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Betsy Byars began her writing career rather late in life. ""In all of my school years, . . . not one single teacher ever said to me, 'Perhaps you should consider becoming a writer,'"" Byars recalls. ""Anyway, I didn't want to be a writer. Writing seemed boring. You sat in a room all day by yourself and typed. If I was going to be a writer at all, I was going to be a foreign correspondent like Claudette Colbert in Arise My Love. I would wear smashing hats, wisecrack with the guys, and have a byline known round the world. My father wanted me to be a mathematician."" So Byars set out to become mathematician, but when she couldn't grasp calculus in college, she turned to English. Even then, writing was not on her immediate horizon.First, she married and started a family. The writing career didn't emerge until she was 28, a mother of two children, and living in a small place she called the barracks apartment, in Urbana, Illinois. She and her husband, Ed, had moved there in 1956 so he could attend graduate school at the University of Illinois. She was bored, had no friends, and so turned to writing to fill her time. Byars started writing articles for The Saturday Evening Post, Look,and other magazines. As her family grew and her children started to read, she began to write books for young people and, fortunately for her readers, discovered that there was more to being a writer than sitting in front of a typewriter. ""Making up stories and characters is so interesting that I'm never bored. Each book has been a different writing experience. It takes me about a year to write a book, but I spend another year thinking about it, polishing it, and making improvements. I always put something of myself intomy books -- something that happened to me. Once a wanderer came by my house and showed me how to brush my teeth with a cherry twig; that went in The House of Wingscopyright 2000 by Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers. All rights reserved.
With increasing frequency juvenile fiction is contracting to the dimensions of a short story and the endoskeleton (dialogue, stage directions, asides to the audience) of drama - of which the climax to Sara's season of discontent is a good example. For fourteen years she had loved her sister without envy, her aunt without finding her coarse, her brother without pity. Now that I'm not anything (pretty or smart or athletic), ten-year-old Charlie is retarded and everyone else is contemptible - especially classmate Joe Melby, suspected of having taken Charlie's prized wristwatch. Then Charlie gets lost and Joe, a gentle knight plus something of a saint, insists on helping Sara find him. Dismayed because she's learned he was innocent, she hesitates over the words to say so, whereupon Joe tells her a story - of a guru who for twenty-eight years has been searching for some great wise word - and she gets the point and, smiling, says she's sorry. It's a sublime moment that even finding the terrified Charlie doesn't surpass, nor Joe's invitation to a dance. The book is a succession of clicks that connect, a sparse but acute self-possessing. (Kirkus Reviews)
