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Spring 2006 Flying Starts
Profiles of six authors making their children's book debuts this spring.
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Spring 2006 Flying Starts: Charlie Price
"Mental illness and addiction and writing—don't they go together? Seems like a perfect fit to me," says Charlie Price when asked how the idea for Dead Connection (Roaring Brook/Brodie) came about. His debut novel, which revolves around the disappearance of a high school cheerleader, is peopled with characters from society's fringes: a borderline psychotic 22-year-old, who may have seen the cheerleader leaving school the day of her disappearance; an alcoholic cop; a loner teen who spends his days in the local cemetery communicating with dead children.
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Spring 2006 Flying Starts: Catherine Murdock
The idea for Catherine Gilbert Murdock's first novel came in a dream. She saw a girl playing football against a boy she was in love with. "It was such a graphic image—I saw her in that three-point stance which, at the time, I didn't even know was called a three-point stance—and their eyes met across the line of scrimmage," Murdock recalls.
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Spring 2006 Flying Starts: Sara Varon
Sara Varon never really aspired to having a children's book published. So she's doubly surprised these days that her picture book, Chicken and Cat (Scholastic Press) has attracted a number of admirers in the children's book world.
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Spring 2006 Flying Starts: Dana Reinhardt
When Dana Reinhardt set out to write A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life (Random/Lamb), she knew she wanted to write something about Jewish identity that didn't have anything to do with the Holocaust or anti-Semitism. "I knew I wanted the novel to be about an adopted girl who discovers her biological mother is Jewish, and I knew that sometime during the course of the novel the mother would die. But that's all I knew," the author reflects.
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Spring 2006 Flying Starts: Frances Hardinge
Frances Hardinge's Fly by Night (HarperCollins) is a fantasy/comedy, centering on plucky heroine Mosca Mye and her passionate love of words. That passion is no coincidence, as Hardinge herself is a firm believer in the very real magic of the printed page.
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Spring 2006 Flying Starts: Frank Portman
Imagine this scene. You're in a rock band that has a cult following. Some passionate young corporate rep comes to one of your New York City club gigs and offers you a… book contract? That's pretty much what happened to Frank Portman. Welcome to the true story of his rock and roll road to publishing his first YA novel, King Dork (Delacorte) about a teenage kid obsessed with forming his own band, scoring with girls, attacking the high-school cult of The Catcher in the Rye and unraveling the mystery behind his father's death.
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Lost in Beijing: Peter Hessler
Peter Hessler insists that he doesn't write books about China.
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Spring 2005 Flying Starts: Cecil Castellucci
Andy Warhol had a 15-minute theory; Cecil Castellucci has "a 10-year theory." Not about getting fame, exactly, but about getting a chance.
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Spring 2005 Flying Starts: D.L. Garfinkle
Michael (Storky) Pomerantz, the endearingly nerdy hero of Storky: How I Lost My Nickname and Won the Girl (Putnam), first emerged over two decades ago in an assignment that D.L. (Debbie) Garfinkle wrote for a creative writing class. "We were given seven words that we had to use in a one-page story," recalls Garfinkle, who was taking the class at Pierce College "just for fun" while working a "really boring job at AT&T." She says her teacher loved her description of Storky and asked to keep it to use as a writing sample for other students. "I never got the piece back," she said.
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Spring 2005 Flying Starts: John Green
A few years ago, when freshly minted college grad John Green was contemplating his future, he probably didn't count on being linked in the public imagination with the use of a toothpaste tube to demonstrate the mechanics of a particular type of oral sex.
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Spring 2005 Flying Starts
Teens already rule at the multiplex and the music store. Now, more than ever, they're also showing their clout at the bookstore.
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Fall 2004 Flying Starts: Katherine Hannigan
Ida B talks to trees. But that's not all. They answer her. Yet, somehow, Katherine Hannigan in her debut novel, Ida B... and Her Plans to Maximize Fun, Avoid Disaster, and (Possibly) Save the World (Greenwillow), makes the situation completely plausible. By the second chapter, her heroine is in the family's apple orchard, greeting the trees by name, and readers think nothing of it.
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Fall 2004 Flying Starts: Katy Kelly
Though she just recently penned her first novel, Lucy Rose: Here's the Thing About Me (Delacorte), Katy Kelly is hardly a newcomer to writing. Remarking lightly that she's been a writer "for a million years," she notes that she has been a reporter for People and a feature writer for the Life section of USA Today, and is currently a senior editor at US News & World Report. And she comes from a family of writers: her mother, Marguerite Kelly, is the author of The Mother's Almanac and a syndicated column on family issues, and her father, Tom, wrote for the Washington Daily News.
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Fall 2004 Flying Starts: Chuck Richards
Jungle Gym Jitters (Walker) reveals something new each time readers revisit its extraordinarily crafted drawings. Even its author and illustrator, Chuck Richards, admits forgetting about and then discovering anew some quirky detail he's created among the book's countless contraptions and spine-tingling perspectives. His high-flying artwork chronicles a boy's fear of his father's fantastic, sky-scraping jungle gym.
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Fall 2004 Flying Starts: Anna Dale
For British author Anna Dale, a childhood fascination with witches proved a key ingredient for the imaginative potion that became her first novel, Whispering to Witches (Bloomsbury).
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Fall 2004 Flying Starts: Meg Rosoff
Meg Rosoff wasn't able to celebrate the glowing reviews her first novel received when they started coming in—she had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. "I was in the hospital for my first operation when the book was released and all these flowers started arriving. Half of the cards said, 'Congratulations,' the other half said, 'We're so sorry.' "
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Spring 2004 Flying Starts: Laura MatthewsLaura
The story of how Fish (Delacorte) came to be published is a bit like the miracle at the center of Laura Matthews's debut novel: Tiger saves the Fish, who leaps from a mud puddle in a war-torn, drought-ridden land. The author never identifies the human narrator Tiger by gender, age or physical attributes. Nor does Matthews identify the country in which Tiger's parents act as relief workers. Even the man who, with his donkey, leads Tiger's family across the border to safety as war encroaches on their small village, is known only as the Guide. Although the author keeps the Guide's nationality and the book's setting anonymous, she steeps the novel in such tangible details—the mountainous terrain, a muddy riverbed—that readers always feel as if they know where they are.
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Spring 2004 Flying Starts: Leslie Connor
Sometimes, getting back to basics helps us appreciate what is truly valuable. This type of reality check certainly had an effect on Leslie Connor, inspiring her to write her first picture book, Miss Bridie Chose a Shovel, illustrated by Mary Azarian (Houghton). In the story, Miss Bridie leaves her thatch-roofed cottage in 1856 Ireland and sets sail for America. Of all her prized possessions, Miss Bridie chooses to bring a shovel to her new homeland, for reasons that soon become apparent in a most practical way.
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Spring 2004 Flying Starts: Mary Ann Rodman
Mary Ann Rodman has wanted to be a writer since age three, when she taught herself how to read. However, it never occurred to her to write a story about her own childhood—growing up in the newly integrated South—until she saw the movie Mississippi Burning as an adult. "It surprised me how many people questioned the movie's authenticity. I began to think that maybe I should write about my childhood," remarks Rodman, whose father, like the Gene Hackman character in the film, was an FBI agent sent to Mississippi to investigate hate crimes during the Civil Rights movement.
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