The five lucky winners of Promise the Night are:

Heidi, Jody, Stacey, Ms. Yingling and Linda!

You’ll be getting e-mails from us shortly.  Congratulations, and thank you to all who commented. 

The lovely and ultra-generous author Michaela MacColl has offered to give away five copies of her new novel, Promise the Night.  

In a starred review, Kirkus says  ”MacColl’s second novel brings to life the childhood of future aviator and writer Beryl Markham (Prisoners in the Palace, 2010). Born Beryl Clutterbuck, she moved with her family to the highlands of Kenya as a toddler. Not long after, her mother and brother returned to England, abandoning her with her rough though loving father. MacColl’s account begins when a leopard steals into Beryl’s hut and attacks her dog—the child leaping from her bed to give chase. Though she loses the leopard in the night, the next morning, she and her new friend, a Nandi boy, Kibii, find the dog still alive and save it. Later she insists on being part of the hunt for the leopard. Young Beryl wants nothing more than to be a warrior, a murani, and to be able to leap higher than her own head. Her jumping skills progress apace, but young white girls, no matter how determined, cannot become part of the Nandi tribe. Her relationship with Kibii’s father, the wise Arap Maina, along with a growing awareness of the consequences of her actions, help lead her into a more mature—though still wildly impulsive and daring—life. MacColl intersperses her third-person narrative with faux news reports and first-person diary entries of two decades later, when Beryl Markham became the first person—let alone woman—to fly a plane west from Europe to America. Fluid prose elucidates a life much stranger than fiction. ”

Michaela joins us today with some insights on how she makes historical fiction so compelling:

My first novel, Prisoners in the Palace, was about Queen Victoria when she was a teenager. I loved writing about a famous person but then confounding the reader’s expectations by showing what they were like when they were young. My second novel, Promise the Night, is about Beryl Markham. She became famous in her 30’s as a pioneering aviator,but her adventures started when she was a child growing up in colonial Africa.

When I start writing about an historical figure I begin my research with a comprehensive biography – actually three or four. My goal is to understand the whole life. Then I begin looking at every biography I can find, but this time focusing on the early years.  Usually this is a much more manageable amount of reading. As I do my research, I’m looking for those nuggets, the little details that will intrigue kids (hey, they intrigue me!) For instance, Beryl slept alone in a mud hut and this was common for kids at the time. Victoria wasn’t permitted to walk down stairs by herself lest she come to harm. These small tidbits usually inspire whole chunks of plot!

Recently I was giving a talk at our local library about women aviators, leading into a discussion of my new book. I created slides about famous flyers like Harriet Quimby, Bessie Coleman and Amelia Earhart who broke all sorts of barriers. Harriet was the first American woman to get her pilot’s license. Bessie was the first African American woman to get her license, even if she had to go to France to do it. And everyone knows that Amelia was the first woman to cross the Atlantic (as a passenger). I had to wonder, why with all these fascinating women to choose from, did I pick Beryl Markham to write about?

Part of the answer is that no one else is writing about Beryl –why try to enter a crowded field?  The next piece of the puzzle is Beryl’s wonderful memoir, West with the Night.  Her voice is so clear and confident – she inspired me to find out more. And finally, the words she wrote to a newspaper before she attempted a record-breaking flight.  She said:  ”I am going to set out to fly the Atlantic to New York. Not as a society girl. Not as a woman even. But as a pilot with two thousand flying hours, mostly in uncharted Africa, to my credit. I don’t want to be superior to men.  If I can be a good pilot, I’ll be the happiest creature alive.

Beryl wasn’t out to prove anything because she was a woman. Not for her was the “first woman to do XXX.”  She just wanted to be great at what she did. What a terrific role model for young readers (and middle-aged writers!).

Leave a comment below to be one of five winners of the soaring Promise the Night.

It’s been a long time since a book stole my heart so completely as Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden.  How can I have overlooked it all these years?  Though it was published in 1958, when I’d have been precisely the right age to read it, I didn’t, nor did I read it thirty years later, with my own children. What a loss!  If only, like our hero Tom Long himself, I could slip back in time!  I’d gather three young daughters around me, and begin, “If, standing alone on the back doorstep, Tom allowed himself to weep tears, they were tears of anger.”

A boy, alone, trying not to cry.  Who could resist?  And Tom really is angry, righteously so.  His beloved brother has measles and as a result he’s being sent to spend his summer vacation in quarantine with his buttoned-up uncle and clueless aunt, who live in a city flat.

Tom can be very rude.  He’s also a ruthless asker of questions. While he’s not as obnoxious as that other garden-denizen, Mary Lennox, is at first, Pearce gives him a backbone that young readers will admire.  Oh, let the gushing being!  Every one of the characters in this book is easy to recognize and yet continually, delightfully surprising. The impetuous and imaginative Hattie, the stern gardener Abel, even Tom’s brother little Peter, whose role is all off-stage—every one of them springs to memorable life.

And the language! It never shows off, yet makes you want to dance.  If ever a book begged to be read aloud, here it is.  The cadence is stately and British; colons, semicolons and dashes abound; beneath the polished surface, the urgency of childhood pulses and breathes.  The setting starts off in early twentieth century England and roams over time.  But what makes this book a genuine, certified, authentic classic, is that the questions it poses  will always bear asking, whether we can answer them or not.

For Tom, for us, that question is the nature of time, and what hold the past, present and future have on us.  His first night with his aunt and uncle, Tom hears the old clock downstairs, reviled by the grown-ups for keeping its own capricious time, strike thirteen. He slips downstairs, opens the back door, and discovers the magic garden. Hattie, a girl in an old-fashioned dress, shows him its many wonders, and they become fast friends, adventuring every night.  Hattie’s age fluctuates, and as the summer wanes, she ages, growing disturbingly older than he is. In a wonderful, witty scene, Tom asks his logical Uncle Alan to explain time.

“’Of course,’ said Uncle Alan, ‘it used to be thought…’ and Tom listened attentively, and sometimes he seemed to understand, and then, sometimes he was sure he didn’t.  ‘But modern theories of Time,’ said Uncle Alan, ‘the most modern theories…’ and Tom began wondering if theories went in and out of fashion, like ladies’ dresses, and then suddenly knew that he couldn’t be attending, and wrenched his mind back, and thought again that he was understanding, and then again was sure he wasn’t, and experienced a great depression.’

Later in the conversation, as Uncle Alan still flounders about, Tom concludes, “Apparently, about Time, as about some master-criminal, you could prove nothing.”

And yet it’s Tom—Tom the child–who, as in all the best children’s books, solves the riddle for himself.   His conclusion presages the discovery at the glorious heart of  When You Reach Me, which in turn echoes and pays homage to the masterpiece A Wrinkle in Time.  There is even, in the breath-taking scene when Tom balances atop the garden wall and sees the wide world outside beckoning, a poignant hint of Peter Pan.  Yet all the while Tom struggles with physics and philosophy, Pearce never lets the story slip into abstraction, and his actions and thoughts are always those of a real boy grappling with real change.

Maybe my helpless swoon into the arms of this book has something to do with my own aging, and new perspectives on that aforesaid master criminal. Like Tom, I wonder what lasts, what we get to keep, which parts of us stay the same, and oh, who knows where the time goes?  I have to admit, too, that I envy Tom getting to have his many fabulous adventures while wearing pajamas, my favorite ensemble.  And if  time really is a plastic, flexible entity, it’s okay that I didn’t discover this book till just now.

Please share your own favorite classics!  I have a feeling there are lots more I’ve missed.