By Kristin Tubb

Growing up, I once told my father that I wanted to “own NASA.” Monetary and logistical issues aside, this seemed like an excellent career path to pursue. Space shuttles! Space stations! And, well . . . Space!

It was with much regret that I left this dream behind, and focused instead on the more realistic dream of studying to become an Aerospace Engineer at Auburn University. Alas, this was not to be my calling, either, as I consistently fell asleep during my classes and while reading my textbooks. (I took this as a sign. Rightfully so.)

Many years and numerous job changes later, I found myself nodding eagerly when editor Kathryn Knight at Dalmatian Press asked me to write an elementary-school-age activity book about space.

“It’ll be the universe, in 64 pages,” she said. I might’ve squealed.

I am terrible at arts and crafts. Seriously. When my daughter needed a toga for Roman Week, I outsourced it to a tailor. (She said, “But Michaela, I’m just sewing some armholes in a sheet.” I was too mesmerized by her skill to speak.) I lived in fear of my kids’ class projects. Dioramas—I’d rather die. Posters? Pose too many challenges for me. So when my third grader told me that she had to choose a famous person for “Living Biography Day,” my antenna went up. What exactly was required? Some research. No problem. A short paper, check. Oh and I have to dress up like that person—KLANG KLANG Warning Bells. I hate costumes (don’t even ask about Halloween).

“Hmm,” I said, “what about Amelia Earhart?” I knew I could manage a leather jacket, a long white scarf and goggles. “OK,” my daughter shrugged. But things are never that easy. She came home that night, looking very sad. “What happened?” I asked. “Five other kids wanted Amelia Earhart!” Ah, I thought, I am not alone! “So who did you get?” I asked. “Louis Braille,” she said in a wail. (I ended up dressing her in a white button-up shirt, sunglasses and a purple beret—she looked like Tom Cruise in Risky Business—but by that point I was past caring!)

A few weeks later I was visiting my mom. I told her the story, hoping for sympathy. She laughed and said, “You should have suggested she do Beryl Markham.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Don’t you remember?” She went unerringly to the spot on the bookcase where West With the Night was. (My mother is irritating that way—I could never put my hand on a specific book without a 20-minute fruitless search.) It looked familiar. I opened to the cover page and saw an inscription from me to Mom, “To the next famous aviator.”

I had given Mom the book in 1987 when she got her pilot’s license. My mom did stuff like that. When I was in high school she applied to NASA to be an astronaut. When she decided to fly, she got her license within a year and enrolled my little brother in the Civil Air Patrol (she’s a lieutenant colonel now). Beryl Markham’s exciting memoir was the perfect gift to celebrate her accomplishment.

I started reading it for the first time and was absolutely blown away. Beryl was amazing. I loved her matter-of-fact approach to risking her life and the wonderful language she used to describe it.

“You know,” Mom said, “Beryl would make a good book. Maybe a biography.”

I agreed, especially since I discovered that there were only two old biographies of Beryl for kids and both felt very dated. In my naïveté, I said, “How hard can it be to write a biography?”

As it turns out, biography is not easy at all. I thought with my research skills, it would be a snap. I thought I would tell her story in a nonfiction way but intersperse the narrative with stories from her life. Well, to my surprise, the nonfiction was a total dud. The only part I liked (and the only part that was any good at all!) was the stories. My writing teacher, Patricia Reilly Giff (a lady who knows more than a little about storytelling!), finally suggested I stop fighting the fiction. “Write the story you love,” she said.

It was good advice. And several years later Promise the Night is about to hit the shelves. I wrote the parts of Beryl’s life that were the most exciting: the lion hunts, the sadistic governess, sneaking out into the African night looking for adventure, not to mention the mean girls at boarding school. I started with a girl who was brave but vulnerable. I explored how she grew into herself and into the woman who would set records in a flimsy flying machine.

And it all happened because I don’t know how to sew a costume.

Once, several years ago, I went to listen to a lecture on writing children’s fiction. There I was told that main characters in children’s books should always be more special than those around them. Orphans must be plucky. Protagonists must have secret royal blood, be the long-lost heir to something-or-other, or be half elf, half Greek god or all alien. Even those that might seem rather normal at first must be destined for greatness, or at least have more gumption and be able to overcome greater odds than the average everyday type. They must be heroes ready to answer the call and start on a hero’s journey. Above all else, the main character of a children’s book must never ever ever be ordinary.

The implication of this is simple. Ordinary characters don’t have stories worth telling. And this bothered me for a very simple reason. I’m quite ordinary myself.

I’ve been ordinary ever since I was a short, plain and moderately dorky child. And my ordinariness was made to seem even more ordinary (if this is possible) by the fact that I had two older sisters who are utterly amazing. One (dubbed “the super genius” by my neighbor) speaks four languages fluently, is proficient in several others, and has the uncanny ability to practically absorb everything she’s ever read. I’ve never had any understanding of how she does what she does—and I’ve certainly never had any hope of doing it myself. If she were a main character in a book, she’d be a super spy, a beloved headmistress, or the solver of complex ciphers.

My other sister (dubbed “the supermodel” by the same neighbor) is tall, athletic, photogenic and indescribably cool. Once, when I was a freshman in high school, and she was a senior, she refused to let the student council (which she was a member of, naturally enough) count the votes that might have led to her nomination as prom queen. She didn’t want to be prom queen. She had better things to do with her time. It was in that moment (oh, who am I kidding—it was in that moment and many more just like it) that I realized just how impossible it would be for me to ever live up to the example she’d set. If she were a main character in a book, she’d be a duly elected queen, the leader of a revolution, or the romantic lead.

And then there is me—the ordinary one. I was a middle-of-the-road student who started my non-illustrious academic career by flunking kindergarten.  I was never particularly popular or unpopular. And I was involved in a number of activities (softball, volleyball, band, theater, mock trial and so forth), but I was never a standout at any of them. In short—according to the theories being put forth in that lecture on writing children’s literature—I wasn’t main character material.

But here’s the thing: We are all the protagonists of our own lives. I may have been a deeply mediocre child, but my childhood wasn’t dull, horrible or tragically lacking. It was filled with all of the wonderful elements of everyday drama. There was ordinary joy, heartbreak, frustrations and anticipation.  There was conflict, hope, disappointment and resolution. Ordinary doesn’t equal boring. And as for my sisters—I adore them—but not particularly for their extraordinary qualities. Instead, when I’m thinking of our best times, I think about a millions of ordinary moments I had with them—watching TV together, getting donuts after school, fighting over the bathroom, playing hide-and-seek with the other kids in the neighborhood, and going to the library together.

And I think that ordinariness is actually the element in fiction that is often overlooked and underrated. For example, it’s all well and good that Harry Potter is “the boy who lived,” a wizard and the only one who can save the world from Lord Voldemort, but I don’t think this is what most people love about the story. What makes Harry memorable is all of his ordinary characteristics: his friendship with Ron and Hermione, his frustrations with schoolwork and rules, his interactions with the other students at Hogwarts, his minor triumphs and his embarrassments. In short, it’s all of the ways he seems just like any ordinary kid you might know.

And all of this brings me to how I came to write Remarkable. After leaving the lecture, I decided it was high time someone wrote a story about an ordinary protagonist who doesn’t discover that she is deeply exceptional in some way. Instead, by the end of the story, this protagonist would learn to appreciate her own ordinariness. And since everyone else around her is exceptional (and some of them are struggling mightily with very qualities that make them exceptional), she’d start to realize that that extraordinariness isn’t a necessary quality to having a worthwhile life.

Not every story—real or imagined—has to have a heroic journey. Not every protagonist has to be exceptional. The fiction-writing rules that say otherwise aren’t rules we need to live by. There is enough delight and drama in the ordinary for millions of fantastic tales.

In Lizzie K. Foley's debut novel for young readers, Remarkable, young Jane Doe must find ways to make herself stand out in a town where everyone is extraordinarily talented or extraordinarily gifted. Foley, who holds a master's degree in education from Harvard and taught women's studies at Northeastern University, lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

On the heels of his multiple-award-winning 2012 release, Bomb: The Race to Build—And Steal—The World’s Most Dangerous Weapon, author Steve Sheinkin returns with another thrilling true-life story pulled from the pages of history. In Lincoln’s Grave Robbers, the former history textbook writer unravels the details of a 19th-century plot to steal Abraham Lincoln’s body from the grave and hold it for ransom. Sheinkin—who won the Sibert Medal, a Newbery Honor, a YALSA Award and a spot as a National Book Award finalist for Bomb—explains here why his latest true story of cops and robbers, counterfeiters, body-snatchers and the Secret Service is sure to catch the attention of young readers.

One of my recent school visits was not going well. The students hadn’t heard of me, hadn’t read my books, weren’t buying my whole “history is cool,” premise. I was losing them. So naturally I started talking about cannibalism.

One of my books tells the tale of the Donner Party. I read the section and asked kids to imagine themselves stuck high in the snowy Sierra Nevada, facing starvation, with no hope of rescue. Would they kill one of their fellow pioneers for food? If one died of cold and hunger, would they roast and eat the flesh to keep themselves alive? 

They all had opinions (most along the lines of “No way!). Best of all, I had their attention. And the experience gave me a great idea for testing potential subjects for future books. I picture myself standing in front of a room full of students. They’re staring at me. They’re waiting to see if I’m going to be boring. I imagine myself telling them the story in my book, and watch their reaction. Are they intrigued? Most of them, at least? If so, the idea has a chance.

As soon as I started researching the story behind my new book, Lincoln’s Grave Robbers, I knew it had a good shot to pass the test. Basically, it’s a true crime thriller about a bunch of Midwest counterfeiters who decide it would be a good idea to steal Abraham Lincoln’s corpse. This was 1876, eleven years after Lincoln’s death, and the gang was desperate to get their best engraver out of the state pen. Their plan: bust into the Lincoln Monument in Springfield, steal the body, stash it under a bridge, and refuse to give it back unless the government lets their partner out of jail. And the most amazing thing of all is how close this crazy-sounding scheme came to working.

It’s so bizarre, kids accuse me of having made it up. But on top of the priceless plot, what makes this story great from a nonfiction writer’s point of view is that the sources are so rich. The main lawman in the story, Secret Service agent Patrick Tyrrell, took extensive notes on all his cases. He was busy chasing counterfeiters (that’s what the Secret Service was formed to do) when he stumbled onto the Lincoln plot. You can almost see the plot unfolding as you read his detailed daily notes.

And there’s John Carroll Power, the 57-year-old custodian of the Lincoln Monument. He was hired to keep the place neat, but the man was obsessed with Lincoln, and created his own mini

Lincoln museum for tourists (his prized possession: a bloody strip of fabric from the dress of an actress who cradled Lincoln’s head moments after he was shot at Ford’s Theater). Protecting Lincoln was more than a job to Power, it was a calling. He was there night of the break-in, saw everything, and, wrote a whole book about it.

Many of the main characters (including the body snatchers) gave interviews to the newspapers, and, incredibly, there was even a Chicago Tribune reporter lurking around the monument the night of the attempted theft. He’d been tipped off that something big was going to happen, and was able to write an eyewitness account of the showdown between cops and robbers.

I should add, for anyone interested in recreating the robbery, Lincoln is no longer in the monument. After the 1876 attempt, his body was placed in a deep hole beside the monument and covered in concrete. But first—in another detail kids seem to love—his friends decided they’d better open the casket just to make sure he was still in there. They hired a Springfield plumber to carefully cut open the lead casket and peel back the soft metal. And there, inside, was the 16th president, looking, friends said, just “like a statue of himself.” Turns out the embalmers at the White House had done such an amazing job, the body was still perfectly preserved all those years later.

Okay, this whole Lincoln grave-robbing thing may not appear on any standardized test; it’s not something kids need to know. But it was a fun story to research and write, and I hope it’ll be fun to read. And besides, when school visits get tough, it’s good to be able to talk about stealing corpses.

Shirley Parenteau's new book for young readers tells the remarkable story of 11-year-old Lexie Lewis. It's 1926, and her class has been raising money to ship a doll to the children of Japan. Lexie dreams of accompanying the doll to the farewell ceremony in San Francisco. This warm novel is based on real events that occurred before World War II, when American children sent more than 12,000 dolls to Japan. In a Behind the Book essay, Parenteau shares the astounding and long-forgotten history of the Friendship Dolls program.

Imagine children all across 1926 America donating pennies to buy dolls for children in Japan. Imagine 12,739 dolls traveling with passports, visas and introductory letters, being greeted by children in Japan with celebration and ceremony.

The story is true, but was lost with most of the dolls in the tumult of World War II.

When I learned of the Friendship Dolls, I was looking for inspiration for a new picture book. I had written one called Bears on Chairs, adorably illustrated by David Walker, which is so popular in a Japanese translation that the bears in the book are now available there as plush toys and other items. I had a greater personal connection with Japan through my daughter-in-law Miwa, who is from Fukuoka.

When Miwa and my son took their daughter to the Girls' Day Festival, or Hinamatsuri, I was intrigued by their photos. Wondering if I could write a picture book about the festival celebrated with treasured dolls, I researched online. One source linked to this website and revealed an amazing story—the Friendship Dolls of 1926.

The project was the inspiration of Dr. Sidney Gulick, a teacher-missionary who had retired after working in Japan for 30 years. Fearing war might break out between the United States and Japan—two countries he loved—he urged American children to send dolls to children in Japan for Hinamatsuri.

All across America, children responded, emptying piggy banks and holding fundraisers. In return, donations from Japanese children allowed their finest dollmakers to create 58 large dolls to send to America. Each wore a kimono in a pattern designed by the empress’ own dressmaker and traveled with tiny accessories as examples of their culture.

Children in both countries continued to exchange letters, but sadly the Friendship Project could not prevent World War II. Fourteen years later, Japanese planes bombed U.S. ships in Pearl Harbor. The dolls became symbols of the enemy in both countries. In America, they were stuffed into storage. In Japan, they were ordered to be destroyed. Of those that survived, many were shattered during U.S. bombings.

I longed to tell this lost story through the eyes of an American girl and to set the book in Portland because I grew up on the northern Oregon coast. A second novel, Dolls of Hope (2015), will tell the story of the dolls from the viewpoint of a girl in Japan.

Happily, many of the surviving dolls have been recovered, beginning in the '70s. About 300 of the 12,000-plus dolls sent to Japan and hidden at great personal risk during the war years are on display. In America, 46 of the 58 Japanese dolls have been located. A list of 38 which can be seen in museums, along with their locations, is here.

In the past 15 years or so, children, communities and organizations in both countries have again begun exchanging dolls.

I wrote Ship of Dolls and Dolls of Hope to celebrate the unquenchable hope of children for international friendship and peace.

Science is far from serious in Frank Einstein and the Antimatter Motor, the first in a new series from Jon Scieszka and Brian Biggs. Take one kid genius, add two hilarious robots and an archnemesis with a doomsday plan, and you've got the perfect blend of imagination and invention. But with so much hilarity and adventure, how do you choose a favorite scene? We put Scieszka and Biggs to the test.

Jon Scieszka, author

Would it be cheating to say I have two favorite scenes from this first Frank Einstein book? Oh, good. I didn't hear anyone say no. So—my first favorite scene is when Frank first meets the self-assembled robots Klink and Klank. Because we, the readers, get to meet the robots with the same realization Frank has—that these two can help figure out/invent almost anything. Then Klank tells a pretty lame knock-knock joke. That drives Klink nuts. And Frank also realizes that these robots are a bit crazy too.

And my other favorite scene is when Frank and his pal Watson meet the evil kid genius, T. Edison, for the first time. They are all in Frank's Grampa Al's Fix It! repair shop. Edison introduces his sidekick and chief financial officer, Mr. Chimp. I don't want to give away too much, but Mr. Chimp's name is a pretty big clue that Mr. Chimp is . . . an actual chimpanzee. Mr. Chimp has taught himself sign language, accounting, jet engine repair and plenty more skills that we’ll find out about in books one through six.

Oh, and my other favorite scene is when Klank attacks Edison’s Antimatter Squirt Gun. This thing is powerful enough to destroy Einstein and Watson and both robots. And though Klank isn't the smartest robot in the world, he does have the biggest robot heart. And Brian's illustrations show exactly what happens.

Ooo ooo oooo and then every scientific diagram is a favorite scene of mine too! As part of the story, Brian and I get to show atomic structure, antimatter, fingerprints, eyeballs, E = mc² and cows producing methane gas . . .

Brian Biggs, illustrator

Being asked to describe my favorite scene from Frank Einstein and the Antimatter Motor is kind of hard. There are about a million really fun scenes in the book, and if Jon does one thing well (and he actually does eleven things well), it’s creating scenes in his stories that are fun to illustrate.

Would it be the scene at the beginning of the book where Frank and Watson are trying to build their first robot during a thunderstorm? The dramatic lighting, the maniacal laughter, the all-important introduction to the world of Frank certainly made this scene a good one.

Hmm. Maybe it was the scene at the end that takes place in a giant factory where one of the robots, Klank, has hugged a huge, pink Antimatter Squirt Gun until he and the Squirt Gun explode in a humongous, colorful BLAM! Or maybe it was the small diagram in chapter seven depicting a cow fart. It was sort of hysterical the day that I had to research this drawing and learn all I could about cow methane.

But actually, my favorite scene in the book, as well as my favorite scene that I got to draw, is none of these. When I read Jon’s description of the moment we meet Frank’s nemesis, T. Edison, as he hides behind the old phonograph (a Thomas Edison invention, natch!), and then his ape cohort, Mr. Chimp, climbs down and joins him, I knew that this scene was going to be a joy to compose and create. I’d done some creepy character sketches for T. Edison showing his shifty eyes, weird mouth, and matted hair, and I’d hoped I’d have a chance to use these, and I did. Mr. Chimp is creepy in his own evil-sneer and barefoot way. He’s actually my favorite character in the series, and I knew that this drawing had to get everything about Mr. Chimp and T. Edison across.

In addition to the characters in this scene, I loved drawing Grampa Al’s Fix It! repair shop in the background. You may not know this about me, but I love details. As Jon wrote the book, I often felt like he was writing it only for me to draw. Frank’s science lab and Grampa Al’s shop are full of old musical instruments, unused appliances, broken clocks, funny contraptions, nuts, bolts and unusual tools, and it was fun to both draw the stuff that Jon described but also add my own layer. The red fan on the left is actually a fan I have in my studio, for example.

Bringing all these elements together still would not have worked without getting the mood right in this illustration. T. Edison and Mr. Chimp are really mean guys. They’re threatening to repossess Grandpa’s shop here. The light is coming in from behind, casting a dark shadow across both characters. I hadn’t had the chance to work with light and shadow much before Frank Einstein, and it was a lot of fun to bring this into the drawings, setting the tone for these two characters and their conflict with Frank that will take place over the six books in the series.

Illustrations © 2014 by Brian Biggs. Reprinted by permission of Abrams Books for Young Readers.

In the summer of 1859, a recently orphaned girl named Nell arrives on the doorstep of her Aunt Kitty, whose "pickled onion" face offers her sorrowful niece a less-than-warm welcome. But when Nell discovers her aunt is a detective for Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, the two end up tracking down thieves and murderers in this fun historical tale.

The character of Aunt Kitty is based on real-life Kate Warne, the first female detective in the United States. Chicago author and former journalist Kate Hannigan shares more about the exciting real-life figure at the heart of her new book, The Detective's Assistant.

Researching and writing The Detective’s Assistant has been a giddy, wind-in-the-hair thrill since the moment I stumbled onto Kate Warne’s name. Really it was just a single sentence about her while researching another story from the same year, 1856, but the moment I read about her I knew I had to learn more. America’s first woman detective? And she had a role in thwarting an assassination plot against Abraham Lincoln?

Her story begins when, as a young widow, she walked into Allan Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency office in downtown Chicago and inquired about a job. Pinkerton wrote that he’d assumed she was there for a secretarial position, but that she gave excellent reasons why he should hire her as a detective.

“True, it was the first experiment of the sort that had ever been tried,” Pinkerton said, “but we live in a progressive age, and in a progressive country.”

He hired her the next day, convinced that she could go, as she said, where no male detectives could by befriending the wives and girlfriends of criminals and crooks and worming out their secrets.

One of the hazards of writing historical fiction is that records don’t always survive. Pinkerton was meticulous about documenting his accounts, his cases and his operatives, but Chicago’s Great Fire in 1871 wiped out much of his writings. So I relied on his detective books, penned later in his career and looking back on the agency’s early adventures.

Pinkerton described Kate Warne as a master of disguise and, along with Timothy Webster, one of the finest operatives he ever employed.

“As a detective, she had no superior,” Pinkerton wrote, “and she was a lady of such refinement, tact, and discretion, that I never hesitated to entrust to her some of my most difficult undertakings.”

Her most important case came in February 1861 after Abraham Lincoln was elected president and had to journey by train from Illinois to the White House. As the Lincoln Special chugged east, the nation was ripping in two. By the time the train was to pass through Baltimore, Pinkerton and his detectives had uncovered a plot to assassinate Lincoln before he could take the oath of office.

Pinkerton’s operatives had swarmed the Baltimore area, and Kate Warne assumed an alias and disguised herself as a Southern belle, befriending the wives and daughters of the Baltimore conspirators. Pinkerton called the information she gleaned “invaluable” and “of great benefit to me” as he made the case for President-Elect Lincoln to slip through Baltimore under cover of darkness rather than in broad daylight, as planned.

When Lincoln finally agreed to the plan, two operatives rode with him on the train, escorting him safely through Baltimore and into the history books: Pinkerton himself and Kate Warne.

This makes for gripping storytelling for history buffs and detective fans, but what about for young readers? I felt like Kate Warne’s story is one young girls should know. Too often it seems that tales of heroism and bravery are limited to one gender. In writing The Detective’s Assistant, I wanted to share the story of a real woman who was brave and bold, full of as much derring-do and confidence as the men of her time.

“Kate Warne felt sure she was going to win,” Pinkerton wrote. “She always felt so, and I never knew her to be beaten.”

Kate Hannigan writes fiction and nonfiction for young readers. She likes to think of writing as a bit like detective work, and she’s a great eavesdropper, though only occasionally is she full of derring-do. Visit her online at KateHannigan.com.

Author photo credit Warling Studios/Picture Day.

Sara Nickerson's new middle grade novel is full of summery secrets, but the inspiration behind The Secrets of Blueberries, Brothers, Moose & Me is an open book. Nickerson takes us to the blueberry-picking days of her childhood.

When I was a kid I wanted to live inside books. I wanted to test myself, face hardships, survive fever 'n' ague. I read Heidi with bread and cheese in my hand. It was regular sliced bread and Thriftway cheddar, but when I ate it, I felt surrounded by mountain air and sunshine. After reading My Side of the Mountain, I mapped my solo escape to the wilderness and spent hours working to trap small animals with a cardboard box and string. To this day I can’t read Farmer Boy without gaining five pounds.

Around that same time, the time of living inside books, I got my first job. My older brother, wanting better school clothes, came up with the idea to pick blueberries. My younger brother and I, obsessed with the awesome things you could order from the backs of comic books, begged to come along. Our mother, busy with two baby brothers, was not hard to convince. We were living in Olympia, Washington, and the blueberry farm was miles past town. Like the farm in my novel, there were feuding farmer brothers, one on either side of a giant hedge. On that first day we were warned: Never go on the other side. I felt the thrill of a real-life adventure.

"Most of all, we treasured the blueberry field because it belonged to us. We weren’t at day camp or a playground or even in the woods behind our house. We’d moved past the boundary of our mother’s voice."

There were other kids in the field, of course, but also grown-ups. We were out there together, sharing an outhouse, and not the modern kind with hand sanitizer. There was mystery in the blueberry field, and romance. There was a girl who would stick a blueberry in her belly button and do the hula. This job, picking blueberries, was a hot and sweaty torture. My brothers and I hated it, we loved it, we were obsessed by the money of it and made lists of the things we would buy, like colonies of Sea Monkeys and giant inflatable beer bottles. Most of all, we treasured the blueberry field because it belonged to us. We weren’t at day camp or a playground or even in the woods behind our house. We’d moved past the boundary of our mother’s voice. Finally, finally, I had stepped into the pages of my very own book.

The Secrets of Blueberries, Brothers, Moose & Me takes place during that summer when everything changes. Twelve-year-old Missy and her older brother Patrick are on their own, making painful mistakes and amazing discoveries. It’s not the story my brothers are expecting to see. They probably won’t recognize my main characters. They’ll miss the dirt clod fights and the old lady named Bernice, who sat on an overturned bucket and couldn’t stop talking, even when no one was around. They’ll miss the dirty jokes, the ones I couldn’t understand but made a point to memorize for the day that I could. They’ll miss the groups of migrant families, who did this work for real.

What my brothers will recognize is the feeling we had out there. We were part of the big wide world. I remember walking into a grocery store a week after I’d started the picking job. I stood in the produce aisle and thought: This is food. It doesn’t just come from a store. I know where it comes from.

For the kids who live inside books, I hope this one will make them want to go outside and look at dirt, even if it’s between the cracks in the sidewalk. Follow an ant’s crazy path, or try to tell time from the sun. Hold an apple or a blueberry or a peach, even one from a can, and wonder where it came from—where it really came from. And maybe feel a new connection to their very own big wide world.

Author photo credit Ingrid Pape.

What lengths would you go to in order to attract the attention of your crush? In Jake Gerhardt's debut middle-grade novel, three eighth-grade boys are all crushing on the same girl: Miranda Mullaly. Told in alternating voices of class clown Sam, studious Duke, athletic Chollie and oblivious Miranda, this comedy of errors is a breezy, fun read.

Gerhardt perfectly captures those awkward middle-school years with lots of humor and plenty of heart. In a Behind the Book essay, he shares his own hilarious story of noticing girls for the first time.

The characters in my book, Me and Miranda Mullaly, fall deeply for their first crush during class one fateful day. It’s the first time a smile from a girl meant more to these eighth-grade boys, and it’s a moment that sets them on a path. My aha moment—as far as girls are concerned—happened just as swiftly, and it’s tied to a flashy movie from the early ’80s. Let me explain.

When I was 12 years old, I spent a lot of time palling around with a set of twin brothers who lived nearby. The twins were the youngest in a family of 11 children, many of whom were in college or otherwise didn’t spend much time at home. We usually had the whole place to ourselves, and our favorite thing to do besides playing basketball was watch “The Dukes of Hazzard” while eating junk food.

Ah, the good life. 

I can’t put my finger on exactly what it was about “The Dukes of Hazzard” that captivated us.  I guess there were just enough car chases, bad guys and mysteries to keep 12-year-old boys interested.

This all changed after we heard about Flashdance.

We’d just finished watching the Dukes break up a gang of bootleggers when the front door burst open and a seemingly endless stream of high school and college girls danced into the house—friends of the twins’ sisters. They were kicking up their legs and shaking their heads in a way we’d never seen before. They shimmied into the kitchen where they raided the refrigerator. We watched and tried to make sense of what was happening.

Apparently they had just seen a movie called Flashdance, and it had changed their lives. They couldn’t stop dancing. And we couldn’t stop watching.

They bounced out as quickly as they’d bounced in, leaving behind an empty milk carton, chocolate cake crumbs and an air of promise.

We went outside to play basketball, but anything resembling our usual camaraderie was gone. The game we played that night was quiet but much more contentious than usual. There were many hard fouls and nasty picks. I got a ride home even though I wanted to walk back, alone.

The next Friday night started out like normal. We sat around the large television and watched in silence as Waylon Jennings began, “Just some good old boys. . . .” After a chase that ended with the bad guys in a rancid pond, no one cheered. We were, in fact, bored.

“This sucks,” we said.

And then someone produced a surprise: a VHS tape containing “What a Feeling” and “Maniac,” songs from Flashdance taped from MTV. Watching the music videos put us in a stupor. We did not blink. We did not touch our buttered popcorn. We ignored our sodas.

“Play it again,” we muttered when the videos ended.

After watching “Maniac” 15 times in a row our blank expressions began to change. Smiles slowly stretched across our faces. They were the smiles of anticipation, the smiles of better days ahead. These were the smiles, I imagine, of the scientists and engineers when Apollo 13 landed on the moon.

We hadn’t accomplished anything yet, but we were excited to embark on a new frontier.

It was the end of “The Dukes of Hazzard” and the beginnings of the rest of our new lives.

Author photo credit Karen Todd.

I never thought I’d write a book about birds. I mean, NEVER!

Birds? Who cares about birds? They chirp, fly around and poop on bikes.

I had simply never given birds much thought. But then there was this one bird, a northern mockingbird, that nested in a tree limb hanging over my roof, right above my bedroom. Right above my head! And every morning it would start singing a “Hello, how are you doing?” song at 3 a.m.

Every. Single. Morning.

Then mating season ended and the song vanished—just like that. My beauty rest and sanity were saved!

A couple of years before the three a.m. singing bird, I moved from teaching fourth-grade language arts to teaching sixth-grade English. I remember being suddenly thrown into a cross-curricular research project on North American birds. I was shocked. Birds? This is English class. We read Shakespeare and other classics, like The Outsiders. No one here cares about birds. All I could think about was that mockingbird waking me up every morning at three a.m. and how I wanted it to migrate somewhere far away and never come back.

During my first year teaching the bird research project, I barely survived. Between learning which birds lived where, and which birds migrated, and which birds stayed home year-round, I felt as blind as a bat (not a bird). Then there was keeping track of students’ progress and helping them find resources about that rare hummingbird that might—just might!—fly over North American airspace every other year.

This bird research project was a staple of the sixth-grade curriculum, and if I wanted to keep teaching middle school English, I needed to commit and invest myself. I needed to put my best foot forward. That meant I’d have to take a genuine interest in BIRDS!

Biiiiirrrrrrrds… (eye roll)

To make our teaching lives more tolerable, my colleague and I curated a list of North American birds that allowed students to experience more success during their research. It also exposed students to a wider range of resources. We streamlined the project to include research categories such as appearance, habitat, migration, diet and mating. We also created writing projects that went along with each category of research. Students were suddenly having fun. WE were having fun!

All this time, I was learning to love birds, and I didn’t even know it.

Over the next several years, I came to appreciate birds and their various behaviors, quirks and personalities. Birds are, after all, similar to people. They’re social and habitual, and they teach their young to fly. Okay, people don’t literally teach their children to fly, but we do guide them out of the nest at some point. And isn’t that like flying?

I was also writing a lot during this time. In 2012, I published a book called The Color of Bones, a book I’d worked on for a few years. I was searching for my next writing project, and little did I know it was staring me right in the face.

One day, while hovering over a stack of students’ note cards, I thought to myself, “What if there was a boy who couldn’t find a bird? What if he searched for this bird every day, like his life depended on it? What if he was searching for a bird and no one believed he could ever find it?”

A couple of years later, after hundreds of hours of research, poring over field guides and websites, and then hundreds of hours of writing, I finished writing a book called Bird Nerd. Which gained me an agent, and then sold to Simon & Schuster as Might Fly Away. Which then molted (one last bird reference!) into its final incarnation as Soar.

Title changes. That’s another essay in itself.

Author photo credit Kremer/Johnson.

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.