Joy McCullough is the author of the new middle grade novel in verse Kestrel Takes Flight. Her other books include the Team Awkward series. She lives in the Seattle area.
Q: What inspired you to write Kestrel Takes Flight?
A: Kestrel Takes Flight began with an unsold picture book about all the different kinds of penguins.
While researching that book, I learned about fairy penguins, the smallest species of penguin, which live in Australia, where they are endangered by an invasive species of fox, but are protected from those foxes by enormous white livestock guardian dogs called Maremmas, who are trained specially for that purpose.
Of course I immediately thought this had the makings of an excellent middle grade novel. But I wasn't the only one.
Often when a book is announced with a very similar premise to what one is working on, an agent or editor will soothe the author, assuring them it's all in the execution and of course their book will be different.
But when a middle grade novel was announced with the exact same premise as the one I was working on - an American girl moving to Australia because her mom had gotten a job helping to train the Maremma dogs protecting the fairy penguins...I knew it was just too close.
I took a step back and assessed what I loved about the book I’d been working on. And while fairy penguins and foxes and angelic bodyguard dogs were of course magical, the real heart of the story was the girl and her mother, escaping from an emotionally abusive home, and learning what love and family should really feel like.
So I did some research on other kinds of conservation dogs and I learned about Karelian bear dogs, originally used in Russia for bear hunting, and a woman in Montana who has developed a way of training these dogs to reduce human-bear encounters. And as it turned out, my mother-daughter story worked just as well in Montana!
Q: How did you create your character Kestrel?
A: For me, character creation is about being honest to the circumstances the character is in. So I created a girl who had been raised in an extremely isolated, controlling way, and then I pulled her out of that situation and into a completely different way of life and tried to honestly portray how I thought she would react.
Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: I am generally a planner, though I plan in a loose way that allows for change throughout the process. I don’t know any writer who doesn’t make changes along the way of writing a book.
I started with the premise of Kestrel’s mom whisking her away to a remote location to get away from her grandfather. I didn’t know exactly how it would resolve, but I had a broad idea, and I always operate in middle grade from the belief that the book must end hopefully.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: I really believe every reader brings their own baggage and needs to each book, and even the same reader might bring something different on any given day.
For that reason, it's really hard to say there's one prescriptive thing I want them to take away. Mostly, I want them to take away what they need.
But for this book, I will say that, if they need to know this, I hope they will come away with the understanding that abuse isn't always physical, and that home and family don't always have to come from blood.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: My next middle grade is coming in 2027, and it’s a novel-in-verse co-authored with Hannah V. Sawyerr called The 99th Street School, about the Love Canal toxic waste disaster in the 1970s.
I also have several more books releasing this year: a picture book about AI called How to Train Your Evil Robot in July, books 3 & 4 in the middle grade Team Awkward series are coming in June and December, and my adult memoir Suffer a Witch is coming in August.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: The dogs in the book are all named after dogs I have loved (plus one for my agent’s dog and another for my editor’s dog)!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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