In Wendy Wan-Long Shang’s debut, The Great Wall of Lucy Wu, sixth-grader Lucy has a few problems. Just when she’s supposed to get her own bedroom after perfect sister Regina goes to college, Lucy’s great-aunt from China moves in. Then, Sloane Connors threatens to take away Lucy’s chance to be team captain of the sixth-grade basketball team. And don’t even get her started on Saturday morning Chinese school.

Shang’s funny coming-of-age novel tells the story of a girl torn between the culture of her family and her idea of a “normal” American life. In a Q&A with BookPage, Shang tells us about her own childhood resistance to Chinese culture, an upcoming project and why Lucy is so good at shooting hoops.

Can you tell us a little about what inspired you to write the novel?
A few years ago, a distant relative in China contacted my mom for family photographs for some genealogy research. After she sent him the photos, he wrote back, thanking her and saying that he had thought he would never see those photos again. His statement really struck me at the core—the idea of losing photographs in this digital age is pretty astonishing, and given China's modern history, I thought he must have lost them in a truly awful way. Particularly during the Cultural Revolution, you could be persecuted for your family's perceived misdeeds, so people often burned family photographs that they thought could implicate them in some way.

I knew I didn't want to write directly about the Cultural Revolution—I think that narrative belongs to the people who experienced it. But I did want to find a way to connect a modern character to her family's past.

Can you tell us a bit about your family's heritage and background? Did you ever feel the resistance to your family’s culture that Lucy experiences?
As children, my parents fled the communists in China and moved to Taiwan. They then came to the United States as young adults. Most of our close family lives in the United States and Canada, as well as Taiwan, though we have some relatives still living in China. 

I grew up in northern Virginia, and at the time, it wasn't a terribly diverse place. (Unlike now—a woman in a hijab made my sushi the other day.) I did feel a tremendous resistance to my culture, probably because it was such a source of tension for me at school. Like Lucy, I did not want to go to Chinese school. I did eat some Chinese food, though I was a pretty picky eater, generally speaking.

Lucy and her siblings are very different—and sometimes clash. Do you have siblings? Which of the Wu kids do you most identify with?
I have one older brother—we are separated by 7 years. I have to say I identify with Lucy the most, particularly because when I was growing up, I felt different from my family. The rest of my family is very science and math-oriented, and I was more geared toward art and language. Kenny [Lucy’s brother] was written for every brilliant but absent-minded boy I know. And Regina—well, we all know a Regina, don't we?

What was your favorite subject in school when you were Lucy's age?
When I was Lucy's age, I loved reading. A great day for me was being dropped off at the library. I also had a wonderful teacher, Mrs. Thompson, and she let us work at our own pace through the class reader. There was a group of us who “competed” against each other to see who was farthest along.

I think like many passionate, lifelong readers, I can't imagine life without reading any more than giving up breathing or eating. I was a bit shy and sheltered as a child, and books were my way of exploring the world—not just different places but different emotions and ways of approaching life. I especially liked characters who did (slightly) naughty things that I wanted to do but didn't dare. The main character from The Alfred G. Graebner Memorial High School Handbook of Rules and Regulations by Ellen Conford was particularly great in that regard.

Who was your childhood hero?
My older brother was my hero throughout my childhood. He was so much older than I was, and he pushed himself to excel at everything. He was his class valedictorian, lettered in track and created these amazing adventures for himself. My parents would often ask him to get me to do things that I wouldn't do for them.

The Great Wall of Lucy Wu reminded me of one of my favorite books from elementary school, In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson. What books did you love to read when you were growing up? If kids finish your novel and want to read more about Chinese characters and families, are there any books you would recommend?

My favorite kinds of books were realistic fiction, often with a humorous edge. I loved Judy Blume, and I particularly appreciated her Tracy Wu character in Blubber. I can't say I was consciously missing Chinese characters at that point, but when I read about Tracy, there was a moment of relief. A there I am! moment. I also loved Harriet the Spy, the Little House books, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and books by Ellen Conford.

If kids are looking for more books with Chinese characters and families, there are great books to choose from. My middle child and I just finished Grace Lin's Where the Mountain Meets the Moon—it may have been the first book he read that didn’t have the word “underpants” and he loved it. While this book is a fantasy, I feel that there is still a strong Chinese sensibility in it when it comes to family and how parents and children are bonded to each other. I think readers would also enjoy Millicent Min, Girl  Genius and Stanford Wong Flunks Big-Time by Lisa Yee, as well as the Alvin Ho books by Lenore Look. If they would like to read more about children who grew up during the Cultural Revolution, Red Scarf Girl by Ji-li Jiang is excellent.

Are you a basketball fan? Why did you choose for Lucy to be obsessed with (and very good at) basketball?
Honestly, I was not a basketball fan when I started the book. I chose for Lucy to be a basketball fan in part because as a Chinese-American woman writing about a Chinese-American girl, I wanted to be sure that Lucy was her own person. Consequently, I deliberately gave her some distinct characteristics I did not possess, namely, basketball prowess and a different height. However, in the course of researching this book, I watched women's basketball and read books, particularly by Tennessee women's basketball coach Pat Summitt, and I have to say, if you want to watch a game that's about teamwork and smart plays, women's basketball is where it's at.

Can you tell us about your next project?
I am currently researching a baseball book (funny you should mention In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson!)—there's an interesting point in time where Little League represented a lot of the hopes and dreams of Chinese-Americans, and reflected the changing culture in America as well. It's kind of funny for me that this book also has a sports motif, since I played exactly one season of organized sports as a kid. But my kids play a lot of sports, and for them, sports are a source of excitement, a chance to learn about sportsmanship, and of course, an opportunity to practice teamwork.

Author photo by Maria Pschigoda.

The Great Depression was a difficult era for most everyone in the United States, but doubly so for African Americans, who were dealing not only with economic hardship but racial discrimination as well. One bright spot during this period came from the success of boxing great Joe Louis, who won the heavyweight championship in a thrilling match in 1937.

Children’s author Andrea Davis Pinkney was inspired by a family photo to research this era and Louis’ pivotal role in it. This research even inspired the author to put on a pair of boxing gloves herself. The result is a captivating new novel for young readers, Bird in a Box, which sees the events of 1937 through the eyes of three children in upstate New York.

From her home in Brooklyn, Pinkney (whose husband is illustrator Brian Pinkney) answered questions for BookPage about the new book and how it came to be.

Why was Joe Louis such an important figure for African Americans in the 1930s and ’40s?

When Joe Louis came onto the boxing scene, he symbolized tremendous hope for African Americans. Joe was boxing at a time when black folks in America were still considered second-class citizens, and when segregation was still a sad reality. But in boxing, one’s ability to swing hard in the ring has nothing to do with the color of their skin. Louis’s pounding punches showed the world that a black mother’s son had superior abilities.On the night Barack Obama won the presidential election, there was an overwhelming pride that welled in the hearts of many people. There was cheering in the streets. Tears of joy came to the faces of grown men. A black man had made momentous progress toward social change. This same pride and elation filled the night of June 22, 1937, when Joe Louis, “the Brown Bomber,” became the heavyweight champion of the world.

Is there a specific message you hope young readers will take from this book?

More than anything, I’d like young readers to know that even when it feels like life is giving you a beating, there’s always hope around what may at first look like a very dark corner. 

What is the one thing you would tell a child growing up in hard times?

As Willie’s mama says in Bird in a Box, “Don’t give up five minutes ‘fore a miracle happens.”

What was the most exciting part of your research for Bird in a Box?

The research for Bird in a Box began at a family reunion with an archival photograph of my great-grandfather, Cyclone Williams, who, as a kid, was an amateur boxer with dreams of becoming a champ. My Bird in a Box character, kid-boxer Willie Martel, is based on Cyclone. The antique photograph belonged to my grandmother, Marjorie Frances Williams, Cyclone’s daughter. The photo was one of her most beloved possessions, and one she seldom let out of her hands.

The picture has a beautiful, haunting quality to it. This is what sparked the idea for the novel. I knew very little about Cyclone before I discovered the picture of him, but my grandmother and mother told me colorful stories about his life and times. To piece together the details of Cyclone’s boxing career, I called on Rachel Dworkin, archivist at the Booth Library, Chemung County Historical Society. My cousin Larry, a historian and newspaperman, also helped by sharing information about Cyclone.

In the photograph owned by my grandmother, it was Cyclone’s determined gaze and solid stature that encouraged me to research everything I could find about the history of boxing and about Joe Louis’s record in the ring. I also spent countless hours in the audio archives at New York’s Paley Center for Media, listening to radio commentary of actual Joe Louis boxing matches. Much of this sports commentary appears in the novel.

To really capture the essence of the book, though, I realized I needed to put on a pair of boxing gloves from the 1930s and get into the ring. That’s when I bought myself a pair of vintage Spalding boxing gloves, got myself a boxing trainer and went to work. Through becoming a boxer myself—and feeling the sting in my knuckles and wrists from speed-punching a peanut bag, working on jab-hook-cross fist combinations, and being knocked toward the ropes—I inhabited the souls of my characters.

The radio is the center around which the characters in Bird in a Box revolve, and it connects them for a number of reasons. Did you grow up with a similar connection in your family or community?

Family has always been important to me, and for this book especially, my family played a key role. Once I’d discovered the photo of my great-grandfather, Cyclone Williams, the family stories about him and life during the Great Depression began to flow.My Aunt Rosa shared recollections and family heirlooms from the 1930’s. These added color and detail to my story. 

My cousin Larry, the historian, has a wonderful use of language and a very distinct central New York dialect, which I used in crafting my characters’ voices.  

My dad, the late Philip J. Davis, told me about the clothes he wore as a child growing up. He shared memories of scrapple eaten at sparse dinner tables, his family’s ice box, and how, as a kid growing up during the 1930s, he took his Saturday night baths in a tin tub set out on the kitchen floor of his tumbledown house. These details are also in the novel.

The one prevailing aspect to all of these family memories is the power of broadcasting, and how Joe Louis's boxing matches spilled into the living rooms of my own family members, and into homes throughout America from the speakers of Philco and Zeniths radios.

This story is set in Elmira, New York, a small town in central New York where your own family has its roots. Have you spent much time in Elmira and did you revisit the area during your research for the book?

As the town where my parents grew up, met and married—and where their extended families still live—Elmira holds a special warmth for me. While writing and researching Bird in a Box, I enjoyed every opportunity possible to just be in the town where my great-grandfather Cyclone was known by the locals as “Elmira’s sensational battler.” While in Elmira I would enjoy the musicality of the speech patterns of my aunts and cousins, watch their mannerisms, observe the ways they interact with each other and listen to them laugh and carry on about life during the Great Depression. In addition to being the home of my extended family, Elmira, New York, was the summer retreat home for Mark Twain. Elmira is the town where Twain did some of his best and most prolific writing. As such, Elmira has its own unique history, and sometimes feels like a place from yesteryear.

If you could live in another era, what would it be?

I was born in the era that is one of my favorites—the 1960s. This is why I still wear an Afro!

What’s the best thing about writing for young people?

Writing for young people is like being a magician of sorts. One of the best things about this is that, as an author, I’m always striving to create what I call “Book Magic.”

Book Magic is the precise moment, or word, or paragraph, or page that—poof!—like magic—draws a reader in and lifts him or her away to a new place and time.  Book Magic is so powerful that it inspires kids to keep reading—and, like magic—casts a spell on me that makes me want to keep writing. 

Sometimes it’s hard to discern what lies behind the façade of a young girl. Take Wren and Darra, the characters in Helen Frost’s intriguing new novel, Hidden. While they have never actually met, these girls share a secret that unites them—a secret that they’ve kept, individually, for years.

After reading just the first two pages of Frost’s novel-in-poems, young readers will be drawn into the vivid tale that unfolds, written alternately from Wren’s and Darra’s points of view. Their perspectives offer an inside look at how one moment in time, one unfortunate act, can both bind and alter many lives collectively.

“There were hidden elements of each girl’s life. The language itself works to bring the two stories together.”

Presenting those two perspectives was the challenge for Frost, who has cleverly woven such intricate details and dialogue into many of her past novels. And it’s a challenge she takes seriously. “It’s very important, and I try to get it right,” says Frost, an award-winning poet who won a 2004 Michael L. Printz Honor for her YA novel-in-verse, Keesha’s House.

As Hidden unfolds, Darra’s abusive unemployed father steals a minivan, not realizing young Wren is in the back. When Darra guesses that Wren is hiding in her family’s garage, she’s torn between helping the young girl she has never met (and seen only on TV news reports) and protecting her father.

The ensuing fear, confusion and uncertainty—experienced by both Wren and Darra—are vocalized through first-person accounts by the two eight-year-old girls. Wren’s insights, written in carefully crafted stanzas, make up the first third of the book. The second section illuminates Darra’s angst about the event, coupled with the blame she puts on Wren for her father’s eventual arrest. The denouement, which comes six years later when Wren and Darra unexpectedly meet at summer camp, brings all the memories, confusion, blame and turmoil to a head.

While some authors start with an event or a kernel of a plot for a novel, Frost instead allowed her compelling characters to take her in a direction she never expected to go.

“In this one, I really started with the characters,” Frost says during a call to her home in Fort Wayne, Indiana. “I had this idea that this family, Wren and her brother, were going to go to the Isle of Barra” (the setting in Frost’s 2006 book The Braid).

But soon, Wren’s character became quiet, withdrawn and overshadowed by her brother. Frost began to envision that something must have happened to Wren to spark her silence.

“It became a very different story,” Frost says. “After I started telling the story, Darra kind of poked her head in. She wasn’t there until six or seven versions of the story went by. I had to keep asking myself questions.”

While the story changed, one thing remained consistent: Frost’s impeccable talent for creating novels in the form of poetry. She says that after she wrote The Braid, where form also plays an important role, “I felt like anything was possible with language. Language itself helps tell the story.”

Language definitely helps to convey the story of Hidden, with each girl’s words captured in a different format. “There were hidden elements of each girl’s life,” Frost says. “The language itself works to bring the two stories together.”

To relay Wren’s experience, Frost says she worked hard “to put her poems in a structured form.” For Darra’s dialogue, she created an ingenious form specifically for this novel. The last words of the long lines, read vertically down the right side of the page, form sentences that elucidate Darra’s memories.

While the form was intentional, the author says the words came organically—to create an authentic, natural-sounding dialogue. “[I] trust the DNA of the language. It creates tension and really interesting reverberations in the story. For kids reading it, I think they will think this is a really fun thing to discover.”

A native South Dakotan who was born fifth in a family of 10 children, Frost says she “grew up in a family that made me feel like I could do anything.” She received a degree in Elementary Education from Syracuse University, and it was there that she discovered poetry.

“I feel really lucky in the introduction to poetry I had. It has always been a part of my life,” says Frost, noting that the much-decorated poets Philip Booth and W.D. Snodgrass were among her teachers.

As her writing career progressed, “I was writing prose for children and poetry for adults,” she says, expressing amazement at how long it took her to meld those two worlds. “I realized that I had all those tools. I sometimes start my books in prose, but then I miss those tools. It’s like a really precise paintbrush. I want the structure, the sound of language.”

Frost has seen firsthand the impact of poetry on young readers. “I saw how much [children] loved poetry,” she says, recalling a time she once worked with a group of tween-age boys. “I remember putting out poems on a table . . . and a fistfight practically erupted. They were fighting over Shakespeare; I really saw a hunger for poetry.”

In addition to drawing on her background in poetry, Frost also infuses her writing with experiences from the many places she’s hung her hat over the years—from a progressive boarding school in Scotland to a one-teacher school in a tiny town in Alaska.

“I think I just grew up with a sense of adventure,” Frost says. “All these places came back when I became a full-time writer; I realized just how much I had to draw on.”

Next up for this talented author is Step Gently Out, a picture book collaboration with photographer Rick Lieder due out next year. She’s also starting a new novel-in-poems, and it’s likely there are even more ideas “hidden” somewhere in her imagination—but don’t worry, she’ll get them down eventually.

“The main thing is to keep from being distracted,” says Frost, a mother of two and grandmother of two. “I love writing, and I love children. To have those two things combined . . . it’s been a long journey to get to this point. It feels really lucky.”

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.”

Here’s a secret about nerds: Most nerds like being nerds . . . because being a nerd is fun—as long as you’re hanging out with equally smarty-pants friends.

Just look at Gabe, the 10-year-old main character of Elissa Brent Weissman’s new novel Nerd Camp. Gabe has plans to spend the summer with delightfully geeky friends at the Summer Center for Gifted Enrichment, but his life gets complicated when his dad gets engaged to a woman with a decidedly ungeeky son of the same age.

Will Zack think Gabe is the biggest dork on earth, or will the new brothers form an unlikely friendship? Weissman—herself a teacher at Johns Hopkins’s Center for Talented Youth—has written a smart, funny book that will appeal to tween guys and girls—and geeks of all ages.

In a Q&A, BookPage got the scoop on Weissman’s favorite brain game, book and level of nerdiness.

There’s no way you could have written Nerd Camp without having been a geek! But what kind of geek were you as a 10-year-old? Band nerd? Quiz Bowl obsessed?

A word nerd, first and foremost! I read like crazy, and I filled notebook after notebook with stories. I even wrote a novel when I was ten. But, like Gabe, I just loved school in general. I was such a nerd that I even “played school” in my free time. I set up a whole classroom in my basement, complete with a chalkboard and worksheets, and I’d teach things to my little brother. I don’t know why he put up with it!

Have you ever been to summer camp?

I went to a day camp that was also a travel camp, so we’d take overnight trips to various parts of the country. That meant a lot of time spent on buses and sitting in the woods; telling jokes and ghost stories; trading stickers and candy; and playing hand games. My fondest memories are of the things we did to amuse ourselves. I was a pro at both “Concentration” (which involved naming things alphabetically according to a category while clapping in rhythm—challenging!) and “Concentrate” (which involved patting someone’s back and chanting about cracking eggs on their head and stabbing knives in their backs—morbid!). I also loved how seriously we took the legends that went around. Who didn’t believe in Bloody Mary or fear hiking Suicide Hill? It’s all that free time to play those games that truly makes summer camp so magical.

What do you teach at the Center for Talented Youth? Did any of your students inspire the characters in Nerd Camp?

I teach a class for rising fourth and fifth graders called “Writing and Reading Workshop.” None of my characters are based on individual students, but Gabe and the other campers are inspired by them in general. I’ve had the sweetest, most talented kids every summer. They’re inquisitive readers and fantastic writers, and they thrive when they’re together in a stimulating academic environment. Like my characters, they can also recite Pi to an impressive number of digits.

Have you ever found yourself in an unlikely friendship, like the relationship between Zack and Gabe?

I have a very close friend who’s the Zack to my Gabe. She’s fashionable and stylish; I live in jeans and sneakers. She’s trendy and in touch with pop culture; I resist trends, if I’m even aware of them. But despite our differences, something about us just clicks. And I know I can always count on her for anything, including a great time when we hang out.

What’s your favorite brain game? (Any secret fantasies of appearing on Jeopardy?)

My favorite is Balderdash. Making up definitions for crazy words is both brainy and creative, which just about sums me up. And it’s no secret that I’d love to appear on any gameshow. I submitted my name for both teen Jeopardy and college Jeopardy, but I never got the chance to audition. I don’t think I could cut it on regular Jeopardy. Too bad there’s no gameshow of Balderdash!

What was your favorite book as a child? Why?

Sixth Grade Secrets by Louis Sachar. I love Louis Sachar’s style. It’s tight and concise, and he plays with language and structure in brilliant ways. But I didn’t think about any of that as a kid. Sixth Grade Secrets was my favorite because it made me laugh out loud every time I read it—and I read it many times.

What can you tell us about your next project?

I’m working on another middle grade novel. It’s about a talented girl who gets herself into some major trouble. But my main project these days is of another sort entirely: being a mom! I have a super smiley four-month-old daughter, and how can I possibly write when she’s grinning up at me, wanting to play?

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.

Best-selling children’s author James Howe had written many books, but suddenly he was stuck. Really stuck. 

Howe was determined to write a book about Addie Carle, one of the main characters in The Misfits, his 2001 novel about four middle school friends. He had already written one sequel, Totally Joe, about a gay seventh-grader in the group. But he had spent two unsuccessful years trying to capture the voice of the strong-willed and extremely outspoken Addie.

“Her voice can be kind of off-putting,” Howe admits during a call to his home in Yonkers, New York. “I had tried so many different approaches, and nothing was working.”

Finally, a letter from an eighth-grade fan put Howe on the right path. The girl wrote: “Addie’s got such a strong personality, but sometimes I think readers don’t actually know what her soft side is.”

Howe realized he had been ignoring Addie’s soft side, and decided to explore what he calls her “inside voice.” He also decided that the best way to explore this part of Addie’s personality would be to write his novel in poetry. This presented yet another hurdle, since Howe had never written a book in poetry. He enjoyed the writing, but soon realized that all of his new poems needed to form a narrative whole.

A letter from a young fan helped Howe discover the softer side of an outspoken character.

“At one point my dining room table was covered with all of these printed-out poems,” Howe remembers. “I was rearranging and physically trying to find where the story was. So it took a good two years to get the shape of the book.”

If all of this sounds like a giant puzzle, Howe isn’t fazed. “I like to draw, and I love to do collage,” he says. “And I used to direct theater. I think there are connections in all of these things. I like taking pieces and making something out of them.”

The result was certainly worth waiting for. Addie on the Inside is immensely readable, with an active and conversational tone.

What did Howe end up learning about Addie, who was, as he puts it, “such a tough nut to crack?”

“I learned that she’s much more tender than I thought she was,” Howe says. “And I learned more about where her outside voice came from, and how connected it is to her own insecurities. I also learned, and this was a surprise, that she did have some desire to be popular and be cool.”

Howe is best known as the author of books for younger children, having gotten his start in 1979 with a beloved series about a vampire bunny named Bunnicula. A struggling actor and director at the time, he began writing for children by accident.

“I was doing what a lot of actors do and staying up too late and watching movies on TV,” Howe recalls. “It was watching all those bad vampire movies in the ’70s that led to the idea of Bunnicula. I can’t say that it’s my proudest moment when I tell young children how I got the idea for still my most popular book.”

He and his wife Deborah co-wrote the first book, but sadly she died of cancer before their book was published. Ever since, Howe has had an intriguing literary and life journey, having now embarked on what he calls “almost a second career” writing for middle school students and young adults.

Howe eventually remarried and became a father to Zoey, now 23. His editor at the time remarked that Howe would probably begin writing board books for his daughter. Instead, Howe felt compelled to head in the opposite direction. “These very powerful feelings that come with being a parent were pushing me to write work that was more personal and deep,” he says, “for older readers.”

Zoey’s eventual complaints about middle school social dynamics prompted him to write The Misfits. Another important event helped trigger Howe’s writing for middle school students. When Zoey was in the fifth grade, he divorced his second wife and came out as a gay man. Howe has now been with his partner for 10 years, and they plan to marry in September.

One of Howe’s immediate reactions upon coming out was anger. “I thought, I cannot believe I have put so much energy and have lived with this inner turmoil for so long and feared all of this rejection,” he says. “I wanted to write a book in which there’s a kid who’s growing up and gay and feels fine about who he is.”

The publication of Totally Joe ended up sparking a few controveries about its gay protagonist. “I was referred to as the openly gay author of The Misfits,” Howe recalls. “After years of being in the closet, that was actually pretty thrilling.”

Howe is especially gratified that The Misfits inspired an annual event called No-Name-Calling Week, which began in 2004.

“It’s gotten big,” Howe says. “There’s a curriculum for it. It’s -really taken off and it makes me feel very good.”

Most authors today are content to make their characters special by giving them extra senses and abilities. In Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes, Jonathan Auxier makes Peter special by taking them away. Peter Nimble is considered the greatest thief in the world, not in spite of the fact that he is a child, an orphan and blind, but because of these things.

After being led to a box containing three sets of beautiful false eyes, Peter is whisked away to the world that exists beyond the edges of a map. There he meets up with his faithful companion Sir Tode, a half-horse, half-cat combination who is as fiercely local as he is strange to look at. The two of them embark on an epic quest to the Vanished Kingdom to rescue the author of a very odd and cryptic note in a bottle. On the way, Peter begins to learn that just because he started life as a thief, does not mean that he isn’t destined for much more.

With his debut novel, Auxier creates a unique blend of epic adventure and touching friendship that goes much deeper than first appearances. We caught up with Auxier (who blogs about the connections between children's literature old and new at www.TheScop.com) to find out more about the creative process behind the book.

What difficulties did you have writing this novel from the point of view of Peter Nimble, a blind orphan?

Well, this is my first novel, so it's really hard to distinguish which difficulties were because Peter Nimble is blind and which came from the standard hurdles of long-form prose writing. That said, I am a pretty visual storyteller, and cutting away all visual descriptions added another layer of work to every scene. There were several moments where I found myself wishing I could just describe the way things looked instead of having to think through what they must also have smelled and sounded like. On the other hand, how often will I get the opportunity to write an entire story through the senses of smell, taste, touch and hearing—that's pretty cool!

Tells us about the world Peter Nimble finds himself in after discovering the Fantastic Eyes.

Peter Nimble & His Fantastic Eyes takes place in a moment of history when the lines between magic and science were being blurred. Strange, exotic lands were being discovered and becoming known—but with that comes a loss of mystery. The central metaphor in the book is that of a half-finished map: the moment a new island or country gets charted by cartographers, it becomes reduced in some indefinable way . . . and that's sad. In the story, I wanted to take that map metaphor and make it literal. So when Peter Nimble sets out for uncharted waters, he finds himself in a place where the rules of logic and science still don't apply—a place where the impossible is still possible.

The chapter illustrations add so much to your story. Do you have a background in art, and why did you make the decision to illustrate the book yourself?

I know a lot of writers came out of the womb with a half-finished manuscript in hand, but that wasn't me. My mother was a painter, and I grew up taking advantage of all the amazing (and dangerous) art supplies in our house. I drew constantly. Even now, every story I write begins with a picture. In the case of Peter Nimble, it all started with the image that you see at the top of the first chapter: a baby floating in a basket with a raven perched on the edge that has just pecked out his eyes. 

I looked at that and I wanted to know more—so I wrote Peter Nimble & His Fantastic Eyes!

Many of your characters are incredibly unique—Peter Nimble, Mr. Seamus, Sir Tode, Princess Peg. Where did you get your inspiration for these characters?

Where didn't I get inspiration? Pretty much every book I've ever read has worked its way into this story. I've always thought of nasty Mr. Seamus as a combination of Bill Sikes from Oliver Twist and Mr. Wormwood from Matilda—a vicious brute who can also be crafty and disarming. Peg is pretty much all the Lost Boys from Peter Pan rolled into one awesome 10-year-old warrior—kind of what I had always wished Wendy had become once she arrived in Neverland! Sir Tode is a knight who has been cursed into an unfortunate combination of human, horse and kitten, which was inspired by a desire to fuse Don Quixote with his nag Rocinante.

Speaking of Sir Tode, when will we get to see a picture of the good knight? I can’t think of many things more interesting that what a half cat, half horse knight would look like!

I was sparing the poor knight's feelings! If you were cursed to look like such a ridiculous creature, would you want to be in the public eye? Also, I tend to think that books are best served by leaving as much as possible to the imagination—I'm a big fan of the unknown.

Parts of your book are quite dark, even unsettling. Why did you think it was important to include this type of writing in Peter Nimble?

I actually think a whiff of darkness is essential to children's literature. From Peter Pan to Magical Monarch of Mo by Frank Baum to The Witches by Roald Dahl—these books create a safe place for a child to explore dangerous subjects. That play between darkness and light is what drew me in as a young reader, and it's still what draws me in today.

What impression/message/moral/feeling do you want readers to be left with after finishing Peter Nimble?

I have more than once said I wanted Peter Nimble to be a sort of anthem to delinquency. All my favorite children's books work to celebrate deviant behavior. Alice Liddell is a perfect example: She falls from the humdrum world controlled by adults and manners into this messy, confusing wonderland in which the only way to survive is by out-nonsenseing the nonsense. Why is this important? Well, for a child whose entire life is controlled by adults, I think inverting that power structure for a brief stint can be incredibly liberating. It also is a way of exposing children to the fact that adults (like the ones writing children's books) can occasionally find themselves ridiculous.

Of course, the very best stories find a way to subvert adults while still ultimately affirming the security and comfort of a loving home—I'm thinking of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are as an example of this.

The Vanished Kingdom and the characters who live there are so rich that it’s hard to leave them behind. Have we seen the last of Peter?

I may have another book for Peter Nimble in mind! However, this novel was meant to really be a complete story, and any subsequent installment would not be a "further adventures of" situation.  Rather, it would be a companion book in the same way that Magician's Nephew is a companion to The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.

Kevin Delecki is a Children's Librarian and Manager at the Dayton (Ohio) Metro Library. He is the father of two crazy boys, and is always in search of his next favorite book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But as for writing fiction herself? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When N.D. Wilson’s 100 Cupboards series debuted in 2007, Harry Potter fans rejoiced—once again they could enter a fully realized magical world, and be fond of the hero who took them there. Now, with The Dragon’s Tooth, the first book in his new Ashtown Burials series, Wilson creates another innovative and exciting world for middle grade readers.

Cyrus and Antigone live a boring life with their older brother Daniel in a decrepit roadside motel. Their ho-hum existence changes quickly when a strange man, with his skeleton tattooed on the outside of his body, arrives and demands a specific room—namely, Cyrus’ room. Soon, the man is dead, the hotel is in flames, Daniel is missing, and Cyrus and Antigone are being rushed to Ashtown, where they are bound to a strange and secret order.

Action-packed from the first chapter, The Dragon’s Tooth is an exciting blend of action, adventure, mythology and mystery. We asked Wilson to tell us more about how he crafted this appealing new series.

Mythology plays quite a role in The Dragon’s Tooth, though not in the way many books have used it recently. What makes The Dragon’s Tooth so unique?

Sheer willpower? Ha. I can only say what I’m aiming for. Readers will be more objective than I am. That said . . . for me, the uniqueness comes in the use of this particular hurtling planet as a fantasy world—and not in a Matrix-y nothing-is-as-it-seems kinda way. This world is a legitimately crazy place and mythologies are our various historical attempts to account for and pay tribute to that craziness. And mythology tends to get it right in feel, even if not always in fact. I want to tell my readers that everything (drum roll) . . . is exactly as it seems.

It seems that I’m standing on a ball right now that is hurtling through space at impossible speeds. It seems like dinosaurs actually lived, and dragonflies could have wingspans more than three feet across, and that some flying reptiles of yesteryear were bigger than my house. It seems like mountains occasionally spew molten rock into the clouds, that whole civilizations have vanished in a flash, that men have made machines that can sail through the air, that the French Revolution happened, and that there really is a huge burning ball of fire in the sky. It seems like the moon is actually up there, and that it tugs the seas around. Yep. Everything is as it seems.

All of your books for children put your characters in situations where they are separated from their parents, and forced to survive (and excel) on their own. Why do you think this works so well in books for this audience?

I hope my stories feed young imaginations whether healthy or hurting.

The answer is a fairly simple one, but it has big ramifications. My protagonists are quite young, and yet they are, in fact, the protagonists. In a blissful, healthy family situation, the kids would rush to the parents to solve any truly fantastic and deadly problem that might arise. And so authors are left with a couple of general choices if they want the kids to be the heroes—they can create dysfunction in the familial relationship (a lack of parental trust, belief, etc.) or they can create dysfunction in the actual familial situation itself (missing parents, dead parents, physically distant parents, etc.). Both of these put the burden of hero-ing on the kids, but I tend to prefer the situational dysfunction to the relational one, because I don’t like fostering a mistrust of parents. On a sidenote, there are huge numbers of kids in this country being raised in fractured families (particularly with distant or absent fathers), and they seem to easily relate to feeling very, very on their own. I hope my stories feed young imaginations whether healthy or hurting.

All of your characters have such personality—even ones we don’t see very much, such as Billy Skelton, Horace and Nolan. Where do you get your ideas and personalities for your characters?

The details of passing humanity are always accumulating in my head. On the street, in traffic, in malls and airports and truckstops. As creepy as it sounds, I’m always watching, noting and collecting. Some of the best (and most impossible) dialogue I’ve ever written was stolen directly from the mouth of a particularly hilarious individual in the Spokane airport. When I’m out to dinner with my wife, there are plenty of times when she stops talking for a moment, and then she leans forward and says, “You’re not listening to me are you? You’re listening to the other booth.” And she’s always right (and she’s extremely patient). So the faces and ticks and mannerisms of my characters are generally assembled from my fellow man. But the skeleton, the thematic root and starting point, frequently takes inspiration from someone more historical, mythical or literary. My William Skelton is taken from Stevenson’s Billy Bones, for example. In Leepike Ridge, I had even more fun, building an assortment of villains around the trials of Odysseus. In 100 Cupboards, I kick off the Kansas fantasy with an aunt named Dorothy. In The Dragon’s Tooth, my favorite side character is a cook built on the greatest literary piratical villain (and cook) of all time.

Your writing draws on a number of genres and traditions. Tell us about some of your influences for The Dragon’s Tooth.

I wanted to nod extensively to Treasure Island (and I do, with characters and plot). I can’t write a book without dragging in a whole lot of Herodotus—whether he likes it or not—so his fingerprints are all over. C.S. Lewis and Tolkien are in my blood, and I don’t have a prayer of getting them out regardless of what I’m writing. I snitched some Ovid, and some Pliny the Elder, and snatched bits from the Epic of Gilgamesh. There’s also Elizabethan historical influence, and truckloads of material from the Age of Exploration in general. But, more uniquely (for me, at least), I also wanted to salt this thing with early modern themes and a lot of nuggets from the 20th century. Most people don’t realize that Americans drafted and adopted eugenics legislation before the Nazis ever did, and my primary villain is the fictitious son of a very real historical character who had a large hand in that filthy business. Of course, a lot of other (more recognizable) names will jump out at readers in passing. And I haven’t even mentioned Brendan the Navigator . . .

The series is named Ashtown Burials, yet we only get to see a glimpse of the Burials of Ashtown in The Dragon’s Tooth. What role will the Burials, and especially the criminals kept in the Burials, play in upcoming books?

Ha! That would be telling…

Both 100 Cupboards and Ashtown Burials have a very cinematic quality. How does your work as a screenwriter influence your novels?

I’d always been interested in working with film, but I actually came to screenwriting through the novels. I watched another writer do an adaptation of my first book (Leepike Ridge), and it looked awfully unintimidating. And if I did learn screen-craft, I assumed that I would gain more control over my own adaptations. (We’ll see!) So I did six months or so as a story consultant for DreamWorks, and then moved on to working on fresh scripts. In doing that, I discovered that the screenwriter is the man in the back room inventing and reworking story recipes—the director is the actual story-=teller. And so I’ve begun drifting in that direction (crazy, right?). Now, while 100 Cupboards and The Dragon’s Tooth are both with producers and in front of studios, I’m actually a little hands-off, focusing on the next novel and working on a couple of totally distinct script jobs (one of which I plan to direct).

So . . .none of that really answered your question. I think the novels feel cinematic because I love using a traditional three-act structure for this readership, and I drip sweat on my keyboard trying to make my description as vivid and immediate as possible. The novels still influence the scripts more than the other way around. (I think.)

Cyrus joins the Order of Brendan with his sister Antigone. Who would you pick to join you in a secret mythological organization?

My kids! Of course, they’ve already joined several on their own. My kids (and their cousins) even founded their own nation (called Apollo) and built their own history, mythology, and legal system (along with some strange weekly governmental rituals). They’ve even had civil wars. So, if I were to join something as dusty and byzantine as the O of B, I’d want them along to provide a veteran perspective. And, of course, I’m assuming my wife would already be in—I’d need her globe-trotting savvy.

How do you think you would fare attempting to pass the 1914 Acolyte requirements?

Give me a few months and I think I could do it. At least I could fail gloriously! I wanted the requirements (especially the fitness requirements) to actually be possible while seeming impossible. I’d need to find a good fencing instructor and enroll in flight school immediately. My Latin would only need a little brush up, but the second language would be tougher (I’ve taken Anglo-Saxon and Greek, but nothing modern). It all comes back to wanting this world to be my readers’ fantasy world—I’d love to inspire some kids out there to really throw themselves at academic and physical training combined (not one or the other). If they do, this crazy world really will open up to them.

Meg Wolitzer is best known for her clever novels for adults—most recently, The Uncoupling, a Lysistrata-inspired suburban drama. In her latest book, The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman, she writes for a different audience: middle-schoolers. The novel is told from the perspective of three children attending the National Scrabble Tournament in Yakamee, Florida, where they’re competing for different reasons: to fit in (and attempt to win money for a single mom); to achieve a parent’s childhood dream; or to prove worth to a sports-obsessed family. In a Q&A with BookPage, Wolitzer answered questions about her own love of Scrabble and why she decided to write for kids. We’re glad she did, since her first effort is funny, charming and surprisingly suspenseful.

When did you first become interested in playing Scrabble? Do you remember your first bingo (play that uses all seven tiles)?

I played Scrabble with my mother from a very young age; she was very good at it, and she taught me the rules. I seem to recall a lot of outdoor Scrabble in my childhood, including at the town pool and the local beach. I don’t recall my first bingo, no, and I don’t even think we called them bingos back then. But I do remember learning the word CALYX in school and then miraculously having all the letters on my rack to make that word in Scrabble the following day. It was weird.

Louis Sachar wrote a book last year about a boy who becomes obsessed with bridge (The Cardturner). Now you’ve written a book about a kid who becomes obsessed with Scrabble. Are old-fashioned games seeing a resurgence of interest, or did they never go out of style?

I know that parents often try to re-create certain aspects of their own childhoods when they have kids, and I have very strong memories of Scrabble with mother, Monopoly with my sister and Mystery Date with my best friend. It seemed natural to me to insert lots of board games into the life of my new family when I grew up and had kids. I suspect a lot of people felt the same way, and as a result board games haven’t really gone away. My kids are now 16 and 20, and are deep in all things electronic, but I am still finding little cards and dice and tiles all around the house.

You’ve written many novels for adults (including BookPage’s Top Pick in Fiction for April, The Uncoupling). How did you have to modify your writing style when writing for children? Did you ever worry about “talking down” to your readers?

When I write a novel, I try to write the one I would like to find on the shelf. With a book for children, I kind of needed to do a mind-meld between my current writer/reader self, and the self who I used to be back in, say, fifth grade, in Mrs. Secunda’s class. I’m not all that different now, really, and because of this I didn’t worry too much about talking down to readers. I think the litmus test is essentially: Am I engaged with this as I’m writing it? Am I completely drawn in? Do I care about the characters and what happens to them? Would fifth-grade me have liked it?  

Your main characters who converge at the tournament each have a different set of concerns. There is Duncan—the outcast with a single mom; April—the girl who doesn’t fit in with her siblings and who is searching for a long-lost crush; and Nate—the skateboarding New Yorker whose dad forces him to play. Do you identify with any of these characters in particular?

I identify with all of them, but I particularly liked April’s sense of longing, which I remember feeling pretty strongly at her age. (My longing largely concerned Donny Osmond, but that’s another—embarrassing—story.)

From your town of women who are overcome by a spell in The Uncoupling to Duncan’s magical fingertips, your work seems to have taken a turn for the (slightly) supernatural. Why do you think that is?

It must have been something in the water . . . Truthfully, with The Uncoupling, I didn’t want the book to be whiny or complainy, with women talking endlessly about how their sex lives had fallen off. I knew I was trying to reach something a little bigger than that, using the spell as a metaphor to have a look at what happens to female desire over time. I suppose the same must have been true with The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman. I liked the idea of giving him a “power,” but not some huge thunderbolt of ability. Instead, I gave him something low-key and odd. Defined that way, most kids have a power, a special ability that contributes to who they are. I felt that a very light layer of fantasy would help underscore that idea.

Is there any message or lesson you’d like readers to take from Duncan’s experience?

I think listening to your own instincts is essential in life. Making hard decisions based on what your own inner voice—not anyone else’s—tells you. Oh, and also: I’d love it if the book made them see that Scrabble is a terrific game.

Do you have plans to continue writing books for children? What is your next project?

Yes, I am writing a second book for Dutton. It’s at a very early stage right now, that lovely moment when the book can go off in many different directions, and you can experiment a lot and not have to commit to anything. I’m still at that time in the writing when anything seems possible.

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.

Author Lisa McMann took some chances with her latest book, The Unwanteds, and her unexpected choices have clearly paid off. For the first time, she aimed her work at a middle grade audience, rather than the teen readers who have made her Wake trilogy a bestseller. And she tackled a genre—dystopian fantasy—that's much more popular in the YA world than in middle grade fiction.

The result is an original and exciting novel that's not only fun to read, but also a great way to get kids thinking about issues like creativity, conformity and the power of the individual vs. society. In The Unwanteds, children who are too creative or expressive are "purged" from their repressive community at age 13 and driven away to face the Eliminators and (they assume) certain death. In the Stowe family, young Aaron is selected for the prestigious "Wanted" group, while his twin brother Alex is labeled an "Unwanted" and led away in chains.

Critics and young readers alike have embraced the book, the first in a planned series. We contacted McMann at her home near Phoenix, where she lives with her husband and two teenagers, to find out more about how the book came to be.

What experiences have you had as a parent that helped to inspire this story?

It’s funny—the whole idea for the Unwanteds series came from an incident involving my kids. One day, when they were 12 and 9, they came home from school with news that the school would be cutting some of the arts programs due to budget shortfalls. I was really bummed out because my kids liked art, music, theatre, etc. And I said, sort of off the cuff, “Wow, guys, I’m so sorry. It kind of feels like you’re getting punished for being creative.” And then I thought about that for a minute and said, “Hey, what if there really was a world where children were punished for being creative?”

My son, who was 12, looked at me very seriously and said, “Not just punished, Mom. Sent to their deaths!”

And my daughter and I said, “Yeah!” And that’s how it all started.

Did you ever feel “unwanted” as a creative little girl?

Absolutely. I’m pretty sure everyone feels unwanted at one point or another. There were several years there where I felt like Charlie Bucket from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was my only friend. And when it came to my secret desire to be a writer, I just never felt like I could tell people that for fear of being teased. Being a writer wasn’t something people around me aspired to be. It was very “artsy” and out there, not at all cool.

What considerations did you give to the scary aspects of this story since it is aimed at middle grade readers, instead of your usual teen audience?

I didn’t really think about it while writing it, though the scary scenes are definitely less graphic in this series than in my teen books. I wrote The Unwanteds with my kids in mind, and my main goal was to write a book that my then 9-year-old reluctant reader would want to read (yay, it worked!). So I guess a sort of parental comfort level played a part instinctively—I knew what my kids could handle, but I also knew what they would expect. Action. Love. Evil. Danger. Conflict. In the end, they were delighted to discover that if they lived in Quill, they’d be doomed.

I believe kids know the difference between fantasy and real life. A few parents might wince at the “to the death!” concept, worrying that their vulnerable little one isn’t ready for such a heavy topic. But children view the scary stuff in literature as a chance to experience risk and adventure from the safety of the couch. The truth remains that characters in grave danger and extreme peril make us care deeply about them, no matter what our age. And I’ve seen it time and again—when children feel uncomfortable with a book, they put it down. They are not going to waste precious fun time reading a book that makes them feel yucky.

What influenced you in your portrayal of the special bond between twins? Do you know any twins or did you do any research on the bonds between twins?

I had five sets of twins in my graduating class in school and I’ve always been fascinated by how much the identical ones looked alike, but were often very different personality-wise. I also researched a bit about the intense bond twins have with each other, sometimes to the point of being able to feel each other’s pain, or intuitively know when the other is in trouble.

I decided to use twins because I loved the intense conflict—brother against brother. One a Wanted, one an Unwanted. Identical, yet so totally opposite. One trying hard to be evil, one very good, but with an unbreakable bond between them. That’s just so exciting to me.

What reactions have you gotten from young readers to the book?

Enthusiastic! I should start by saying that after touring high schools with each of my four previous teen novels, I was a little bit afraid of doing presentations to fourth through eighth graders. But wow, I forgot how much I love this age! Kids aren’t afraid to tell me what they think should happen in books two, three, four and beyond. It’s such a delight. Often I’ll talk about how my husband and kids and I sat around the living room coming up with spells based on art supplies, and I tell them that maybe over lunch or on the bus ride home they can do the same thing with their friends. That always gets 45 zillion hands shooting up so they can tell me the magic spells they’d create. I love it.

What message do you hope readers will take from The Unwanteds?

I suppose I should say something responsible like “Everyone should accept others no matter what,” or “good prevails over evil,” or “eat your Brussels sprouts,” but the truth is that I just want kids to have a book they can fall into and love and experience just for the fun and adventure of it all. And maybe the kids out there feeling unwanted can find a little comfort knowing they’re not alone.

What were your favorite books as a young reader?

Oh, I love this question. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory because Charlie suffered more than me, and I loved him for that. Little Women because of Amy and the limes, and because of Jo and the hair, and the suffering . . . do you sense a theme here? I loved Narnia, which was definitely an influence in my writing of The Unwanteds. I loved all the original dark fairy tales (the ones that ended with children being killed, not the fake ones with happy endings), and I loved Charlotte’s Web, because I just knew deep down that with the right combination of pig, girl and spider, they’d all be able to talk to each other, and that story could really happen. (And I knew I was the right girl.)

How do your two children feel about having a mom who’s a successful writer?

At first they were embarrassed, but then when Miley Cyrus and Paramount optioned the film rights to the Wake series, they thought I was probably sort of cool, and then when they started seeing kids in school walking down the hallway reading my books, they decided I was worth keeping. But I’m still not allowed to speak at their school.

What's coming next in the Unwanteds series?

So. Much. Drama. Book two (The Unwanteds: Island of Silence) will be out in September 2012. The suspense and danger ramps up as the momentary stability between Quill and Artimé crumbles. In Quill, Aaron tries to recover from his failures and get revenge, and in Artimé, Mr. Today has a surprising plan in store for Alex. New characters are introduced in both worlds, there is mass chaos, disappearances and death. I would never say this out loud, but secretly? It’s the best book I’ve ever written, and I can’t wait for you to read it.

Do you have any advice for parents on what they can do to encourage creativity in their children?

You know, we parents are all bozos on this bus together, just trying to figure it out and get it right, aren’t we? But now that my kids are 18 and 15, I can think of some things I could have done better in those middle grade years.

I think it’s really important to realize that creativity comes in many packages. In the world of Quill, it’s only the artistically creative kids who are considered to be Unwanted. But the ruler of Quill overlooks the nature of the very people she promotes—like Aaron, the Wanted twin. He’s extremely creative in coming up with ways to improve their society’s resources, but because he is obedient to the law of the land, his kind of creativity isn’t feared, so he’s safe.

For the child who is artistically creative, I absolutely love and recommend children’s community theatre, and not just for actors. There are wonderful experiences to be had for singers, painters, kids creative in building sets, and for those interested in the technical side of things—sound and lights and backstage managing. There’s so much camaraderie in putting on a show as a team—the friendships they build will be deep and strong.

For the child who doesn’t like to draw or sing or act or tell stories, why not encourage them to help with landscaping, or ask them to fix things around the house, or figure out the best way to lay out the furniture in a room? Ask them to estimate how much you’re spending based on the groceries in the cart, and maybe they can create a computer generated grocery list or expense spreadsheet. Maybe they can’t draw a giraffe to save their life, but they can take an old clock apart and put it back together, or create a go-cart out of two skateboards, a lawnmower and a broken dining room chair. Or maybe they’re really gifted with patience for younger children, and could shine as a babysitter or a volunteer in afterschool daycare. Maybe they can create a better cup holder in your car that keeps your coffee from sloshing around. Or maybe they can tutor students in science, or sell lemonade like it’s going out of style and raise money for charity. And maybe they can run or swim or play football with a natural instinct that makes you marvel. Creativity knows no bounds. Every child has a gift we can encourage.

One last thing. A few years ago my daughter said “I’m going to perform on Broadway,” and I very nearly told her that the chances of that were slim to none. What was I thinking? And who am I, shy nerdy girl from small town Michigan-turned-NYT best-selling author, to crush my kid’s creative dream? We think we’re protecting them by telling them the odds. But what they hear us say is, “I don’t believe you are good enough to do that.”

So when your child says “I’m going to win ‘American Idol,’ ” or “I’m going to be on the space shuttle,” or “I’m going to play for the NBA,” say something like, “If anyone can do it, it’s you. Go for it.” There are plenty of other people who will discourage them along the way. Somebody’s got to have your kid’s back. Let it be you.