Super Sleuths Pedro and Sophia hopped off the bus at the 50th Street stop and walked back to 51st. The buildings became increasingly run down as they walked toward the river. Sophia, as Lead Investigator, presented her plan. “We’ll hit the Mister Creamy truck on the corner, then eat our cones on that bench while we watch Vlad’s apartment.” “Excellent! Since ice cream is a key food group, if we add strawberries, we’ll get total nutrition!” She paid for the cones, and the two s

From Mission 1: All in a Day's Work, Chapter 1 Sophia and Pedro were outsiders at the fashionable James Samuel Calder Academy on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Each formed its own small minority. Pedro was a scholarship student and Hispanic. Sophia was outspokenly individual and feminist, whereas her classmates were devotees of Teen Vogue and the New York Times society pages. The fashionistas thought Sophia’s unruly, curly red hair and high-top red sneakers with striped laces a

Several weeks ago, I scribbled a brief article on an interview by Writers Cooperative with the author, Amy Tan. She spoke about the autobiographical aspects of her writing: “Readers of The Joy Luck Club often suspect Tan wrote herself into the story as a single character (a woman named Jing-mei), but she says, ‘The truth is that every character has a bit of me.’” This caused me to question this regarding my middle-grade series, Sophia of the Bright Red Sneakers. Guilty as ch

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A Wrinkle in Time was almost not published because according to its author, it “dealt overtly with the problem of evil, and it was really difficult for children, and was it a children’s or an adults’ book, anyhow?” The book was rejected by almost every publisher and ultimately returned to her by her agent and hidden away in a drawer. However, a Christmas tea given for her mother changed all of that. A guest at the tea introduced her to the publisher John C. Farrar. At the tim

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