I'll post the reader's guide on SLU Global for anyone who'd like to hear more from Deborah Wiles. If you have suggestions for other topics you'd like to hear her address, please post them in the comments. I will be interviewing her next Friday at NCTE.History happens to real people with real feelings and real lives, everyday lives. Heroic things are done by ordinary, everyday people, every day. In Countdown, I consider each character no less heroic than those in the biographies I tell. My characters have more everyday lives, perhaps, but so did Harry and Fannie and Jack and Jackie and Pete, when they were young. And my readers were once kids, or are kids, and I want them to know that they also live lives full of everyday heroics. They make history every day. Every choice they make reverberates and becomes a part of their history, and affects others’ history as well. I chose to extend the biographies in Countdown to the present day, in order to show how every choice we make affects not just our own lives, but history as a whole—everything is connected, which is something Franny finds out for herself in Countdown.
Jennifer Buehler
I love this idea of historical fiction. I have a hard time putting my finger on why I enjoyed the book so much. The idea that these are real people with real feelings dealing with real things seems to strike a chord with me.
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