A Talk with Five NBA Finalists (or: What I Saw Underneath the Disreputable Chains of the Spectacular Now)

By Sue Corbett, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 10/30/2008

The five finalists for the National Book Award in the Young People’s Literature category are a prolific bunch—among them, they have more than 100 published books. Two of the writers—Kathi Appelt and Judy Blundell—moved out of their comfort zones to try something new, one is a second-time NBA finalist, one was given permission from her editor not to write the book for which she’s now been nominated, and one is a finalist before his book has even gone on sale. The winner, who will receive a $10,000 prize, will be announced in New York City on Nov. 19.

Judy Blundell: What I Saw and How I Lied (Scholastic)

Judy Blundell.
Photo: Paul Llewellyn.

Under several names (most often Jude Watson), Judy Blundell has written scores of books, several of which have charted on the New York Times bestseller list. But the great majority of them are media tie-ins—Jude Watson writes those Star Wars novelizations that kids gobble up like candy.

So when the cover proofs for her latest original novel came with her actual name on it, she thought it was a mistake. “Judy has built a huge fan base as Jude Watson, but it’s a science fiction and thriller fan base and those books are not coming from a very personal place,” says David Levithan, executive editorial director of Scholastic. “This one was, and if there was ever a book to separate Judy Blundell from Jude Watson, this was the one to do it. I did, however, really think that she and I had talked about it.”

Blundell laughs. “It’s our 48th book together. We talk without speaking.”

The idea for What I Saw and How I Lied came to Blundell—surprisingly—in a dream. “I do not dream images for books, but I saw a girl sitting in a deserted hotel lobby in Florida.” Blundell and her husband spent five years in West Palm Beach when he was working at the Norton Museum of Art. “I knew it was out of season and I knew it was another time,” she says of that original image, but it took her another five years to start writing about it. “Actually I moved four times, had a baby and wrote 20 other books before David said, ‘Write something that you want to write.’ ”

It was an article about the Gold Train—boxcars of valuables taken by the Nazis from Hungarians but looted by American soldiers—that finally kick-started the story. “I put that together with the image I had, and with an idea I wanted to explore about family myths,” Blundell says. “Part of growing up is recognizing that something the family tells each other all the time is not necessarily true.”

She got the news about her nomination in a phone call from National Book Foundation executive director Harold Augenbraum, whom she knows from having served as a judge in the young people’s literature category in 2006. “I thought he was calling to ask me to be on a panel. I hate those things and my thoughts immediately rushed ahead to, ‘I’m going to have to get a babysitter,’ until finally I caught on and he said, ‘Are you there?’ I went dead silent for about 30 seconds. Then I said ‘Oh my God,’ 27 times.”

Tim Tharp: The Spectacular Now (Knopf)

Tim Tharp.

Tim Tharp’s first book, Falling Dark (winner of the 1999 Milkweed Fiction Prize), was published for adults but embraced by teens. “I did a high school visit and the kids were so enthusiastic—they hated this character and they loved something else—that I left there thinking, ‘Maybe I should write specifically for teenagers.’ ”

Which he did. His next book, Knights of the Hill Country, was his first young adult novel, earning him notice from reviewers as a “writer to watch,” and winning the Oklahoma Book Award. His second, The Spectacular Now, has the distinction of being a finalist for the National Book Award before it’s even been released. It goes on sale November 11.

“I wish it was out now,” admits Tharp, who lives in a suburb east of Oklahoma City, where he has taught composition and humanities at Rose State College for the past seven years.

The son of a newspaper editor, Tharp was encouraged to channel his writing talent into fiction by a professor at the University of Oklahoma, where Tharp earned his undergraduate degree. The professor had studied at Brown and recommended Tharp apply to graduate school there. “When I got accepted, he pretty much insisted I go.”

At Brown, Tharp began writing short stories while earning his MFA. All three of his novels have grown out of those stories. “It took me a while to realize they were really chapters of novels. It turns out short stories are not my medium.” Sutter Keely, the lovable slacker whose brio in the face of impending disaster carries The Spectacular Now, began life as a surly and cynical character in a Tharp short story.

“I loved the character and had been thinking about him and, just kind of out of the blue I thought, ‘What if he was upbeat and positive even though his life is a mess?’ ” Tharp says. “And once that voice came into my head, the novel took off.”

Laurie Halse Anderson: Chains (Simon & Schuster)

Laurie Halse Anderson.

In the decade since Anderson’s first National Book Award nomination for Speak, she’s become slightly inured to the process. “I’ve had so many books out that didn’t get that kind of attention that I decided, ‘It’ll never happen again.’ That was lightning in a bottle.”

So when the call came, “I was so unprepared for it. If they check their Web site to see who visited I’ll be totally embarrassed, because I hit it a couple hundred times making sure it wasn’t a mistake and that they hadn’t changed their mind.”

The idea for Chains is also nearly a decade old. Anderson was doing research for her second novel, Fever 1793, when she came across a fact about Benjamin Franklin that disturbed her: he was a slave owner. “And he had been my No. 1 hero!” She squirreled the information away, but years later while working on Independent Dames, a picture book about women in colonial America, she again uncovered details about American patriots fighting for freedom from British rule while enslaving others in their households. Anderson now envisions the project as a trilogy and has finished a draft of a sequel, which will follow Curzon, a friend of Chains’s main character, Isabel, on his path to Valley Forge.

Coincidentally, the 2006 NBA winner, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing by M.T. Anderson, covers the same issue and historical period. In fact, Anderson says what she looks most forward to once she finishes her trilogy is reading that other Anderson’s work. “Because I was writing Chains, I haven’t allowed myself, but I’m dying to read both volumes,” she says. “I’m sure I’ll be surprised at how different they are. It’s a story that needs to be told many different ways, many, many times.”

Anderson was heading out on a 20-city tour when the finalists were announced. A few stops had to be postponed to accommodate NBA events, which Anderson relishes attending. “I’m just going to go and have a good time,” says the veteran. (Back in 1999, Speak lost to Kimberly Willis Holt’s When Zachary Beaver Came to Town.) “I didn’t understand the impact of [being a finalist] when Speak was nominated, but it changed my life. It’s been one heck of a decade.”

Kathi Appelt: The Underneath (Atheneum)

Kathi Appelt.
Photo: Chandler Weston.

Ask a bookseller or a librarian how long Kathi Appelt’s books are and they can probably tell you without looking it up: 32 pages. She has published one collection of linked short stories, Kissing Tennessee, but Appelt’s reputation rests on her knack for knocking out rhyming picture books.

She began The Underneath thinking it would be another volume of stories, a way of pulling together several episodes from her childhood that haunted her in a setting she couldn’t forget: East Texas’s Piney Woods, where she’d lived during college. There was a story about a boy who rescued a kitten that had been thrown into a creek, and one about Sam, a big dog she and her sister owned as children. Against all odds, Sam had befriended a feral cat that gave birth to kittens, before being struck and killed by a passing car.

“It was a true thing—Sam became those kittens’ protector,” Appelt says.

Then her longtime and beloved agent, Marilyn Marlow, passed away. Appelt would need to replace the irreplaceable, but even more than that, she needed a change. “I just felt like I needed to break out and do something surprising,” she says. “I really was thinking, ‘If I write another rhyming picture book, my head will explode.’ ”

She was also trying to live up to the “very heady company” she keeps as a member of the Vermont College faculty, which includes M.T. Anderson and Norma Fox Mazer. “It was really important to me to write something that made me feel like I belonged.”

She approached Pippin Properties’ Holly McGhee to represent her. “I think she was a little reluctant to take me on. She asked me where I thought my writing was going. I told her I wanted to write something that would crack open the heart. I think that was the right answer.”

But after she signed with Pippin, Appelt froze. “I couldn’t get to cracking open a reader’s heart if I didn’t crack open my own, and I couldn’t do that by writing a rhyming picture book. I did a lot of hard thinking and asked myself a lot of hard questions about the human spirit.” Pippin wound up taking the resulting manuscript to auction, resulting in a two-book deal won by Caitlin Dlouhy.

Appelt says she tried to write The Underneath in such a way that “it asks to be read aloud. I hope it has that oral quality. As a picture book writer that’s my whole sensibility, so I was really careful with the rhythm of it.”

She also knows some children will need an adult to mediate the novel’s darkness—the violent, gin-swilling Gar Face who, having been abused as a child, turns the abuse on Ranger, the big dog modeled on Appelt’s Sam.

“My intent was for the reader to see that Ranger was Gar Face’s alter ego, that they had equally abusive backgrounds, but that they made different choices,” Appelt says. “One chose darkness and the other chose light. Everybody always has a choice.”

E. Lockhart: The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks (Disney-Hyperion)

E. Lockhart’s seventh young adult novel began over lunch with her editor, Donna Bray.

E. Lockhart.
Photo: Heather Weston.

“She said she had always wanted a novel about Truth or Dare and wondered if I would be interested in writing something about that,” Lockhart recalls. “I told her I was not very interested in truth but I am interested in dares. Or maybe not dares but like the things we did in college, sneaking into buildings and up onto rooftops and out onto the golf course in the middle of the night. The spirit of that, I’d like to capture in a book.”

A contract was issued, but the story did not come easily. “I had various ideas about things I’d read about that I wanted to get into a novel—urban exploring in sewers and steam tunnels, the panopticon, feminist theory I had read in graduate school. All this stuff belonged in the same book but there was no story.” She called Bray in a panic, saying, “It’s not really a book, it’s just ideas.” Bray told her to take a month off and do something else.

“So the next day I started writing,” Lockhart says. “Having been given permission not to write it freed me up to do it, in some perverse way.”

Also unconventional was the way she learned about the nomination for Frankie. She saw an e-mail from Augenbraum, but ignored it for hours. “National Book Foundation wasn’t totally merged with National Book Award in my consciousness. I get lots of requests to send a signed copy of a book for an auction, so I thought it was something like that.”

Instead, the e-mail asked that she call him, which she couldn’t because her home telephone wasn’t working and the battery in her cell needed charging. When she did finally reach him, he told her the news, then swore her to secrecy. (The finalists are notified the day before they are announced to the public.) “So I immediately e-mailed Sara Zarr, who is a friend,” and who was nominated last year for Story of a Girl. “And she called me right away and talked to me in soothing tones.” Zarr’s advice: Don’t spend the whole cash award on the dress.

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