Though some of the students in Sarah Dooley's special education class at Brevard High School in North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains had serious learning disabilities, she insisted all of them participate in National Novel Writing Month in November 2008. "Everybody had a goal, some just 30 words, others as much as 600 to 700 words," Dooley recalls. "And they challenged me to have a goal, too."

Though she'd never written a novel before, Dooley says she had a "concept floating in my head"—about a teenage girl with autism—but had "no clear idea of where I was going with it." On the first Monday of that November, just as she and her students sat down to write, "We heard a scream in the next room and we all went running in there. It was a mouse and everybody was standing on chairs. From that came the first scene I wrote about Livvie—she in the kitchen with her sister and her sister's mouse, Bentley."

Dooley's students met their NaNoWriMo goals—most of them doubled them—and Dooley produced the novel, Livvie Owen Lived Here (Feiwel and Friends), which was bought in April 2009 by Liz Szabla, editor-in-chief at Feiwel and Friends. "My goal had been 50,000 words and that was how many I wrote, although they are not the same 50,000 words that are in the book now," Dooley says.

Olivia "Livvie" Owen narrates her own story, a poignant tale about the trouble she feels her autism has brought on her beloved family. The Owens have moved innumerable times, sometimes for financial reasons but just as often because a landlord or a neighbor loses patience with Livvie's emotional outbursts. Like many kids with autism, change is especially hard on Livvie, who has written one complete sentence in her life—"Livvie Owen lived here," which she scribbles on the wall before her family is forced out of yet another home.

Allowing Livvie to narrate allows readers to experience the day-to-day struggles of a special-needs student and provides a window into both how she thinks and what she remembers about events. Logic eludes Livvie at times; some memories are clearly too painful to store.

"There are a lot of books out there narrated by kids with autism or Asperger's and we'd seen a few of those but they didn't ring true for us," Szabla says. "The top selling point for us with Sarah was the unreliable narrator. This is a voice that is difficult to pull off and we felt she nailed it without resorting to cliché."

Dooley relied on her workaday know-ledge of special needs kids and her own childhood. Like Livvie, Dooley had quite the peripatetic youth—moving 24 times before age 18, following her father's work as a traveling minister. She did not set out to be a writer; her degree from Marshall University in Huntington, W.Va., is in elementary and special education.

"I had ideas, but I never got serious about writing until I saw how seriously my students were taking it," she says. "They held me to every standard I held them to."

In November 2009, she again participated in NaNoWriMo, producing a second novel, Body of Water, which Feiwel and Friends will also publish. "It's one of the most visceral depictions of homelessness from the point of view of a child that I've ever experienced," Szabla says. "Like Livvie, Sarah is writing about real life and writing it from experience. There's no fantasy here. Real life presents enough drama." —Sue Corbett