SLJ Talks to Five National Book Award Finalists
This article originally appeared in SLJ’s Extra Helping. Sign up now!
Joan Oleck -- School Library Journal, 11/22/2006
Forget the glitz of the "official" National Book Awards ceremony: For young adult readers, the real action was at New York's Donnell Library the day before, when 230 local middle and high school students were treated to a panel and reception with the 2006 National Book Award Finalists for Young People's Literature.
M. T. Anderson ended up winning the award, along with $10,000, on November 15 for The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1: The Pox Party (Candlewick), about a boy raised during the Revolutionary War by a band of strange philosophers.
Other finalists were Martine Leavitt for Keturah and Lord Death (Front St), the story of a young woman who holds off Lord Death with her storytelling; Patricia McCormick for Sold (Hyperion), a series of poetic vignettes about a Nepali girl sold into sexual slavery; Nancy Werlin for The Rules of Survival (Dial), the story of a teenager who won't let his family remain at risk; and Gene Luen Yang for American Born Chinese (Roaring Brook/First Second), a graphic novel about the discrimination a Chinese-American boy suffers after moving to the suburbs.
Q. What inspired you to write your book the way you did?
Leavitt, McCormick, Yang
Anderson: I grew up in the area around Boston, so through my childhood the Revolution seemed very close to me. One day I went to a re-creation where people dressed up like Redcoats and Patriots and fought each other, and what I found was that it was completely terrifying to be confronted by this line of Redcoats marching toward you very regularly and firing their guns all in concert…It's incredibly loud and creates this huge plume of smoke. I had been living in this town [and it occurred to me that] if I had been here 225 years ago, I would have been here at this time in the morning on this exact spot having these people confront me—but they'd be using musket balls instead of just firing blanks. And I thought, "Could I have handled that?" And that started the whole thing about "who would be a Loyalist?" So that's how I got on the track of writing the book.
Q. Tell us your feelings about the cycle of life and death.
Leavitt: I wanted most of all [in writing Keturah and Lord Death] to have fun. Then Lord Death walked onto the page. I felt, first, that I might get rid of him; then I realized that we all have to work death into the story of our life, and we still manage to love and have fun, so I kept him. Then I realized that that made him a fantasy…I thought, "What is this spiritual journey that I'm on?" And I realized that it was to finally look at death and figure out exactly what were my feelings about it. And it was quite a journey; I was just as surprised with what I came up with.
Q. Do you relate yourself to the book in any way?
Yang: I do. My book is made up of three different story lines. The second story line—the main character is a character called Jin Wang and my name is Gene Yang. So he's kind of an image of me...in the story Jin ends up getting a best friend named Wei-Chen. Jin considers him an FOB [fresh off the boat] who's recently emigrated from Asia. That's actually based on this kid that I knew in fourth grade. But Jin is more virtuous than me because, with the kid I knew, I didn't end up being his friend. He immigrated and then my teachers at the time brutally pressured me into being friends with him because I knew how to speak Mandarin, and he spoke Mandarin—and I really didn't want to. I had a white best friend at the time. This immigrant kid followed us around all week, and at the end of the week we ended up throwing tanbark [wood shavings] on him. And he went away…in some ways this book is a working-out of that guilt.
Q. Why did you choose to write this book as a long letter?
Werlin: When I was looking at this book in second-draft form, suddenly like a thunderbolt I thought, "He's writing to his little sister; she doesn't remember anything." And it gave the book what's called "narrative power." What it does for the book I believe is make the reader a character in the book: You are eavesdropping on the book because you are reading the letters meant for someone else...and it gave me the power I needed to pull the reader through such a difficult story and also answered a question I had had, since I wanted to make sure everyone knew on page one that these kids were going to be safe in the end.
Q. You have two children, and I was wondering if either of them are daughters and how that affected you in writing this book [about sexual trafficking in India].
McCormick: I have two children: a daughter who's 24 and a son who is 17. When I found out that children were being trafficked for trade as sexual objects…I really felt I wanted to write a book about it from the girl's point of view…fiction really calls on your empathy and activates you more than news headlines…I feel really excited by the response the book has gotten from people your age because I feel this is a really activist generation; you are the people who raised money for the kids displaced by the tsunami, who were in danger of being trafficked. You're the ones who marched on behalf of the kids in Darfur. So if this book inspires some kind of energy or activism on this issue, I'd be really proud of that.
