formulaic story about Charlie accidentally ending up at Wonka’s house one night, foiling a burglary there and being rewarded with a sweet shop of his own. [You can] let your imagination run wild, and if you did it with enough verve and gusto and confidence, and took your readers with you into a magical world that had its own mad, interior logic, they would follow delightedly wherever you went.

Of all the different ways the book has been honored this year, none has brought so as much attention (and negative attention, at that) than the new Penguin Modern Classics book cover. What is your take on this cover, and what do you think Dahl himself would have thought of it?
I’m not sure how Roald Dahl would have felt, but as a writer who first made his name writing fabulously sinister short stories for adults he might have been sympathetic to the designers’ intentions. Maybe he would have loved the evocation of his other work—the merging of his two writing worlds? I don’t know.

Which is your favorite movie adaptation?
The 1971 movie is my favourite—although I feel bad for saying that, because Dahl hated it. He thought it was sentimental—especially the ending—and that Gene Wilder was completely wrong for the part. (“He played it for subtle, adult laughs,” Dahl said.) He had wanted Spike Milligan or Peter Sellars for the part, who were more genuine eccentrics in real life. But he had a very bad experience trying to write the script for the film (which was not really his forte), so I think that probably coloured his view of it. I think it captures the anarchic, freewheeling spirit of the book very beautifully and in that way is much more faithful to the book than Tim Burton’s careful, polished retelling of the story in his 2005 film.

I couldn’t believe that the squirrels in Tim Burton’s movie adaptation weren’t computer animated, but were real-life squirrels! What most surprised you when you were researching this book?
I think there was some CGI used with the squirrels, but they certainly had real ones for a lot of it. Mel Stuart in his film in 1971 was defeated by the squirrel scene—he had to change that room into one in which geese laid golden eggs—but by 2005 technology had caught up with Dahl!

I think I was—idiotically—most surprised to see how many drafts he had done. I somehow had always assumed that it had sprung forth fully formed! But there are five surviving drafts, and it’s clear that he destroyed at least one other.

But I think maybe we all do that with books in childhood, assume that they came easily and perfectly, and that they’re just there, for our delectation and delight. But I still think it even now—I subconsciously, or even consciously, assume that every article or book I read just emerged like that, even though I know from my own experience as a journalist and author and from that of friends similarly employed, that it doesn’t happen like that for anyone.

Were there any plot points from the earlier Charlie drafts that you wish had held over for the final product? Which ones? Why or why not?
I don’t think I wish he’d kept any of the earlier stuff—he really did improve the story each time he rewrote it—except some of the other children’s names, Herpes Trout being a particular favourite of mine.

Although I do love the character of Miranda Mary Piker. (“How could anybody like her? / Such a rude and disobedient little kid,” sing the Oompa Loompas.) She’s one of the original 10 characters Dahl wrote in his first draft, the insufferable child of progressive parents who believe in self-expression instead of manners and discipline. When asked if the sugar daffodils she has picked are for her mother, she says “No! I’m to gobble them up all by myself!” “You see,” responds her mother delightedly, “what an interesting child she is!”

You can practically hear the howl of rage and pain from a writer born in 1916 and now writing in the early-mid ’60s as hippies begin to wreck everything. . . . She made it to the penultimate draft, which makes me think Dahl was probably quite fond of her, too.

If you could have a lifetime supply of any kind of Wonka candy, which would you choose?
Whipplescrumptious Fudgemallow Delight bars. Definitely. No question. Nestle actually produced a version to accompany the release of the 2005 film, and it was almost as delicious as in imagination. How often does reality live up to the hype like that? And of course they withdrew it a few months later, before I’d even had a chance to stockpile. I was—I am—bereft.

Sweets are no longer the precious treasures they once were, and now it’s much easier for kids to get their hands on candy than on healthy, wholesome nutrients. Do you think the next generation of young readers will continue to be drawn to Charlie? Why or why not?
I think so. I think the wit, the dizzying pace, the appeal of extreme vice and extreme virtue, the dazzling nature of Wonka and the “naughtiness” of the whole thing will appeal forever, just as it does in older, more traditional fairy tales—which is what, in many ways, Charlie is. The chocolate and the sweets are the icing on the cake—if you’ll pardon the joke, though you probably shouldn’t—and I think children have a basically endless appetite for them actually and metaphorically, so that will always delight, too. Though I agree that the changes in children’s dietary upbringing in the last 50 mean they’ve probably lost a slight edge since the book was first published (which, in the U.K. of course, was in a country that still vividly remembered wartime and postwar rationing).

Order from: BAM | B & N | Indiebound | Amazon

Find out more about Roald Dahl’s stories and characters, including more about the 50th anniversary of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, at www.roalddahl.com, on Facebook or Twitter (use #CharlieAndTheChocolateFactory).

Roald Dahl's timeless adventure, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Inside Charlie's Chocolate Factory is a fun and informative peek into the Wonka world.

Children's & YA, Middle Grade

Children's & YA Middle Grade

Jacqueline Woodson looks back on a life full of dreams

Interview by Cat, Deputy Editor

by Cat, Deputy Editor

Why did you write a memoir? Why now?
I finally have something to say. [Laughs.] No, I think what I was saying in the session was, when my mom died suddenly, I realized there was so much I didn’t know, that I wanted to find out, so many questions I couldn’t ask. I felt like I wanted to get the stories down from people before they passed on because so many of my relatives are older. I wanted to get a sense of who my mom was before she was my mom. I felt like it was time. I had written almost 30 books—I’ve lost count—and this was the story that was coming to me, that I wanted to tell now.

Why did you think verse works so well for this book?
It’s how memory comes. Memories come in these small moments, with all of this white space around them, but the moments are very distinct. I feel like I have all this information, [but I’m] not sure what it’s connected to. And then the exploration of years and months and days brings the connection together. But it wouldn’t have been a straight narrative. A straight narrative would’ve been a lie. It’s not how you remember things—you remember them in small moments.

Some people say it’s poetry. I think the language is very poetic, but I think the verse is less intentional than poetry, so that where I have the line breaks are moments when I want you, the reader, and myself to pause and see this moment. Verse does allow for things to be more visual because of the minimalism.

What sort of challenges do you think verse poses?
I think one of the biggest challenges was consistency. There were points where I just wanted to tell the whole story and put it on the page because I had so much memory about it. I had to make the choice to say, “This is not the place for that story.” John Gardner talks about the “dream” of fiction. In On Becoming a Novelist, he says, when you’re reading and you’re in the fictive dream, if something happens that dream can be broken. I didn’t want to—it’s not a fictive dream, it’s a memoir dream—but I didn’t want it to be broken by suddenly the reader seeing a chapter pop up and thinking, This doesn’t belong here. It didn’t feel like anything [other than] the verse belonged there.

“At this moment, this is what I know. Here’s something else I know. Here, read these memories. This is what I know.”

How did you decide on the poetic forms for the different subjects?
All the “How to Listen” pieces are in haiku—except there’s a typo in there, I’m so cranky! Those were just kind of writing guides that I was learning as I went along and that, once they were in the book, they were writing guides for people coming to write. So much of what I learned about writing I learned from reading. With Brown Girl Dreaming, it is a memoir, but it is also, this is how you write. You listen. You let yourself be still. You let the stories you’re being told become memory. All of these moments—those small moments of haiku are moments of instruction. That’s how I decided on that. I wanted it to be part of the story, the narrative, as it was being formed. At this moment, this is what I know. Here’s something else I know. Here, read these memories. This is what I know. That was very deliberate.

Speaking of learning to write—as there is a lot in Brown Girl Dreaming about loving words at a young age—what is your strongest influence in fostering your love of words?
Reading picture books. With a picture book, you can look at the pictures and know the story without having to read the words. Back when I was a pre-reader, I’m sure the pictures were telling me stories or I’d make up the stories, and then once I was able to attach the words to the pictures and the story, it gave me a whole new level.

Picture books are accessible, I think for anyone. College kids, high school kids. It’s one of the most approachable ways to learn about writing. . . . It really does crack the code for you, in a way. I feel like for me as a really young kid, that code began to get cracked with the reading of picture books.

And then the poems of Langston Hughes, you know, the people who were writing poems that I could understand, that were not coded. I think of, “Well son, I’ll tell you: / Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.” It was the language. Langston Hughes was writing in a language I understood. It was the language that people I knew spoke. “Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair” was OK, I understand what he’s saying. Life has been jacked up along the way, but I keep climbing. I’m going to push through this.

You depict an incredibly complex relationship with the South.
[Laughs.] I do! Well, with the South and the North. The relationship with the North is complex in a more nuanced way because that’s what I had by the time I got there. Remember, when I was in the South, I was very young. The South, you know, this is Jim Crow, the laws were very blatant and very much understood out loud. Whereas in the North, the laws were not understood out loud and not written down, but they still existed in some way.

It is complicated for so many African Americans. The lush South, the beauty of it, the food, the people, the magic of it is so complicated and shrouded in the history of that oppression and the resistance. All of that is very complicated. But without complexity, you don’t have richness, right? The simpler something is, the less memorable and less of an impact it has.

You mentioned during your session that when you started writing this memoir, you went back to South Carolina and started interviewing family and writing down your family history, and in that process you learned something about yourself. What’s something you learned about yourself?
I feel like I learned what I already knew—that I was loved, how much I was loved and that at every corner there was someone moving me toward being a writer, even without knowing it. That came through the love. I always knew that I didn’t just wake up and say, “I’m going to be a writer.” It had to come from somewhere. And when I started to investigate and put the memories down on paper, I really got a sense of, OK, I am here because of them. I am here because of the South and because of the North and because of Ohio and because of my great-great-grandfather and the Civil War. The depth to which my history informed myself today was really both humbling and, of course, empowering.

You mentioned your favorite piece in your session, “Music,” which is about the music of your childhood and how your mother wouldn’t let you listen to any song that had the word “funk” in it. Why is it your favorite?
I love music so much because it speaks to the other complexity of my childhood. Here I was in this environment, and Jehovah’s Witnesses say that you’re in the world but you’re not of the world, and every step of the way that was true for me! [Laughs.] Including, here I am in this predominately black and Latino neighborhood in the ’70s, where the word “funk” is everywhere, and my family’s saying, “Step out of that, you’re not a part of that.” And here I am trying to define my myself and saying, “But this is what I know! This is what’s having an impact on my life!” And it’s just funny to look back on it and say, “Wow! Of course I’m writing, of course.”

I don’t know if it’s disparity, but there’s a difference between here and there, and that’s so much of what the book is talking about. Will I always have to choose between home and home? The funk was home for me, and then the white music became home for me, because that was informing so much of who I was. . . . When I get to the end of the book, I talk about, when there are many worlds, you can decide [which] you’re going to walk in. I think about the Robert Frost poem, “Two roads diverged . . .” It’s kind of all of these roads. You can take that one and you can take that one and you can take that one, and they all lead you to this one place, and you’ve always been walking all of them. The one place is the self and the complexity of the self. When you’re a writer, you have to have your eyes wide open and be aware of all of that. You can’t have tunnel vision and shut down what you don’t want to experience because that closes off the roads.

Any new projects in the works?
No, not really. [Laughs.] This book tour. Jonathan Demme’s making a movie of Beneath a Meth Moon, so when I get back I’m going to hopefully have a script to read and advise on. And then I’m going to take a little bit of a break. I’m just going to be Mom for a couple of months.

After Jacqueline Woodson spoke to an eager audience at the 2014 Southern Festival of Books, BookPage chatted with the award-winning author about her new memoir-in-verse, Brown Girl Dreaming, her love of words and her complex relationships with music, the South and so much more.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Christina Baker Kline brings history to light

Interview by Cat, Deputy Editor

by Cat, Deputy Editor

Since its publication last year, Christina Baker Kline’s fifth novel, Orphan Train, which illuminated a little-discussed moment in American history, has fascinated readers. Between 1854 and 1929, trains carried thousands of abandoned children from the East Coast to farmlands in the Midwest. Many were adopted by new families, while others found themselves entering into indentured servitude. Orphan Train intertwines the story of one of these children—Vivian Daly—with that of Molly, a contemporary young woman who has spent her youth in and out of foster care. As a friendship between the two women forms, history is revealed and healing can begin.

The orphan trains ran for many years, but not much has been written about them (at least, not for adults). Why do you think that is?
I think the story has taken a long time to come out, and for people to wrap their heads around what exactly happened and how many people were on these trains, how they got there. The train riders themselves, many of them kept quiet about what happened to them and never told anyone. A lot of people died before relatives even could find out.

Most history is not the history of dispossessed children or the poor. The truth is, this was happening and no one was really writing about it, partly because that wasn’t what was really being written about. It’s only in the 20th century really that the concept of childhood—even of teenage-hood—came into being. Journalists and reporters started uncovering what was happening to poor people in all different kinds of ways. All of this ferment around immigration—and also about Native Americans—was not happening then in the same way. This is a time that people are trying to excavate and figure out what constitutes American history. Even the concept of Columbus Day . . . it feels like a vestige, an evolutionary webbed foot.

Frankly, this story is shocking to us with our 21st-century brains, but it was not shocking in 1920, the idea of sending children to better homes to work, because they were working already.

“The story has been hidden in plain sight in American history. . . . It’s obviously hit a nerve.”

The modern-day storyline shows how things haven’t changed all that much for orphans since the time of trains.
I did a presentation to a room full of social workers, 60 social workers, and one of them said, “We don’t send children on trains anymore, but we do send them all over the state without their knowledge of where they’re going, into homes where they have no idea where it is, to communities they’ve never been in, and the transition is not that different.” The feelings that children have today in the foster care system, even though there are checks and balances in place now, are the same feelings.

This book became a huge word-of-mouth hit since it was published last year. In fact, in reverse of the usual order, it went from paperback original to hardcover. Why do you think that is?
I think that the story has been hidden in plain sight in American history. I think that a lot of people are intrigued by that, that we don’t know about this. I think that the juxtaposition of the contemporary story of a troubled girl . . . to the orphan train-rider a hundred years ago gives it immediacy. You’re not just looking at some sepia-tinted story of a girl from long ago. Immediately you’re faced with what it feels like today to be a child who’s displaced. That creates a lot of room for conversation.

I didn’t do it in a calculated way, thinking that would happen. My publisher had no idea. My agent had no idea. Nobody expected this, for there to be 1.5 million copies in print in 25 countries. It’s obviously hit a nerve.

What are you working on next? Is there another moment in history you’d like to illuminate in this way?
I’m not really a historical novelist. My next novel is inspired by a painting, “Christina’s World” by Andrew Wyeth, and it’s about the girl, the woman in the painting. If you consider the mid-20th century historical, I suppose it is historical fiction, but it’s really a whole different kind of narrative and story.

After seeing how many readers showed up for your session, do you have a fun fan story to share?
What’s most fun for me is when people have gone on adventures with their own families after reading my book. This old guy came up to me at one event—I mean, I’ve had a number of these—but this particular guy, his daughter made him read it. . . . His brother was taken onto the train, and he was adopted. It all came back when he was reading the book. He’d never done anything to try to find out what happened, but he found his brother in California! Not only that, but they’re both members of the Lions Club, and they were a featured story on the cover of the Lions Club magazine a couple of months ago! . . . It was so inspiring and interesting to hear about how the book propelled him to find out about his past. I love hearing those stories.

Who are you most excited to see while you’re here at the Southern Festival of Books?
Well, my good friend Lily King! I love her, and I just read Euphoria, and I loved it.

Kline's many fans packed the house for her session at the 2014 Southern Festival of Books. BookPage had the pleasure of speaking with the author about the book's runaway success and what she's working on next.

Fiction, Popular Fiction

Fiction Popular Fiction

Lauren Oliver

Interview by Cat, Deputy Editor

by Cat, Deputy Editor

Lauren Oliver is well known and quite beloved for her young adult and children’s books. Her first novel for adults, Rooms, is a ghost story, but is completely unlike any we’ve read before. In an elegant blend of real and supernatural worlds, the story takes place entirely within the walls of one house, moving from room to room and unfolding through the voices of seven different narrators—including two ghosts.

What was your inspiration for Rooms?
I’m really interested in old houses. I grew up in an old house, and when I grew up there, I was always thinking about the people who must have lived there before and the people who lived there afterwards. Part of the idea for Rooms was I wanted to just be able to tell a house’s story—all of the dramas and tensions and romances that have played out within one home—and be able to tell it in a way where you’re collapsing the timeframe and telling multiple stories that have existed at different points.

I also love stories of dysfunctional families that can be in a home—This Is Where I Leave You being a recent example, which is about family that returned home to observe shiva, but also The Corrections. There’s a whole literary tradition of dysfunctional families that return home and collide.

What sort of research did you do on ghosts or haunted houses for this book?
My ghosts are unlike other apparitions or spirits that one would typically find in Gothic literature or “Ghost Hunters”-type TV shows. My ghosts have real personalities and narratives and patterns of speech. But I did do a lot of research about who they were and what kind of life they lived. One of my ghost narrators was born around 1920, and the other was born in the early 1950s in Georgia. They have had experiences that I didn’t really know about—like anything, when vacuum cleaners became common usage, what it was like to grow up in Georgia in 1955.

Did you draw on any well-known haunted houses?
No, not really. One of my best and oldest friends is obsessed with ghosts and obessed with hauntings, so I’ve gone with her on different ghost missions and tours. And I have an old house in upstate New York which is allegedly haunted. Although I have never had any experiences with the ghosts, several of my friends have.

But the research I did was more about encapsulating their personalities and what their experiences would’ve been.

There are seven main narrators in Rooms. Did you have one you enjoyed writing the most?
I really loved writing Trenton. I had a particular fondness for him because he was one of the first characters that came to me. Sandra was a hard voice for me to capture because she’s so incisive and foul-mouthed—not that I’m not foul-mouthed, but I’m foul-mouthed in a very different way. She’s older and she’s so ornery. And so it was hard for me to get her voice, but once I did, it was so fun. She says the most ridiculous things, uses the most ridiculous metaphors. She’s a crass, loud, doesn’t-give-a-shit kind of person.

This is your first novel for adults. Did you face any new challenges in switching to an adult audience?
I came across a million challenges regarding Rooms because of the way that it’s structured and the way that there are so many narrators and the fact that it takes place in one house—but those are not necessarily challenges endemic to it being for adults. It’s hard to say, because those are challenges endemic to the book, and I couldn’t have written that book in that way for anybody who wasn’t an adult. So of course they’re related, but afterward it feels like the challenges pertain to the material itself and not to any audience.

What’s next?
In March 2015 I have a teen book called Vanishing Girls, which is a realistic novel about teen girls in the aftermath of an accident, for fans of We Were Liars by E. Lockhart. In fact E. Lockhart blurbed it. In the fall I’m launching a middle grade series that’s really fun, called Curiosity House. And then currently I’m writing a teen book and an adult book.

Is there anyone you’re excited to see while you’re here for the Southern Festival of Books?
I’m here for like one second, so no. I’m just going to catch up with two of my friends, Claudia Gray and Lev Grossman, though now it turns out I’m probably going to miss him.

Following her session at the 2014 Southern Festival of Books, BookPage spoke with author Lauren Oliver about her first book for adults, haunted houses, haunted families and much more.

Children's & YA, Picture Book

Children's & YA Picture Book

Jan Brett

Interview by Cat, Deputy Editor

by Cat, Deputy Editor

Do animals have a Santa Claus? This is just the sort of question Jan Brett would ask. In her new book, The Animals’ Santa, a young snowshoe hare in a cozy striped vest doesn’t believe all the other animals when they talk about Santa. As the squirrels and porcupines decorate the forest and share stories about the mysterious giver of gifts, the incredulous little rabbit crosses his paws. In the same way children wait up all night, hoping to hear to the sound of jingle bells and hooves on the roof, the little rabbit’s older brother—a true believer—decides to try to catch Santa. Brett’s classic illustrations capture the precious details and gentle beauty of the snowy wood, and children will treasure this tale of believing in Christmas.

What was the inspiration for this funny little story?
This funny little story just appeared to me all of sudden, the way you see in cartoons when someone has a light bulb idea over their head. . . . I was thinking, wait a minute, why don’t animals have a Santa Claus? I was thinking how I could make it into a poem about how the earth changes on its axis, and we go from fall into winter and about winter solstice. I was thinking, maybe in those couple of days, the animals don’t kill and eat each other. It was kind of poetic!

And I thought [the animals’ Santa] would be a snowy owl because they’re kind of like avian nomads, traveling all over from the arctic where they breed and where they live. They travel on silent wings, if you know about owls. What a perfect Santa Claus an owl would make!

The little skeptical rabbit’s brother decides to try to catch Santa in the act by hanging up pieces of ice. What was your inspiration for this?
I love this time of year when it’s cold enough for this ice to form. It has this kind of skin over the top of a puddle. It’s really fun to run through it and go crinch crinch crinch. It has very pretty designs, and often I’ll stop my run and see a little stream that’s coming through the woods, and it will be like lace. All this ice, this beautiful lacey ice. . . . There’s a tinkling noise that happens when it breaks. It could be a lovely trap, not a mean, awful trap.

What do you love most about these animals?
I love these animals from the arctic. I’ve always had an affinity—well, not an affinity so much as a curiosity about these animals that are white in the winter and brown in the summer. I mean, how did that ever happen? There’s something so sophisticated about how the pigment in the fur can change from winter to the summer. It sounds almost unbelievable.

One of my favorite elements of your illustrations has always been the border scenes. In The Animals’ Santa, little lemmings that look like elves make gifts for the woodland creatures. These scenes seem to be decorated with porcupine quills.
I had gone up to Canada, to Newfoundland . . . for a school visit. . . . We had stopped at this store that just specialized in native crafts. It’s a level of craft that’s really an art. I love these boxes made of porcupine quills, and I had collected them for years, not really knowing what they were. I just really love the tactile feeling of them and the colors that are used. Sometimes the Native Americans would use vegetation from native plants, so the colors aren’t knock-your-eye-out orange or red. They’re just these beautiful colors. So I met these people that have this beautiful art and found that some of these quills can be flattened out and form almost like a raincoat. . . .

One day in the summer I was driving along, and I saw a porcupine that had been hit. But it wasn’t squished, it just looked like it had went to sleep. So I went to the hardware store and got a big rubber mat that would go in a bathtub and gloves and a big, huge aluminum shovel to pick it up. The reason they’re called porky-pines is because they’re really heavy and fat! It took all my strength to get it into the car. . . . The quills, even if you just get near them and touch them, those barbs will stick you. They’re kind of dangerous. So I had these gloves and everything, and took picture of it, and this porcupine was kind of a major part of this book. . . . I started to photograph it . . . but then decided to do the next best thing, which is to draw it!

Do you have a favorite scene from The Animals’ Santa?
It would definitely be the owl. I really didn’t do it justice. This is a beautiful, beautiful animal. I’ve never really seen one—I might’ve only seen one on the wing one time but I didn’t have time to take a picture of it. They are so beautiful.

At the time I did the book, I had read somewhere that the white ones are mostly all male, so I made him all white. The females have these black markings on them—so beautiful. Last year there was an eruption of snowy owls. Apparently, from my reading, and also from this website by this guy Norman Smith, who’s from the Audubon and from my area in Boston, they had an eruption. What happens is, the lemmings and the snowshoe hares have a really good year, and there’s lots of vegetation for them to eat, and they can have multiple litters in a season. It quickly turns to fall, and then the owls feed on them, and all of a sudden you have more owls than the land can support. And who gets kicked out? The young males, so the big males can defend their territory and tend to stay up [in the arctic], and all these young males fly south. They came as far as Boston and even further, and they’d gravitate toward Logan Airport and to some of these barrier island beaches that look like the tundra. . . .

So that’s my favorite page, but I couldn’t really capture the luminescence of those feathers. It’s almost like a magical thing. It’s almost like the real animal is as unbelievable as the Santa Claus owl because of their lifestyle and the way they look. They almost kind of look like Santa Claus with their fluffy heads and mustache.

Your illustrations to me, and for so many readers, epitomize Christmas. As someone who’s constantly telling Christmas stories, how do you always find more inspiration in this season?
I would go back to what I would call my craft. I love to do details in my drawings. When I was 6 or 7, I knew I was going to be an illustrator. I used to promise myself that I’m not going to do simple drawings of cartoons, although I loved Charles Addams cartoons when I was that age. But I wanted to have things that really were pithy, that had a full range of emotions.

When you’re little, you have your own sense of aesthetics. You ask a 6-year-old what they’re going to wear to school, they’re going to tell you that they want this but not that. I think the smart parents respect that because it’s kind of a flag of a child’s individuality. It’s what they like and their idea of what beauty is. . . . I used to love books that felt like I could walk in the page and be in a different place, that transporting, that time-machine feeling of a really good story. Sometimes the illustration was the thing that propelled you in that world.

I always wanted to do that, but my style is so detailed that sometimes you don’t see the forest for the trees because it’s so busy. But the snow is the perfect foil for being able to show a little red squirrel with a brilliant coat and little whiskers that are kind of shining in the moonlight. The beauty of nature against the white. I think anybody who goes down a walk after a snow—it’s almost as if your whole color reference is booted, jump-started, because you’re seeing stuff for the first time. All of a sudden a birch tree, which is white, all of a sudden you can see the greens and the pinks and the yellows, and there’s always a few trees with a few leaves attached, even in a snowstorm. You wouldn’t see that if it was a late fall without any snow. I love that! It works for my pictures. The snow makes everything more defined.

When I go to my book signings, I talk about how everybody has their own style. Figuring out what makes your style work is part of the process. . . . One thing you need for that is time. That’s a big talking point when I talk to the children: Give yourself some time to draw and let your imagination take you away. It can be a human and exciting experience to, all of a sudden, create something.

BookPage called Brett at home in Massachusetts to discuss this sweet Christmas story about a most unexpected Santa.

YA, YA Fiction

YA Fiction YA

Jandy Nelson: Two halves make one incredible story

Interview by Cat, Deputy Editor

by Cat, Deputy Editor

Jandy Nelson’s I’ll Give You the Sun dazzled us with elegantly crafted prose and flawless narrative structure as it switched between the perspectives of twins Noah and Jude. Its captivating balance of heartbreak and hope garnered it the highest honor in YA fiction, the 2015 Printz Award.

What was the first thing that went through your head when you found out you had won the Printz?
I think it was something like: HOLYHELLOHMYGODNOWAYIWONTHEPRINTZHOLYHELLOHMYGODNOWAY et cetera for about a week now and counting!

Who was the one person you couldn’t wait to tell about the award?
This is a very hard question because I instantly and passionately wanted to tell everybody on the Earth! Barring that, Mom was the one and she was indeed the first person I told.

“I love that ‘everything’ aspect of writing about/for teenagers, all the terrible and amazing firsts all happening at once.”

Do you have a favorite past Printz winner?
So many! But I’m head over heels for A Step from Heaven by An Na, How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff and Looking for Alaska by John Green. Also, I must admit I haven’t read all the titles. I’ve been told on penalty of death I have to read Jellicoe Road and Going Bovine. Both are in the stack on my bed table awaiting me.

What’s the best part of writing books for a younger audience?
I love being inside the minds/hearts of my teen narrators, love the urgency of the teen experience, that period of time when everything is so new, so dramatic, so emotional, so confusing, so funny, so raw, so honest, so everything. I love that “everything” aspect of writing about/for teenagers, all the terrible and amazing firsts all happening at once. It’s a headlong ride, and I feel really lucky to get to do it. Teens are such smart passionate readers—it’s such a joy to hear from them.

What kind of reaction have you gotten from your readers about this book?
The letters so far for Sun have been bursting with emotion and enthusiasm, and from all ages/sexes, lots of teens who are thinking about coming out or struggling with their sexuality who really relate to Noah, other teens going through tough family times and relate to Jude, others who are falling in love, and many who just respond to the kind of over-the-top passionate natures of the twins, their mistakes and triumphs, and their artistic relationship with the world. What’s been amazing is some teen readers who are artists have been sending me incredible artwork they’ve done based on the book or its characters.

Have you read or listened to past Printz acceptance speeches? Are you excited (or worried!) about your own speech?
I’m completely and utterly terrified! But I gave myself a week to be in denial, to not think about it, and then I’ll face the music. I believe I’ve heard bits and pieces of Libba Bray’s and John Green’s speeches: brilliant bits and pieces! But, of course, mixed in with the terror is a lot of excitement. The whole thing is such a thrill, a once in a lifetime thrill. I’m so glad you can’t unwin the Printz! That this will always have happened!

What’s next for you?
I’m writing another YA novel called The Fall Boys & Dizzy in Paradise about two brothers and a sister living in a hot, dusty Northern California vineyard town called Paradise. Their father mysteriously disappeared 16 years earlier, and the story begins when this strange, enigmatic girl shows up and sends all their lives into tumult. It’s kind of a relay race of a love(s) story, with some serious violin playing, food making, grape crushing, break ins and outs, dreams shattered and pieced back together, time lost, love lost and found, and a band called “Hell Hyena and the Furniture.” I’m really excited about it!

Author photo by Sonya Sones.

We caught up with the San Francisco-based author to find out what it's like to win the Printz.

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