Spring 2009 Flying Starts

This spring saw many strong children’s book debuts, but for our semiannual Flying Starts, which highlight standout first books, we narrowed the field to four. The novels we selected feature a girl who embraces science one stifling summer in 1899 Texas; a boy coming of age in rural Oregon against the backdrop of war; a group of delinquent teenage boys investigating the disappearance of a friend; and a family quietly suffering an abusive father.

Jacqueline Kelly

Jacqueline Kelly. Photo: Deanna Roy.

“It’s a huge house, built for an enormous family, but it is falling down and the air-conditioning is entirely inadequate,” says Kelly of the home she shares with her husband, Robert, two dogs and three cats. “I was lying there in the middle of the day wondering, How did people stand it a hundred years ago? and, immediately, a whole family sprang to life. They basically dictated the first page to me and I wrote it down.”

The result—nearly a decade later—is The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate (Holt, May 2009), a coming-of-the-modern-age tale starring “practically-12-year-old” Calpurnia Virginia Tate (called Callie Vee), an only daughter sandwiched between six brothers. Callie’s spirited recollection of seeking emancipation from the corseted strictures of her day through scientific inquiry has earned Kelly four starred reviews, a feat that most surprised the author, who didn’t know she was writing a novel, or that it was a work for children, when that first sweaty inspiration struck. Callie’s original incarnation came in a short story, which Kelly shared with her critique group. “They said, 'We think this is a novel,’ ” she recalls. “I was appalled by the idea. I’d never written a novel before.”

She came around, submitting the first chapter of Callie’s story to the Texas Writers’ League’s annual Manuscript Contest in 2002. Serendipity intervened: the judge was Marcy Posner of Sterling Lord Literistic, who awarded her first prize and asked to see the entire novel. “Then I had to write the thing,” Kelly says.

Though Calpurnia Tate is Kelly’s first book, “author” is her third profession. Born in New Zealand and raised in British Columbia, Canada, she practiced law (“12 very stressful years as a litigator”) before returning to medical school. Dr. Kelly still sees patients twice a week at a clinic in Austin. “My heart is really in writing, but I don’t see myself giving up my medical practice. I’ve been at this clinic for 27 years,” she says.

Her scientific knowledge certainly helped in crafting Callie Vee, whose choice of reading material is Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and whose preferred activity is collecting botanical specimens. Laura Godwin, Henry Holt’s publisher and Kelly’s editor, had recently acquired Deborah Heiligman’s Charles and Emma, about the nexus of science and Christianity inside the Darwins’ loving and supportive marriage. Kelly’s manuscript was the middle-grade fictional yin to Heiligman’s YA nonfiction yang.

“When we got the manuscript, it was love at first sight, but we weren’t the only clever ones—there was competition,” says Godwin. “So I asked to speak to the author, and we learned we had much background in common. We both grew up in Canada, and my father was a botanist. It was one of those wonderful moments where you find out you not only love the writing but there’s this nice connection, too.”

Godwin gave Kelly a two-book contract, but she isn’t sure what she’ll write next. She’s working on something inspired by Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, a book she loves, and is thinking about a sequel that follows Calpurnia into the 20th century. Godwin professes no worries that her author will find another field to conquer. “It’s quite astonishing, but she says those other two careers were practice careers. What she really wants to do is write,” Godwin says. “And I’m all for that.” —Sue Corbett

From the editor, Laura Godwin: "My first thought upon reading this manuscript was, Who wouldn't love this book? A novel that begins on a sweltering summer's day in 1899 that is described so vividly we can feel the Texas heat. Add to that an effervescent protagonist who is tenacious, un-self-conscious and a girl who likes science. The fact that she is surrounded by six brothers and wonderful grownups who actually act like real grownups do only makes the story all the more irresistible. The manuscript was so obviously fun, thoughtful and beautifully written that deciding to publish it was easy."

Rosanne Parry

Rosanne Parry. Photo: Corona Photography.

These days she’s a part-time teacher, living with her husband and four children in Portland, Ore. She has taught the spectrum of ages—from kindergarten to high school—but says her favorite to teach is middle grade, “which is probably why I love to write to that age.”

In her novel Heart of a Shepherd (Random, Jan. 2009), a 12-year-old boy’s father is shipped off to war in Iraq. The boy, Ignatius—known as Brother—assumes responsibility for the family’s eastern Oregon ranch; he promises to keep it running perfectly, in hopes that will bring his father home safely. Reviews have been laudatory; the starred review in Kirkus called it “an unassuming transcendent joy.”

The book actually began as a poem, 10 years ago. “I wrote a sonnet about my father teaching my son to play chess,” Parry says. “Their personalities are so different—it was hilarious to watch. A year or two later, I wrote a short story about a grandfather and a boy playing chess—I had visited a friend in eastern Oregon, and I set the chess game on the back porch of a ranch house there. The meat of the story hasn’t changed.”

She sent that story, which won a Kay Snow Award from the Willamette Writers group, to Random House’s Jim Thomas, whom she had met at an SCBWI retreat. “He told me, 'This is great writing. Send me something else.’ So I put it aside and worked on other things, but I kept thinking about how to integrate that chess game into a larger story.”

Then in 2003, when the U.S. went to war in Iraq, Parry began to remember how it had felt to send her husband off to Desert Storm, more than a decade earlier. “Oregon has deployed a lot of reservists, not proportional to the size of our population,” she says. “I started thinking about the people being deployed from these smaller towns. They’re all such a part of the community: they’re on the volunteer fire department, they’re on the school board. When you take them dozens at a time, it's hard. Once I combined the military family aspect with the ranching family aspect, I thought I had enough to sustain it as a novel.”

Nine months later, she finished a first draft; she asked her agent to send it to Thomas, who said, “This is the one I want.” Next came the revision process, which Parry says she enjoyed, but called it “very intense.” And she found Thomas’s guidance helpful throughout. “He’s really great about listening for character voice—I probably appreciate that more than anything else.”

She’s now working on a second book for Thomas, set in Berlin and Paris in 1990, which she describes as “sort of a Stand by Me for girls,” due out in fall 2010. So far she’s having a banner year; she also has a debut picture book out (Daddy’s Home, from Candy Cane Press), and Heart of a Shepherd was optioned by Tashtego Films. “I was really surprised—that was very cool,” Parry says. “Really what I’m hoping is that my book does well enough so that I can just write the next one. It’s been such a great adventure.”—Diane Roback

Michael Northrop. Photo: Eric Goto.

Northrop insists the teenage boys at the center of his dark, dread-soaked mystery are “complete constructions,” though the smalltown setting and dynamics are drawn from his experiences growing up in Salisbury in northwest Connecticut. “It was very much a smalltown upbringing. It’s not even a three-hour trip [from New York City, Northrop’s current home], but there’s a tremendous world of difference.”

In Gentlemen, narrator Micheal (his parents misspelled his name) and his friends Mixer and Bones—all remedial students—begin to suspect that their English teacher might be involved with the disappearance of their friend Tommy. Things only get more grim and violent from there. “Obviously, this is a mystery, but I didn’t want them to be kid detectives,” Northrop says. “I wanted to take normal kids with normal problem-solving skills and give them an intractable problem.”

While this is Northrop’s first novel, he’s been writing for years. He has published several short stories in literary journals and quarterlies, and until leaving last year to focus on his writing, he had been a senior editor at Sports Illustrated Kids. “For a while, there was that divide—literary fiction for adults on my own time, sports articles for kids at work—and at some point I decided to write a YA book to sort of bring the two together.”

There were some false starts. Northrop calls his first novel a “plotless mess,” and started over when he got feedback from agents that it wasn’t working. His second attempt, The Dark Precincts, got him an agent—Sara Crowe at the Harvey Klinger Agency—but not a book deal. It featured dual narration (between a lost 11-year-old boy and the "broken-down, alcoholic state trooper" who is looking for him) and according to Northrop, “no one knew what to do with it.” When it was suggested that he either split it in half or write a new novel, he chose the latter. The result was Gentlemen, which Scholastic signed in July 2007.

Gentlemen has received two starred reviews (including one from PW), was a Junior Library Guild selection and ALAN pick, and Northrop was named a New Voice for 2009 by the Association of Booksellers for Children. He is currently working with his editor, Anamika Bhatnagar, on a new novel, Trapped, about a group of teenagers trying to survive in their high school during a freak blizzard, which is scheduled for late 2010. "It's probably not as dark as Gentlemen," Northrop says, "though that's despite myself."

Although Northrop initially prepared for the worst—eviscerating reviews, readerless bookstore appearances—the positive responses to his book have let him relax a bit. “I’ve come out of that shell a little bit and allowed myself to enjoy the process. You only have one first book.”—John A. Sellers

Thalia Chaltas. Photo: Viking Books.

Despite her affinity for writing, Chaltas focused on science in college. That, however, didn’t come as easily. “To keep my grade point average up, I would take any class that required writing,” she recalls. “I would take something like art history or architectural history so I could write a paper, because I was really a C and B student in the sciences. Somehow I chose a path that wasn’t natural for me.”

Chaltas, a New Hampshire native, received a degree in physical education and went on to try a number of career possibilities (and time zones, having spent time in New York, Missouri and Arizona) before settling in Santa Barbara, Calif., where she lives with her five-year-old daughter, Kaeva, and runs a medical transcription business.

But “writing kept creeping back in,” Chaltas says. “I had always written poetry, but had done that on the side.” A fan of science fiction and murder mysteries, she initially considered writing an adult novel. She then realized that many of the novels she had loved and collected over the years—Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonsong, The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare, Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy—were children’s novels.

Chaltas joined a writing group and began trying to write picture books as a starting point. “I found it unbearably hard,” she says with a laugh. Then one day, she sat down to write some poetry. “Two hours later I had the first 10 poems of what is now Because I Am Furniture.” When she read the poems at a critique, a member suggested that the poems could become a novel, something she hadn’t considered.

In fact, she hadn’t even thought of them as fiction—the poems about abuse were drawn from her own past. “Having an abusive father is so far in the past at this point,” she says. “I’ve had enough therapy to kill a horse and I’m very solid in my self at this point.” Although she chose to fictionalize the poems, writing Because I Am Furniture still had difficult moments. “I was surprised by how much it affected me considering how far I’ve come.”

A friend, children's author Lee Wardlaw, passed a draft of the book to her agent, Ginger Knowlton at Curtis Brown, who began representing Chaltas a few months later. Knowlton found a home for it with Viking’s Catherine Frank, who bought it in 2007.

Now that the book is out (and into its second printing), Chaltas, who is working on a second novel with Frank, is surprised and humbled by the reality of being published. “It opened a whole different set of experiences I was not anticipating,” she says. “I’m getting e-mails daily from teen readers and adult readers. The outpouring of people I knew from my past was magnificent. It shows me how far-reaching a book can be.” —J.A.S.