Linda M. Castellitto

Cynthia Kadohata's last two books 2005 Newbery Medal-winner Kira-Kira and Weedflower explore the experiences of Japanese families trying to build happy lives in America. The stories' protagonists are observant young girls who, even as they play children's games and wonder at the behavior of the adults around them, are able to discern the joy and beauty found in strong family bonds.

Kadohata's new book for young readers, Cracker! The Best Dog in Vietnam, is as moving, humorous and interesting as her previous young adult novels. But this time around, the observant, clever narrator is a bit different: It's a dog. A dog named Cracker, to be precise—a female German shepherd sent to Vietnam to serve as a scout dog during the war. The author says she's long been trying to sell a dog book to her editor, Caitlyn Dlouhy.

"I sent her a dog-from-another- planet idea. I spent all this time on it, but it didn't thrill her. So I kept looking for dog topics. When I sent her the idea for Cracker! she bought the book on the basis of just that e-mail," Kadohata explains from her California home, with her baby son, Sam, in her lap and her other baby her Doberman, Shika Kojika lying by her side.

A lifelong love for and fascination with dogs fed the author's desire to write a dog-centric book. In fact, she laughingly says, "dog-related childhood drama may well have been a contributing factor: When my sister and I were young, my mother would let us get a dog. We'd fall madly in love with it, and she'd decide we weren't taking good enough care of it and get rid of it. This happened five times, and I'd be just hysterical every time the dog was gone. In fact," she adds, "when my ex-husband and I first got a dog, he said it was like a nuclear explosion all that stuff from childhood coming back." Today, the author has in Shika Kojika a devoted companion ("my dog is always with me," she says) and in Cracker! a unique, compelling story that will captivate and educate readers.

The background of the story thousands of dogs were sent to Vietnam during the war to serve as scouts (German shepherds) and trackers (Labrador retrievers) may well be unfamiliar to many readers. But the real-life details about the dogs, gleaned from the personal stories Kadohata heard from Vietnam veterans, quickly bring the past to life.

"The dog handlers I spoke with were really enthusiastic about the book for that very reason that people don't know this went on—and very passionate about their dogs," Kadohata says. In fact, many of the men have difficulty talking about their dogs even today because, of the 5,000 dogs that went to Vietnam, none returned. And why didn't thousands of hard-working dogs make it back to America? "Because the dogs were considered military equipment," the author says, "and they were put down. Some of the handlers are still angry because they thought it was unnecessary a lot of them would have been willing to pay to transport their dogs home."

Cracker! not only pays tribute to the dogs who worked to serve their country, but to the owners who shared their pets and the trainers who became devoted, dedicated partners to the animals. The characters are complex and fully realized, making for an engrossing reading experience. Cracker! often is suspenseful, too; there are several scenes that can only be described as action sequences (and yes, nail-biting will likely ensue).

Initially, though, the human characters in the novel weren't quite ready for prime time: "When I handed in the first draft, my editor said the dog character was more fully developed than the human characters!" Kadohata recalls.

It's just that sort of from-the-hip feedback that the author welcomes from her editor, Dlouhy, who she says is one of her closest friends and the person who first suggested she write a children's book. (Previously, Kadohata published two adult novels.) "It's a good partnership," she says, "and she always just tells me, 'If you'd done what I told you in the first place. . . .'" Friendship is also at the heart of Kadohata's novel. The friendship between the German shepherd and her owner, 11-year-old Willie, and the bond forged between the dog and her trainer, 17-year-old Rick, are powerful examples of the ways in which twosomes can be strong and productive, loving and even life-saving. It's a heartening message, especially in our uncertain times, and it offers yet another way we can learn from our country's wartime past.

Linda M. Castellitto writes from North Carolina.

Sports and musical theater may seem like an unusual pairing, but not in the hands of children’s author Deborah Wiles. Her memorable new novel for middle-grade readers, The Aurora County All-Stars, artfully combines drama and baseball, friendship and loss, in a story that is by turns hilarious, poignant and poetic.

Wiles, the author of two picture books and two previous novels (including the National Book Award finalist Each Little Bird That Sings), says childhood summers she spent in Mississippi were the inspiration for her characters and her enduring love of storytelling.

" As the oldest of three children in an Air Force family," Wiles says, "Mississippi was an important place for me, because we moved all the time. Having a place to call home, to go back to over and over, no matter where we lived during the year Mississippi is so instrumental to who I am."

The author, who recently moved to Atlanta after spending many years in Maryland, says she harks back to those summers with every story she writes. "I love dialogue it comes naturally to me. It also comes from listening to the old people tell their stories over and over again. The cadence, the rhythm, the passion, the delight in the telling, stayed with me."

Her delight is evident in The Aurora County All-Stars, where humor and mystery abound: Who is Mr. Norwood Boyd, and what’s his relationship to young protagonist House Jackson? Will Frances Shotz, age 14, and her grandiose plans for a pageant derail the annual baseball game? Will Ruby play catcher, even though she’s (gasp) a girl? And is that pug really wearing a tutu? If those questions feel like dramatic cliffhangers, it’s no coincidence; The Aurora County All-Stars is filled with them, thanks to its origins as a serial novel in the Boston Globe. The newspaper asked Wiles if she’d like to write it as part of a project for Newspapers in Education. The specifications: Aim for a male audience, write for grades four to seven, and use eight 2,000-word segments.

Wiles got right to work. "I decided to learn as much as I could about Victorian serial novels. They’re so much like Southern stories. They’re over-the-top, there’s mayhem involved, secrets and all kinds of dead guys. As for the baseball plotline, it wasn’t much of a stretch. I remember loving the Dodgers as a kid. I wanted Sandy Koufax to notice me and marry me. My brother loved the Yankees, so there was a big rivalry in our household," she recalls. Wiles says her longtime love of Walt Whitman’s poetry inspired the story’s poetry-centric plot elements.

The author’s own writing life has followed a long arc, from an early time of struggle to a new era of discovery and satisfaction.

"I married at 18 and skipped college," Wiles says. "I raised my first two kids as a single parent. Those were tough, lean years." She adds, "I had no skills and no education. My longest job was in the Washington, D.C., subway system, in the 1970s. I spent my lunch hours at the [now closed] Tenley Circle branch of the public library."

It was at that library, Wiles says, that she began to realize her dream of becoming an author. "I scoured the library shelves and used bookstores for books on how to write." Wiles began to publish her writing—mostly essays and articles 10 years after those library days, but her children’s book efforts were rejected for 10 more.

"Then, on my 40th birthday, an editor said, ‘I really like this one, do you want to work on it?’ The book sold five years later. It took decades, it was ridiculous," Wiles says. "Who would go through that craziness? But I wanted to tell these stories. They meant so much to me."

Wiles says she believes grief and sadness are important elements of storytelling. "When I wrote Each Little Bird That Sings, I was going through a lot of death: my mother, father and my marriage died," she explains. "Loss has shaped me an awful lot, but I don’t mind. If [our stories] deal with joy, pain, grief, fear or contentment, we’re here to help one another through."

That outlook has affected Wiles’ writing. "I try to be as honest as I can," she says. " [At first] I was afraid to let my characters’ hearts break, to let anything bad happen to them. Now I know I have to do that it’s a fact of life." But joy is the predominant emotion when Wiles speaks of her career as an author. "Kids are a great audience to write for. Their hearts are ready for stories, ready to be entertained and so is mine. I’m so fortunate to be, finally in my life, to be doing something that feels so purposeful and meaningful, the thing I wanted to do for so long."

Linda M. Castellitto writes from North Carolina, where she keeps her ears open for good stories.

Jeff Smith recently returned from a world tour, an endeavor most often associated with religious leaders or rock stars. Smith won’t be riding in a pope-mobile any time soon, but he’s got Bono-worthy status in the world of comic books and graphic novels. The writer-artist didn’t harbor dreams of having fans worldwide when he began drawing his Bone comics. Nor did he suspect that his work would someday be published by Scholastic, which launched its new Graphix imprint with the Bone books. The latest entry in the nine-volume series, Bone: Ghost Circles, is out this month. Smith spoke to BookPage from Columbus, Ohio, the home base of Cartoon Books, which he launched in 1991 to self-publish the Bone books (his wife, Vijaya, became his business partner in 1992).

"I started Bone pretty much in the garage, writing and drawing a black-and-white comic every couple of months and putting it into the comic-book market, for other cartoon-heads," he recalls. "I definitely wasn’t picturing them as children’s books."

Instead, he wanted to create comics with characters reminiscent of the ones he’d loved as a kid—Uncle Scrooge, Bugs Bunny—and with storylines he craved, but could never find. "We always think of comics as a kind of ephemeral thing," he explains. "They’re in the newspaper every day, and Charlie Brown never gets to kick the ball or change his shirt. I always thought the medium of comics could handle a really large story with a large structure." Smith drew a daily newspaper cartoon when he was a student at Ohio State University and, after college, he founded an animation studio. But his interest in creating a more substantive story never waned. Then, in the mid-1980s, "I discovered the indie underground comic book world . . . a movement where people were drawing their own comics and telling their own stories."

For 12 years, Smith created his story: 1,300 pages via 50-plus issues of Bone. The epic story focuses on the adventures of Fone Bone, Phoney Bone and Smiley Bone. The cousins are little blobby guys who, despite their small size and adorable appearance, prove to be quite strong. This is fortunate, because the Bones keep encountering scary creatures that want to eat them. They also have to climb over mountains, dash through dark forests and reason with dragons as they journey through unfamiliar territory rife with unusual beings, dark magic and other surprises. Smith encountered his own surprise when he began talking with Scholastic—namely, the suggestion that the Bone series be published in color. Smith says that, when he first created Bone, he stuck with black-and-white for several reasons, including a small budget, an affinity for newspaper comics and his desire to pay tribute to Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel memoir, Maus. It’s a bit, well, comical how things turned out: Spiegelman was instrumental in convincing Smith to add color to the Bone books. (Spiegelman and his wife, Françoise Mouly—art editor of The New Yorker—were advising Scholastic on the imprint-launch.)

"At first, I thought the idea was a little sketchy, that it would be like colorizing Casablanca," Smith says, adding that he’s not comparing Bone to the classic movie. "But then, I felt we could do storytelling things with color: create depth, direct people’s eyes, create a mood. If something is happening at sunset or twilight, you can only tell the reader or draw really long shadows [in black-and-white]. But if you throw a bright orange light on it, you can really change it. I’ve been won over." And the books have won over young readers. Smith’s cartoon-head fans share the books with their own children, but he says librarians deserve a lot of credit for getting the Bone books into kids’ hands, too.

"Librarians and teachers have let me know they are getting reluctant readers to read with Bone. So people can actually see there are benefits to graphic novels, vs. the stigma that always was attached to comics. . . . I knew it wasn’t true. I learned to read because of comics." Smith says he loved reading about Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes when he was younger; he later turned to The Iliad, The Odyssey, Le Morte d’Arthur and Moby-Dick. "I really like epics. Moby-Dick is honestly my favorite book. I’m just fascinated by the literary structure," he says. He cites The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as an influence, too: "It was a real model for me. It starts off very much like a boy’s adventure story, but it quickly grows darker and the themes become more complicated and sophisticated." Bone: Ghost Circles has no small amount of darkness; Smith says the book is the beginning of the final act. "A volcano has loosed ghost circles: vast areas that are too poisonous to enter. It’s the darkness before the dawn."

The Bones and their friends must make their way past the circles, battling thirst, fear and confusion about the Moby Dick costumes they suddenly seem to be wearing. There’s plenty of humor amid the scary, suspenseful storylines and—while eager readers can quickly devour the story, thanks to lots of dialogue—they’ll surely be slowed by drawings that feel as if they’re moving or, in some cases, breathing. It’s that inimitable mix of art plus story that makes graphic novels so stimulating and engaging, Smith says. "As an author, I’m extremely aware every day that, when it comes down to it, you read [graphic novels] left to right, top to bottom, just like a book. They have their own subsets of symbols that don’t belong to prose and movies—it is its own visual art form that works on its own and makes an immediate connection with a reader."

The success of Bone has brought Smith a new level of respect, even from his own family. "One really fun thing that’s changed [since Scholastic began publishing the books] is that my parents and their friends’ kids know about Bone now," he says. "Before, it was only in the comic-book stores, but now it’s in bookstores. All of a sudden, my parents are like, ‘Oh, my gosh!’ "

Although he's now a popular and prolific children's author, Dan Gutman says his own love for reading and writing was slow in coming. In fact, when he was a boy, he admits, "I hated to read. I thought it was boring and hard to do."

Although it might sound counterintuitive, it was his new enthusiasm for sports at age 10 or 11 that led Gutman to discover an affinity for the written word. "When I got into sports, I realized I had to read about stuff if I wanted to learn about it," he explains. "That's what got me interested in reading."

He kept reading, and started writing, too: after college, he penned articles and screenplays, and in 1982 he launched a magazine called Video Games Player (which closed in 1985). He wrote several sports-centric books for adults, and continued to write about sports and technology for magazines and newspapers.

But it wasn't until his son was born—and he tried his hand at writing children's books—that Gutman felt really excited about what he was doing.

"My son inspired my whole career," he says. "When Sam was born in 1992, I started reading kids' books for the first time since I was a kid." The experience sparked an epiphany: "I instantly felt, this is what I'm good at—this is my calling."

Since then, Gutman has written 75 children's books, with more on the way. He writes from an office in his Haddonfield, New Jersey, home, but doesn't tend to stay put for long: he regularly visits schools across the country, where he does readings, answers questions and lunches with students. "It's much more fun than eating with grownups, and it's great to bounce ideas off the kids," he says.

Fittingly, his My Weird School books, a 21-book series for early readers, have been a big hit with the younger set. The wacky stories—which have titles like Miss Daisy Is Crazy! and Mrs. Cooney Is Loony!—offer a kids'-eye view of the seemingly (and sometimes genuinely) bizarre antics of the teachers, principal and other denizens of Ella Mentry School.

Gutman says the series was inspired by his daughter Emma. "She was in second grade, reading the Junie B. Jones books, and I thought there should be something like that told from a boy's perspective." Enter A.J., who routinely declares that he hates school (but always ends up having fun there, somehow). A.J. goes to school with know-it-all Andrea, crybaby Emily and a host of characters that kids and parents alike will enjoy.

This year marks the launch of the My Weird School Daze series, which follows the children from the My Weird School series into third grade, where they embark on fresh adventures.

In the first book of the new series, Mrs. Dole Is Out of Control!, second-grade graduation goes hilariously awry: two PTA moms get in a fight, A.J. accidentally tosses his cap right into the eternal flame, and a bunch of animals escape from a nearby petting zoo. In the second entry, Mr. Sunny Is Funny!, the gang is spending summer vacation at the beach, where Andrea develops a crush on the hunky lifeguard. Those sorts of goings-on certainly keep kids reading—and Gutman writing.

"As the Daze series has progressed, it's gotten more wacky. There's usually a climactic ending where all hell breaks loose, and kids love that stuff. Grownups are always the ones who say a story is too far-fetched. Kids never say that—they get that it's fiction, so anything could happen."

But although that wackiness is humorous and freewheeling, there's a serious purpose behind it. "I'm really trying to reach the kids who are tough nuts to crack, especially boys who refuse to read," he says. "I try to write a story so captivating that they open the book and two hours later, don't even feel like they were reading. It should be effortless, it shouldn't feel like work."

He adds, "I don't spend a lot of time describing things. Kids don't care—at least not the reluctant readers. I have a short attention span, too, so I can relate to them. Kids who are really good readers can read Harry Potter, or books by Philip Pullman. Those who aren't, can read my books."

And readers of all ages would do well to heed Gutman's take on things—specifically, the value he places on having fun. Just as he is driven by a desire to make reading fun for kids, he says, "I enjoy what I do, and love what I write. I don't have to push myself to get to work." Sounds nice, doesn't it?

Linda M. Castellitto wishes more of her teachers' names rhymed with adjectives.

Housecleaning often results in unpleasant surprises—astonishingly large dust bunnies, lower back pain and the like. For Kathryn Fitzmaurice, however, a tidying session led to something else entirely: a decision to leave her teaching career and focus on writing full time.

In an interview from her Southern California home, where she lives with her husband and two sons, the author tells BookPage that her grandmother, science fiction writer Eleanor Robinson, “passed away 21 years ago and left me a huge box of unfinished work. She wrote on the box, ‘Give these to Kathy—she’ll know what to do with them.’ ”

For many years, Fitzmaurice says, “I’d go by it and think about trying to follow in her footsteps. I kept putting it off because I was afraid to really see if I could it.” Then, three years ago, “I was cleaning out the house and, looking at that box, I thought, I want to try it!” Although quitting her teaching job was “a really scary decision,” it was a sound one: Fitzmaurice soon signed a two-book deal, and her first novel for young readers, The Year the Swallows Came Early, lands in bookstores this month.

A few weeks after the book’s release—March 19, St. Joseph’s Day, to be exact—hundreds of cliff swallows will arrive at the San Juan Capistrano Mission from Goya, Argentina; they will remain in California until their October return flight.

“That’s 7,500 miles one way,” Fitzmaurice marvels. “They’ve been doing it for centuries, fulfilling their inner biological destiny. It’s one thing that’s always the same, a promise that will never be broken.”

Unbroken promises are something that Eleanor “Groovy” Robinson (named for the author’s grandmother) longs for as The Year the Swallows Came Early begins. The seventh-grader witnesses her father’s arrest, only to learn that her mother called the police. Although Groovy’s small family is a loving one, her father’s carefree yet unreliable nature has finally led him to do something that could jeopardize Groovy’s future. Groovy is a thoughtful child who dreams of attending culinary school. She practices cooking at home and at the nearby Swallow restaurant, where she joins her schoolmate Frankie in working for his stepbrother Luis.

Fitzmaurice skillfully captures the sound and feel of children’s conversations—the banter between Groovy and the brothers, with its underlying fondness, feels genuine and sweet. So, too, do Groovy’s interactions with the sassy Marisol, a neighbor girl who is determined to become a famous artist and is supportive of Groovy’s dreams of a life filled with creative pursuits.

That sense of possibility, of a world wide open, infuses the book; even as the characters are hurt or confused by the strange, sometimes incomprehensible turns their lives are taking, they cook and draw and look forward to the swallows’ arrival.

The author says she enjoys writing for the middle-grade age group (8 to 12) because of that sense of wonder. “I love it, because children that age still believe things can really happen. They have hope and faith built into them . . . not that you necessarily lose that after age 12, but I love the spark at that age where everything is possible, still.”

One possibility that’s central to The Year the Swallows Came Early is that of forgiveness. As Fitzmaurice notes, “Forgiveness is hard, and sometimes you have to do it again and again. It can slip away.”

She adds, “I would hate to sound didactic. But maybe, if someone could see it’s possible to make the choice to forgive someone vs. to keep on being angry—it’s so exhausting, and it takes away from the good things in your life even if you’re not aware of it.” With forgiveness, as with writing, Fitzmaurice says, “You can’t push it—you have to wait until it’s there.” She writes between 4 p.m. and 1 a.m., in an office that has on its shelves volumes by or from her grandmother, including a book of Emily Dickinson’s poems.“ In the front cover, she wrote, ‘Dearest Katherine, Emily Dickinson is a revered poet. Perhaps one day the same will be said of you. Love, Grandmother Eleanor.’ I made a copy and framed it,” Fitzmaurice says. “It shines from the wall, giving me hope and a map toward someone I can maybe become someday.”

Linda M. Castellitto housecleans and writes in North Carolina.