Invisibility: Andrea Cremer and David Levithan/Reflections

This is how it happens:  I write an adult book that Laura Geringer discovers and reads; she gets in touch.  For a year Laura and I talk about how ill-equipped I feel I am to write books for young adults.  A conversation in a Philadelphia restaurant changes everything; I am persuaded to try.  I write what will become several books for Laura, and in the midst of story development, copy editing, cover design, and publicity, I meet Jill Santopolo—utterly adorable, fashion savvy, super smart, wildly well-organized, and Laura's second in command at Laura Geringer Books/HarperTeen, where I will write four books, one of them (The Heart is Not a Size) being Jill's very own.  Then one day Jill calls to say that she is headed to Philomel to join a children's book empire carved out by a man named Michael Green.  I'd really like Michael, Jill says.  She hopes I'll eventually meet him.

(She is right.  And I do.  Facts made true in reverse order.)

A few years later, I see Jill again, this time at an ALA event, where she slips me a copy of Between Shades of Gray and whispers two words in my ear:  Tamra Tuller.  Jill and Tamra are, by now, colleagues at Philomel, and Tamra edits the kind of books I like to write.  Jill, looking trademark gorgeous, encourages me to read Ruta Sepetys' international bestseller of a debut novel as proof.  I do.  Again, I am persuaded.  Not long afterwards, I have the great privilege of joining the Philomel family when Tamra reads a book I've been working on for ten years and believes that it has merit. Jill has opened her new home to me, and I am grateful.

What happens next is that Tamra moves to Chronicle and I, with a book dedicated to her because I do love her that much, move to Chronicle, too.  What happens next is Jill and I remain friends (Jill and I and Michael and Jessica, too (not to mention Laura)).  Which is all a very long way of saying how happy I was to receive two of Jill's newest creations just a few weeks ago.  Last night and early this morning I read the first of them.  It's called Invisibility, it's due out in May, and it is co-authored by Jill's fabulously successful Philomel author, Andrea Cremer (The Nightshade Series) and the big-hearted author/editor/sensation/Lover's Dictionary Guru David Levithan.

I hear David Levithan—his soulfulness, his tenderness, his yearning, his love—when I read this book. I hear Andrea Cremer—her careful and credible world building, her necessary specificity, her other-worldly imagination.  It's a potent combination in a story about a Manhattan boy whom no one in the world can see.  No one, that is, except for the girl who has moved in down the hall—a girl who has escaped Minnesota with a brother she deeply loves and a mother who cares for them both, but must work long hours to keep her transplanted family afloat.  Cremer and Levithan's Manhattan is tactile, navigable, stewing with smells and scenes.  Their fantasy world—spellcraft, curses, witches, magic—is equally cinematic and engaging.  The love between the invisible boy and the seeing (and, as it turns out, magically gifted) girl feels enduring, and then there's that other kind of love—between Elizabeth and her brother—that gives this story even greater depth and meaning.  The parents aren't nearly bad either (not at all).

What it is to be invisible.  What it is to see and be seen.  What it is to know there is evil in the world and that any strike against it will scar and (indeed) age those who take a stand.  Invisibility is a fantasy story, but it is more than that, too.  It's a growing-up story in which courage, truth-telling, sacrifice, and vulnerability figure large, and in which love of every kind makes a difference. 

Read more...

the Small Damages cake, from Ruta Sepetys

I have written many times on this blog about the exquisite writer and human being, Ruta Sepetys.  I am lucky to know her—it's that simple—and the gift of our friendship is a gift that Tamra Tuller, our Philomel editor, gave.  Tamra sent Ruta a copy of Small Damages a long time ago, and Ruta not only lent her voice to this story, but she stayed in touch, sending notes from all around the world as she met with teachers, parents, and children to discuss her international bestseller, Between Shades of Gray—and, later, to prepare us for the February 2013 release of her absolutely lovely second book, Out of the Easy.

Home for Ruta is states away from here.  Life for Ruta is many obligations which she, with all the grace of a true diplomat, seamlessly fulfills.  Still, on July 19th, the day Small Damages was released into the world, Ruta thought to send me a gift.  Enclosed is a little cake, not quite full of taste, but certainly full of love, she wrote.

It had been my son's birthday, and then my husband's.  There was endless corporate work to do.  My party for this little book was two months away.  But there Ruta was, reminding me to take a moment for this book that had consumed ten years of my life and almost (so many times) vanished.  Her cake will always sit among my treasured things, a reminder:  Take a moment.

Today, taking a page from Ruta, I stop to remind us all.

Read more...

Out of the Easy/Ruta Sepetys

The dignity of Ruta Sepetys is telegraphed from afar. It's in the books she writes—the international sensation Between Shades of Gray and now (coming in February 2013) Out of the Easy.  It's plain as day in her interviews, her commentary, her web site, her broadcast segments.  And if you ever have the chance to meet her (and I'm lucky; I briefly have), it's all right there in her face.  Ruta isn't a writer simply and only because she wants to be a writer.  She's a writer because she has something to say.

She's a writer, too, who knows the value of deep research—the liberating and liberalizing ways that rooting around in both personal and world history, in the files of the Soviet secret police and the murky streets of the historic French Quarter, in old maps and and the catalogs of Smith College, in the workings of all kinds of watches will, when pondered long enough, when tacked and quilted, generate story.  Research, particularly historic research, can be hard to master and harder to contain.  Ruta makes it look easy.  What she knows never trumps the many things that she imagines.

I spent today lying in a steamy east-coast house, circa 2012, reading Ruta's delectable new circa 1950s New Orleans novel.  Often I forgot just where I actually was as I slid into the dream, drifted in and out of the old bookstore (and the chatter, always smart, about books), had a good old walkabout in the brothel (equal parts gaudy and opulent), and fell in with Easy's seventeen-year-old heroine, Josie.  Josie has found her way despite her mother's poor profession, witless selfishness, and fancy for bad men.  She's a spitfire, an I'll-do-it-myself-er, a girl walking around with a pile of lies but without a dent in her actual morality.  She's the favorite of the wily, big-hearted madam known as Willie.  She's loved by two boys—Patrick, her co-worker at the bookstore, and Jesse, a beautiful boy with a mysterious past—not to mention a whole lot of poor souls who make her tattered life rich.  Josie's mother's on the lam and Josie's in trouble, and there will be murder, mayhem, lies, sacrifice, and choices before this story is through.  There'll be a whole lot of color and New Orleans twang, a rip-roaring cast, and, always, Ruta's intelligent sense of humor, not to mention instructions from Dickens.

Easy, which is a Tamra Tuller book, which is to say a Philomel book, which is to say the product of a remarkable book family headed by Michael Green, sounds spectacularly like then (the details are so right, their webbing-in so clever), but it resonates for now.  It's going to generate a whole lot of book love when it debuts next winter.  

Read more...

My BEA Day (with photos)

I rose at 3 AM, walked the just-before-dawn streets, took one train and then another (much, oh much too much delayed) train, then ran the long blocks toward the BEA.  I was, shall we say, windblown by the time I arrived.  But there to greet me were the ever-lovely, ever kind Danielle (There's a Book) and Florinda (The 3rs Blog)—first-rate bloggers and people. It was about time I met the generous Danielle.  About time I gave Florinda (who was my unofficial publicist last year at the BEA) another hug.

From there to see my dear friends at Philomel, to meet more of that tremendous team, and to finally say hello to the phenomenal Ruta Sepetys in person; she has a new book coming out that I think will be just as amazing (in many different ways) as Between Shades of Gray.  From there to listen to four of the buzz adult authors talk about the process, their books, their hopes.  A beautiful interlude with Lauren Wein.  Then to sit in the audience of Jennifer Brown (the fantastic children's editor for Shelf Awareness) and Kristi Yamaguchi, an Olympian with a heart of gold. A run from the Downtown Stage to the Uptown Stage so that I could sit in the front row (all other seats were gone) of the YA Buzz panel, featuring, among other people, Melissa Marr, Jenny Han, Tonya Hurley, and my friend Siobhan Vivian.

Just after dawn now, and I've filed all my stories for Publishing Perspectives. I'll link to them here when they go live.

Now I'm going to go fix my hair. Then settle down, and teach.

Read more...

Seville, Berlin, Philomel: At long last, I am meeting Tamra Tuller

In the summer of 2010, I was at the American Library Association meeting in Washington, DC, when the ever-fashionable Jill Santopolo (who had worked with me on several Laura Geringer/Harper Collins books and had herself edited The Heart Is Not a Size) slipped a copy of Ruta Sepetys's novel to me and said, "I read this on the train and cried.  I think it's the kind of book you'd love."

I did.  So did the world.

Reading Between Shades of Gray made me wonder about the editor of that book, Jill's Philomel colleague Tamra Tuller, who had taken on Ruta's literary exploration of another time, another place.  I had been working on a Seville novel for years at that point.  I had come close—very close—to selling it more than one time.  My heart had been broken, but I hadn't given up; if I believed in anything I believed in that cortijo, that cook, those gypsies, those Spanish songs.  I wrote a note to Tamra—brazen slush pile person that I have often been—and asked if she might take a look.

She did.  The rest is history.  Two years to the month after my first reaching out to Tamra, Small Damages—far the better book for the conversations Tamra and I had—will be released, on my son's birthday, to be exact.  A year or so from now (the timing isn't fixed) my Berlin novel, a book born out of a phone conversation Tamra and I had one afternoon, a book that reflects both our love for that city (Tamra having gone there first, Tamra having sent me thoughts about where I might go, what I might see), will find its way into the world.

And today, for the first time, I meet Tamra, a young woman who has changed my writing life immeasurably in ways both big and small.  Two trains, a long walk, a conversation—in person.  If I'm lucky, Jill herself will be in sight (and the very dear Jessica).

It feels like going home.

Read more...

The Kaleidoscopic Vision of Ruta Sepetys

I have written here of the extraordinary kindness and straight-through goodness of the people of Philomel—Tamra Tuller, Michael Green, Jill Santopolo, and, last night, the dearest note from Colleen Conway.  I have written of how lucky I am to find myself in their company with the forthcoming release of Small Damages.  I have written, too, about the important and hugely acclaimed novels that Tamra has edited, and of the writers she has brought into her fold.

But have I told you how kind those writers are?  How generous both Ruta Sepetys (Between Shades of Gray) and Kathryn Erskine (Mockingbird) have been with me?  Perhaps I simply haven't had the words.

I still don't have the words. But this morning I invite you to visit with Ruta Sepetys by way of her remarkable, whimsical, internationally seasoned web world.  It's like being in Manhattan in the snow, Christmas season.  Like finding yourself inside a kaleidoscope.  Like talking to a friend.

Read more...

The Making of an International YA Bestseller: A Behind the Scenes Look

Ruta Sepetys' debut young adult novel, Between Shades of Gray, stunned us all with its depiction of life during the Soviet reign of terror.  The story was researched and original.  It had meaning.  It could teach us.  It was no wonder, then, that a publishing house of the quality of Philomel and an editor as graceful and dear as Tamra Tuller would want to take it on.  But how did Philomel convert this book into an international force before it had even launched in the United States?  How did it transcend paranormal and dystopian trends to achieve this kind of bestsellerdom?

I am not the only one who wondered.  But I am someone who was privileged to go behind the scenes with Philomel's dynamic president Michael Green and with Tamra herself.  I had already seen, first hand, how enormously capable and engaged and passionate and just plain kind these two individuals are (thanks to the upcoming publication of my novel, Small Damages, with Philomel).  But the answers I received to the questions I asked underscored for me the value of simply taking care—of thinking strategically, working ahead, exercising patience, and believing in books with a literary, historical bent.

I told this story in the October 13 Frankfurt Show Daily, a publication of Publishing Perspectives.  The piece is available here and also here on page 14.  For now I will leave you with these thoughts, from Michael Green.  They brighten my day each time I read them:

“YA literature is simply some of the finest writing
in the business,” says Green. “We’ve long known
this, and we’ve long known that reaching emerging
readers is important. Changing the world one
reader at a time may sound simultaneously corny
and impossible, but we believe in what we do. Ruta’s
book allows us to touch people otherwise out of
reach and open their eyes to something important.
That is literature, YA or otherwise, at its best.”

Read more...

"Historical fiction is struggling,"

I was told in an ever-so-brief e-mail yesterday.  Strangely, the note didn't do a thing to discourage me from the work I am doing to tell William's story in a Dangerous Neighbors prequel.  Most importantly, perhaps, because I just love this book—the guy-oriented nature of it, the pretty fascinating history behind it, and the way it visits me, late at night (my characters inside my dreams, my dreams beginning alongside a mess of noisy railroad tracks, in the clamor of a newsroom, in the rescue of a red heifer).  But also because when I look around I see books I've loved—historical novels for young adults—that are absolutely thriving.

Let's consider Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (Ransom Riggs), a Quirk publication, now in its seventh week on the New York Times bestseller list (I'm 70 pages in and loving the mix of image and story; expect a full report tomorrow).  Let's talk about Ruta Sepetys' Between Shades of Gray, a book that led me to the marvelous Tamra Tuller of Philomel, and which, in its very first week, debuted on the New York Times list.  Let's talk about The Book Thief, one of my favorite books of all time, still number one on the list, or, for that matter, the award-winning, bestselling The Good Thief, still generating much enthusiasm.  Libba Bray didn't do too badly with The Sweet Far Thing or A Great and Terrible Beauty, Rita Williams-Garcia was deservedly rewarded for her basically perfect One Crazy Summer, and I recall—do you as well?—a certain series of historical novels featuring glamorously clad society heroines that rocked the lists for a very long time.  (I'm also thinking of the big recent award winners like The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate and about the up and coming May B. by Caroline Starr Rose.)

Then there are those adult books, historical novels all, with which we are so familiar—Devil in the White City, The Help, Water for Elephants, The Paris Wife, Loving Frank, so many others—that locked in their places in book clubs and on lists. Struggle isn't a word that I would apply to them. 

I believe, in other words, that there is room for those of us out here who have fallen in love with a time and place and have a story to tell.  I've been barely able to breathe under a load of corporate work lately.  But the first chance I get, I'm returning to William.  I left him in a saloon down on Broad Street by name of Norris House.  He's been hankering for some dinner. I've got ideas about a multi-media launch.  And this kind of fun is worth having.

Read more...

Between Shades of Gray/Ruta Sepetys: Reflections

If I brought just one ARC home from the BEA—the glorious The Report (Jessica Francis Kane)—I was to have traveled home with two ARCs from the ALA convention.  The first, Caroline Leavitt's Pictures of You, did in fact make it into my bag.  The second, Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys, was delivered to me at the Egmont USA booth by a fashion-runway-worthy Jill Santopolo, only to be snatched by an eager reader when I oh-so-briefly turned my head.  I had to wait until yesterday, when another copy of the ARCs arrived by mail, to read this book that Jill had loved so much.  It had made her cry on the train, she said.  She had thought that I might like it.

She was right, as Jill so often is.  Between Shades of Gray is an important book—a story that captures the terrifying deportation of a Lithuanian family by the Soviet secret police.  Along with tens of thousands of others, 15-year-old Lina, her younger brother, and her educated, lovely mother are packed onto trains and sent toward the bitter cold of Siberia; their father, meanwhile, is sentenced to a prison-camp death. What will survival look like?  What will kindness look like?  Who is to be trusted?  The losses will be great; in an author's note, we learn that more than a third of all Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians were killed during Stalin's ruthless genocide.  Goodness, however, also prevails, for Lina is strong and she is faithful—losing and gaining, falling in love, making a record of the life she is living through drawings and words.

Simply and compellingly told, endowed with an honorable and serious purpose, Between Shades of Gray is the sort of book that wakens new knowledge in its readers.  Knowledge of a terrible time, absolutely.  Knowledge about the great capacity of the human heart:  that, too.  

Read more...