Sneak Preview

Today I got the first glimpse of the cover art for my forthcoming middle-grade novel, due out this fall from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. I love it! I haven't always loved my covers, but I love this one.

For years - decades - I've wanted to write a book built around the hugely successful advertising promotion that Quaker Oats did in the 1950s, tied in with the radio program "Sergeant Preston of the Yukon." Every box of Quaker cereal contained a deed to one square inch of the Yukon. My husband still had his deeds, saved from his boyhood, and to me there had to be a story there: it was just so magical to have one square inch of land all your own, to do with whatever you wanted, to create whatever you wanted to create.

In the book, Cooper and Carly get their grandfather's deeds to eight square inches of the Yukon and create their own kingdom of Inchland as a refuge from their widowed mother's encroaching mental illness. But in the end, there is no safe place they can find anywhere, except whatever safe place they can create within themselves.