I never read Nancy Drew until my daughter got a haircut a couple of years ago that prompted people to say she looked like the famous sleuth. But that doesn’t mean I never went through the girl detective phase as a kid. I actually did it more than once. Linda Craig’s curiously crime-ridden ranch filled my first and second grade years. Trixie Belden’s curiously crime-ridden quaint bedroom community took up a stretch of fifth. In third grade there was also a bunch of kid detectives with a house trailer hideout in a junk yard, but I think they were all boys. In any case, I’m not new to girl detective books, even though it has been a long time since I immersed myself in one.
ByGD
Enchantment Lake
ByGD
Ambassador Kate DiCamillo at Seattle Public Library
Kate DiCamillo has a Southern accent. I did not expect this because I do not hear it in the lyrical rhythms of her wide-eyed fiction. Both the accent and the wonder are explained by her childhood in Florida, where she experienced a number of unusual theme parks, and was particularly impressed by the vision of hidden worlds granted by glass-bottomed boats. It was on one of these boats that she heard a lady in a plastic rainbonnet say
Oh my. This world.
And knew exactly what she meant. Read More
ByGD
The Orphan Device
Writers are always reading, and usually on more than one level. I still remember the shock I felt the first time I saw a typo in a published book. Even as a child, I noticed that child protagonists are disproportionately orphans. Once I noticed, it didn’t take long to figure out why. Parents protect their children. Safety precludes adventure. If you want your protagonist to have adventures, you’ve got to get the parents out of the way, and the easiest way is to knock them off.
Once upon a time, there was an orphan named….