I’m lucky enough to be hosting Nancy Toomey, author of
From the Abuelas’ Window (
which I reviewed earlier today), for a guest post about her inspirations for the debut MG novel. There will also be a signed copy up for grabs – more about that at the end of the post. Take it away, Nancy!
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The First September 11th
YA readers will remember September 11, 2001 and the attack on the World Trade Center and The Pentagon the way my generation remembers November 22, 1963, the day President John Kennedy was assassinated. Both were world changing events with impact on the lives of thousands of people, perpetrated by a few men. But, for the people of Chile, that long thin stretch of land between the Andes and the Pacific Ocean, in South America, another September 11th weighs on the collective memory of multiple generations.
Chile was a democracy with a strong economy and elected government much like our own, until September 11, 1973 when a military junta stormed the Presidential Palace and deposed the elected president Salvador Allende. Thousands of men and women disappeared during the ensuing dictatorship, their fates still unknown; the torture of the victims and the pain of survivors and families of the disappeared remain as the junta’s legacy despite the return to democracy in the 1980’s.
Could the same thing happen here in the United States? Imagine what your life would become if it did! Events can and do have significant impact on the lives of ordinary citizens when something so devastating befalls a government. We’ve never had such events in the USA.
I was not a victim of the junta’s oppression. I was searching for a setting for my novel, in 1998 when the newspaper headlines were filled with accounts of the arrest, in England, of the Chilean dictator, Auguste Pinochet, for crimes against the Chilean people. I felt the reverberations of his legacy and my heart whispered that readers in our country must know this episode of history because our United States government supported the junta, and because we ought to understand why citizens of Latin America and elsewhere come to our country. But most importantly, we must be aware of how fragile our freedoms might be if we allow the leadership of our country to be won by the wrong people.
Magical Realism
South American literary giants like Gabriel Garcia Marquez write stories with fantastical elements mingled with the real and accepted by their characters as true. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in his own words " expands the categories of the real so as to encompass myth, magic and other extraordinary phenomena in Nature or experience which European realism excludes." The real and the fantastical are indistinguishable from each other. For example, in his story, The Old Man With Enormous Wings” a couple is shocked to see an angel fall out of the sky but never question its existence.
Elements of Marquez’s magic realism made their way into my story almost without effort. It really is true sometimes that stories exist on their own and they simply choose the writer through which they find their way onto the page.
The Kidscape
I grew up reading Mary Stewart’s adventure stories, The Moonspinners, The Ivy Tree, My Brother Michael, and naively believed a lifetime of adventure was required in order to become a writer.
My childhood summer adventures involved endless hours parked in a lounge chair next to our 4 by 15 foot swimming pool where I whiled away hours with a book in my hand. Those summers were also spent on wild bicycle rides through nearby Watsessing Park, (East Orange, NJ) where I encountered potential kidnappers, thieves, murderers, international spies and other imaginary villains. My sisters and I outsmarted or out rode every one of them and lived to tell the tale. This kidscape fills the pages of my first novel although the story takes place in a far away country, during a murderous reign of real-life villains.
Mary Stewart said, “One can hardly start explaining how imagination allows a writer to describe vividly something he has never done or seen. I personally have never been threatened with a gun… I have never even been alone with a homicidal maniac... But I think I know how it would feel if I were. The place for truth is not in the facts of a novel; it is in the feelings."
Put a young girl on a bicycle (roots in my own childhood) in the midst of a beautiful country in political turmoil, torture and fear, (lots of research) and see what happens. That is essentially how this book got started. Take the ride with Maribel through the streets of her village and see for yourself.
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If you’d like to win a copy of
From the Abuelas’ Window, please fill out the form below - or, to take chance out of the equation, you can
order it from her website! Thanks Nancy!
