on the dignity, intelligence, and craft of Patricia McCormick

A few years ago, at the invitation of Alessandra Balzer of Balzer + Bray (Harper Collins Children's Books), I joined a table of remarkable young adult writers and advocates in a famed Philadelphia restaurant.  Chris Crutcher sat to my left, Patricia McCormick to my right. I was, of course, lucky.

But only lately, reading CUT and SOLD, two of McCormick's rightly beloved books, have I realized just how lucky I was.  Patricia McCormick is—I'll use the word—a writer.  A writer with a moral heart and a social conscious.  A writer who has taken on subjects like cutting and the horrors of sex slavery, not to sensationalize, but to teach, not to exploit, but to help the rest of us understand what is truly at stake, what must be fixed.  And a writer who boldly experiments with form.  A writer of true and beautiful sentences.

There is an elegance to her work, a dignity.  There is great intelligence as she unpacks her stories. Everything feels real. Nothing feels forced. There is the bounty of genuine knowing.  Listen to this, from the early pages of SOLD, the story of a young girl forced to work at Happiness House.  These are the halcyon days.  This is before.  Lakshmi is poor, and she has a gift for seeing beauty.

At dawn, our hut, perched high on the mountainside, is already torched with sunlight, while the village below remains cloaked in the mountain's long purple shadow until midnight.

By midday, the tawny fields will be dotted with the cheerful dresses of the women, red as the poinsettias that lace the windy footpaths.  Napping babies will sway in wicker baskets, and lizards will sun themselves outside their holes.

Like CUT, SOLD never blinks.  It doesn't glance away from the hard truths. It doesn't gauze the facts with fairytale.  I read both books with my heart in my throat—heartbroken and also awed by McCormick's talent.

Patricia McCormick has a new book due out soon—a book called NEVER FALL DOWN, based on "the true story of an 11-year-old boy who survived the Khmer Rouge by playing music in the Killing Fields."  Archbishop Desmond Tutu has called the book "one of the most inspiring and powerful books" he's ever read. Our teens need books like these.  And so do we.

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Well Groomed

I have been out of my home more than I should be of late—at meetings, at conferences, at gatherings. I have not found the time simply to be. Last night, as I walked through the dusk of my city, Philadelphia, toward the ALAN cocktail hour at the NCTE event, I felt a floating disassociation from myself. I counted the things that I should be doing, the things that would never get done.

That welling was countered almost at once by the embrace of HarperTeen's own Laura Lutz (who is a dark-haired version of the young Amy Irving, I finally decided); by a conversation with the delightful Matt Phelan; by the long rat-a-tat with HarperTeen's Emilie Ziemer, not just a dancer herself, but an exemplary reader (and good soul). It was further improved by time spent with Jill Santopolo, and by listening, then, to writers talk about their process and their teaching.

Are you a lawyer? someone asked me. No, why? I wondered. Because you ask so many questions, came the answer. A familiar accusation.

There was a dinner after that—eating on stools, family style, in the Osteria kitchen; it was like a scene straight out of Top Chef. Chris Crutcher talked about freedoms of speech. Patricia McCormick was her extraordinarily lovely self (we share friends, as it turns out, and experiences in special places). Alessandra Balzer and Patty Rosati were gracious hostesses. I wasn't entirely sure, to be honest, just why I was there, how I fit—if I would ever fit—within that lit world glamor. But I was very glad to have been invited. To have touched down, for a brief spell, within that world of books.

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