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Sydney Taylor Book Award Blog Tour — Interview with Honor Book Award-winner Tziporah Cohen and a GIVEAWAY

By on February 12, 2021   /   Articles, Author Interviews, Giveaways  

The Mixed-Up Files is thrilled to be a part of the 2021 Sydney Taylor Book Award Blog Tour! (For the full schedule click here.)

The Sydney Taylor Book Award is presented annually to outstanding books for children and teens that authentically portray the Jewish experience. As someone who has followed the award closely for many years (and was honored to be a past winner of their manuscript award which recognizes unpublished manuscripts) as well as a member of the review team for the Sydney Taylor Shmooze, a ‘mock’ version of the awards, I am especially thrilled and delighted to welcome author Tziporah Cohen, whose debut novel No Vacancy —about an 11-year-old Jewish girl who, with her Catholic friend, creates a Virgin Mary apparition at a drive-in movie theater to save her family’s failing motel—is a 2021 Sydney Taylor Award Honor Book in the middle grade category.

SEE BELOW for a chance to WIN A COPY of NO VACANCY by Tziporah Cohen!

 

About the book:

SYDNEY TAYLOR BOOK AWARD HONOREE!
Shortlisted for THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FOR CHILDREN’S LITERATURE! 

 

“With effortless mastery, Cohen weaves the opposing forces of innocence and corruption, right and wrong, love and hate.”—Inderjit Deogun, Quill & Quire starred review

Buying and moving into the run-down Jewel Motor Inn in upstate New York wasn’t eleven-year-old Miriam Brockman’s dream, but at least it’s an adventure. Miriam befriends Kate, whose grandmother owns the diner next door, and finds comfort in the company of Maria, the motel’s housekeeper, and her Uncle Mordy, who comes to help out for the summer. She spends her free time helping Kate’s grandmother make her famous grape pies and begins to face her fears by taking swimming lessons in the motel’s pool.

But when it becomes clear that only a miracle is going to save the Jewel from bankruptcy, Jewish Miriam and Catholic Kate decide to create their own. Otherwise, the No Vacancy sign will come down for good, and Miriam will lose the life she’s worked so hard to build.

 

 

Author Interview:

And now, here’s No Vacancy author Tziporah Cohen joining us here on the Mixed-Up Files!: 

MD: Hi Tzippy, what inspired you to write this story?

TC: The whole idea began while on a mini-vacation in Hershey, PA, where we stayed a couple of nights in a tired motel one summer while I was working on my MFA degree. There was a boy hanging around—maybe 7 or 8 years old—and it turned out he had moved there with his family and they were running the place. I thought it made a great, unique premise for a middle grade novel—a kid living in a motel that her parents were managing. (Kelly Yang’s fantastic novel, Front Desk, hadn’t come out yet.) The boy we met was South Asian, and Hershey is a pretty white town, and I wondered what that was like for him and his family. I had been thinking of writing something from my own Jewish experience, so the boy became an eleven-year-old Jewish girl named Miriam. I wrote the first chapters in that hotel room after my kids went to sleep!

MD: As a debut author, can you tell us about your journey to publication?

TC: It was a long one, as they usually are! I had an idea for a picture book back in 2006 and took an adult education course on writing picture books, which led to some online writing courses, which eventually led to an MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts. I never saw myself writing a novel, but since you can’t do a two-year MFA just writing picture books, I wrote the first draft of No Vacancy over three semesters there. It took several more years of work after graduation before it was ready to submit. I had started looking for an agent but had also submitted the manuscript to Groundwood Books in Toronto, where I now live. When Groundwood sent me an offer of publication, after screaming with excitement, I approached the agents I was interested in with the offer in hand. So my road was a bit backwards at the end.

(The irony is that I never did write that picture book idea that started this whole journey!)

MD: I loved your interview on the Book of Life podcast where you talk about mentor texts—can you briefly explain what a mentor text is, and how you used them when writing NO VACANCY?

TC: Mentor texts are books (in this case) that a writer studies to learn how another author tackles a topic or how they use their craft to form a story. In my case, I wanted to see how other writers tackled the topic of religion and faith in their middle grade novels. There weren’t many out there, but I went back to a childhood favorite, Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. and the more recent Confessions of a Closet Catholic by Sarah Darer Littman, both of which feature girls struggling to sort out their religious identity and what role they want Judaism to play in their lives.

MD: How did you choose the setting of upstate New York?

TC: I love upstate New York. I spent four years at Cornell University, in Ithaca, and while that’s not a small town, it was certainly very different from where I grew up on Long Island, about an hour’s drive from Manhattan. I’ve done many drives through upstate New York since then, going back and forth from Toronto to Long Island, and so it all felt very familiar and easy to picture in my mind.

MD: Are any of these events true to your own life?

TC: Unfortunately, the only event in the book that’s true to my life (outside of the religious observance) is the anti-Semitic experience that Miriam’s mother had. While I was never assaulted like she was, I had the experience of having pennies thrown at me in the halls of my junior high school. Like Miriam’s mom, I remember feeling ashamed. I wish I could redo that moment by confronting the person and—best case scenario—educating them about the hateful origins of that stereotype. And I would have liked to have felt proud rather than ashamed.

MD: I really love how you show both interfaith and interdenominational cooperation between Jews and Christians, as well as how even within Judaism that there are differences of observance such as between Miriam’s immediate family and her Uncle Mordy. Can you talk a little about that?

TC: It was important to me to show some of the diversity of Judaism—how differently people who identify as Jewish see their relationship to Judaism and how many different ways people practice it. I wanted Jewish children from a variety of religious backgrounds to see themselves and their families in the book, and I wanted non-Jewish children reading it to understand that there isn’t just one Jewish experience. So it was very intentional that the different members of Miriam’s family observed Judaism in different ways. My extended family’s Judaism is just as diverse as Miriam’s!

In the book, Miriam’s Christian neighbors support them after an act of anti-Semitism. My favorite stories, in real life and in fiction, are when different communities come together to fight hatred, because we are so much stronger when we are there for each other.

MD: What does it mean to you to win the Sydney Taylor Honor Award?

TC: I grew up reading Sydney Taylor’s All-of-A-Kind-Family books, which were probably the first books I read that were about a Jewish family, if you don’t count The Carp in the Bathtub! I grew up reading books with the Sydney Taylor Book Award stickers on them, and I’ve read innumerable winners to my children. I never even imagined I would write a book for kids, let alone one that would have its own Sydney Taylor Award sticker. It’s mind-blowing and humbling to me that I’m part of this club. I’m still pinching myself!

MD: Wow—congratulations and Mazal Tov, Tzippy! Thanks so much for these thoughtful responses and for sharing your journey with us here on The Mixed-Up Files! Readers can find Tzippy on Twitter at @tzippymfa and on her website http://www.tziporahcohen.com.

Giveaway! Enter! Win!

To enter for a chance to be the lucky winner of a copy of Sydney Taylor Honor Book NO VACANCY by Tziporah Cohen, click the link below and you can: comment on this blog post, tweet it out and tag us at @MixedUpFiles, or like our post on Instagram at @mixedupfilesmg. (US and Canada winners receive a hard copy, international winners receive an e-book and signed bookmark.)

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Picturing the Past: ENSNARED IN THE WOLF’S LAIR Blog Tour

By on February 11, 2021   /   Articles, Giveaways  

Welcome to the Ensnared Blog Tour!

To celebrate the release of Ensnared by Ann Bausum on January 12th, blogs across the web are featuring exclusive articles from Ann, plus 5 chances to win a hardcover copy!

Picturing the Past

by Ann Bausum

Often the best way to bring history alive is to share it through the eyes of people who witnessed it happening. Ensnared in the Wolf’s Lair is bursting with cherished photos, personal recollections, and primary source documents about the family punishments that followed the failed attempt to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944. Although the book focuses on a handful of affected families, I deliberately folded breadcrumbs into its pages about many others. Savvy readers can trace additional relationships using these embedded strands of history.

Consider the Hayessen family, for example. Although the children are never specifically mentioned in the main text, readers can learn about them by using visual clues and the book’s supplemental reference material. Take a good look at the meticulous inventory of families that appears in the back matter. Not only do readers discover the names, ages, and genders of each person; the itemized listing includes a key that helps to identify their individual fates.
By consulting this guide, we can surmise that Hans-Hayo Hayessen, the oldest child in the family at age two, had probably barely begun to talk by the time of his family punishment detention. Volker, at age nine months, was unlikely to even be walking. We can tell from the Hayessen family listing that the boys’ father died because of his involvement in the attempted coup, and their mother was detained.
Using the book’s index we are taken to the last photo ever taken of the family. This image captures an ordinary family moment that would, within months, be impossible to regain. The facing page authenticates some of the family’s trials by showing the certificate Margarete Hayessen received when she was discharged from Ravensbrück concentration camp.
BTW—here’s a tip to keep in mind when reading German dates: Europeans typically present the date and month in the reverse order from the American pattern. So the day shown on her discharge certificate of 6–10–44 represents the date October 6, 1944.
Would you like to follow some more breadcrumbs?
Let’s start with Dagmar Hansen. We can tell from the itemized listing of families that she was a newborn during this period, and this fact is reinforced several times in the text. By using the index we can find a family photo that predates her birth, and we can read about how her christening served as an alibi for her father on the day that the conspiracy unfolded. Subsequent text references are indexed in the book, including the revelation that Gestapo agents took Dagmar away from her mother when the girl was just two weeks old.
Visitors to my author website will find a series of classroom suggestions for Ensnared in the Wolf’s Lair. Among other ideas I challenge students to research various families using the book and other resources. A good first stop beyond my book is the German Resistance Memorial Center in Berlin. If the site displays in German, click the EN option in the upper access menu to switch the text to English. Then use the BIOGRAPHIES tab that appears at left in the home menu to find brief biographical essays about all coup conspirators.
Are you curious about other family members? Savvy internet users will discover that one of the 46 detained children became a famous German model and actress. (Hint: you’ll find a childhood photo of her on page 44.)

*****

Blog Tour Schedule:

February 8th – Teen Librarian Toolbox

February 9th – Christy’s Cozy Corners

February 10th – Bookhounds

February 11th – From the Mixed-Up Files

February 12th – Ms. Yingling Reads

 
Follow National Geographic Kids: Website | Twitter | Books Twitter | Facebook | Youtube
Follow Ann Bausum: Website | Twitter | Facebook
“I’ve come on orders from Berlin to fetch the three children.” –Gestapo agent, August 24, 1944
With those chilling words Christa von Hofacker and her younger siblings found themselves ensnared in a web of family punishment designed to please one man—Adolf Hitler. The furious dictator sought merciless revenge against not only Christa’s father and the other Germans who had just tried to overthrow his government. He wanted to torment their relatives, too, regardless of age or stature. All of them. Including every last child.
During the summer of 1944, a secretive network of German officers and civilians conspired to assassinate Adolf Hitler. But their plot to attack the dictator at his Wolf’s Lair compound failed, and an enraged Hitler demanded revenge. The result was a systematic rampage of punishment that ensnared not only those who had tried to topple the regime but their far-flung family members too. Within weeks, Gestapo agents had taken as many as 200 relatives from their homes, separating adults and children.
Using rare photographs and personal interviews with survivors, award-winning author Ann Bausum presents the spine-chilling little-known story of the failed Operation Valkyrie plot, the revenge it triggered, and the families caught in the fray.

ANN BAUSUM is an award-winning children’s book author who brings history alive by connecting readers to personal stories from the past that echo in the present day. Ensnared is her 11th book for National Geographic Kids and her fourth look at international history. While researching the book, she traveled twice to Europe to get to know the people and places that became intertwined in 1944 after the failed effort to kill Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair. Previously Bausum has explored international history with such works as Stubby the War Dog; Denied, Detained, Deported; and Unraveling Freedom. Many of her books highlight themes of social justice, including her National Geographic title The March Against Fear. In 2017, her body of work was honored by the Children’s Book Guild of Washington, DC. Individual titles have won numerous starred reviews and been recognized with a Sibert Honor Award, the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award, the Carter G. Woodson Award, and the SCBWI Golden Kite Award, among other distinctions.

GIVEAWAY
  • One (1) winner will receive a hardcover copy of Ensnared
  • Check out the other four stops for more chances to win
  • US/Can only
  • Ends 2/21 at 11:59pm ET

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WNDMG — Author Interview and Book Giveaway

By on February 8, 2021   /   Articles, WNDMG  
We Need Diverse MG
We Need Diverse MG

Artwork by Aixa Perez-Prado

I had the good fortune to talk about her award-winning book Lupe Wong Won’t Dance with kidlit author Donna Barba Higuera. She was just awarded a Pura Belpré honor and a Sid Fleischman award for humor!

Lupe Wong Won’t Dance

APP: Donna, can you tell me something about yourself and your journey as a kidlit writer? How did you get started?

DBH: I didn’t set out to write “kidlit” specifically. I’ve always written down the stories that entered my imagination. Mostly short stories. I decided to try writing a novel about nine years ago and knew I had a lot to learn. I found my critique group, The Papercuts ( http://www.papercuts.xyz ) They have become my second family; a strange, dysfunctional family, but I love them and so I’m keeping them. We meet weekly, so I get lots of writing practice.

It took many years and hit a few potholes, but I have an amazing agent, Allison Remcheck, with Stimola Literary Studio. Shortly after signing with Allison, I met my editor, Nick Thomas with Levine Querido. (www.levinequerido.com) He was leading a first pages SCBWI round table. He read the first few hundred words of Lupe Wong Won’t Dance, and a few weeks later, the book was off to acquisitions. It sounds like a quick journey, but it was years of conferences, weekly critique, and about 5.5 novels to publication.

My husband always reminds me when people say I got lucky, “Luck is when perseverance meets opportunity.”

On the Merits (or not!) of Square Dancing

APP: You are so right, perseverance is something we can all use on this kidlit journey. Your main character, Lupe, certainly has the skill to persevere! Your story starts off with your Lup being horrified of square dancing in PE and doing everything she can to eliminate it. Why square dancing? I loved it when I was a kid, probably because I was no athlete and we actually got to touch each other. Plus there was music! But Lupe is dead set against it.

DBH: This comes up a lot! I think we have to consider that someone like yourself who probably hated basketball or baseball, there are just as many like Lupe who feel the same about dancing. But without giving spoilers, Lupe grows in her understanding and feelings on square dancing.

I’ve discovered people have strong opinions on square dancing one way or another. So many ask why Lupe is so set against dancing. Why not just do it? I have equally if not more people who express how much they hated square dancing. Or how it was just something that made them uncomfortable.

This book isn’t meant to criticize square dancing itself. But rather that feeling of being told you “have to do something” but not understanding entirely why.

 Pitching the Lupe Wong Won’t Dance Story

APP: Yes, I can totally relate to that and I’m sure that so many kids can as well! Can you tell me how you were able to pitch your story. What do you think caught the attention of an agent and/or editor?

DBH: Uggh! I am the worst at writing pitches. I had a really difficult time writing a query letter. I had several rejections state they weren’t interested in a book about square dancing or baseball. That was my fault for not pitching the book properly. Neither of those is what this book is about. It’s about friendship. It’s about speaking up about things that don’t feel fair, equitable or just. But also learning to determine what battles really matter. But I still don’t think any of those things are what caught my editor’s attention. Lupe has a very strong voice. Lupe doesn’t try to be funny. But it’s obvious from the first few pages that she has stuff to say.

Humor and Heart

APP: She certainly does! Lupe is a story that uses a lot of humor as well as heart, especially humor about the body, odors and changes that happen in middle grade. Did you get any pushback from editors about that?

DBH: No pushback at all. All those things you mentioned are very real to middle schoolers. Not all sensory details are ahem…pleasant. Not all bodily changes are embraced. Books need to feel genuine, especially to middle schoolers. Those smells and changes and feelings are real life to kids. Kids need to feel that as writers, we aren’t acting as gatekeepers to filter what they can or can’t read. My editor fully embraced all the awkwardness and difficulty of bodily changes in middle school.

APP: I know kids will totally relate to that. But Lupe isn’t the only one going through changes. I loved your secondary characters and how they grew in the novel, especially Gordon. His quirkiness was lovable. But after his makeover and amazing tooth repair, I felt distressed when he intentionally destroyed his flipper. Why did he do that? Couldn’t he have saved those teeth? I felt bad for his grandma!

DBH: I’m so glad you asked this question. No one has. This was something we discussed a lot. I pondered at length before deciding I had to include it. I was a kid with the double whammy of having a big gap between my front teeth in addition to a wedged chip on the right. I also had a speech issue when I was very young. I felt pressured by the dentist to fix my front teeth even though I was perfectly fine the way I was. I went to speech therapy.

 I know now, through Gordon, I was addressing my wounds. Gordon’s prosthetic tooth flipper was not his idea. Well-meaning adults thought they were doing him a favor. But what message did their unsolicited “improvements” to Gordon’s appearance or the way he spoke send? As I was as a child, he was perfectly fine the way he was. Kids have enough pressure to achieve what society envisions as perfection. I wanted to show a character who both loved himself and had friends who accepted him for who he was. I know the monetary value of the broken flipper might bug people. But I’d argue, there are costs to a child’s self-esteem that are far more valuable.

 Culture, Race & Identity

APP: No doubt about that. Your book is also about cultural identity, a subject that fascinates me. Lupe worries that her identity as a Chinese – Mexican is not recognized by society at large, and she demands to be recognized. Did that experience come from real life for you?

DBH: I think many of us who are mixed race have experienced this. I am Chicana and White. I was told from the time I was a young child to “choose one” bubble on the scantron. I am not a single bubble, nor are my children who are also Chinese. I am proud of all of who I am and I want my children to feel the same about all their races and cultures. Mark all your bubbles proudly kids!

We all have such different and varied experiences. No two are the same. I wanted to show a character, who like myself and daughters, lives in multiple cultural experienced. I hope kids reading will cherish and find pride in all of who they are. I hope they will never feel pressured to choose one part of themselves over another.

((Enjoying this WNDMG article? Read more from our WNDMG series here))

APP: I hope so too, and I think they will! But this book is also about parts of identity that can lead extremely challenging and painful experiences. How did you decide on the amount of racism or prejudice to include in the book? The lyrics that Lupe finds are so jarring that they end up changing a curriculum. Did you worry about making that too stressful for an MG?

DBH: This is such a tough question. Yes. I worried. Knowing I was writing for children made me very hesitant to include that. My own instincts are to protect others from harm. But I also know that seeing unpleasant and hurtful history is how we grow and learn to do better. And what better place to learn than through the safety of a book? Still I was extremely cautious about how I presented the information.

So, I did it through Lupe’s eyes. She discovers things any child could find with a simple internet search.

This is the article I found and imagined Lupe would have found. The book presents this information via Lupe and how she decides to handle it without showing the article itself. But I would like to warn you, the article is difficult to read and some of the content offensive: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/05/11/310708342/recall-that-ice-cream-truck-song-we-have-unpleasant-news-for-you

Not Everyone Grows

APP: Thank you for sharing that, and thank you for having Lupe find that on her own in your book. I think many kids might do exactly what she did when they are looking into a topic and encounter information that can be extremely difficult to process. On another note, a lovely note, tell me about the stage scene with Lupe and her gym teacher. It really took me by surprise and moved me. How did you come up with that?

DBH: I don’t really know! I just wanted to show that adults have wounds too. Coach Solden (I chose her last name because I thought it sounded sad) had a square dancing wound. I wanted to show that sometimes we carry things that happen to us when we are young for a lifetime. Part of Coach Solden’s character arc was to heal that childhood wound. That scene made me so happy to write!

APP: I’m sure it did, it had so much heart and humanity and the way you wrote it made me picture it perfectly in my head. On the other hand what about those horrible girls that are so mean to Lupe? Do you think it is important to include characters in MG that can be horrible and who don’t change for the better?

DBH: Yes. That is real life. Not everyone grows. Not everyone learns to become a better person as they go through life. I think kids need to see they’re not alone. They need to see we all run into crumby personalities and mean people.

Listening to Kids

APP: Well, that certainly is true. Luckily Lupe has many caring, if at times bumbling adults in her life. I loved when she told the principal that her attempt at integrating cultures in the school via a celebration is, ‘a good start’.  That is so true and such a common way that schools deal with issues of diversity – celebrations rather than deep exploration of issues. Lupe is right to call it a ‘start’. Did you every worry that Lupe seemed more insightful and perceptive in many ways than the adults who surround her? Or is that just reflective of real life – kids know more than we do!

DBH: Kids are so much more insightful than we give them credit for. I think so many are just intimidated to give their opinions. Or perhaps feel no one is listening. My own children say such intelligent answers to life’s questions. Far more astute than what I may have been thinking. So yeah, I think kids know more than we do! Or maybe we just forgot.

APP: Yes, I agree, they are way ahead of us. That brings me to what kids are facing In today’s divisive and difficult environment. Lupe has a double whammy as both Latinx and Asian. Do you think that makes this story especially relevant and timely?

DBH: I didn’t mean for this book to be timely. I was just writing a story based on my daughter’s experience. But yes. I worry for my daughters with how divisive our country has been recently. But I’ve also raised my daughters to be proud of all of who they are. They know it’s okay to walk away from those who are unwilling to have empathy or kindness for others. They also know you can have differing opinions and still love others. But yes, Lupe’s biracial heritage and the issues of race in our country, especially recently, have made her story and struggles far more relevant.

Advice for Diverse Authors

APP: I think so too and I appreciate that Lupe Wong Won’t Dance is available for kids of all backgrounds to discover. Finally, do you have any word of advice for others who are aspiring kidlit authors from diverse backgrounds?

DBH: Don’t be afraid to write what you know. Don’t put your culture in parenthesis or italics. Meaning, don’t stop to explain or show it’s somehow different for the reader normal experience. Let the reader experience a culture they might not understand through your characters eyes. Giving readers a welcoming place that offers them the chance to understand a culture outside their own.

APP: Thank you so much for the wise words and your wonderful work.

DBH: Thank you and I’d love to give thanks and credit to those who’ve supported me and helped usher Lupe into the world: My agent and biggest cheerleader, Allison Remcheck at Stimola Literary Studio. My genius editor, Nick Thomas, at Levine Querido who is brilliant at finding the heart of the stories and characters and helping to give them a voice. I am also so appreciative of my critique group, The Papercuts and my own supportive family.

Donna is also the author of  picture book El Cucuy is Scared Too!

Book Giveaway

Donna has generously offered to send a copy of, Lupe Wong Won’t Dance to one lucky winner US only! Please like, retweet, and follow MUF for a chance to win.

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