The Higher Power of Patron: Profile of Newbery Winner

One lousy starred review. That was all, initially, that Susan Patron had to show for the 10 years she spent writing The Higher Power of Lucky, her funny, tender story of a little girl struggling to gain control over her life. One star, from Kirkus Reviews, for the heart and soul Patron poured into her second novel.

Sure, positive notices had appeared in School Library Journal and Booklist. And Lucky (S & S/Richard Jackson Bks., 2006) also garnered favorable attention from the New York Public Library and Parents Choice. But the book was barely a blip on most librarians’ blogs and mock Newbery lists. There was no buzz, certainly. And Lucky suffered at least one perceived snub, when Publishers Weekly reviewed it online instead of in print. Patron’s first novel, Maybe Yes, Maybe No, Maybe Maybe (Orchard, 1993), had appeared on a host of “best of the year” lists. But Lucky? The book disappeared below the children’s lit radar even though it was, Patron passionately believed, the better book: “I put much more into it.”

No wonder this children’s librarian of 34 years, all of them spent at the Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL), lost faith. “In my job, I am glued to reviews,” says Patron (whose surname rhymes with “phone”), the library’s juvenile materials collection manager. “I am hyper-aware of how a book is being received.” But Lucky was barely received at all. The Newbery Medal? Pfff! as Brigitte, one of Lucky’s main characters, might put it. “I had given that fantasy up,” the author says, “because the book was kind of… ignored.”

Still, on the night before the Monday morning awards announcements, at home with her husband, René, Patron couldn’t help nurturing the dream just a little. “I don’t think there is a writer seriously writing, pouring themselves into a book, who doesn’t fantasize about [winning] the Newbery,” she says. “Hope reigns; you can’t squelch hope.” Convinced that any call would have come by late Sunday night, a distraught Patron finally whispered to René, “I think I’m going to send back the advance for Lincoln’s Knot,” her sequel. “I’m not going to be a writer anymore.” And she went to bed.

The phone rang. It was 6:30 a.m., January 22, and Patron was fixing a chicken sandwich to take to work early to watch the Newbery/Caldecott broadcast online. Gandalf, her huge aging Rhodesian Ridgeback, was lunging at the chicken. And someone on the phone was identifying herself as Newbery Committee chair Jeri Kladder, saying Patron had won. “My sister is pulling some sort of little joke here,” the newly minted medalist first thought.

Then the good news sunk in… well, halfway. Patron was thinking she’d won a Newbery Honor citation, certainly not the big kahuna. “Are you sure?” she asked Kladder. She could hear the committee members in the background laughing uproariously. And suddenly she found herself crying. “My voice broke, I think, and I thanked them and ran upstairs to tell my husband I was going to be a writer again.”

Good news for René, good news for us. Because the Newbery may mean a year’s worth of parties, speaking engagements, and glitz. But for Patron, who turns 59 this month, “the great gift of the award is, many, many children will read Lucky.”

Certainly that dream kept her going during the decade it took to write the book. “She wanted to write a love story or a survival story that somehow involved the desert,” explains Richard Jackson, literary lion of the children’s book world and Patron’s editor for her four picture books and two YA novels. What she lacked, Jackson says, was a uniting idea for Lucky Trimble, age 10, and her pals, fellow fourth-grader Lincoln, and kindergartner Miles.

All live in tiny hardscrabble Hard Pan (pop. 43), a fictitious town in California’s high desert, a place not unlike the High Sierras outpost where Susan and René share a get-away-from-it-all cabin, sans phone or Internet. A place “so vast, so peaceful,” Patron says, where she loves taking walks with Gandalf to breathe in the desert air. For several years, however, those bracing walks failed to conjure up the life force that Lucky’s characters needed. “I had the settings; I had the characters,” Patron says. “And sometimes I’d have the feeling they would look at me from the page and say, 'So what’s my motivation?’

“I didn’t quite have it until, yeah, my mom died, and I knew the heart of the story was going to be about moms.”

Patron’s loss occurred some years ago—the very private author won’t say when. “It hit me hard,” she acknowledges. “It pulled out something from inside her,” says UCLA Information Studies Professor Virginia Walter, a close friend. “I mean, she always writes well, but I think that gave her that emotional edge.”

Lucky becomes motherless, placed in the guardianship of her absent father’s first wife, Brigitte, who moves from France to Hard Pan and seems for all the world intent on moving back. Lucky imagines an orphanage in her future and ponders a frightening life without Brigitte’s love.

Is Lucky, indeed, some version of her creator? That’s the impression offered from comments by Patron’s friends and professional colleagues. “The quality about Susan that I could easily describe in the wrong way is, there are times I’ve been with her and felt she was on the verge of tears, and it wasn’t because she was sad—it was because of the intensity of her way of feeling ordinary experience,” says children’s book historian and author Leonard Marcus.

“You just know she’s thinking a lot of deep thoughts,” adds Ginny Moore Kruse, emeritus director of the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin. And, from Walter: “She is able to take this fresh look at things that helps me see things differently.”

Perhaps that’s why Patron heeded the advice of Franny Billingsley, author of the award-winning The Folk Keeper (S & S, 1999), at a Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators conference back in 2005. Billingsley advised Patron to put something in her characters’ hands. So Patron made Lincoln a devoted tier of knots. And into the hands of Miles, she placed a dog-eared copy of the P. D. Eastman classic, Are You My Mother? (Random, 1960). She continued her riff on motherlessness, describing how Lucky’s guardian, Brigitte, longs for her own mother back in France, and added a story that Lucky tells Miles about a burro named Chesterfield, who gains a “husband and child.” Once this groundwork was laid, Patron says, the book “wrote itself.”

But loose ends remained. Lucky’s dog? A smaller female version of Gandalf, originally named Rachel Carson, later became HMS Beagle. That’s because Lucky is a budding scientist obsessed with Charles Darwin, and Darwin not only lost his mother at age eight, like Lucky, he made his discoveries while sailing on the HMS Beagle, sleeping in a cabin the size of Lucky’s “canned-ham” trailer.

The motherless Lucky, so desperate for love, also needed an entry point to her spiritual self. So Patron opted for Lucky to seek her “higher power” via a slate of 12 Step programs (with offerings, no less, for gamblers, smokers, overeaters, and drinkers). Lucky eavesdrops on them all through a hole in a fence. (One recovering alcoholic’s mention of a rattlesnake bite to his dog’s scrotum prompted some librarians to reject the book based on that one word. See “Hitting Below the Belt?” p. 16.)

By choosing the 12 Step route, Patron says, she shared a bit of her own past. “I had smoked very heavily for 20 years and finally quit by going to Smokers Anonymous,” the author confides. “As a librarian, I loved that they used stories as a tool to help each other.” Those tales helped her kick her own habit at age 36—“the hardest thing I ever did”—because back then, even cigarette butts littering the ground in front of a Smokers Anonymous meeting could affect her, Patron says.

She put that in the book, too, giving Lucky a job cleaning up the Alcoholics Anonymous butts that tempt members of Smokers Anonymous. But not before revisiting her own past. “This is going to shock you; this shocked me!” Patron says. “For the writing of Lucky, I started smoking again! So that brought back that whole 12 Step thing and how it could be a sort of metaphor for spirituality and Lucky’s finally finding her higher power… then I quit again.”

The book is chock-full of bits of Patron’s life. Brigitte is a composite of French relatives. And the Westcraft trailer Brigitte inhabits comes from the trailer-selling days of the author’s father, George Hall, a small businessman who alternated between middle-class prosperity and bankruptcy. “There were a lot of iffy times,” Patron says of her childhood. Her mother, Rubye, was a homemaker, and home was Hollywood. Patron was the middle of three daughters and today calls her sisters her closest friends. “I was fairly introspective, and at the same time a middle sister becomes very much a peacemaker and a liaison, solving problems,” she says. “That was my role in the family.”

As a six-year-old, Patron appeared on Art Linkletter’s Kids Say the Darndest Things, where she told the TV host she wanted 10 kids when she grew up. She also recalls beginning to write at eight: “I was telling stories to my sister, and the whole thing of telling stories [was something] I wrote extensively about in Maybe Yes, Maybe No, Maybe Maybe. This morning, in fact, I found a little book my mother saved for me. I probably was eight or nine when I wrote and illustrated it.

“It was about a sunbeam that came to earth—just the kind of book we dread seeing! But we all have to start somewhere.”

Patron married her French husband, a rare-book restorer, right out of Pitzer College, where she majored in English. The couple, who have no children, bought a 1922 neo-Spanish house surrounded by fruit trees in the lower Hollywood Hills (far from the movie star enclaves, Patron laughs). Casting about for a career, she chose librarianship after René remarked that “the nicest people I’ve met in this country are librarians.” The choice clicked. She’d been an eager reader since third grade, when a friendly public librarian impressed on her that reading riches could be found beyond her daily dose of the Los Angeles Times’ comics.

From all accounts, Patron is good at what she does. “She has the finest taste and sense of what’s good in children’s books,” says Walter, who is a past president of the Association of Library Services to Children. Walter, a former LAPL children’s coordinator herself, remembers fondly how Patron mentored her back into the field after an absence. Walter also tells the story of a library student she had—a woman now in academia—who remembered Patron in her branch library from back when she was a child. “You have to be really good to make that kind of impression on a kid,” Walter says.

Clearly Patron uses her empathy with children in her literary life, a second career that began when the fledgling writer met Jackson in the late 1980s and was invited to submit a manuscript. “Susan is very attuned to how children’s minds work—the kind of labyrinth of thoughts and half-knowledge and unformed, yet intense, feelings that children have,” says Marcus. And Walter adds, “You think about good children’s book writers being in touch with the child that they were; and Susan definitely is in touch with her little girl.”

Will Patron keep in touch with “her little girl” as she finishes Lincoln’s Knot (a sequel she promises won’t take 10 years)? Or will the Newbery Medal get in the way? For an answer, consider the story Jackson tells of how he had to talk Patron into flying east the day after the Newbery announcement to appear on NBC’s Today show. “'Yes, but tomorrow is Tuesday; it’s a [library] training day!'” Jackson remembers her exclaiming. “And I thought, 'This is a woman totally unimpressed with herself.’”