Deborah Hopkinson

In just one week, fifth grader Mattie Breen, custodial apprentice and secret storyteller, will face the moment she always dreads: introducing herself in front of her classmates in yet another new school.

This time, as she helps her Uncle Potluck, director of custodial arts at Mitchell P. Anderson Elementary School, prepare for the opening of school, Mattie stands in the empty classroom and wonders what it will be like. Is it possible that, for once, she can find words to say that will magically bring her friends? Can she say something that will make her more than “that shy girl?”

Mattie is the engaging young heroine of Linda Urban’s lyrical new novel for young readers, Hound Dog True. Urban brings Mattie’s emotions to life so perceptively it’s natural to wonder if the author herself was shy as a child, or if, like Mattie, she had the experience of being teased about her writing. 

“It is risky to be earnest. It is risky to show that you care. Irony is like wearing bubble wrap.”

“When I was a kid, I wrote all the time—joyfully and fearlessly,” Urban remembers during a call to her home in Vermont. “Then in seventh grade, we were given an assignment to write about Christmas Eve. I wrote a piece that was filled with memory and detail—I really put my heart into it. We were asked to read our pieces aloud and I did, and a boy in my class said that one of the words I used was weird. And that I was weird for having used it.”

The incident had an effect on the direction Urban took. She stopped writing fiction and went on to study advertising and journalism in college. Eventually she became a bookseller at an independent bookstore in Pasadena, California, before moving to Vermont with her family seven years ago. 

But as for writing fiction herself? 

“Too risky. Too scary,” the author says. 

In fact, Urban didn’t begin writing fiction again until age 37, when she started reading picture books to her baby daughter. She began getting up early (a writing habit she continues now as the mother of a nine- and seven-year-old), and didn’t even admit to her husband for months that she was trying her hand at writing children’s literature.

Urban’s first novel for children, A Crooked Kind of Perfect, published in 2007, tells the story of a girl who dreams of getting a baby grand piano but gets an organ instead. The book received many accolades, including being named a selection of the Junior Library Guild. In 2009 Urban published a picture book, Mouse Was Mad, illustrated by Henry Cole. This amusing story for preschoolers about an angry mouse who tries to handle his emotions was also praised by reviewers.

Now, with three books to her credit and another novel in the works, Urban is an advocate for young writers like Mattie. “My own memories of writing that Christmas piece in seventh grade and the reaction I got from my classmates had a little to do with the emotional core of Hound Dog True and Mattie’s fear about sharing her writing,” she says. 

“I do a lot of school visits and hear from young writers who are afraid to tell people they write. It’s common, that fear. Not just of sharing writing, but of risking. It is risky to show how much you care about the things you do or try. I think that is why we live in such an ironic age. It is risky to be earnest. It is risky to show that you care. Irony is like wearing bubble wrap.”

In Hound Dog True, Mattie learns a lot about what it means to take risks—not just in showing her writing to others, but in taking the first small steps toward friendship with another girl, Quincy Sweet, who, like Mattie, must find her own way amid the expectations of others. Having a real, intimate friend—a friend you can be honest with—is scary for Mattie, but as her new principal tells her, “You can’t have brave without scared.”

Urban is an acute observer of these small steps toward bravery, independence and friendship. An inveterate reader herself (her entire household dedicates Tuesday evenings to “Read at the Table Night,” where kids and parents bring a book to a finger-food dinner), Urban loves “heart and honesty and humor. I love brilliant turns of phrase that never threaten to hijack the story. I love people who understand the underside of kids, but maintain an outlook that is hopeful and generous.

“I tend to write about moments and choices that seem small to outsiders but are huge to the people experiencing them,” Urban continues. “In this book, I hoped to show how hard those small, brave, risky steps can be—and also how rewarding.”

And so, when Mattie Breen does find herself standing in front of her new fifth grade classmates on the first day of school, readers will be pulling for her to speak up and declare who she is—a girl who writes stories.

2008 Newbery Honor Book

Author Gary Schmidt's Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy (2004) was that rare book that appealed to both teenagers and younger readers. An eloquent, beautifully written novel based on the destruction of an African-American community in Maine in 1912, it came as no surprise that it earned both a Printz and Newbery honor.

Now, with Schmidt's new novel, The Wednesday Wars, he has achieved something equally rare: a book that manages to be an accessible, humorous school story, and at the same time an insightful coming-of-age tale set during one of the most turbulent times in 20th-century America.

Like his 12-year-old protagonist, Holling Hoodhood, author Gary Schmidt grew up on Long Island. Schmidt's own school recollections include vivid memories of a middle school teacher named Mrs. Baker. Holling also has a teacher named Mrs. Baker, and as the book—and the school year—open, he's convinced she has it in for him:

Of all the kids in the seventh grade at Camillo Junior High, there was one kid that Mrs. Baker hated with heat whiter than the sun.

Me.

On Wednesdays, you see, everyone in the seventh grade—except Holling—is excused early to go to weekly religious classes. Half the class is Catholic; the other half, Jewish. Holling, being the only Presbyterian, is left behind to be the bane of his teacher's existence.

"Just as in the book, I really was the only one in class for the last couple of hours every Wednesday afternoon. But my Mrs. Baker really did hate me," notes the affable Schmidt, a professor of English at Calvin College in Grand Rapids. "After all, I was standing between my teacher and freedom—early release every Wednesday."

Like his young hero, Schmidt breathed in his share of chalk dust cleaning erasers on those Wednesday afternoons. But unlike young Holling, he most definitely did not spend the year exploring the plays of Shakespeare, gaining a fuller appreciation of his teachers as adults with their own trials and problems, and coming to terms with complex school and family relationships. Most especially, the author did not have to grapple with two gigantic, escape-artist rats named Sycorax and Caliban. "I haven't told you about Sycorax and Caliban yet, and you might want to skip over this next part, since it's pretty awful," Holling courteously warns readers.

Holling's year in seventh grade takes place in 1967-1968, a time of social upheaval in America. Although the timeframe does not correspond to Schmidt's own seventh-grade year, his choice was deliberate.

"This was one of our country's most violent years, with the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. Vietnam dominated the evening news, with 250 soldiers being shipped home in body bags every week," says Schmidt.

To better understand this era, Schmidt did extensive research. "I read The New York Times for the entire time that is covered in the novel. And although this was not in any way meant to be a book about Iraq, over the past three years as I was writing it, I was struck by the similarities to headlines today."

Although the issues in The Wednesday Wars are serious—prejudice, the backdrop of Vietnam, uncertain family and school relationships—Holling is a self-aware, engaging narrator, and the situations he relates are often laugh-out-loud funny.

There are those rats, of course. And there's also the matter of Holling's costume for his debut as Ariel the Fairy in the Long Island Shakespeare Company's Holiday Extravaganza. "I got through the whole dress rehearsal playing Ariel the Fairy while wearing bright yellow tights with white feathers on the . . . well, I might as well say it—butt. There. On my butt!" Holling tells readers. "White feathers waving on my butt."

"I wanted to try something different by writing in a colloquial voice," says Schmidt, noting how different The Wednesday Wars is in style from Lizzie Bright. "I also wanted to show the mixture between drama and comedy, sad moments and silly ones. That's how we live our lives:really ping-ponging back and forth."

One of the most poignant relationships in the book is that of Holling and his father, an architect with ambition. Holling's father rules "the Perfect House," which is scrupulously maintained to outshine every other house on the block. He's also determined to be the head of a perfect family, which inevitably leads to conflicts with Holling and his older sister.

While at the outset Holling is simply "the Son Who Is Going to Inherit Hoodhood and Associates," by the end of the school year he has begun to develop the courage to stand up for the right to choose his own future.

"The idea for this book originally came to me as one simple image," Schmidt explains. "I could see a kid running, with a teacher standing on the sidelines, shouting encouragement."

That scene does, in fact, make it into this rich and multilayered story. It occurs toward the end of the school year, in April. And it is well worth waiting for, both for readers and for Holling, who has begun to realize just how special his Wednesdays with Mrs. Baker have been.

One thing readers will not have to wait too long for is another book by Schmidt, who somehow manages to balance being the father of six children, a professor of English and one of the most talented and thought-provoking writers for young people.

The next novel, he promises, is already done.

Two-time Newbery Medalist Lois Lowry is one of the most distinguished writers of all time. In On the Horizon, she reflects on her extraordinary childhood and the historical moment in which it occurred. As a young child, Lowry and her family lived in Hawaii, scant years before the attack on Pearl Harbor; after the war, they moved to Tokyo.

In the poems that compose On the Horizon, Lowry intertwines personal memories with the experiences of historical figures and ordinary people at Pearl Harbor and Japan who lived through same history as Lowry herself. BookPage spoke to Lowry about writing in verse, choosing which stories to tell and revisiting the past.

Tell us about the decision to tell this story of connections in verse. What did you find challenging about it? Rewarding?
Nine years ago, two other authors—Richard Peck and Cynthia Voigt—and I, all at the same time, without talking to one another about it, wrote novels in which all of the characters were mice. How on earth did that happen? Was there something in the atmosphere? It’s a mystery.

And now, this year, the book I was working on seemed to want to be written in verse. There is no other way for me to describe that. And so I wrote it that way—and later discovered that a lot of authors were writing novels in verse. Another odd coincidence.

I like the demands of poetry. It distills things, pares them back to their essence. Maybe that is what I needed to do with this narrative. It was a subject that had been haunting me for a long time. Was it a story? A memoir? I wasn’t certain. But it floated there in my consciousness for some years, images drifting and surfacing now and then. And that’s what poetry does, I think. When the images began to appear on the page in that form, it seemed right.

The servicemen portrayed in the Pearl Harbor poems are based on real people. How did you choose to tell these particular stories?
The selection of particular individual stories was the same for both the Pearl Harbor and the Hiroshima sections. Research provided me with many true stories, each gripping in its own way.

In the reading and rereading, though, I found that now and then one small, sometimes not terribly important detail would capture my attention. The 17-year-old Marine, Leo Amundson, on the USS Arizona, for example. He was no one special, really, until I discovered that he was from the same small town in Wisconsin where my grandmother lived and where my father had grown up. Had they known each other? Possibly. No way to know. But it made Leo special to me.

Or the sailor named James Myers. Nothing really unique about him, until I followed paths through the archives and found that his family had already lost their two other sons in tragedies unrelated to the USS Arizona. An old newspaper quoted his mother, an Iowa farmer’s wife, as saying, “I had bad luck with all my boys.” I couldn’t get the terse enormity of that woman’s statement out of my mind. Sometimes it was a visual image. Shinichi Tetsutani, about to have his fourth birthday, riding on his red tricycle the morning that he died in Hiroshima. And his parents, burying the tricycle beside him. I couldn’t erase that image from my consciousness.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of On the Horizon.

You moved to Japan not long after the end of World War II. At the time, how much did you understand about what had happened there?
I was 8 years old when the war ended, so my childhood had been permeated with war-related details: the thin blue stationery on which infrequent letters from my father in the Pacific arrived; the ration stamps that my mother used at the grocery store; the news coming from my grandfather’s radio every evening.

All of us as children knew about the war. We even played games in which the bad guys were the Japanese or the Germans—but we had no understanding of the uncertainty, the fear, the huge tragedy that was taking place. I think it was not until 1991, when my own son was a fighter pilot during the first Gulf War, that I understood what my mother must have gone through while my father was overseas.

In the poem “Now,” you mention the Hiroshima memorial. When did you visit it? How were your experiences of visiting Japan at that time different compared to your memories of your life there after the war?
I left Japan in 1950 when the Korean War began and my father, fearing for our safety, sent us back to the United States. (He was on the staff of the Tokyo Hospital and had to stay because of the casualties arriving from Korea.) As a child, I had spent summer vacations on an island in the Inland Sea, near Hiroshima. But I never visited that city then, nor did I during subsequent trips to Japan as an adult. Then in 2014, I had an opportunity to take a trip around Japan by boat, and during that trip we entered the Inland Sea, stopped at Hiroshima and visited the Peace Museum there. 

Japan, and especially Tokyo, is so different now. My house near Meiji Shrine is gone. Skyscrapers and high fashion have taken the place of the rubble and poverty that I remember. But some things, like the quiet courtesy, seem unchanged. I was walking in a park in Kyoto when it began to rain, and without a word a woman approached, smiled and held her umbrella higher so that I could join her under it. When we parted a little later, without thinking, I bowed slightly to her as a thank you. It came quite naturally and felt familiar to do so. Japan still feels, in a way, like home to me.

“It is always small stories . . . that remind us how connected we are to one another.”

Your author’s note contains a fascinating anecdote about a childhood encounter with a boy who grew up to become the illustrator Allen Say—who, as an adult, also remembered the encounter. Why do you think that moment was memorable to both of you? Has he read On the Horizon?
Allen, with whom I have remained close friends, read the book in manuscript form. I talked with him on the phone recently to confirm the accuracy of my pronunciations of Japanese words before I recorded the book as an audiobook. I had to ask him, too, for his original Japanese name (he is portrayed in the book with his childhood name, Koichi Seii) because I have only known him as Allen Say.

The moment described in the book, when we were both 11 years old and looking with both curiosity and suspicion at each other, would never have been a memorable one had we not met each other by chance almost 50 years later.

Many young readers are fascinated by World War II; your book, Number the Stars, has gained a wide readership over the years since its publication. I imagine you’ve received many letters from young readers about that book as well. Do any common themes emerge from those letters about their experience of the novel?
Although Number the Stars is set during WWII in Europe and deals with the Holocaust, its focus is really on the courage and humanity shown by Denmark during that time. I still—32 years after its publication—receive letters and emails from young readers all over the world. The thing that interests them, and that they write passionately about, is just that: the generosity and compassion shown to the Jewish people of Denmark in 1943. So often they write and ask me to tell them what happened to the young girls in the book, and I have to explain that the girls are fictional, but that the real people they represent did in fact survive and grow up and, like all of us, hope for a world free of prejudice.

“Reading, thinking and writing about events during World War II has reminded me again and again that our humanity unites us.”

Three decades and many books separate the publication of Number the Stars and On the Horizon. One is fiction, one is not; one is prose, one is in verse. Both address the same moment in world history. How has your own perspective on or understanding of that historical moment changed (or has it)?
This is a hard question to answer because right now we are feeling so many chilling undercurrents of discontent and divisiveness. Reading, thinking and writing about events during World War II has reminded me again and again that our humanity unites us. 

My son, when he was stationed with the Air Force in Germany, met and married a German woman. Her mother described to me being 9 years old, hiding in a basement, terrified, when the Americans—the enemy—entered her village. She said the soldier who entered the basement where she huddled, crying, was the first black man she had ever seen. He reached into his pocket and gave her a piece of candy.

It is always small stories like hers that remind us how connected we are to one another. These days we need reminding. I guess that’s why I keep telling them in whatever ways I can.

What other books about the war have been meaningful for you—either for young readers or for adults? 
Without question: Hiroshima by John Hersey, Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl and All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.

What is something you love about being a writer of books for young people?
The response, always. The heartfelt misspelled emails. I feel so connected to those readers.

Author photo by Matt McKee