‘Best Week Ever’ Preserved in Print

By John A. Sellers, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 3/27/2008

The author-editor relationship can often develop into friendship, but in the case of Marla Frazee and her editor Allyn Johnston, that friendship extended to their sons, James and Eamon. The boys’ real-life trip to nature camp inspired (and landed them starring roles in) the picture book A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever, out this month from Harcourt.

The actual trip to camp took place in the summer of 2005, when Johnston’s parents invited the nine- and 10-year-old boys (and longtime friends) to stay at their Malibu home and enroll in the weeklong camp. Later, while the boys were spending a few days at Frazee’s Pasadena home, Johnston asked Frazee if she and the boys might put together “a little card and draw something on it as a thank-you,” to her parents.

Eamon (l.) and James, now 12 and 13.

Frazee and the boys collaborated on what she calls a “slightly snarky” illustrated card about their week in Malibu. Johnston’s parents sent their daughter a copy, and she saw the spark of a book idea, particularly how it encapsulated the boys’ friendship and in the way the text acted as “straight man” to the illustrations. “This little card had so much resonance and it felt so genuine,” Johnston says.

Frazee remembers thinking, “I can’t imagine how this very specific thank you could be made universal enough to be a book.” But that changed when one of her older sons discovered the card in her car as she was driving him to the airport following his Christmas break from college. “He started reading it, and he was laughing,” says Frazee. “As we walked into the airport he’s still reading. When we were saying goodbye at the security gate I’m close to tears because he’s going away to college and he’s cracking up.”

An interior illustration  from the book.

With Frazee now on board, the book’s concept began to come together—but now Johnston became nervous about pitching a book based on her and Frazee’s sons to her colleagues at Harcourt. Happily, she didn’t have to worry. “It was a great example of in-house support,” she says, adding that staffers “saw something there,” and their questions helped make it a more universal story. “I’m not exaggerating,” says Frazee. “We went through 25 rewrites trying to get this little story to be what it became.”

Now that the book has been published, Frazee finds that her nervousness about the book has abated—mostly. “For a period of time before it came out, I thought, ‘No one is going to “get” this book.’ ” But she says that recent school visits have reassured her that it has indeed been understood as a story about friendship—not just an inside joke. “Boys who don’t necessarily come up after a school visit come up and say, ‘Thank you,’ ‘It was funny,’ or ‘That reminds me of my friend.’ There’s a boy connection that I’m so happy to be seeing.”

The real-life Eamon and James are now 12 and 13, and though they’ve not made a second trip to nature camp, they have since attended a cooking camp together. Frazee and Johnston are “not ruling out” the possibility of a return outing for their picture book counterparts.

A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever by Marla Frazee. Harcourt, $16 978-0-15-206020-6 (Mar.)

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