Girls’ books

Lan­don, from Pow­ell, Ohio asks, “Why do you tell some sto­ries from a girl’s per­spec­tive like in Char­lotte Doyle?” 

Well, Lan­don, as I under­stand it, slight­ly more than half the world’s pop­u­la­tion is female. I do not think I want to ignore that many peo­ple. I have many good friends, boys, girls, men, and women. More­over, in our cul­ture, I think girls tend to read more than boys do—though I wish both boys and girls read equally.

In addi­tion, in our cul­ture boys and girls often (not always) learn to think dif­fer­ent­ly about the world. When you write a sto­ry, it becomes deep­er and, I think bet­ter, when dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters react dif­fer­ent­ly to the events in a story.

In the case of True Con­fes­sions of Char­lotte Doyle, I think the sto­ry is inter­est­ing because it is about a girl’s trans­for­ma­tion from one kind of girl to anoth­er kind of girl. It is not that she becomes a boy, but that she remains a girl, even as she becomes truer to herself.

As for Ida in The Secret School, I wrote it the way I did because I heard sto­ries about going to a one-room school­house from a woman who went—when she was a girl—to such a school.

Most recent­ly there is Sophia’s War. She is the main char­ac­ter because she is torn between her affec­tion for John André (the British sol­dier) and her pas­sion­ate belief in the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion. I think that is what makes the sto­ry interesting.

I do not want to write boys’ books or girls’ books. I want to write good books.