SATA
ENTRY TYPE:
WORK TITLE: WE ARE ALL HIS CREATURES
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://deborahnoyes.com/
CITY: Somerville
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: SATA 331
http://www.candlewick.com/authill.asp?b=Author&m=bio&id=3011&pix=y
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born September 13, 1965, in Carmel, CA; daughter of Peter and Valerie Noyes; married Courtney Wayshak (a teacher); children: Clyde, Michaela.
EDUCATION:University of Massachusetts, B.A., 1987; Vermont College, M.F.A., 1993.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, editor, and photographer. Franklin Park Zoo, Boston, MA, zookeeper, 1990; Boston Review, Boston, managing editor, 1991-92; freelance writer, 1992—; Candlewick Press, Cambridge, MA, copywriter, 1997-2000, editor, beginning 2000. Western New England College, Woburn, MA, adjunct lecturer, 1994-2002; Emerson College, Boston, adjunct lecturer, beginning 2003; Lesley University, visiting writer.
AVOCATIONS:Printmaking, nature and hiking, traveling.
MEMBER:Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.
AWARDS:Best Book for Young Adults selection, American Library Association (ALA), Books for the Teen Age selection, New York Public Library (NYPL), and Best Book for Children and Teens selection, Chicago Public Library, all for Gothic!; Notable Social Studies Trade Book, National Council for the Social Studies-Children’s Book Council (NCSS-CBC), for Hana in the Time of the Tulips; ALA Best Book for Young Adults selection, NYPL Books for the Teen Age selection, and Henry Bergh Children’s Book Award, American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, 2006, all for One Kingdom; ALA Best Book for Young Adults selection, for The Restless Dead; honored among Boston Public Library’s Literary Lights for Children, 2007; Best Children’s Book of the Year selection, Bank Street College of Education, 2008, for Red Butterfly; Shirley Jackson Award finalist, 2008, for novelette “Hunger Moon”; ALA Nonfiction Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults designation, 2010, for Encyclopedia of the End; ALA Amelia Bloomer list, 2017, and New York Historical Society Children’s History Book Prize finalist, both for Ten Days a Madwoman; NCSS-CBC Notable Social Studies Trade Book, and Best Children’s Book of the Year selection, Bank Street College of Education, both 2017, both for The Magician and the Spirits; Best Children’s Book of the Year selection, Bank Street College of Education, 2020, for Tooth and Claw.
POLITICS: Democrat. RELIGION: “Raised Catholic.”WRITINGS
Contributor of short stories and reviews to periodicals, including Seventeen, Threepenny Review, Bloomsbury Review, San Francisco Chronicle, Stories, Chicago Tribune, Cicada, and Boston Sunday Globe.
SIDELIGHTS
A writer, editor, and photographer, Deborah Noyes is the author of award-winning works of fiction, including Hana in the Time of the Tulips and Red Butterfly: How a Princess Smuggled the Secret of Silk out of China, as well as nonfiction titles such as Tooth and Claw: The Dinosaur Wars and Ten Days a Madwoman: The Daring Life and Turbulent Times of the Original “Girl” Reporter, Nellie Bly. She has also edited three highly acclaimed anthologies, including Gothic! Ten Original Dark Tales.
Although she is perhaps best known for her fiction, Noyes says that nonfiction played a big role in her life growing up. “Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey were my idols growing up,” she explained in an autobiographical essay appearing on her website, “and if I had another life to live (I imagine it often, this parallel life), I’d be a field biologist or trek around photographing birds for National Geographic.”
Noyes’s first picture book, It’s Vladimir!, focuses on an impatient young vampire who desperately wants to earn his bat wings. Vladimir’s constant tantrums drive his family members from their castle, however, and he must turn to a host of forest creatures for support and advice. According to Booklist reviewer Marta Segal, “the [story’s] moral is balanced by winning humor and the idea of wishes coming true.”
Set in seventeenth-century Holland and illustrated by Bagram Ibatoulline, Noyes’s Hana in the Time of the Tulips concerns a young girl whose father ignores her after he becomes caught up in the period’s tulip craze. Here Noyes “tells an unusual story with appealing rhythm and rich, fanciful language,” noted Gillian Engberg in a Booklist review of the picture book.
Based on actual events, When I Met the Wolf Girls describes the story of two feral children, Amala and Kamala, who are brought to live in an Indian orphanage by a missionary who hopes to civilize them. Examining themes of colonialism and religion, When I Met the Wolf Girls also explores “the notion of taming the wild, which permeates the story and infuses it with a sense of sadness,” as Marianne Saccardi commented in School Library Journal.
In the lushly illustrated Red Butterfly, Noyes and illustrator Sophie Blackall offer a picture-book take on an ancient legend. As she prepares to leave her homeland to marry the ruler of Khotan, the emperor’s daughter hides silkworms and mulberry seeds in her hair, hoping to retain pieces of her past life. “Noyes’ graceful text includes allusions to nature and the shifting seasons in a style reminiscent of traditional Chinese poetry,” Engberg stated.
In the picture book Prudence and Moxie: A Tale of Mismatched Friends, illustrated by AnnaLaura Cantone, Noyes tells a story of opposites attracting. Prudence is a very staid Moose, while Moxie the raccoon is a risk taker, but the two, despite being so different, remain good friends through numerous adventures in this “fanciful foray [that] should tickle readers who have their own mismatched friends,” according to a Kirkus Reviews contributor. Similarly, School Library Journal reviewer Meg Smith thought “children will enjoy the humorous antics of this unusual duo.”
In African Acrostics: A Word in Edgeways, Noyes serves as photographer, illustrating the text of Avis Harley. The eighteen poems of this collection each feature an animal and are written as acrostics. Writing of Noyes’s work in School Library Journal, Susan Scheps noted that “most of the full-page, full-color photos of the animals are perfect companions to the facing selections.” A Kirkus Reviews critic offered further praise, writing: “This belongs in every collection—for the poetry, for the photographs, for the information.”
Turning to older readers, Noyes penned Angel and Apostle, an adult historical novel of interest to teens, and The Ghosts of Kerfol, a collection of stories. The former reimagines Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter from the perspective of Pearl, Hester Prynne’s daughter, and the story follows the impish sprite into adulthood. The author “tackles passion and Puritanism in a riveting historical tale with timeless overtones,” wrote Library Journal reviewer Beth E. Andersen in a review of Angel and Apostle. The Ghosts of Kerfol, which contains five ghostly tales inspired by an Edith Wharton story, was praised as “beautiful and genuinely frightening” by a contributor in Kirkus Reviews.
In Gothic! Noyes collects ten stories by such acclaimed young-adult authors as Joan Aiken, Neil Gaiman, and M.T. Anderson. A companion volume, The Restless Dead: Ten Original Stories of the Supernatural, includes tales by Annette Curtis Klause, Kelly Link, and Holly Black. “As both a reader and an editor, I’m drawn to the place where popular genre and literary intersect, and these writers, great stylists and masters of the weird, really delivered,” Noyes stated in an online Cynsations interview with Cynthia Leitich Smith. “For me, anthologies are an excuse to invite a bunch of writers I admire out to play.”
In her 2010 historical novel Captivity, Noyes writes for more of an adult audience. She tells two stories in this work. One deals with two nineteenth-century mediums, Maggie and Kate Fox, actual historical personages, who believed they could communicate with the dead. Their story begins in 1848 in rural New York when they claim to hear tapping sounds in their house; these come from a ghost killed in the house, they claim. Soon they become famous for their seances, and their renown leads to the spiritualist movement that was so strong in American in the last half of the nineteenth century. Their story is intertwined with that of a reclusive Englishwoman and illustrator, Clara Gill, who rarely ventures out of her father’s house in Rochester, New York. Clara and Maggie become friends, and this relationship makes Clara reexamine her former difficult life in London. Library Journal contributor M. Neville felt that this “endlessly fascinating work should be considered by all fiction readers.”
Noyes writes for a young adult audience in her 2013 novel, Plague in the Mirror, a time-travel fantasy. May, who lives in Vermont, will be a senior in high school next year, but big change has already come her way. Her parents are divorcing and want her to decide whom she will live with her final year of high school. She is given a treat to take her mind off this family disintegration, however, being allowed to travel with her best friend, Liam, and his mother Gwen, a travel writer, to Florence, Italy, where Gwen is working on a new book. May tries hard to forget events back home in Vermont, taking in the sights and sounds of contemporary Florence. Then one night she awakens to discover a young girl, Cristofana, standing at the foot of her bed. The girl so resembles May that she could be her twin. It is with amazement and horror that May discovers that Cristofana is not of her time; rather, she has come through a magical portal from the fourteenth century, when Florence was gripped by the plague, or Black Death. Cristofana would like nothing better than to trade places with May, fearful that she will be among the many victims of the plague. She uses the handsome painter Marco as bait to draw May through the portal and back in time. While May dallies in the past with Marco, Cristofana makes mischief in the present day, which results in a straining of relations with Liam. May must ultimately determine when and where she belongs. A Kirkus Reviews contributor thought that the “gritty reality of pre-Renaissance life comes alive set against the relative ease of modern times.” Writing in Horn Book, Jonathan Hunt similarly noted that “Noyes creates an eerie mood and limns a hauntingly vivid landscape” in this novel that blends “elements of romance, fantasy, and horror.”
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A collection of eleven interlinked short stories, We Are All His Creatures: Tales of P.T. Barnum, the Greatest Showman focuses on the individuals who were part of the legendary entrepreneur’s orbit. Chronologically organized and spanning the years from 1842 to 1891, the tales explore the complicated relationships between Barnum and his family members and performers, offering profiles of Barnum’s often neglected daughters, Caroline and Helen; the ambitious Charlie Stratton, aka General Tom Thumb; and giantess Anna Swan, among other figures. “The stories are rich in detail,” Melissa Kazan wrote in School Library Journal, and a writer in Kirkus Reviews observed that that tales are “united by similar themes: loneliness; the simultaneously empowering and disempowering nature of performing; and the pressures of living in the public eye.”
[END NEW PROSE]
One Kingdom: Our Lives with Animals, a nonfiction work illustrated with photographs by Noyes, examines the relationships between animals and humans in myth, history, and science. A former zookeeper, Noyes raises a number of questions about society’s treatment of animals, including the ethics of captivity. In the words of Horn Book critic Betty Carter, the author “inserts herself into the narrative as she becomes a partner in a freewheeling inquiry with the reader.”
Noyes offers a further nonfiction work illustrated with her own photographs in Encyclopedia of the End: Mysterious Death in Fact, Fancy, Folklore, and More, in which she looks at aspects of death in encyclopedic entries. “Chock-full of fascinating facts, this is an alphabetically arranged compendium of enthralling yet easy-to-understand entries,” noted School Library Journal reviewer Kelly McGorray. Similarly, a Publishers Weekly reviewer felt that this “stylish A-to-Z encounter with all things related to death and dying shows Noyes … at her liveliest.”
In Ten Days a Madwoman, Noyes introduces young readers to one of the earliest, and most famous, female media personalities. “I first encountered Bly in my friend Matt Phelan’s graphic novel Around the World, a lively chronicle of three epic circumnavigations. Already a star reporter for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World,” Noyes said in an interview with Deborah Kalb in Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb. “Bly beat the record of Jules Verne’s 1873 novel Around the World in Eighty Days and became, for a time, the most famous woman on the globe she’d just girdled. And she was only twenty-four. But in the end it was the lesser-known story of her hungry beginnings that drew me—and her knack for turning disadvantage to her advantage.”
The author “sets Bly’s life and career in context,” stated a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “especially with regard to limitations on women and condescending attitudes toward their abilities.” “Nellie’s grit and daring nature inspired other women to copy her stunt reporting ways,” wrote Laura Panter in Voice of Youth Advocates, “opening the field to aspiring women reporters.” “Noyes’s thoroughly researched account,” declared a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “… offers a well-rounded look at a self-possessed women who was nothing if not resilient.”
Noyes tells the story of magician Harry Houdini’s quest to debunk the popular practice of spiritualism in The Magician and the Spirits: Harry Houdini and the Curious Pastime of Communicating with the Dead. Houdini was at first ideologically opposed to the idea of communication with the dead. “After his mother died,” explained Booklist reviewer Sarah Hunter, “Houdini wanted to believe in the possibility of contact from beyond the grave.” As a professional magician, however, he understood the variety of tricks that were used by fraudulent mediums to trick their gullible clients. As Noyes told Elissa Gershowitz and Katie Bircher in an interview appearing in Horn Book. “He and his wife Bess even did a brief stint as fraudulent spirit mediums, so it was easy for him to spot the tricks of the trade.” In the process, however, Houdini alienated some of spiritualism’s most fervent supporters. “Noyes’ engaging narrative,” stated a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “explores how Houdini’s public crusade to expose spiritualism as bunk and mediums as frauds strained his relationship with Conan Doyle.” Writing in Horn Book, Betty Carter found “chilling” The Magician and the Spirits‘s “conclusion that humans, no matter how smart or educated, will, despite scientific evidence, believe in those fictions they wish to.”
[NEW PROSE]
In Tooth and Claw, Noyes provides “a fresh gander at the beginnings of dino-mania,” according to a Kirkus Reviews writer. Chronicling events from the mid-nineteenth century, the volume centers on the relationship between prominent American paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, former colleagues turned bitter enemies. With the discovery of a trove of dinosaur bones in the American West, the two men engaged in a very public and oftentimes scandal-laced competition to acquire fossils. Writing in School Library Journal, Kelly Kingrey-Edwards described Tooth and Claw as “an exciting retelling of the passionate rivalry between two researchers, and the dinosaurs that ignited their intellectual labors and fueled their conflict.” Booklist reviewer Kathleen McBroom applauded the book’s “accessible, engaging style, deftly integrating historical events …, sidebars, and period illustrations.”
[END NEW PROSE]
Noyes once remarked: “The poet Marianne Moore argued that good poetry should present ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them.’ This pretty much sums up my ideas about writing for kids. I love the interplay of the real and the fantastic, the way these worlds, for many of us, are constantly overlapping.
“I’m an avid student of the craft of writing, the particulars of language and imagery, and I try to think like a poet when I can, with my senses. But I’m always drawn back to the universal, too—the stuff of history, myth, and legend—the storyteller’s toolbox. I love supernatural tales and fairy tales and never tire of watching them transmogrify, of listening as new voices reinvent them. Many of the projects I’m working on retell old tales or try to view history—whether seventeenth-century Holland, imperial China, or the American landscapes of the U.S. Civil War and the Great Depression—through a new or unusual lens. I also think a lot about character. Most of my stories, even the fanciful ones, are (for better or worse) less about what happens than about whom it happens to and why. Even my photos strive, however simply, for a raw emotional connection of some kind, though their subject is more often animal than human.
“Apart from family and friends, reading and writing have been the great gifts of my life. I’m so grateful for the chance to help pass those gifts along to kids.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, October 15, 2001, Marta Segal, review of It’s Vladimir!, p. 401; October 15, 2004, Jennifer Mattson, review of Gothic! Ten Original Dark Tales, p. 404; November 1, 2004, Gillian Engberg, review of Hana in the Time of the Tulips, p. 498; October 15, 2004, Kristine Huntley, review of Angel and Apostle, p. 31; October 15, 2006, Ed Sullivan, review of One Kingdom: Our Lives with Animals, p. 38; March 15, 2007, Hazel Rochman, review of When I Met the Wolf Girls, p. 47; May 15, 2007, Debbie Carton, review of The Restless Dead: Ten Original Stories of the Supernatural, p. 54; November 15, 2007, Gillian Engberg, review of Red Butterfly: How a Princess Smuggled the Secret of Silk out of China, p. 50; September 1, 2008, Cindy Dobrez, review of The Ghosts of Kerfol, p. 96; April 15, 2009, Ian Chipman, review of Sideshow: Ten Original Tales of Freaks, Illusionists, and Other Matters Odd and Magical, p. 38; April 15, 2009, Patricia Austin, review of Prudence and Moxie: A Tale of Mismatched Friends, p. 48; July 1, 2009, Hazel Rochman, review of African Acrostics: A Word in Edgeways, p. 58; December 14, 2015, Carolyn Phelan, review of Ten Days a Madwoman: The Daring Life and Turbulent Times of the Original “Girl” Reporter, Nellie Bly, p. 41; June, 2017, Sarah Hunter, review of The Magician and the Spirits: Harry Houdini and the Curious Pastime of Communicating with the Dead, p. 82; March 1, 2019, Kathleen McBroom, review of Tooth and Claw: The Dinosaur Wars, p. 46.
Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, March, 2020, Elizabeth Bush, review of We Are All His Creatures: Tales of P. T. Barnum, the Greatest Showman, p. 315.
Horn Book, November-December, 2004, Lauren Adams, review of Gothic!, p. 714; September-October, 2006, Betty Carter, review of One Kingdom, p. 609; May-June, 2007, Elissa Gershowitz, review of When I Met the Wolf Girls, p. 270; September-October, 2008, Jonathan Hunt, review of The Ghosts of Kerfol, p. 593; September-October, 2009, Lauren Adams, review of Sideshow, p. 570; July-August, 2013, Jonathan Hunt, review of Plague in the Mirror, p. 140; October 11, 2017, Elissa Gershowitz and Katie Bircher, “Five Questions for Deborah Noyes”; November-December, 2017, Betty Carter, review of The Magician and the Spirits, p. 124; September-October, 2019, Betty Carter, review of Tooth and Claw, p. 117.
Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2004, review of Gothic!, p. 871; September 15, 2004, review of Hana in the Time of the Tulips, p. 197; April 15, 2007, review of When I Met the Wolf Girls; August 1, 2007, review of The Restless Dead; October 1, 2007, review of Red Butterfly; July 15, 2008, review of The Ghosts of Kerfol; March 1, 2009, review of Prudence and Moxie; June 15, 2009, review of African Acrostics; June 15, 2009, review of Sideshow; May 1, 2013, review of Plague in the Mirror; November 15, 2015, review of Ten Days a Madwoman; June 1, 2017, review of The Magician and the Spirits; February 1, 2019, review of Tooth and Claw; January 15, 2020, review of We Are All His Creatures.
Kliatt, January, 2007, Joseph DeMarco, review of Gothic!, p. 28.
Library Journal, October 15, 2005, Beth E. Andersen, review of Angel and Apostle, p. 47; May 1, 2010, M. Neville, review of Captivity, p. 69.
Publishers Weekly, November 22, 2004, review of Hana in the Time of the Tulips, p. 60; August 22, 2005, review of Angel and Apostle, p. 36; November 19, 2007, review of Red Butterfly, p. 56; July 21, 2008, review of The Ghosts of Kerfol, p. 161; November 17, 2008, review of Encyclopedia of the End: Mysterious Death in Fact, Fancy, Folklore, and More, p. 59; March 23, 2009, review of Prudence and Moxie, p. 59; March 29, 2010, review of Captivity, p. 36; November 23, 2015, review of Ten Days a Madwoman, p. 71.
School Library Journal, October, 2001, Patti Gonzales, review of It’s Vladimir!, p. 127; October, 2004, Kathy Krasniewicz, review of Hana in the Time of the Tulips, p. 126; November, 2006, Janet S. Thompson, review of One Kingdom, p. 163; June, 2007, Marianne Saccardi, review of When I Met the Wolf Girls, p. 156; September, 2007, Anthony C. Doyle, review of The Restless Dead, p. 204; December, 2007, Margaret Bush, review of Red Butterfly, p. 140; December, 2008, Jake Pettit, review of The Ghosts of Kerfol, p. 134; March, 2009, Kelly McGorray, review of Encyclopedia of the End, p. 166; April, 2009, Meg Smith, review of Prudence and Moxie, p. 114; June, 2009, Susan Scheps, review of African Acrostics, p. 143; July, 2009, Leah Krippner, review of Sideshow, p. 89; July, 2013, Kathy Kirchoefer, review of Plague in the Mirror, p. 99; December, 2015, Jennifer Prince, review of Ten Days a Madwoman, p. 145; July, 2017, Magdalena Teske, review of The Magician and the Spirits, p. 108; March, 2019, Kelly Kingrey-Edwards, review of Tooth and Claw, p. 133; February, 2020, Melissa Kazan, review of We Are All His Creatures, p. 74.
Voice of Youth Advocates, February, 2016, Laura Panter, review of Ten Days a Madwoman, p. 80.
ONLINE
Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb, http://deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com/ (March 10, 2017), Deborah Kalb, “Q&A with Deborah Noyes.”
Cynsations blog, http://cynthialeitichsmith.blogspot.com/ (October 4, 2006), Cynthia Leitich Smith, interview with Noyes.
Deborah Noyes website, http://deborahnoyes.com (July 1, 2020).
History Detectives blog, http://historydetectives.nyhistory.org/ (April 17, 2017), Rachel Walman, interview with Noyes; (September 14, 2018), Caitlin O’Keefe, interview with Noyes.
Deborah Noyes is the author of numerous books for children and adults, including the young adult short story collection The Ghosts of Kerfol and the young adult novel Plague in the Mirror. She lives in western Massachusetts.
Deb Noyes writes adult historical fiction, young adult novels and nonfiction, and children's books, and is an editor and photographer. Born in California, she has lived most of her adult life in Massachusetts, working all manner of day jobs to support the writing habit -- from bartender and book reviewer to children's book editor and zookeeper. She's the only person she knows who's been bitten by a dwarf lemur.
Deborah Noyes is the author of nonfiction and fiction for young readers and adults, including Encyclopedia of the End: Mysterious Death in Fact, Fancy, Folklore, and More,One Kingdom: Our Lives with Animals, and The Ghosts of Kerfol. She has also compiled and edited the short story anthologies Gothic!, The Restless Dead, and Sideshow. She would like to slide down bannisters for a living, but writing is the next best thing.
Deb writes for adults and children, and is also an editor and photographer.
Her short fiction and reviews have appeared in Threepenny Review, The Boston Sunday Globe, Seventeen, Washington Post Book World, The Chicago Sun-Times, Cicada, San Francisco Chronicle, Bloomsbury Review, and other publications.
Her photography has been featured in the Boston Art Commission's Public Art Walk brochure/website, The Vermont Center for Photography, The Griffin Museum of Photography, The Sun: A Magazine of Ideas, and several of her own books.
Deb earned a B.A. in English from the University of Massachusetts and an MFA in Writing from Vermont College. She has taught writing and literature at Emerson College and Western New England College, and was a Visiting Writer in Lesley University's MFA in Writing for Young People program.
She's a regular faculty presenter at retreats and conferences, as both author and editor, including Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) weekends in Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Oklahoma, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin as well as events for the Harvard Museum of Natural History, Vermont College, Big Sur Writers Workshop, the Women's National Book Association (WNBA), the Texas Book Festival, the Burlington Book Festival, the Salem Book Festival, Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), and others. In 2007, Deb was honored as one of the Boston Public Library's Literary Lights for Children.
Born in California, Deb spent her early years as a "military brat," living also in Maryland, Virginia, and Massachusetts. Over the years she's worked all manner of day jobs to support the writing habit -- from bartender and book reviewer to children's book editor and zookeeper. She's proud to report she's the only person she knows who's been bitten by a dwarf lemur.
"Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey were my idols growing up, and if I had another life to live (I imagine it often, this parallel life), I'd be a field biologist or trek around photographing birds for National Geographic. I wanted rugged adventure, a wild and rambling, get-dirty sort of life, but for a lot of years I ended up in a fairly settled way instead, raising a family and writing ghost stories in my pajamas. Nature and restlessness cropped up often in my writing as favorite themes though, and reading and writing continue to be the adventure of a lifetime."
Deb lives in Western Massachusetts.
Deborah Noyes
As a child
I was born in California, but we moved a lot when I was a kid. Changing neighborhoods and schools was a challenge, but a nomadic life suited me. The rangier education appealed to my curiosity and sense of adventure. While school knowledge often fit together like a puzzle of mismatched pieces, I learned to pursue my own interests, reading greedily on my own: historical fiction with its solid (exotic, to me!) sense of place and time; fairy and weird tales; folklore, myths, and legends; high fantasy; books about animals and animal behavior; ghost stories.
As an adult
I still read all that, along with histories of whatever odd subject has my fancy: silk, tulips, honey, death, royalty, feral children, the circus… but I live a more settled life in Massachusetts now with my own family. But I travel whenever I can, most recently to Namibia, and rarely write at home, roaming instead with my laptop from coffee shop to coffee shop.
As an artist
My restless early life set the stage for the kind of writer I am now. I’ve been lucky to publish a wide range of books — from picture books and creative nonfiction to YA and adult historical fiction — and to work as an editor/anthologist and photographer. Photography started as a hobby, but I have a habit of corralling my hobbies into my work so I have the excuse to play more. Animals are my favorite photographic subjects and turn up all the time in my writing too. In THE GHOSTS OF KERFOL, they even haunt a house....
Things you didn't know about Deborah Noyes
Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey were my idols growing up
I was a zookeeper for a year, caring for snow monkeys, an anaconda, Madagascar hissing cockroaches, and many others. I’m the only person I know who’s been bitten by a dwarf lemur.
I’ve also worked for the railroad, taught poetry to police officers, shined shoes in a tuxedo shop, and tended bar
We have a Jack Russell terrier named Molly and a cranky marmalade cat named Moe (who avoid being in the same room)
Olives are my favorite food
I love old things: photographs, Harry Houdini posters, ballads
Music is my joy. I especially love listening on long drives.
My one regret is that I never learned an instrument as a child. So I’m teaching myself to play piano, though I can’t seem to keep the notes straight.
I live in the city but in the suburban neighborhood nearby where I hike with my dog, I’ve seen coyotes, foxes, owls, deer, herons, and hawks. This makes me happier than anything.
I hope to live in an apple orchard someday and raise bees
NOYES, Deborah. Tooth and Claw: The Dinosaur Wars of Cope and Marsh. 160p. further reading, notes, websites. Viking. Apr. 2019. Tr $18.99. ISBN 9780425289846.
Gr 7 Up--The conflict between two pioneering 19th-century scientists provides a framework for detailing the burgeoning scientific fields of evolutionary theory and paleontology in this accessible history for younger readers. Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh came to their professional scientific careers in the wake of the U.S. Civil War from very distinct backgrounds and achieved prominence through different means, but they began work as contemporaries and affable colleagues and ended as bitter enemies. Noyes details Marsh and Cope's individual accomplishments, their feud and its repercussions, contemporary developments in the scientific community that impacted their work, and the popular interest in science that supported their research and gave an audience to their dispute. The discovery of troves of pre-historic bones in the opening. American West provided an apt landscape upon which Marsh and Cope could act out their resentments toward each other, use the media to shape the public's understanding of dinosaurs and science as a discipline, and outline the direction of paleontology for generations to come. Detailed sidebars and insets give the history and science behind Cope and Marsh's work and the ways that the pair have influenced paleontology and scientific inquiry today. VERDICT An exciting retelling of the passionate rivalry between two researchers, and the dinosaurs that ignited their intellectual labors and fueled their conflict. Recommended for middle and high school nonfiction collections.--Kelly Kingrey-Edwards, Blinn Junior College, Brenham, TX
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 8th Edition APA 6th Edition Chicago 17th Edition
Kingrey-Edwards, Kelly. "NOYES, Deborah. Tooth and Claw: The Dinosaur Wars of Cope and Marsh." School Library Journal, vol. 65, no. 2, Mar. 2019, p. 133. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A576210412/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=dd268898. Accessed 2 Mar. 2020.
Tooth & Claw: The Dinosaur Wars
by Deborah Noyes
Middle School Viking 152 pp.
4/19 978-0-425-28984-6 $18.99
Noyes takes readers back to the mid-nineteenth century, when much of the world's population believed that the Earth was formed in seven days just a few thousand years previously, and that the then-contemporary animals had always existed. Paleontologists, just creating their discipline, began to find flaws in those beliefs as they unearthed giant fossilized bones, bones that captured the public's imagination. As the demand grew for more and more information that would explain the fossils and (not incidentally) validate Darwin's findings, scientists clamored to provide it. In America a frenzy to acquire fossils erupted, primarily defined by two early paleontologists seemingly motivated more by selfish desires than altruistic efforts to set the natural history record straight. These two men, Edward Cope and Othniel Marsh, competed for bones, money, and recognition, a competition that resulted in shady deals, reputational slights, and, ironically, a public feud that ultimately became more famous than their individual scientific contributions. By providing alternate chapters for each, Noyes reinforces their animosity by showing first one side and then the other, allowing readers to participate in the volley of their arguments. The deep green used for the informational sidebars, fore edges, and chapter dividers and some of the type suggests an appropriately primordial atmosphere. Appended with source notes, a list of fossil collections in the U.S., a bibliography, and an index.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 The Horn Book, Inc.. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Sources, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.hbook.com/magazine/default.asp
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Carter, Betty. "Tooth & Claw: The Dinosaur Wars." The Horn Book Magazine, vol. 95, no. 5, Sept.-Oct. 2019, p. 117. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A610419096/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2d7dead7. Accessed 2 Mar. 2020.
NOYES, Deborah. We Are All His Creatures: Tales of P. T. Barnum, the Greatest Showman. 288p. Candlewick. Mar. 2020. Tr $17.99. ISBN 9780763659813.
Gr 7 Up--This collection of connected short stories is a look into the behind-the-scenes life of P.T. Barnum, focusing on his family and the "living curiosities" who performed for him. The chronologically organized vignettes paint a picture of a profit-driven opportunist who capitalized on the imagination of his inner child and the public's fascination with the eccentric until Barnum's death at age 80. The stories are rich in detail and place the reader in the mid-1800s, when industry regulations were few (Barnum's American Museum burned down more than once) and high society was often unabashedly captivated by other people's misfortunes. The most affecting tales are those that involve Barnum's daughters and how they each adjusted to being the progeny of a famous and unconventional figure. Noyes follows them from childhood through adulthood and deftly ties their narratives together in the final chapter. While Barnum has been criticized for exploiting his performers, that issue is not explored significantly in the stories. As these accounts are fictionalized, readers are left to decide for themselves how much truth each piece holds. VERDICT An entertaining, absorbing look at the prominent figures in Barnum's life that will appeal to his fans and history buffs in general. Recommended.--Melissa Kazan, Horace Mann School, NY
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Kazan, Melissa. "NOYES, Deborah. We Are All His Creatures: Tales of P.T. Barnum, the Greatest Showman." School Library Journal, vol. 66, no. 2, Feb. 2020, p. 74. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A613048827/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5eb8a8b4. Accessed 2 Mar. 2020.
Noyes, Deborah WE ARE ALL HIS CREATURES Candlewick (Young Adult Fiction) $17.99 3, 10 ISBN: 978-0-7636-5981-3
Noyes (Tooth and Claw, 2019, etc.) explores P.T. Barnum's career from the perspectives of his family members, performers, and acquaintances.
Barnum, the "Prince of Humbug," rose to fame by exhibiting--and exploiting--a collection of human and animal "wonders." But here, Jumbo the elephant and the Fejee mermaid aren't the showman's only "creatures." In 11 intertwined, third-person stories spanning from 1842 to 1891, the author imagines the perspectives of those in Barnum's narcissistic shadow--from his belittled, overwhelmed wives and overlooked daughters to such celebrated performers as the little person Charlie Stratton, aka General Tom Thumb, who pays for his fame by losing his identity. The disparate cast is united by similar themes: loneliness; the simultaneously empowering and disempowering nature of performing; and the pressures of living in the public eye. Though the stories create a vivid, dark impression of Barnum's personality, many other characters' development is shallow and disjointed. Further details of characters' lives are scattered among other characters' stories, and keeping track of the crowded cast across a multigenerational time span is an occasionally taxing, ultimately underwhelming exercise. Several characters' fates are rather abruptly summarized, and expository prose and dialogue dull poignant emotions and backstories. A slightly supernatural plot thread is left dangling. Most characters appear to be white. Archival photographs introduce each story.
An earnest but unfocused glimpse behind the curtain of Barnum's career. (author's note, image credits) (Historical fiction. 13-18)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Noyes, Deborah: WE ARE ALL HIS CREATURES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2020. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A611140172/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3f4f0315. Accessed 2 Mar. 2020.