Alison McGhee – Weird Sad and Silent

Steve Thomas: Alison, welcome to the show.

Alison McGhee: Thank you so much, Steve. I’m honored to be here with you.

Steve Thomas: Before we really dive into the book, can you talk about what role libraries have played in your life, when you were young and how it’s different now as an author working with libraries?

Alison McGhee: Oh, great question.

Well, when I was young, our library, and by our library, I mean the library that was five miles from my house in very, very rural upstate New York, the foothills of the Adirondacks. It was so important to me and to my siblings. We grew up on a couple hundred acres of woods and creeks and pastures. My mother was a teacher and so she had the summers off and we went to the library once a week.

It’s the Didymus Thomas Library in Remsen, New York. I had always thought it was a Carnegie Library because it’s so beautiful, but it was actually built as a donation by a woman in the village. And they based the design of it on all our beautiful Carnegie libraries.

But we would go there once a week. You could take out 10 books at a time. I took out 10 books at a time, came back, had them all read by the time we went back. It was a very quiet, almost solitary, rural life. I had siblings, but I spent a lot of time up in my tree house reading and the hay fort reading.

I can still feel what it was like to open the door of that library. I believe the floors were marble. It had that hushed stillness that libraries have, and the librarian wore her glasses on a chain around her neck. And she had a pencil, and I remember the sound it made on the checkout card ’cause of course it was way before electronic checkouts and just the stillness and the hush of it. By the time I was in high school, I had read a lot of the books in that library, and I remember walking along the stacks with my head bent, which is still what I do in libraries, and it’s what I do in bookstores. And when I do that, that physical motion, that same feeling of peaceful excitement comes over me. So it was a huge influence on me as a child.

As an adult, as a writer, I’ve been a writer my whole life and I’ve given lots of talks in libraries. I live in Minnesota, which is an incredible state in many ways, and it has a legacy fund that sponsors writers to travel around the state, way outstate, like in places where I grew up, and give readings and workshops, so I’ve spent a lot of time in libraries around the state of Minnesota due to the grants that are available there. It still brings me back to my youth. Although libraries are now sort of cornerstones of so much in a community beyond books, all the programs they offer, all the different ways you can read a book now, the story times, you name it, they are cornerstones of democracy, I think of them as. It’s a beautiful place.

Steve Thomas: Can you remember any book in particular that either maybe made you a reader in the first place that really delighted you, or a book that made you decide you wanted to write?

Alison McGhee: Oh gosh.

Steve Thomas: Or have you always been a writer?

Alison McGhee: I have always been a writer, and I know this because I began writing when I learned how to print, and I would write stories on notebook paper that I illustrated, and they were all about a family of kittens called the Rickety Kittens. And in each one, a kitten would have a terrible misadventure and they would all rescue him. But I wanted to be a writer from age six on because when I look at those tiny books that my mother saved, it will say “Written and illustrated by Alison McGee, published by Publisher Alison McGee.” So, I mean, I guess it was fate.

But the books I read that instantly come to mind as influential on me to this day were A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, still one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read, and still an influence on me. Charlotte’s Webb by E. B. White. My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George, about a boy who lived on his own in downstate New York. He tanned his own deer hide. He’d made his own acorn pancakes. Oh, and Heidi by Johanna Spyri.

So I was drawn to books about children who were on their own in some way. I was always drawn to that and as a writer, whether I’m writing for adults or children, I often write in the voice of a child who is observing the world around them and coming to terms with it. Everything they see, everything they experience. That is sort of a hallmark of my writing, I think.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. And that’s what something that’s in Weird Sad and Silent. It’s in first person. So is it easy for you to kind of get into that mindset of, like in this book, it’s a 10-year-old of just to figure out her character and be able to speak as her? Is that something that’s difficult for you to get into or once you got the character you can make it work?

Alison McGhee: Yeah, that’s a really good question because I’m definitely not a child anymore, on the outside, but I don’t even think about it. I write in any age without thinking about it, and I think the reason is that we’re all the same age as we ever were. On the outside we look as if we’re babies and toddlers, and then we advance in age and we get tall and we grow and we become adults, but all the experiences we’ve ever been through still live inside us concurrently. So I can go right back to fifth grade that day on the steps when something bad happened and I can go right back to being a baby who could not take naps and looking up at the ceiling and just waiting for the arms to reach down and pick me up so I could go back to the world of people who weren’t supposed to nap.

So no, it’s very easy for me to inhabit all the ages. It’s kinda like if you can picture a telephone operator from the forties how they used to plug in those cords? Well, let me plug into being 10. Let me plug into being 13, and then I just go.

Steve Thomas: Do you have to work to create them or does it feel like they’re already out there and you’re kind of inhabiting them as a character?

Alison McGhee: Oh, that’s the best question. I’m what’s known as a “pantser” of a writer. I don’t plot things out. Oh, how I wish I could. I have writer friends who can outline and they can then just write the story. I fly by the seat of my pants. And this book, unlike almost all of them, came to me in a rush. I heard a voice one day say to me, “To begin, my name is Daisy Jackson,” and I visualized this little girl who was counting on her fingertips over and over and over, and so I gave the book a very unusual, invisible structure that has to do with numbers. And then I just wrote every day, wrote and wrote and wrote. And she told me the story.

Steve Thomas: Can you just give the basic idea of what the book is for listeners?

Alison McGhee: Absolutely. Weird Sad and Silent is narrated by Daisy Jackson. She’s 10 years old. She lives with her mother Flora Jackson in an apartment that they moved to after they finally were able to escape her mother’s ex-boyfriend who was cruel and could be abusive. They live in a wonderful apartment building now with a next door neighbor, Lulu, who stays with Daisy when her mother works nights cleaning office buildings.

Daisy loves the librarian at her school. She loves the custodian at her school. She loves her mother. She loves Lulu. She does not have real friends her age. And the reason for that is that a couple of years ago, the school bullies witnessed her counting out loud up to 111 and back. And as they witnessed that, they began to laugh at her and they decided to call her Weird Sad and Silent because they’re bullies and that’s what bullies do. And ever since that day, which was horrifying to Daisy, she has learned to, in her words, invisibilize herself. She sits in the back of the classroom. She walks down the sides of the halls. She doesn’t talk to anyone. She doesn’t raise her hand. She’s just trying to keep herself safe because she’s been through some stuff in her life and she doesn’t wanna bring anything else on. She watches the bullies make others feel terrible, and she doesn’t know what to do about it.

But then, one day a new kid that comes to school, his name is Austin Roseau, and Austin has been through some stuff too, even though we’d never really find out what it is. But the magical thing about Austin is he is not afraid of bullies. And through him and his instant seeing her. She’s not invisible to Austin. He sees her and it’s as if he already knows her and they become instant friends. Daisy begins to stake her own claim in the world.

Steve Thomas: I never gave it a word like that before, but I mean, that’s definitely how I felt as a kid and sometimes feel like as an adult as well, that I want to invisibilize myself. And she also, futurizes herself too, basically future planning, and one of the ways she’s futurizing is her other friend in her life, the feral kitten whose name is Rumble Paws.

Alison McGhee: Yes. Daisy doesn’t have any pets, and she becomes aware that there’s a feral cat hanging around her apartment building who also has learned how to invisibilize himself. She decides that she is going to create a “lure Rumble Paws into her life” plan, and she does that very methodically. She will sit outside with an open can of tuna and just wait until she sees the weeds rustling. She doesn’t move, she doesn’t look at him. She doesn’t say anything.

She decides that Rumble Paws, like her, has been through a lot. He’s missing one ear. He has some injuries. He’s terrified of the world, and she decides that he was a former pro wrestler cat who had to fight even though he never wanted to. So there are some similarities between bullies and standing up to them that are evidenced in Rumble Paws.

The librarian in the story is inspired by an actual real life person. That is one of the few instances in any of my books where a real life character was truly the inspiration for one of the characters.

The story in my own life is a few years ago on Instagram, I began noticing posts from a young librarian in California whose posts were all about library joy and library magic, and how the library is a place that welcomes everyone. And so I began following him. He only had a few followers. His name is Mychal Threets, M-Y-C-H-A-L, T-H-R-E-E-T-S.

And sure enough, that man just blew up because who doesn’t want to read posts that are about joy and love and welcoming and how libraries embody all of that? And the other thing about Michael is he’s so absolutely honest about his own struggles with mental health. He makes not only a library a safe place for people, but he makes his own spaces online, safe places for everyone. He’s a beautiful, beautiful person, and just being in his presence on Instagram reminded me of, again, the refuge that a library is for everyone.

So I wanted to create in this book a school library that was the place that our Daisy Jackson could go always for solace and comfort and love and companionship. And so the day that those bullies nicknamed her Weird Sad and Silent is the day that Marimba, the school librarian, began having lunch with Daisy every day in the back store room at the library where, not coincidentally, Marimba keeps all kinds of school supplies for kids who don’t have enough money to buy them. Kids will come into the library throughout the day and just whisper something to her. She’ll bring out a bag and later they’ll come collect it.

And, I feel I’m starting to get a little emotional here. Marimba reminds me of all the teachers that I have worked with in my life who put their students first, who spend their own money to make their kids’ lives better which of course makes sense ’cause we all know how magnificently teachers and librarians are paid. But it’s just a beautiful generous place at the library, whether it’s in a school or a university or a community, and it’s populated with beautiful humans who wanna make life better for others.

Steve Thomas: In any average kind of story, it might be, oh, they have this special relationship and you really show that they do have a special relationship, but she also cares that much for all the students in the school. I mean, she has a special little thing with Daisy, but she would do anything for anybody in that school.

 You mentioned before when you were describing Daisy, that she does the counting on her fingers. I think she learned when she was bullied about it to do it more in her head than to try to do it out loud, although she occasionally does and that’s her coping mechanism. Whenever she gets anxious, she starts doing that.

Alison McGhee: I think we all have our methods for calming ourselves down. Some of them are visible, some people have very visible means of doing it. I have invisible means of calming myself down, and Daisy, she really has some PTSD from her years living in the apartment with her mother’s violent ex-boyfriend, and what she and her mother used to do was just count on their fingertips when he was raging, count, count, count, and now it is what Daisy does whenever her anxiety overwhelms her, or she’s in the presence of the bullies. She will put her hands behind her back. She will always try to hide it under the desk. She will count very, very gently.

She has two favorite numbers: a hundred eleven (1, 1, 1) and two hundred twenty-two (2, 2, 2). And they formed the invisible structure of the book. Just as she invisibly counts on her fingertips, I created an invisible structure that uses those two numbers and that helped propel me through the writing just like all our little human strategies help us cope when things are hard.

Steve Thomas: And part of it is also that they’re learning Roman numerals. And so I love all of the things, it’s very kid-like, of where she’ll say “A hundred, or as we say it in Roman numerals, ‘C'”…

Alison McGhee: “We, the ones who know Roman numerals….” Honestly, when she started doing that, I just laughed out loud and then I had to look up Roman numerals past a certain point ’cause I realized, “Wow, Alison, you have kind of forgotten some things here!” So yeah, I had a little table of Roman numerals to help me out as the chapters progressed.

Steve Thomas: I love how she uses those numbers, not only as her favorite numbers, not just because they’re kind of repeating numbers, that, it’s easier to read in the text, but that 1 1 1 is also W-O-N, W-O-N, W-O-N. So you’re winning. And 2, 2 2 is also TOO instead of not just TWO. So you’re adding on to things and so it’s a support for her in that way too ’cause she can think of it in those ways. I love that.

Alison McGhee: Yeah. Yeah. That was a comfort to her. Like there’s always more, there’s always more that can be done, and I can win at things.

Steve Thomas: And you do explore, as you mentioned, domestic violence and bullying. Do you have to think about how you approach those subjects when you’re writing for children? Writing it through her voice, I guess helps filter it that way ’cause you’re kind of seeing it through a child’s point of view?

Alison McGhee: Yeah, that is something that I employ my logical, conscious brain with because when I’m writing for children, I think so often children are not respected as the incredibly sentient and observant people that they are. I think they’re talked down to a little too much in the wider world, in the world that wants to sell things to them, but teachers who choose to spend their lives with children and librarians and others like that have such an innate respect for them. And I want always to be that way when I write for children, whether I’m writing a book that’s meant to make them laugh or whether it’s a book like this, which is, you know, do you see yourself in this world, and what are your feelings about it?

I don’t wanna downplay how hard life can be, and I also don’t wanna downplay how beautiful and full of hope it can be. And sometimes that can be a balance that requires me to think, well, many children do live with the specter of intermittent violence in their lives, whether it’s because of the neighborhood they live in, whether it’s a family member or someone outside the family.

And so, i’m okay with that, but I also didn’t want children to feel terrified. So I made the abuse happen in the past. It’s not happening in the present time of the book. That’s one way you can do it as a writer, but still, Daisy is haunted by it occasionally. And so this is a book about something that happened and how you go on and you reconfigure your life and you make it a beautiful life despite, despite what went on in the past and I’ve done that with a bunch of my books for children and then I have to counteract it by writing a book that’s just to make them laugh. Just to make myself laugh too.

Steve Thomas: I heard that Steven Spielberg made Jurassic Park II after Schindler’s List just to kind of clear his head and like, let me just do something empty and entertaining.

Alison McGhee: Yeah, I read the same thing. I either I read it or I heard it in a podcast and I thought that totally makes sense to me. You gotta just wipe this slate a little bit and refill the wells.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, it’s tough to explore those topics, as a writer or as a reader.

Alison McGhee: The day that the abuse stopped was a day that Daisy just acted out of pure instinct and it laid the ground for later in the book when she really begins to stake her own claim in the world as someone deserving of a claim in the world.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, and reading it as an adult, anybody out there, I encourage you to read the book as well, not just as a thing so you can do readers’ advisory for kids, but I think it’s just a really good book too, because you get that kids’ view of adult things that you don’t really understand. Like her mom’s always wanting to apologize to her for it. And you can feel that as like a parent and an adult, that if you did something like, “Oh, I kept you in that home for too long and I had my reasons, I was in love with them,” or whatever the reasons might be, but you see the damage that it did to your child. I could see that you would just want to apologize forever for that kind of thing. Daisy doesn’t wanna talk about it usually, and you don’t get into that too much. But there’s enough there, again, if you’re an adult looking at that, you can definitely see the mom’s point of view there.

Alison McGhee: Yeah. Yeah. I could feel it very deeply. You know, there’s just a few times in my life as a parent when I look back with just great regret, like just momentary things, and I have apologized to my children and my son has said, “Honestly, mom, I don’t even remember,” but I remember, and you know, I write my books for adults and children and so, yeah, Daisy’s mom remembers and she will always regret even as she sees her daughter flowering into this new life and she herself flowering into it.

Steve Thomas: We won’t spoil anything, but it’s happy endings all around. Everybody’s a well-rounded character, even the bullies, you get some more insight into them and why they might, you know, we always know that bullies are usually hurt themselves and they’re just kind of exerting that as a coping mechanism themselves, but you definitely see that different side of them as well.

Since you were a writer your whole life, do you have any advice for any young writers out there? I guess maybe especially the ones that are kind of like Daisy?

Alison McGhee: Yeah. Oh gosh. Yeah, I would say write the way only you can write. You might wanna write like a writer that you love and admire, but keep playing around just on your own and think about what you yourself love and you’re drawn to. Annie Dillard in her wonderful essay called “Write Till You Drop” has a line something like, ” You were put here on earth to give voice to your own astonishment.” It’s something like that.

So I would say kids out there writing, you just write whatever you want to and write and write and write and have fun. Make yourself laugh. Make yourself cry. Don’t be afraid to put it all out there.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. Authenticity is what really resonates with readers.

Alison McGhee: Yeah. Yeah.

Steve Thomas: You hear about it more in art, but like sometimes you do want to write like someone that you like because that’s the way you pick up good habits that you can incorporate into your own writing, like not just steal it outright, but just how somebody writes a certain thing or turn of phrase or something. Again, just like art, you can copy Monet to learn how Monet did this or that or the other, and then you learn how to incorporate certain techniques.

Alison McGhee: That’s actually a great point. As much as being a writer, you are a reader and when you’re reading, you’re automatically, the more you read, it’s a process of osmosis. You are learning how to write, and so the writers you most love, they will sink into you. I know that Carson McCullers, as a child, I read a Member of the Wedding, I reread it 10 years ago, and it was stunning how much of her writing is in my writing. So yeah, it’s almost an unconscious process. So read, read, read.

Steve Thomas: And before we go, do you have any other upcoming work that you wanted to tease or anything that’s coming up?

Alison McGhee: Oh, great question. I can only say what I’m working on. I am writing a series of comic tiny mysteries under an alias. Because after writing Telephone of the Tree, which came out last year, and Weird Sad and Silent, and with everything currently facing us in the world, I wanted to make people laugh and make myself laugh, so it’s a period of one of those, the well fills from beneath. And in the meantime, I’m going to have some fun and hopefully make other people laugh with some funny books.

Steve Thomas: That’s great. You’re doing your Lost World: Jurassic Park now.

Alison McGhee: Yes, exactly!

Steve Thomas: Well Alison, thank you so much for joining me today. I love the book. And it is available now wherever books are sold, or of course at your local library as well. I’m sure you can check out a copy there, and read it yourself for your own good, but then also that’s a good thing that you can recommend to all those quiet, brilliant little kids coming into your libraries who might just need a story like Daisy’s to understand that they’re not alone in the world.

Alison McGhee: Oh, that’s beautiful. Thank you, Steve.

Steve Thomas: Thank you so much for coming on.

Alison McGhee: Yeah. It’s been an honor. I love your podcast. Thank you.

***

Rebecca Vnuk: Hello and welcome to another edition of the Circ Desk. I’m Rebecca Vnuk, the Executive Director of Library Reads.

Lindsey Dunn: And I’m Lindsay Dunn, a librarian who works for NoveList.

Rebecca Vnuk: And today we are chatting about Weird, Sad, and Silent by Allison McGee. So you just heard the full interview with Allison and Steve, and Lindsay and I were trying to think, okay, how could we come up with some read alikes for this book? Now she’ll tell you all about NoveList and how you can find children’s and YA titles there, but I will take this opportunity to tell you that Library Reads is an adults-only list. I feel like we need to have like the little hands stamp that you get at the club, right, over 21.

We do not do any children’s books at Library Reads. We have a Canadian counterpart called Loan Stars. If you go to their website, which I believe is loanstars.ca, they do have a junior list. It’s similar to what we do, and usually when people ask me for children’s or YA book recommendations, I either send them to NoveList or I send them to the ALSC website; that’s a subsection of ALA, and they have a million book lists on their site. It’s very great. What I did try to do, we were chatting about it on email before we got to our Circ Desk, and Lindsay let me know, like, the themes of this book. Do you have anything adult that might fit this?

So I get a little thing in my head about things I had read previously that have appeared on the Library Reads list, and I came up with a title called If the Shoe Fits, and that is by Julie Murphy, and it is the first title in a loose series that’s put out by Disney Hyperion, and they’re called the “Meant to Be” novels. And what made me think of this was, I’ll read the Library Reads description to you first, and then I’ll tell you a little bit why I thought it was maybe a good read alike. So our description on this is, ” Low on job prospects, fashion school grad Cindy moves in with her reality show producer stepmom.” Are we getting the theme here? Cinderella, stepmom, right? “When a spot opens up in the Bachelor-style series, Cindy seizes the chance to get nationwide exposure for her design. The last thing she expects is to find love. A Cinderella-inspired romance with a plus-size heroine and multicultural cast.”

And what I liked about this is ’cause I’ve read this one personally and I very much remember Cindy is a character who is bullied by her peers. She doesn’t have any true friends. People are kind of, it’s fake, she lives in LA, so everything’s very glossy and on the surface, and she needs to sort of dig into herself and find strength to become basically this overnight sensation on television. So I thought this was kind of a cool match. I also thought it was a little bit cool to maybe take a middle grade book and then match it with something that’s an adult book that would be appropriate for teen readers as well. The whole “Meant to Be” series is if you haven’t guessed by now, it is retelling of Disney movies.

So there’s one based on The Little Mermaid. There’s one based on, oh, Jasmine Guillory did one called By the Book, which is based on Beauty and the Beast, that one’s my favorite. There was just one out this year, a retelling of Mulan. So there are these very sweet romances. There’s not a whole lot of sexy times going on, and I think it will appeal a lot to younger readers, maybe looking for an adult romance that’s not quite so adult.

So I thought that might be a decent Library Reads pick to go along with it. But Lindsay, I’m really excited to hear what kind of younger kids books you found via NoveList.

Lindsey Dunn: As I was approaching this, I was thinking about this book and how I would sort of categorize it. So, for those who haven’t read Weird Sad and Silent by Allison McGee, it’s about a girl named Daisy with a lot going on. She’s an abuse survivor. Her and her mother have left mom’s abusive ex and now moved to a new place. She’s bullied at school for being quiet, and mom is a little emotionally unavailable at the moment.

So the topics could feel kind of heavy and, you know, in my time we used to call these “everything but the kitchen sink” books. I think at an earlier time they used to be called “problem books.” It’s books that are about kids dealing with a lot of issues, and these are the kinds of books I liked as a child, maybe because my life felt somewhat sheltered. So it’s kids dealing with some really tough issues that I myself never had to deal with.

But one thing that’s really interesting about middle grade fiction is that authors know that even in a heavy topic book, you have to offer some lightness, some kind of hope, for the reader. That’s not always true of adult books. We can have the trauma fiction that is just heavy, bleak, dire, and there’s no hope.

Your example was a great opposite of that. It sounds really fun and enjoyable, but this book, what the lightness in this book, in Weird Sad and Silent, comes from the first person narration, which shows Daisy to be a bright, imaginative child with an active inner world. So her circumstances may be kind of yucky, but she has a good, resilient personality and we enjoy hearing her opinions and how she’s experiencing this stuff through her vibrant narration.

And I liked that hook right away of the first person narration, and what’s nice about NoveList is you can use the hooks of a book. This book has many hooks, and I’m gonna talk about some of them, but you can use hooks, like first person narration to find other books that have that.

So the other thing going on is she has these coping strategies that come out of her anxiety. She likes to pretend she’s invisible. She counts using Roman numerals. She makes lists and haikus. So she has these, she sees the world through patterns and she also channels her own need for care into wooing a spicy feral cat that she calls her future cat. She hopes this will be her cat one day, and that’s a plus for me. There are many hooks for this book.

A cat in a book is gonna be one for me. How do you feel about cats in books, Rebecca?

Rebecca Vnuk: I mean, that’s a funny thing. I probably could have found some cat books, but they would all be witchy romances ’cause that’s what’s so popular right now on Library Reads, so that wouldn’t be a match, but yes, I think that’s always a fun hook, especially in that age group because all kids want a pet, right?

Lindsey Dunn: Mm-hmm. So you can use like the themes being an abuse survivor. You can use her identity as a person with anxiety. You can use the first person narration, you can use the fact that she’s bullied at school. You can use all these elements to pick your books.

So I looked for this element of trying to befriend a spicy animal is a big connection to my first recommendation, which is called a Boy Called Bat by Elena Arnold. It’s a 2017 title, but bonus, if you like series, this is a series starter, so there’s three more books to enjoy if you really like it. So like Daisy, Bat, which stands for Bixby Alexander Tam has some challenges. His parents are getting a divorce and he is dealing with that upheaval of his home life. Plus his sister is annoying sometimes, of course, as siblings are, but where Weird Sad and Silent is introspective and hopeful, a Boy Called Bat is thoughtful and funny. Bat, like Daisy, is a neurodiverse character who has autism, and his kind includes stimming. His coping strategy is braiding hair, which allows him to use his hands, and he is trying to make a pet out of a spicy, or in this case, smelly animal. A baby skunk his mom has brought home named Thor. Oh my gosh.

So the plot line has a lot of similarities, but with a different tone of being funny. And his challenges are more internal than external ’cause he goes to a school that celebrates his differences and there’s no bullying, but he does get frustrated sometimes with having to communicate with other people, but it just has a different tone to it, which I think that’s a good fit ’cause when you give a read alike you want something a little different, right?

Rebecca Vnuk: Absolutely.

Lindsey Dunn: And then my second book is called Close to Famous by Joan Bauer, and this is a backlist title, goes back to 2011. Oh, so we’re going back in the Wayback Machine, but this again starts out sounding very similar, but with the tone that is cozy and feel good, similar to what adult librarians call a gentle read, Rebecca.

Rebecca Vnuk: Exactly.

Lindsey Dunn: And it starts out with a girl named Foster and her mother escaping from an abusive home. The abusive ex is an Elvis impersonator, so that’s kind of weird. But the pair ends up in a small town of Culpepper, West Virginia.

Foster is a passionate baker and expresses her views on life via baking metaphors. They are taken in by a small town with lovable, quirky neighbors, and Foster uses her baking skills to fill her new friends’ bellies with the delicious treats. So perhaps “Like Water for Chocolate for tweens”, I don’t know?

It’s also got that first person narration with a strong personality that shows up in the narration of Foster. So I thought that sounded, again, like a similar kind of story about a kid dealing with a lot of stuff, but we got some different tones here. We got serious and then we have funny, and then we have cozy and gentle.

Rebecca Vnuk: And I like that because I think when it comes to read alikes, this is a great example of how you’re not always gonna find the exact same book to give to someone, right? Sometimes there’s some pressure on us that we feel like, “Okay. Here’s this book. I have to find something that’s got the same kind of character and it’s got the same kind of pace and it’s got the same kind of tone.” And this sort of exploring read alikes helps us realize, well no, actually we could give them something that has a completely different tone because maybe it’s that character that they’re really interested in. Or maybe the fact that she’s got the cat, and in your first choice, he’s got a skunk.

It’s all about finding an animal to sort of focus on and make your friend. It really shows how we don’t have to be constrained in read alikes the way we sometimes feel we ought to be. I know when I was looking at trying to find an adult match. I was like, “Okay, where do I even start with this?” And Lindsay had helpfully said, ” Here’s the themes I’m looking at. We’re looking at bullying, we’re looking at past trauma, she’s taking care of this spicy cat.” And I was like, okay, well, all I have for matches when I look at the Library Reads archive, which can I just say has 1800 titles in it, I’m so excited about that, but when I put in “trauma,” I am not getting read alikes for a middle grade. I’m getting like real trauma books or when I put in “bullied,” that’s just not a term that I’m finding in adult books, and so I kind of had to stretch that out a little bit.

And I think that that’s what’s sort of fun, it’s part of the read alike adventure. You have to get in your brain. What am my keywords I’m looking for? NoveList does this great job talking about things having appeal terms, and using NoveList is the luxury of clicking the little boxes at the bottom that you guys have so helpfully created like, “Okay, I want a book that’s got these four themes in it,” or “I want this particular setting and that’s great.”

So it really is about finding what are our keywords that float to the top on what we’re looking for here? What are the appeal factors that we can look for? So we’re not gonna find a book that’s the exact match to this, but we’re sure gonna find you some ones that fit that mood for when you’re reading it. I think you’ve done a great job with that.

Lindsey Dunn: Well, thank you. Yeah. I like that we can mix and match the elements.

Rebecca Vnuk: A hundred percent. A hundred percent. And like I said, if the reader was like, “Oh no, I wanna read alike to this book ’cause I really liked the cat!” Yeah, well then I could come up with 20 witchy romance books with cats in them!

So I think on that note, witchy cats, we’ll leave it at that and we will check you out next time on the Circ Desk!