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| morguefile.com |
It's summer time! Yahoo! And what better way to celebrate summer than to indulge in some summer time reading. It’s my favorite genre to write and read. Historical fiction is the coming together of two opposing elements: fact and fiction. But as the great Katherine Patterson once said, “…historical fiction [is] a bastard child of letters, respectable neither as history nor as fiction.” I’ve written before, how defining historical fiction shares similar idiosyncrasies as
Doctor Who.
When Patterson wrote historical fiction, she was often taken to task for writing stories that were considered not true to contemporary readers. But, said Patterson, “…In many instances, historical fiction is much more realistic than a lot of today’s realism…Nothing becomes dated more quickly than contemporary fiction.”
In the best of historical fiction, as with any story, a child becomes a hero who gains power over her situation, a theme that contemporary readers appreciate.
And summer time is the best time for savoring my favorite historical reads. An exciting read from Avi is
City of Orphans (2011). The book follows young Maks Geless, a newsie scraping a living on the mean streets of New York City in 1893. Maks’ sister Emma has been arrested and he has only four days to prove her innocence.
Paul Fleischman’s award-winning
Bull Run (1993) brings together sixteen distinct viewpoints in the
gripping retelling of the first great battle of the Civil War. This can be either an easy afternoon read or a fun summer performance for readers’ theater.
Laurie Halse Anderson’s Seeds of America Trilogy begins with
Chains (2010). As the Revolutionary War starts, young Isabel wages her own fight for freedom. The story continues in its sequel,
Forge (2012) with Curzon as an escaped slave serving with the Continental Army. A particularly moving and heart-stomping depiction of the struggles that the enslaved and the freemen endured during the country’s fight for its own freedom.
Laurie J. Edwards, under the pen name Erin Johnson, introduced Grace Milton in her Western for young adults,
Grace and the Guiltless (2014), Book One of the Wanted Series. When her family is murdered by the Guiltless Gang, Grace struggles to survive the wilderness and her grief. Her story continues in the sequel,
Her Cold Revenge (August, 2015), as Grace becomes a bounty hunter and hunts the gang that killed her family.
As one reviewer offered, this may just be the story that hooks a new generation of readers on the Western genre. For a summer treat, you can read the first chapters of
Her Cold Revenge here!
Another series that I have particularly enjoyed this summer is Iain Lawrence’ High Seas Trilogy. The Wreckers (1998) and its companion The Smugglers (1999) follows young John Spencer in a high-sea adventure complete with swashbuckling characters, salty dialogue and a spine-tingling cliffhangers. The story continues with The Buccaneers (2001). This series reminds me of another favorite, Robert Lewis Stevenson’s Kidnapped.
Let the adventure begin!
Bobbi Miller
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| Thomas Edison, 1921. |
Title adapted from Laurie J. Edwards’ discussion on inspiration. Thank you!
And don’t forget to enter to win a copy of Stefanie Lyon’s YA novel in verse, DATING DOWN. You can enter here between now and midnight, May 15, 2015.Fred White blogged in 2010 that “Being inspired smacks of amateurish, daydreamy passivity, the notion that some supernatural presence must appear before us before the words can flow. And we’re reminded to death of Thomas Edison’s overquoted words about invention demanding 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration, perhaps not realizing that without that primal 1 percent jolt from the gods, Edison might not have been driven to sweat out the hard work or to cope with a zillion things going wrong.”
Inspiration is important for any creative activity. In fact, some argue that art made the world (See Nigel Spivey’s
How Art Made the World, 2005). When early humans produced art over 77,000 years ago, they crafted tools and embellished it with color, but
the defining element that made it stand above their Homo habilis ancestors using tools is found the singular capacity of using the imagination. From these humble beginnings, civilizations were born.
And inspiration fires the imagination. I’ve asked some of my favorite people about their favorite inspirations, and include them below.
All photographs are from the Library of Congress, used with permission. From Laurie J. Edwards, YA author extraordinaire:
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Henry Ford, 1924. His first car and his ten millionth car.
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“Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eye off the goal.” ~ Henry Ford
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| Bamboo Gardens, China, 1900. |
From Rebecca Colby, author of It’s Raining Bats and Frogs and other picturebooks:"The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it." ~ Chinese Proverb
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| Martha Graham, Age 67, 1961. |
F
rom Marcia Strykowski, author of Call Me Amy:
"There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one ofyou in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost." ~ Martha Graham
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| Eleanor Roosevelt, 1946. |
From Yvonne Ventresca, author of Pandemic:“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. . . .You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
And because it's Mark Twain:
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| Mark Twain, 1903. |
“
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” ~ Mark Twain
From Christina Banach, author of Minty and other YA fiction: “I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.” ~ Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird.
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| Historic mural depicting the Harper Lee novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird" located in Monroeville, Alabama. 1961. |
“
Inspiration matters because it prods us to traverse the full spectrum of human experience. An important part of what it means to be a writer is to become so turned on to the business of being alive, to be so completely inspired by life, that you will harvest ideas for writing everywhere—from books, from people, from music and other art forms, from the natural world, and most of all from your own inner resources.” ~
Fred White, 2010
What inspires you?Bobbi Miller
