Ann Brashares and Ben Brashares are the authors of the new middle grade novel Westfallen. Ann's other books include the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series. Ben's other books include Being Edie Is Hard Today. Ann lives in New York City and Ben lives in New Jersey. They are siblings.
Q: The Publishers Weekly review of Westfallen says, “The Brashares vividly illustrate the perils of forgetting lessons of the past in this historical science-fiction thriller...” What do you think of that description?
Ben: We hoped that would be a take-away from the book. We went in with an “entertain first” M.O. and tried not to hit any readers over the head with any messages but they’re in there and that’s probably one of the clearer ones.
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| Photo by Wes Jones |
Ann: Always best if you can show it within the context of the characters and their conflicts. It was also important to us not to represent America as some kind of heaven compared to Westfallen’s hell. The two have more in common than we like to think, and we wanted to give readers room to ask hard questions.
Q: How did you research the novel, and did you learn anything that especially surprise you?
Ben: I read a lot about life in Germany at the start of WWII with a particular interest in the Nazi youth. More than 80 years have passed since the start of WWII by the time we enter Westfallen so it obviously wouldn’t look the same as it did in the early ‘40s in Germany.
But it was good to get that base knowledge so I/we could then ask ourselves how those views/practices in pre-WWII Germany would have changed (or not changed) over the course of 80+ years in a place such as America.
Ann: I spent a lot of time thinking about trash. A town dump plays a role in the 1944 part of the story. Lawrence, one of the three main 1944 characters, collects scrap metal, rubber and paper for the war effort.
When you think about it, there was no plastic then, nearly all food garbage was used for animal feed or compost, so what is left? I found it fascinating to imagine how different it was, how little waste there was compared to now. I love how tangibly objects can open up the past.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: We are deep in revision mode for Book 2. We just got some cool cover mock ups for it. It’s exciting.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: https://www.vote.org/polling-place-locator/
Let’s keep it fictional.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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