Your books have always been very important to us. We did read other books too, but
yours we read over and over and over.
Three of your books
I never found in a bookstore, we only had them from the library. So I
recorded my reading of them. That cassette tape, of Blue Moose,
The Return of the Moose, and Jolly Roger got played a
lot during the 90s. Amazingly, that tape still works, and now my six
year old grandson loves those stories, and also gets to enjoy my
reading them though we live far apart.
Way back when I read
The Worms of Kukumlima (maybe 1993) there was something
familiar that I couldn’t quite remember. Recently it hit me:
Krakatoa! I had a faint memory of reading a fantastic book (well,
fantastic for back then since you hadn’t published anything yet) when
I was a kid and now with computer aided memory, know that it was The
Twenty-One Balloons.
I know you disavow
any knowledge of how your writing process works, but I guess that
book must have been some kind of trigger for you.
[time passed]
(I could not figure
out how to post this to the site, so years later now, I am trying
again.)
Now that grandson is
nine, and is reading Crazy in Poughkeepsie. We have loved all
of your more recent chapter books, especially The Neddiad and
The Yggyssey and… but I was greatly disappointed that the
Bushman Lives sequel didn’t.
One more interesting
note: when she was about eleven years old, my daughter used Theobald
Galt’s talk about avocados from The Snarkout Boys & the Avocado
of Death for her monologue for a theatrical tryout. She got the part.
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Yes! The Twenty-One Balloons by William Pene DuBois is an outstanding book, and I remember enjoying it as a child. I'm sure elements, and certainly the feeling of it, are part of my subconscious. Nice call, and nice post. Thanks for your kind words.
