Q&A with Caroline Gertler

 

 

 

Caroline Gertler is the author of the new middle grade novel Where You've Got to Be. She also has written the middle grade novel Many Points of Me. She lives in New York City.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Where You've Got to Be, and how did you create your character Nolie?

 

A: This book started with the character of Nolie. She came to me as she is, along with her older sister, Linden, and their parents.

 

In early drafts, I set the book in a beach town, where Nolie and her mom and sister had moved to help take care of an elderly woman. But in revision, that story didn’t feel right. I ended up setting Nolie’s story in New York City, where I felt I could better explore some of the themes that Nolie would face.

 

Q: How would you describe the relationship between Nolie and her sister, Linden?

 

A: The sister relationship in Where You’ve Got to Be is the framework for the rest of the story. I have two older sisters (and a younger brother), my mother and mother-in-law come from families of sisters, and I am the mother to two sisters. Sister relationships are one of the most complicated, yet rewarding, that a woman can experience.

 

I describe Nolie as the younger sister who feels overshadowed by her older sister. She looks up to her older sister, Linden, but is also confused by her behavior, and hasn’t quite caught up to her yet.

 

They are at the ages (11 and 12) when their bodies and minds are changing rapidly, and that affects how they feel about each other. But even though they fight and drift apart, we get the sense that their connection is strong and will remain steadfast in their lives going forward.

Q: What role do you see Judaism playing in the novel?

 

A: I am Jewish, and my experience of Judaism is similar to Nolie’s. My family is very assimilated, and I wanted to explore that experience of being American, yet in having a religious and cultural identity that makes us different and minority.

 

I grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust, the fear that something like that could happen again. And now that historical time feels distant for my children. Antisemitism is rampant, even though we feel protected living in a place with a large Jewish population.

 

Aside from all those complicated feelings, I wanted to capture how the rhythms of Jewish holidays bring joy and positive connection to the life of a reformed family. And, in a subtler way, how a religion like Judaism can guide a child in discovering her moral compass.

 

Q: How was the book's title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: Where You’ve Got to Be is about finding your place in the world, and the title came from a song in the book: "Simple Gifts," which is a Shaker hymn that I learned at school, that always runs through my head, and which I sing to my children as a lullaby.

 

The line is: “’Tis a gift to come down where you ought to be.” We considered making the title Where You Ought to Be, but that felt too preachy and Christian to me, plus the book designer thought the word “ought” might read strangely on the cover. So that’s how we got to this title. It unintentionally rhymes with the title of my first book, Many Points of Me.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I am working on another middle grade novel, told in the interweaving voices of a boy and a girl whose lives come together when they find an injured hummingbird on the street.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: My great-great grandfather was a peddler who died in 1936 driving his horse-drawn wagon over the Williamsburg bridge, when a policeman’s car struck him and catapulted him over the edge. The news appeared on the front page of the Brooklyn Times Union newspaper on Aug. 21, 1936.

 

The story goes that my grandmother was away at camp when this happened, and her parents didn’t tell her about her grandfather’s death, but they sent her the newspaper so she could read the comics (the “funny” pages), and that’s how she found out. This story didn’t make it into Where You’ve Got to Be,  but it could’ve made a nice anecdote for Nolie’s grandmother to tell her!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Caroline Gertler.

Q&A with A.M. Linden

 

 

 

A.M. Linden is the author of the new novel The Oath. It's the first in The Druid Chronicles series. She is a retired nurse practitioner.

 

Q: The Oath is the first in a series. What inspired you to write The Druid Chronicles?

 

A: There is either a long or a short answer to this.

 

The long one begins begins with the Native American folk tales that my mother read to me at bedtime, runs through the works of J.R.R. Tolkien that captivated me as a teenager, and then to my belated discovery of young adult epic fantasy.

 

The short one is the impact that the African proverb “Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter” had on me the first time I read it.

 

It was unquestionably this adage which inspired me to wonder how the conquest of Britain, theologically by Christian missionaries and militarily by Anglo-Saxons, may have been experienced by the polytheistic pagans who were being supplanted.

 

Q: How did you research the book, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?

 

A: Having come up with the idea of writing a story about the struggles between pagan Celts and early Christian Saxons, I began my research by googling “Druid.” The result was over 40 million listings that ranged from academic treatises to internet games.

 

Narrowing my focus to the academic and historical pages, I used the rich online resources, as well as those of my local bookstore and library, to become acquainted with the complex interactions between these cultures and religions.

 

In the following years I had the opportunity and the privilege to travel to England, Scotland and Wales, visiting museums and ancient heritage sites and exploring the remains of Celtic hillforts that were being browsed by modern-day sheep.

 

The process of delving into the history of a time and place I’d previously only known from fiction held a great many surprises—the first of which was that Druids do not appear in the historical record beyond the first centuries A. D. and, despite their being mentioned in folklore, there is no documentation that there were any left by the time the Anglo-Saxons had been Christianized.

 

This potential problem for my main plotline was offset by finding out there are sufficiently large gaps in what is known about this period that there was room for me to insert my fictional cult and its priests and priestesses without anyone being able to prove that they couldn’t have been there.

 

Q: What do you see as the right blend of fiction and history in your work?

 

A: On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is almost entirely fiction and 10 is mostly historical, I would put my work somewhere between a 2 and a 3. There are only rare mentions of historical figures in the series, and none of those figures have any significant role in the narrative.

 

While I did my best to avoid anachronisms—having cottages with fireplaces instead of hearths or characters who are wearing clothes with pockets—I definitely took liberties with the landscape and put rivers in where I needed them.

 

At a deeper level, my characterization of how ethnic and religious divisions can be perpetuated, exploited, or overcome says more about my concerns about human behavior in my own time period than my insight into people living 12 centuries ago.

 

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?

 

A: First and foremost, I hope that readers will enjoy The Oath and its admittedly quirky characters, and that they will finish the book wanting to find out what happens to them.

 

Beyond that, I frankly have confidence that readers who chose to read about Druids and Christians from the Druids’ point of view are already fully endowed with any principles of social justice that I may have tried to slip into the story’s subtext. 

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m finishing the fifth and final book in the series. It’s titled The Challenge, and while it’s clear how things work out for the main characters, I will admit that the challenge for me is making sure that I’ve tied up all the loose ends for the minor but still significant ones.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: That additional information about the series can be found on the website: www.Druidchronicles788ad.com 

and on Goodreads:

www.goodreads.com/author/show/20566180.A_M_Linden?from_search=true&from_srp=true

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb