I Grew up in Idaville

I grew up in Idaville. I grew up in Riverdale, in Smallville, in Shopton, in a house on Klickitat Street where it meets Rover Avenue. I knew that when I became a teenager, I would drive around in a van and solve mysteries with my friends and my dog. Then, as an adult, I would get a job at Swift Enterprises building spacecraft, or I would open my own detective agency. Or both.

Even as a kid, I knew that wasn’t the way the world really worked. But I wished it did.

I grew up in Boise, Idaho, at a time before the Internet, with four channels on our TV. I walked to school, where my friends and classmates had names that could have been written by Beverly Cleary. I loved reading and books, and when I disappeared into them, I recognized an ideal version of my own world.

So it was not too outrageous to believe that I could be a boy detective or a young inventor. I read books about crime and tried to make robots out of Legos and Micronauts and wished for something cool like a spaceship to appear in the sky. At Collister Elementary, my friends and I traded stories of Bigfoot, or, as we got older, urban legends about the mayor and the richest people in town worshipping Satan at Dry Creek Cemetery. (We dared each other to go out there at Halloween, and while we all said we would, we never did.) We watched monster movie marathons on Channel 12 and passed around Stephen King books like they were contraband.

Even when things got hard, I was lucky in so many ways I only see now.

One way in which I was especially lucky was to have a teacher named Kathy McNally in second grade. She let me write anything I wanted after I proved I couldn’t stick with the topics she put on the chalkboard for our papers. She didn’t see my inability to stick to the lesson as disobedience or disrespect, but creativity. She gave me permission to use my imagination. And I did.

I still am. I wouldn’t be where I am now if not for her.

This week, I’ve released my seventh novel, REUNION, and I tried to put those same feelings of growing up in a magical place into it. There is a boy genius, a girl detective, a young wizard, and a warrior princess. They do their best to keep Middleton, their little part of the world, safe from the monsters, but they are only children. And when they grow up, they have to come back and reckon with everything they thought they left behind. For kids, magic and horror often live side-by-side. The world is big enough to contain unknown monsters, but still small enough to save. Now more than ever, I think we are seeing the truth of that. And that’s the story I tried to tell.

I couldn’t have written this book if I had not grown up where I did, when I did.

REUNION is out in the world now. I hope you enjoy it.