Hi everyone. School is back in session and it's time for some middle grade reading for September! I interviewed two MG authors for my blog, Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb, and here's what they had to say...
On the fiction side,
I interviewed Tiffany D. Jackson about her new novel,
Ghost in the Night. I asked her what inspired the book, and how she created her character Harmony, and she said: "During a brunch with some Scholastic folks, I mentioned
how my favorite pastime is to go on ghost tours in different cities, but
mentioned that I always seemed to be the only black girl on the ghost tour. My
editor overheard that and said, 'Now there’s a book.' So the story was born
from a casual conversation." She added, "When thinking of potential main characters, I wanted a girl
who was whip smart and determined yet vulnerable in her grief. Harmony was a
natural fit."
Turning to nonfiction,
I interviewed Kate Messner about her new book
History Smashers: The Space Race, which is the 14th book in her
History Smashers series. She said: "When I’m doing research for the
History Smashers series, I always lean
heavily on primary source material, and fortunately there’s no shortage of that
when it comes to the Space Race." She added: "What surprised me most was information that came from some
fairly recently declassified documents that revealed just how deeply German
space scientists like Wernher von Braun were involved in Hitler’s Nazi
government. When I’m dealing with more recent history in this series, I
also love to interview current experts in the field. I visit lots of
specialized research libraries and museums, and for this book, I was also able
to tour NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and interview
then-director Dr. Laurie Leshin, who was the first woman to lead JPL and shared
some great insights about the role of failure in space exploration."
Happy reading, everyone!
--Deborah Kalb
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