The Philadelphia Inquirer review of Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent: Dazed and Grateful

The day began early, as they do, and I was out when the emails started to come in about a Philadelphia Inquirer review of Dr. Radways's Sarsaparilla Resolvent. Email after email.

Congratulations!

But it wasn't until just now that I had the time to find the story myself, and I am floored. Floored.

I never knew if anyone would read this book when I wrote it, rewrote it, rewrote it. I never knew if it would find a publishing home. I just knew how much I loved William and his Philadelphia, and so I carried on.

Katie Haegele, how do I thank you for words like these?

The bare bones of Beth Kephart's new story sound modern, but this bright, burning novel—intended for a young adult audience but powerful enough to engage any adult—is set in the Philadelphia of 1870. Using surprising period details and a gorgeous turn of phrase, Kephart has called forth an interesting time in our city's history and made it live again for just a moment.

And later:

The language is what does it. These people feel real, and we have no trouble imagining them living out their dramas just as painfully and joyously as we do ours, 100 or more years before we were born.

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Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent: Introducing William and Career (an excerpt)

There was no arguing with her. There was nothing. He’d carried her back up those steps, like an empty dress in his arms. Had taken his place in the chair beside the bed and was half asleep when he heard the knock on the front door.

“Coming!” he’d called out.

Then, to his Ma, he’d whispered, “That’ll be Career.”

He’d pulled on a pair of Francis’s trousers, belted up, checked the pockets, and found a chip of coal that Francis must have tucked away after a day of hunting the line; he’d slipped it under the bed for later. He’d taken the stairs quick, grabbed his cap. He’d opened the door to his best friend, who leaned hard into the brick and held a match to the end of a pipe, his head cocked toward the dying sounds of the power looms being tooled across the street. Career wore his charcoal-colored sack jacket and his one too-big-for-him vest. The dust had been rubbed from the crease in his boots.

The two set off down Carleton, stepping through the pool of the hydrant’s wasted water and giving a nod to Mrs. May, leaning out her window—nosy as always and putting a gloss on the hairs of her chin.

“Your Ma all right?” Mrs. May calls.

“Had some rye,” William says. “Some tea.”

“It’s something,” Mrs. May says.

“Not enough.”

“You keep at it boy, you hear me?”

Her voice sounding like bad news, always, no matter how nice she tries to be.

Career wears his black hair long, past his ears. William wears his tucked inside his cap. Career walks straight, to make himself taller. William, tall, walks a crouch. More hydrants have gone off up and down—the spurt and the fizzle of water, free. The flangers, the fitters, the chippers, and caulkers are home. The patternmakers and carpenters. The iron molders and turners. The ones who make the boilers go. The casting cleaners and assistants. Not Pa. It’s visiting hours up at the penitentiary. Career always comes along. 

— excerpt, Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent, illustrated by William Sulit

(New City Community Press/Temple University Press, April 30, 2013)

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a starred Kirkus review for Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent (and Beth drops to the floor in gratitude)

Years ago (it seems now) I wrote a book about Centennial Philadelphia—a novel about twin sisters of substantial means set against the Exposition that drew 10 million visitors to Philadelphia during 1876 and was endangered, on one incredibly hot day, by a greedy fire. Among my characters was a boy named William, making his way on the poor side of town. William rescued lost animals for a living. He rescued, in many ways, my grieving character, Katherine.

Dangerous Neighbors (Egmont USA/Laura Geringer Books) was originally told in three first-person voices—Katherine's, William's, and the fire's. Published, it was a single third-person telling, focused primarily on Katherine. I never lost sight of William, however. He was vital and alive to me and (I would read in review after review) to many Dangerous Neighbors readers as well.

I lost a major corporate account two years ago and found myself with the time (and desire) to return to William. I dialed back the clock by five years to 1871. I studied the sounds and the stresses of Baldwin Locomotive Works, Eastern State Penitentiary, Schuylkill River races, the odd medicines of the time (such as that sarsaparilla resolvent), and the neighborhood then known as Bush Hill. I gave William a best friend named Career, who worked for my idol, the Public Ledger editor George Childs, and I set the tale in motion. I rewrote this book dozens of times. I struggled with self-doubt, and that loneliness that sets in during the heat of making things.

Finally I asked my husband if he might illustrate the book and give me a cover. I wrote some jacket copy. I talked to Micah Kleit at Temple University Press. Micah and the Temple team had made Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River happen, and that book—odd, uncategorizable, a risk—has meant the world to me. William's story was also a risk, also a love song to my city. Micah, teaming me with Stephen Parks at New City Community Press, said (thankfully) yes. I asked Quinn Colter, a University of Chicago student with an eye on a copy editing career, if she might read the book looking for type errors. New City Community Press brought in a book designer named Elizabeth Parks, who was very kind (and talented).

And then the book was done and, for a very long time, I held my breath.

I exhaled last week, when Temple University Press's Gary Kramer, a publicist for whom I have enormous respect, sent me this starred review from Kirkus.

Dear Kirkus reviewer, whomever you are: I have no words. I am floored, and I am grateful.

Dr. Radway is due out on April 30th.

DR. RADWAY'S SARSAPARILLA RESOLVENT [STARRED REVIEW!]  
Kephart has crafted a deeply satisfying tale that’s richly evocative of its time and place.
Playing masterfully with words, knitting them into new and deliciously expressive forms, Kephart’s story is one of loss and then redemption. William Quinn is only 14. With his father in the Cherry Hill prison and his genially wayward older brother, Francis, recently beaten to death by a brutal policeman, his mother has ground herself into unbearable, paralyzing grief, and the boy has to find a way to save them both. He has help from many: Career, his cheerfully ambitious best friend; Pearl, a good-hearted prostitute; Molly, a neighbor child who’s deeply smitten with Career; a wayward goat named Daisy; and the abiding memory of Francis. Gradually, William finds a way to make right some terrible wrongs that are only revealed at a perfectly measured pace. Stark, spare illustrations provide an effective counterpoint to the flowing, poetic language. Against the 1871 Philadelphia setting (five years before the related Dangerous Neighbors, 2010), a faultlessly depicted world of sound, energy and ample filth, the fully developed characters of William and Career are trapped in a bleakly hopeless situation. But they never fully give up hoping. Like the very best of historical fiction, this effort combines a timeless tale with a vividly recreated, fascinating world.
An outstanding and ultimately life-affirming tale. (Historical fiction. 11 & up)

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Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent: an excerpt, an illustration

In less than two months, Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent, my 1871 Philadelphia novel (and prequel to Dangerous Neighbors), will be released by New City Community Press/Temple University Press.

This illustrated book (all thanks to William Sulit) is another song to the city I love, and more about it can be found here.

Nearly two years ago, I posted the first words of the book here.

Today I share the whole of a very short chapter two:

Chapter Two

“I keep losing things,” Ma says to William. The room is swampy, the shadows smug. A bottle of Bitter Wine of Iron sits lidless on the near table, a sorry spoon beside it. William wipes his forehead with his sleeve and studies the single mourning dove that will not leave the sill.

“Ma,” he reminds her. “I’m still right here.”

He stands up from the chair where he’s been sitting. Measures the Bitter Wine onto the spoon while the dove watches with the flat disk of its eye. William worries briefly for the dove’s mate, disappeared on the same day that he and Ma lost Francis. The one dove staying and the other dove gone, and William’s mother dying by inches of heartache.

“Take your medicine, Ma,” he says. “Doctor made you promise.”

Nothing.

“Rejuvenation, Ma. Comfort. Says it right here on the label.”

Ma turns. She closes her eyes and leaves William standing with the thick drip of the stuff on the spoon—E.F. Kunkel’s Bitter Wine, bought with Francis’s stealings for a hard one dollar. Lifting the spoon to his own mouth, William sucks it clean, then pours himself a foul second. The mourning dove cocks its head in a sideways scold.

“Mind your own,” William tells it, but the bird just stares. Everything that’s broken is William Quinn’s to fix.

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Dangerous Neighbors (paperback) and Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent: two upcoming releases

In just a few days, Dangerous Neighbors, my Centennial Philadelphia novel, will be released by Egmont USA as a paperback, with a bound-in teacher's guide.  A few weeks after that, in mid-February, Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent, an 1871 Philadelphia novel that features Dangerous Neighbors' own best-loved boy, William, will be released by New City Community Press/Temple University Press.

Dr. Radway's introduces, among many other Philadelphia places, Eastern State Penitentiary.  In this scene (below) William and his best friend, Career, are making their way toward the old prison, which was known back then as Cherry Hill.  They're going to keep William's father company, in the only way they know how.

The image above was taken two years ago, when I was in the midst of my research for this book.

Career pulls a stone out of his trouser pocket, drops it to the street, and kicks it ahead to William, who smacks it crosswise and up, stepping back to let two twin girls in dresses like pink parasols pass, their mother stern in blue.  Career lopes and knocks the stone to where William would be if he wasn’t still staring at the girls, both of them with the identical ginger hair and jewel eyes, neither somehow like the other.  Neither, mostly, like the mother, who casts her opinion on William and hurries her exotic procession along.  

William feels the heat in his face and runs for the stone.  He smacks it hard Career’s way.  The game stays good between them now—past Spring Garden and Brandywine, Green, Mt. Vernon, Wallace, all the way to Cherry Hill, where finally they stop and stand in the long skirt of the prison’s shadows, its massive gothic gloom.  Cherry Hill runs the full block and back, two-hundred feet in the east-west direction, four crenellated towers on its front face and a watchman high, looking for trouble. Career works another match into the shallow bowl of his pipe, and it takes.  The tobacco flares sweet. 

“You going to call to him, then?” Career asks, after a while.

“Walls too thick.”

“You going to try it anyway?”
            “Your whistling,” William says, “goes a longer way.”

Career blows the smoke of his pipe through the spaces between his teeth.  He clears his throat and finds his song, and it carries.  William closes his eyes and imagines his Pa inside—past the vaulted doors and the iron gates, beneath the eye of the warden, and of God.  People are puny at Cherry Hill.  People are locked away to consider what they’ve done.

“You think he can hear that?” Career asks now, stopping his song.

“Keep on.”

Career picks the song back up, and William stands there in the shadows, at his best friend’s side, trying to see Pa in his mind’s eye.   “Don’t do it, Pa,” Francis had warned him, Ma, mostly.  Don’t, don’t, don’t. 

Career whistles a professional melody.  William hears what he thinks is the wind, but it’s that bird winging in close, that dove tucking its wings then letting them go, its rise and its angling in effortless.  Career stops his song and looks up.  The bird goes on, north and west—a free line across the prison wall and out, toward the river.

Cherry Hill still locked up tight as a vault. 

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Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent arrives (as galley pages)

It's been quite a week here, as proof pages for both Handling the Truth and Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent arrive.  Over the next few days I'll turn my attention to the second, my 1871 prequel to Dangerous Neighbors, which features Eastern State Penitentiary, Baldwin Locomotive Works, Schuylkill River races, George Childs, a famous murder, and a boy named William who rescues animals for a living.

This book also features illustrations by William Sulit and a book design by Elizabeth Parks (and copy editing by my blogger friend Quinn Colter).  It will be released this coming March from New City Community Press/Temple University.

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the 1871 Philadelphia novel moves into final design, and Dangerous Neighbors prompts an afternoon reverie

I returned from Asbury Park and Bruce Springsteen Appreciators to an email from Quinn Colter, a young friend destined for a big career as a copy editor.  I had invited Quinn to join the Dr. Radway editorial team, and she had—plying my text with wonderful questions and delightful commentary (it seems that Career, one of my primary characters, has won our Quinn Colter over).  Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent, my 1871 Philadelphia novel about Bush Hill, Eastern State Penitentiary, Baldwin Locomotive Works, Schuylkill River races, George W. Childs, and two best friends, now goes into design and will be released next March by New City Community Press/Temple University Press.

I left the desk at last to take a walk.  Meandering through my streets, I discovered Kathleen, a very special green-eyed woman, who had, she told me, read Dangerous Neighbors a few weeks ago.  Kathleen grew up in Philadelphia at a time when circus elephants walked the streets of Erie and Broad, and in Dangerous Neighbors, a book about Philadelphia during the 1876 Centennial, she discovered many details that resonated with her.  Standing there in the glorious afternoon sun, Kathleen told me stories about the Oppenheimer curling iron, the fifteen-cent round-trip trolley, the ferry one took from Philadelphia across the Delaware, and the shore years ago.  Kathleen's grandmother was an eleven-year-old child during the time of the Centennial, and so Kathleen remembered, too, whispers of the great exposition.

I had published an essay about the Jersey shore in the Philadelphia Inquirer a few weeks ago, and that story prompted for Kathleen memories of her own trips to the sea as a child.  We spoke, then, of this, too—this shared geography that has been transformed by time and yet remains a signifier, a home.

As much as I often wish I were back in the city living the urban life, I am tremendously grateful for the streets where I live.  I am grateful, too, for the people who enter my life—for Quinn now on the verge of her career, and for Kathleen with her storehouse of memories.

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bringing Quinn onto the Dr. Radway team

How do we ever get to be, in this life, to be the thing we want to be?

Sometimes somebody just has to give us a chance.

For as long as I have known Quinn Colter (we met shortly after I started this blog, when she was still in high school), she has wanted to be a copy editor.  Words—the right words, rightly spaced and punctuated—matter to her.  She studies them and celebrates them.  Their mismanagement irks her. She sees herself in New York City someday, but between now and then—how? what?

Readers of this blog know how important copy editors are to me.  Quinn knows how important she has become in my life.  Not long ago I made the decision to invite Quinn onto the Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent team, and so I am so happy today to announce that she will be my copy editor on this important project.

Dr. Radway is due out next March from New City Community Press/Temple University Press.

Welcome to 1871 Philadelphia, Quinn.

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thoughts on the next book

It took me a while to find my next book.  The one that is to come after Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent (New City Community Press/Temple University Press/March 2013), Handling the Truth (Gotham/August 2013), and the Berlin novel (Phliomel/Winter 2014).  It had occurred to me that I might have said everything I ever had to say.  That I had shadowed all the characters, or ideas, or places, that could ever mean something deeply real to me.

And so I read—not to find a next book for my beloved editor, Tamra Tuller, but to satisfy hollow places within.  I wrote essays—short pieces about landscapes and people, inquiries into the art of literature or the state of young adult tales, profiles of writers whose work intrigues me, reviews of new and forthcoming books.  I planned road trips (south, this coming September) and dreamed of returning to Europe.  I listened to Springsteen songs until even I knew it was time to stop.  I watched documentary films.  I cooked.  I went to two different beaches on two different days.  I tried not to ask myself, What?  Next?

Still, what next crept in, slow, on a sideways angle.  It arrived via old memories, new readings, and an urge to take five paragraphs that I wrote a dozen or so years ago and turn them into the start of something new.  What next beat its feverish wings at me.  I began to buy books, to take notes.

I'm in no hurry.  I've written nothing that I'll keep.  I'm just thinking about all of this, sure of this one thing:  the center of this idea holds and I want to write the heck out of it for Tamra.  I have time before the idea becomes a project becomes a deadline.  I have time, but I also have (incredible, necessary) a new and urgent passion.

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It's Official—and Cover Reveal: Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent

Many years ago I wrote an odd book called Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River.  Flow had grown out of my love for my city, was supported (in all its strangeness) by a Pew Fellowships in the Arts grant, and was published by the best possible house for a book such as that one:  Temple University Press.  Micah Kleit, my editor, gave the book room, while Gary Kramer, a savvy and delightful publicist with deep Philly roots, gave it wings.  Not so run-of-the-mill in tone, structure, and voice, but always Philly true, Flow sits today—slender and alive—on my shelves, thanks to Micah's picking up the phone when I called.

From Flow grew Dangerous Neighbors (Laura Geringer Books/Egmont USA), my 1876 Centennial novel.  Katherine, a bereaving twin, stands at the heart of that story, but just one step to her left is a character named William, a young man from the poor side of town who rescues lost animals for a living.  William was a character who never left my thoughts.  He lived with me long after Dangerous Neighbors ended.

Soon I was conjuring William as a young adolescent living among the machines of Baldwin Locomotive Works in 1871 Philadelphia.  His brother has been murdered by a cop (the murder based on a real Philadelphia event), his father is in Eastern State Penitentiary, and it is up to William to protect his heart-and-soul-sickened mom.  William gets some help in this from his best friend, Career, who has a job with the newspaper man, George Childs.  He gets help, too, from a prostitute named Pearl, and from the little girl next door.  He thinks he's getting help from the strange medicines (that sarsaparilla resolvent among them) that were being pedaled at the time.  And those ginger-haired twin girls from Dangerous Neighbors?  They're in and out of his poor neighborhood, thanks to their feminist mother.

After I'd finished writing this novel, I sat and thought for a time about publishing options.  I wanted a true Philadelphia home for this book.  I wanted an opportunity to work with a house that might connect this story to Philadelphia school children, museum goers, history buffs.   It wasn't long before I was writing a note to Micah at Temple University Press, who thought the story sounded interesting and encouraged me to send it on to his colleague, Stephen Parks.  Steve is a Syracuse University professor who also runs New City Community Press.  NCCP began as a literacy project in the public schools of Philadelphia, won a major national grant in support of its ethos, and remains today committed to telling community stories.  I liked the sound of all that, and so, last February, I met Steve in Chestnut Hill and we talked.  There's been no question (in my mind) about this book's future ever since.

Today I can officially announce that Dr. Radway's Sarsparilla Resolvent will be released next March from New City Community Press and distributed by my friends at Temple University Press.  It will be illustrated by my husband, William Sulit, who also designed the book's cover, revealed for the first time here; for a glimpse of interior art, go here and for more of Bill's art, go here.  In January, Egmont USA will release the paperback of Dangerous Neighbors, with my teacher's guide bound in (the starred PW review of Dangerous Neighbors can be found here.).  It is my great hope, then, that the two books will make their way into the homes and hearts of Philadelphians and others.  There are some other fun developments in regards to this project, but I will save them for later.  For now, my great thanks to Micah, to Steve, to Gary, to Egmont USA for the paperback, and to Amy Rennert, my agent, for stitching the innumerable parts of my crazy dreams together.

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