For Jacqueline Woodson, hope is an essential component of a good story. Whether she’s reading or writing, “happiness doesn’t have to come at the end, but there has to be hope somewhere, to keep me engaged and wanting to move forward.”

Since her first book was published in 1989, the much-lauded author of 30 books and counting has created many characters who are dealing with difficult problems. “They have to figure out what they’re going to do with the hand they’ve been dealt,” Woodson says from her home in Brooklyn, where she lives with her partner and their two children. “For the most part, kids are so resilient, and they do figure out a way to move through it.”

Her latest book for teens, Beneath a Meth Moon, opens on a bleak day in the life of 15-year-old Laurel. She’s a pretty blonde who, not long after moving to a town called Galilee, makes the cheerleading team, meets a new friend (Kaylee) and boyfriend (T-Boom) and becomes a meth addict.

Laurel and Kaylee’s budding friendship will feel familiar and sweet to anyone who’s felt that frisson of delight at the start of something good. And under Woodson’s hand, when Laurel and T-Boom lock eyes on the basketball court, their attraction is palpable: “Just me and T-Boom, seeing each other—not for the first time, really, but yes, for the first time. . . . He’s home to me, and I don’t even know him.” 

Behind the 7-Eleven just hours later, when T-Boom offers Laurel meth and she unhesitatingly breathes it in, her acquiescence is horrifying and sad but, thanks to Woodson’s skill, not entirely surprising. Readers have already learned that Laurel is hobbled by grief and searching for a way to blunt her feelings of pain and sadness.

Woodson doesn’t reveal Laurel, or her other characters, in a linear manner; she moves back and forth through time, from present-day conversations to snippets of thought and memory. Until she was 11, Laurel and her family lived in Pass Christian, Mississippi, on the Gulf of Mexico with its pretty water and warm sand. But those memories get crowded out by what came in 2005: Grandma M’lady decided not to evacuate during Hurricane Katrina and Mama stayed with her, while the rest of the family went to Jackson to wait for them. 

Like so many others, M’lady and Mama did not survive the hurricane. Woodson compassionately renders the shock of those left behind, and, by extension, the efforts made by anyone experiencing such sadness to adjust to their new burden. Laurel’s father moves her and her younger brother, Jesse Jr., to Galilee in hopes of putting the past behind them, but, Woodson says, “This promised land, this dry land, is not what they expected.”

“There are so many great reasons to be here, to be whole, to be fully in the world no matter what our life situation is.”

The author’s own grandmother died a few years ago, and her mother died suddenly just before she started to write Beneath a Meth Moon. “You have to figure out what happens to you,” she says. “How does the world change for you, what do you do with that change? And here’s Laurel having lost two important figures very quickly, and being lost in a way that makes absolute sense.”

While Laurel’s meth use doesn’t make sense to Woodson in a literal way (like this writer, she read Go Ask Alice in her youth and the book had the desired, frightening effect concerning the dangers of teenage drug use), she says that writing Beneath a Meth Moon was a way to explore things she’d wondered about—like the children who survive a massive, tragic event, or people who decide to take a drug they know to be dangerous and destructive.

She says of the young Katrina survivors, “What happened to those kids, emotionally, psychologically and physically, given this kind of loss? You just don’t hear about them, unless they survived and went on to play for the Dallas Cowboys . . . otherwise, people are apt to just disappear. I don’t want that to happen.”

And, she asks, “Why would anyone even put meth to their nose? Seeing the damage that drug can do, why would you make the choice to do it? Who would do it, why would they do it, what would be their reason for living?”

Through the character of Laurel, Woodson says, “Hopefully what readers get is that there are so many great reasons to be here, to be whole, to be fully in the world no matter what our life situation is.” 

That sense of promise—that hope—is present not only in Laurel’s story, but in those of her family and friends, too.

There’s Kaylee, who sticks around even when she doesn’t understand or agree with Laurel’s decisions. “To some extent, Laurel is Kaylee’s hope,” Woodson says. “What Laurel brings to her is the bigger world. She’s done something else, lived another life, and they’re going to escape together.”

And there’s Moses, a young man who paints murals of children who died of drug overdose. He’s kind to Laurel, but also matter-of-fact in noting that she may well be one of his subjects someday.

The author says she can relate to the push-and-pull of being a teenager trying to imagine the future: “I think kids have to make choices all the time about who they are becoming. It’s part of identity politics: ‘Am I who you’re naming me to be?’ Those moments of not being who you want to be, of wanting to get past it and be something else. And having gone through that myself as an adolescent, not wanting other people to decide my fate—like becoming a writer, when the message was, you don’t come out of this community to be a writer, you become a blue-collar worker.”

Certainly, Woodson has moved far past that proscription. Her books have garnered many honors—including several National Book Award nominations, three Newbery Honor awards, ALA Best Book for Young Adults nods and more. 

With the timely, unflinching and empathetic Beneath a Meth Moon, she adds another powerful story to her critically acclaimed body of work. 

Daniel Handler is a force to be reckoned with in the world of children’s literature. He’s a beloved and best-selling author of both middle grade and picture books, but don’t be surprised if you don’t recognize his name: He’s best known for the Series of Unfortunate Events, written under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket. For his latest book, Why We Broke Up, an illustrated novel for teens, Handler teamed up with illustrator Maira Kalman to create an intoxicating, melancholy meditation on love. This tale of romance gone sour has won starred reviews, many accolades and now a Printz Honor from the American Library Association.

Handler graciously answered a few questions about how he wrote Why We Broke Up, though he prefers to remain mum on the subject of his own worst breakup.

We know why Minerva and Ed broke up, but why did they ever get together? They're such different people; did they ever stand a chance?
A chance of what? Nothing lasts forever, even in high school.

Writing from Min's perspective, you hit on a lot of very true ideas about being a teenage girl in love and the places that can lead. As a non-teenage male, how did it feel to wear that particular hat?
Intimidating. Young women are among the grooviest and most powerful creatures on the planet, and in my experience they only lend hats to one another.

What do you think Ed's reaction to receiving Min's letter and the box might be?
Outwardly, a scowl and a shrug. Inwardly, everything Min hopes for.

Min is obsessed with old movies, constantly comparing scenes from her life with scenes in the movies she loves, which are all made up. How did you decide to use film in this way, and why did you use made-up films instead of existing classics?
If I say, I’m having a day like The World Of Henry Orient (a real film), you might think I mean a magical, youthful one, or an insufferable one, or you won’t know what I’m talking about. But if I say that my day reminds me of the closing scene of Uptown Scoundrels, when Gladys Finn throws a drink in her ex-husband’s face and then puts out her cigarette in his lapel, which bursts into flames as she wraps her ermine stole around her throat and disappears into the starry night, then we all know what we’re talking about.

Young women are among the grooviest and most powerful creatures on the planet, and in my experience they only lend hats to one another.

How did you come to collaborate with Maira Kalman? Her paintings really enrich the story, and made me think there should be picture books of some kind for readers of every age. Would you do something similar again?
I came to collaborate with Maira by a) being an enormous fan of her work; b) managing to acquire an introduction; c) slowly cultivating her friendship and lulling her into an unsuspecting state; d) taking her to lunch at a restaurant so delicious anyone would agree to anything. Why We Broke Up is our second collaboration, following the picture book 13 Words, and we have other plans afoot.

You created a somewhat unusual website to promote the book: the Why We Broke Up Project, where you ask readers to submit their own terrible breakup stories. But your own worst breakup story is conspicuously missing. Why?
Well-founded fear of retaliation.

You've written for adults, young adults and (as Lemony Snicket) younger children as well. What are the differences, if any, between these processes?
None whatsoever. I just try to tell an interesting story, interestingly.

What's next for you?
A new Snicket series begins this fall, so you’ve been warned.

RELATED CONTENT
Read a review of Why We Broke Up.

Meg Rosoff has never shied away from complex or controversial topics, as readers discovered in her first novel, the Printz Award-winning How I Live Now. Yet perhaps she has never displayed such a compelling combination of irreverence, intelligence and humor as in her latest novel, There Is No Dog. In this book, God is a teenage boy named Bob who generally prefers sleeping to looking after the world he created. But few things are more likely to rouse Bob from his slumber than a pretty girl, and when a young woman named Lucy sends up a plea to God, “I should like to fall in love,” her prayers are answered in a way she never expected—with globally catastrophic results.

Rosoff spoke candidly with us about her own beliefs, the backlash she has experienced and the difficulty of taking on the job of God.

Books re-imagining gods (such as the Greek gods in the Percy Jackson books) have become popular with teens and young readers, but not many have dared to re-interpret the Judeo-Christian God. What was it that drew you to this particular idea?

I didn’t think I was being particularly daring! I’ve been trying to make sense of the Judeo-Christian God since I was about seven years old and realized I was an atheist. Many of the examples of God’s wonderful creation have struck me as flawed, pretty much throughout my life, so I guess you could say that this is a book I’ve been thinking about for something like half a century!

There Is No Dog is a very irreverent take on a topic that many people take very seriously. Have you gotten much backlash about the book?

The book has been banned in a number of schools (particularly Church of England schools) in the UK, and I was uninvited from a couple of book festival appearances in the UK, and uninvited from another big international festival in Dubai. There’s a lot of talk online about how it’s blasphemous and shouldn’t be shown to children, but in actual fact, I think it’s a rather gentle, faith-affirming book. I always say that the Judeo-Christian tradition isn’t about to fall apart on the basis of a bit of satire. It’s been around for a very long time, and is no doubt used to it. And in any case, because There Is No Dog is a comedy, I’ve been able to deal with a lot of difficult subjects in a fairly lighthearted manner. But I suppose imagining God as a sex-mad teenager whose mother won the job for him in a poker game is bound to be a little controversial.

I loved the idea that the job of God has actually been split between two people: Bob, a teenage boy who spends most of his time sleeping and fantasizing about sex, and Mr. B, a middle-manager type who does all the actual work of answering people’s prayers and cleaning up Bob’s messes. How different would the world be if the job had gone to Mr. B alone?

Ah, well, maybe we’ll find out someday. . . . But of course the job is more or less impossible no matter who’s doing it, so I’m not sure how much better Mr. B would do. Though at least he would try. And care. And I suppose if he had been the one responsible for creation, we might all have ended up with far fewer flaws, so that would be a very good thing.

Bob is essentially a spoiled brat: selfish, thoughtless and rather difficult to like. What was it like to write a character like that? Did you find yourself growing irritated with him, or perhaps feeling sympathy for his struggles?

Bob is difficult to like, but I hope not impossible. I’ve noticed that my teenage readers and parents of teenagers have the most sympathy for him. He isn’t entirely bad—he has brilliant inspirations, feels things very strongly, is passionate, and actually very lonely as well . . . it’s just that he can’t see much further than his own desires and passions. If he weren’t a god, and therefore stuck in his 19-year-old self, he would probably grow out of his solipsism.

Animals play a large role in the book, from Lucy’s job at the zoo to Bob’s pet Eck to Mr. B’s beloved whales. Are you an animal lover yourself?

I’m a huge animal lover and have been all my life. I have two whippet cross dogs (known as lurchers in the UK) which you can see running on my website, and I share a horse and ride as often as I can. But I’ve always identified quite strongly with animals—sometimes I think I can get inside the heads of animals, or am part dog or horse myself. Animals keep showing up in all my books, no matter how hard I work to keep them out. They just jump over the fences and sneak underneath the walls!

RELATED CONTENT
Read our review of There Is No Dog.

Grave Mercy, the first volume in an exciting new trilogy for teens, is set in a 15th-century French convent where the nuns are trained killers for the god of death. There’s wealth beyond imagining, stark and stunning violence and a romance in the midst of it all. Make no mistake: This book is vividly imagined. So it’s surprising to hear how easily it might never have come to exist.

“I had always wanted to be a writer,” author Robin LaFevers says from her home in southern California. “Since I was a little kid that [desire] had always been there, but the well-meaning adults in my life tried to redirect me” away from work that had a high risk of rejection and no guarantee of financial security. LaFevers didn’t argue: “I listened to them.” But no clear career path emerged, so she held a handful of jobs, including work at a bank, a brokerage house and a stint as a truck driver for an energy company. As she describes it, “I really just drifted” for a number of years.

Her eventual success took root after the birth of her two sons. “I was a stay-at-home mom,” she says. “Books were our salvation. We would just read for hours.” LaFevers reconnected with her childhood love of books, especially the way books we love as kids continue to resonate as we grow up. Figuring it was safe to risk rejection, and seeking a diversion from 24/7 mom duties (“I really needed to save my sanity”), she decided to go for broke and begin what she calls an “eight-year apprenticeship,” leading to the publication of her first book, The Falconmaster, in 2003. Several books in, she landed a contract that enabled her to quit a part-time job and jump into writing full time.

"I'm so tired of the bad boy, semi-stalker love interest and lust at first sight. I wanted to show that real love opens the world up to you."

With one early exception, all of LaFevers’ work is historical fantasy, which mingles real facts and people with fictional and supernatural details. Her interest in the genre is grounded in how often these seemingly divergent areas overlap. “So many of the things we think of as fantasy elements, like wizards and alchemy, people actually believed as science at one point,” she says. “It makes me aware of how much we shape our reality. In 500 years, what are they going to be laughing about that we believed was real? That’s much more interesting to me than the events and places and dates of history—it’s how people moved in a world” built around beliefs much different than those of our present day.

In Grave Mercy, the worlds of history and fantasy come together when Ismae, newly escaped from a life of abuse and arranged marriage to a cretin, is taken in by the convent of St. Mortain. While you won’t find assassin nuns in any history book, Ismae’s job takes her to Brittany and Duchess Anne, who really did rule the region at the ripe old age of 12. That the characters in this story are teens is entirely faithful to the roles they occupied in society, “doing really big, important, cool things” as military and political leaders.

LaFevers recalls that those adult responsibilities aroused one editor’s suspicions. “My editor kept saying, ‘Really?! She just seems too old to be 12!’” while reading about the unusually sophisticated Anne. “I said, we can change [the character] but all people have to do is Google her to find out she really was 12, and she really was speaking and writing Greek and Latin at five and a half. She was raised to be a duchess from the moment she was born.” The author, who lives with her husband and a cat she describes as “demonic,” hopes readers will look up the historical characters in the book, but warns that Anne’s real-life story contains some spoilers as far as her future goes in the His Fair Assassin trilogy.

It’s not just the people but the setting for Grave Mercy that lends itself to historical fantasy. LaFevers has posted a photo on her website showing a medieval chapel in the Brittany region of France. “One of the starting points for me” in researching the books “was seeing this church built right next to these two pagan standing stones,” she says. In Grave Mercy those pagan ways include not just “herbwitch” as a job description, but souls rendered visible above the bodies of the dying and a pantheon of saints at the ready to intercede on behalf of virtually any cause. This, too, is true to Brittany as it was in the Middle Ages. “That duchy really clung to their old folk beliefs longer and harder” than many neighboring areas. Even today Brittany observes some holidays tied to pagan beliefs.

For the character Ismae, a world rich with spirits is the backdrop for a journey of personal discovery. Grave Mercy is ultimately “intended to be a story of coming into one’s own mental faculties and learning to think for yourself, make your own decisions, your own choices. It’s about seeing the world with your own eyes, not your parents’ or your convent’s eyes.”

That journey does include a romance between Ismae and Gavriel Duval, a Breton nobleman, but don’t expect this courtship to be business as usual. LaFevers says, “I’m so tired of the bad boy, semi-stalker love interest and lust at first sight [in young adult fiction]. I wanted to show that real love opens the world up to you. You don’t have to give up part of yourself, or be less than who you are, or need to be saved. Two strong people can meet and find common ground.”

The romance develops into a sexual relationship, which is ultimately why the novel is designated for readers 14 and older. However, there’s violence in the tale as well, particularly in the book’s first scenes, that some readers may find alarming. To keep the opening from being mired in gloom, Ismae is seen smiling even as she’s locked into a root cellar by her monstrous new husband, just to show that her spirit hasn’t been broken.

With Ismae, and characters who will take center stage in future volumes, some of the fascination is in what sees them through their difficult backgrounds. “Part of it’s about coping mechanisms,” LaFevers says. “We know people have these really dark [life] circumstances,” but the grim details may not be as useful as the ways people learn to navigate through them. “That’s what I’m trying to focus on.”

Talking to YA author Paul Volponi is exactly like you would expect: He’s a perpetual teacher, endlessly encouraging, but the edge in his New York accent suggests he’s ready to throw down on the court at any moment.

After teaching high school English for six years at Rikers Island, the biggest jail in the world, and teaching for another six years at a drug treatment center for adolescents, Volponi has acquired a unique ability to speak to and write about urban teens in tough situations. “It’s a real interesting dynamic, to hear me yell and scream at them [on the basketball court] . . . and then to go teach in jail,” says Volponi via Skype from New York. His grin is so large, it’s easy to imagine him driving a layup past a bunch of kids and swapping a little smack-talk on the side.

His experiences from the streets of New York and his lifelong love of basketball (often playing against his own students) come together in his new book, The Final Four, which takes place during the triple overtime of a NCAA Final Four game between the favored Michigan State Spartans and the underdog Troy University Trojans. It highlights the lives and emotions of four players: Malcolm McBride, the Spartan star from the Detroit projects; Michael Jordan, a struggling Spartan who is constantly compared to his namesake; Roko, a Trojan all the way from Croatia; and Crispin, the Trojan sharpshooter who has lost his edge after a rocky relationship. Interspersed between scenes of the game are flashbacks, faux articles and transcripts of characters’ Final Four interviews, all combining to give each of these four boys a powerful and individual voice. As overtime suspense rises, Volponi reveals each boy’s will to win—and the reader feels it as well.

In Volponi’s novels, teens face the hardcore moral complexities of urban life: hate crimes, drive-bys, gang violence, grand theft auto and stabbings. The result? Reluctant readers are picking up his books. “I hear constantly kids and teachers saying, ‘So-and-so doesn’t read. He picked up your book. He read it from cover to cover. Now he’s reading your other books and he’s thinking about writing something himself that he’s seeing,’” says Volponi. “And that’s really terrific. That works for me.”

“I don’t try to preach to you. I try to show you the mirror of what’s there.”

Volponi now visits hundreds of schools every year, either in person or on Skype, to talk to students about his books and to encourage them to write their own stories. However, he shrugs off the phrase “reluctant reader,” saying, “Oh, I’ve heard that,” perhaps because it rings a little patronizing toward disinterested teens. The last thing Volponi would do is preach. He earned A’s and B’s in school by playing what he called “the student game”: listening in class, participating in discussion but never reading the book. The only time he couldn’t fudge it was with The Catcher in the Rye. “For the first week or so, I thought it was about baseball. It was not,” he jokes.

Eventually he found the love of reading, and now he spends his time transferring that love to kids. When he taught at Rikers Island, he fashioned a way to keep his incarcerated students’ attentions on literature. “I began to teach classic books by simply teaching scenes. I can’t give a kid Huck Finn and think he’s going to get from the beginning to something meaningful in the middle.” His favorite scene is when Huck gets separated from Jim and the raft. Huck angers Jim by tricking him into believing that it was all a dream, and it takes Huck 15 minutes to fess up to the truth. Volponi considers this scene the greatest in American literature: “To me, that’s the most incredible mirror I’ve ever seen. Twain took the 10-year-old kid, held the mirror up and said that’s where society was. I don’t need to read the whole book with kids who aren’t good readers, or who are struggling, to get that scene across. All I need to do is describe the time, describe who’s on the raft and play it from there.”

Volponi has taken Twain’s lesson to heart, writing books that also serve as mirrors to society. Like all of his books, The Final Four goes much further than just a high-intensity basketball story, as each boy’s life poses a different struggle. The story of Michael Jordan, who is compared to the basketball legend, encourages readers to define their role models by more than just their athletic talent. Roko’s home country is a war zone not unlike Malcolm McBride’s projects. Perhaps most importantly, Volponi dedicated the book to “the lifeblood of college basketball: the players, who are all too often viewed as the product instead of the source.”

The price of amateurism is the core issue here, and hotshot McBride is its voice. After one year of college ball, McBride plans to enter the NBA draft and “escape being an NCAA basketball slave.” According to one of the articles in the book, the NCAA earns more than $700 million during the tournament, winning coaches can earn a bonus of up to $500,000 and the winning school receives $15 million. This game of “money ball” skips the students altogether, barring them from receiving any money from sponsors or even a share of the profit from the sale of replicas of their own jerseys. Furthermore, students’ families must pay their own way to see the Final Four, while coaches’ wives, children and babysitters are flown to the game and often receive a sizable per diem.

The author is not interested in swaying anyone on this issue, however. Despite his star character’s angry commentary, Volponi is simply interested in the reality of it. “I try to show you an accurate reflection. I try not to tell you what to think. You know, obviously, sometimes when I write it, it’s slanted the way I feel for it, but I don’t try to pull you with me,” he says. “I don’t try to preach to you. I try to show you the mirror of what’s there.”

In this regard, Volponi considers The Final Four a success. The finished copy of the book will include blurbs from several coaches commenting on the book’s validity: UConn’s Jim Calhoun, University of Pittsburgh’s Jamie Dixon and Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski. The quote from Krzyzewski might be Volponi’s greatest compliment: “The Final Four does a terrific job of capturing the emotion of March Madness. It also serves as a reminder to readers that the college game is played by young people, each with their own unique story.” For Volponi, that’s what it’s all about.

Each of Volponi’s 10 books reflects either his own life or a news headline that touched him. Rikers High brings to life the relationships between teachers and student in a high school jail. For Rooftop, he tapped into the dreams and fears of kids in a treatment center. In Black and White, he sought to answer the question on the minds of all his Rikers students: Where are all the white kids? “Once you walk through the gates of the jail and into a high school classroom on Rikers, every student in front of you was either black or Hispanic,” Volponi says. “You could talk about all the socio-economic reasons you want . . . but all that kind of smart stuff kind of fades away when kids are looking at each other and they’re stuck in a room and it’s five degrees out and they’re all wearing t-shirts and they just walked across the yard, and they look at each other and they’re all black and Hispanic. And you can tell them all the reasons it happens, but I really feel they begin to look at each other and go, ‘What’s wrong with us? Why are we here?’”

The author originally planned a sequel to Black and White, but he is currently looking forward to other projects. In the works are a possible kung-fu book (Volponi studies with “one of the great kung-fu minds”) and a football novel. “I really think my next story is going to be a story about a young man—it’s happened here in the past—a 13-year-old who gets a football scholarship,” he says. Classic Volponi material, this comes straight from the headlines and is inspired by USC Coach Lane Kiffin, who has a habit of handing out scholarships to promising players in their very early teens (Evan Berry in 2009, David Sills in 2010). “So now the scholarship’s hanging over his head,” explains Volponi. “People treat him differently. People make a fuss over him. People expect him to play well. What’s the pressure hanging over that kid?”

One thing we can all hope for is that Volponi keeps writing about basketball. “I think it’s such a cool game,” he says. “Reflecting in all my basketball books is that tactile sense of being there, because I’m writing from my own memory of what it’s like to push and shove with people. I do that twice a week now, still.”

But when you get down to it, it’s still about the students he talks to and plays with every day. “I hope a lot of kids get to read it,” Volponi says, “I hope it makes them read other things.” There’s no question that any kid who picks up The Final Four will find a reason to finish it. This book is real life, no matter how tough it gets.

Kristin Cashore’s Bitterblue is a big book in every sense of the word. It’s the lead book on Penguin Young Reader’s spring list, and it weighs in at nearly 550 pages. Most importantly, though, Bitterblue deals with hefty themes and emotions, which not only leave an impact on readers, but took a toll on the author herself.

This is the third in Cashore’s critically acclaimed Seven Kingdoms series for teens—after the bestsellers Graceling and Fire—and it’s hard for the author to leave this fictional world behind. “It’s actually really sad,” she says by phone from her home near Boston. “I’m having a hard time letting Bitterblue go, and I feel like I really need to, because in order to have any equilibrium whatsoever during a book release, you need to kind of unhook yourself from the book. But I don’t want to let her go, and I feel bad that she doesn’t need me anymore.”

It’s no wonder that Cashore has grown fond of her title character. Her novels, although set in a complex, politically charged fantasy realm, are primarily about the characters that inhabit this world. “The books I love are the ones where I can really believe in the characters and get into their stories and their relationships,” she says. Some of her characters—like Katsa (the heroine of Graceling) and the title character of Fire—are “graced” with special gifts. In Katsa’s case, it’s the Grace of killing. In Fire’s case, it’s the ability to read minds—a trait Cashore admits was especially difficult to wrap her head around as a writer.

Although she is of royal lineage, Bitterblue has no particular Grace, and that’s what made her both a pleasure and a relative ease for Cashore to write. “She doesn’t have these amazing superhuman skills, and consequently I felt like I could relate to her a bit more,” Cashore says. “I’m not saying I’m very like her, but it was just easier to get into her mindset than it was with Katsa or especially with Fire.”

"The books I love are the ones where I can really believe in the characters and get into their stories and their relationships."

Although Bitterblue is not graced with any magical powers, she does have a strong moral center, an unquenchable curiosity and a desire to right injustices. This becomes especially important when she—as a young ruler still counseled by the advisers to her late father, the evil King Leck—begins to look outside the walls of her castle and ask questions about her subjects: the people who still tell tales of Leck’s reign of terror in the pubs each evening, the people who are still suffering from the atrocities Leck committed years before. Often taking personal risks and setting out in disguise in order to escape her sequestered existence, Bitterblue becomes more and more horrified as she learns of the man her father was and of the ruin he left behind.

Cashore—who first introduced Leck as a character in Graceling, which is set nine years before Bitterblue—admits that she was taken aback by the dark directions Bitterblue takes. “When I wrote Grace­ling,” she says, “Leck was just my villain. I never realized what I was getting myself into. Now I feel like I wrote Graceling and Fire to work myself toward Bitterblue. Gradually I realized that this has to be the book where this girl deals with this horrible person who, until this book, was actually kind of fun to write. It was not even slightly fun to write the prologue in Bitterblue or any of the sections told from Leck’s point of view. It was very oppressive, and depressing, and upsetting to write.” Leck’s journal entries, in particular, were difficult for Cashore to write and will be difficult for many readers to read; Cashore’s willingness to deal with atrocities head-on, however, is what makes the novel both powerful and relevant to the real world.

Bitterblue is a mystery of sorts, as Bitterblue tries to uncover and then repair both her own personal history and the history of her people. It’s also a reunion, as favorite characters—particularly Katsa and her companion Po—turn up repeatedly, much to readers’ delight. But, as in Cashore’s previous novels, Bitterblue is not a typical fairy tale with a happy ending. When asked about this, Cashore admits, “I had to tell the story how it happened, and I hope people won’t be too disappointed. I don’t love conventional, tidy endings as a reader. This is a story that happened; I wasn’t as in control as people think I might have been.”

Readers who are disappointed at where Cashore leaves things at the end of Bitterblue, however, can take heart. According to Cashore, “there’s a very good chance that my readers will be seeing these characters again.” But not in Cashore’s next novel—which she says will not be a fantasy. She feels confident, however, that readers will see more of the Seven Kingdoms fantasy world—and some of their favorite characters—in at least one more book.

But what about readers who, like Cashore herself, feel a sense of loss when they finish immersing themselves in Bitterblue’s world? Cashore has plenty of suggestions for fans who are looking for some great novels to tide them over until the next Seven Kingdoms adventure. She recommends Megan Whalen Turner’s Attolia series, Melina Marchetta’s books (both her fantasy novels and her contemporary stories) and the novels of Diana Wynne Jones, Tamora Pierce and Philip Pullman. Cashore also advises readers to look up the old-fashioned adventure novels of Mary Stewart: “They’re dated now, but a woman always ends up in some romantic part of the world, and there’s mystery and adventure and romance, and they’re just a lot of fun.”

Mystery, adventure and romance are also in store for readers of Cashore’s Seven Kingdoms novels, along with a healthy dose of political intrigue, moral complexity and characters that readers will love getting to know.

Now that she's an author herself, former book publicist Elizabeth Eulberg has had some trouble getting used to the spotlight, despite the fact that she's comfortable singing karaoke—and she hopes Pat Benatar will invite her on stage someday to sing “Hit Me With Your Best Shot.”

“It’s funny,” says Eulberg during a call to her apartment/office in Hoboken, New Jersey, “[Benatar] does not like to sing that song. The last time I saw her in concert, she was saying, ‘Oh, I hate singing this song,’ and I was literally like, ‘I will sing it!’” She laughs easily, something she will continue to do through our entire conversation.

For the four teens in Take a Bow, Eulberg’s third young adult novel, bright lights are as commonplace as math homework and frenemies. Emme, Sophie, Carter and Ethan attend the New York City High School of the Creative and Performing Arts (CPA), where every day is a constant competition to prove their talent.

While Eulberg never attended a performing arts high school, these settings have always fascinated her, especially when she was growing up in small-town Wisconsin. Fame and Grease had a big hand in forming that fascination. “I genuinely thought when I was little that people danced around in the cafeteria and thought that was the greatest thing ever,” says Eulberg, laughing. “I was like, ‘This is awesome! High school’s so much fun!’ And . . . not so much.”

Eulberg may not have done any singing and dancing on the way to class, but she still filled her high school days with music. Name the school band and she was in it, playing piano or clarinet: jazz band, marching band, pep band, even regular band class. During her senior year, her rock star dreams came out when her favorite music teacher, Michael Tentis, gave her the opportunity to play any instrument she chose. “I wanted to make noise!” says Eulberg, so she picked the tri toms (three tenor drums) and banged her heart out.

That freedom to choose and experiment is not shared by the students in Take a Bow, and they definitely do not have time to sing in the cafeteria. Like the LaGuardia Arts High School in New York, which is best known as the Fame school and was the inspiration for the fictional CPA of Eulberg's novel, students must re-audition every semester in order to prove their talent, and the school days are an hour longer to fit in extra studio time. Also, the pressure is far greater than what Eulberg experienced while “battling it out” for clarinet solos. “I think I put more pressure on myself than anyone put on me when I was in high school,” she says, “but it was really [while] doing the research that I realized how competitive [a performing arts school] environment could be.”

“I genuinely thought when I was little that people danced around in the cafeteria and thought that was the greatest thing ever."

Take a Bow unfolds through the narratives of the four main characters—Emme, Sophie, Carter and Ethan—who grapple daily with fame and friendships as they compete with the rest of their classmates for a spot in the senior showcase. Songwriter Emme prefers working behind the scenes for her best friend, superstar singer Sophie. However, Emme is also a member of the rock band Teenage Kicks (named for the song by The Undertones), and Sophie doesn’t appreciate her rising talent. On Sophie’s arm is Carter, a former child TV star who risks his acting career to pursue something he actually loves. And Ethan, the fourth member of this quartet, is in Teenage Kicks with Emme; despite his feelings for her, he constantly sabotages his relationships in order to get the edge he needs to write powerful lyrics.

Like many of the characters in Take a Bow, Eulberg knew exactly what she wanted to do after high school and it all started with music. Her dream was not, however, to become a superstar. “I would love to be a rock star, are you kidding me?” she says. “But being a teenager, you have all these dreams, and how quickly those can be thrown away for ‘reality.’” Like the members of Teenage Kicks, whose namesake song begins “Are teenage dreams so hard to beat?” and who know they will never be more than a teen band, Eulberg has always understood the temporary nature of teenage dreams. She never gave up on music, just chose a realistic direction: the music industry. A tip from her mother (who happened to be the high school librarian) led her to publicity. It appealed to her, says Eulberg, because “I like talking to people and if I’m excited about something, I like to share it.”

After working at a small entertainment PR agency in New York, she landed a job as a children's book publicist, something that almost kept her from becoming a writer. “I saw so many people go up to my authors and go, like, ‘I think I could write a kid’s book’ and be very dismissive about it.” It wasn’t until 2004 that she began to write her first book, The Lonely Hearts Club, which came out in 2009. “I really do believe in the universe and fate, and I do believe that I was meant to be in publishing and meant to write and it was just my path to it.”

After talking to Eulberg, it’s easy to see why Emme is the sleeper star of Take a Bow. She doesn’t want the spotlight, but it finds her anyway—an all too familiar situation for the author, who had some difficulty adjusting to being the center of attention. “I wouldn’t want to be Angelina Jolie,” she says. “Okay, I would like to look like her and make out with Brad Pitt, but you can’t leave your house. You don’t have any privacy anymore.” Eulberg wrote Take a Bow when she first began attending author events for The Lonely Hearts Club. It wasn’t until she read the page proofs for Take a Bow that she noticed the similarities between Emme and herself. “It was uncomfortable for me at first to get used to talking about myself. . . . It was kind of one of those things, going through the page proofs, finally sitting down to read the book as a whole, I was like, ‘Oh! I think I’m working through some issues!’” She laughs.

The fame junkie in Take a Bow is Sophie, Emme’s backstabbing best friend. She’s a character Eulberg understands from her own days competing for the best concert seat—but doesn’t have much sympathy for. “People are going to definitely have a strong reaction to her,” says Eulberg. “I think there are people like that in the show business who will do anything and everything because they think fame is the be-all, end-all. And I don’t think it is.” For this reason, it was no surprise that Eulberg politely declined to comment on her most famous client, Stephenie Meyer. It’s just not her style.

However, it is undeniable that her work for Twilight is legendary, so her decision to write full time—leaving behind her publicity career of more than 10 years—was initially tentative. It’s looking good, though: She recently celebrated her one-year anniversary as a full-time writer and another book is on the way. Revenge of the Girl with the Great Personality will be Eulberg’s fourth book, a story of a smart girl whose little sister competes in beauty pageants. Think “Toddlers and Tiaras” with a dark side, a broken family and a little humor.

From the sound of it, there will be plenty more to come. “You get the best letters from teens,” Eulberg says. “I don’t know what adult authors get from readers, but I’m sure they don’t get letters like, ‘You have written the greatest book in all of humanity. Like, it has changed my life.’ You know? It’s so sweet.” And of course, she laughs.

Now, if only Pat Benatar were looking for a duet partner. . . .

There are many reasons an author might have a tough time meeting a deadline, from writers’ block to family drama to, say, a hurricane hitting her house even though she lives hundreds of miles inland.

Despite Hurricane Irene’s unlikely arrival at Patrice Kindl’s rural upstate New York home last August, the author kept things moving along on her YA novel, Keeping the Castle, albeit from an office not her own, because her usual writing spot was thoroughly waterlogged. “It’s been a difficult seven months,” she says by phone from her home, during a break from lugging ruined furniture to the curb. “There was eight feet of water outside and four inside. It was a major blow.” Another, longer-term challenge for Kindl was an illness that led to a decade-long pause in her writing career (she published four YA novels from 1993-2002, including the critically lauded Owl in Love). Fortunately, “major surgery a couple of years ago resolved the worst problems,” she says.

Keeping the Castle represents her return to writing, as well as the author’s own pursuit of truth in fiction: She was motivated to create her own Regency novel because, she says, “I’d read one too many historical fictions in which the heroine is totally opposed to getting married and goes off to London and becomes a detective. They didn’t do that!”

In fact, she says, during the early 19th century, “Women got married because they had to; there were just so few choices, aside from becoming a governess, which is one step up from a servant, or a hat maker or dressmaker. These were very dependent positions with no security, so marriage was the best option—unless, of course, they were in the unusual position of being independently wealthy. A woman in control of her own money was very rare.”

And another thing: Kindl’s a bit indignant about writers who shirk Regency conventions. She “looove[s] Jane Austen” and doesn’t understand “why writers want to take a period and violate all the rules and conventions of society at the time. Half of the ones I’ve read, women had sex outside marriage. That’s something they just didn’t do. It would’ve had serious repercussions. I wanted to do something appropriate for the genre, and it’s nice having the framework, like with a sonnet or haiku—you know the rules.”

Thus, Kindl’s heroine, 17-year-old Althea Bears, doesn’t swan about the countryside while pondering which glamorous career will suit her, should she feel like having one. Instead, she worries every day about whether she can find a financially solvent husband in time to save the elegant yet crumbling castle in Lesser Hoo, Yorkshire, where she lives with her widowed mother, stepsisters and young brother.

She also feels responsible for the fate of their servants—a devoted, resourceful bunch who gamely help Althea engage in social subterfuge as a means to preserving the family’s we’re-doing-just-fine facade.

Althea’s worries are especially timely, and some young readers will find themselves identifying with her money-centric concerns. But even those who are blissfully unaware of financial matters will find themselves caught up in the humor, suspense and moral dilemmas Kindl has conjured up.

For example, Althea may seem a bit mercenary, but is it wrong to think of marriage as a means to an end first, an opportunity for love second, if it means saving her family from ruin?

Creating a protagonist with such mature (and, it must be said, often hilarious) concerns is another departure from Kindl’s previous books. She says, “One of the limitations of doing a romance with a 14-year-old is there can’t be any closure. You’d be surprised how many kids write to me and ask, ‘Did they get married?’ So, doing a 17-year-old in this time period is fun, because I get to marry her off. It’s satisfying.”

Another reason Kindl enjoyed Althea’s story arc: “I am definitely pro-marriage. When it works, there’s nothing like it, and I’m in a position to know,” says the author, who has been married to her husband, Paul, for 35 years.

She adds, “I do think any time you give women power in society, divorces are going to go up because [women] don’t have to put up with creeps anymore . . . but that doesn’t mean marriage isn’t going to work. You have to be lucky, and it’s not something everyone is going to be able to achieve, but I do think it’s a worthy goal.”

The author’s current goals include doing more hurricane cleanup and continuing Althea’s story. The manuscript for book two is under way, and readers will delight in catching up with the goings-on in Lesser Hoo.

As Kindl notes, “no one at [Althea’s] age realizes how long life lasts,” but it’s going to be fun following along as she figures it out.