Linda M. Castellitto, Author at BookPage | Discover your next great book!

When she began to write her eighth novel, Rita Williams-Garcia decided to try something different. “Every writer should get a little antsy once they get too familiar with the worlds they create—if that happens, you’re not working hard enough, and there’s not enough in it for you as a writer,” she says in an interview from her home in Queens, New York. “I have a very different background from the kids I tend to write about, so I thought, for a change, why not tap into the childhood I did have?”

And so she did, setting One Crazy Summer on the West Coast rather than in her usual locale of New York City. “My sister, brother and I were always amusing ourselves in the wide-open spaces of Seaside, California. I was determined to have the three girls in my story run around outside in California in the 1960s, too.”

Eleven-year-old Delphine and younger sisters Vonetta and Fern live in Brooklyn with their father, Papa, and grandmother, Big Ma. The adults decide to have the girls spend the summer of 1968 in Oakland, California, with their mother, Cecile, who left them after Fern was born. Big Ma has never forgiven her, but Papa prevails, and off they go.

The scenes depicting the girls at airports are just a few of the many moments in One Crazy Summer wherein the author’s gift for combining everyday settings with social commentary and wry wit make for memorable, but not heavy-handed, reading. Delphine rolls her eyes (and bites her tongue) when she and her sisters are stared at as if “on display at the Bronx Zoo,” and the girls engage in what Williams-Garcia calls “colored counting.” It’s an activity she and her siblings “did everywhere. It was a time when, in public places, you might not see a lot of African-American people. We’d count how many of us were there, how many words we got to say on TV.”

These small but telling moments are the ones that most interest Williams-Garcia. “Usually I don’t like to do ‘the race book’ because it’s not how people live,” she says. “Not to say racism doesn’t exist, but it’s not this moment-to-moment consciousness. I like to include the domestic, intimate things about race and identity that never really make it into books or media—you mainly get big or dramatic events of racism, violence or discrimination.”

Thus, when none other than the Black Panthers become part of the sisters’ everyday lives, there aren’t cinematic goings-on at every turn. Sure, the girls initially are anxious when Cecile sends them on all-day visits to the Panthers-run community center, where they have free breakfast and learn about the group’s political causes and views. And the political rally at book’s end certainly is exciting.

But in between, the children develop friendships and enjoy being part of something larger than themselves, even if they understand only some of what’s going on at the center. Cecile keeps a printing press for the Panthers in her kitchen, which she fiercely protects as her own space for working, thinking and writing her poetry.

Cecile and the other women in One Crazy Summer—smart, strong, often unrepentant—are in many ways like Williams-Garcia’s own late mother, whose influence was central to another change in approach for the author. Her previous work—including the 2009 National Book Award Finalist Jumped—“always seemed to mourn the loss of childhood,” she says. This time, “I decided to celebrate my experiences. My mother was the super-mother of all mothers; she made it clear there was only one woman in her house, and my sister and I did not qualify.”

With that in mind, she wanted to have a chasm between mother and children in One Crazy Summer. “I respect the difference between parent and child. Delphine and her sisters haven’t earned their mother’s story, and she hasn’t earned their forgiveness.”

Ultimately, what is attainable for Cecile and her children is a truce of sorts, one characterized by hope for mother and daughters, as well as the America they’re living in.

As for Williams-Garcia, herself the mother of two daughters, she’s hoping to challenge herself even more via her next book, a gaming novel: “I’m estrogen-ed out—it’s time for me to write about a boy.”

Linda M. Castellitto writes from North Carolina.

YA, YA Fiction

YA Fiction YA

Lynne Rae Perkins

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

by Linda M. Castellitto

The writing and artwork in Lynne Rae Perkins’ books spring from her ever-creative, Renaissance-woman brain—but her family has played a role in many of her works, too, from 2006 Newbery winner Criss Cross to her new teen novel.

In Criss Cross, a photo sequence shows a comb falling out of a character’s pocket. The model? Her husband, Bill. “We did a really low-tech staging session,” she says in an interview from her home in Northern Lower Michigan.

As Easy As Falling Off the Face of the Earth involved her husband (an anecdote from his father made its way into the plot), 16-year-old son (her research-road-trip companion) and college-student daughter (who suggested the book’s final line).

This dovetails nicely with the book’s themes, which center on family—both the blood-relatives kind and the true-friends sort. At the heart of the novel is 16-year-old Ry, who’s off to archaeology camp for the summer, until he learns the camp has shut down. When his train stops for a short break, he disembarks to call his grandfather, who is house- and dog-sitting while Ry’s parents enjoy an island vacation. Alas, Ry’s train leaves without him, he can’t get any cell phone reception, and he’s left alone many miles from the nearest town.

He presses on, though, moving from head-shaking disbelief to a sort of dream-state acceptance combined with a determination to get to his family, even if he has no idea how that’s going to work. Talk about a wacky summer vacation.

Perkins says the story began to percolate in her brain after she read Mark Salzman’s The Laughing Sutra. “I read a description that called it a ‘picaresque.’ I didn’t know the exact definition, so I looked it up, and the dictionary said it’s a story told in episodes with a rogue as the main character.”

“At the same time,” she says, “I was thinking about a friend who died in an accident when my son was a year old. He was a really interesting character and I wish my son could’ve known him. I thought I’d introduce them in the book.”

Indeed, when Ry meets Del, a smart, laid-back fellow with MacGyverish tendencies, his life gets even more exhaustingly exciting and surprising. Adventures range from a comical shoe-shopping expedition to falling out of a tree to a grand trek by air, land and sea.

But Ry isn’t the only one who finds himself engaged in assorted escapades: Perkins gives the reader dispatches from Ry’s parents’ vacation and his grandfather’s misadventures, the former amid palm trees, the latter, maple and aspen. And the dogs—oh, the hilarious dogs, whose exploits we follow via black-and-white comic-book-style panels tucked in among the text.

“[The idea for that] just popped into my mind one day,” Perkins says. “I was thinking about The Incredible Journey and how funny it would be if the dogs didn’t know where they were going. I sent scribbled sketches to my editor, and she went for it.”

Ideas like that are what sets Perkins’ work apart. Criss Cross was lauded for its mélange of words—including haiku and Q&As—and art. Like that book, As Easy As Falling Off the Face of the Earth combines imagery and words that illustrate what it’s like to be a teenager who longs for freedom and excitement . . . and what happens when he gets it.

Fortunately, Perkins’ longstanding relationship with Greenwillow Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, has afforded her artistic freedom. “Not that they’ll publish anything I do,” she says with a laugh. “But I’ve always felt respected, and they raise really good questions.”

Greenwillow gave Perkins a start on her unexpected path to becoming a writer. “I was trying to get work as an illustrator, and Ava Weiss at Greenwillow asked me if I wrote. I had a story I’d written just for the sake of doing illustrations for my portfolio, and they published it: Home Lovely, my first book, in 1995.”

Since then, Perkins has created six picture books and three novels, moving between age groups as well as juggling drawing and writing. She says, “I needed to reassure myself periodically because I was more confident about the drawing than the writing. I’m starting to feel more comfortable with writing, though.”

Her current project takes her back to art: illustrating a picture book by Esmé Raji Codell. “It’s my first time illustrating someone else’s book, which is what I originally wanted to do,” Perkins says. “Now I’ll find out if I really can do it.”

In Criss Cross, a photo sequence shows…

Children's & YA, Middle Grade

Children's & YA Middle Grade

Cynthia Lord

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

by Linda M. Castellitto

There’s a slip of paper, pulled from a fortune cookie, taped to Cynthia Lord’s computer monitor. It says, “Someday your talents will be recognized and suitably rewarded.”

Happily, those encouraging words turned out to be prescient ones. “I put the fortune on my computer monitor as a joke,” Lord says in an interview from her home in Maine. “But I sold my first novel, Rules, two weeks later.”

That fortune was still around when Rules was named a 2007 Newbery Honor Book, and it remains with the author today. When it’s time to discard a computer monitor, “I peel [the fortune] off and apply it to the new one!”

The seeming magic of superstition doesn’t just figure into Lord’s life; it’s a central element of her heartwarming second novel, Touch Blue. The layered story is narrated by 11-year-old Tess Brooks, a smart, earnest girl who loves her island home and is determined to keep things they way they’ve always been, whether through wishing, working or some combination thereof.

Tess’ beloved island is off the coast of Maine, a place where lobster fishing is a common occupation and kids of all ages learn together in a single schoolhouse. Tess’ mother is in danger of losing her teaching job, and the community, its school: The state is threatening to close it down because of low enrollment. If the island doesn’t get more students, its residents will have to move to the mainland and leave behind their homes, livelihoods and special way of life.

Their solution? Take in foster children in an effort to save the school and do good at the same time. Although it might seem like a wild idea, “a little school in Maine in the 1960s did that to save their school,” Lord says. And she knows what it’s like to worry about such things, having taught at a Maine island school in her pre-author days. “My books always have personal experiences in them,” she says, adding that her commute from the mainland “was very romantic . . . except for December through March.”

In Touch Blue, Tess’ new foster brother arrives on a boat (in nice weather, fortunately), and she’s very excited to meet him, not least because she’s read books about foster children, like The Great Gilly Hopkins and Bud, Not Buddy. At first, she’s disappointed by 13-year-old Aaron’s reticence, not to mention his skepticism of her neighbors’ interest in knowing everyone’s business. But over time, despite run-ins with a bully and somewhat stressful preparations for a talent show, Tess learns she can’t control everything, and Aaron grows to like being around people who care enough to meddle.

Under Lord’s writerly hand, those realizations bring their own kind of comfort, the sort that even age-old superstitions cannot provide. “As a kid, you think you’re not in control of the things you care about. Superstitions are one way that people deal with that,” Lord says.

To that end, there are superstitious sayings at the start of every chapter in Touch Blue (finding them all, Lord said, “took a lot of research!”). The book’s title is drawn from one such saying—“Touch blue and your wish will come true”—and, in keeping with the book’s real-life feel, Lord notes that “lobster fishermen are often very superstitious.”

Like the fishermen—and the characters in Touch Blue—Lord loves the ocean. “I can even smell it from my front yard. It’s always so different. . . . Sometimes it’s blue, or gray or green. You never know what you’ll see.”

Her love for the water began in her childhood in New Hampshire, when she lived near a lake. It was part of everyday life, whether swimming or ice skating. “I was a voracious reader,” she adds. “I loved to lay down on the wharf and read all afternoon.”

Her next book will be set in New Hampshire, in “those beautiful mountains” around her childhood home. But first, she’ll be spending more time on the islands of Maine: Lord says she does some 40 school visits a year, and for Touch Blue she’ll go to schools like the one in the book.

Surely, thanks to what she learned writing Touch Blue—not to mention the fortune she has taped to her computer—Lord will keep in mind the superstition from chapter three: “Start your journey with your right foot and good luck will walk with you.”

There’s a slip of paper, pulled from a fortune cookie, taped to Cynthia Lord’s computer monitor. It says, “Someday your talents will be recognized and suitably rewarded.”

Happily, those encouraging words turned out to be prescient ones. “I put the fortune on my computer monitor…

YA, YA Fiction

YA Fiction YA

Tim Tharp

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

by Linda M. Castellitto

Tim Tharp didn’t start out writing novels for teens. But after visiting book clubs to talk about his first book, Falling Dark (winner of the Milkweed National Fiction Prize), he says, “I had such a good time talking to high school students about it, I thought, I’m going to write a novel for them.”

The idea stuck—and it’s been working well, to say the least. His debut YA novel, Knights of the Hill Country, was named to the ALA Best Books of 2007 list. His second, The Spectacular Now, was a 2008 National Book Award finalist and has been optioned for a movie.

His newest, BADD, is a creative and moving exploration of what happens when a young soldier named Bobby returns home from war, no longer able to relate to the life—or self—he’d left behind.

Bobby always was a rebellious sort, a charming risk-taker whose antics inspired the book’s title, as explained by narrator Ceejay, Bobby’s adoring younger sister: “He was wild and he was B-A-D-D, BADD.” Things got worse when he stole a car; that’s when he had to choose between the army or jail.

But after several tours of duty, he’s finally coming home, and Ceejay is unbearably excited, not least because of her big plan: They’ll move in together, get jobs and escape their small town. She plans to surprise Bobby with the idea, but is herself surprised when she sees him in town—which can’t be right, because that’d mean he was home early, and didn’t tell her he was coming.

Soon, a lot of things don’t seem right to Ceejay, who’s already frustrated from her arguments with Captain Crazy, a wildly eccentric local man whose anti-war protests make her angry and defensive. Then there are her parents—her unfailing perky mom, and her dad, who doesn’t understand anything, least of all her.

The inspiration for BADD was drawn from a mix of old and new influences, Tharp says from his home outside Oklahoma City. “It was partially inspired by what’s going on in our country right now, but it was also a story idea I’d had in mind for years. This one was going to be a post-World War I novel.”

The idea morphed into something different when some of his students at a local community college began coming back from Iraq. “A few of them had post-traumatic stress disorder. . . . I started thinking that was something important to take a look at,” he recalls.

Tharp took an additional layer of care with an already delicate subject because “the suburb I live in is an Air Force town. There is that feeling of wanting to do them justice.”

In fact, the author’s father was a WWII veteran who told Tharp stories about his experiences. “I always thought having the perspective of a young person on a returning soldier would be interesting,” he says. “But really, the driving force was to investigate different aspects of courage, besides just facing physical violence like you see in movies.”

That off-the-field courage is a quality Ceejay possesses, though she doesn’t know it at first. She’s occupied with her confusion and hurt at the changes in her brother, who, to her shock, starts spending time with Captain Crazy. And her mother’s perkiness, at first annoying, reveals itself to be something else entirely: a choice to remain upbeat, no matter what—itself a type of strength.

“Ceejay has to rely on different kinds of courage, like perseverance and standing up behind someone you love. The kind she draws upon is something I think women have more access to than men, who are supposed to put on a tough act,” Tharp says. “Ceejay starts looking around and realizes she’s more like the women in her family than she thought she was.”

That’s a challenging emotional journey for people of any age, but Tharp said it doesn’t occur to him to shy away from what some might view as heavy topics for a YA book. “I grew up hearing those war stories from my dad, and both my parents died of cancer. I’ve gone through those kinds of battles myself, so I drew upon them.”

After all, he adds, “Kids do go through these kinds of things. I think it’d be good for them to have a book, so if they’re going through something, they see the characters are, too. . . And a lot of kids read adult novels. Why not bring that complexity to the YA novel itself?”

It’s the very complexity of BADD that makes it such a memorable read; amid the struggle and catharsis are humor, beauty, wonder and hope. Tharp says it wasn’t an easy book to write: “It was kind of draining, but satisfying at the same time, like doing a good physical workout.”

Turning the last page of BADD is sure to leave readers feeling the same—a little worn out, a lot more clear-eyed and suffused with the glow that comes from knowing they’ve just finished something important.

Health & Fitness, Lifestyles

Lifestyles Health & Fitness

Timothy Ferriss

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

by Linda M. Castellitto

Timothy Ferriss published his first book, The 4-Hour Workweek, in 2007, and in a self-promotion tour de force, went from a little-known investor and business advisor to a best-selling author whose blog garners a million-plus visitors a month.

When it came time to find volunteers for his new book, The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman, hundreds of his fans joined experiments in diet, exercise, sex and more. But the title of head guinea pig goes to Ferriss himself. He underwent thousands of blood tests, traveled as many miles and compiled hundreds of case studies on everything from weight loss to sexual behavior to learning to swim in 10 days. Ferriss took some downtime to answer questions about the new book, his obsessions and why his methods are most likely to succeed.

Your first book struck a chord with readers. What made you write your second book about body rather than work? Did you view the change in topics as a risk or a natural progression?

The wider world thinks I’m obsessed with time management, but they haven’t seen the other—much more legitimate, much more ridiculous—obsession. I’ve recorded almost every workout I’ve done since age 18. Since 2004, I’ve tracked everything from complete lipid panels to free testosterone. I’ve had stem cell growth factors imported from Israel to reverse “permanent” injuries. . . . I’ve spent more than $250,000 on testing and tweaking over the last decade. And that was just to satisfy my own curiosity and improve my own physical machine.

Then I had a conversation with a WIRED magazine writer, in which we joked that the main fears of modern men and women could be boiled down to two things: e-mail overload [addressed in The 4-Hour Workweek]and getting fat. Shortly thereafter, I realized I had to write The 4-Hour Body. It is, without a doubt, a natural progression, a risk and the most important thing I’ve ever written.

Any book that addresses eating and exercise is met with skepticism, most likely because people find it difficult to remain motivated. How will your approach be more effective for readers?

Big changes seldom work. The 4-Hour Body is intended to answer one question: What are the smallest changes that produce the biggest physical changes? To illustrate the point: Even if someone has 100 pounds to lose, I wouldn’t have them start diet and exercise at the same time. Why? The exercise often triggers “reward” meals, more overeating and abandonment of the new program after a few weeks of plateauing. Instead, I have them focus on one small change that can produce three to five pounds of fat loss in a single week, such as changing breakfast to include at least 20 grams of protein. Using this small-step approach, compliance is incredible: 58 percent of test subjects I tracked indicated my diet was the first diet they’d ever been able to follow. Many lost 20 pounds the first month, and some lost 100-plus pounds total.

You recommend a Slow-Carb Diet, and characterize it as “better fat-loss through simplicity.” Tenets include avoiding “white” carbs, eating the same few meals and cheating one day a week. Why are these practices so effective?

Because the diet removes any paradox of choice. The more decisions someone has to make, the more they’ll make mistakes or give up and revert to old behaviors. The Slow-Carb Diet removes the need to think, and offers one day a week to do whatever you want. That one day—a stress release valve that also accelerates fat loss—means you’re not giving up your favorite foods forever, just six days at a time. After testing all the diets and fads, this is the best, most enjoyable approach I’ve found for sustained fat loss. I’ve been doing it for more than five years.

You’ve included explicit sexual advice in the book. Why? Did anyone try to discourage you from being so detailed?

Sex is a fundamental part of life, but there’s very little mainstream discussion of how to improve sex with real specifics. Also, most sexual advice is based on a footnote from a book, based on yet another book—there’s no testing. I tested it all, and had others replicate my success with things like the 15-minute orgasm. For many readers, this will easily be the most important part of the book. But did my publisher let me include my explicit photos? Nope. We had to make them detailed illustrations.

Anything I haven’t asked that BookPage readers should know?
At least 50 percent of the case studies are women. This isn’t a book only for 30-something guys. It’s for anyone who’d like to become the best version of themselves possible.

When it came time to find volunteers for…

Children's & YA, Middle Grade

Children's & YA Middle Grade

Rick Riordan

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

by Linda M. Castellitto

Rick Riordan’s writing space is not decorated with images of mythical creatures or epic battle scenes—what one might expect from a teller of fantastical, dramatic tales like The Kane Chronicles trilogy.

The first book in the best-selling series, The Red Pyramid, debuted last year, and book two, The Throne of Fire, was released May 3. But despite the book’s title, there is no fiery throne—the author sits on a regular desk chair. “My office is pretty nondescript,” he says in an interview from his home in San Antonio, Texas, “just a room with a computer.”

"It's a typical week in the life of the Kane family," Riordan laughs. "Gods are annoying that way."

And he laughs when asked if he’s an exceptionally organized person. He’d have to be, in order to write two children’s book series at once (The Kane Chronicles and The Heroes of Olympus), hard on the heels of an earlier series (Percy Jackson and the Olympians), plus helming a multi-author series (The 39 Clues), not to mention doing plenty of signings and events, right?

“Not really,” Riordan replies. “I’m very easily distracted and don’t normally sit for 10 hours at a stretch staring at the screen. I do hit-and-run writing.” He adds, “I’m writing a book every six months now. I wanted to see if I could pull it off. It’s made me a lot more disciplined and productive.”

Riordan is no stranger to such brainbending scenarios—before he started writing for kids, he was a middle school teacher and the author of the award-winning Tres Navarre adult mystery series. “When I got the contract to write kids’ books as well, I didn’t want to leave teaching, but I felt like I had one too many balls in the air,” he says.

And so, after some 15 years as an English and history teacher, Riordan left to pursue writing full time. Thanks to his books’ popularity, though, he’s found himself in classrooms, libraries and bookstores all over the country, meeting eager young fans that often number in the thousands.
“I’ve had amazing crowds,” Riordan says. “Thanks to my teaching background, I like to give every kid my attention, and I don’t always get to spend the one-on-one time I used to be able to have. But the kids are so great—even if they have to wait in line for a long time, they’re so excited to be there, they jump up and down.”

Books didn’t make a young Riordan jump for joy, however; at least, not at first. “I really was a reluctant reader in elementary school,” he says. “Dyslexia runs in my family. I was never diagnosed, but I have a feeling it maybe was part of my struggle.” Eventually, book recommendations from his teachers (“I had wonderful English teachers—they got me into mythology”) and maternal encouragement turned Riordan into an avid reader. “My mother got me interested in storytelling; she was really instrumental in my path as a reader and writer,” he says.

It’s fitting, then, that a character inspired by his mother is at the heart of The Kane Chronicles: Sadie Kane, a confident and clever 12-year-old raised in London by her grandparents after her mother’s death.

“My mom was an Air Force kid who grew up in London and moved back to the U.S. in high school,” Riordan says. “She felt she didn’t really belong in either country and was caught between two cultures. It was an interesting dynamic for me to play around with.”

Sadie’s 14-year-old brother, Carter, stays with their father, a globe-trotting Egyptologist who, after six years apart, reunites the siblings on a Christmas Eve trip to the British Museum. No boring excursion, that: It touches off a series of ever-wilder events and revelations, including the fact that they’re descended from ancient Egyptian pharaohs and have special powers that they must harness so they can use them to save their father from the angry Egyptian gods he has unleashed.

And that’s just book one! In book two, The Throne of Fire, the Kanes discover that Apophis (who’s even more evil than the kids’ nemesis, Set, in The Red Pyramid) wants to “come back, rule the world, swallow the sun and ruin everybody’s day,” Riordan says. The only way to stop Apophis is to bring back his archenemy and find the Book of Ra . . . in one week. “It’s a typical week in the life of the Kane family,” Riordan laughs. “Gods are annoying that way.”

The gods may be, but the books sure aren’t—whether it’s sibling rivalry, talking animals or learning that parents are only human (or are they?), The Kane Chronicles are exciting, edifying and enthralling. Readers will learn about mythology and geography, ponder family and identity, and thrill to the suspense that builds with the turn of every page.

As readers join Carter and Sadie on their adventures in The Throne of Fire, Riordan will be working on book three of The Kane Chronicles and book one of The Heroes of Olympus (a sequel series to Percy Jackson and the Olympians). He’ll also be spending time with his family and fitting in book tours, too.

For now, though, most of Riordan’s time will be spent in his nondescript office. “I’ve had to cut back on the amount of visiting I do,” he says. “For now, the best way I can communicate [with my readers] is writing the best books I can as fast as I can.”

Children's & YA, Middle Grade

Children's & YA Middle Grade

Kathryn Erskine

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

by Linda M. Castellitto

For Kathryn Erskine, art imitates life—deliberately. “I love reading and learning things from fiction,” she says, “and I figured others would, too.”

They certainly do: Her third novel, the 2010 National Book Award winner Mockingbird, features a fifth grader named Caitlin, who was inspired by Erskine’s daughter; both have Asperger’s syndrome.

In Erskine’s engaging new novel, The Absolute Value of Mike, the main character has a math-related learning disability that creates friction with his engineering-obsessed father. Once again, Erskine drew on the experiences of a family member—her son, who has a learning disability. The author says she’s learned a lot from him and wanted to incorporate those lessons in The Absolute Value of Mike. “I was a kid who got straight A’s, and thought that’s what you should do, that it meant you were smart,” she says by phone from her home in Charlottesville, Virginia. “My son does fine, but he’s not a straight-A kind of kid, and I realized he has all these life skills—he understands people, and he’s a problem-solver. I’ve learned great grades don’t guarantee success.”

The author wants kids to understand that, too. “I see children with learning disabilities or other issues who are down on themselves,” Erskine says. “I’d like them to take the message away that we all have something to contribute, and we need to follow whatever our passion is.”

Young readers will empathize with Mike’s frustration at his father’s insistence that math would be easier if he only tried harder—and they’ll share his trepidation when he’s sent to stay with relatives in rural Pennsylvania for the summer and work on an engineering project.

Mike becomes impatient with the project, but he is intrigued when he learns of a town-wide effort to raise money to adopt a little boy from Romania. Readers will be moved as Mike becomes part of something bigger than himself—and gains self-confidence in the process.

While a young Erskine wouldn’t have been daunted by a Pennsylvania trip (she lived in several countries as a child, thanks to her parents’ foreign-service jobs), she does know about international adoption—both her children are from Russia. “[Adoption] is something I thought others might not know that much about, but they’d be interested.”

Right now, Erskine is herself interested in a few different projects: an adult novel “for a change of pace”; a picture book “as an exercise to force myself to use very few words to get my point across”; and historical fiction for middle-grade readers.

“I don’t even want to use the h-word, because it turns kids off sometimes, but history is like a fantasy world—except it really happened!” Readers won’t need convincing. Thanks to books like Mockingbird and The Absolute Value of Mike, it’s clear that, if anyone can make learning an enjoyable experience, Erskine can.

For Kathryn Erskine, art imitates life—deliberately. “I love reading and learning things from fiction,” she says, “and I figured others would, too.”

They certainly do: Her third novel, the 2010 National Book Award winner Mockingbird, features a fifth grader named Caitlin, who was inspired by Erskine’s…

YA, YA Fiction

YA Fiction YA

Lauren Kate

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

by Linda M. Castellitto

Being 17 and in love can be glorious, but what if the object of your affection is a fallen angel? And you’re both beset by an ancient curse? No wonder Lucinda “Luce” Price spends a lot of her time feeling confused and frustrated in Passion, the latest installment in the Fallen series by Lauren Kate.

If fan enthusiasm and sales figures are any indication, readers will thrill at re-entering the dark, dramatic world Kate has created, all the better to cheer on their beloved Luce as she sets out on a quest for clarity, safety and love. The first two books in the series, Fallen and Torment, were New York Times bestsellers, and Kate routinely gets eager crowds at book signings here and abroad.

In an interview from her home in Laurel Canyon, California, Kate says it was at her very first signing that a reader uttered the “best question [she’d] ever been asked.” The author recalled, “I read this really frustrating, annoying fight scene between [the characters], and their special love isn’t really visible if you read the scene alone. But an 11-year-old girl came up to me afterward—she waited until everyone was gone, and then asked quietly, ‘Do you really think a love that beautiful exists in the world?’ ”

“It was amazing,” Kate recalls. “That she could see into it, and was open enough to imagine what lay beyond those pages, was really cool.” And yes, the author adds, “I do believe in that love very strongly. When Fallen came out, I’d been married for three months.”

Nearly two years later, even Kate’s husband sometimes gets to feel the affection of fans: “We went to the Philippines for a book signing, and there was a long line. People went up to him, saying, ‘I’ll never get to the front, can I just take a picture with you?’”

Kate’s belief in a “magical connection that’s gorgeous and attainable” resonates in her voice when she talks about her husband—and her characters, Luce and Daniel, who in Passion demonstrate their willingness to take all manner of risks in service of being together.

In Fallen, Luce finds herself in reform school in Savannah, Georgia, where she meets Daniel and his friends, “and realizes she’s been swept up in a longstanding curse,” Kate says. Luce parts from Daniel and goes to California in Torment; “it’s a growing-pains book, an awakening book that prepares her for the excitement of discovering her past.”

And discover it, she does: In Passion, the boundaries of the U.S.—not to mention time and space—are roundly broken when Luce travels from Kentucky to England to China to Israel to Egypt, and from 2009 to the 1700s to 3100 BCE, among other locations and centuries. She and her friends (and enemies?) do so by way of Announcers, shadowy supernatural entities that serve as unusually swift, albeit unpredictable, modes of transportation.

Luce’s and Daniel’s quest to understand and break the anti-love curse makes for an exciting pace, with plenty of surprises and humor to balance the agony and fear the two experience as they jump through time. They never know where they’ll surface (the bathtub? A war zone? The edge of a cliff?). Then there’s Bill the helpful gargoyle, who does a fabulous job as Luce’s stylist (he specializes in “un-Anachronizing”). Is he as nice as he seems?

Another big question: Is it the curse that’s keeping them apart, or is there some larger message about love between an angel and a mortal, and connections between the heavenly and the earthly? Such matters first pinged on Kate’s writerly radar in graduate school, when she took a course in the Bible as literature.

“I was kind of at a wall with another romance novel I was working on. It was just about these two people, and was insular in a confining way. I wanted to do something that would implicate a lot more people, even the entire world,” she says.

References to angels in biblical texts piqued her interest, and she began to have regular conversations with her professor, who made a statement that became a turning point for the author. “I was struggling as I read different texts, with all these discrepancies [about angels]. I asked her what to do, and she smirked and said, what do you think Milton did? Just pick what’s relevant to you and the story—you’ll never find definitive answers for reasons that defy explanation.”

And with that, Kate’s writing took off. “It empowered me to say, this is my story. I will do research and pick the pieces that fit,” she says.

One way of doing that: layers of references to other books she’s loved and learned from, particularly novels. For example, in preparation for writing about Milan, Kate read A Farewell to Arms; for Moscow, The Master and Margarita; and for 1600s London, she turned to her Shakespeare-scholar husband (he’s pursing a Ph.D. in poetry). “It was fun to look back and realize these incredible novels I already love are set in time periods I could explore in Passion, and my husband is probably one of my best readers.”

He’ll soon have more work to do, because Kate is in the midst of writing Rapture, the final book in the series (due out in 2012). Just as Passion elevates the series onto an even more dramatic and exciting plane, Rapture represents yet another new frontier.

“At the beginning of the series, I wondered—am I going to go there, and have Lucifer and God be characters? It’s challenging . . . it feels strange to imagine your own version of heaven and put it on paper. And the godly force, the physical reality of God, I’m working on that. It’s a very delicate balance, still.”

There’s one area in which Kate is unwavering: She loves writing about 17-year-old girls. “That age is very inspiring to me. To be 17 holds so much gravity, so much possibility. So many fraught situations are going to be inevitable at that age, that liminal place between girlhood and adulthood.”

It’s a time her readers know, or remember, well. And they’ll be happy to hear that Kate has no plans to shift her focus: “I can see myself writing about this age forever.”

Fiction

Fiction

Hillary Jordan

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

by Linda M. Castellitto

We’ve heard of suffering for your art, but writer Hillary Jordan took things to a new level while researching her latest novel—she almost got herself arrested by suspicious border guards.

In an interview from her home in Brooklyn, the author says she likes to “get a feel for the landscape, how people speak, how things smell,” as she did for her first book, the bestseller Mudbound, and again for her provocative new novel, When She Woke.

That’s where the almost-arrested part came in. Jordan had been “in the throes” of finishing When She Woke during a five-week -writers’ retreat, and “by the end, I was literally almost out of my mind. But I needed to go to the Canadian border, because that’s [one of the places] Hannah goes in the book.”

When the border guard asked why Jordan was there, “I said I was researching my book, looking at how to get my heroine across illegally.” An on-the-spot investigation ensued: “They went through my entire car, my papers, and found evidence that I’m not a drug trafficker—just a complete idiot,” she recalls.

Jordan’s provocative new novel is a politically charged re-imagining of 'The Scarlet Letter.'

Of course, Jordan has clearly proven that she’s no dummy: Mudbound, a novel set in the tense racial landscape of post-World War II Mississippi, garnered critical acclaim and won Barbara Kingsolver’s Bellwether Prize for fiction dealing with social justice issues. Her new novel, When She Woke, is another thought-provoking story—one that will have readers thrilling to its suspenseful plot even as they re-examine their stance on everything from religion to social stigma to our prison system.

The aforementioned heroine, Hannah, is at the heart of this engrossing dystopian story—which is, Jordan says, a “re-imagining or riff” on The Scarlet Letter. Like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s heroine, Hester Prynne, Hannah finds her personal business made painfully public. When the novel opens, she awakens to discover her skin glowing red as punishment for having an abortion—a crime in the near-future society Jordan has created.

Through Hannah, Jordan paints a vivid, disturbing picture of a time and place where church has melded with state and privacy is only for the privileged. Like Hannah, offenders must wear their actions via a damning color-coded system implanted in the skin—and the condemned aren’t imprisoned, but released to fend for themselves among hostile, often violent, fellow citizens.

This frightening state of affairs took shape in Jordan’s mind in 2007, when she found herself “concerned about what was happening in our country: the muddying of the line between church and state, attempts by many states to limit women’s reproductive freedom, governmental intrusion on people’s civil rights.”

Although both of her novels address controversial social issues, Jordan doesn’t see herself as a political writer. “I feel I’m first and foremost a storyteller,” she says.

She emphasizes that, in When She Woke, “I’m not condemning faith in any way. In fact, the presentation of the abortion issue is not black and white at all, although it’s less black and white than I feel: I’m pro-choice, and feel abortion should be legal and rare. But I tried to portray the difficulty and agony of it for people, and I think it’s a subject about which people can disagree.”

As she wrote about characters who question the belief system in which they’ve been raised, Jordan found herself rethinking things, too. “It was an exploration of faith for me as well, which was interesting,” she says. “I’ve written two books about people of faith, but I’ve always been an agnostic, pretty much. I’m still figuring things out.”

The importance of taking time to figure things out—and staying open to the possibility of being wrong about something—are central themes in When She Woke.

Jordan says it’s unlikely she would have written this book without having gone through her own awakening, during which she left behind her life as an unhappily married, unfulfilled advertising copywriter.

“I didn’t want to wake up at 60 and not have done this thing,” she says. “I didn’t want an ordinary life, I wanted the crazy, insane life of a writer.”

And so, over the course of a year, she got a divorce, quit her job and moved from Texas to New York to attend graduate school at Columbia, where she wrote Mudbound and the first pages of When She Woke.

Jordan has certainly been embracing the writerly life: She has completed 10 writer’s residencies and is about to embark on an “epic” tour to promote her latest novel (following on the 80-event tour she did for Mudbound).

After that, she’ll work on her third book. “I have something in mind for it, but I’m still deciding. I’m so upset about so many things right now,” she says with a laugh.

We’ve heard of suffering for your art, but writer Hillary Jordan took things to a new level while researching her latest novel—she almost got herself arrested by suspicious border guards.

In an interview from her home in Brooklyn, the author says she likes to “get a…

Children's & YA, Middle Grade

Children's & YA Middle Grade

Sarah Weeks

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

by Linda M. Castellitto

Much of the time, Sarah Weeks feels like she’s still in middle school. As the author of some 50 books for kids, that’s a very good—almost essential—thing.

“I remember what it feels like to make believe,” Weeks explains during a call to her home in Nyack, New York. It’s an attitude that has stood her in good stead over the last 20 years, during which she has written picture books and middle-grade novels, including the award-winner So B. It and her new novel, Pie.

To write for kids, Weeks says, “you have to have arrested development on some level. It probably makes me annoying to live with, because I’m basically a kid. I think of myself as being very deeply rooted in sixth grade.”

When it came to writing Pie, the author says it “was by far the most fun I’ve ever had writing a book.” It’s certainly fun to read: Pie combines stories of family, food and friendship with comical shenanigans and well-crafted characters—including a mysterious pastry thief and a cranky cat named Lardo.

Things start to get strange when Aunt Polly bequeaths her prized pie crust recipe to her cranky cat.

There are pie recipes, too. The first, apple pie, was provided by Weeks; for the rest, she “wrote to friends and family and teachers and schools I’d visited. . . . I got back recipes, stories and lots of pictures of pies.”

Pie has long been part of the author’s life: Growing up, she and her mother baked together, and Weeks bakes for her own family. But despite the pastry’s prominence in Pie, the author says, “It was not my intention to write a book about pie, but to write about gratitude. I have a huge amount to be grateful for.”

Alice, the young heroine of the book, learns gratitude from her beloved Aunt Polly, who shows her by example the joy of doing things for the experience, whether or not it results in plaudits or paydays. Polly is the Pie Queen of Ipswitch, Pennsylvania. People come from near and far to bring Polly fresh ingredients that she makes into delicious pies. This makes her visitors very happy—but leaves Alice’s mother feeling jealous. And when Polly dies in 1955, she leaves her Blueberry Award-winning pie crust recipe to her cat, Lardo . . . and she leaves Lardo to Alice.

That’s when things start to get strange. There’s a green Chevrolet rolling slowly through town, Alice’s mother insists on baking pies (even though she’s terrible at it), and it turns out Alice’s friend Charlie possesses strong amateur detective skills (which come in very handy).

Although Alice’s life gets chaotic after her aunt’s passing, the goings-on are set against a simpler backdrop: a small town in the 1950s. “I was born in 1955, and Pie takes place there,” Weeks says. “I wanted to set it in a time where there were no worries about cell phones, computers, Google.”

She also kept research to a minimum. “I’m very lazy about it,” she says with a laugh. “My dad was always reading the newspaper, and I watched ‘Sky King’ every day. I used references that were actually relevant, rather than searching to find things.”

In fact, this focus-on-the-actual approach is what got Weeks started as an author. For many years, she was a singer-songwriter. Then she met an editor who suggested she turn her songs into books: “It was a fairly direct translation, because many of my first picture books had a CD in the back with me singing. I segued to picture books without songs, and then chapter books.”

Weeks had two young sons when she started writing, and they weren’t big readers—a boon to her writing, too. “The way they fought and talked to each other was very funny. It was a goldmine—I could put embarrassing things in my books and they’d have no idea. They know now, though. Gabe got a girlfriend, and she started reading all my books.”

Although her own kids are on to her, Weeks’ abiding fascination with the younger set provides ample story fodder. “I’m interested in what makes them tick. I like the weird kids, the ones that do something unusual.”

Perhaps that explains her fondness for the final recipe in Pie: Peanut Butter Raspberry Cream Pie. “It’s the one I feel most grateful for, from a teacher whose school I visited in Illinois. Her grandma was a little senile and mixed up two recipes. We now call it PBJ.”

If events thus far are any indication, Weeks will get to taste plenty more pie—unusual or otherwise—as the word spreads about Pie. Her publisher, Scholastic, hosted a “Pie Palooza,” she’s scheduled to judge a pie contest in Connecticut and she will visit “everywhere there’s pie.”

Here’s hoping the crusts are flaky and delicious, just like the ones on Aunt Polly’s award winners.

Much of the time, Sarah Weeks feels like she’s still in middle school. As the author of some 50 books for kids, that’s a very good—almost essential—thing.

“I remember what it feels like to make believe,” Weeks explains during a call to her…

YA, YA Fiction

YA Fiction YA

John Green

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

by Linda M. Castellitto

It would be completely understandable to discover, upon meeting John Green, that he’s tired and hoarse and must sleep with his hands elevated on the softest of pillows every night.

After all, the award-winning, best-selling author lets nary a day go by without updating his Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, Facebook and blog. And all the while, he’s writing books, too—including his latest novel for teens, The Fault in Our Stars, which goes on sale January 10.

“It was sort of fun in a weird way,” Green says of signing more than 150,000 books.

Still, Green was energetic and smooth-voiced (and, because “it’s all about keyboard positioning,” carpal tunnel syndrome-free!) when he spoke with BookPage from his home in Indianapolis, where he lives with his wife and son. This despite having recently added a significant undertaking to his daily routine: He signed his name for 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for about a month.

Why 400 hours of writing “John Green,” Sharpie marker in hand? “I came up with the idea to sign all the pre-orders of The Fault in Our Stars,” he says. “I kept thinking about all the kids who live in North Dakota or Guam, places I’m never going to go on tour. It seemed unfair that people who live in major metropolitan areas could get a signed book, but people who don’t, can’t.”

He adds, “It became clear that the only way to do it was to sign the entire first printing, because of the nature of book warehousing—150,000 [autographs], plus an extra 2,000 in case of spoilage.”

After Green announced plans for the signing last summer, pre-orders shot the novel to #1 on bookseller websites. Of course, Green posted progress videos of the signing on his website and—despite getting a bit wild-eyed, mussy-haired and tense-armed—he says, “It was sort of fun in a weird way. I got to watch lots of Ken Burns, ‘MythBusters,’ a show I didn’t even like called ‘Pawn Stars’ and listen to lots of audiobooks. In the end, it was a privilege, honestly. It felt very much like a gift given back to me by my readers.”

Green’s willingness to undertake the task is but one indication of his connection with his fans, who call themselves Nerdfighters. Other authors may have a social media platform; Green has a loving, vocal community that works toward common goals and has its own lexicon.

While Green’s fan base has been growing since his first book (2005’s Looking for Alaska), the Nerdfighteria community was born during a project he started with his brother, Hank. During 2007, the two communicated only via YouTube videos. Their VlogBrothers YouTube channel now has 607,000 subscribers, and they’ve launched VidCon, an annual conference for creators and fans of online video.

“I’m ultimately much more passionate about writing and books, but I really love YouTube and the community that’s built up around our videos,” Green says. One example: “We’re one of the largest groups that donate to Kiva, a microfinance website that makes loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries. We’ve loaned more than $100,000 in the last six months. Books are great, but you can’t have a visceral connection to changing the world, and doing stuff that makes you feel better about being a person. It’s a different kind of work.”

The Fault in Our Stars has already developed a following; at presstime, two chapters had been released online, plus video readings by the author. No spoilers here, but we can say this: Green’s trademark grace, wit and creativity have resulted in a story that will stir the Nerdfighters to even greater adoration.

Sixteen-year-old Hazel Lancaster is the narrator, and the heart, of The Fault in Our Stars. Diagnosed with incurable thyroid cancer at age 13, Hazel left school, but got her GED and now attends community college. She gets around all right, oxygen tank in tow—and dreads going to a weekly support group attended by a “rotating cast of characters in various states of tumor-driven unwellness. Why did the cast rotate? A side effect of dying.”

Hazel’s matter-of-fact-ness doesn’t go untempered by fear or sadness, but she and her cohorts are nothing like the saintly, heroic, very quiet sick people who populate so many books and movies.

The creation of un-saintly characters was essential, Green says, to the genesis of The Fault in Our Stars. “After I graduated from college, I spent five months working in a children’s hospital. Immediately after I left, I started writing a story. . . . I was trying to write about sick kids that were like the sick kids I’d known in the hospital, not these fountains of wisdom, and not a sentimental story about poor little kids. Everything I wrote was crap. I couldn’t . . . imagine them as people outside of their illness.”

All that changed when he encountered another young cancer patient. “I met Esther Earl in 2008. I never thought about her as inspiration for the story—it’s the one I’ve been waiting to write pretty much my whole career—but I wouldn’t have been able to write it if I hadn’t known her. She was so funny and thoughtful and normal. I was able to find another way into thinking about illness and lives that are shorter than they ought to be.” Esther’s was: She died of thyroid cancer in 2010, at age 16. Green dedicated the novel to her.

“To be frank, I think it’s extremely difficult not to be nihilistic when faced with the reality that children die,” Green says. “That’s the real reason I couldn’t write The Fault in Our Stars until I knew Esther: I couldn’t reconcile myself to looking at it honestly, and being hopeful. [And] reading should be fun; I wanted to write something that was funny and evocative of life and embraced life. That was important to me.”

Throughout his career, Green has been a vocal proponent of the importance of books and reading. Speaking of change in the industry, he says, “I really believe in publishers and publishing, [and that] publishers serve a tremendously important role in literature in the U.S. Even if that’s not a statement in favor of print, hopefully it’s a statement about quality. I don’t care if people use e-readers, I just want them to read books.”

Green’s doing his part to keep people turning those pages, and they’re clearly responding. In fact, the Nerdfighters’ enthusiastic pre-ordering resulted in an earlier release date for The Fault in Our Stars (it was moved from May 2012 to January). Now that shows the power of the people—especially those who really, really want John Green’s autograph.

Did you love The Fault in Our Stars? Wondering what to read next? Check out our "Read it Next" blog post!

It would be completely understandable to discover, upon meeting John Green, that he’s tired and hoarse and must sleep with his hands elevated on the softest of pillows every night.

After all, the award-winning, best-selling author lets nary a day go by without updating his…

Children's & YA, YA, YA Fiction

Children's & YA YA Fiction YA

Jacqueline Woodson

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

by Linda M. Castellitto

For Jacqueline Woodson, hope is an essential component of a good story. Whether she’s reading or writing, “happiness doesn’t have to come at the end, but there has to be hope somewhere, to keep me engaged and wanting to move forward.”

Since her first book was published in 1989, the much-lauded author of 30 books and counting has created many characters who are dealing with difficult problems. “They have to figure out what they’re going to do with the hand they’ve been dealt,” Woodson says from her home in Brooklyn, where she lives with her partner and their two children. “For the most part, kids are so resilient, and they do figure out a way to move through it.”

Her latest book for teens, Beneath a Meth Moon, opens on a bleak day in the life of 15-year-old Laurel. She’s a pretty blonde who, not long after moving to a town called Galilee, makes the cheerleading team, meets a new friend (Kaylee) and boyfriend (T-Boom) and becomes a meth addict.

Laurel and Kaylee’s budding friendship will feel familiar and sweet to anyone who’s felt that frisson of delight at the start of something good. And under Woodson’s hand, when Laurel and T-Boom lock eyes on the basketball court, their attraction is palpable: “Just me and T-Boom, seeing each other—not for the first time, really, but yes, for the first time. . . . He’s home to me, and I don’t even know him.”

Behind the 7-Eleven just hours later, when T-Boom offers Laurel meth and she unhesitatingly breathes it in, her acquiescence is horrifying and sad but, thanks to Woodson’s skill, not entirely surprising. Readers have already learned that Laurel is hobbled by grief and searching for a way to blunt her feelings of pain and sadness.

Woodson doesn’t reveal Laurel, or her other characters, in a linear manner; she moves back and forth through time, from present-day conversations to snippets of thought and memory. Until she was 11, Laurel and her family lived in Pass Christian, Mississippi, on the Gulf of Mexico with its pretty water and warm sand. But those memories get crowded out by what came in 2005: Grandma M’lady decided not to evacuate during Hurricane Katrina and Mama stayed with her, while the rest of the family went to Jackson to wait for them.

Like so many others, M’lady and Mama did not survive the hurricane. Woodson compassionately renders the shock of those left behind, and, by extension, the efforts made by anyone experiencing such sadness to adjust to their new burden. Laurel’s father moves her and her younger brother, Jesse Jr., to Galilee in hopes of putting the past behind them, but, Woodson says, “This promised land, this dry land, is not what they expected.”

“There are so many great reasons to be here, to be whole, to be fully in the world no matter what our life situation is.”

The author’s own grandmother died a few years ago, and her mother died suddenly just before she started to write Beneath a Meth Moon. “You have to figure out what happens to you,” she says. “How does the world change for you, what do you do with that change? And here’s Laurel having lost two important figures very quickly, and being lost in a way that makes absolute sense.”

While Laurel’s meth use doesn’t make sense to Woodson in a literal way (like this writer, she read Go Ask Alice in her youth and the book had the desired, frightening effect concerning the dangers of teenage drug use), she says that writing Beneath a Meth Moon was a way to explore things she’d wondered about—like the children who survive a massive, tragic event, or people who decide to take a drug they know to be dangerous and destructive.

She says of the young Katrina survivors, “What happened to those kids, emotionally, psychologically and physically, given this kind of loss? You just don’t hear about them, unless they survived and went on to play for the Dallas Cowboys . . . otherwise, people are apt to just disappear. I don’t want that to happen.”

And, she asks, “Why would anyone even put meth to their nose? Seeing the damage that drug can do, why would you make the choice to do it? Who would do it, why would they do it, what would be their reason for living?”

Through the character of Laurel, Woodson says, “Hopefully what readers get is that there are so many great reasons to be here, to be whole, to be fully in the world no matter what our life situation is.”

That sense of promise—that hope—is present not only in Laurel’s story, but in those of her family and friends, too.

There’s Kaylee, who sticks around even when she doesn’t understand or agree with Laurel’s decisions. “To some extent, Laurel is Kaylee’s hope,” Woodson says. “What Laurel brings to her is the bigger world. She’s done something else, lived another life, and they’re going to escape together.”

And there’s Moses, a young man who paints murals of children who died of drug overdose. He’s kind to Laurel, but also matter-of-fact in noting that she may well be one of his subjects someday.

The author says she can relate to the push-and-pull of being a teenager trying to imagine the future: “I think kids have to make choices all the time about who they are becoming. It’s part of identity politics: ‘Am I who you’re naming me to be?’ Those moments of not being who you want to be, of wanting to get past it and be something else. And having gone through that myself as an adolescent, not wanting other people to decide my fate—like becoming a writer, when the message was, you don’t come out of this community to be a writer, you become a blue-collar worker.”

Certainly, Woodson has moved far past that proscription. Her books have garnered many honors—including several National Book Award nominations, three Newbery Honor awards, ALA Best Book for Young Adults nods and more.

With the timely, unflinching and empathetic Beneath a Meth Moon, she adds another powerful story to her critically acclaimed body of work.

Since her first book…

Children's & YA, Picture Book

Children's & YA Picture Book

Lita Judge

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

by Linda M. Castellitto

If you’ve ever wondered—or tried to explain—what birds are saying as they flit about in trees or preen on their perches, help is here: Lita Judge’s new book, Bird Talk: What Birds Are Saying and Why, is a wonderfully illustrated compendium of bird behavior and communication for young readers.

The talented author-illustrator of 10 books and counting (including the recent picture books Red Sled and Strange Creatures), Judge knows what our feathered friends are up to—whether a series of caws or a sudden flurry of poop-missiles—thanks to a childhood spent immersed in nature.

Born on a small Alaskan island, Judge and her family traveled wherever her father’s soil-scientist jobs took him. Home base was in Wisconsin, where her grandparents, who were both ornithologists, lived on a remote farm with no TV or running water, but plenty of bird-centric chores to be done. “When I was young, I thought everyone had eagles and owls in the house,” she says in an interview from her home in New Hampshire.

At age 14, the author was accepted for two summers of work on a dinosaur dig in Canada, and after college, she became a geologist. She eventually quit her geologist job to work as an artist—mostly painting landscapes for galleries—but never stopped feeling a pull toward books.

“I always had a huge desire to be a writer and artist, but I didn’t have role models to show me it could be done professionally,” Judge says, adding that she spent some time wishing she’d gone to art school. But, she says, “I’ve realized I am who I am because of my past. I believe really strongly my background in science taught me a lot about art.”

She explains, “To get birds to look fluid and gestural and come to life when they’re essentially made out of graphite, you have to know anatomy and behavior; you have to spend a lot of time watching them. Geology is a science of observation, and as a kid, I spent hours on the marsh with my grandparents. I would write and draw what I saw, but I didn’t see it as art—more as a contribution to what they were doing.”

Her grandparents were “strong disciplinarians, and I spent hours and hours in blinds being absolutely still. To make a book takes so much patience and contemplation, and that training gave me a peaceful stillness and the ability to observe subtle things.”

In addition to her childhood adventures, Judge says she draws inspiration from the wildlife that surrounds her home. “I spend a lot of time outside going for hikes, where the inspiration comes, and I do the work in my studio. It’s a regular thoroughfare here because we have feeders everywhere. At any one time, we have 40 wild turkeys circling the house, bears looking right in at us, foxes, bobcats and lots of deer.”

The creatures that populate Bird Talk are a delight to behold, from the elegantly arched neck of the Indian Sarus Crane to the tensed body of a striped American Bittern who’s hiding in tall grass—but risking a yellow-eyed peek to see if his ruse is working.

And Judge’s eye for color will help young readers connect the fascinating images and facts in the book with what they see in real life, whether gazing up at flashes of blue or red in a tree, admiring vivid plumage in the bird-house at a zoo, or clicking through bird photos online.

“I wanted every child to have a bird they could identify from their backyards. I also wanted to include those really bizarre things kids just love. So, it’s a healthy mix of birds I’ve seen firsthand and those I remember being thrilled by,” Judge says.

The Sage Grouse will not disappoint (think: blowfish with feathers), and the charm of the Blue-Footed Booby belies its name. A bird-guide and glossary, plus a list of references, will aid curious kids in learning more about bird appearance, behavior and habitat.

Through her books, Judge says she hopes to convey the thrill—and value—of being around animals and exploring nature. Based on her visits to schools, there is a receptive audience: “The average kid is much more articulate [than kids of decades past] about the consequences we have on the environment.”

She adds, “They don’t have to be watching wild animals personally to care about them. I find they’re all heart and want to make a difference, but at the same time they have a lack of knowledge about just how complex the natural world is. One thing I want to do with this book is hopefully fuel kids’ natural inborn curiosity and love for animals, and give an appreciation of how complex animal behavior is.”

Bird Talk is just the vehicle to spark, or enhance, that appreciation: Judge’s expressive illustrations and textual translations add dimension and personality to the feathered creatures we see and hear every day. Her deep knowledge of and affection for nature is evident—not to mention her delight in at last becoming the author and artist she was meant to be.

“When I finally switched to children’s books, and to doing what I did as a kid with writing and visuals working together to tell a story . . . it felt like falling into myself,” she says.