NYC Teens Interview National Book Award Finalists
By Joan Oleck -- School Library Journal, 11/13/2007 1:58:00 PM
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| From left: Brian Selznick, Kathleen Duey, Sherman Alexie, Sara Zarr, and M. Sindy Felin |
The resulting teen "press conference," sponsored by the National Book Foundation at the New York Public Library's Donnell Library Center featured the 2007 finalists in the young people's literature category: Sherman Alexie for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sara Zarr for Story of a Girl (both Little, Brown); Kathleen Duey for Skin Hunger, M. Sindy Felin for Touching Snow (both Atheneum); and Brian Selznick for The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Scholastic).
During the 90-minute give-and-take , the writers plied their middle and high school audience with funny anecdotes and insider information about the writing processes.
Zarr told the audience that Story of a Girl, about the social fallout a girl suffers after being caught having sex in a car at age 13, was not autobiographical, but the feelings surrounding it were hardly foreign. "I've experienced all those things: wanting to belong, wanting my father to approve of me... they're universal feelings.
Alexie, a Native American, said his book closely mirrored his upbringing "on the rez" of the Spokane/Coeur d'Alene nation in Washington. An example? He described an incident on the first day of seventh grade at the reservation school when he opened up his math book to discover that the book had belonged to his mother 30 years ago. That emblem of poverty incited rage, he said. "In real life I picked up the book and threw it across the room and hit the wall. In the fictional version , I pick up the book, throw it across the room, and hit the math teacher in the face."
Other questions involved the emotional underpinnings of the finalists' books. Felin, whose Touching Snow follows Haitian immigrants in the New York suburbs as they encounter a new culture, was asked to define "the line between fiction and nonfiction." "The one thing in the book that I don't really fictionalize are the feelings," Felin answered.” “The actual events, the things that happened, are fiction, but the way that Karina and her sister feel about what happened—those are not fiction, those are, to the best of my ability, what I think a child or a teenager who goes through those experiences would really feel."
Duey, whose book title Skin Hunger comes from the name for the psychiatric syndrome that afflicts children who are not touched enough as infants, said that she found the inspiration for her story "from watching the world for the last 29 years.” The book really is about belief," Duey continued, "and where it skips over the line to become fanaticism."
Kids were fascinated by Selznick, author and illustrator of the Invention of Hugo Cabret, who came up with the idea of adding pages of illustrations to his novel. Selznick explained that he worked on his sketches for two years, using a regular drafting pencil. Each drawing was a quarter of the final book size, he said, so he had to work using a magnifying glass on watercolor paper.
"When you work smaller and blow it up larger, it loosens up the drawing a little bit," Selznick said, noting his "10-hour" days—which made his audience gasp.
"I think it's really fantastic that there are two books on this list that are using illustrations in an unusual way for books for older readers," Selznick added, referring both to his and Alexie's book.
