Once you've read Susan Vaught's new novel for teens, you're not likely to look at an overweight person in quite the same way again. After all, that obese girl you just passed on the sidewalk (averting your eyes to avoid gawking) probably has a circle of friends, a boyfriend, hopes, dreams and embarrassments, just like you.

Vaught, a practicing neuropsychologist who recently lost 170 pounds herself, tackles the issue of obesity head-on with insight and hilarious style in Big Fat Manifesto, the story of a high school senior who has no intention of living up to anyone's expectations of how a fat girl should act. Jamie, who writes a column for her school newspaper, proclaims to her fellow students, "I'm not a jolly round person. I'm a peevish, sarcastic, smart, dramatic round person." Jamie is indeed all of that and more, and she has a voice that's both outspoken and poignant and as engaging as any recent character in young adult fiction. "I'm fat, fat, fat," Jamies writes. "If the word makes you uncomfortable, that's your problem."

  Vaught, who spoke to BookPage from her farm 50 miles north of Nashville, says Jamie's voice interrupted her while she was working on another book. "It was right about the time that I had lost 70 or 80 pounds and people were beginning to notice that I was smaller," Vaught recalls. Just a few months earlier, when she weighed 350 pounds, "I had become so large that I was invisible, if that makes sense. People would look at me and then they would look away. And I knew why." The new, more positive reaction she got for being thinner and the feelings of confusion and anger that resulted worked their way into the character of Jamie, who demands that people accept her for what she is, but also struggles to accept herself.

Big Fat Manifesto is Vaught's seventh book for teens, and the follow-up to her well-received 2006 novel, Trigger, which tapped her experience as a neuropsychologist to explore the dilemma of a brain-injured boy who had tried and failed to commit suicide by shooting himself. "Trigger came out of my head so fast and so complete, and it was so based in things that I knew, I wasn't sure if I would ever write a book that strong again," the author says. "And then this book sort of wrote itself." 

Vaught divides her time between her two vocations, spending three days a week in private practice as a psychologist, specializing in the care of patients with structural damage to the brain, and three days a week writing. The issue of obesity was one she had struggled with most of her life, always unsuccessfully. "Since I was 10 years old, I had been trying to lose weight and everything I tried wouldn't last or it wouldn't work or I just couldn't make sense of it," she says. Suffering from diabetes and hypertension, Vaught was depressed and disheartened, convinced that she would never lose weight. And then her literary agent recommended a computer program, the Diet and Exercise Assistant, which tracks calories consumed and expended. "It keeps up with everything I put in my mouth if I just enter it," Vaught says. "Whatever is missing in my brain that allowed me to weigh 350 pounds in the first place, this program sort of replaces like a little computer chip." With tweaking from her doctor, Vaught began a program that allowed the pounds to fall off even more rapidly than she expected. "The first month, I continued to enter the calories, even if I had a bad day, and I began to understand where I was shooting myself in the foot all along," like the steak dinner at a popular chain restaurant that added 5,000 calories to her daily total. By avoiding these dining disasters, and starting a strength training program, Vaught dropped below 200 pounds in less than a year.

 The experience made her even more keenly aware of society's attitudes toward the obese. "When you're very large, life and the world beat up on you just as a matter of course. If you're going to a movie theater, you have to worry about whether you're going to fit in the seat. If you're flying, you have to worry about whether you'll be forced to buy two seats when you can't afford it," Vaught says. "You go to a store and you have to look at all the beautiful clothes you can never have." Like Vaught herself, however, Jamie refuses to dress down because of her size, always aiming to look stylish and snappy. But she's embarrassed by her overweight parents, who she feels look like slobs in their sweatpants and oversized clothes. Jamie is also hurt by her boyfriend's decision to have weight-loss surgery, causing her to question whether he really loves her as the oversized person she is.

Vaught's goal is for Jamie's "manifesto" to stir discussion, especially among thin people who are repelled by the obese. "I hope the book will open debate at different levels, she says, and force those reading it to look at their own thoughts about obesity and about big people and their stereotypes."

Many of Ronald Kidd's novels for children and young adults are built on keen historical research. Monkey Town (2006) explored East Tennessee in the 1920s during the infamous Scopes trial on the teaching of evolution. Kidd's latest, On Beale Street, offers readers a trip back to the Memphis of the mid-1950s, a city mired in Jim Crow racism but also the site of an upcoming musical explosion.

"Memphis is a seminal place," Kidd says. "As someone who as a kid listened to a transistor radio under my pillow, I got fascinated with the idea of a teenager in Memphis being exposed to black music and having it open up a world for him."

The protagonist in Kidd's new book for teens is 15-year-old Johnny Ross, a spunky and inquisitive young man facing identity and class issues. Johnny is also drawn to the rhythm and blues he hears on Beale Street, Memphis' musical mecca, and this passion leads him to landing a job with legendary producer Sam Phillips, whose Sun Records cut the first Elvis Presley hits and later helped launch the careers of music immortals like Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison and Jerry Lee Lewis. Kidd deftly merges the real-life Memphis music people and events with his cast of fictional characters.

The author, who lives in Nashville, was a musician himself in earlier days. "It's great to return to that in my writing," Kidd says. "It just seems like a bunch of stuff came together in Memphis in the '50s—the cult of celebrity, rock 'n' roll, how the blues went R&B—and I became fascinated with that point in history." Like his creator, Johnny Ross becomes enamored of the Memphis musicians and clubs and DJs of the day, even befriending Elvis and hanging with icons like guitarist Scotty Moore. Kidd asked Moore, now 76 and also a Nashville resident, to give his book a read in the manuscript stage to assure historical accuracy. Kidd also includes some valuable endnotes in the book, which delineate a dozen or so Memphis personages.

On Beale Street also works a strong racial theme, which becomes very personal for Johnny yet is also reflected in the confluence of musical styles, serving as a harbinger of Elvis' eventual success. "If I could find a white boy who sang like a Negro," Kidd quotes Phillips, "I'd make me a million dollars." Johnny Ross embodies the coming together of black and white. "I had to deal with the racial issue, which I embarked on with some trepidation," says the author. "Like who am I to write anything about the experience of being black in the U.S. or in Memphis at that time? But I thought the story called for it, and if I told it from the point of view of someone who is white, then that would give me a way in." The totally fictional side of Kidd's tale features credible characters who represent various aspects of the Memphis racial and economic divides, from Southern white bigots to at least one young black man who has strong ideas about justice and change. Johnny becomes fully caught up in the social collision, and surprising revelations have a dramatic impact on his future.

"I'm interested in the mixture and the sparks that are struck when different groups meet and clash," says Kidd. "Plus, the world that Johnny Ross discovers in this book is essentially gone. That's one reason I wanted to try to recapture it—because it was a really special, gritty place." When he's not a novelist, or working his day job as an editor of religious nonfiction, Kidd is also a playwright. "When I write plays," he says, "they're for adults or a general audience. But for some reason, when I write novels, they're for teenagers. It's nothing I turn off and on—it's simply the way I think about the story. It's always someone in their teenage years who's at a turning point in their lives."

Next up for Kidd is The Year of the Bomb, due out next spring. The setting is again the 1950s, his heroes four 13-year-old boys, his theme revolving around McCarthyism. "I do lots of historical research," Kidd says, adding with a chuckle, "it's hard to know when to stop. But between the Internet and books and helpful librarians, I'm always finding a pathway into my material."

Martin Brady is a musician and writer in Nashville.

Even superstars get the jitters. Christopher Paolini tries not to dwell on the huge expectations surrounding Brisingr, the third book in his blockbuster Inheritance Cycle fantasy series.

With the first two books in the series selling 15.5 million copies worldwide, Knopf is preparing for Brisingr's September 20 release with a 2.5 million-copy first printing, its biggest ever for a children's book. Meanwhile, fans are squealing messages like, "I can't wait!" and "OMG. I need it!" on web discussion boards."As an author, I found that I can't really allow myself to think about those things," 24-year-old Paolini says, speaking by phone from his home in Montana. "I actually fell into that trap with the first part of Brisingr… sat there and I started obsessing about every single word."

He worked past it by turning away from the keyboard and writing with an ink-dip pen on 80-pound parchment paper. His mother transcribed the pages. Now it's readers who are obsessing, spinning the meager bits of information Paolini has teased out to them into full-blown speculation about what will happen to Eragon, Saphira and the rest of the inhabitants of Alagaësia.

Among the clues: Eragon will meet a new and terrifying enemy ("He likes to laugh a lot and not in a good way," says Paolini), Eragon will meet a god and one of the characters gets pregnant.

Paolini says Brisingr is more complex than the two books that preceded it, Eragon and Eldest, in part because of its multiple points of view. For the first time, portions of the story are told through Saphira's eyes. How did he find the voice of the smart, loyal and brilliantly sapphire female dragon? "I drew upon my own experience of the pets and animals that I grew up around, especially some of the cats I had," he says. "I thought a dragon would be like a cat in some ways, that same sort of self-satisfied attitude."

Beyond that, weighty moral dilemmas and the sheer number of events make for a rich narrative, he says. The story is so complex, in fact, that halfway through the writing of the book, Paolini decided to turn it into two books. "At a certain point, I realized that if I wrote the rest of Brisingr as I'd planned, it was going to end up being about 2,000 pages," he says.

What had been billed for years as a trilogy became a four-book cycle. As it is, Brisingr is no lightweight at 784 pages. Paolini acknowledges that the book's sophistication reflects his growth as a writer, but he also sees it as the inevitable result of having spent nearly a decade immersed in the fictional world he created when he was just 15.

The home-schooled teenager had earned his high school diploma early and wasn't ready to plunge into college yet when he began writing Eragon. Two years later, he gave it to his parents to read. They decided to self-publish the book and by the age of 18, the boy who'd grown up sheltered, living in the shadow of Montana's Beartooth Mountains with his parents and younger sister, suddenly found himself touring libraries, bookstores and schools to peddle his book. And he did it while wearing a medieval costume.

Eventually, the book ended up in the hands of Michelle Frey, executive editor at Knopf Books for Young Readers, who offered Paolini a publishing contract. After that, success came at Paolini so hard and so fast that he found it difficult to fully grasp what he'd become.

"When Eragon came out I was—I'm going to use a cliché—pleased as punch, of course, and delighted, but I didn't really feel like I was a writer," he says. In fact, it's only been recently that he's felt comfortable using that word to describe himself.

Now that he has embraced the label, he's eager to keep growing and proving his abilities to himself. He knows that once he completes the fourth and final book in the cycle he will deeply miss Eragon and the land of Alagaësia, but he's looking forward to exploring other fictional worlds. He's already experimented with writing in different genres, including science fiction and noir.

And even as fans wait breathlessly to get their hands on Brisingr, Paolini is taking nothing for granted. "There's always this feeling like, well, I still remember when I didn't have this and it still might not stick around," he says. "It's good not to be 100 percent comfortable, because if you're 100 percent comfortable, you can lose your edge."

Karen Holt is a freelance writer who lives in Connecticut.

Two teenagers take off in a whirlwind journey and a quest for answers in Jennifer E. Smith’s second book for young adults, You Are Here. Along the way, they find out a little about each other and a lot about themselves.

Emma Healy and Peter Finnegan, both on the brink of their 17th birthdays, embark on a road trip—in matching Mustang convertibles—that will change their lives and their feelings for each other forever. Emma, a middle-of-the-road student and self-admitted misfit, has never quite understood how she is related to her academic-obsessed parents and multi-degreed, uber-successful siblings. She has always felt that there was a missing link in her life—until she finds a clue to a dark family secret hidden away in the attic.

On the other hand, Peter, a study geek and history buff, fits in with Emma’s family just fine—but not his own. His widower, police officer father cannot understand why Peter would ever want to leave their small upstate New York town or why he is obsessed with historic battlefields and far-off places instead of just being happy where he is. First separately, then together, Emma and Peter set off on a spontaneous road trip to find out for themselves who they are and where they belong.

Smith’s coming-of-age story, told intermittently through the eyes of both Emma and Peter, is remarkably insightful, heart-wrenchingly sad and laugh-out-loud funny. Through both Emma and Peter, we learn how the loss of someone you never really knew—in Emma’s case, a twin brother, and in Peter’s, a mother—can leave scars that run surprisingly deep. We see how an uninvited three-legged hitchhiker (a mangy but hilarious dog) can unlock hidden talents and emotions in a person. We witness how a friendship born out of patience, understanding and a little bit of teasing can lead to unexpected first love. And we see how the open road and a fresh perspective can help two teenagers find a new path to happiness.
Smith got her start in the publishing world working in a literary agency in New York City shortly after graduating from Colgate University in upstate New York, a location she later used as the setting for You Are Here. She had wanted to be a writer since the fourth grade, and after helping others get their starts in the literary world, Smith took the plunge into writing herself.

Having perused volumes upon volumes of adult literary fiction, Smith was anxious to focus on another genre. “That’s what steered me to young adult books,” the author recalls in an interview. “It’s a different world from adult, and it was nice to sit down and be the writer for once.” It also helped that she was a longtime fan of the genre. “I loved Where the Red Fern Grows and Bridge to Terabithia,” Smith says, “and I wanted to write a book that I would have liked to read when I was a kid, something wholesome and heartfelt.”

Smith’s first novel for young adults, The Comeback Season, was inspired by her love of baseball. A Chicago-area native, Smith was watching a Cubs baseball game on TV when she got the idea for the book. “I wrote the first two paragraphs of the novel right then—and they are the same now as when I wrote them,” she says. In fact, the book took her a mere four months to write. “It was a once in a lifetime experience,” Smith says, “and such a wonderfully easy process.” From there, Smith was convinced that YA was the right market for her. “The more I learned about YA books and the wonderful outpouring from kids and teachers, the more hooked I became.” She especially loves hearing from her readers. “The emails I have received have been so gratifying,” she says. “Kids have an unabashedly honest response to people’s work, and that’s the best part.”

After The Comeback Season was published, Smith went back to school to get her master’s degree in Creative Writing at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. While there, she started working on her second novel, You Are Here. “It was great to take a year to really focus on writing and traveling,” Smith recalls, “and it was nice to have a new perspective.” When Smith returned to New York, she went back into publishing—this time as an editor—and had to finish the book “on the side.” “I love my job,” Smith says, “and it’s been great to see the industry from all perspectives, but it does make writing a little slower.” Still, she hasn’t been that slow: she finished You Are Here in nine months.

The author’s experiences traveling through Europe and studying abroad leant a theme of perspective to the book as well. Her characters seem to be able to “find” themselves once they have stepped out of their normal comfort zones. For Emma, it takes tracing her family’s history back to her birth and visiting her long-lost brother’s grave to find out that she is the glue that has always bound her eclectic family together. For Peter, it takes a road trip to Gettysburg and a view from outside his small town’s limits to realize that where he actually wants to be is home.

Smith’s own journey is taking her further into the YA world, with two more books already underway. In addition, she’s promoting You Are Here with local readings, school visits and guest blogging for various YA sites. All the while, she is keeping her “day job with homework,” as she calls it, and continues to edit manuscripts for the adult literary world by day and write wonderful stories for her young adult audience by night. With her sophomore title already poised to take the YA world on an incredible voyage, Jennifer E. Smith has arrived.

Fans of The Hunger Games, the riveting and wildly popular novel by Suzanne Collins, have been eagerly awaiting the publication of the second book in the trilogy, Catching Fire on September 1. And they won’t be disappointed.

Katniss Everdeen hails from District 12, a poor, coalmining region, part of the nation of Panem, with its shining Capitol surrounded by 12 districts, each with its own products and geography. The Capitol is focused on controlling the districts; rebellion or dissension simply isn’t tolerated. In order to maintain its tight hold on the outlying regions, for the past 74 years the Capitol has required that each district send one boy and one girl between ages 12 and 18 into a horrifying, televised spectacle—a fight to the death.

In Catching Fire, Katniss, an expert with a bow and arrow who has grown up hunting in order to help feed her sister and widowed mother, begins to encounter the ramifications of the events that propelled her into the spotlight of the 74th Hunger Games, when she volunteered to take her little sister’s place. She now finds that her actions there have placed her, as well as her friends and family, in even greater danger.

Although she’s working assiduously on the final book in the trilogy, Suzanne Collins graciously gave BookPage some of her time to discuss the books. Despite her success, Collins is friendly, forthcoming and down-to-earth (her two kids keep her that way, she says).

And, a promise: no spoilers!

You’ve been a successful writer of books such as Gregor the Overlander series. Did the overwhelming reaction to The Hunger Games take you by surprise?
The reaction did surprise me somewhat. I’ve been writing for television a long time, books not so long. Writing for TV is very collaborative, and relatively anonymous. Since there are usually so many writers involved, there’s not much attention on an individual writer.

Has it been difficult to find time to write?
It has been harder to find time to write, especially last fall, when I was promoting The Hunger Games, finishing Catching Fire and developing book three. However, the good news is I think we’re right on schedule!

At what point did you know that your story was a trilogy?
I knew from the beginning. Once I’d thought through to the end of the first book, I knew there would be repercussions from the events that take place there. So I actually proposed it as a trilogy from the outset, with the main story laid out. I started out as a playwright, and have an M.F.A. from New York University in dramatic writing. After I graduated, I began writing for television. Since I’ve worked in television so long, the three-act dramatic structure comes naturally to me. But I don’t like to “over-outline.” I like to leave breathing room for the characters to develop emotionally—which they often do. Characters always have surprises for you. They try on possibilities and even make some decisions you don’t anticipate. It’s a good thing, and I think it indicates that a story has vitality.

In Catching Fire we see a side of Katniss where she is not always as sure-footed or aware, especially in matters of political intrigue.
I think the thing to remember is how limited her experience is to her world and politics. Even as she becomes more embroiled in events, no one sees that it is in her best interest to educate her.

It’s rare to find a book with two such appealing romantic heroes as Peeta and Gale. Do you know how the romantic triangle will turn out in Book Three?
Yes, I do. [Sorry, readers, that’s about all she would say!]

It’s impossible not to ask about the third book and the movie. Will you be involved in any way with the film?
Yes! The Hunger Games has been optioned and I’m signed on to do the screenplay. I am looking forward to telling the story in a different medium. Of course we will be handling the subject matter very carefully and anticipate that the film will have a PG-13 rating.

What do you hope these books will encourage in readers?
I hope they encourage debate and questions. Katniss is in a position where she has to question everything she sees. And like Katniss herself, young readers are coming of age politically.

Where do you live and what does your family think about your success?
We now live in Connecticut. We lived in New York City for a long time but with two children we were bursting out of our apartment. I have a daughter, age 10 and my son, 15. My son’s a great reader for me. And they both have a good time teasing me about all the attention.

What are some of your favorite things to do when you’re not writing?
I like to read and watch old movies. And these days, when I can, sleep!

Deborah Hopkinson’s new books for young readers are Michelle and Stagecoach Sal.

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Read Deborah Hopkinson's October 2008 review of The Hunger Games.

What if World War I was fought with giant walking machines and genetically modified monsters instead of airplanes and ammunition? What if, instead of telephones and radios, long-distance communication was carried out by talking lizards and trained birds? What if our version of history was somehow turned on its head and futuristic tales were spun instead? 

This is just what happens in Scott Westerfeld’s exciting new novel for young adults, Leviathan. Westerfeld treats readers to a captivating story about a young boy in the early 1900s, who happens to be the orphaned son of Archduke Ferdinand. History teaches us that the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife ignited the sparks that led to World War I. In Leviathan, this bit of history remains the same, but the details of the war are dramatically different: Britain and her allies are armed with a fleet of Darwinian-created “beasties,” including a flying, hydrogen-burping whale, while Austria and her allies fight with enormous “clankers” made of metal and gears, and run by classic engines.

For Westerfeld, whose previous works for teens include the Uglies and Midnighters trilogies, writing in the genre known as “steampunk” has been an interesting challenge. “It’s about rewriting history in an alternative way—and making it better,” he says in a telephone interview from New York, a day after arriving in the city from his native Australia. Westerfeld and his wife Justine Larbalestier, also a successful YA author, divide their time between the two locations.

Although steampunk has been around for awhile (think H.G. Wells and Jules Verne), it gained notoriety in the 1980s and ’90s. The genre gets its name from the time period in which most stories are set, the Victorian era, when steam power was king. Westerfeld became aware of the genre when he came across a role-playing game called Space 1899, in which players explore futures that could have been. “That was the first time I realized that people were really doing this stuff and thinking it through,” he says. 

Westerfeld especially enjoyed researching and writing about the technology of the era. “Everything looked weird at the time, sort of clunky and fantastical: airplanes had three wings, tanks looked like boilers on tractor treads,” he says. He particularly liked researching zeppelins—both the original giant flyers and his own genetically fabricated creations. “I have a big airship fetish,” Westerfeld admits, “and thought a living airship would be a kind of fascinating thing.” To do research, he and Justine went to the headquarters of Zeppelin Corporation in Switzerland, where a smaller version of the historically giant airships are still being produced. “We got to go up in one and that was cool,” Westerfeld says.

He also drew a bit of inspiration from the biological sciences: Darwin and his true-life granddaughter Dr. Nora Darwin

Barlow play major roles in the book.  “Scientists of that era were the original action hero-adventurers,” Westerfeld explains, “and I thought it would be fun to make Darwin a character.” Indeed, the author takes Darwinian philosophy to a new level, creating a world in which Darwin has discovered DNA threads and has been able to manipulate them to create hybrid animal species: jellyfish that float through the air like hot air balloons, lizards that talk like parrots, and of course, the title creature Leviathan, the aforementioned flying whale.

To help us visualize these fanciful creatures, Westerfeld enlisted the artful talents of Keith Thompson, who created more than 50 illustrations for the book. “It was a very collaborative process,” he says. “He did with the pictures the same thing I was doing with the text. It was like being a novelist and an art director at the same time.” After Thompson drew the magnificent creatures and ornate machines that Westerfeld had imagined, the author edited the text to reflect the details that Thompson had added.

Westerfeld’s exuberance for the technology of the era—and beyond—comes through clearly in his writing. From mechanized horses to metal-eating bats, eight-legged battleships and light-producing earthworms, he has created a world where technological and biological sciences collide. “It’s a war between two completely different world-views,” he notes.

The same could be said of the early 20th century, and the events of the era created fodder for Westerfeld’s storyline. “The great thing about doing historical research is that you can look back and say, if they had only done this it could have all been different. It’s a fascinating perspective.” By creating the alternate reality of Leviathan, Westerfeld is able to inspire his readers—young and old—to think about what really did happen at that time in history, how close we might have come to the fictional story, and how the fate of the world can hinge on seemingly innocuous events.

Heidi Henneman writes from New York.

Barry Lyga’s debut YA novel, The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl, told the story of two high school outcasts: one a self-described geek who spent most of his time writing and illustrating his comic book, and one an angry, depressed girl still reeling from the death of her mother. Fanboy and Goth Girl touched a chord in many readers, and although Lyga has since published several more books, his fans kept asking to see more of those two characters. In Goth Girl Rising, he brings them together once again. Emotions run high and the outcome is uncertain when the two reunite; the result is an honest and thoughtful exploration of friendship, anger and love.

Lyga answered questions about the new book from his home in Las Vegas.

Your three previous YA novels have all been written from the perspective of a teen boy. Was it difficult to get inside the mind of a teen girl for this book?
You know, I worried about that . . . for roughly 10 seconds. The instant I sat down and started writing, the concern went away. Maybe if I was writing about some other teen girl, it would have been difficult, but this is Kyra. I know her. I know her incredibly well. I just said to myself, "OK, I'm Kyra now. What am I thinking?" and the book flew from there.

You make quite a few references to comic book writers such as Brian Michael Bendis and Neil Gaiman in the Fanboy and Goth Girl books. Why did you decide to incorporate real people into these stories, and what was it like to write about them as characters?
I had decided early on that these stories took place in the real world, where there were comic books about Superman and Spider-Man, not in some alternate universe with characters like SuperbGuy and Arachnid-Kid. I could have made up my own ersatz versions of the characters, but it just seemed phony and transparent. Once I decided to use the actual names of the characters, it was just a short step to incorporate the actual names of the people who work on those characters. Using a name like Bendis or Gaiman will immediately communicate volumes of information to someone who knows about those guys, and if a reader doesn't know anything about them, it's not like the story will be harmed by that not knowing. A reader who doesn't know who Bendis is, for example, would just assume I made him up. (And I'm sure Bendis would be thrilled to know someone out there thinks I invented him!) I just felt that using these public figures made the book more authentic, grounding it in reality.

As to what it was like to write about them as characters: It was slightly nerve-wracking at first, but then I just let go and allowed myself to enjoy it. Neil Gaiman is mentioned in the books, but Bendis actually shows up, so I was most concerned with writing his dialogue and getting him right. When I wrote the book, I hadn't met him, so I was flying blind, but then a friend of mine who knows him read the book and said, "Oh my God—you got him! This is exactly how he talks!" So that was cool.

Kyra talks about comic books as having a simple structure, created from basic building blocks such as panel borders and word balloons. Having recently written a book about Wolverine (from the X-Men comics), do you think that's true? How is writing a comic book different from writing a novel or short story?
Well, first of all, the Wolverine book I did (Wolverine: Worst Day Ever) wasn't actually a comic book—it's an illustrated novel. So the concerns aren't really the same as writing a comic book. But I have written comics in the past, and the differences between comics and prose are pretty stark. Each format has its strengths and weaknesses, and there are very complicated distinctions—too complicated to really expound on them here and now beyond some generalizations. In comics, you're really telling a story to the artist, who then interprets it for the audience. It's more akin to filmmaking, in that you have to think visually. In prose, you have the opportunity to get much deeper into the head of the protagonist, but lose some of the visceral thrill of immediate reader identification with a scene, character or moment.

You had a story in the recent YA anthology Geektastic: Stories From the Nerd Herd, and some of your characters—notably Fanboy—consider themselves geeks. Do you identify as a geek? What do you think defines a geek?
Yeah, I guess I identify as a geek, which isn't as shameful these days as it used to be, now that geeks have sort of reclaimed that term and turned it around. I used to do a presentation in schools called "Geekery: An Analysis," which was a half-serious, half-tongue-in-cheek analysis of what a geek was and how geeks rule the world. I think geeks are people who are obsessed with something, possibly obsessed beyond the bounds of what is considered good mental health, and don't mind letting that obsession dictate large portions of their lives. To that degree, crazy sports fans are geeks—they just happen to be geeks for something that society doesn't look down on. There's no qualitative difference between a guy who's learning to speak Klingon and a guy who can recite chapter and verse of every inning of every game in the World Series dating back to 1912. It's just that society has decided that the latter is acceptable and the former is risible.

Screw society. 🙂

All of your books and stories so far have been set at the same school, at roughly the same time and with many of the same characters appearing in them. How do you keep track of the timeline of events and the interactions between characters? Is there a specific time in your mind when all these stories are taking place?
The "specific time" is always roughly "now." I want the stories to feel as if they take place in a loosely definable age that could always be right now. I realize that the comic book references will, inevitably, date the books to a degree, but that was a balance I decided was worth seeking—countering timelessness with immediate identification.

As to how I keep track: Well, most of it is just in my head. I do have a list of all of the teachers and various adults because they're less immediately present in my mind, but the kids are no problem. The kids just tell their stories and things seem to work out.

Your books often contain some raw dialogue and graphic scenes, and have dealt with issues such as suicide and sexual abuse. What makes you decide to include those elements in your writing? Do you worry about your books being censored or banned?
I'll take the second question first: Yeah, I think about it. I'm not sure "worry" is the right word because it sort of implies that I sit around stressing about it, which I don't. It flits through my head, but I don't let that impact how I write or what I write. Our best efforts to the contrary, there will always be a confederation of idiots out there who want to ban books. Sometimes they'll want to ban mine. I prefer to deal with it when it happens and not give them one ounce of my precious thought in advance.

As to the first question: It's not really a decision. It's not like I sit down to write a book and think, "Hmm, what topic or salty language can I add to this?" The topics, the language—these things are integral to the story. They're crucial organs. I write what I write and the way I write it because I'm writing for teens and about teens. This is the world they live in. These are the words they speak. I'm not inventing any of this. I'm just taking it in, massaging it and turning it around for everyone to see. It would be dishonest to write otherwise, I think.

What kind of responses have you gotten from teens who have read your books?
For the most part, great enthusiasm! It's terrific. I think most gratifying have been the kids who write to tell me that they never liked reading until they read one of my books. Most authors have that experience, I believe, and it's great. To think that you've opened up a whole new world to this person. Reading saved my life as a kid—it was the one thing that kept me sane when the world around me made no sense. So to be able to give that gift back into the world is just tremendously fulfilling.

In the acknowledgments for Goth Girl Rising, you say that you never planned a sequel to The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl, but that you received lots of emails from fans who wanted the story to continue. Do you think that your fans will be satisfied with the way Goth Girl Rising ends? Will Fanboy and Goth Girl's story continue in another book?
Oh, wow. I have no idea if people will be satisfied. I'm not even sure I want people to be satisfied by the ending. Sometimes I get hassled for my endings because I tend not to tie everything up in a nice, neat little package, but I think at times an untidy ending—something that lingers and gnaws at your brain—can be more satisfying than something that just drops all the answers in your lap and says, "Here! Ta-da!" I hope people who read the book will get to the end and say, "Oh, OK, I get it," and then sit back and speculate on their own as to what might happen next. And I hope they'll enjoy that.

I don't know about another book. I tend to think not. I think with Goth Girl Rising, I've taken these characters as far as I can. Or should. I think everything that happens next is pretty easily predicted, and easy predictions don't make for great storytelling.

Then again, I never thought I would write the sequel, so who knows!

Kristina Springer is unequivocal and unabashed about her love of coffee. She drinks it often, her kitchen is espresso-themed and she’s a devoted customer of her local Starbucks. In fact, during the horse-and-carriage segment of her wedding, she and her husband halted the horses so they could pop in to get coffees and take photos.

It’s fitting, then, that Springer’s debut young adult novel, The Espressologist, is set in a coffee shop—and was written in one, too. Plus, a coffee-related skill Springer possesses was imparted to her main character, 17-year-old Jane Turner: the ability to size up people based on their choice of coffee drink.

“When we were dating, my husband and I would go to coffee shops to hang out and people-watch,” Springer said in an interview from her home just outside Chicago, where she lives with said husband and four young children. “After a while, it occurred to me that I could tell what people will order.”

What remained entertainment for Springer became a matchmaking tool for protagonist Jane. During her shifts at Wired Joe’s, Jane keeps careful notes about customers’ quirks, preferences and characteristics and uses her coffee clairvoyance to steer them toward potential romantic partners.

Jane keeps her unusual skill a secret from mercurial manager Derek, until he overhears a fellow barista refer to Jane as an “Espressologist” and, ever alert to ideas that might boost sales, demands to know the details. That’s all it takes to make the nickname official: Derek decides that, on Friday nights, customers can come in for a coffee and Espressology, courtesy of Jane. Not surprisingly, all sorts of interesting situations ensue.

Springer does a spot-on job of creating those situations, not least by speaking fluent teenager. Anyone who’s worked in a service-industry job will nod in recognition while reading passages about snarky customers and cranky coworkers—and anyone who’s been a teenager will relate to the romantic tension that builds as Jane makes matches for her friends but doesn’t realize she’s overlooking her own perfect romantic partner.

The atmosphere of Wired Joe’s is just right, too. The book’s pages aren’t coffee-scented, but they could be, considering every word was crafted in that favorite Starbucks. Springer says, “I think people thought I was crazy. . . . I was always looking at customers, and I’d hang over the counter after someone ordered a drink and watch how they made it.” She adds, “After a while, I told [the Starbucks employees] what I was doing, and they were very supportive.”

It’s an approach and environment that works for Springer; she says that, although she’s only able to set up at the coffee shop a couple of times a week for a few hours each time, she’s written several novels, including a middle-grade novel due out next year called My Fake Boyfriend Is Better Than Yours.

Now an avid writer of fiction, Springer says she’s long been a devoted reader: “I read tons of books as a young adult; I really liked series. I read 100 of the Sweet Valley High books, and The Girls of Canby Hall books. I was drawn to female authors and characters as a kid.”

Speaking of female authors, Springer says she didn’t have Jane Austen’s Emma in mind when she wrote The Espressologist, but when the book was previewed at the American Library Association conference last summer, Austen fans noticed the similarities and were eager to meet her. When it’s pointed out that she was a bit Austen-like in writing the book—sitting back, quietly observing and writing about people—she says laughingly, “It wasn’t intentional!” But, like Austen, she says, “I eavesdrop all the time. It’s part of the [writer’s] job description.”

Springer adds, “I still don’t know how I did this. I never thought I’d be good at writing fiction,” particularly after obtaining a nonfiction-centric master’s degree in writing and working in technical writing for many years.

“Maybe I just found the right genre and age group,” she says. “My natural voice must be the teen voice.”

Linda M. Castellitto is a former barista who favors tea over coffee.

Motivated by a desire to interest his son, Jack, in reading, super-successful author James Patterson took his first step into young adult fiction in 2005 with the Maximum Ride series, which—like his books for adults—soared straight to the top of bestseller lists. Now the seemingly tireless Patterson is launching a new series for teen readers with the supernatural adventure story Witch & Wizard. The heroes are 15-year-old Wisty (a witch) and 17-year-old Whit (a wizard), a sister and brother whose teenaged existence is rudely interrupted by the arrival of henchmen representing The New Order, a totalitarian regime bent on suppressing any hint of nonconformity. We reached the prolific Patterson at his home office in Palm Beach, Florida, to ask about the new book, his efforts to get kids excited about reading and more. The New Order likely would not approve.

Witch & Wizard paints a foreboding picture of what the world would be like if innovation and curiosity were criminal. What inspired you to tell this story?
The idea for The New Order came about after thinking, what would it be like to have all art, music and freedom of expression taken away? And what if the youth were somehow enabled to fight back for these freedoms that they hold so dear?

What sort of research did you do for the book?
You’ll find that the book is eerily similar to a lot that has happened in recent history. It’s real scary stuff—and scarier still is that people really have enforced such laws outside of Whit and Wisty’s fictitious world.

What do you hope readers will get out of Witch & Wizard?
I don’t really do messages, but I do like a good story. And I hope readers get lost in this one. The book introduces a new world—or worlds, actually—and a strong, fiery brother-and-sister duo. They learn they are a little different when their powers start up, powers that are enhanced as the world around them gets more dangerous. For those who have been waiting for a series as mouthwatering and addictive as Harry Potter, this’ll do it.

Did your son give you any interesting and/or surprising feedback?
Jack is a tough critic. I usually come to him with the finished package and pray that he likes it.

Were you an avid reader as a child?
Although I was a very good student (and high school valedictorian) growing up in Newburgh, New York, I had very little interest in reading for enjoyment—at least initially. I only read when I was required to read. Later in college, when I took a night-shift job at a local hospital to help pay my tuition, I started reading a lot. That’s when I fell in love with books.

How does the child and teen you were then inform your books for young readers today?
I always had a creative spirit. It was when I was older, working at that hospital, that I realized I couldn’t go any longer without writing down all the wild stuff I was witnessing.

What kills me is that so many kids, like me as a boy, miss out on the joy of reading. I believe we should spend less time worrying about the quantity of books children read and more time introducing them to quality books that will turn them on and then them into lifelong readers—they’ll thank us for it.

Do you have a different approach to writing your books for young readers vs. writing your adult fiction?
I don’t discriminate against ideas on the basis of the audiences they’re best for.  I like to think I do romances when it’s a romantic storyline, I do thrillers when they’re thrilling, and I write for kids when the idea for a story would work best with them. The various characters bring about the books’ differences more than a conscious decision to write a different way.

What do you hope to accomplish with your children’s book website, ReadKiddoRead.com?
We need to let parents know on a regular basis that “good parents give great books.” It’s surprising how many people don’t really think to do that; they rely on schools, or think the reading habit will kick in on its own. ReadKiddoRead lists only the best books out of the thousands of children’s books published every year—it’s an easy tool for parents to see what’s out there that will actually work to get their kids engaged. I also talk to a lot of great authors, and we give away free books every month.

Will there be more Whit and Wisty books? Any tidbits you can share?
Assuming they make it out alive in the first . . . yes, there will be more.

What’s next?
Stay tuned for an illustrated series I’m working on about middle school. And the sixth book in the Maximum Ride series, Fang, will be out in March.

Photo by Kelly Campbell.

CORRECTION: This article has been updated to reflect the fact that the book's main characters are siblings but not twins.

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Imagine spending a week totally unplugged: no iPod, no Facebook, no e-mail or voicemail or text messages. It may sound impossible, but that’s exactly what popular author Rachel Cohn (co-author of Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist) did, and she lived to tell the tale. Cohn’s “technology detox” taught her a lot about just how reliant we’ve all become on the technology in our lives, not only for information but also for connection. “What I learned is that it’s very lonely,” Cohn says. “We’ve gotten so used to having that phone in our hands and having all that information at our disposal, but all of a sudden you feel so isolated.”

Cohn, a self-confessed couch potato, tackled her technology detox as a way to understand the heroine of her newest novel, Very LeFreak. Veronica (known as Very) is a first-year student at Columbia. She sleeps cuddled with her laptop across her chest and her iPhone in her pocket so that she’ll never miss a phone call, text message or e-mail. The major accomplishment of her freshman year is creating The Grid, a social networking site for her dorm, but when the flash mobs and parties organized on The Grid start getting out of control, Very’s previously promising future at Columbia is suddenly in doubt. Meanwhile, Very’s got some pretty big issues in her past that she’s never really acknowledged. If she turns off all the noise that surrounds her, she might have no choice but to really listen to her own heart.

At least that’s what Very’s friends and family hope when they drag her, kicking and screaming, to ESCAPE (Emergency Services for Computer-Addicted Persons Everywhere), a treatment center in the wilds of Vermont, which seems a million miles away from New York and from the technology she’s had to leave behind. And ESCAPE is no mere flight of fancy, as Cohn explains, noting that there is a technology addiction treatment center called ReSTART in Washington state. “This is being looked at as a real addiction now,” she says, “in the same way we talk about drug addiction or alcoholism.”

Very’s time at ESCAPE might prompt her to deal with the past—and perhaps to open herself up to love. But how does Cohn characterize her own complicated relationship with technology? The author, whose writing is well known for including musical references, used to listen to music—loudly—whenever she was writing. “I don’t anymore, oddly,” she remarks. “As I’m aging, I can’t stand all the noise. Once I get past the opening sections of a novel, into my comfort zone, though, then music is on in the background.” For Cohn, who listens to the Berkeley, California, university radio station, the absence of KALX was one of the starkest silences during her break from technology: “The DJs feel like family in a lot of ways, and not having them here felt wrong, too quiet.”

Now that Cohn’s plugged back in, she’s grown more appreciative—and more thoughtful—about the role of technology in our lives. Readers, too, might be inspired to view technology differently after reading Very’s outrageous but thought-provoking story. “Go online for a specific reason, because otherwise it’s just a gigantic waste of time,” advises Cohn. “Limit it. Go out and live at the same time.”

Norah Piehl writes from Brookline, Massachusetts. For her interview with Rachel Cohn, she tried out a new piece of technology—a headset for her cell phone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Levithan and John Green are two of the biggest names in teen fiction today; Levithan made a splash with his 2003 debut Boy Meets Boy and has seen 2006’s Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist (co-written with Rachel Cohn) turned into a movie, while Green’s first two novels, Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines, won the 2006 Printz Award and a 2007 Printz Honor, respectively. Now they’ve co-written a new book: Will Grayson, Will Grayson, about two teenage boys named (you guessed it) Will Grayson, who meet quite unexpectedly one night in Chicago, and also about Tiny Cooper—writer, director and star of the world’s most fabulous high school musical.

BookPage asked Levithan and Green to shed a little light on the inspiration for Will Grayson, Will Grayson and the process of writing it together.

How did the idea for this project come about?
David: It came to me in a dream. A guy I didn’t know was singing “Alaska! Alaska!” and then, before I knew it, he was handing me a sheaf of pages saying, “Here is my half of our book. Where the hell are yours?”
John: David is lying. For one thing, it took a lot longer than that. (We started discussing this project more than five years ago.) David and I became friends after he read an advanced copy of Looking for Alaska; after a while, he told me about this idea for a book about two guys with the same name whose paths cross in the middle of the book. I loved the idea. Then it was just the small matter of writing it, which took a while.

Has either of you ever had a friend like Tiny Cooper? What would it be like to be Tiny’s friend in real life?
David: I have friends who are that gay, but none who are that large.
John: And I have friends who are that large, but none who are that gay. I did have friends in high school who were charismatic and overwhelming in the way Tiny is, and I wanted to write about how you forge a real friendship amid the performances inherent to being in high school.

Will Grayson, Will Grayson turns out to be a sort of love story, although the central romance is between friends rather than lovers. Did you know from the start that this would be a book about love? And how do you feel about the word “bromance”?
David: You can’t actually have a romance between friends. That sort of defeats the definition of the word “romance.” The word you’re looking for is “love.” It’s a love between friends, just as there’s also love between lovers, or possible lovers, or even ex-lovers. Same holds true for “bromance”—it’s just a clever word used to avoid the word love, for straight boys who don’t want that old-fashioned taint of gayness. Dudes, you love each other. Deal with it.
John: I think the relentless focus on the kind of love that involves French kissing has made us all pretty crazy, frankly, and I guess I maybe wanted to write against that, although not consciously. Consciously, I just wanted to write a story about best friends.

You’ve both collaborated with other authors on other projects in the past. What was it like for the two of you to work together? What are some of the challenges and rewards of working with a collaborator?
David: I love the fact that when I was writing this book, I knew exactly who my audience was—John and his wife Sarah. It made me raise my game and go places I never would have gone on my own.
John: The challenge is the same whether or not I’m collaborating: to empathize with your reader and to tell a story that will matter to him or her. But the mechanics of going about that challenge change when you’re collaborating, because you have someone to help refine your thinking and expand your vision of what might happen. I really enjoy it.

Were either of you ever surprised at how the other one wrote a particular scene or character? Were there any disagreements about where the story might go or how the characters should act?
David: There was dueling. There were fisticuffs. There was one very fateful game of rock-paper-scissor. And he wouldn’t let me use the talking Nordic lawn gnome because, and I quote, “Libba Bray already did that better than you ever could, David.”
John: If there had been any fisticuffs, they would have been very humorous fisticuffs, indeed.

Do you expect that readers will be able to figure out which of you wrote each Will Grayson?
David: I thought so, but I’ve been proven wrong many, many times in this regard. To the point that I don’t want our answers to give away who wrote who.
John: Ideally, it won’t cross their minds, because they’ll be inside the story as a story.

Music plays a big role in this and many of the other books that you’ve both written. Why do you think music is so important to teenagers? Do you try to stay informed about what’s popular with that age group?
John: I have no idea what kind of music teenagers like, but I also had no idea what they liked when I was a teenager. I listen very broadly (although not as broadly as David), and I assume that my readers do, too.
David: The music’s all over the map in this book. I mean, we have Neutral Milk Hotel and we have Broadway showstoppers. Which is what I love about music, and by extension, life. 

David’s debut novel, Boy Meets Boy, has been credited with creating the “gaytopia” genre of teen literature, in which gay teen characters are fully accepted in their communities. Do you think Will Grayson, Will Grayson fits into that genre?
David: That’s a genre? Nobody told me! Is anyone else writing in it besides me? In that regard, I feel there isn’t anything utopic about the gay in Will Grayson, Will Grayson—it’s not a creation, but more of a reflection of where a lot of kids are now.
John: I think it will read more utopian to adults than it will to contemporary teenagers.

Will there ever be a soundtrack released for Tiny’s musical, Tiny Dancer/Hold Me Closer?
David: I want fans to make YouTube videos singing the songs. Lots of YouTube videos singing the songs.
John: Yeah, I’d rather the soundtrack come from them than from us.

What projects are you both working on now? Do you have any plans to work together again in the future?
David: I have a new book with Rachel Cohn, Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares, coming out in October. Then a book about adults, The Lover’s Dictionary, coming out next year. And, yes, I would work again with Mr. Green in a nanosecond.
John: I’m working on a new novel set on a desert island. As for reuniting with David: Our plan is to commence another five-year process in five years, so look for the follow-up in 2020.

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