Still new in the world, with big questions
Late in Kate DiCamillo’s new novel for middlegrade readers, 10-year-old Raymie watches her temperamental baton-twirling instructor sleep. Ida Nee is stretched out on a plaid couch, white boots on her feet, baton clutched to her chest. Her mouth hangs open:
“Raymie looked at Ida Nee and then she looked away,” DiCamillo writes. “There was something scary about watching an adult sleep. It was as if no one at all were in charge of the world.”
Moments of insight like this — moments that send grown-up readers hurtling back to the confusion and tumult and newness of childhood — are scattered throughout “Raymie Nightingale,” the seventh novel and 20th book from DiCamillio.
For the 52-year-old author, it is not particularly difficult to climb inside the mind of a young person. That part of her is easily accessible. At the ready.
“I feel like that part of myself is right on the surface,” DiCamillo said in a phone interview. “I don’t know why I remember what it feels like to be a
10-year-old, I just do. I feel lucky that I do.”
DiCamillo, who won Newbery Medals for “The Tale of Despereaux” (2003), which was made into an animated film, and “Flora and Ulysses” (2013), appears in Houston on Sunday as part of Cool Brains! Inprint Readings for Young People. She’ll discuss “Raymie Nightingale,” the story of three young girls who meet at baton-twirling lessons in a small Florida town in summer 1975 and end up helping each other in ways none of them could have anticipated.
Raymie hopes to win the Little Miss Central Florida Tire contest so that her father, who’s just run off with a dental hygienist, will read about her in the newspaper and return home. Louisiana is more than a little adrift, a delicate dreamer being raised by her eccentric grandmother and surviving mostly on tuna fish. Beverly is a tough and capable type, the daughter of a cop who knows how to pick locks and arrives at baton-twirling lessons one day with a black eye.
The story jumps nimbly from action to abstraction and back again. As
Author appearance
Kate DiCamillo will discuss and sign “Raymie Nightingale,” 3 p.m. Sunday, Johnston Middle School, 10410 Manhattan. Free. Information: 713-5212026 or inprinthouston.org.
the girls move between the Golden Glen Nursing Home, the Very Friendly Animal Shelter, Clarke Family Insurance, Lake Clara and other local haunts, Raymie often finds herself tumbling toward emotional and intellectual clarity.
“She had the feeling that she was going to understand things, finally, at last,” DiCamillo writes. “She had this feeling often, that some truth was going to be revealed to her.”
Raymie relates these feelings to her soul, which shrinks and grows as she faces harsh realities about her own life and the lives of her new friends. When she is troubled or sad, her soul feels like a small, hard pebble. When she’s happy, her soul inflates — taut and wide, like a tent.
“Kids have a lot of profundity,” says DiCamillo, who criss-crossed the country to raise awareness about reading and children’s literacy as National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature in 2014 and 2015. “They’re thinking about big things, but they don’t necessarily have the language to talk about it. … You’re new in the world, so that makes the questions even bigger, and it makes everything much more beautiful because it’s all new. Then we grow up and forget about the intensity involved in being a kid.”
In addition to the animated version of “The Tale of Despereaux,” DiCamillo’s first novel, “Because of Winn Dixie” (2000) was made into a film by 20th Century Fox in 2005.
“Both times, with both movies, it was wonderful to watch it happen,” she says. “It’s a fever dream that gets constructed without you. It’s just like when a book gets translated. The story is going out into the world, having a life of its own.”
“Because of Winn Dixie,” the story of a lonely 10-year-old girl who adopts a stray dog she names for a supermarket chain, was such a successful first novel that, for awhile, DiCamillo wondered if she should keep writing similar stories.
“I spent a lot of time thinking I need to write another book just like this or people won’t love me,” says the author, who is single with no children. “But you can’t write that way — for approval. You have to write for the story.”
Similarly, DiCamillo keeps those Newbery Medals, one of the nation’s highest honors for young people’s literature, close but out of sight.
“It’s something to not think about,” she laughs. “The Newbery comes with an actual, physical medal, and I keep those in the second drawer of my desk, way in the back. Once every few months, I open the drawer, very slowly, to see if they’re still there.”
maggie.galehouse@chron. com