What a thrill it was to be chosen to adapt Loren Grush’s outstanding 2023 book The Six, the story of America’s first women astronauts, for a new audience of young people. I’m over the moon that it has received great reviews from Kirkus (starred), School Library Journal (starred), Booklist, and, most recently, the Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books. You can read them here.
Category Archives: Publishing
My latest book: Super Navigators
Natural history and ethology, the science of animal behavior, have been interests of mine for a long time. That made it both an honor and a lot of fun for me to adapt David Barrie’s fascinating book Supernavigators into this version for young readers.
Illustrator Qu Lan and Tra Publishing outdid themselves, producing a book that is almost as beautiful as the many creatures in the natural world that it celebrates.
People also navigate through the world, and the book talks about how they do it. After all, we’re animals, too!
Glowing review for The Six: Young Readers Edition
It was a great pleasure to be invited to write the middle-grade adaptation of Loren Grush’s book The Six, the story of America’s first six women astronauts, with all their struggles and victories. It’s another great pleasure to get this glowing starred review of the adaptation from Kirkus, which says, “This riveting account is an effortless and irresistible read that many young readers will find difficult to set down.” The Six: Young Readers Edition will be published by Atheneum Books for Young Readers on February 11, 2025.
Winnie-the-Pooh and Cthulhu, too
If you check out the author list for Flame Tree Publishing’s handsome new anthology Lovecraft Mythos (and you really should) you’ll see my name right below that of William Browning Spencer. *swoon*
Sure, the alphabet is responsible for that placement, but I couldn’t be happier about it–or about the fact that my story “Entirely Surrounded by Water” is part of this assemblage of new and classic works of cosmic horror. The title comes from Chapter IX of Winnie-the-Pooh, although I imagine that my late maternal grandmother, who gave me my well-worn copies of Milne some years ago, would not approve of the use to which I have put it. If you get a chance to read the story, I hope you enjoy it. . . .
Great news about my YA Origin of Species
The Junior Library Guild has named Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species: Young Readers Edition as one of its selections. The book, soon to be published by Atheneum Books for Young Readers, a Simon & Schuster imprint, will be shipped to some 1,400 school and public librarians who subscribe to JLG. This is a big boost for the book, as being chosen by the JLG generally results in improved visibility and sales. I couldn’t be happier–or more eager for the book to come out.