Condie to visit Edmond
n her “Matched” trilogy for young readers, Ally Condie included a spark of innocent romance. In her most recent novel, “Summerlost,” she tried something different and much more difficult.
“It’s about a girl and a boy falling into friendship,” she said during a telephone interview from her home state of Utah. “It’s also about loss and grief.”
“Summerlost,” released last year, is now available in trade paperback. The novel has been nominated for an Edgar Award, which recognizes superior mystery writing, and a Whitney Award, given to the best Mormon authors.
She will make three appearances in Edmond on Tuesday, including stops at Oakdale School and Central Middle School. She will sign copies of her books and answer questions about them from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at Best of Books, 1313 E Danforth Road.
A PAIR OF MYSTERIES
In brief, “Summerlost” goes something like this:
Twelve-year-old Cedar is facing the emptiest summer of her life. Her father and autistic brother, Ben, died in a car accident, and she hasn’t yet processed her losses and the inevitable life changes resulting from them. The summer after the deaths, Cedar and her mother move into a house in the small town of Indian Creek. Almost at once, Cedar spots a boy riding past on a bicycle, dressed in a peculiar costume. Curious, she follows him to the annual Summerlost festival, a huge celebration of all things related to William Shakespeare.
The festival is fantastic enough, but things get really exciting when Cedar finds herself confronted by two mysteries. The first involves a possible haunting; a famous Hollywood actress used to come to the Summerlost festival each year. Even though she’s dead now, people think she still comes to the festival … as a ghost. Is it true? Why doesn’t she move on? The second mystery is more personal: Someone keeps leaving small gifts and trinkets on Cedar’s windowsill. They’re exactly the type of items her dead brother would’ve liked. Is he reaching out to her somehow? Could he possibly be alive?
Seeking answers to the mysteries draws her closer to Leo, the boy on the bike, but only as friends. Special friends. The kind that remain friends forever.
LIFE MIRRORS ART
Condie stops short of admitting that “Summerlost” is autobiographical, although there are obvious parallels to her real life.
When she was a girl, she lost her grandfather and baby sister within the space of a year. She formed a lifelong friendship in the aftermath. And one of her four children, a boy, is autistic. Writing about Cedar’s brother was a struggle for Condie. “It was very hard, the hardest part of the book, not because I didn’t have experience in dealing with an autistic child,” she said. “But I wondered if I should” write it.
Plenty of books for young readers deal with protagonists who have lost people they care about. It’s almost a necessary trope, and one that dates back to the Brothers Grimm. Children in such stories lack parental oversight, enabling them to go off on adventures and face danger without an obvious safety net. Everyone from Cinderella to Spider-Man to Harry Potter is molded by the consequences of death. Rarely do books consider the loss of autistic children. Condie did it because it adds another layer to Cedar’s sadness. It’s tough to form relationships with some autistic children. In ways, Condie said, they remain strangers even to those who love them the most.
“What Cedar’s mourning is not only the loss of him,” Condie said, “but she worries that she didn’t know him in the way he needed to be known or to be seen. … It’s hard when you realize you can’t ask the questions you have, the questions you didn’t think to ask, when you realize you didn’t even know them.”
NONPROFIT WRITING CAMP
Condie, a former English teacher, loves to be around children. It’s her favorite part of book tours, and it’s one of the reasons she founded a nonprofit called the WriteOut Foundation (writeoutcamp.org). The nonprofit is about to host its inaugural writing camp for students ages 13 to 18. Major components of the camp are exposure to the outdoors, including national parks, and a chance to see “As You Like It” at the Utah Shakespeare Festival.
The camp opens in late June at Southern Utah University in Cedar City. “I grew up in a small Utah town,” Condie said. “We never had an author visit our school or anything like that. I thought it would be cool if we brought these opportunities to my area. … Kids from anywhere can come. Some are scholarship students from very small towns in Utah.”
Condie’s latest manuscript is now in the hands of her editors. She doesn’t know when it will be published.
Next up is Condie’s first foray into writing fantasy novels. The book’s target audience is people ages 14 and up. Odds are it’ll be OK for children even younger, as there may be dark themes and heavy topics, but there’s no explicit language or sex scenes.
She thinks books are important for all young readers, even those fortunate enough to have avoided grief so far. “We read to practice living,” she said.