Journaling Back Through Time with Marissa Moss
Sally Lodge -- 8/31/98
The author employs her successful diary technique in a new venture
The process of recording one's thoughts and daily experiences in a diary has become a popular activity for middle-grade girls, and it seems that the opportunity to read the secrets a peer records in her journal is even more enticing. So one might conclude from the brisk sales reported by Tricycle Press, as well as a handful of retailers polled, for Marissa Moss's series of hand-lettered, playfully illustrated journals penned by a girl named Amelia. Moss followed up the original 1995 title, Amelia's Notebook, with three additional hardcover releases, Amelia Writes Again, Amelia Hits the Road and the just-released Amelia Takes Command, as well as a paperback fill-in book, My Notebook (With Help from AmeliaI).
Together, the books have sold close to one million copies and recently, according to industry sources, Pleasant Company agreed to buy rights to the series for an eye-opening $3 million (though no one queried would confirm the dollar amount). Now, Moss has given her diary format a historical twist in her latest series, Young American Voices, which Harcourt Brace's Silver Whistle imprint launches in September with Rachel's Journal: The Story of a Pioneer Girl.
Moss said that her own childhood inspired her choice of format, characters and subject matter. "I always kept a notebook as a girl and loved to read those of others," she explained. "My memories of being nine or 10 years old are especially vivid, since this is a time when you have a real sense of who you are -- before the self-conscious preteen years start. Before I began writing the first Amelia book, I bought a composition book at the drug store and wrote down as much as I could remember about my life at that time. Amelia is very much based on me, and my sister is the model for her older sister, Cleo."
Though a number of publishers turned down the initial draft of Amelia's Notebook, after several reworkings she showed it to her friend Mollie Katzen. Katzen, author of the Moosewood cookbooks, has also written Pretend Soup, a cookbook for children published by Tricycle in 1994. She encouraged Moss to show the manuscript to Tricycle's publisher, Nicole Geiger. As Geiger recalled, "Mollie told me that her own son had taken Amelia's Notebook into his bedroom and wouldn't give it back, which struck me as quite a recommendation. And then I, too, instantly fell in love with Amelia's incredibly true voice."
Recreating the Past
"Marissa has an uncanny ability to be an eight- to 12-year-old girl," concurred Paula Wiseman, editorial director of Silver Whistle. Explaining how her company came to publish Young American Voices, Wiseman said, "I was very fond of the Amelia books and I had already signed up a picture book by Marissa, called True Heart. And my eight-year-old daughter was keeping a journal that she was passionate about."
Tackling Rachel's Journal presented Moss with new challenges. Obviously, she had to call on more than childhood memories to shape this heroine, who in 1850 travels with her family along the Oregon Trail from Illinois to California. "I had to make this voice as real, yet I clearly couldn't rely on my life here," Moss said. "Though I began my research by reading some general history on this period, I soon narrowed my focus to reading firsthand accounts written by pioneers at this time -- mostly women and children." The author characterized writing historical fiction as "a great deal more intense" than writing the Amelia books, since, in her words, "I didn't want to lose Rachel's voice or the sense of her era. I carried this character around in my head all day long. When I wasn't writing, I had an almost obsessive need to get back to her."
With an initial printing of 25,000 copies, Rachel's Journal has obviously sparked enthusiasm from the publisher. Booksellers, too, noting healthy -- and growing -- sales for Moss's Amelia notebooks, expressed high expectations for her new series. Among them was Michele Cromer-Poire of Red Balloon Bookstore in St. Paul, Minn.The combination of diary format and historical fiction, she commented, has also helped make Scholastic's Dear America series a hit in her store and others. According to Cromer-Poire, "The diary format grabs the kids and the history angle appeals to parents and teachers."
This is exactly what Moss hopes Young American Voices will achieve. The writer and artist -- who receives (and personally answers) an enormous volume of mail from readers who enthusiastically declare "Amelia is me!" -- d sn't expect the audience for her new series will identify as completely with her historical heroines as they do with Amelia. "But what I do want them to get from Rachel and the other characters," she said, "is a firsthand sense of another time period, and to discover that learning about history can be cool. Where Amelia has encouraged a lot of kids to write themselves, I hope Rachel makes kids want to learn more about her era."
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