Tag: Black Storm Comin’

Posted in Uncategorized

My Next Big Thing

Posted on by beckylevine

Last week (two weeks ago?!), Carol Baldwin tagged me in a meme about current WIPs. It’s Saturday, with no work looming, so I thought I’d finally get around to playing! Thanks, Carol!

What is the working title of your book? I have absolutely no working title. I would love to have a working title. OFFER me your working titles! At this point, I refer to the book in my head as Caro’s Story, but believe me, that will never show up on a cover or title page. Titles either come to me in a flash, or I struggle and struggle and…yeah, struggle.

Where did the idea for the book come from? I was reading a book–wish I could remember which one–that talked about the 1913 suffrage march on Washington, D.C. It described about the moment when the predominately white Chicago delegation asked Ida B. Wells and one other black woman to walk separately from them, at the back of the march. Wells went away, then later stepped into the march with the Chicago group and walked right in the middle of them. I had a flash that I wanted to write about a young girl who was at that march and who took two steps to the side as she walked to make a space for Wells. I worked on that story for a while, but during the research process I felt in love with Chicago and a different hero who started showing herself to me, one who I couldn’t fit into the first story. The girl who was developing on my computer was someone who didn’t live in a world that would take her to that spot, that moment, in D.C. She had a different journey to tell, one of discovering Jane Addams and Hull House and of living under the cloud of her immigrant mother’s depression and having to carve out a life of strength for herself, in Chicago. I wrote a first draft that had an obvious, huge crevice in the late middle–between the character of Caro and the very different hero who, I still hope, has a place with Wells somewhere in my writing future. These days, though, Caro and I, while complete suffragists, are focusing our energies on the Chicago immigrant world of the 1910s.

One to two sentence synopsis of the book:  I’m even worse at these than titles. Time enough to torture myself when I get to submission!

What else about the book might peak the readers’ interest? My goal is for this story to have the  high-energy, fast-paced feel I get when I read about the Chicago of these years. Caro is a strong character, a girl looking hard for her purpose, her thing. She lives in a narrow, too-quiet world, and when she steps out of that space into the city, her heart beats faster and she feels she like can do anything. I’m hoping the contrast between the pressure to damp herself down and the drive she has to burst out of that pressure and do something will jump off the page and suck readers in. The other connection I hope to make is this: I think many teens know what it’s life to be controlled by an adult, even an adult who–frankly–can barely control their own life, who is the worst possible judge for what their child should be doing. I want to give Caro credit for knowing what is best for her and the strength to realize what she has to do to get that. I’m hoping that readers will respond to and identify with her path and the steps she takes to stride freely along it. Dreaming this is, for me, the easy part. Now I just have to translate the dream onto the actual page!

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
I would very much like to find an agent who falls in love with my writing and feels strongly enough about it to represent it to publishers. I realize that the publishing industry is changing every second of every minute of every day, but this still feels like the right choice for me.

 How long did it take you to write the first draft of the story? Which first draft? Too long. It took me a whole draft to realize I’d been trying to fit two mismatched stories into one. Then I tried to write another first draft (and got pretty far along) without knowing my plot well enough. I don’t know what I was thinking–I know I need plot, but I got impatient and landed in the place where the Are-You-EVER-Going-to-Get-Published signs were flashing at me in neon, and I tried to rush past the process that works for me. I’ve been plotting for a while now, and it’s finally starting to come together. I will be starting the THIRD first draft by the end of this year or at the start of the next. I know what you’re thinking: “She must REALLY love this story.” And, yes, except for random moments of panicky frustration, I do.

What other books would you compare it to in this genre? I don’t really do comparisons–I think they’re a good way to get into a loop of worrying and feeling bad about yourself. BUT…I’ll share a few of the historical books for teens that I’m currently in love with, I would name Sherri L. Smith’s Flygirl, Diane Lee Wilson’s Black Storm Comin’, Joyce Moyer Hostetter’s Healing Water, Kathryn Fitzmaurice’s A Diamond in the Desert, and Kristin O’Donnell Tubb’s Selling Hope. I can’t and shouldn’t want to write like them, but if you told me that my name and book title (whatever that might be!) would someday show up in someone else’s list with these authors, you would make my day. My year.

What actors would you chose to play a movie rendition? Oh, I love doing this for other people’s books, but my own…I have a very clear image of Caro in my mind, but she doesn’t actually match any actresses that I know. If you took Natalie Portman, crossed her with Gina Torres and maybe a bit of Scarlett Johansson, then took, oh, 20-25 years off, you might start to get close.

I’m not going to tag any specific bloggers, but if you read this and want to carry the meme over to your blog, about your WIP, feel free to drop the link into the comments so we can all check it out!

Posted in YA Historical Fiction Challenge

YA Historical Fiction Challenge: Sherri L. Smith’s FLYGIRL

Posted on by beckylevine

Some books are so good, it’s actually hard to know where to come at them for a truly thoughtful, analytical review. Sherri L. Smith’s FLYGIRL is, for me, one of those books.

My basic review is…WOW.

Okay, I’ll give you a little bit more.

Ida Mae Jones wants to fly. She already does some, on the crop-duster plane that was her father’s before he died, the plane he taught her to fly in, the plane she plans to keep flying after she finds someone who will give her—as a woman—a pilot’s license. Then World War II breaks over the world, takes her brother as a soldier, and offers Ida Mae the chance to do her part and to fly. She may be able to join the WASP–the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots—if she’s willing to live a lie. A big one. She has to be willing to pass as white.

I have read three books in the last month which have characters who choose, for very specific, believable, and important reasons to “pass”—Flygirl, Diane Lee Wilson’s Black Storm Comin’ (see my review here), and Richard Peck’s The River Between Us. I don’ t know if this is a subject that’s becoming more “okay” to write about, or if it’s one of those reading coincidences that do happen. What I do know is that it’s an incredible world to read about, and all these writers handle it beautifully. Smith’s writing is easy and graceful, and yet she continually keeps up the tension by putting us right in the middle of the risks Ida Mae takes by hiding the truth. Risks to her safety, risks to her family, risks to her own self-identity–her core understanding of and belief in the person she knows herself to be.

The best fiction crosses barriers of experience and draws the reader into a world they know nothing about, then make them believe in and understand that world as well as they can without having lived it. Smith has done this. She shows us all the possible paths for Ida Mae; she shows us the choices Ida Mae faces and makes. WWII America carries a great burden of responsibility for having created situations and dangers that pushed people like Ida Mae to lie, and Smith makes that pointedly clear. BUT, at the same time, she has created a hero who, within that era, is also responsible for her own decisions and who recognizes this–a strong hero who is, yes, justifiably frightened and angry and confused, but who in no way plays out a passive role in her own story.

I love Ida Mae Jones. I want to put her in a plane and fly her into the future, even a future beyond today, where she doesn’t have to have this battle–internal and external. And I want to step back into the past with her and be the one person she can trust with the truth, someone who would support her and walk with her and go up in that second seat of the plane and let her fly me wherever she wanted.

One last word–this comes perilously close to a spoiler, but it’s not going to cross the lines. There are certain types of book endings that are seriously hard to pull off (and I’m not going to tell you what those are!). Many authors fail when they attempt this kind of ending, and I get very frustrated when I have to read them. Smith succeeds absolutely and brilliantly.

And, yes, you’ll have to read the book to see what I mean! 🙂

Posted in Book Reivew, YA Historical Fiction Challenge

YA Historical Fiction Challenge: BLACK STORM COMIN’

Posted on by beckylevine

For my first read in the 2011 Historical Fiction challenge, I started off by breaking one of my own specs. In the post where I announced that I’d take part, I said, “I’m going to try and focus my search on books with protagonists who are at least 16 years old, at the older end of the YA spectrum.”

Oh, well.

The thing is that, in Black Storm Comin’, Diane Lee Wilson has totally achieved what I am looking/hoping for in the older books. She’s removed the safety net.

Too often, I think, historical fiction for kids and teens places its heroes in dangerous situations, very realistic to the times the authors are writing about, and then…somehow…make those situations feel not dangerous. I think there are various ways this happens–the hero has a powerful adult around for support; the hero doesn’t actually live IN the world where the danger exists and can pretty much escape as needed;  the point of view never gets close or deep enough to show real threat or real fear; the hero’s story gets overwhelmed, and cushioned, with too many details of the historic setting. Whatever the cause, I frequently find myself frustrated with a story that somehow takes me away from the actual pain and hardship I should be feeling.

Not so in Black Storm Comin’.

Colton Wescott may be only twelve, but he is moving through a world in which twelve can and does mean carrying a man’s life on his shoulders, a man’s responsibilities, and definitely without that safety net. The story starts as Colton and his family are traveling with a wagon train on the way to California–at the tail end of that wagon train, because Colton’s mother is black and his father is white, and nobody really wants them there. His mother is “in bed” in the wagon, with her newborn baby, and his father is jittery and nervous, so much that he accidentally shoots Colton with a blast from his shotgun and takes off–fleeing both the consequences and his family. Colton and his next-oldest sibling, ten-year-old Althea, immediately and literally become the adults in the family, barely getting the wagon and their very-ill mother to an outpost with a doctor. And getting them there with just about no money.

That’s when Colton sees the advertisement for Pony Express riders. The idea of becoming a rider pulls at him, both for the money and for the chance to ride–to fly, really–over the land he’s been plodding across for weeks now. His decision is complex, layered with the worry that what he’s really trying to do is desert his family, just as his father did, and with the added complication that he’s light-skinned enough to pass for white–which will let him apply for the job–but the rest of his family is not. He worries that keeping the secret is betraying them, and something in himself. Still, he is an adult, and there are too often, in an adult life, no real choices. He applies for and takes the job.

And what a job. If life as not-quite teenager in 1860 is hard, you should try life as a rider for the express. Colton is assigned the route–you can’t really call it a road, or a trail, or anything other than a direction the horses know by heart–over the Sierras into California. Just as winter sets in. Wilson is a fantastic author; she takes Colton along that route twice. The first time is to set us up for knowing how miserable it is, to show it to us in detail, with the horse barely making it up the mountain and small, skinny Colton barely staying on that horse’s back. The second time is the time of real urgency, with a specific life-or-death letter that Colton must get through. Each pass has its own tension–from the near-impossible physical test and from the urgency of Colton’s task, and each–again–gives no way out for Colton, no extra or unrealistic shelter or aid. Each time, it is Colton and the horse, and that’s it.

As it would have been.

Yes, there are people who help Colton. There are adults who help him get a job that he is, historically, too young to hold, and people who care for him when he is badly injured. The thing is, though, the help is at a par with what any adult would have gotten and comes with nothing extra for him because he is so young. And any aid Colton receives is countered by the help he doesn’t get, from his loving but fatalistic mother, from the old prospector who would all too quickly give away Colton’s secret–just for the fun of it, from the father who definitely does not swoop back into the story at the darkest moment and save the day. All the people in the story are well-drawn, but one of the best secondary characters is Althea, who is thrust into the same role as Colton and given no chance to ride like the wind, to get away from the dreary reality of keeping her mother alive and her younger sister at least safe and fed.

Childhood is not always a safe place, even today, and the best realistic stories, modern or historical, are the ones that do more than talk about that on the surface, that show the weight kids and teens carry, that show the battle they have just to survive.

Diane Lee Wilson has told such a story. Beautifully.