Two-time National Book Award finalist Adele Griffin (Where I Want to Be; Sons of Liberty) once again explores the dynamics of a family with her tale of two sisters who were once close and are now estranged, All You Never Wanted (Knopf, ages 14-up). She lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., with her husband and young daughter.
On your nightstand now:
I have so much to-do reading by day that I won't multi-task the nightstand--a sacred no-rush zone. On it now: Spit Back a Boy by Iain Haley Pollock, and I am enjoying my time with it.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Bridge to Terebithia. In fifth grade, I cut class(room) and hid in the library to finish that book. A singular act of nerd rebellion.
Your top five authors:
My OCD demands I make this a tidy top six, divided into pairs.
Roald Dahl and Robert Cormier--because they made me want to write for kids.
Thomas Hardy and George Eliot--because I returned to them so often.
Meg Wolitzer and Jennifer Egan--because I read them with such intensity and joy.
Book you've faked reading:
Moby Dick. I've faked my way through many conversations about it, too. I have lots of completely unfounded, ignorant opinions of that book.
Book you're an evangelist for:
How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff. I'm not wild for dystopian, but this world was a harrowing vision. I was fully harrowed.
Book you've bought for the cover:
None. But I will buy for the jacket flap. In my first job as an editorial assistant, I wrote jacket flaps and I've never lost my romantic spark for them.
Book that changed your life:
Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes. I hold onto passages and meditations, it's a powerful sermon for me.
Favorite line from a book:
"Poets can't, don't, shouldn't drive. (British poets can't or don't drive. American poets drive, but shouldn't.)" --Martin Amis, Experience: A Memoir
This kills me every time. It's a great smartass joke, but I think it also works as an insight into the challenge of reconciling a vivid interior world with a "normal" public life.
Or maybe I just love it because I don't drive.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
It's a tie: The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood. That book gave me everything I need--enormous narrative; complicated, haunting characters; the drop-everything imperative to finish. It's a feast. And When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead: it's a perfect jigsaw puzzle of time-travel. I read it in such delight and I reread it with such respect.
Okay, here's my question to myself: Speaking of time-travel, what's happening right now in children's publishing that interests you?
I think we're in exciting times in terms of the ever-expanding definition of the word "book" past its narrow physical construct. Whether it's through e-devices, or animated books, or books targeted to, for example, dyslexic children who see and process so differently--needs are being met in all kinds of inventive ways. Lots of options. That, to me, is very cool.