Libba Bray’s secret underground lair, from which one day she plans to rule the universe, is, interestingly enough an exact replica of her living room in Brooklyn. Although the fact that it contains the world’s most uncomfortable couch may be her downfall. As she told BookPage while sitting on that couch, “It’s hard to be an Evil Author Overlord™ with an aching back.”

Fans of Bray’s best-selling Gemma Doyle trilogy (beginning with A Great and Terrible Beauty) who have sought out her stories in anthologies such as The Restless Dead and 21 Proms will be familiar with her manner of pulling humor out of the darkest corners of life. Now in her tremendously original and compulsively readable picaresque Going Bovine, Bray goes all-out to explore her inner weird and has produced a provocative road novel for the 21st century.

Readers of the Gemma Doyle books may wonder if this is the same author. Bray says it should actually be the other way around: when she wrote the Gemma Doyle books her “close friends were thrown for a loop. They expected a Going Bovine-type book, not gothic historical fantasy.”

Going Bovine was sparked by a story Bray’s mother told her. “A man in our hometown had been diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob’s disease, the human variant of mad cow disease. During his deterioration, he suffered from horrifying hallucinations, including one in which he would see flames shooting up into his field of vision.” Bray was fascinated by the idea of not being able to trust your reality.

That idea of not knowing what’s real and what’s not eventually grew into Going Bovine, in which 16-year-old Cameron discovers he has mad cow disease and is horrified to find it is a death sentence. Cameron’s vision quest across the country in search of a cure begins when he realizes how much of his life he has missed by just letting it pass by. This “temptation to drift off into solipsism” was what Bray wanted to investigate in Going Bovine.

Bray had no trouble getting into Cameron’s teenage male headspace. Growing up, she had a backstage pass into the Y-chromosome experience—many of her close friends were male and she was spared nothing by her brother, Stuart. She proudly declares that many of her female friends have pointed out she is a teen boy at heart. Further proving her point, Bray says, “I realized while writing this that the characters I identified with most as a teen/young adult were all male—Holden Caulfield, Jimmy from Quadrophenia, Harold in Harold & Maude. All the poster boys for the vulnerable, disillusioned and sex-and-death obsessed.”

Even though Bray immersed herself in pop culture as she wrote the book—her list of influences includes The Flaming Lips, Ray LaMontagne, The Shins, Gnarls Barkley, Sufjan Stevens, Thomas Pynchon, George Saunders, Julian Barbour, Kurt Vonnegut, Don Quixote, Ovid, Norse mythology, Star Wars, The Wizard of Oz and even “the way midnight movies make you feel when you are 17”—she uses imaginary names for the bands and brands her characters talk about so that the book wouldn’t be dated. These imaginary people and products, such as Rad Soda, notch up the absurdity and surrealism quotient and allow Bray to slide in a little commentary on rampant consumerism, reality TV and branding. “And,” she noted, “it’s really fun to make stuff up.”

But the real question is, does she still eat hamburgers? “Occasionally. But now I hear a ticking time bomb of death with every bite. Honestly, if you want to scoot toward vegetarianism, just research mad cow disease.”

For the next little while she’ll be concentrating on Tiger Beat, a band comprised of YA authors—Natalie Standiford on bass, Daniel Ehrenhaft on guitar, Barney Miller on drums and vocals and Bray on vocals and drums (her tambourine skills are really improving). They have a gig with Frank Portman and the Mr. T Experience at Sidewalk Café in New York City on September 20 and are hoping to do more later in the fall.

As for future writing projects, Bray says, “I just want to write what I want to write when I wants to write it.” Her work-in-progress is once again very different from her previous work (although it too sounds like a un-put-down-able read). She describes it as “a satire about a group of teen beauty queens whose plane crashes on a deserted island. Sort of Lord of the Flies as channeled by P.J. O’Rourke and [National Lampoom writer] Doug Kenney.”

Gavin J. Grant is the publisher of Small Beer Press. He does not eat hamburgers.

RELATED CONTENT
Read a review of Going Bovine.
Read an exerpt of Going Bovine on the book's website.
Watch Tiger Beat perform Janis Joplin's "Down on Me."
And don't miss the hilarious trailer for the book.

The story of how Jessica Verday came to write The Hollow, the first in her paranormal teen trilogy—and her publishing debut—sounds like a scene from the novel in itself.

“This is going to sound like it was in a dream, but it wasn’t,” she explains during our interview at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville. “I was waiting to fall asleep in January of 2006, when all of a sudden I heard this girl speak. She said something, and I couldn’t hear her name clearly. All I could hear was the ‘b’ sound in the middle of the name. The line she said was intriguing and it got me very interested in her story.”

When describing the experience to her husband, he guessed that the girl’s name might be “Abbey.” Verday knew that he was right.

“As soon as I knew her name—and this is going to sound very odd, very strange—suddenly this flood of information came. What if this girl liked to make perfumes? Could I set it in Sleepy Hollow? What if she hung out in cemeteries?”

Verday listened to her character. “Most people would think it was weird, but I loved ghost stories growing up, and to me it just seemed very natural,” she says. “I thought, I’m supposed to write this down—I never thought, this is weird, I’m hearing voices in my head. I thought it was very natural. I thought these characters clearly have a story to tell, so I started writing.”

After a bad start on the computer—she re-wrote the first chapter three times—Verday tried writing by hand. “I got out the notebook and the pen, and it just flew from there. Once I started it was clear that this was the way the story was meant to come out.”

Although she loved reading everything from Newbery winners to R.L. Stine when she was growing up, Verday did not anticipate being a professional writer. “I wasn’t the type of person who said in elementary or high school that ‘I’m going to write a book,’” she says, although she did dabble in short stories about haunted houses and girl detectives.

Verday’s mother worked as a church secretary in Allentown, Pennsylvania. “I spent my time in a church cemetery,” Verday says of her childhood. “When I finished the book, I was like: I wrote about this girl who hangs out in a cemetery. That was what I did growing up, and that apparently influenced me more than I knew.”

Verday had a “childhood filled with books.” She also had family problems, and a few weeks before her 16th birthday, she ran away from home. She took a Greyhound bus to Austin, Texas, and married her boyfriend a few weeks later.

“Luckily it’s worked out very well,” she says. “We’ve been happily married for 11 years.”

When Verday was 17, she and her husband took another Greyhound to Nashville. They lived in a hotel for six months and worked long shifts to “pretty much just get on our feet,” she says. They eventually moved into an apartment, and Verday had a string of different jobs—many of which have influenced her writing. Perhaps the most interesting was her stint as a phone psychic, which lasted for a week.

“I know that’s going to come up again,” she says. “I have a story where I know I’m going to write about someone who’s involved in tarot card readings, and that was one of the things they taught me how to do.”

Thirteen notebooks and 15 pens after first hearing Abbey’s voice, Verday finished The Hollow in the summer of 2007. She got positive responses from agents, and in early 2008 she signed a three-book deal with Simon Pulse.

Each chapter of The Hollow begins with an excerpt from Washington Irving’s legend, and a large portion of the novel takes place in the Sleepy Hollow cemetery. When she decided on her setting, Verday took a trip to Sleepy Hollow, New York. She toured the real Sleepy Hollow cemetery and took hundreds of pictures. Although there are paranormal elements in her novel, Verday wanted to make her setting “founded in reality as much as possible.”

The novel begins after Abbey’s best friend, Kristin, has disappeared, presumed dead. After an empty casket is buried, Abbey meets Caspian at Kristin’s grave. The two feel a strong connection to each other, and Abbey and Caspian continue to see each other at the cemetery. He won’t give Abbey his contact information or tell her about his past, however—even as Abbey begins to rely on him while she copes with her friend’s death. Although Verday writes convincingly about real emotions—grief, loneliness, teen love—the novel contains plenty of spooky scenes (one involving the Headless Horseman).

As readers will discover, book one ends with many unanswered questions, especially when it comes to the man in Kristin’s life. “In book two you’ll find out who he is,” says Verday. “He’s a fun character—he had a lot of surprises for me.”

The second and third books in the trilogy will be released in the fall of 2010 and 2011. The tentative title for book two is The Haunted. Verday won’t reveal the title for book three, although she does hope to continue with the “H” theme. She did admit that she has an idea for how the trilogy will be perceived by readers: “Book one is questions, book two is answers and book three is choices.”

After so many ups and downs, Verday is content with her life as a full-time writer in Goodlettsville, Tennessee. “It is so amazing to get to put words on a paper, and then they are put on someone’s shelf and someone will read them. It is fantastic to be able to say that this is my job.”

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Watch the YouTube trailer:

Lurlene McDaniel, author of over 40 titles on young people facing life-threatening illnesses, has begun a new series spotlighting teens volunteering for missions in Africa. The first in the series, Angel of Mercy, introduces Heather, an idealistic girl from a privileged background whose experiences aboard a medical missionary ship and in a Ugandan health clinic prove life-changing. In the second of the series, Angel of Hope, Heather’s sister Amber takes center stage. McDaniel recently talked with BookPage about her writing, her life, and her new series.

BookPage: Your One Last Wish novels and the Jenny books cover topics most find depressing — the illness and death of young people — but they are successful. What brought you to write about those topics?
Lurlene McDaniel: I was always a writer, and when my son was three years old, he became critically ill. The diagnosis was juvenile diabetes, and all of a sudden I was thrust into the world of the chronically ill. I learned it wasn’t fair. There was nothing my son had done to deserve this disease and yet he had it. The first rule of writing is to write about what you know. Few people wrote about the chronically ill, so people who had illnesses never saw themselves in literature. I started writing about kids with chronic illnesses, and they were just enormously successful, surprisingly so.

BP: How is your son Sean?
LM: He’s doing well. He’s 30 and a businessman, still a diabetic and always will be. He coaches youth soccer.

BP: Do you have a teenager that you use as a sounding board?
LM: Oh, I wish. Sean had a brother, Eric, who’s a youth pastor in Alabama. I can be around kids if I need to be.

BP: Do you write with an audience or gender in mind?
LM: I have always been amazed guys read these books and seem to enjoy them. Because I’ve raised boys, I like to think I can get inside a guy’s mind. I try and make the boys talk like guys, sound like guys and react like guys. [Characters] say, "Well, you know, she’s got cystic fibrosis, and that grosses me out." You’ve got to be realistic.

BP: A poll taken by Book magazine lists both female and male teens’ favorite authors. Your name was fourth for females and fifth for males. This must be immensely gratifying.
LM: That blew me away. I am very privileged and honored when someone chooses to read a book, especially a book of mine.

BP: One of your books, Six Months to Live, has been placed in a time capsule at the Library of Congress, to be opened in the year 2089. How did that come about?
LM: That book got put in the time capsule because it was nominated by children from all over the country. Pizza Hut sponsors a reading program: Reading is Fundamental. This particular year, they invited children to nominate their favorite books and write an essay why. They were going to take the top letter from each state and put it in the time capsule. They notified me that Six Months had been the most nominated book in the competition. It had won in three states. The grand prize letter was from South Carolina.

BP: Why that title versus any of your others?
LM: I’ve often wondered what is behind the phenomenon of this book as opposed to other books. It’s one of the first serious books they run across after they’ve exceeded the Babysitter’s Club. They’re walking through the book fair and see Six Months to Live. It’s a great title, you gotta admit. They just are mesmerized that a 13-year-old girl who is normal, just like them, could get leukemia.

BP: Your characters are often in emotionally charged situations. Do you emotionally detach sometimes?
LM: No, actually, it’s the other way around. You want to attach emotionally. I have been through a lot of medical trauma. I was diagnosed with breast cancer three years ago and went through that trauma. I wrote the book Don’t Die, My Love as I was going through radiation, so it certainly has an air of authenticity about it because I was there. I think all of my books took on kind of a deeper tone when the lady who wrote about cancer all of a sudden had cancer. I’m doing well. I went through it all and they said, ‘You’re fine."

BP: Great. You know, many consider your works inspirational.
LM: Well, thank you. That’s the goal I go for. You know not every book has to have a happy ending, but it has to have a satisfying ending. I like to tell young people—you know one in four children die by their own hands—no matter how bad things seem, just wait a day, wait a week. Life will turn around. I have known some magnificent young people who died very young but had wonderful lives and inspired many people by their short existence.

BP: Angel of Mercy and Angel of Hope focus on volunteers at a medical mission in Africa. How did you choose this topic and setting?
LM: I wanted to write about the third world and had the opportunity to go live in the trenches, so to speak. I wanted to show what it’s really like for 98 percent of the world’s population. Plus, I also see there are an awful lot of young people out there doing good things, and I wanted to give them a platform. I created a character whose motives were pure and good and she was going to go out and save the whole world. But the truth is, you can’t save the whole world, but you can save one. And that was the whole thrust of the novel — to save just one.

BP: Heather, your main character, encounters powerful experiences. I’m thinking of that scene where the baby is lifted over the fence. Are any of her experiences based on what you saw or heard directly while you were in Africa?
LM: Yes. As a matter of fact, you just see a lot. Women walk in three days from the bush with a sick infant. By the time they get to medical help, it’s too late. Children are dying of things we get a shot for. I saw that first hand.

BP: Heather certainly inspires readers. In Angel of Hope the shift will be from her to Amber. Does Amber’s character differ from Heather’s?
LM: Well, Amber is more self-centered and self-focused. Amber feels like her sister’s shadow, an addendum in her family. Heather is the good, noble, smart one, and Amber has always tried to get attention by being the crazy, wild one. Well, in Angel of Hope, Amber ends up going in her sister’s stead. The focus of that book and the next one coming out, Angel of Love, is how she finds her way out of her sister’s shadow and into herself. That’s really what those two novels are based on.

Teen author Ally Carter, best known for the best-selling Gallagher Girls series, has always loved movies like To Catch a Thief, The Thomas Crown Affair and Ocean’s 11—heist stories in which the bad guy is the good guy, and twists and turns are staples of the genre.

“You can never 100 percent see what’s coming, and I always enjoyed that,” says Carter, from her home in Tulsa during a recent phone interview with BookPage. “You know that something’s going to go wrong, and [the characters] are going to have to fix it in the end.”

With this in mind, Carter wrote Heist Society, the first in a new series about a teen girl named Kat who was born into a family of thieves. When the novel begins, she’s being dragged back into “the life” after escaping to Colgan, a prep school. A family friend has staged a crime to get Kat kicked out so she can save her dad; he is wrongfully presumed to have stolen a mobster’s valuable paintings. What’s the best way to save Dad from the mafia? Kat and her friends will steal the paintings back, of course.

The true thief is Visily Romani, whose name is a “Chelovek Pseudonima,” or an alias that old crime families used “when they were doing things that were too big, too dangerous—things they had to keep hidden . . . even from each other.” Carter, who loves movies and has dabbled in screenwriting, based the “Chelovek Pseudonima” concept on two ideas from Hollywood.

“It was really late one night and I was working on the book, and The Usual Suspects was on TV,” she says. “I love the idea of [a legendary criminal like] Keyser Söze . . . all the other thieves know his name, and maybe he doesn’t even exist. The second thing is that [in the past] if a director was taken off a movie, or if it was cut without the director’s permission and he thought it was a terrible movie, he could actually choose not to be listed in the credits. And the name that they used instead was Alan Smithee.”

So, Visily Romani is Carter’s nod to Alan Smithee and Keyser Söze—a notorious alias that any thief can use.

When Kat and the gang figure out that Romani is no ordinary criminal, they go on a romp around the world, breezing through Naples, Vienna, Warsaw and other cities in order to crack the crime and figure out how they can snatch back the paintings—under a two-week deadline. As the leader of the group, Kat must prove her worth after bailing on the family business. Since many of her fellow thieves are boys, she must also navigate the terrain of teen romance.

Readers will get sucked into this fun, fast-paced story. And though the plot is mostly focused on solving the mystery of the stolen art, Carter addresses heavier themes such as isolation within a group of friends, standing up for your beliefs and rebelling from family—subjects with which most teens can identify. Readers will also learn about art history, specifically paintings that were stolen during the Holocaust.

Although if she were a thief, Carter would steal untraceable bearer bonds (“art is very very difficult to fence”), she is personally interested in art, especially old art. “In a way, those painters were capturing a moment in time and the moment has become as famous as the actual physical paintings themselves, and that has always been really fascinating to me,” she says.

A former agricultural economist, Carter wrote two chick-lit novels before breaking into YA literature with I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You, the first Gallagher Girls book, about a girl who goes to spy school. The transition between writing for adults and teens was easy for Carter: “It feels like coming home,” she says. “Writing for adults felt like traveling in a foreign country in which you’re fluent in the language; you can get by, but it still doesn’t feel like home. Writing YA definitely felt like my home country.”

And Carter has been embraced by her audience. When she posted the jacket image and title of the next Gallagher Girls book (Only the Good Spy Young, out June 15), she received a whopping 340 comments on her blog. Carter’s Twitter account has more than 2,700 followers. In a publishing landscape where authors are practically expected to interact with fans via social media, Carter has thrived.

“A thing I’ve noticed from my readers is that they feel like they know me,” Carter says. “They bring me peanut M&Ms to my signings because I blog about how I like peanut M&Ms. And when George Clooney is seen in the tabloids with an Italian supermodel, they email to tell me about it because my ‘boyfriend’ George Clooney is stepping out on me. It’s like building a community, which is something I never set out to do. And I’m very grateful that it happened. I don’t necessarily think it’s something you can plan for.”

Carter’s readers may know her, but she also thinks about their lives—and how they might identify with Kat, whom she calls “a person without a home” since she doesn’t fit in at Colgan, but she’s not completely at ease with the family business, either. Although Carter suggests Kat’s dissatisfaction with stealing might be rooted in morality, there’s something else behind it, too. “When you’re a 15-year-old girl, part of your job description is rebelling against your parents,” she says. “When you’re a 15-year-old girl and you were raised to be the world’s best thief, part of that rebellion might very well be trying to fly straight, and so that’s what she does.”

Carter hopes her readers can understand Kat’s restlessness. “I think all teenagers feel like outsiders whether they admit it or not. There’s something deep inside that they know is different, or that feels different from the people around them. And they’re conscious of that all the time.”

In Heist Society, Kat deals with her outsider status by slowly gaining the trust of her crew and figuring out that she can do the family business “on her own terms, in her own way,” explains Carter. It’s an adventure that readers won’t be able to put down.

Wouldn't it be great if you could always find the perfect parking spot? Or if every time you went shopping, all the most amazing clothes looked perfect on you and were on sale? Or what if you had the ability to stay out of trouble? Or to have a perfect hair day, every single day? The characters in Justine Larbalestier's new book for teens, How to Ditch Your Fairy, might have any one of these abilities—as long as they have the right fairy!

How to Ditch Your Fairy is set in the fictional city of New Avalon in the not-so-distant future. It's an Australia-meets- America kind of place, with quirky teen slang, an East Coast – West Coast rivalry, and lots and lots of sports. Larbalestier, a native of Sydney, Australia, splits her time between her hometown and frequent visits to the U.S.—most often New York City—so a mix of the two locations seemed like the perfect setting for her tale. Although the characters in her novel have troubles much like teens the world over – boyfriend dramas, clothing disasters, it-girl cliques—one thing stands out in this brave new world: everyone has a personal fairy. Whether they like their fairies, however, is quite another matter.

Our story follows 14-year-old Charlie, a freshman at a sports-focused private school, who has been blessed with having, of all things, a parking fairy. Unfortunately, Charlie doesn't appreciate this would-be good luck charm. Not only is she too young to drive, her relatives, friends and neighbors enlist her to help solve their parking crises. Larbalestier got the idea for the book while on vacation in Australia after seeing firsthand how helpful a parking fairy could be. "I was on holiday in Queensland, and one of our friends kept finding great parking spots at the busiest beach resorts," the author says by phone during one of her recent stays in the U.S. When she was asked to write a short story for a series an editor-friend was publishing, an idea came to her: "What if there was such a thing as a parking fairy, but you were too young for it to be useful?"

The idea stuck. Once she started writing, however, the story grew too long for the assignment. So instead of using it as a short story, Larbalestier turned it into a novel. It became her fourth published work of fiction, after the acclaimed Magic or Madness trilogy (Magic or Madness, Magic Lessons, Magic's Child). The award-winning author has been writing since she was a child; to support her writing habit through early adulthood, Larbalestier took a few less creative jobs: she worked as a receptionist, a waitress, in tech support and as an academic. At one point, she even trained to be a massage therapist. Her writing efforts finally paid off in 2003, when her trilogy was picked up by Penguin Razorbill. These days, she writes full-time with no need for moonlighting money. However, she does one additional job for free: she serves as the personal editor for fellow YA/fantasy writer Scott Westerfeld, who happens to be her husband.

"It's great actually," Larbalestier says. "We both have an editor on tap, and we've gotten into the habit of reading each other's chapters out loud—so we can tell if either of us is getting bored or getting a laugh out of it."Like several characters in Fairy, Larbalestier is a major sports fan. "I am completely obsessed with women's basketball," she says, "especially the New York Liberty." For the book, she was intent on showing what it would be like if everyone was truly into sports—and how that might affect them in various ways.

"There didn't seem to be many YA books for girls about sport, and I know there are just as many really popular female athletes as male athletes," she says. The main character, Charlie, is an avid basketball player and other characters in the book excel in everything from track, to lacrosse, to luge. Growing up, Larbalestier dabbled in fencing, tennis and swimming, and during the Beijing Olympics, she kept a blog tallying each country's medals – and providing her own commentary about which country she thought had won overall.

While the author doesn't believe that fairies actually exist, she wouldn't mind having one occasionally. "I think some people have an extraordinary amount of luck in certain areas that are inexplicable," Larbalestier says. The clothes-shopping thing, for instance: she has a friend like that. "I know a few people who have the opposite, too," she claims, "like a 'getting-ignored-at -restaurants' fairy." Larbalestier wouldn't mind having the clothes-shopping fairy for herself, or she readily admits, a "not-to-procrastinate" fairy. But her greatest wish seems to be a little more time- and space- oriented: "I would really like one that makes the flight from New York to Sydney much shorter," the frequent traveler says. Now that would be a lucky fairy indeed.

Heidi Henneman is searching for her personal fairy in New York City.

What would it be like to assume another person’s pain? The author of more than 30 books, Neal Shusterman explores this question in Bruiser, his haunting new novel for teens.

“Bruiser” is the nickname of Brewster Rawlins, voted “Most Likely to Receive the Death Penalty” by his high school classmates. When twins Brontë and Tennyson befriend Brewster, they realize that the bruises on his body belong to other people; when someone he cares about is injured emotionally or physically, Brewster takes on the friend’s wounds. Though Shusterman tackles a heavy topic, his language is lyrical and even filled with occasional humor. Both teens—boys and girls—and adults will be moved by this story.

To get a behind-the-scenes look at the novel, BookPage talked to the award-winning author about his memorable characters and the joy that comes after pain.

Bruiser alternates among four points of view: Brontë, Tennyson, Brewster and Cody, Brewster’s brother. Why did you tell the story in this way?
I’m always looking for new ways of telling stories—or at least ways that I haven’t tried before. I liked the challenge of coming up with four distinct voices that combined into a coherent whole.

The chapters narrated by Brewster are in verse, mixing up the rhythm of the book and providing a strong visual shift on the page. What do you hope this style conveys about the character’s thoughts and personality?
I wanted to show the contrast between the way he’s perceived vs. who he really is—his outward vs. his inner life. I felt that the verse was a way of making his character not only unique, but rich in ways we never expected.

Brontë and Tennyson’s parents are literature professors—hence, the literary names. Of all authors and poets, why do you refer to two people from the 19th century? Do the names reflect on the characters?
Growing up, I knew a kid named Tennyson, and I always wanted to name a character that. Until now, there never seemed to be a character who felt like a “Tennyson.” When I began to write the book, and realized that this kid is an athlete from a very literary family, I knew I had to name him Tennyson. Almost instantaneously, I knew his sister would be Brontë. It just kind of felt natural. For once I didn’t have to struggle to name the characters!

Brewster has two unusual abilities: he has a remarkable memory, and he takes on the pain of people he cares about. Are these abilities related?
Yes, they are related. His ability to take on the pain of others is an extension of the ability to “take in” everything around him.

Your novel deals with serious issues such as domestic abuse and extreme pain, and Brontë refers to psychology to help her deal with Brewster’s difficult situation. While writing Bruiser, did you study any real-life cases of teens dealing with violence? You have a degree in psychology—did that inform your writing?
I think a degree in psychology always informs my writing . . . as does my degree in drama. My stories all tend to be psychological in nature, and fairly dramatic! I did do research on kids dealing with violence—but more than that, I really tried to get into the minds of the characters experiencing it. Research can only tell you facts—it’s putting yourself in the place of the characters that makes it real. I also really wanted to address divorce: the pain involved, and also the healing. Having gone through a divorce myself, and having seen my own children deal with it, I wanted to tell a story for the many, many kids out there who have had to face such a change in their family. And I use the word “change” very intentionally. In spite of the fact that 40% of all families will experience divorce, society tends to demonize it, with expressions like “broken family.” Divorced families aren’t broken, but they are changed, and with that change comes pain . . . but hopefully pain from which everyone, parents and kids alike, can grow.

Tennyson changes drastically over the course of the novel, from a bully to a sympathetic person. Does he change because he’s “addicted” to how he feels when Brewster assumes his pain? What else contributes to his shift?
The moment in which he has the epiphany that he’s been a bully all his life, it leaves him ripe for change. His change doesn’t come easy, because no matter how hard he tries to do the right thing, self-interest intrudes, as does his “addiction” to Brewster’s power. My goal with Tennyson was to have the reader really care about him, yet also be angry with him for the wrong decisions he makes along the way. . . . Hopefully that’s outweighed by all the right decisions he makes, though.

Tennyson notes that pain is “rightfully ours, because everyone must feel their own pain—and as awful as that is, it’s also wonderful.” Can you elaborate on that statement? Do you think teens recognize the truth in the oxymoron?
Things can only be defined in relation to their opposite. The idea of being “happy” 24/7 is ridiculous. How would we even know what “happy” is, if we haven’t experienced unhappiness? How would we ever be able to appreciate joy, if we’ve never been in emotional pain? Our society is so much about either hiding or denying emotional “bad stuff,” I wanted to point out that it is our experiencing of the full range of human emotions that makes us complete human beings. So often teenagers feel that, when they go through dark times, it’s the end of the world. I want to remind them that “this too shall pass,” and if there’s something that brings you pain, always remember that it is merely setting the stage for something else that will bring you joy.

Many of your books seem to take very real feelings—such as being ignored (The Schwa Was Here) or understanding others’ pain (Bruiser)—and elevating the concept to an extreme level. Are there other feelings or issues you plan to address in future novels? What are you working on now?
Thank you for pointing that out! Yes, I like to take feelings and explore them from as many different perspectives as possible. I have several projects in the works, and in the wings. In addition to the third book in the Everlost series (Everfound), a sequel to Unwind and a third “Antsy Bonano” book, I’m also working on a novel called Challenger Deep, which uses the unimaginable depths of the Marianas Trench as a metaphor for mental illness. (Anyone interested in keeping up with the various projects can always visit me on my website, www.storyman.com, and can sign up as a fan on my Facebook page.)

Related content:
Review of Bruiser.

Unwed mothers are nothing new. But in today’s reality TV-fueled world, their plight is often glorified, and the very real challenges they face are diminished amid the spotlight. That’s not the case, however, for 14-year-old Mary Rudine (aka the girl named Mister). Just one handsome young boy, one breathless failure to say “no” and Mary’s life is turned upside down.

Addressing teen pregnancy—especially for a tween and teen audience—takes a mix of masterful writing, accessible format and a raw, honest voice. That’s just what author-illustrator Nikki Grimes delivers in A Girl Named Mister, a free verse novel just published by Zondervan.

“You have to really capture your reader immediately; that’s just a reality,” Grimes says. “Our lives are so busy now, and books are written so much differently than they were years ago.”

You know a character is good when it keeps you up at night, eager to turn the next page. But you know a character is great when it keeps its author up at night, eager to get her story on the page.

“This character would wake me up,” says Grimes, a New York City native who now lives in Southern California. “I could not get rid of her.”

Grimes, who among her accolades has received the Coretta Scott King Award and Honor (for both text and illustration) several times, has tackled tough and realistic topics before—such as life in foster homes (Jazmin’s Notebook), a subject she knew firsthand.

“It can’t help but influence you,” she says, referring to her own troubled childhood, in which she was shuttled between relatives and foster homes. “For me, reading and writing were my survival tools,” adds Grimes, who wrote her first poem at age 6.

Among all the topics she has touched on in her books, Grimes believes the subject of unwed mothers is a particularly important one, especially in light of the inaccurate or misleading messages often portrayed in the media. “[The book] is the only way I could respond to what’s happening in society,” she says.

Her approach, however, wasn’t just to relay Mary Rudine’s thoughts, fears and challenges. Rather, Grimes—a Bible scholar for more than 20 years—interweaves a secondary, yet parallel, story. In chapters presented in a different typeface, Grimes tells the story of another Mary—the biblical Mary—and her initial shock and awe at being an unwed mother in a time when that could have resulted in her stoning. (Interestingly, Grimes’ 2005 Coretta Scott King honor book, Dark Sons, also juxtaposes a Biblical tale—the father/son relationship of Abraham and Ishmael—with a modern story. The book has just been reissued by Zondervan in a new paperback edition.)

In A Girl Named Mister, the two Marys’ stories are similar, yet each is tempered by the social mores of the time.

Readers see the Biblical Mary question her miraculous pregnancy and what it will mean for her, for Joseph and in the eyes of her community. Likewise, the contemporary character, Mary Rudine, seeks acceptance and answers and prepares for her uncertain future—hoping that someone will help her make the right choices.

Initially afraid to tell her mother about her pregnancy, Mary soon realizes that her mother had a hunch something was wrong—but, even though they are close, both were simply too nervous to tell each other their concerns.

Mary stays at home and in school during the pregnancy—taking the looks and comments that come her way—and mentally tries to ready herself for the birth and aftermath. Grimes’ portrait of the teen is both realistic and believable, both in the way the teenage father all but disappears (figuratively and literally) after he learns of the pregnancy, and in the way Mary reacts to the pregnancy—with initial disbelief, then fear, then resolve.

“Her voice is strong,” Grimes says of the modern Mary. “She does struggle, so the message isn’t that there’s no struggle.” But, she adds, “There is a way to triumph.”

Triumph has different resolutions for both young mothers, but, ultimately, Grimes feels she has done the topic justice.

“My tendency is to leave a story open-ended,” she says. “Life is open-ended; there's always more to the story."

Brandon Mull is best known for his Fablehaven series, but young readers looking for adventure will get a big kick out of A World Without Heroes, the first book in the new Beyonders series.

A World Without Heroes tells the story of eighth grader Jason Walker and ninth grader Rachel, the only two "beyonders" (people from Earth) who have reached the world of Lyrian. As the book's title suggests, there are no more heroes in Lyrian—but Jason might be the guy for the job.

Before he headed out on his Beyonders tour, we contacted Mull at his home in Highland, Utah, to find out more about heroes, Frodo . . . and yodeling.

What was your favorite book as a child?
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The Narnia books really created my love of reading.

Where do you write?
I write in an office in my basement. Usually on the floor with a laptop. I'm highly distractable, so I need to be alone.

How would you describe the world where your novel takes place?
Lyrian is a fantasy world apart from our own. The main characters in the Beyonders cross over to Lyrian from our world. Lyrian has a long history. In the past, wizards used their powers to create a variety of magical races and species. Over time the wizards died off, but many of the races they engineered have survived. To help Lyrian feel truly elsewhere, I wanted to create creatures and races that I hadn't seen before.

Of all the characters you've created, which is your favorite and why?
So hard to pick! I try to only write about characters that interest me. The Blind King in the Beyonders is one of my favorites because he used to be a great swordsman and hero, but after he was captured and blinded, he lost his heroic status and lives a more anonymous life. As the series goes on, we get to see him pick himself up and try to be great again.

What has been the proudest moment of your career so far?
My Fablehaven launch parties have caused some of my proudest moments. We've had thousands of fans show up to watch the show we put on, and it feels cool to think that all these people came together to have a good time because they enjoy my crazy books.

The first book in the Beyonders series is called A World Without Heroes. Aside from your own characters, who is your favorite fictional hero?
I love Frodo from Lord of the Rings. I love that he feels like a humble, regular person with huge responsibilities thrust upon him.

If you weren't a writer, how would you earn a living?
Before I made my living writing fiction, I was paid to write advertisements and marketing copy. If I wasn't allowed to do any kind of writing, I'd probably have to fall back on yodeling.

Author photo by Laura Hanifin.