Spring 2009 Flying Starts: Michael Northrop

Michael Northrop may share his first name with the narrator of his debut novel, Gentlemen (Scholastic Press), but don’t think that character is a stand-in for the author. “That was a bit of a trick on my part," he says. “Everyone is always asking that question”--was this what high school was like for you?--“so I decided to turn the dial up on that, to increase that impulse,” he says.

Spring 2009 Flying Starts: Rosanne Parry

Unlike many authors, writing wasn’t a favorite childhood pastime for Rosanne Parry. “I had terrible handwriting and was a terrible speller,” she recalls. “I didn’t love writing, but I always loved making things up.” One book she read over and over was From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. “I remember how satisfying it was to read about kids going off on their own and having an adventure. And later, as a camp counselor, a teacher and a parent, I came to see the unique power that stories have to keep kids’ attention.”

Spring 2009 Flying Starts: Jacqueline Kelly

The first line of her first novel came to Jacqueline Kelly as she was suffering through a particularly oppressive summer in her century-old farm house, 40 miles south of Austin, Tex.: “By 1899, we had learned to tame the darkness but not the Texas heat.”

Spring 2009 Flying Starts

This spring saw many strong children’s book debuts, but for our semiannual Flying Starts, which highlight standout first books, we narrowed the field to four. The novels we selected feature a girl who embraces science one stifling summer in 1899 Texas; a boy coming of age in rural Oregon against the backdrop of war; a group of delinquent teenage boys investigating the disappearance of a friend; and a family quietly suffering an abusive father.

Fall 2008 Flying Starts: Donna Freitas

As a professor of religion at Boston University, Donna Freitas (pronounced FRAY-tis) does a lot of writing—essays, articles, nonfiction—but what she most likes to read are children's books. She uses The Giver, Skellig and Tuck Everlasting as “core texts” in her undergraduate classes because they get her students thinking and talking about life's Big Questions.

Fall 2008 Flying Starts: Marie Rutkoski

A lifelong bookworm, Marie Rutkoski always wanted to write a book of her own, but discouraged by her attempts at fiction, she focused on academic success instead. Then in 2006, just as she was finishing her Ph.D. in English from Harvard, studying Renaissance children with reported special powers such as the ability to breathe fire, she got the idea for The Cabinet of Wonders (FSG).

Fall 2008 Flying Starts: Kristin Cashore

The author of Graceling (Harcourt) is nothing like her heroine, Katsa, whose mixed eye color (one is blue and the other green) signifies in her particular world that she is “graced,” born with a unique skill. Katsa's grace is for killing.

Fall 2008 Flying Starts

This past season saw a bumper crop of first novels. We spoke with the authors of three standouts: a riveting fantasy about a girl “graced” with the skill of killing, a tale of a 16th-century clockmaker's daughter who attempts to retrieve her father's enchanted eyes, and a coming-of-age story about a teen who petitions the Vatican to make her a saint.

The Hemingses: First Family of Slavery

Annette Gordon-Reed has completed a massive new work, 'The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family '(W.W. Norton, Sept.) that promises to transform not only the study of Thomas Jefferson's life but also how Americans look at racial identity.

Spring 2008 Flying Starts: Padma Venkatraman

Padma Venkatraman is a woman of many talents and passions. A lover of science, math, history and literature, she always wanted to be a writer but felt there was more financial security in following a different path. At age 19, she moved from India to the United States to attend graduate school at the College of William and Mary School of Marine Science, and she is currently a professor of oceanography at University of Rhode Island.

Spring 2008 Flying Starts: Stephanie Bodeen

The Compound was not the first young adult book Stephanie Bodeen wrote. In fact it was her 10th. But although she had published picture books before, she had yet to sell a YA novel. In fact, Bodeen had pretty much decided to quit trying after her agent returned a box of manuscripts to her, telling her they were unsaleable. But then she made another decision. “I decided I'm either a writer or I'm not a writer, so I signed up for National Novel Writing Month and on November 1, I started a young adult novel,” she recalls.

Spring 2008 Flying Starts: Ingrid Law

Remember your 13th birthday? Chances are it wasn't anything like the ones in the Beaumont family, whose members usher in their 13th year by receiving their “savvy,” or supernatural ability. Such is the magical premise of Ingrid Law's Savvy (Dial/Walden Media).

Spring 2008 Flying Starts: Sarah Prineas

Sarah Prineas has a young reader of the children's magazine Cricket to thank for the impetus that led to her very splashy debut—a three-book contract, two starred reviews for the first volume, and 13 foreign rights sales. Prineas had written only three lines of a story—A thief is a lot like a wizard. I have quick hands. And I can make things disappear—when she came across a letter to the editor in Cricket from a reader who wanted “more stories with wizards and magic.”

Spring Flying Starts

Fall 2007 Flying Starts: Katherine Marsh

Soon Katherine Marsh will have more to celebrate than her debut novel, The Night Tourist (Hyperion), with her first child due February 1. “It's exciting because this is who I'm writing for,” she says. “I'm creating my audience.”

Fall 2007 Flying Starts: Jonathan Bean

In 2002, when Bean was a senior at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, he had an idea that he wanted to be an illustrator. A professor there, Stephen Fieser, who taught illustration, put him in touch with Wes Adams, an editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. “I sent him some illustrations,” recalls Bean, now 28, “ which he politely rejected. But he wrote me a really long email critiquing them.”

Fall 2007 Flying Starts: Jake Wizner

At Manhattan's Salk School, a prestigious public middle school for the scientifically minded, the best-read book this fall has nothing to do with physics. It's Spanking Shakespeare (Random House) a bawdy, faux memoir about a high school senior in search of a sex life, written by Jake Wizner.

Fall 2007 Flying Starts: Jenny Downham

When you ask writers how they came up with the idea for their first novel, some might say that it came to them in a flash. Or that they based the main character on someone they knew. Not Jenny Downham, the 43-year-old British author of Before I Die, a luminous story about a feisty 16-year-old girl who is dying of leukemia. She, in fact, heard voices.

Fall 2007 Flying Starts

Jenny Downham When you ask writers how they came up with the idea for their first novel, some might say that it came to them in a flash. Or that they based the main character on someone they knew. Not Jenny Downham, the 43-year-old British author of Before I Die, a luminous story about a feisty 16-year-old girl who is dying of leukemia.

Spring 2007 Flying Starts: Melissa Marr

To the list of authors with eyebrow-raising credentials, add Melissa Marr, whose Wicked Lovely was published by HarperCollins: in high school, she was voted “most likely to end up in jail.” And she has the yearbook picture to prove it.