Children’s author Lynne Jonell stopped by Suvudu to talk about her new book, LAWN MOWER MAGIC, which hits stores today, February 28th, 2012! Here’s a little more about the book:
With a POP! and a puff of smoke, the Willows’ lawn mower calls it quits. A new mower will cost their parents a lot of money, money Derek had hoped to borrow for a train ticket to visit a friend. Luckily Derek and his brother and sisters find a rusty push mower tucked away in the shed. It doesn’t look like much, but it turns out that it’s been soaking up magic for years. And it’s hungry for grass!
Can Derek earn his ticket? Maybe . . . if he, Abner, Tate, and Celia can keep the magic mower under control!
Lynne Jonell follows up her Junior Library Guild selection, Hamster Magic, with a second story of the Willow family’s rowdy run-ins with mixed-up magic.
Read on to learn more about the lawn mower in question, Lynne, and how she fell in love with reading.
Your childhood may be long ago and far away, but I’m betting it’s not so distant that you can’t remember when you fell in love with reading. And since you’re on this site, it’s a good bet that you were smitten with some variant of fantasy.
Close your eyes and think of the first book you truly loved. Can you remember the feel of the paper, the bent corner where you dropped it, the glow of the flashlight at night when you couldn’t bear to sleep until you found out what happened?
Maybe you can’t recall the book itself. Maybe all you remember is the feeling you had when you were reading—the magic between the pages, the way the book pulled you in and the world around you fell away. Or how your mother called you five times for supper but you only heard her once, and you couldn’t understand why she was so upset.
I know, I know. Some of you didn’t fall in love with books until your teens or even later. I’m married to a man who didn’t enjoy reading until he hit his forties. But for most of us, the light switch went on sometime in grade school—which means that some of the most influential books in our lives were children’s books. There was some magic there that captured us, enraptured us, made readers of us for life. And ever since we’ve been on the lookout for more of the same.
I was grabbed by fantasy. I loved books where ordinary children were going about their ordinary business when suddenly magic appeared and everything changed. The ship flew; the Psammead granted wishes; time itself wrinkled and there was no escaping The Dark Thing. Now that I’m grown, and a writer, I want to give young readers the same sort of ride.
My picture books and novels all have a fantasy element, but lately I’ve been having a blast with chapter books aimed at children ages 6-9. This is an age when readers are made for life, or turned off forever, and you had better believe I want to deliver a good story. But the plot has to be simple, the sentences short, the words easy to sound out, and the voice right for the age. It’s an interesting challenge.
It’s hard to do much character development in six short chapters, for example. So writing a series, where the characters can grow over time, has a lot of appeal. It’s interesting to structure a series from the beginning, too. The books have to work as stand-alones, and they have to make sense if they’re read out of sequence, too.
But reading the series as a whole delivers an added experience. The child who reads the whole series of twelve books, in order, will get the sweeping arc of the whole story, in which the rules of magic are cumulatively revealed, the characters are fully realized, and the series comes to a satisfying climax in the final book.
By the time they’re finished, they’ll have read the equivalent of a 120,000 word fantasy novel. And with any luck, they’ll be hooked for life.
