One best-seller leads to a more personal novel
After the tremendous success of her previous young adult novel, “Every Last Word,” about a teen girl dealing with a mental disorder and being true to herself, Orinda author Tamara Ireland Stone received a flood of letters from her young readers containing their own experiences, poems and stories. She was overwhelmed by the responses, by the sheer bravery it took for these teens to share such deeply personal tales.
“I was so moved by the letters,” Stone said in between stops on a nationwide book tour. “They inspired me to be brave myself and take on a story in my next book that was very personal to me. It’s the kind of story I would love to have read when I was a teenager, to have known I wasn’t alone and someone else had gone through what I was experiencing.”
Stone, 49, has deftly masked her own experiences in her latest young adult novel, “Little Do We Know” (Hyperion, $17.99, 400 pages).
It tackles some big topics — friendship, destiny, love, sexuality, taking a stand, questioning faith, even contemplating neardeath experiences — all through the eyes of Emory and Hannah, best friends since childhood by virtue of their homes’ proximity, their bedroom windows just 36 steps apart.
As kids, the girls would meet in the middle, confiding secrets, sharing anything and everything. But as high school seniors with graduation approaching, they’ve become “former” best friends. They haven’t spoken in months after a fight over something very personal to Emory. Words were said that can’t be unsaid, and a chasm forms, making those steps between them seem more like miles.
The girls are very different, with different world views; a contrast laid out in the book’s structure with alternating chapters from each one. Hannah is the good, obedient, cross-wearing daughter in a devout family. Her dad is the director of a financially struggling Christian school where Hannah sings in the choir. But her feud with Emory and other life challenges have shaken her faith.
Emory lives with her divorced mom, who is planning to marry a man Emory can’t stand. She goes to public school and is a big drama geek, cast in the lead role of “Our Town,” hoping to go to UCLA in
the fall but anguished to leave her awesome boyfriend, Luke, when they go off to separate colleges.
Despite their longstanding rift, Emory and Hannah are never far from each others’ thoughts.
“It was almost over. All of it, and all at once,” Em-
ory says, when contemplating graduation. “High school. Performing on that stage. My relationship with Luke. Mom and me, and our family of two. It was bad enough that I’d already lost Hannah. Soon, the rest of it would be gone along with her.”
One night, Hannah finds Luke slumped over his steering wheel of his car, near death. It will change everything. Ultimately, all their lives merge more deeply than they could have imagined, and as in all of Stone’s young adult and middle grade novels, the smart female lead characters don’t need rescue. They always save themselves.
“There’s a lot of me in this book,” Stone said. “The faith bit is certainly one I struggled with growing up in a very conservative Christian home. It wasn’t until college when
I took a course on world religions that I appreciated how other faiths see the world.
“Our church didn’t encourage you to question things, merely that you had to have faith and that would answer your questions. It was very circular. So new ways of looking at life and death and everything; it was an eye-opening moment,” she said. “I’d say Hannah is me growing up. Emory is me later in life.”
Luke’s vivid near-death experience hits home for Stone as well. Both her father and father-in-law “died” under different circumstances and were brought back, both coming away with very different afterlife scenarios, but both with a sense of love and making every moment count.
That’s where the metaphors in “Our Town” come into play. As Emory bemoans the sadness in the script, a friend tells her what it’s really about.
“It’s about being alive. About noticing all the little things, because no one ever knows if it’s the last time they’ll see them.”
A Bay Area native, Stone began her writing career less than a decade ago. She’d spent 20 years in the tech industry, co-founding a woman-owned marketing strategy and communications firm, working with small startups as well as some of the top software companies, including Apple.
She’d always known she’d do something with writing, having been a journalism graduate from Chico State, but she was surprised to discover a special talent for young adult books, ending up on the New York Times best-seller list for “Every Last Word.”
“I hadn’t expected to start doing this,” she said. “I was writing for my job, of course, for clients, for work. And I loved that. But I found myself entering my 40th year and I wanted to write for myself, no matter if anyone else would read it. I got this idea about a time traveler who ends up in 1995 (which became her first book, “Time Between Us”). I was just kind of writing between work meetings or at night when I couldn’t sleep. I got it down and I realized I was writing for young adults.”
She was a voracious reader when she was a teen, she said.
“So I’ve been covering a lot of concepts I would have wanted to read about when I was that age. I listen a lot to how teens talk. My own kids, my son and daughter are 15 and 13, and I get lots of ideas just riding in the car with them.
“Teenagers are very deep thinkers. They’re a very discerning audience. You can’t underestimate them.”
“There’s a lot of me in this book. The faith bit is certainly one I struggled with growing up in a very conservative Christian home. It wasn’t until college when I took a course on world religions that I appreciated how other faiths see the world.” — Tamara Ireland Stone, author