Author of over 400 Books for Children and Adults
Yes, I published PIRATES IN PETTICOATS back in 1963, but this book about women pirates is not a simple retread. It is entirely different, some new pirates added (like Grania O’Malley and Queen Teuta and Artemesia) and some dubious ones from the first book dropped. There is much more pirate
After my son Adam and I wrote Pay the Piper, our first Rock-and-Roll fairy tale, we turned our attention to this book, Troll Bridge. Piper had been set in the Massachusetts area where Adam had grown up, but Bridge is set in Minnesota where he has lived for the past twenty years or so. We were
This short novel has a long and complicated history. My agent was phoned by an editor at Scholastic wanting to know if I had any interest in a new series they were starting called HORRORS! It was to be novels based on old fairy tales brought up to date, with a frisson of terror
For the fourth (and alas final) Young Heroes book, Bob and I decided on Jason because the old tales tell about how he was raised on a mountain by the kindly centaur, Chiron.
So there I was, walking around the halls of the International Reading Assn conference, and I stopped at the small but elegant display of Barefoot Books. I was immediately struck by their distinctive style. One in particular was The Barefoot Book of Opera Stories.
So many people wrote to me asking that I write a book for boys to pair with my collection Not One Damsel in Distress: Folk Tales for Strong Young Women, that I decided to try it.
This third book in our Young Heroes series began with my vision of a girl and a bear roaming the woods together. In the old stories about Atalanta it was said that as an infant she’d been set out on a hillside to die, and was discovered and nursed by a bear.
In many ways this book was the hardest of all to write so far of the Unsolved Mysteries, because it had three separate stories of travel to America by boat, with slaughters on all sides, and then a missing colony. Also, because it dealt in part with
The idea of a Young Heroes series came from my editor at HarperCollins, but choosing to work with Bob Harris–already my co-conspirator from Queen’s Own Fool who had a degree from St Andrews University in
The third book in the Tartan Magic series. An American family comes to Scotland for the summer and immediately falls into magic. The setting is in Fairburn, a made-up city that