In this fascinating interview, award-winning author Sara
Levine shares some of the surprising strategies she used in crafting
her new picture book about how plants send messages to animals.
anatomy of bones and teeth. Why did you decide to write about plants?
textbook I’d inherited for a college course on introductory biology. It
detailed how specific colors of flowers attract specific pollinators—information
that was new and fascinating to me, and, later, equally fascinating to my college students. I thought young readers would be interested
too.
second- and third-person narration, which is quite common for expository
nonfiction picture books. Why did you decide to write this book from a plant’s
point of view?
original draft also had a third-person point of view. My editor at Millbrook
Press, Carol Hinz, found the topic interesting, and she was intrigued that it
covered material previously unpublished for kids. But she thought my writing
lacked the playfulness and humor of my previous books.
made a surprising suggestion. “It might be going too far to propose that a
flower narrate the book,” she said, “but I’m going to throw that out as one
possibility just to see if it leads you to any other interesting approaches.”
did.
that a plant communicating with animals to get its needs met (i.e., its pollen
moved efficiently) wouldn’t want to waste its time explaining to humans how
this works. So I made my narrator cranky—“Go take a hike. I’m pretty busy in
case you haven’t noticed.”—but in the best way. I modeled him after some of my
favorite older relatives from Brooklyn—cantankerous, funny, slightly off-color
and loving. He’s sort of like Oscar the Grouch.
advantages of having a cranky plant as a narrator?
SL: It allowed me to include a lot
of humor. For example, the narrator (whom illustrator Masha d’Yans aptly chose
to portray as a prickly pear cactus) tells his human readers about all the
false and human-centric ideas we have about flower colors, and then comments,
“What a load of fertilizer!” That’s
probably my favorite line in the book.
something new about the relationship between plants and animals from this book,
and I hope that they find it
entertaining as well.
MS: Like your earlier books, this one has an expository
writing style. It provides an explanation rather than telling a story. Do you
consider it fiction or nonfiction?
real-life information based on research. But it is told from the point of view
of a plant, and, as far as we know, plants don’t talk to us–at least not this
directly, or with Brooklyn accents. So, it uses a fictional device.
books with true information relayed by non-human narrators, as “informational
fiction.” I don’t know that it’s so important to put the book into a
category. What is important to me is that readers recognize that the
information given is factual. Hopefully, this will be evident by the way the
book is written and presented.
Sara Levine is an educator, veterinarian,
and award-winning author of seven published or upcoming science books for children. Her honors include the
AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize, Utah Beehive Book Award, Cook Prize finalist,
Monarch Award master list, and Bank Street College Best Children’s Book of the
Year. Learn more at http://www.saralevinebooks.com
or follow her @saraclevine
Most Popular Posts
Resignation
Re-thinking “E” Is for Everyone
We Need Diverse Nonfiction
The 5 Kinds of Nonfiction
Behind the Books: Does Story Appeal to Everyone?
10 STEM Picture Books
Nonfiction Authors Dig Deep by Melissa Stewart
Nonfiction Authors Dig Deep by Deborah Heiligman
Is It Fiction or Nonfiction? A Twitterchat
5 Kinds of Nonfiction, Book Lists
Topics
3 Responses
THANK YOU for the back story on the evolution of Flower Talk, including your editor's surprising suggestion, and how the cranky cacti narrator came to be. Brilliant!
Thanks for the interview, Melissa! Sara's other books are so fun and lively, and this one sounds terrific too. I'm working on a book with Carol and she's wonderful too :)!
Interesting approach. And lucky to have a good editor.