Young readers discover an unforgettable voice in the latest novel-in-verse from Skila Brown, To Stay Alive, about 19-year-old Mary Ann Graves, a real survivor of the tragic Donner Party of 1846. Brown shares the moment when Mary Ann captured her imagination.

What did I know about the Donner Party? I’m sure I’d heard about them in school—a paragraph in a dry textbook chapter on westward expansion. I had a fuzzy idea their story involved cannibalism when I pushed play on a How the Donner Party Worked podcast while driving on an interstate through Indiana four years ago.

I was immediately captivated.

This story was the very definition of high-stakes drama: accidental deaths, sickness, fights, missing treasure, romance and murders (plural!).

And of course there was the fact that they were stuck by the mountains all winter and watching their food supply dwindle. Mothers couldn’t feed their children. Honestly, the cannibalism seemed the least dramatic part of the whole escapade.

I had to know more. First books . . . then documentaries . . . then . . . googling the names of survivors for photos.   

And that’s when I saw her. The “belle of the Donner Party.” Mary Ann Graves. Staring off to the side with dark ringlets and a strong jaw and a haunted look in her eyes. I couldn’t look away.

A little bit of research and suddenly I was holding in my hands a copy of her marriage license. Sunday, May 16, 1847: Just weeks after she was rescued, and while her feet were still healing, she and a rescuer named Edward Pyle—a man born in the same county in Indiana where I now live—stood before an official and took their wedding vows.

They were married for a year when her husband disappeared the following spring. For 12 months, he was missing and Mary Ann was alone. Around the time that would have been their second anniversary, his body was recovered. He had been dragged behind a horse, and when that failed to kill him, his throat had been cut. A man was tried and found guilty of the crime. Mary Ann reportedly cooked for him and delivered food to him in prison so that he would live long enough to hang.

I liked Mary Ann.

She remarried a few years later and had seven children. Those eyes that haunted me in her photograph gave her trouble after the snow-blindness she suffered while trying to cross the mountain for help. For the rest of her life, she couldn’t make tears.

Here was a woman who’d journeyed west by foot for the promise of new land and better climate. She’d watched her family starve around her on the way, then taken a husband, only to become a widow. Later in life she cared for her son while he was dying, taking sick herself and following him shortly after to death. And all the while, she was tear-less.

You don’t meet a character like this every day. I didn’t set out to write a book about the Donner Party, but no character I could create as a fiction writer would be as interesting to me as this woman. Someone who actually existed. I had to get my hand on every letter she’d written, every interview she’d done. I had to see what her siblings said about her, how the other people she traveled with described her.

I had to write about her. What choice did I have?

Joel ben Izzy, when he was “way too awkward to live.”

What’s the deal with the choliday of Chanukkah?

Though everyone’s cheard of it, few can understand it, even among Jews. Especially among Jews. We can’t even agree how to spell it, which is how you know it’s a Jewish holiday. In Dreidels on the Brain—written from when I was a 12-year old super-nerd magician—I spell it differently each time use it.

The ever-changing timing of Hanukkkkkah is also baffling. Three years ago it actually began before Thanksgiving! That’s only happened once and—due to quirks in the calendar—isn’t scheduled to happen again for 79,000 years. Hope you enjoyed it! This year Haanukah begins at sunset on December 24—Christmas Eve! That’s even more confusing, because whatever Kchaanukah is, one thing is clear—it is not the Jewish Christmas.

So, what is Haanukah all about? From the beginning, it’s been an uneasy melding of two stories about miracles. One was of the Maccabean revolution, with a simple moral: We kicked their butt because God was on our side. The problem was that the Maccabees went on to be terrible rulers, so bad that people decided not to include the story in any Jewish holy books. It’s true—to read about the Maccabees, you need a Christian Bible!

The other story tells how after the battle they went to rededicate the temple in Jerusalem, but only had a tiny amount of oil. Yet it lasted all eight nights—and that was the miracle.

I could go on about how confusing Qchanukah is, but I won’t, because here’s what’s important: I think I’ve figured it out—and that’s why I wrote Dreidels on the Brain.

It’s about what happened to me and my family during the eight nights of Chaaanukah, in December 1971, which is when the story takes place. It was a dark time in my life. My family was poor, my dad was sick, and I was way too awkward to live. So I made a bet with God, over a game of dreidel: All I wanted was one Kchanukkah miracle. 

Without giving away the story, I will say this: When it comes to dreidel—and miracles—God does not play fair. During that Chaanukah, my life fell apart. But, at the end of it all, I was given something I will always treasure.

I’ve always loved stories, which is why I’m a professional storyteller. And when I have a good one, I’ll turn right around and tell it. But this was different. I knew I needed to hold on to that story until the time was right.

That was 45 years ago. And now, at last, I’m ready to share the gift I was given that Haanukkah—a tale of how, no matter how dark things get, you can still somehow find light within the darkness.  

And, for me, that’s what Hanukkah—and Dreidels on the Brain—is all about. 

In 1983 storyteller Joel ben Izzy graduated from Stanford University and set off to travel the globe, gathering and telling stories. Since then, he has performed and led workshops in 35 countries. Over the years he has also produced six recorded collections of his stories, which have won awards from Parents’ Choice foundation, NAPPA, ALA and a Booklist Editor’s Choice Honor. Joel is also one of the nation’s most sought-after story consultants, supporting organizations and leaders working to make the world a better place, with clients in fields ranging from philanthropy to medicine to technology to entertainment. Joel’s first book was the highly acclaimed memoir The Beggar King and the Secret of Happiness, which has been published in 17 languages and is currently in development as both a film and a musical. He lives with his wife in Berkeley, California.

Andrew Maraniss and Perry Wallace at the RFK Book Awards, where the adult version of Strong Inside received a special recognition in 2015.

When I set out to write the original, adult version of Strong Inside, I felt pressure to satisfy two discerning audiences: historians and sports fans. These folks may not hang out in the same pubs, but they both know their stuff and aren’t afraid to call you out when they think you’re wrong.

I’m pleased the book, a biography of Perry Wallace, the first African-American basketball player in the Southeastern Conference, succeeded on both fronts. It debuted on the New York Times bestseller list in both the sports and civil rights categories, earned two major civil rights book awards, became the all-freshman read at Vanderbilt University, and may have been the first book covered by both the SEC Network and NPR.

But now, with Strong Inside out in a middle grade format, I may have the most skeptical readers of all to satisfy: 12-year-olds.

Talk about a tough crowd. And none more important audience.

I’ve seen the news that middle school suicides at an all-time high. I’ve read the reports about incidents of racially motivated bullying increasing since the election of Donald Trump. I’ve learned the term “reluctant reader.” I feel a country divided between rural and urban, right and left, white and black.

Yet in Perry Wallace’s story, I see an opportunity to deliver a dose of hope. Chances are, you’ve never heard of Perry Wallace. I doubt I’ll meet a middle schooler who knows Wallace’s name. But his story could not be more important at this time in history, when racism—subtle and overt—was at the heart of a winning presidential campaign.

Wallace was no ordinary basketball player. Yes, he was a star on the court: three-time high school state champion, team captain at Vanderbilt, NBA draft choice. But he has always been so much more than an athlete. As a kid, he taught Sunday School, practiced trumpet four hours a day, studied his four older sisters’ college textbooks. He was the valedictorian at Nashville’s all-black Pearl High School, earned an engineering degree at Vandy, and graduated from Columbia University law school. He watched Nashville’s 1960 lunch-counter sit-ins as a 12-year-old, met with civil rights figures Martin Luther King Jr, Stokely Carmichael and Fannie Lou Hamer while in college. Today he’s a professor of law at American University.

And all along the way, he’s overcome gigantic obstacles, seen the worst of human nature, feared that racists in a small southern town would shoot him, been taunted as a token by some black observers. He’s the most courageous—and smartest—person I’ve ever met.

I’m hopeful young students of color will discover a character they recognize and admire. I’m hopeful white kids will learn something about race and racism, empathy and understanding. I’m hopeful that kids who love sports, but not books, will find a story they can’t put down. I’m hopeful that boys and girls who don’t care about sports at all will identify with Wallace’s intellect, his sensitivity, his challenges to overcome bullying and isolation.

Call that a lot to hope for from just one story, but I know the power of Perry Wallace. I first interviewed him when I was just a student myself, a sophomore at Vanderbilt in 1989 working on a paper for a Black History class. I’ve dedicated more than half of my life now to telling Perry Wallace’s story. And it’s because I know how meaningful that story can be to people that I paid close attention to the advice I was given by those who guided me through the process of adapting this book for young readers. Professor Ann Neely at Vanderbilt, bestselling author Ruta Sepetys, and editors Brian Geffen and Michael Green at Philomel said: Respect the audience. Don’t dumb-down the story. Don’t sanitize it.

And that was on top of the advice I had already received from my father, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Maraniss: Do the real work, the reporting, the research, the interviews. And the advice from Perry Wallace himself: Just tell the truth.

Authors have always had the opportunity to bring light where there is darkness, and in this new America, we have a special responsibility to counter hate and bluster with truth. Kids, of all people, still demand it. And I know they deserve it.

Follow Andrew Maraniss on Twitter @trublu24 and visit his website at www.andrewmaraniss.com. Strong Inside: The True Story of How Perry Wallace Broke College Basketball’s Color Line was published by Philomel on Dec. 20, 2016, and is a Junior Library Guild selection.

“Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?”
       —“History Has Its Eyes on You,” a song from the musical Hamilton

On a January evening in 1969, 10 paintings were vandalized at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the letter “H” (which presumably stood for Harlem) scratched onto the surface of each canvas. There was no permanent damage to the paintings. The vandalism was committed in protest of the Met’s new exhibition, “Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900-1968,” and occurred during its exclusive opening gala. The perpetrator was never caught.

I stumbled on this juicy tidbit of a story[1] while doing research for The Harlem Charade. Eureka! I immediately assumed that this unsolved mystery—complete with art, intrigue and more than a little chutzpah—would become the cornerstone of the story. But as I dug deeper, I realized that there was a lot more to this story than vandalism and vengeance.

The “Harlem on My Mind” exhibit was controversial from the very start. Protests against the show sprouted quickly. Community members and artists, including the well-known painters Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden, decried what they saw as the museum’s failure to include the input of Harlem residents in the planning of the exhibition. They also criticized the Met’s decision to exclude black painters and sculptors from the exhibit, choosing instead to focus exclusively on photography, which made the show feel more like a sociological study than a fine art exhibition. A flyer in protest of the exhibit proclaimed, “If art represents the very soul of a people, then this rejection of the Black painter and sculptor is the most insidious segregation of all.”[2]

As I read more about “Harlem on My Mind,” it became clear that this conflict wasn’t about art at all. This was a battle—of life and death—over representation and the right to define and tell one’s own story. Rather than accept the Met’s definition of art, and of who they were as artists and what Harlem was as a community, those who initially protested “Harlem on My Mind” put their dissatisfaction to productive use. They built new organizations and institutions, like the Studio Museum in Harlem, and created opportunities, like artist residencies and programs to mentor new curators of color, that nurtured the creativity and careers of artists of color and helped to change the palette of the art world in New York City and beyond.

Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?

The Harlem Charade is set in contemporary Harlem, decades after the “Harlem on My Mind” exhibition took place. However, I wanted to make connections between the Harlem of the 1960s and the Harlem of today, because both periods represent moments of significant change in the neighborhood. Though the issues may have been slightly different (civil rights and poverty in the ’60s, gentrification of the community today), the fundamental question remains the same: Who tells your story, and what story do you want to tell?

As Alex, Jin and Elvin, the three protagonists of the book, go about solving an art mystery of their own they—like those Harlem artists years before them—must grapple with what it means to live in a society where people have very different visions of community and progress, of the truth, of history and the future. In the process, they must also figure out what stories they want to tell, about themselves and their community.

My challenge to readers of The Harlem Charade is to learn more about their own neighborhoods and to ask questions of their families and of our local and national leaders in order to formulate their own ideas about the changes that they’d like to see in their immediate communities and in the world. Stories matter, and the stakes are high. If we don’t tell our stories, we risk being rendered invisible, washed away in the tidal wave of change. I want to inspire young people to not only discover their own stories but also to recognize and activate their power to use these stories to shape the future.

Author photo credit Phill Struggle.

[1] “Paintings Defaced At Metropolitan; One a Rembrandt” by Martin Arnold, The New York Times, January 17, 1969.

[2] "Black Artists and Activism: Harlem on My Mind (1969)" by Bridget R. Cooks, published in American Studies, 48:1 (Spring 2007): 5-40.

In the isolated society of A Single Stone, only the seven smallest girls can tunnel into the mountain in search of the mica that allows their isolated society to survive harsh winters. But Jena, one of the seven girls, begins to question her society’s traditions, forever altering her understanding of the world around her. Meg McKinlay’s latest middle grade novel displays an intense reverence for the earth, the bonds of sisterhood and carefully chosen prose. McKinlay describes the inspiration for her novel as being like drops of water laden with sediment, disparate elements all building to something powerful.

The way a story comes together always feels a little mysterious to me—a kind of alchemy. It starts with a drop of something, which is joined at some point by a drop of something else altogether, and I’m never quite sure how or why certain things combine. I’m not sure I want to be, to tell you the truth. I like the mystery of it.

What I can say about A Single Stone is that its very earliest “drop” appeared when I was around 7 years old, reading The Chronicles of Narnia. In The Silver Chair, there are some gnomes who live deep underground and who express their horror of the "Overland," saying things like:

They say there’s no roof at all there; only a horrible, great emptiness called the sky.

You can’t really like it—crawling about like flies on top of the world!

This had a profound effect on me, making me think for the first time about what cultural difference really meant. I wondered how I might feel—who I might be—if I had grown up somewhere else. I think it’s from here that my main character, Jena, eventually evolved—a girl so comfortable underground she feels ill at ease outside with nothing pressing on her.

There’d be no story, though, without the other drops. The most important of these presented itself when, as a teenager, I was introduced to the work of Franz Kafka, and became very fond of his aphorisms, among them this one:

Leopards break into the temple and drink what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance and becomes part of the ceremony.

As a teenager attending an Anglican high school and spending time in church youth groups, I was taken by this notion of how something inherently random and meaningless might be co-opted into sacred ritual. For what reason, to what end? Consciously or otherwise? And what are the consequences when that practice becomes detached from its origin?

For me, these questions are at the heart of A Single Stone, and with these two “drops,” I had the beginnings of both character and theme. But while I can see all this in retrospect, I had no sense of it at the time. I never consciously gather ideas; it’s more that these random fragments sleep quietly in the back of the mind, and at some point certain things seem to bump against each other and set a story in motion.

There are many other influences at work, too, some of which I was unaware of while writing, and probably many more I’m yet to discover. For example, my brother recently reminded me that I love rocks. It’s something I’ve inherited from my father, who always used to stop and point out interesting stones. And as a child growing up in a goldmining town, I spent a lot of time scanning the rocks around me for surface gold. It was a reader who asked whether there was any connection between this and the way the girls hunt for flashes of mica in the book. Somehow, I made neither of these links myself. And this is actually something I love about being a writer. I can’t count the number of times people have said things like, “I love the way you did this,” or “I was just wondering why you did that,” and I think, Well, but I didn’t, and then in the next breath, Oh yes I did!

For me, writing is a kind of discovery, and readers have a huge part to play in that. I can’t wait to see what a new audience brings to A Single Stone.

Lauren Baratz-Logsted is the author of more than 25 books for adults, children and teens, including the popular series The Sisters 8. In her new middle grade novel, I Love You, Michael Collins, the students of Mamie’s class are assigned to write letters to the astronauts who will journey to the moon. Mamie is the only student who chooses Michael Collins, and she fills her letters with stories of her troubles at home. She admires the part Collins plays on the mission; he may not land on the moon, but it is very important that someone stay with the ship. These engaging, folksy letters transport the readers back to 1969, where young Mamie contemplates what it would be like to be near the moon, but to not set foot on the surface.

In the summer of ’69, the U.S. was a country divided. We were in the midst of the civil rights movement; women’s liberation was gaining momentum; Vietnam, both the war itself and protests against it, was heating up; and on June 28, Stonewall, a seminal moment in the history of gay rights, occurred. The entire country was in turmoil, separated by divisions stronger than at any time since the Civil War. And yet, amid all that, there was one bright spot. . . .

Flash forward in time, to the 11 years between 1983 and 1994 when I was an independent bookseller in Westport, Connecticut. One of my favorite customers was a man by the name of Robert Hanrahan. He came in nearly every week, bought a lot of books and never made any trouble. What was there not to like? He also had steel-colored hair to match the frames of his glasses and suit, blue ties to match his eyes—here was a man who knew how to play to his strengths. One Friday, though, he came in looking like James Dean: worn blue jeans and a tight white T-shirt, the only thing missing a pack of smokes rolled up in his shirtsleeve. Naturally, I had to know: Why the change?

Mr. Hanrahan said he’d retired from his job that day. And, because for the first time since I’d known him he had time on his hands, we had the opportunity to chat. He told me that the first significant job he ever had was, in the summer of ’69, working for NASA right when they were trying to land a man on the moon for the first time. Having been 7 years old myself when Apollo 11 made its historic landing, I naturally had a lot of questions. Graciously, he answered them all. But one of the things that made the biggest impression on me was when he said:

“It was the most amazing time. Everywhere we went, when people found out we worked for NASA, they wanted to do whatever they could for us: clap us on the backs, buy us beer, pick up the tab for our dinners. The entire country was excited about what we were doing.”

The entire country was excited about what we were doing.

Flash forward yet again, this time to the present, nearly a half century since Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon. I write a book called I Love You, Michael Collins, a book that to me is about so much: a girl, a family, a very special astronaut and the importance of staying with the ship. It’s also about a divided country coming together in excitement over one common goal.

When you sit down to write a book for children, you’d better not be thinking, I hope my book educates you in some way! The truth is, if you can’t and don’t entertain your readers first, they won’t still be there by the time you get around to saying something important. So I hope kids are entertained by my book about one girl’s extraordinary journey. But beyond that, if I can dare to wish for something more, I hope that kids—kids who are living through a time in our nation’s history when we are more politically and starkly divided than in any time since the Civil War or the ’60s—get a glimpse of a time when we were all united by one common goal: putting a man on the moon.

Some days, I think that that’s what we need now: one goal to unite us. It seems so unlikely, but then the Pollyanna part of me—and the one who lay on the floor with my brother, watching men walk on the moon for the first time while the amazing, the incredible Michael Collins orbited, staying with the ship as he awaited the return of Armstrong and Aldrin—wonders: If it happened once, why can’t it happen again?

Follow Lauren Baratz-Logsted on Twitter @LaurenBaratzL or visit her website at www.laurenbaratzlogsted.com.

I’ve always been fascinated by Edgar Allan Poe. 

I had read some of his stories. I’d seen the iconic photo, showing a man with scraggly black hair, sunken eyes, a mustache crawling wormlike across his face and eyes that didn’t look quite right. But it wasn’t until I read more about Poe that I discovered the most remarkable thing of all: He invented three literary genres—science fiction 25 years before Jules Verne, mysteries 50 years before Arthur Conan Doyle and horror 100 years before H. P. Lovecraft. Poe lived so long ago that when he was born, Thomas Jefferson was president.

"Poe deserved a fitting death, not an ignominious one."

I felt compelled to write about Poe, and my first thought was historical fiction, a form I’ve always enjoyed. I imagined a novel featuring Poe that would consist of three parts, in sequence: science fiction, mystery and horror. I still think it’s a good idea, but something else kept nagging at me. It was his death.

Poe was obsessed with death. Death was his greatest and most terrifying subject. And yet his own death—what we know of it—was squalid and sad. 

At the time, Poe was living in New York. After his beloved wife Ginny died, he sometimes traveled to Philadelphia and Richmond to raise money for the Stylus, a journal of literature and the arts that he dreamed of starting. In October of 1849 Poe found his way to Baltimore, where his writing career had begun and he had spent some of his happiest years. There he was discovered in a tavern, suffering from an unidentified illness, and was taken to a hospital, where he died a few days later. It was reported that before he died, Poe repeatedly called out the name “Reynolds.” That’s all we know.

Poe deserved a fitting death, not an ignominious one. My goal in writing this book, therefore, wasn’t to portray history but to fix it. I took those few facts, built on them, and reimagined his death—not as it was but as it should have been. 

What if …
… Poe concocted a final magnificent story that he was determined to live out when he died.
… the plan went terribly wrong and left him trapped in agony between life and death.
… his soul wailed and screamed and grew twisted over time. 
… a house sprouted like an evil mushroom—haunted, horrible, worthy of Poe.
… a boy moved there years later and, through his anger, unleashed Poe’s spirit. 

The story gripped me, hard, and I wrote it. Eventually it became Room of Shadows, the first novel I’ve written that actually scared me. 

We are in modern-day Baltimore. Thirteen-year-old David Cray is angry. Terror takes root in the closet. And Edgar Allan Poe, at long last, gets the death he deserved.

Ronald Kidd has written more than 30 works, including plays, novels and children’s books. His suspenseful new middle grade novel, Room of Shadows, follows the experiences of 13-year-old David Cray, who moves into a creepy house in downtown Baltimore with his mom and unwittingly unleashes the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe. Kidd lives in Nashville with his wife and daughter. Visit RonaldKidd.com to learn more about his writing.

Author photo by Helen Burrus

Patricia Forde’s The List, her first book for children to be released in the U.S., is set in a world where language has been restricted to 500 words. Forde is a speaker of Irish Gaelic, mistakenly considered by some to be a dead language, and knows a thing or two about the preciousness of words.

One language dies every 14 days. As many as half the world’s minority languages are expected to be extinct by the end of the century. My native language is one of those. We call it Irish, the rest of the world calls it Gaelic. Reports of the death of the Irish language have been, to misquote Oscar Wilde, greatly exaggerated. The language is still alive—it is in the critical care unit and the prognosis isn’t great, but it has a heartbeat. That heartbeat resides in places like Connemara, where I live.

Here, in the west of Ireland, people still speak Irish on a daily basis, in the shop, at school, at work. But it is a language with fewer words than ever before and that list grows shorter every year. Does that matter? I think it does. There are words in Irish that don’t translate into English. They don’t translate because they carry within them the psychology and the history of a people. The word macnas is a good example. Macnas is the term used to describe the mad cavorting of a calf on first being introduced to a meadow. How do you say that in English? You don’t. Or what about fíbín? It’s the way an animal reacts after it has been bitten by a gadfly. Those words reflect our relationship with our landscape and our traditional way of life. A language, it seems, is more than the sum of its words.

When I began to write The List, I didn’t know that one of the things it was about was language. I only found that out when I had written it, but I was not surprised. Language has played a big part in my life. I have been bilingual since I was 4 years old, and for most of my life I have been aware that we may be the last generation to speak Irish. In the novel, the story opens in Ark, where the list of legal words has just been reduced from 700 to 500.

With every generation in Ireland, the list of commonly used Irish words grows shorter. Words that were once commonplace are now exotic, words that were used every day on farms are now preserved only in dictionaries, words used to describe certain elements in nature no longer exist at all. When we lose the words to describe the landscape—the words for a hundred different types of seaweed, for example, or the word for a tune that you can’t get out of your head, the word for the madness of a newborn calf—when we lose those words, do we also lose the ability to see that diversity of experience in our own lives? And if we don’t see the diversity, can we lose something invaluable, almost without knowing it?

In The List, the young protagonist, Letta, wonders how we can dream if we don’t have words, how we can even hope if the word itself is now forbidden. Language and our relationship with it is a deeply mysterious thing. An Irish philosopher, John O’Donoghue, once said: The place between silence and language is where you find poetry. I love that thought. I hope The List inspires people to see that every word matters, to see that we need words to forge relationships and to fix them when they fall apart. We need to respect the need for our words to be accurate and exact, not to throw them about without due care and responsibility. How many words do we need to survive? As many as we can remember, and if that isn’t enough, then as many as we can invent. Every word matters. Every language matters. If we use words wisely, they are an enormous force for good and will help us to know exactly who we are. What could be more important than that?

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The List.

Author photo credit Philip Smyth.

“Maybe more than any other sport, cross-country is about not quitting.”

Joseph has ADD, but he has a sense of humor about it: At least he doesn’t have the “H” part. Since his focus wanders, team sports are especially exasperating, and he’s not a natural athlete anyway. When he joins the cross-country team, a healthy bond is formed away from the usual teasing and frustration. Then comes a fast new girl, Heather, who is brave enough to stand up to the bullies and accepting enough to befriend Joseph exactly as he is.

With Sidetracked, debut author Diana Harmon Asher offers a story devoid of pity and replete with humor. Here, she shares the inspiration behind her heartwarming cross-country tale.

When my oldest son started running cross-country, I learned about singlets and starting guns, warmups and runners cramps, muddy trails and fartleks.

And really, what aspiring children’s book author could resist writing about a sport that has a term like “fartlek”?

The hero of my debut novel, Sidetracked, is a seventh grader named Joseph. He has Attention Deficit Disorder, he’s a terrible athlete, and he’s loaded with anxieties. Just for starters, he’s afraid of gargoyles, street sweepers and stewed prunes. To Joseph, middle school might as well be the running of the bulls. He just tries to keep up or stay out of the way or find someplace to hide.

Heather is new to Lakeview. She seems to be Joseph’s opposite—smart, fast and strong. But it’s not so easy being faster than the boys and stronger than the bullies. In fact, as Joseph puts it, “I wonder if you can be as miserable being good at something as you can being bad at it. Maybe things are reversed somehow, when you’re a girl.”

Cross-country gave me a starting point for their stories, because it’s a place where doing better than last time has a name. It’s called a “personal record.” It’s a place where boys and girls train together, where talented athletes come together with kids who have been cut from baseball and tennis and soccer, to make a team. It’s a hodgepodge of abilities, a virtual trail mix of kids, but it’s a team.

Maybe more than any other sport, cross-country is about not quitting. There’s no bench time, no timeouts, no substitutions. You run, and you try to finish. Middle school can feel like that—especially to kids with ADD and other learning differences. They’re constantly reminded that they’re not living up to expectations. But that makes what they do accomplish even more noteworthy. As my son who runs marathons and climbs mountains for fun reminds me, “easy” isn’t a story.

There’s no one tougher than a cross-country runner. But I have to admit, there are a lot of comic possibilities when you put a bunch of seventh graders in their teeny tiny shorts and singlets on a cross-country trail. I hope Sidetracked will be a fun read for kids, and I hope it encourages them to give themselves a chance. A chance to compete, even if they’re not the best. A chance to be a good friend. And I hope it gives them license to ignore the people who try to tell them who they’re supposed to be and box them in with their expectations. Because really, which of us, even as adults, feel that we’re everything we’re expected to be?

Is Joseph a great runner? No. But he’s in the race. He does the best he can, like we all do. We start slow and get better, and we try not to give up. If we’re lucky, we find our team. And however we live or run or write, it’s of value, because no one else can do it in exactly that same way.

Author photo credit Alison Sheehy Photography.

My childhood had a dramatic setting: a bridged island in Maine with mountains, thick woods, a thundering sea and granite boulders strewn over the coastline. It was just the place to come up with stories. It was also just the place to feel the crushing isolation of rural life. And so as a child, I read.

Books were my earliest link to a world beyond my own. I read widely—whatever was in the house, whatever sparked my interest on the library’s shelves. But what I loved most were fantasy adventures: stories of a bold character who sought to gain a treasure, win a contest or defeat evil, all while mastering new skills and exquisite weaponry and learning what it meant to be a hero.

The hero of these stories was nearly always a young man. During my formative years, I read no story in which a young woman played this role.

The heroine was quite different. Often strong-willed, she was also often in need of a boy or man to protect her or give her purpose. Some stories starring girls lacked a “hero,” but they usually didn’t include a lot of action and ended with the protagonist’s marriage or the promise of marriage.

Those were my fictional worlds.

In the difficult years of middle school, I found an additional world that helped me both persist and thrive: writing. I wrote my first novel at age 14. It was a wild tale of adventure with swordplay and rescues, danger and escapes. I remember a scene in which my young protagonist (a girl) held a sword for the first time.

But the weapon wasn’t hers: It belonged to the young male hero.

Even then, in a world I controlled, the stories I had read dictated the roles I could imagine. Of course, the girl was there to be rescued, to be aided in her escapes. Of course, the young man had the sword and was both brave and strong. Those were their roles.

And those are the roles that still exist today in hard-core adventure novels for the middle grade crowd. There are some exceptions, but not many. And when we have them, it’s often a transposition of genders—a girl takes the traditional boy’s role. But what about girls who are strong on their own?

I needed to write a novel to confront the gender roles in the novels I had grown up with and to offer new concepts of what a girl could be to readers today. And so in my fantasy adventure, The Mad Wolf’s Daughter, my protagonist Drest is more than a girl with a sword masquerading as a boy. She embodies the person I wanted to be when I was 12: strong, brave, determined and focused on doing the right thing. She lives in medieval Scotland when tales of men’s strength and bravery dominated all discourse. This was a world where no one expects her to play the boy’s role.

I gave Drest the support of her father (the villain of the story, by the way, another of my tweaks to the genre) and five vicious but loving brothers, who never see her for her gender but for who she is beyond it, and include her in their infamous war-band. She also learns from them how to care about other people. In her own way, she’s nurturing. She loves deeply and fiercely.

But Drest also begins with a kind of masculine arrogance, commonly seen in the adventure genre, where brash heroes need to learn humility. Like her brothers, she adopts a seemingly noble but ultimately unsettling part of her family’s war-band code: to honor and protect all women and girls. The code exists because women are weak and vulnerable, her father says, while he’s told Drest that she “was as tough as any of her brothers.”

And yet when she first meets girls and women, she realizes that they’re powerful in ways she’s never known. They are each as tough and strong as her brothers and make significant differences in their worlds—including one she only hears about: a girl long dead whose story motivates much of the action. Drest slowly learns that the gender roles she once understood don’t exist and that there is no one kind of woman. And in that process, she also learns about her own potential to be a true hero.

I hope that Drest, the women and girls, and the sensitive and physically weak boys in The Mad Wolf’s Daughter will help to dismantle the traditional gender roles of heroes and heroines in the fast-paced adventure genre. I hope my young readers take to heart these examples and understand that there are different ways of being a girl—and different kinds of strength and power.

“Everyone knew that all islands were worlds unto themselves, that to come to an island was to come to another world.” —Guy Gavriel Kay

When you hear the word leper, what do you think? When I do school visits, the subject is greeted with either confusion or disgust. If it’s the former, I explain that it is a bacterial disease that damages nerves, often leading to the loss of fingers, toes, or noses. The disgust follows quickly after. I wrote The Island at the End of Everything because I used to feel like that too, and because I came to realize the error of my ways. Before I wrote stories for children, I wrote poetry for adults. I was at a poetry prize ceremony when someone stood up and read a poem entitled “Culion.” It spoke of abandoned hospitals, forgotten patients, a beautiful island haunted by a dark past. I was instantly intrigued. Afterwards, I asked the poet how they had gotten the idea, and they told me that Culion was a real island in the Philippines, which between 1906 and 1998 grew into the largest leper colony in the world.

That night, I stayed up late Googling Culion. Initially, I was driven by a sort of morbid fascination, but this quickly evolved into a deep sadness at both my reaction and the lives and deaths of the inhabitants of Culion. Throughout history, people with leprosy have been treated appallingly. Their disease and subsequent deformity were associated with sin and poor hygiene in everything from law to the Bible when in actuality it is caused by bacteria similar to a cold, only much harder to catch. One solution was to isolate them from society, and the most extreme implementation of this was the conversion of islands into leper colonies.

Culion was far from the first island leper colony, but it was the biggest. In 1906, a law was passed in the Philippines segregating healthy inhabitants from those with leprosy. On paper, this may seem a good idea; in practice, it was devastating. Children were taken from their parents, and families were ripped apart, never to be reunited. When I actually stopped to think of what the word segregation means, it horrified me. And I knew I had a story to tell. Ami lives happily on Culion with her Nanay, who has leprosy. She spends her days caring for her mother and watching for butterflies, but their peaceful existence is wrecked by the arrival of a cruel government official, Mr. Zamora. He oversees the segregation, and along with several other children, Ami is taken from her mother and transported to an orphanage across the sea. Mr. Zamora, an avid butterfly collector, runs the institution and makes the children’s lives a living hell. But Ami forms a friendship with a honey-eyed girl named Mari, and together they set out to try and find a way back to the island at the end of everything.

Placing a child at the center of the story enabled me to enter its emotional heart. Children are so often underestimated and overlooked, and this allows them freedom from both scrutiny and responsibility. Ami and Mari are brave and bold, and driven by an uncomplicated love of both each other and Nanay. Ami’s greatest strength is kindness, and a willingness to see the best in anyone, and this protects her from much of Mr. Zamora’s threat. But time and the tide are against them.

Writing The Island at the End of Everything taught me that disgust is often driven by fear, and that tolerance is perhaps the best path to love, which is the opposite of fear. Telling Ami’s story grew my heart and my mind. I hope it does the same for my readers.

“For decades, I wrote adult novels advocating for race, class, religious and gender equity. I write for children now. I believe they are our best hope for a better world.” 

The heightened national awareness of police brutality's effects on American minorities has brought a wave of brilliant, devastating novels for teen readers like The Hate U Give and Tyler Johnson Was Here. Award-winning author Jewell Parker Rhodes’ (Sugar, Bayou Magic) Ghost Boy, which follows a 12-year-old boy named Jerome as he navigates the afterlife following his death in a police shooting, is one of the first books to breach this sensitive, necessary topic for younger readers. Here, Rhodes opens up about motherhood, the legacy of Emmett Till, the importance of honesty in stories for children and the issues of racial and social justice that fuel her writing. 

I was born a year before Emmett Till was murdered, and I still recall seeing images of his mutilated body in Jet and Ebony magazines. I grew up with images of men lynched—one that still haunts me had corkscrew holes all over his body. I was raised in a segregated ghetto in Pittsburgh, where no one shielded children from racist actions and images. I watched civil rights battles and cheered Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. I believed during my lifetime, a time would come when people were judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” I married Brad, a white man, in Maryland (a state that didn’t recognize interracial marriages until 1967). We had a son with brown skin and a daughter with white-toned skin. And within our own family, we experienced how the world treated our children differently. Our daughter was given the “privilege” of being white, and I was considered her nanny. Our son, the older he grew, was seen as more suspect, and his father was presumed to have adopted him. Dozens of strangers declared there was no way our daughter and son could be siblings.

Rodney King was battered when our son was 2. I wrote an essay, “Evan,” for Between Mothers and Sons: Women Writers Talk About Having Sons and Raising Men, that spoke of our family’s anguish that 2-year-old Evan—who loved Legos and ants—would one day as an adult be stopped and attacked by police. When the officers who beat and hog-tied King were acquitted and the LA riots began, our family drove north—as far as Monterey Bay—to find a refuge.

My son heard my worried “walking, talking [and] driving while black” speeches. But as a high school student when President Obama was elected, Evan believed his mother, in particular, was too traumatized by past racial woes. However, as a graduate student stopped almost daily by police, he learned how some systematically devalued him and doubted he knew “his lowly place” as a black man. The constant harassment was horrific. More horrific were the numerous contemporary media examples of police officers who brutalized and killed black men across America.

I thought the world had gotten better, more tolerant. Now, as a grandmother, I worry racism and racial bias are again tearing our nation apart. I worry that my generation lost the battle for more tolerant hearts and minds. I worry that my children and grandchild have to fight and struggle on for equity and social justice.

For decades, I wrote adult novels advocating for race, class, religious and gender equity. I write for children now. I believe they are our best hope for a better world. The young are curious and have such open hearts. I write challenging stories not to embitter them but to empower them to “be the change,” to remember always the sense of justice and fairness they knew instinctively as children when they become adults. Writing stories about ending all forms of bias and discrimination, I hope will be my legacy—my own personal attempt to “bear witness” beyond the grave.