From: Cassie Wilson <cwilson2>
Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 22:58:54 -0400

I would be interested in hearing more about really new emerging authors whose names I might not yet know that I should watch for.
    One author who impresses me has been around for 3 or 4 years, I guess, and has published two books, but is still standing in the shadowy wings, waiting for her own limelight. Sharon Flake writes really short, fairly spare, books, so she might appeal to reluctant readers, especially with the whallop she packs in those skinny books. Her main characters are about as completely different from me as can be: they are fictional; I am real. They are young teens, I am . . . not. They live in a tough modern day world and attend high schools that have little or no likeness to the gentler, kinder, southern high school of many years ago that I loved. These girls in her books have lived on the streets and are still only a curb away; I've never even known a homeless person, rarely seen one. And, of course, they're black and I'm white. There were few broken homes and no single parents in my growing up, but her heriones see them as the rule rather than the exception. So we're different. Yet, those girls carry me along in their pockets, sharing with me the pain in their hearts, filling me with their strength. I know them; I feel them.
    How does Ms. Flake work that magic and in so few pages? And she's just getting started; she's gonna blow the lid off in one of these novels coming up one of these days.
    I love Polly Horvath's work, too. Her words absolutely dance as her plots march themselves into significant and well patterned conclusions.
    I wonder what Snicket could do in a serious way?
    Martha Moore wrote 2 terrific novels ("Angels on the Roof" and
"Under the Mermaid Angel") and has said no more.
    Enough from me--?ssie Wilson
Received on Tue 15 Oct 2002 09:58:54 PM CDT