Bloggy Giveaways is hosting their quarterly giveaway carnival this week! There are already over 700 entries of fabulous prizes to win!
I'll be giving away FOUR (4) copies of the delightful young adult novel, UNDERCOVER, by National Book Award Nominee, Beth Kephart. To enter just leave me a comment by 5 PM (eastern) on Sunday April 27th (continental US residents only please). I'll draw the winners later that evening.
Here is the book's description:
Like a modern-day Cyrano de Bergerac, Elisa ghostwrites love notes for the boys in her school. But when Elisa falls for Theo Moses, things change fast. Theo asks for verses to court the lovely Lila—a girl known for her beauty, her popularity, and a cutting ability to remind Elisa that she has none of these. At home, Elisa's father, the one person she feels understands her, has left on an extended business trip. As the days grow shorter, Elisa worries that the increasingly urgent letters she sends her father won't bring him home. Like the undercover agent she feels she has become, Elisa retreats to a pond in the woods, where her talent for ice-skating gives her the confidence to come out from under cover and take center stage. But when Lila becomes jealous of Theo's friendship with Elisa, her revenge nearly destroys Elisa's ice-skating dreams and her plan to reunite her family.
I recently had the pleasure of reading UNDERCOVER. I'll admit that it had been quite a few years since I read a young adult novel, but I was instantly drawn into the characters through Elisa's eyes. I loved the way Elisa relates people (herself included) to nature. But even she realizes that human nature is more complex than that. The story is beautifully written and any adult or teen would certainly find it compelling. Mother-Daughter book clubs (both formal and informal) are growing in popularity and UNDERCOVER would be an excellent selection to experience together.
Beth Kephart was kind enough to answer a few interview questions regarding UNDERCOVER and her writing process:
What made you decide to try your hand at writing a young adult novel and how did this writing process differ from your previous work?
I find that every book has multiple beginnings. Having taught young writers for several years and having chaired the National Book Awards’ Young People’s Literature Award in 2001, I had a pretty good sense for what I felt worked in books for a certain segment of younger readers and for what seemed to be missing. But I’d been writing memoirs and was in the midst of writing a history/poetry book about a river when Laura Geringer of HarperCollins sent me a very beautiful letter asking if I’d consider writing a novel for young adults. I didn’t think I had what it took, but I loved Laura and her sensibility. Over the course of a year we’d talk by phone, and then one weekend she came to Philadelphia with her husband for a conference and took time out to meet me.
It was our conversation over breakfast that day that finally set UNDERCOVER in motion, for Laura asked a lot of questions about my own adolescence. I’d been an aspiring teen poet, I told her. I’d been a behind-the-scenes person. I had learned to skate on a pond and then took lessons and began to compete, particularly in interpretive free skating competitions. My dad was away a lot and I missed him. I often thought of myself as being invisible, unseen.
Something just happened. Something clicked. And on the train home that day I wrote the first ten pages of what became UNDERCOVER. Elisa has her antecedents in my own life, therefore. She sprung to life because of Laura’s questions. And she likely wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t written memoirs for adults that Laura had somehow found her way towards.
Elisa is such a beautiful character. I really enjoyed her ability to relate the people she encounters to nature; yet later she realizes they are even more complex than that. If you could picture her 15 years older, what would her life look like?
I’m so glad you liked Elisa, and I thank you for saying that you did. I wasn’t her—the beauty of fiction is that one transports the facts, idealizes them—but I understand her, I have lived, I often still live, within the range of her emotions. I know, therefore, who she grows up to be. At 30, she’s still in awe of nature. She’s still eager to find the right words to name feelings and things. She has built a life for herself, even a small reputation, but still there are times when she fights against a nagging sense of not being entirely seen. I’m not sure Elisa will ever entirely escape that feeling.
I found the “Book of Words” to be an intriguing concept and a great tool for writers of all ages and genres. Did you include this from personal experience?
I began my own book of words when I was in my twenties. I’d started a business at the age of 25—ghostwriting, copywriting, strategic and tactical marketing for architects and engineers—and I needed to expand my vocabulary. I needed to get porticos, cornices, all of that straight in my head. So the book of words began as a book of architectural terms and phrases, but it soon began to hold quotes and descriptions and adjectives from almost anything that I was reading. It’s still here. I still add to it. It’s gray and battered, with a light blue spine.
Can we expect more young adult novels from you in the future, or is your writing taking you in a different direction?
My second novel for young adults, HOUSE OF DANCE, is due out in May of this year. This is a story of a 15 year old named Rosie, who is taking care of a dying grandfather during a summer in which her single mother has, in many ways, disappeared. Rosie seeks to give her grandfather one final gift, and this gift involves color, light, dance—the elements that will, she begins to understand, evoke his sweetest memories. I’m a ballroom dancer myself, and I’m excited about this book. Very.
Next May there will be a third, called NOTHING BUT GHOSTS, which is a romance and a mystery that takes place on the site of a reclusive gardener’s estate. The following May there will be a fourth, THE HEART IS NOT A SIZE, which concerns a mission trip that teens take to a squatter’s village in Mexico.
I’ve written a picture book for children, which is in the works. At the moment, I’m at work on an historical novel. Most of the time, though, I run a business with my husband, which still involves the ghosting and communications work that I began years ago. My husband is a designer. I continue to do the strategic work, the research, and the writing.
Every baby needs to have a nice warm blanket to be wrapped in! 
