I’m a former public radio reporter who now investigates other worlds, both real and imagined, present and past.
My first book for children, The Fairy Ring, Or Elsie and Frances Fool the World (Candlewick Press, March 2012) has gotten starred reviews from The Horn Book and Booklist and won praise from The Wall Street Journal, Publisher’s Weekly, and Kirkus Reviews. It’s also a Junior Library Guild Selection. (I’ve put links to reviews on my page “Praise for The Fairy Ring,” under the bar heading “About the Fairy Ring.”)
The cover photo for The Fairy Ring was taken by Frances, who was nine at the time. The girl in the picture is her cousin Elsie. The fairy in the right lower corner…well…let’s just say it was this fairy, and several others, that led Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to write a book called The Coming of the Fairies.
Many, many people have been mystified by what came to be known as the Cottingley Fairy Photographs. But I was intrigued by the girls who took them. Who were they? What were they thinking?
To find out, I went to Yorkshire, England, where they (and their fairies) lived…
For my second book, also non-fiction, I retraced the long-ago journeys of a boy found living wild in the forests of France in 1797. After many escapes and recaptures, he was finally captured for good and taken to Paris. He went by foot (bare) and by stagecoach. I went by foot (hiking-booted) and by train and bus.
Wild Boy: The Real Life of the Savage of Aveyron, with pictures by Timothy Basil Ering, illustrator of Kate DiCamillo’s Newbery-award-winning The Tale of Despereaux, will be out in 2013, also from Candlewick.