Interviewed by
Alex Heimbach
on
January 26, 2017
Courtesy Rayon Richards
What happens when a child is charged with murder? Well, it depends. Salacious procedural episodes aside, these cases are so rare that there’s little precedent for how to proceed. When Tiffany D. Jackson came across one such story, of a 10-year-old girl in Maine charged with manslaughter for allegedly shoving pills down the throat of an infant her mother was babysitting, she immediately saw a story in it, but she added a twist: what if the girl might be innocent ...
Um, where are the f-bombs?
By
Vicky Smith
on
November 9, 2016
One of the hazards of pre-publication reviewing is that the books we are evaluating are still works in progress. They're mostly finished, but many are still going through copy editing and proofreading. We check quoted language with the publisher to make sure it hasn't changed and learn sometimes that it has. Other times we will simply describe something that has been changed, and the publisher will let us know.
In the vast majority of these cases, we are ...
Interviewed by
Alex Heimbach
on
November 1, 2016
Nicola Yoon photographed by Sonya Sones.
Nicola Yoon is a self-described “romantic goober.” She loves (and writes) young-adult romances, and she really, really loves her husband, David. The two—she’s a reformed electrical engineer from Jamaica, and he’s a Korean-American English major—met in grad school. Despite their differences, they fell in love, got married, and eventually had a daughter. Yoon’s anxious love for her child gave her the idea for her first novel, Everything, Everything, which tells the story of Maddy, a girl who is allergic ...
Interviewed by
Alex Heimbach
on
October 19, 2016
Sonia Patel
Patel is the most common Indian surname in the U.S. The name comes from a caste of village leaders and landowners in the state of Gujarat, many of whom moved to North America in the 1970s, buying hotels and shops to support their families. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there are a lot of stereotypes about what it means to be a Patel: first and foremost is an intense focus on family.
But what happens when that dynamic curdles? This is the ...
By
David Rapp
on
October 7, 2016
Meg Medina photographed by Steve Casanova.
Meg Medina’s YA novel Burn Baby Burn tells the story of Nora López, a Cuban-American 17-year-old living in Queens, New York, in 1977—a year that brought a brutally hot summer, a citywide blackout, and constant fear of the serial killer Son of Sam. In this environment, Nora and her single mother try their best to make the rent while her brother gets deeply involved with drugs and crime; at the same time, she finds a new romance with her co-worker ...
Interviewed by
Richard Z. Santos
on
September 22, 2016
Guadalupe Garcia McCall photographed by Roger Campos.
Guadalupe Garcia McCall’s new novel for young adults, Shame the Stars, deals with a bloody and forgotten time in American history. In 1915, along the Texas-Mexico border, the Texas Rangers violently suppressed real and perceived revolutionary activity by Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. There were hundreds of lynchings, countless rapes, and an atmosphere of violence that scarred the victims so badly that their descendants still aren’t talking about it 100 years later. Garcia McCall is also a high school English teacher in ...
Interviewed by
Megan Labrise
on
September 6, 2016
M-E Girard
In many ways, Canadian high schooler Pen Oliveira is your typical 16-year-old dude: Pen loves gaming with guy friends, raids older brother Johnny’s closet for sweet threads, and has a crush on a wild-haired girl. And if you saw her on the street, you might mistake her for a boy.
“I’m used to people staring at me, trying to figure out what my deal is,” M-E Girard writes in Girl Mans Up. “Ever since I started swiping clothes from ...
Interviewed by
Alex Heimbach
on
July 28, 2016
Conjoined twins are one of the rarest human mutations, occurring in roughly 1 in 200,000 babies, most of whom either die soon thereafter or are surgically separated. With just a handful of attached twins alive today, they’ve taken on almost mythical status, especially in fiction. In her debut novel, Gemini, Sonya Mukherjee takes a very different approach to the story of pygopagus twins Clara and Hailey, exploring their otherwise very ordinary lives as high school seniors in rural California ...