At a time when teen fiction is dominated by vampires, werewolves and time travel, first-time author Ruta Sepetys has written a novel whose horrors are all too real.

Exposing the agonies endured by victims of Josef Stalin’s regime, Between Shades of Gray grips readers from the first page with its against-the-odds survival story. Teenager Lina and her family are forced by the Soviet secret police to leave their home in Lithuania in 1941 and travel in a miserable, crammed train car to labor camps in Siberia, on the verge of starvation. They eventually end up north of the Arctic Circle, where they endure hardships so extreme that readers will be shocked to learn this novel is rooted in historical events.

During an interview with BookPage, Sepetys explains that her connection to this atrocity is personal. Her grandfather was an officer in the Lithuanian army. He was on execution lists when the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania in 1939, so he and his wife and son fled to Austria, then Germany, and eventually settled in America. The family members they left behind were deported to work camps and imprisoned.

As Sepetys writes in her author’s note, Stalin was responsible for more than 20 million deaths—including more than a third of the population of Lithuania. But the story of the Baltic deportations is not a well-known part of history. During our conversation, Sepetys explains that, after World War II, people living in Soviet-occupied countries could not speak about Soviet crimes for fear of being punished.

“It’s as if the voice of an entire generation was swallowed,” Sepetys says. “The story sort of went dark and now the people that still have ties to it are in their late 80s. A whisper is left and we’re just about to lose it.”

On her first trip to Lithuania, as an adult, Sepetys met family members and asked to see old pictures. They had to tell her that they’d burned the photos when her grandfather fled—they couldn’t let anyone know they were related.

When she learned of this tragic history, Sepetys saw it as her responsibility to share the story with the world, and tell it as accurately as possible.

“My freedom and everything I have has cost me theirs. My freedom, in the U.S., because my father left, had cost them their freedom. And that’s very heavy, but it made me even more determined that I was going to do this.”

Her family warned that “the world just isn’t interested in this story,” but Sepetys refused to accept that advice. As it turns out, she was right. At the time of our interview, there had been 22 foreign sales of Between Shades of Gray, including one in Lithuania. “This is not about me at all; this is about their story and honoring the people and their experience,” she says.

Though she wanted to share Lithuania’s history, it was important that it be wrapped in fiction. When Sepetys talked to people about their experience during the Soviet occupation, many of her interview subjects had a condition.

“So many people told me, I’ll tell you what happened but you have to promise not to use my name. They were so terrified. Fifty years had passed but the pain was still so raw,” she says. “Fifty years had passed but their hands were still shaking when they spoke.”

Sepetys honored their wishes by drawing on their experiences to create memorable characters. The two who will probably stick with teen readers the most are Lina, the 15-year-old main character, and Andrius, a boy she meets on the long, harrowing train ride to Siberia and with whom she shares a budding romance. The plot centers on the remarkable survival story of Lina and her family as they are forced to travel to different labor camps in extreme conditions—including a camp that is literally at the North Pole.

Although Between Shades of Gray is Sepetys’ debut novel, she is no stranger to the creative process. She has worked in the music business for 20 years, currently as the owner of an artist management company based in Nashville. Besides her day job, she is hard at work on her second book—the story of a murder set in 1950s-era New Orleans.

Sepetys feels that she has found a home with historical fiction. “History holds secrets, and around every corner there is some little-known story,” she says. “Through studying mistakes from the past, hopefully we can learn from our mistakes and create hope for a more just future.”

A reluctant convert to the young adult genre, John Son resisted writing Finding My Hat, his debut novel, for almost 18 months. Son says his friend Amy Griffin, an editor at Scholastic's Orchard Books imprint, was working on a new line of titles called First Person Fiction, which focused on the immigrant experience. She'd seen one of his stories in Zoetrope magazine in 1999 and thought he'd be right for a First Person Fiction book.

Son, however, wasn't sure he agreed. "I never intended to write for a young adult audience and didn't know if I really had something important to say about the immigrant experience," he explains.

Griffin had planted the seed of an idea, however, and Son found himself reading more and more YA books. He read Burger Wuss by M.T. Anderson, and Rats Saw God by Rob Thomas, and lost any remaining skepticism about the genre. "These books blew me away. They weren't like the YA books I read when I was a young adult. I identified with these characters a lot more," he told BookPage during a recent telephone interview.

But it was a New York Review of Books reprint of Darcy O'Brien's 1977 novel A Way of Life Like Any Other that convinced Son to start writing. "I just love the entire tone of the book," he explains. "That was the ideal I wanted to approach." Son's book, like O'Brien's, is a humorous, straightforward take on coming-of-age with plenty of comic potential. In Finding My Hat, narrator Jin-Han grows from a toddler to a teenager, traveling with his family from Chicago to Memphis to Houston as his father searches for a better way to support the family. The voice of the book is convincing all along the age-spectrum: Jin-Han's confusion on his first day of nursery school rings just as true as his endearing gullibility on class-picture day in elementary school, and the excitement and embarrassment he experiences when he falls for his high-school lab partner.

Son says that, as his writing progressed, he found his views were changing. "I realized I like writing for this age group. I fell in love with it, because writing for this audience seems more pure; there are fewer stylistic elements in the writing you have to just clearly paint the picture." This experience with purer writing has changed Son's approach to the craft overall. "I have changed my adult fiction writing, too. I try to be less show-off-y, or flashy. YA audiences can sniff out fake-ness very quickly, so I felt my writing had to be emotionally honest." Those who are curious about novelistic honesty (as represented by the eternal question: How much of this fiction is in fact true?) may sate their curiosity by reading the book's epilogue, in which Son details when and how Finding My Hat mirrors the events of his own life. For example, Jin-Han's parents own a wig store, with kooky results, and Son's did, as well. Jin-Han feels joy when he discovers books and rapidly becomes a bibliophile; Son is an avowed bookworm, too.

The author and his character also share a major turning point in their lives: Son's mother died when he was 29, and in Finding My Hat, Jin-Han's mother dies when he is 15. Son notes, "One of the big things about the book was that it was for my mom. I wanted to get that [experience] in there." In addition to offering him a way to explore his feelings about his mother's death, Son says that writing Finding My Hat prompted him to further consider his own feelings about his identity. He made his first-ever visit to Korea when he was halfway through his novel, and says, "I saw relatives I hadn't met before. Half of the people look like my dad, half like my mom. It was a very genetic experience." The Korean excursion reinforced Son's feelings about where his happiness lies. "It was great to be in touch with my culture, but I couldn't wait to get back home," he says. "Going to Korea made me feel more American than I realized I was."

Linda Castellitto is the consulting creative director at BookSense.com.

Prolific children's and YA author Tim Wynne-Jones has created a page-turner with Blink & Caution, the story of two teen runaways who are accidentally drawn into a mystery.

Wynne-Jones may have written a thriller, but he hasn't lost his sense of humor. In a Q&A with BookPage, the author reflects on his own experience as a runaway (from a rock band), his fondness for crossword puzzles and why he'd like to hang out with Hamlet.

Blink & Caution is about a couple of teen runaways. When you were growing up, were you ever tempted to run away from home?
I did run away from home when I was three with a tea cozy on my head, but that doesn't really count. As a teenager I was pretty lucky; my parents ran away instead, which saved me from having to do it. They moved and I stayed where I was, so it was kind of like running away in reverse. But the thing is, I did run away more than once even after I no longer lived at home. I ran away from a rock band in which I was the lead singer. We were on the road and things had gotten really crazy, so I just took off and left them in the lurch. I'm not proud of it but it was a life-saving thing to do, as far as I could tell at the time. Sometimes running away is the answer as long as you know that at some point, one way or another, you're going to have to run to . . .

If you had to be stranded on a desert island with one fictional character, who would you want it to be?
Probably Hamlet. I'd make him do all the work. It would be good therapy for him—no time to stand around soliloquizing. Is that even a word? Anyway, Hamlet. I just hope the island would be somewhere tropical and not in the North Sea. Who wants to hang with a melancholy Dane when it's cold and rainy all the time?

Of all the characters you've ever written, which is your favorite?
A difficult question; sort of like asking a parent who their favorite kid is. But I guess I'd have to say Rex Zero, the star of the three Rex Zero novels. He's sort of me but way braver and he gets into better messes than I did at his age.

What was the proudest moment of your career so far?
Hmmm. Can I have three? 1. Reading with J.K. Rowling at the Toronto Sky Dome. 2. Having Philip Pullman blurb my last book, The Uninvited, and say it was "Impossible to put down." and 3. Winning the Edgar award from the Mystery Writers of America for my YA novel Boy in the Burning House. I've been lucky enough to win quite a few awards but that one is great because it was something I dreamed of when I first started writing.

What's the best thing about writing for young people?
Young people. That's the best thing. I mean, I don't wish I was young again—it's way too hard! But I look at young people and I love to see all the stuff they're dealing with, bad and good, and I remember how incredibly ALIVE you feel when you're trying stuff out and figuring who the heck you are. And I guess, also, I've got some issues with sixteen. Like I said, I wouldn't want to do it over again but I'm going to keep kicking at the particular can trying to open it up and dig through the garbage.

If you weren't a writer, how would you earn a living?
Singing or cooking or doing crossword puzzles. I'm not sure you can earn a living doing crossword puzzles but I'd give it a shot.

What are you working on now?
The fourth and final Rex Zero book. But also I'm toying with an idea for a graphic novel.

When it comes to creating a true teen voice, author Carolyn Mackler has it down. Readers of her first two novels, Love and Other Four-Letter Words and The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things, found remarkably realistic portraits of today's teenagers. In her latest novel, Vegan, Virgin, Valentine, she channels the teenage voice once again with hilarious and enlightening results.

"I'm definitely attuned to that age group," Mackler tells BookPage. "It's a combination of having a very clear memory of my own teen years it's a hugely significant time, and I really remember the emotions, what I wore, the heartache, friendships, wondering where I fit into the world and just a fascination with teenagers."

Mackler herself was a teenager in the '80s: the era when big hair was best, Arnold Schwarzenegger was just a movie star, and acid-washed denim was cool. So it works out nicely for her research that Mackler has a 16-year-old stepsister to keep her informed about current teenage trends. "She lives in Manhattan, where I do, and I quiz her about her life and friends and social scenes. It helps me keep my stories authentic and current."

A bit of eavesdropping comes in handy, too, for getting the lingo and rhythms of teen-speak just right: "I'm often on the bus, and if there are two teenagers in front of me, I'll take dictation!"

That dedication to research pays off, for the two young women at the center of Vegan, Virgin, Valentine 17-year-old Mara and her 16-year-old niece V are tempestuous, caring, rebellious, confused and utterly believable characters. Mackler takes a classic tale of repression vs. exuberance, responsibility vs. rebellion, and gives it a modern twist in an interesting setting: the author's own hometown of Brockport, New York. Mara's thoughtful, honest narrative voice adds credibility, and there are several crossroads at which the girls must make important and often difficult choices. This is no accident, of course. "I feel the best place to get information and see the real world reflected is in fiction," Mackler says. "[YA novels] are a safe and quiet place for kids to find the information about their lives that they're wondering about."

Thus, she says, the book is meant not only to provide an entertaining read, but to give readers "things to think about, to serve as a way to let people consider how they would handle certain situations." While it has obvious appeal for the younger set, Vegan is a good choice for parents, too. Mackler does an excellent job of showing the ways in which adults and kids can learn from one another, which is sure to offer hope to adults who are a bit mystified by their teenagers' new propensity for door-slamming and to teens who are frustrated that their parents can't seem to just, well, chill out.

And chilling out, or learning to just slow down a bit though not at the cost of maintaining responsibilities and a good heart is a central theme in the book, one that often results in scenes that are poignant, funny or both. For example, Mara, a type-A overachiever, scrupulously maintains a vegan diet, but has recurring, lustful dreams about cheese. Mackler, herself a vegetarian, notes, "Mara became a vegan around the same time she got dumped because she wasn't lusty enough, and veganism became part of her repression."

The author says she once temporarily denied herself the pleasure of full-time writing, though she always knew she loved reading particularly YA books. "I read in gulps, and I've always passionately loved YA novels. During college, I realized how much I like writing. I enjoyed the hours at the computer, feeling so connected to myself and the world in my head." Since becoming a successful author, she says she has received "some wonderful notes from people saying thank you, I identified with the characters, I feel like you read my journal."

Right now, Mackler is working on another novel and using strategies to find balance between working hard and enjoying her life. She says her husband helps her keep on track: "There's a challenge: if I write until noon each day, I get a star, and after 10 days I get ice cream. If I screw up one time, I lose all the stars on the sheet. I have to have strict rules and stick to them, otherwise I get completely distracted!" No matter what, though, she always gets to have cheese.

Linda M. Castellitto long ago learned to embrace her lusty love for cheese. Especially brie.

What do you do when you already have seven best-selling books for teens under your belt, numerous awards on your mantel and an uncanny talent for relating life’s toughest challenges with humor and hope? According to author Joan Bauer, you simply have to put your Best Foot Forward.

In Bauer’s latest novel, readers meet up once again with Jenna Boller, the beloved character introduced in Rules of the Road (1998). Struggling with a difficult situation at home, Jenna shines in her after-school job at a shoe store. In Best Foot Forward, Jenna is starting her junior year in high school and the family-run Gladstone Shoes is in the midst of a corporate takeover. "When I finished Rules of the Road, I didn’t think I had another book in me," Bauer tells BookPage from her home in Brooklyn, "but it was so interesting to revisit the characters and realize there was so much growth. It was like running into a couple of old friends that you haven’t seen in a long time."

One of those friends is Mrs. Gladstone, the feisty matriarch of the Gladstone dynasty. This time around, we find her struggling with the takeover of the company she and her late husband built. With a conniving son trying to make a quick buck and a corporate machine that is ready to make a profit at any cost, Mrs. Gladstone serves as a beacon of morality in a sea of unethical chaos. "She speaks her mind and has the kind of courage I wish I had," Bauer says.

Jenna, however, is the real star of the show. Her struggles to decipher right and wrong, her frustration with her family, especially her alcoholic father, and her difficulty in being able to trust other people make her both endearing and tough. "She is a survivor," says Bauer. "Jenna faces hard time after hard time and it makes her stronger." Like Jenna, Bauer herself has been through some difficulties in life. "She and I have the most connections of any of the characters," admits Bauer. "We certainly share some of the pain—my dad was an alcoholic and my grandmother had Alzheimer’s, just like Jenna’s."

But Bauer’s own most difficult hurdle may have been the life-threatening incident that prompted her to start writing for the teen market in the first place. Bauer had just made the move from newspaper journalism to screenwriting when she was involved in a serious car accident, severely injuring her neck and back. During recovery, her enthusiasm for life, not to mention writing, was starting to dwindle. "One day I saw a picture of a guy standing next to this big pumpkin that he had grown. I laughed out loud and thought, who in the world would want to grow something like that." The more she thought about it, the more interesting the notion became. And soon, Bauer started writing a story about a teenager in Iowa trying to grow a record-setting pumpkin. "It was a crazy interconnection in life where this other part of me came rushing in like fresh water," says Bauer. The book, Squashed, which started out as a screenplay, won the Delacorte Press Prize for First Young Adult Novel, and Bauer was soon on her way. "It was one of those moments—the humor in that story saved my bacon," Bauer recalls.

These days, writing itself makes the author feel alive. "There is something about telling stories," she says. "I love struggling with words and creating characters." Bauer claims she got the talent from her grandmother, who was a professional storyteller. "In our house, we explained the world through fiction; it has real truth to it." And Bauer still follows the family recipe. In every story she writes, she tries to explain a little about the world, "a part of the hurt, a part of the present that can be overcome or a part of the world that makes some people nuts."

Interestingly, Bauer found that a shoe store was the perfect setting for making points about commitment and the need to do our best. "I so wanted to have a symbol that I could take deeper," says Bauer. As she sees it, someone who is willing to sell shoes has a helping heart and doesn’t mind getting down on their knees or dealing with smelly things. And, says Bauer, "I like the metaphor of how our feet take us down life’s road." With that in mind, Bauer puts her Best Foot Forward and proves that although life’s journey can be difficult, it can teach us some funny, poignant and powerful lessons.

Every time Suzanne Fisher Staples hears about fighting in Afghanistan, she worries. I wonder about people I have known, she says. I always hope they are safe. Her latest book for young readers, the deeply touching novel Under the Persimmon Tree, is set in Afghanistan and Pakistan, countries she knows well. She worked for 10 years as a reporter for United Press International, based in Hong Kong and then India, and later spent four years in Pakistan on assignment for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). No doubt some reviewers will compare Under the Persimmon Tree to Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, the bestseller set in Afghanistan, Pakistan and America. Staples says she loves Hosseini’s novel, adding, The Kite Runner gives you an idea of the suffering of people no matter what class they come from, and this very ancient Persian sensibility that is so beautiful and so essentially Afghan. Staples first visited Afghanistan in the late 1970s, just before the Russian invasion. I left the region in 1982, she says, and have been haunted by the plight of the Afghan people, the terrible suffering they have endured ever since. After returning to the States, she began writing young adult novels. Not surprisingly, much of her fiction takes place in lands where she once lived and reported: Shiva’s Fire is set in India, while Newbery Honor-winning Shabanu and its sequel, Haveli, are set in Pakistan. Staples discovered that writing fiction was a way to deal with the many incidents she witnessed during her reporting years. It’s a funny thing, she says, I think when you’re a newspaper reporter, you really have to set your emotional reactions aside to be effective. My way was saying, well, I’ll sort this out later. Under the Persimmon Tree began as a short story for a young adult collection called 911: The Book of Help Authors Respond to the Tragedy (Open Court). On September 11, 2001, Staples was already immersed in her own family tragedy her mother had just died at midnight, and she was on the phone with a funeral director when her brother told her to look at the television. She spent much of the next 18 months lecturing about the areas of the world that were suddenly in the headlines.

She also started writing. I set aside the stories people told me about living in a war zone, Staples says, a war that they didn’t want and that they felt no personal connection to aside from the fact that it was destroying their land and taking away everything they had. By the end of the story, she realized she had the skeleton for a novel. Under the Persimmon Tree alternates between two narrators: Najmah, a young Afghan girl whose father and brother are unwillingly taken away by the Taliban to fight, and whose mother and newborn brother are blown up in an air raid. She makes her way to Pakistan, where she meets Nusrat, an American woman married to an Afghan doctor who is missing. While the book is fiction, Staples says most if not all of the incidents are based on stories Afghans told her, including the story of a young girl who witnessed the death of her mother and brother.

She gathered much literary fodder while working in Pakistan with USAID and interviewing women. Staples recalls, At the end of the day we would sit down and build a fire and prepare a meal and eat, and afterward, while the fire was dying down, they would tell stories. They told me extraordinary stories about themselves, and the stories were sometimes mixed with mythology. I realized that Americans really need to hear these stories. Staples now works in a more bucolic setting, on a piece of Pennsylvania farmland where she and her husband recently built a new home. Does she miss her reporting days? You know, there’s not very much of me that misses it. For one thing, I’m older. I’ll be 60 this year and I know that we’re not invincible. And now that I’ve been writing fiction for a while, I realize that I’m so much better suited to writing fiction. What interests me most is basic human motivations. I think that we all have the same motivations, but we all have different circumstances.

Literary legend has it that Mary Shelley's tortured Frankenstein monster came to her in a dream that inspired the classic horror tale. Twilight, a young adult novel by debut author Stephenie Meyer, has similar origins, but the otherworldly characters in her story are not lumbering monsters. Instead, they're beautiful vampires who make excellent use of their unusual abilities while trying to fit in with the other students at a small high school.

"I never really thought about being a writer, but when I had the dream, the characters were ones I didn't want to forget," Meyer says from her home in Arizona, where she and her husband are raising three sons, all under the age of 10. Writing Twilight was "an unusual experience because I felt obsessive about the process. It wasn't like me to be so focused—it's hard to be, with all the kids around."

A neophyte in the publishing world, Meyer is truly an overnight success. Just two weeks after she sent her manuscript to a Manhattan agency, she was signed on. Soon after, Twilight landed in the hands of editor Megan Tingley, head of Little, Brown's MT Books imprint. And not long after that, movie rights were sold to MTV Films.

"It's been a real whirlwind—more like a lightning strike," Meyer says. "Sometimes I feel guilty. People go through so much [to get published], and I skipped over the bad parts. It feels like cheating, somehow." Despite the occasional pangs of guilt, Meyer kept up a furious writing pace.

"Sometimes I feel guilty. People go through so much [to get published], and I skipped over the bad parts."

"I just kept going after the first one, and wrote four books in one year." Now, she's in the midst of editing her second book, a process she likens to labor: "It's equal in pain, and can drag on and on."

Despite all that editing, Twilight is 499 pages long, quite a tome for teen readers. "If it weren't for J.K. Rowling, I think publishers wouldn't be willing to put out lengthy books," Meyer points out. "It just proves that if a book is good enough, young people will read it. People say teens have short attention spans, but they are quite capable of reading [longer books]. There are tons of kids aged 16 or 17 who dig Shakespeare and Austen."

Meyer has no idea why she dreamed of vampires that fateful night, but she's always been fascinated by superheroes, and she reads science fiction and fantasy titles as eagerly as classics. In her house, J.K. Rowling and Orson Scott Card books share shelves with ones by Shakespeare, Binchy and Bronte. And, Meyer argues, as monsters go, vampires are pretty appealing: "Vampires, while dark and icky, are attractive, sophisticated and intelligent. They're forever youthful, powerful—things people crave or envy. No one looks at a zombie and wants to be like that."

The vampires in Twilight are certainly worthy of envy. The lithe and beautiful Edward Cullen looks at protagonist Bella with loving eyes (even as he fights his urge to, well, suck her blood). His gorgeous siblings are athletic, drive great cars and are far less awkward than their classmates. Of course, they don't lead a typical teen lifestyle: instead of McDonald's, they subsist on blood. Since they want to live among humans, they force themselves to feed on animals rather than people.

Meyer also has a knack for developing her human characters, especially Bella, a troubled 17-year-old who comes to realize her own intelligence and strength. "Hopefully," says Meyer, "most girls who read it will find something in Bella they can respond to."

Through Bella and the vampiric Cullen family, Meyer conveys the importance of making one's own decisions, a value drawn from her Mormon background. "Mormon themes do come through in Twilight. Free agency I see that in the Cullens. The vampires made this choice to be something more that's my belief, the importance of free will to being human."

Twilight builds to a dramatic and suspenseful second half, not to mention a nail-biting conclusion. Fortunately for impatient readers, Meyer's next book is due out within a year. In the meantime, the author will embark on a book tour this month to cities such as Seattle, San Francisco, Milwaukee and Chicago, where there will be—appropriately enough—a blood drive.

Linda M. Castellitto writes from North Carolina, where there is a Transylvania County. Hmm.

Given her youthful appearance and complete lack of attitude, it's difficult to believe that Sarah Dessen has been publishing books for a decade. Dessen, who is 35, started early. Her first novel, That Summer, was released not long after she graduated from college, and since then, six titles have followed, five of which have been named Best Books for Young Adults by the American Library Association. That Summer, along with Dessen's second novel, Someone Like You, provided the basis for the popular 2003 movie How to Deal starring Mandy Moore.

"It's gotten harder as I've gotten older," Dessen says of the writing process. "Maybe I just had more energy when I first started, but I'd also like to think there's more going on in the books now, that they're becoming more complex." There's plenty happening in her new novel, Just Listen, a fast-moving, often lyrical narrative about sisterhood and self-esteem that demonstrates the author's intuitive understanding of the pressures of adolescence. The book is sure to please the legions of readers 1,200 a day who visit Dessen's website to check out the blog she posts from her home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

"With Just Listen, I wanted to explore the drive for perfection that's so typical in teenage girls today," Dessen says. "Why do girls feel they have to look perfect, make perfect grades, make everything appear effortless? I wanted to explore the roots of that stress."

An image provided Dessen with the inspiration for the novel. Flipping through a high school yearbook, she came across a photograph of three beautiful girls, obviously sisters, and had what she terms a knee-jerk reaction to the picture, automatically assuming the flawless-looking trio led perfect lives. In the new novel, she wanted to depict the flip side of that scenario to portray characters who appeared to have it all, but in reality were struggling just like everyone else.

Just Listen features Annabel, Whitney and Kirsten Greene, three very different sisters who work as part-time models. While the girls have a solid family life a fussy but well-intentioned mother; a successful father who's an architect their lives are far from tranquil. Reserved Whitney, the oldest sibling, has an eating disorder. Kirsten, the loud-mouthed middle sister, is desperately trying to find herself. And then there's Annabel, the novel's narrator, the youngest of them all and a quiet-natured observer. "I fell somewhere between my sisters and their strong personalities, the very personification of the vast gray area that separated them," Annabel says.

A new school year is beginning, and Annabel, who is in 10th grade, finds herself completely alone, thanks to a falling-out over the summer with her best friend, Sophie. One of the most popular girls in school, Sophie is brash and brave gutsy enough to go for cute senior Will Cash. But her involvement with Will leads to big trouble, with repercussions that affect Annabel and others.

Through the use of flashbacks, Dessen builds suspense, hinting at the conflict between Annabel and Sophie, which isn't fully revealed until late in the book. Structuring the novel was tricky, she says, but writing about Whitney's problem was even more challenging.

"When you're writing about a delicate subject like an eating disorder, you really have to be cautious," Dessen says. "A certain responsibility comes with presenting a subject like that. You have to make sure you put it out there in the best way possible."

After so much success so early in her career, what's next for Dessen? "I don't know if I'll write for teenagers forever," she says. "I'd like to write for an older audience, maybe essays or short stories. But the young adult readers are so devoted and genuinely affected by the books. There's a passion there I'm not sure I would find other places, so I won't be going anywhere anytime soon."

Elizabeth Craft and Sarah Fain aren't fazed by blood the fake stuff, anyway. As writers and co-producers for the television show The Shield, it's all in a day's work to answer such questions as, Is this bloody mannequin bloody enough for you? Should we put more blood on the knife? And yet their latest endeavor, the young adult novel Bass Ackwards and Belly Up is a decidedly un-gory one. Craft and Fain have written an engaging, adventure-filled story about four longtime friends who, right after high school graduation, decide to defy convention, expectations and their parents, in the name of following their dreams. The authors know long-term friendship they've been close since the 1980s, when they were co-editors of their Kansas City, Missouri, high school newspaper. Almost 10 years later, the two reunited in Kansas City over Christmas vacation, and Sarah mentioned to Liz that she was moving to Los Angeles to pursue her dream of being a writer. We were home visiting our families, and we got together for drinks, Craft recalls. After the first beer, I was saying I'd visit Sarah in L.A., maybe even for a few weeks. By beer number three, I was thinking about moving. I stayed up all night thinking about it, and announced my decision to my family the next day. Soon after, the pair settled in a beach house in Santa Monica and began writing for television.

Now Craft and Fain share office space and writing duties at the Los Angeles headquarters of the FX police drama The Shield. We spoke with the authors via conference call as they sat at their desks, which are next to each other in a pit that used to be a storage closet, Fain says, with papers, DVDs and videocassette tapes piled high. The lived-in dŽcor doesn't hamper the writers' productivity. In fact, they didn't even take time off from television to write Bass Ackwards and Belly Up (or, as they call it, BABU). They worked on the book in the morning hours and turned back to TV later in the day. Adding a novel to their workload meant that, in addition to achieving new heights of time-management savvy, the writing partners had to reconsider the way they divvied up their workload and adjust their writing styles, too. In TV, every line on a page is a precious bit of space, Craft says. We had to get out of that mindset and realize it's OK to describe someone in detail. Fain adds, For TV, we separate our work by storyline. For the book, we separated it by character: I did Kate and Becca, and Liz did Harper and Sophie. There was never any question, the authors say, about writing for teens. We never considered another genre, Craft explains. To me, it was like therapy to write young adult fiction . . . reliving that difficult emotional time, taking my power back. It heals some wounds, to live vicariously through the characters. Emotions indeed shape the lives of BABU's four friends, who experience the fear, boredom, uncertainty and high drama that can come from living in the so-called real world. But they're also exhilarated to realize they're able to make important choices and survive hardships, whether on a trip around Europe (Kate), at college in Vermont (Becca), navigating the societal wilds of Hollywood (Sophie), or at home in Boulder attempting to write a novel (Harper). It's not lost on the four protagonists, though, that their frequent contact with one another (mainly by e-mail, as befits 21st-century teenagers) is vital to their confidence and appetite for adventure. That's no accident, says Fain: We feel very close to the story because it's about friends who support each other as they're figuring out what their dreams are, and pursuing them. We wanted to say through the lens of our own experience that anything really is possible. If you can pin down what you want, then you can go after it and get it. The authors aren't sure how many of their coworkers at The Shield will read the book; Fain says their colleagues are bemused by the writing duo's latest project. That's not altogether surprising, because, it's a very, very, very testosterone-driven environment. So, when we show up with our lovely purple-covered book, it's not anything they understand. Still, she says, testosterone (and estrogen) aside, in keeping with BABU's central message, they are very supportive, and very proud. Linda M. Castellitto writes from North Carolina, where she lives her dream of getting paid to read and write.

Ysabeau Wilce lives a few blocks down from the Chicago bookstore Women and Children First in a neighborhood with enough cafes to keep an army of writers supplied with coffee. There is a Prohibition-era speakeasy in her basement, and an unusually placid border collie asleep in the study where she has been at work completing her second novel, a sequel to her just released debut, Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog.

Wilce, who has a graduate degree in military history, says, 19th-century dime novels always had long titles, such as Red Top Rev: Vigilante Prince, or How He Whipped the Regulators and Saved the World. "I tried very much to write Flora Segunda in the tradition of a dime novel."

Her first novel is an exuberant young adult fantasy set in the city of Califa (which bears, at times, a strong resemblance to an alternate historical version of San Francisco), whose Warlord has made an uneasy truce with the powerful Huitzil Empire. Flora Fyrdraaca, the 14-year-old narrator, a child of a much-decorated military family, longs to flout family tradition and join the Rangers, an elite corps of magic-wielding scouts.

"I come from a military family, and there is a definite caste mentality that I am very familiar and comfortable with. It was natural to make Flora's family a part of that." Speaking about writing more generally, Wilce says, "It's easier sometimes to use real details than to make things up I know an awful lot about 19th-century military culture, and rather than let all that useless knowledge go to waste, I figured I'd recycle it. It's funny for a fantasy writer to say, but I never make anything up when I might be able to use something real."

Wilce, formerly a museum curator, was sitting in on a lecture when the idea for Flora Segunda first came to her. "I was responsible for setup and cleanup at the event, but I didn't have anything to do during the lecture itself. So I was sitting outside the lecture hall, on a bench, bored, and I had a notebook with me. A sentence popped into my head, and I wrote it down." The first draft of Flora Segunda was done in two weeks.

The result is a book that begs to be read aloud, as well as one that should appeal to both teenagers and adult fans of books like M.T. Anderson's The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series. As well as a rollicking old-fashioned plot full of pulse-pounding adventure and strong female characters, Wilce's novel offers the enticements of Flora's ancestral home, Crackpot Hall. She gives the 11,000 rooms of the title names like The Hallway of Laborious Desire, The Stairs of Exuberance and The Cloakroom of the Abyss.

"For a few years my family lived in an Elizabethan revival house in Mexico City, of all places. It had a musician's balcony over the great hall-like living room, a full English-style pub and four ramshackle floors. My room was in the garret, at the top of a very narrow set of stairs, and had dormer windows and a slanty ceiling. That house made a pretty big impression on me," Wilce says. "Perhaps because we moved every three years when I was a kid, I'm fascinated by families that have lived in the same house for generations."

When asked where she's lived, Wilce lists San Francisco, Anchorage, Miami, Mexico City, Madrid, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, Philadelphia and Brooklyn. But she's always brought her books along with her. At present, she's reading Paul Park's A Princess of Roumania, Dorothy Dunnett "for the zillionth time," and Sketches from Texas Siftings. "It's a compilation of comic sketches originally published in a Texas newspaper in the 1880s. Each little essay concerns some aspect of Texas life The Texas Cow, the Pelon Dog, the Typical Texan, etc. They are very funny, plus good research on frontier life. As you can see, I am always reading several things at once. On a good week, I can put away five to eight books. There are a zillion books in the world I hope to get to maybe 10 percent of them before I go to my reward, so I don't waste any time."

As to the early buzz her own book is generating, Wilce says she is surprised and pleased, of course. "I've been working on Flora Segunda for so long that the book had begun to feel like my own private obsession. Now that I've had to let her go out in the cold world alone, it is gratifying to know that there is an interest in Flora and her travails beyond just me!"

Kelly Link is the author of the story collections Stranger Things Happen and Magic for Beginners.

Paula Jolin wrote her richly detailed teen novel, In the Name of God, over the course of 10 weeks. That’s a seemingly brief time frame in which to write an entire book especially a debut novel but the research process began years earlier, when Jolin was living and studying in the Middle East.

As a child growing up in Massachusetts, Jolin was always interested in other cultures. She always wanted to be an author, too, but at age 20, she realized she wasn’t yet ready to try her hand at writing a book. I thought I didn’t have anything to say, she explains. One of the reasons I started traveling was to have something to say. And travel she did. During her junior year at Brown University, she embarked on a study abroad program in Cairo that became the launching point for several years of cultural observation and exploration. After graduation, Jolin went to Tunisia, and then Syria, where she enrolled in The Ma`Had, or The Institute for Teaching Arabic to Foreigners. As a foreign woman in Syria, you get the best situation you get invited into homes, people feed you. A Syrian woman couldn’t sit alone in a cafŽ, or have an apartment, like I did, she says. On the strength of her positive experiences, Jolin enrolled in the Islamic Studies department at McGill University in Montreal, and traveled to Syria and Yemen during her summers off. Later, she pursued a doctorate in anthropology and worked as a teacher in Sudan each summer. Eventually, though, she realized academia wasn’t for her. She had gotten married and was pregnant with her first child when she decided it was time, at last, to write.

Her strategy worked: Jolin found her writer’s voice and completed In the Name of God, a character-driven novel that offers a window into a Syrian family’s daily life as seen through the eyes of 17-year-old Nadia. Despite living in a place that is seemingly so different from America, Nadia has many experiences that mirror those of American teenagers. She struggles with feeling left behind as her cousins become more Westernized, and with her confusion as she realizes that her cousin Fowzi’s anti-government views may be risky, but they’re also intriguing, even empowering. In her search for a foothold in an ever-changing world, for a way to feel powerful in a community that is closely watched and controlled, Nadia enters dangerous territory. It is to Jolin’s credit that we understand Nadia’s decisions, even as we are shocked by them.

When people do things we think are totally out of bounds, there is a process. Nobody starts out that way, Jolin explains. I wanted to show someone who’s in a place we couldn’t imagine being to show how they got there. But, as Jolin makes clear in In the Name of God, while life in Syria may be different from life in America in important ways, there are common bonds human connections and similarities that are universal. There are so many things you can’t say in Syria you can’t talk about the government, and there is a sense that all taxi drivers are spies, Jolin says. But amid all this pressure and difficulty, people are happy a lot of the time. Jolin says she wanted to show readers the Syria she experienced, and the sort of people with whom she became very close: families that have joys and conflicts, secrets and celebrations, just like any other.

Jolin lives with her own family (her husband and their son and daughter, now 4 and 2), in suburban North Carolina. Their home is a welcoming one, where children’s toys share space with shelves filled with books of all sorts, and wonderful aromas waft out from the kitchen. There are no obvious indications of Jolin’s time spent in the Middle East, but her passion for travel and the people she met along the way is evident whenever she speaks about her experiences. Jolin’s passion for writing is clear, too. In fact, her second young-adult novel, Three Witches, is due out next year. Still, she says, I only recently started telling people I’m a writer. I’m a stay-at-home mom, and proud of it. I would tell people I’m a runner but not a writer. I’m a terrible runner, but I’ve been more comfortable calling myself one because there’s nothing at stake. She adds, laughing, Of course, when I sold the book, it was months before anyone asked me what I did. Even when I say it now, I wonder, Is this really true? Am I making this up? Not at all.

Linda M. Castellitto writes from North Carolina.

Donna Jo Napoli tried hard to avoid becoming a writer. After growing up in a poor family, she resolved to enter a practical, financially secure profession. So, when she matriculated at Harvard, she majored in math and reluctantly took an English class, thanks to the university's writing requirement.

In an interview from her home outside Philadelphia, Napoli recalls what happened next: I handed in my fiction assignment and got a phone call from the professor, who said I really ought to be a novelist. Rather than savoring such praise, she says, I decided never to take another English course. I wanted nothing to do with that unstable life. Instead, she discovered and pursued linguistics: She has been a professor since 1973, and recently stepped down after 15 years as department chair at Swarthmore, where she teaches today.

Fortunately for readers, Napoli eventually overcame her anti-author sentiments. She has written nearly 30 books for children, from playful picture books to complex young adult novels, several of which offer retellings of folk tales from around the world. Her new YA novel, <b>Hush: An Irish Princess' Tale</b>, re-imagines an Icelandic folk tale about an Irish princess who is kidnapped by Vikings.

In Hush, teenaged Melkorka endures great suffering before she finds peace in a version of her life she never anticipated or desired. For Napoli, too, suffering eventually led to an unexpected form of fulfillment. After she received her doctorate, married and had a baby, she suffered a miscarriage. Her emotional pain compelled her to write letters to a friend, and those letters gradually became stories. I was writing, really, for myself, and then I realized I really like to write. I started writing story-stories, not just my pains and joys, Napoli says.

Skillfully rendered pain and joy certainly are to be found in the pages of Hush. Melkorka and her wealthy, happy, royal family take a trip to Dublin (which counts many fearsome Vikings among its residents). An encounter gone wrong throws the family's village into battle mode, and the king and queen send Melkorka and her sister, eight-year-old Brigid, on a trip to another, safer town. On the way, they are kidnapped by slave-traders, and the girls' privilege and security are replaced with danger and uncertainty.

Hush is a dramatic tale, and the characters' emotions are palpable. Whether the author is conjuring up the smells of the slave ship, conveying the whispered agony of the captives, or eavesdropping on the Viking captors, readers will feel immersed in the story. I so enjoy giving my readers something to taste and hear and feel, Napoli says. I pay a lot of attention to the senses. She's also respectful of the tales that inspire some of her books. I'm very reverential toward the traditions handed to me, she says. The reason these things last through time is that they're good. I don't want to lose the power they have. The Icelandic saga that inspired Hush didn't have a lot of detail about the princess, which makes the many characteristics Napoli incorporates into Melkorka's personality her fondness for her family, her tendency to chatter, her ultimate strength all the more fascinating. So, too, is Melkorka's decision to hush, to stay silent.

Because of my interest in languages, I'm always interested in how we get ourselves understood and understand others, Napoli says. Silence accidentally becomes [Melkorka's] source of power. . . . What binds us to each other is language in general, and her refusal [to speak] is so harsh, and so hard on her. Just as the author doesn't gloss over what life was like on Viking slave ships, she doesn't neatly tie up the ending of Hush, in keeping with the arc of the ancient story from which she drew. One of the jobs of life is learning how to give up on some things and move on, Napoli says. As readers, we should not have to be satisfied, to have every question answered. If a book does that, it's leaving you unprepared, leaving you undefended.

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."