SATA

• The Apprentices G.P. Putnam's Sons (New York, NY), 2013
• The After-Room G.P. Putnam's Sons (New York, NY), 2015
• Devotion: A Rat Story ( novella) Riverhead Books (New York, NY), 2015
• Do Not Become Alarmed Riverhead Books (New York, NY), 2017
• The Octopus Escapes ( picture book) G.P. Putnam's Sons (New York, NY), 2021

1. The octopus escapes LCCN 2020034122 Type of material Book Personal name Meloy, Maile, author. Main title The octopus escapes / Maile Meloy ; illustrated Felicita Sala. Published/Produced New York : G.P. Putnam's Sons, [2021] Projected pub date 1111 Description pages cm ISBN 9781984812698 (hardcover) (kindle edition) (epub) CALL NUMBER PZ7.M516354 Oc 2021 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. Picnic at Hanging Rock LCCN 2017020324 Type of material Book Personal name Lindsay, Joan Weigall, Lady, author. Main title Picnic at Hanging Rock / Joan Lindsay ; foreword by Maile Meloy. Published/Produced New York : Penguin Books, 2017. ©1967 Description xi, 204 pages ; 20 cm. ISBN 9780143132059 (softcover) CALL NUMBER PR9619.3.L49 P53 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 3. Do not become alarmed : a novel LCCN 2016051263 Type of material Book Personal name Meloy, Maile, author. Main title Do not become alarmed : a novel / Maile Meloy. Published/Produced New York : Riverhead Books, 2017. Description 342 pages ; 24 cm ISBN 9780735216525 (hardback) 9780735216532 (paperback) 9780735219403 (international edition) CALL NUMBER PS3613.E46 D6 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 4. Devotion : a rat story LCCN 2014504284 Type of material Book Personal name Meloy, Maile, author. Main title Devotion : a rat story / Maile Maloy. Edition First Riverhead edition. Published/Produced New York : Riverhead Books, 2015. ©2013 Description 97 pages ; 11 cm ISBN 9781594634598 (hbk.) 1594634599 (hbk.) Links Contributor biographical information https://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1612/2014504284-b.html Publisher description https://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1612/2014504284-d.html Sample text https://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1612/2014504284-s.html CALL NUMBER PS3613.E46 D48 2015 FT MEADE SpecMat/Mini Copy 1 Request in Science/Business Reading Room only - STORED OFFSITE 5. The After-room LCCN 2014046252 Type of material Book Personal name Meloy, Maile, author. Main title The After-room / Maile Meloy ; with illustrations by Ian Schoenherr. Published/Produced New York, NY : G.P. Putnam's Sons, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA), [2015] Description 412 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm. ISBN 9780399175442 CALL NUMBER PZ7.M516354 Af 2015 LANDOVR Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 6. The apprentices LCCN 2012048715 Type of material Book Personal name Meloy, Maile. Main title The apprentices / Maile Meloy ; illustrated by Ian Schoenherr. Published/Produced New York : G. P. Putnam's Sons, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., [2013] Description 407 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9780399162459 (hardback) CALL NUMBER PZ7.M516354 App 2013 LANDOVR Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Maile Meloy website - https://www.mailemeloy.com/

  QUOTE: I like going back and forth between the two. It's been great meeting so many middle schoolers. Kids are much more intense and focused readers than grown-ups are
  ABOUT MAILE MELOY
  Maile Meloy is the author of the novels Liars and Saints, A Family Daughter, and Do Not Become Alarmed, and the story collections Half in Love and Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, which was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by the New York Times Book Review and one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times and Amazon.com. She has also written a trilogy of novels for young readers, beginning with The Apothecary, which was a New York Times bestseller and won the E.B. White Award. Meloy’s short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, and Best American Short Stories, and on This American Life and Selected Shorts. She has received The Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two California Book Awards, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2007, she was chosen as one of Granta’s 21 Best Young American Novelists. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Slate, Sunset, and O, and she wrote for the series The Society on Netflix.

  Maile is represented by Amanda Urban at ICM (literary), and by Clifford Murray at Management 360 (TV and film).

  How to Pronounce “Maile”

  A Biography for Kids’ Events

  ABOUT MAILE MELOY
  Maile Meloy grew up in Helena, Montana, and was always a reader. She was an English major in college, and then worked as a river ranger in Utah, and on a political campaign in Montana. When she moved to Los Angeles, she taught swimming lessons and then became a development assistant at Disney Direct-to-Video Animation. She played on the U.S. women’s kayak polo team for four years. She writes short stories and essays, and has published award-winning books of fiction for adults. Her first novel for kids, the New York Times bestseller The Apothecary, combines historical fiction and fantasy and won the E.B. White Read-Aloud Award and the California Book Awards Gold Medal. The Apprentices picks up where The Apothecary left off, and The After-Room is the trilogy’s finale.

  How to pronounce “Maile”

  Maile on writing kids’ books

  The Apothecary series is illustrated by Ian Schoenherr

  Return to the standard biography

  FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

  How do you pronounce your name?
  Maile is pronounced MY-lee. It’s Hawaiian.
  A recording and explanation
  A short biography

  How do you write for kids if you don’t have them?
  I wrote about that for The New York Times, here.

  Do you like writing short stories or novels better?
  I like going back and forth between the two. It’s like the difference between a long marriage and dating, and there are advantages to each. With a novel, you know you have the book there to work on every morning. With stories, you have new characters and fresh situations. (Although some of my stories have taken me as long as the novels, as I’ve put them aside and picked them up again.) Some of the stories in Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It were written (or started) before and between the novels, and some after.

  Do you like writing for kids or adults better?
  I like going back and forth between the two. It's been great meeting so many middle schoolers. Kids are much more intense and focused readers than grown-ups are.

  Do you outline your novels and stories before you begin?
  No—I wish I could. It might be more efficient. I figure the story out as I go along, and then revise heavily when I know what it is. The story “O Tannenbaum,” in Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, started with the idea of a family out cutting down a Christmas tree, and choosing one that’s crowding another tree, so that the tree left behind would have room to grow. We used to do that, when I was growing up in Montana, and it seemed like a promising idea, but I didn’t have anything more in mind than that. The hitchhikers showed up for me as they do in the story, under a tree in the snow. And then I have to figure out what to do with them, why they’re there.

  When did you decide to write A Family Daughter? Were you planning it when you wrote Liars and Saints?
  I wrote Liars and Saints first, with no thought of writing another novel about the Santerre family. I really thought I was finished with them. It wasn’t until after Liars and Saints came out that I started thinking about writing a book about someone who’s written a novel, and about the way people wonder what’s true in it. Then it seemed interesting to have one of the secret-keeping Santerres write one, so that A Family Daughter would seem to be the bigger, messier, less-streamlined source material from which Liars and Saints emerged.

  Everything I’d written until then had been very straightforwardly realistic, and this new novel would have a meta-fictional aspect to it, but only in relation to the other book. A Family Daughter also had to work on its own, as a story with its own plot, if you hadn’t read Liars and Saints. The mental exercise of doing both things at once seemed interesting and entertaining to me, and you have to find things that are interesting and entertaining to you, if you’re going to plug away at a novel.

  I think the best way to read the two novels together is to let a little time pass—enough time to read another book—in between.

  What’s The Apothecary series about?
  The Apothecary is a cold war spy novel with kids and magic, but a kind of magic that’s more like science: it has to be learned. The book is set in 1952, and it’s about a girl, Janie Scott, whose parents are on the Hollywood blacklist, so they have to move to England to work. In London, which is still reeling from the war, Janie meets a mysterious apothecary and his defiant son, Benjamin, and gets drawn into their world. It’s about a boy confronting his destiny, and a girl finding a new life, and it’s set in the atmosphere of fear and anxiety of the early fifties, of “Duck and Cover” bomb drills and a mounting nuclear threat.

  The second book is called The Apprentices, and it begins with Janie in boarding school in New Hampshire, trying to work on her own experiment and not knowing where Benjamin is. The After-Room picks up where The Apprentices leaves off, and is set in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the South China Sea, and in Rome. All three novels are beautifully illustrated by Ian Schoenherr.

• BookPage - https://bookpage.com/interviews/8943-maile-meloy-childrens#.YQ_CeogzbIU

  INTERVIEWS

  Maile Meloy
  Where magic and science meet
  BookPage interview by Linda M. Castellitto

  June 2013

  Maile Meloy’s middle grade books mix adventure with historical fiction, scientific curiosity and a hefty dose of thrilling, mysterious magic. They also feature extensive artwork that helps to tell the story, so Meloy’s fans won’t be surprised to learn that she considers herself a visual thinker.

  In fact, Meloy says in a call from her Los Angeles home, it was her habit of using clip art to organize chapters that sparked the idea for publishing the books as illustrated novels. Her middle grade debut, The Apothecary, came about after two screenwriter friends told her their idea for “a movie about a magical apothecary, set during the Cold War.” They eventually decided it should be done as a novel first, with Meloy as the writer. “They provided a beginning and some general ideas. It was fantastic to have that push. . . . And part of the reason why I used art to organize it was because they’re such visual thinkers, too. Over time, it became a great way to make sure I had the right focus, so I’d make sure I had a title and image to go with each chapter.”

  The illustrations in her books certainly enhance the story, such as when she wants to “build suspense, or illustrate a samovar or Samoyed dog.” Ian Schoenherr’s artwork is detailed and vibrant, achieving whimsy without being cutesy. Even better, his line work evokes depth and darkness when something scary or sad looms, and it’s just plain fun to turn a page and encounter, say, giant frogs’ eyes calmly contemplating the reader.

  The magic in her books, of course, lends itself well to fantastical artwork, and it also provides her characters with the adventure of their lives. After the events of The Apothecary, Janie, Benjamin and Pip have been scattered to the far corners of the world at the beginning of The Apprentices. The year is 1954, two years since they’ve all been together. They’re all dealing with often exciting, sometimes disturbing new realities: Janie has returned to America, where she’s diving into the intellectual challenges at a New England boarding school . . . but a jealous roommate and her sinister father just might upend everything. Benjamin and his father are working together in the midst of war in the Vietnam jungle, and Pip is swanning about Europe enjoying his new TV-star status.

  Despite their geographical separation (and lots of hazy memories), they find new, strange ways to communicate and eventually start making their way back to each other as they become embroiled in a race against time to maintain world peace (and perhaps foil a few bad guys along the way). Readers will pick up some fascinating historical information, too, and they’ll be intrigued to encounter kids who sometimes know more than adults, scientists who believe in magic and birds that might not be just birds.

  Meloy, who has also published four books for adults, all critically lauded, says she didn’t have to make a concerted effort to change her writing for younger readers. “I did say to myself at one point, I have the Invasion of Nanking in a children’s book—what am I doing?” she says with a laugh. “But I feel like kids do deal with big issues, so that was really the only thing where I decided to tone down the description a bit.” She explains that Janie, who narrates the books, “is writing as an adult, and everything is how she experienced it at 14, so that determined the register, and she can explain things she knows now but didn’t know at 14. Plus, she’s an intelligent kid.”

  This isn’t the first time Meloy has worked on stories for children. After graduating from Harvard in the mid-1990s, she moved out to L.A. and worked in what she describes as a “funny little corner of Disney, where they did direct-to-DVD animation of things like sequels to big movies, and fairy-tale-based projects. It was great storytelling training . . . really smart people telling universal stories about love and loss and home.”

  Considering her successful career thus far, it’s safe to say she took that training to heart. The Apothecary and The Apprentices have at their heart a group of characters that readers care deeply about, judging by the wonderful letters Meloy’s young fans send her. She says, “You don’t get that when writing books for adults. You don’t get letters with illustrations in the margins, or pleas for a sequel. So that’s really fun.”

  Meloy also loves that the covers for both books are gender neutral. “When writing novels for grown-ups, I’d get a cover design and say that no guy will ever pick up this book, and they’d say men don’t read novels. It made me so sad,”she recalls. “With these books, they’re told by a girl, boys have a major part in it, they’re adventures. . . . I’ve really found a lot of the kids that connect to it are boys.” Mother-daughter book groups are particular fans, too.

  Boys, girls, young, old: If readers loved The Apothecary, they’ll be thrilled to get their hands on The Apprentices—and to learn that Meloy is now writing a third book about Janie and her cohorts. We can’t share too many details, but she did reveal that Book 3 begins soon after Book 2, and there will be plenty of magic. Let the anticipation begin!

• Wikipedia -

  Maile Meloy
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Jump to navigationJump to search
  Maile Meloy
  Born January 1, 1972 (age 49)
  Helena, Montana
  Nationality American
  Alma mater Harvard College, University of California, Irvine
  Genre Fiction
  Notable awards Guggenheim Fellowship (2004)
  Relatives Colin Meloy (brother)
  Carson Ellis (sister-in-law)
  Ellen Meloy (aunt)
  Maile Meloy (born January 1, 1972) is an American fiction writer.

  Contents
  1 Early life and education
  2 Career
  3 Personal life
  4 Works
  4.1 Short fiction
  5 References
  6 External links
  6.1 Archival collections
  6.2 Other
  Early life and education
  Born and raised in Helena, Montana, Meloy received a bachelor's degree from Harvard College in 1994 and an MFA from the University of California, Irvine.

  Career
  Meloy won The Paris Review's Aga Khan Prize for Fiction for her story "Aqua Boulevard" in 2001;[1] the PEN/Malamud Award for her first collection of short stories, Half in Love, in 2003;[2] and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004.[3] In 2007, Granta included her on its list of the 21 "Best Young American Novelists."[4][5]

  Her work has appeared in The New Yorker,[6] and she is a frequent contributor to The New York Times.[7]

  Describing how she wrote "Half in Love," Meloy is quoted on the Ploughshares web site as saying, "What I wound up with was a book that was set in different decades, partly in Montana—and those stories were some of the hardest to write, because it's the place I’m closest to—and partly in other places, in London and Paris and Greece. So it had very little temporal or geographical unity, but the characters are all caught between one thing and another, half in love with something or someone, when life deals them something they didn’t expect."[8]

  In 2015, two stories from Meloy's collection Half in Love ("Tome" and "Native Sandstone") and one story from Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It ("Travis, B.") were adapted into the movie Certain Women directed by Kelly Reichardt. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2016 and was released by IFC Films in October 2016. A story from the book was also featured on This American Life's 2016 Christmas episode, read aloud by Meloy.

  Meloy served on the writing staff of the Netflix series "The Society," which premiered in 2019.[9]

  Personal life
  Meloy is the older sister of Colin Meloy, frontman of The Decemberists, solo artist, and author of The Wildwood Chronicles novels Wildwood, Under Wildwood and Wildwood Imperium. Their aunt, the late Ellen Meloy, was also an author.

  Maile Meloy lives in Los Angeles.

  Works
  Half in Love: Stories (2002)
  Liars and Saints (2003)
  A Family Daughter (2006)
  Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It: Stories (2009)
  The Apothecary Series (books)
  The Apothecary (2011)
  The Apprentices (2013)
  The After-Room (2015)
  Do not become alarmed (2017)
  Short fiction
  "Demeter". The New Yorker. Vol. 88 no. 36. November 19, 2012.
  "The Proxy Marriage". The New Yorker. May 21, 2012.

• Skip Prichard - https://www.skipprichard.com/tips-for-aspiring-authors-from-maile-meloy/

  Tips for Aspiring Authors from Maile Meloy
  June 4, 2013 | Uncategorized

  Tips for Aspiring Authors from Maile Meloy
  Maile Meloy grew up in Montana. She’s written award-winning books including novels Liars and Saints, A Family Daughter, and story collections Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, and Half In Love. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Slate, Sunset, O, and The New Yorker.

  Maile is also a friend, and I previously interviewed her in person about the release of her first young readers book, The Apothecary. The sequel, The Apprentices, is coming out in June.

  This is a guest interview post by my daughter. I have also read and enjoyed all of Maile’s books, but these questions are hers.

  Between your first installment (The Apothecary) and the second (The Apprentices), you changed the point of view from first person to third person. What made you change from purely Janie’s point of view to one that switches?Maile Meloy Picture 2

  The Apothecary is narrated by a character named Janie Scott, and it’s the story of what happened to her when she was 14, in 1952. I loved writing in Janie’s voice, and I think it really helped me write the novel. But I’d never written a whole book in first person before, and I found it kind of frustrating after a while. I could only write about things Janie experienced, so she does a lot of eavesdropping. I could never cut away to the villains or include anyone else’s point of view. The other main character is Benjamin Burrows, the apothecary’s son, and I briefly considered writing a second book from his point of view. But the circumstances at the end of The Apothecary determined the form of The Apprentices: everyone is scattered. Benjamin has gone off with his father, and Janie doesn’t know where he is. So I started with Janie in boarding school, in close third person, meaning the narrator says “she” but is basically in her mind. Then I could shift and have chapters where the narrator is in Benjamin’s mind (in the jungle), and Jin Lo’s mind (in China), and Pip’s, and even the apothecary’s. It was very freeing.

  Will there be a third in the series? I hope so!

  Yes! I’m working on it now. It begins not long after The Apprentices ends.

  9780399162459Will you do a book trailer for The Apprentices like you did with The Apothecary?

  That’s a great question—I had to ask my publishers. They hired the very talented people at Crush Creative to make the fantastic trailer for The Apothecary, and they’re planning to update it to use for The Apprentices, too. But there won’t be a separate trailer for The Apprentices, so if anyone wants to make one, please do!

  You were a successful author for adults long before writing for young readers. What made you decide to write for young adults?

  My friends the filmmakers Mark Levin and Jennifer Flackett wanted to make a movie about a mysterious apothecary, set during the cold war, but they thought it should be a novel first and asked me if I wanted to write it. I thought it would be a short experiment—I didn’t know it was going to take over my life. I wouldn’t have written for young adults otherwise, and I’m very indebted to them.

  With chemical potions, inventions, invisibility, and some telepathic elements, you have so many scientific-magical blends. Where do you come up with your ideas?

  Mark and Jen, the filmmakers, wanted the kids to turn into birds and become invisible, so those were givens from the start, and I had to figure out why and how they would do it. Since then, I’ve made a long list of every cool magical transformation or ability that I can think of, and then I see how I might work each one into a story, so that it’s something the characters really need to use. When I went on tour with The Apothecary, I asked kids what kinds of magical elixirs they would want, and they had great ideas. I’ve tried to include the ones that came up a lot.

  3 Writing Tips from Maile
  Read all you can, that’s the really important one. And be curious about the world.
  Write all you can: essays, stories, poems, whatever. Don’t worry about whether it’s good while you’re writing it, just keep going.
  Then let some time pass and go back to read it over, and you’ll see things you want to fix. Time is the great editor.
  How do you develop characters? Do you develop them as you go or do you really sit down and think about or outline them first?

  I develop everything as I go and figure out the characters as I write the story. Who they are is inseparable from what they do and how they respond to what happens. Sometimes things occur to me when I’m taking a walk or doing something else, but mostly I work it out on the page.

  The illustrations by Ian Schoenherr are amazing. How did you find him and how did he capture the plot so perfectly?

  When we first began, the wonderful art director Cecilia Yung asked me what kind of illustrations I wanted. Janie tells the story as something that really happened to her when she was 14, so I wanted the illustrations to be realistic, not stylized or cartoon-like. But I also wanted them to be atmospheric and to work with the magical elements of the book. Cecilia suggested Ian Schoenherr. As soon as I saw an illustration he did based on a 19th-century family photograph, in which he made everyone into pigs, I knew he was the one. And he’s done such an amazing job with the books. He’s always very careful about detail and writes to me asking, “Is it this kind of boat? Is it this kind of RAF knife?” In The Apothecary, I had a character with a wooden peg leg, but Ian painted a perfect, historically accurate, articulated artificial leg, with nails holding up the socks, so I went back and changed the book. His leg was better than mine.

  “
  Encourage your mind to come up with unexpected things, not scold it or shut it down. -Maile Meloy

  TWEET THISSHARE ON FACEBOOK
  Tell me your top three tips for aspiring young authors.

  Read all you can, that’s the really important one. And be curious about the world.
  Write all you can: essays, stories, poems, whatever. Don’t worry about whether it’s good while you’re writing it, just keep going.
  Then let some time pass and go back to read it over, and you’ll see things you want to fix. Time is the great editor.
  As a writer, you not only write but then also go on book tours and do interviews and promote your books. Do you still write every day or do you stop when you’re out promoting titles?

  I wish I could write on the road, but I can’t. I have to stop when I’m promoting a book. That’s why I ask for ideas for magical formulas—I want to take something back with me. When I was at a school talking about The Apothecary, after I’d started the sequel, a girl who’d read the book asked if the character of Jin Lo (a very smart, tough, magical-chemistry expert) was in the new one. I realized she wasn’t yet, so I went home and wrote a Jin Lo chapter. You can see, reading The Apprentices, the point at which I visited that school. It’s like an archaeological dig. But it turned out to be a perfect place to have Jin Lo’s story come in, and she became a major part of the book.P1290725

  What books or other authors have inspired you personally? Growing up, who were your favorite authors?

  I loved Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game, and Madeleine L’Engle’s books, especially the A Wrinkle in Time novels. And the D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, which is all about magical transformation. And the Narnia books. I think Philip Pullman is really wonderful, not just His Dark Materials, but also the Sally Lockhart mystery novels, set in the 19th century, beginning with The Ruby in the Smoke.

  You’re so creative in your writing and plot. What advice would you give to others who want to improve their creativity?

  I think editing and revising are really important, and I do it until the last possible second when they take the book away from me and send it to the printers. But, having said that, I also think it’s important (for your creativity) not to edit or limit or criticize yourself when you’re starting something. Be curious, be inventive, don’t beat up on ideas that don’t seem great, because they can lead you to the great ones. You want to encourage your mind to come up with unexpected things, not scold it or shut it down. It’s like the gardener says in The Apothecary, when he tells the kids they can become birds: you have to allow for the possibilities, and not decide in advance that certain things won’t work. Stay open.

• The Millions - https://themillions.com/2013/10/keep-them-guessing-an-interview-with-maile-meloy.html

  Keep Them Guessing: An Interview with Maile Meloy
  THE MILLIONS INTERVIEWAlexis Coe October 1, 2013 | 10 books mentioned 1 7 min read
  Related Books:
  cover
  cover
  When I was a lowly editorial assistant at Simon & Schuster in 2006, a colleague gave me a galley of Maile Meloy’s forthcoming A Family Daughter, and I was absolutely done for. Within a year, I had exhausted all of her published works.

  Meloy is just ten years my senior, which means I’ve enjoyed an admittedly precious, evolving relationship with her work. Under normal circumstances, she probably couldn’t produce enough to mollify me, but she’s been downright vexing since 2009, when her last adult book, the short story collection, Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, was released. Since then, she’s published a small number of articles and short stories in NPR, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and elsewhere. I won’t pretend that every new offering is her best, but for me, it fills an acute deficiency. It is the sustenance I need while I await her next book.

  cover
  cover
  But the thing is, that book has yet to arrive. Instead, Meloy has made an unexpected foray into middle grade fiction with The Apothecary, a 2011 book about 14-year-olds and a magic book that falls into the hands of Russian spies. In June, the book’s sequel, The Apprentices, was released, and there were rumors of a third book, but no clues on her website.

  In fact, despite being a reader in lockstep with this writer, I have absolutely no idea where she’s going. It seemed time to query the writer herself, and Meloy was kind enough to email with me last week.

  The Millions: The book tour for The Apprentices, the sequel to The Apothecary, is rapidly approaching, and I understand that you’re working on a third installment. Will this be a trilogy, or an ongoing series?

  Maile Meloy: I’m planning to make it a trilogy. But there are so many fourth-in-the-trilogy books out there that it must be tempting. Yesterday a kids’ book club suggested that I write a fourth book that’s the story of The Apothecary from Benjamin’s perspective, rather than Janie’s, and I’m crazy enough to have thought, “Hmm.”

  coverTM: Are you considering it? I can’t help but see a connection between that suggestion and your two adult novels, Liars and Saints and A Family Daughter.

  MM: I thought the same thing. I finished writing Liars and Saints thinking I was done with all the characters in it, and then ended up writing a parallel story about them in A Family Daughter. And I was really taken, this year, with Jane Gardam’s brilliant Old Filth and The Man in the Wooden Hat. They’re both the story of the same marriage, one novel being mostly the husband’s story and one novel the wife’s. I think Old Filth is a masterpiece on its own, but it was the combination of the two, at the end of the second book, that made me burst into tears. I like the idea of novels that aren’t exactly sequels but companion novels, that each stand on their own but complicate the other. And I’ve written a couple of parallel short stories like that. But I don’t think I want to do it with a novel again.

  TM: The Apothecary was your first middle grade novel, and it was also the first time you had written an entire book in the first person. In The Apprentices, you return to the third person, and the main characters, Janie Scott and Benjamin Burrows, are now far flung. Did their distance necessitate the shift, or do you prefer it?

  MM: I loved writing in Janie’s voice, and the sense of reality it gave: that this is the true story of what happened when she was fourteen, in 1952. First person is frustrating, in some ways, because everything had to be filtered through Janie’s experience — overheard or noticed or learned by her. But it was really the distance that dictated the shift. I started with the main characters across the world from each other, so switching to third person was a way to include their scattered perspectives. And it felt instantly comfortable, as it’s the way I’ve written novels before.

  TM: You’ve described writing the first draft of The Apothecary as somewhat freeing, devoid of the kind of rules and expectations you’ve felt as an adult novelist and short story writer. How did the process of writing The Apprentices compare?

  MM: The Apothecary hadn’t come out when I started writing The Apprentices, so I still felt some of that freedom: I didn’t have a sense of what the expectations might be. And I also felt more confident, having done it once. I really love the pacing that writing for kids both requires and allows.

  Then The Apothecary came out while I was still writing the second book, so I was talking to kids, and they would ask if certain characters were in the new book, and I’d go home and make sure they were.

  TM: I imagine many of your middle grade readers come to book signings with their parents, some of whom are familiar with your adult novels and short stories.

  MM: Yes, although sometimes adult readers don’t put it together until they get to the back flap of The Apothecary and realize they’ve read the other books. I’ve also done some mother-daughter book clubs, which I love. The communal family reading that people do now strikes me as very sweet, and one of my goals was to make sure the parents didn’t find it a chore.

  coverTM: Speaking of family, you’re now working in the same medium and genre as your brother, Colin Meloy of the Decemberists. He’s also written a middle grade trilogy, Wildwood: The Wildwood Chronicles. Do you foresee a collaboration?

  MM: Colin has such a beautiful collaboration going already with his wife, Carson Ellis, who illustrates the Wildwood books. I love everything they do. And novel writing is a solitary practice for me, at least so far. I love Will Grayson, Will Grayson, the YA novel John Green and David Levithan wrote together, but I don’t quite understand how they did it.

  TM: How did the essay in Medium last May, “On Playing With Others,” come about?

  MM: That’s funny — that’s about the solitary practice, too. The composer Greg Bolin wrote two short one-act operas based on two of my short stories, and they were being performed together. I wrote an essay about the process, and about how strange it is, when you’re used to sitting by yourself writing fiction, to suddenly have to worry about the availability of opera singers and rehearsal space.

  TM: When did you write the short story, “The Proxy Marriage,” which appeared in the New Yorker in May of 2012?

  MM: I wrote it right before it was published. I needed some distance from The Apprentices to figure out the plot, so I stopped and tried to write a short story — which I wasn’t sure I could do anymore, being used to the pace of novels. And then it was the closest thing to instant gratification I’ve ever had in writing fiction. Usually I revise forever, and then everything takes so long. But the New Yorker is quick, and I’ll probably never have that kind of turnaround from conception to publication again.

  The only thing about “The Proxy Marriage” that wasn’t quick was the digging around in the Montana territorial code to try to find the original source of the law that triggered the story. Montana is the only state that allows for a double proxy wedding, so that neither party has to be present; both can have someone else in their place. My generous father did that digging for me, but we never figured it out. We did find out that he co-sponsored the bill that established the current law, when he was in the Montana legislature in the 1970s, and he’d forgotten about it. I asked him why he thought double proxy weddings were allowed and he said, “Well, why not?” It’s a contract you’re entering into, and if you’re going to allow one proxy there’s no reason not to have two. Which is not to say that Montanans are unromantic, but we’re practical.

  TM: Have you taken similar breaks from the third middle grade novel? Has it worked as well?

  MM: I took an inadvertent break this summer because I spent a lot of time with my family. When I got home, I started reading the unfinished novel draft from the beginning, to get my head back into it and see where I was. I love having a little time away, and the distance it gives you. I could see where the plot was getting away from me, and where things weren’t hanging together. I was so happy adding pages, before, and now I’m so happy cutting them.

  TM: I read everything you write, so when you moved to middle grade novels, I dutifully followed. At first, I found your writing for children to be quite different, but I soon realized that Janie and Benjamin are dealing with a duality that looms large in your adult works. Their lives consist of the normal stuff of childhood, but they’re also contending with simultaneous, albeit extraordinary, realities. Your adult characters often feel as if the lives they’ve lived have had concurrent, imagined ones all along, full of things they long to do but abstain, because the associated risks seemingly promise a chimera will emerge and wreak havoc. It isn’t as if they have regrets they sometimes think about, but rather an ever present temptation.

  MM: It’s always been frustrating to me that to choose a path means giving up all the other possibilities. To have a choice at all is extraordinarily lucky, of course, but you choose a career, a city, a partner, to have kids or not to have kids, and you become a different person than you might have been. Other things fall away. To write a novel in which an extraordinary reality is possible in conjunction with ordinary life, in which people can actually fly away or become invisible (and not just want to do those things metaphorically), was an enormous pleasure.

  TM: In 2011, you told GalleyCat “I have a novel for adults in mind, but I haven’t found my way into it.” Have you progressed on that novel for adults, or another? Can we hope for another short story before 2013 concludes? I must confess, I fear you won’t come back to us.

  MM: Oh, that’s very kind. I have a short story — a real estate horror story — coming out with Byliner in October, just in time for Halloween. And I have a story in xo Orpheus, a really amazing collection of myth retellings that’s out this month. Mine is the Demeter and Persephone myth as a joint custody story (it always struck me as one). The novel from 2011 was a period story. I started doing research for it on the side while working on The Apothecary, and I got too caught up in the real history. It’s always dangerous for me to do too much research in advance; I get overwhelmed by facts and don’t feel as free to make things up. But I’m hoping to forget a lot, and let it settle and ferment, and start again.

• Hazlitt - https://hazlitt.net/feature/tiny-inward-scream-appropriate-response-exposure-interview-maile-meloy

  QUOTE: When I’m really underway and working every day, I get sort of spaced out. I’m revising a novel now, and my brain feels like a computer that has a giant program running: I’m slow and bad at other tasks, like finding a parking spot and not getting lost. And I send myself notes all the time—my brain is working on the book even when I’m not at my desk. But in general, I work everything out while I’m actually sitting at the keyboard. I work in the morning, when my brain feels uncluttered. Forcing myself doesn’t help, but I do try to just be there. Sometimes I think that if I had sat down to work on Wednesday instead of Tuesday, the story might have gone a different way, but of course there’s no way to verify that. I’m kind of haunted by that idea in life, too, by those moments where the path might have been altered."
  ‘A Tiny Inward Scream is the Appropriate Response to Exposure’: An Interview with Maile Meloy
  BY KATHLEEN HALE
  The author on horses as harbingers of death, MFA programs, and how reading is a way to practice being brave.The trick to reading Maile Meloy’s work without having an identity crisis is to revert back to the person you were before you thought you had a novel in you. Before I learned this trick, I’d rise from bed after spending an evening with one of her novels, and I’d sit down in front of my own work in progress—smiling! Because her writing had inspired me to be a better writer!—and then I would run screaming from the computer, because her gripping, economical prose made everything I wrote look gloppy, self-indulgent and sentimental in comparison. (Because it was.) Looking to Meloy’s work for writerly inspiration is like looking to a physics professor to teach you higher-level math if you are a golden retriever.

  Sometimes, there are perfect authors, and I’m being earnest when I say that Maile Meloy is one of them. Her stories remind readers how to simply be an audience, and if you haven’t yet read her work, I am so happy for you, because it means you can start.

  Meloy has written for The New Yorker, among other places, and is the author of two story collections, Half in Love, and Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It, as well as five novels, including Liars and Saints, A Family Daughter, and the best-selling, three-book Apothecary series for middle-grade readers. Recently, Penguin Random House (hi!) released a tiny, adorable, and aesthetically pleasing hardcover edition of Meloy’s story “Devotion,” which involves rat infestations, is very gross, and comes highly recommended, by me.

  Kathleen Hale: “Liliana” has one of the best [first?] sentences in the history of the world: “On a hazy summer afternoon in Los Angeles, while my wife was at work and our children were napping, I answered the ringing doorbell to find my grandmother, two months dead, standing on the stoop.” In general, your short stories start with first sentences that evocatively but economically introduce us to the character, his or her world, the stakes. They read almost like thesis statements. Do you think of them that way? Is the first sentence important to you? Do you write the first sentence first, at the end, or is there no pattern? Do you find that you have the entire story in mind before you start, or have there been instances where the story flows in response to that first line?

  Maile Meloy: Thank you! That’s so nice of you. I do think the first sentence is all-important. It’s often the first thing I write and it doesn’t usually change that much, which is funny because I never know where the story is going to go, but that first sentence has the DNA of the story in it, somehow. Or should. It’s like the seed out of which the story grows.

  Your short stories typically proceed chronologically. Do you write chronologically?

  Mostly. I think of stories in chronological terms: what happens next? I love books that jump all over in time, like Jane Gardam’s Old Filth, but I kind of marvel at the structure, I’m not sure how she does it.

  What is the writing process like for you? Do you walk around for a few months and let one form in your mind before starting? Do you sit down every day with the same routine and force yourself to move ahead? Does it change? What was it like for you this morning?

  When I’m really underway and working every day, I get sort of spaced out. I’m revising a novel now, and my brain feels like a computer that has a giant program running: I’m slow and bad at other tasks, like finding a parking spot and not getting lost. And I send myself notes all the time—my brain is working on the book even when I’m not at my desk.

  But in general, I work everything out while I’m actually sitting at the keyboard. I work in the morning, when my brain feels uncluttered. Forcing myself doesn’t help, but I do try to just be there. Sometimes I think that if I had sat down to work on Wednesday instead of Tuesday, the story might have gone a different way, but of course there’s no way to verify that. I’m kind of haunted by that idea in life, too, by those moments where the path might have been altered.

  This morning I had a list of three things I wanted to add, and I spent the morning tracing the ramifications of them through the book. I’m mostly making things harder on the characters. I tend to want to take care of them too much in the first draft.

  How do you come up with your ideas? And when they occur to you, do you write them down or wait for them to percolate? When you notice a gesture or something else that interests you, do you write it down immediately or see if it sticks? Do you keep a notebook? Do you have a good memory?

  I write myself notes on scraps of paper, or send myself emails from my phone, or write ideas in a sort of journal file on the computer, but those notes don’t always make it into anything. Things kind of ferment in my brain and then if they’re useful they show up.

  Who are your readers? Not your audience, but the readers who read your work before it’s published? What are the traits, in your mind, of a helpful reader? Is brutal honesty always best, or does helpful feedback balance criticism with praise? Are you sensitive about private feedback or inured to criticism by this point? What is the most constructive feedback you can remember receiving, and what story did it help to improve?

  I have a few friends who read things for me, and my husband reads for me, and I have great editors. They’re all very smart and direct, and they all notice different things. I give drafts to them when I don’t know what else to do with it, when it’s as good as I can make it at that moment, and I give one draft to one reader at a time.

  I’m not inured to criticism. I would rather get nothing but checks and stars in the margins, and exclamations of delight. There’s often a moment when you first get notes and it’s slightly painful and the advice all seems wrong. But I say thank you, thank you, and I sit with the notes a day or two and I usually find that they’re all pretty much right.

  I’ve gotten so much constructive feedback that there’s no one best example. It’s like someone looking at your swimming stroke and saying that you’re not kicking at all. That’s awesome news, because now you know what to do, and you can get a lot better and more efficient, right away. If they don’t have any notes, then you just have to swim faster, or write better. And that’s nearly impossible.

  What human behavior (or failing) captivates you most?

  The way people, some people, push away the thing they want most, without knowing they’re doing it. They alienate the people they want to draw close, and can’t seem to help it. I don’t know if I’ve written that much about it, but it’s endlessly fascinating and heartbreaking to me in real life.

  What are you reading right now?

  I just started Helen Oyeyemi’s story collection, What is Not Yours is Not Yours. And I just finished Evicted, by Matthew Desmond, which is incredible, and Our Spoons Came from Woolworths by Barbara Comyns­—I love the New York Review of Books reprints. And I just listened to the audiobook of Villette by Charlotte Brontë, which is much weirder than I expected.

  Would you be willing to throw together a reading list of personally impactful works? Just stuff off the top of your head.

  This is really off the top of my head, just books I’ve loved fairly recently:

  Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke, Her First American by Lore Segal, Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton, Being Mortal by Atul Gawande, The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters, The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro, the Neapolitan books by Elena Ferrante, Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews, The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler, The Clothes They Stood Up In by Alan Bennett, The Uninvited Guests by Sadie Jones, On Writing by Stephen King.

  In what ways did your MFA program change your destiny? Do you consider your experience at UC Irvine essential to your career?

  Everything Geoffrey Wolff told me at UCI shaped me as a writer. He identified my bad habits and brought out my strengths. And he told me I couldn’t be the writer I wanted to be and also be worried about what people thought of me, about being a good girl. I’m trying to live up to his advice all the time. And Michelle Latiolais told me to take two of the stories out of my first collection and start a novel with them, and that became Liars and Saints. I’m forever grateful to them.

  Did you write A Family Daughter with the intention of deconstructing another of your novels? Was it more that you remained attached to those characters, or a bit of both? Or did it just evolve naturally?

  It was the first time I was writing a novel when I’d already had one out. (For complicated and boring publishing reasons, Half in Love didn’t come out until I’d finished Liars and Saints.) So there was this new thing I knew about, when I started A Family Daughter: what it feels like to have a novel out in the world. You’ve spent all this time alone with a book, in your head and on your computer, and then suddenly it’s out in public, and people are asking you questions about what’s real in it. I told a friend of a friend that she didn’t have to read my first novel and she said, “Oh, but we will. And then we’ll think secret thoughts.” The tiny inward scream that is the only appropriate response to exposure like that never really goes away. It seemed like an interesting thing to write about. I already had these secret-keeping characters from Liars and Saints, so I thought, what if one of them writes a novel? And what if A Family Daughter purports to be the bigger, messier, less-streamlined source material from which a novel like Liars and Saints emerged? A Family Daughter also had to work on its own, as a story with its own plot, if you hadn’t read Liars and Saints. The mental exercise of doing both things at once seemed interesting and entertaining to me, but I didn’t plan it beforehand.

  What is the shortest amount of time it has taken you to write a short story? The longest?

  The shortest time has been a few weeks, the longest a few years—not solidly, but returning to the story and taking it apart, trying to make it work.

  Maybe I’m being presumptuous (maybe you grew up with a million horses, and maintained close personal relationships with under water welders) but I feel as if many of your stories required careful research. Do you enjoy research? In what ways can research be an impetus or impediment to the writing process? Are you researching anything now?

  I do research but I try to do it late, to fact-check and add things. I try to get the emotional story, the stuff that happens between people, down first. If I do too much research in advance, I get lost in the facts and the reality of the subject. I feel less free to make things up. So a lot of times in the first draft I’m kind of flying blind.

  Your Apothecary books (incredible!) take place in London. Did you spend a lot of time there while writing? Janie and a lot of your characters live through the decade or so post-WWII. What interests you about that time?

  I had just read a book called Austerity Britain, 1945-1951, which is all contemporary accounts of post-war Britain, and it was like having a time machine to a moment when everything in the world was shifting. The war was won, but it had been so exhausting, and revealed such horrors about the world. Food was still rationed, everything had been bombed, there were no resources with which to rebuild, Europe was a mess, the Soviet allies were getting scary, the Americans were annoying because they hadn’t suffered in the same way England had. And the nuclear threat created this immense, un-addressable fear, so in the States you have “Duck and Cover” and McCarthyism. I love LeCarré novels, that sense of dread and moral murkiness. It seemed possible to translate for middle school readers, who know all about dread.

  Who are some dead writers who have had an impact on your writing?

  F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever, Laurie Colwin, Evelyn Waugh, Stella Gibbons, Nancy Mitford, Merce Rodoreda, Gabriel García Márquez, Madeleine L’Engle, Ellen Raskin.

  Who are some living writers who inspire you?

  Joan Didion, Philip Roth, Elena Ferrante, Cormac McCarthy, Susanna Clarke, Ann Patchett, Peter Orner, Sheila Heti, Jane Gardam, Philip Pullman, Edwidge Danticat, Sarah Waters, Anthony Doerr, Anthony Lane, Anthony Marra, Zoë Heller, Junot Díaz.

  Do you remember the first story you ever wrote? What was it about?

  I wrote one very short story at about fourteen, while on a family vacation. It involved a teen love triangle and a big house party and a discovery and a betrayal, and I wrote it in one sitting. It had nothing to do with the family vacation, which I think was the point. I didn’t write another story until I was twenty-one, when I wrote “Kite Whistler Aquamarine” for the first fiction class I ever took, in my last semester of college. It was about a foal that’s born early in cold weather so its feet freeze, and a lawyer taking her client’s young daughter to pick up her mom, who’s getting out of prison. The story ended up almost intact in Half in Love.

  Do other mediums ever inspire your work? (Television, film, paintings?) If so, which shows, artists, etc., are you most obsessed with?

  Television and films often remind me of big narrative moments that are important, especially with the kids’ books, when I might be caught up in details and reflection. For example: I saw Avatar when I was finishing The Apothecary, and the final fight scene with the villain reminded me that I needed Janie to face off against her nemesis. They needed that one-on-one confrontation. And serialized TV dramas are inspiring and instructive on how to keep a story going and changing. The Sopranos and Breaking Bad and Homeland are such incredible narrative achievements. (And useful if you tend to go too easy on your characters.)

  Looking at paintings, I tend to space out a little. I read the little panels, I want things to be relational, I want narrative even when I’m not supposed to.

  A little about the recurring motifs in your books. Have you spent a lot of time around horses? What is it that intrigues you most about the relationship between humans and horses?

  When my uncle was young and broke, he knew someone who was keeping a racehorse locked up in a trailer, and he talked the guy into selling or giving the horse to him, and he trained it and raced it. Then he had other horses, and we used to go to the track to watch them. I remember sobbing when that first horse died. It’s easy to be sentimental about horses, but humans “break” them and beat them and drug them irresponsibly, and disrupt their social structures. Some people do it in a better way; Natural Horsemanship is beautiful and watching videos of Stacy Westfall free-riding makes me cry, even though I don’t begin to understand the subtleties of what she’s doing. But there was a herd of wild horses in the canyon in Utah where I worked after college, and I found it so moving that there were horses in this country who’d escaped people.

  I rode as a kid in a pretty untrained way. My mom had a really sweet horse when I was three, and my friend and I were riding together bareback in a field and we both just slid off to the ground. The horse came back to see if we were okay. When I was about eleven, another friend and I tied our horses badly, and they got spooked and ran and fell and got their legs scraped up. There are few things in my life I’ve felt as guilty about as that.

  I ride about once a year now, on unfamiliar horses, which is dangerous and also killingly painful for a few days afterward. It’s like surfing or being in the ocean: You have the illusion of control, when really this thing is so much bigger and more powerful than you are, and you can easily die.

  In Half In Love and Devotion you use some very effective, gruesome imagery. (I’m thinking of the face eating, and the colt’s legs falling off as it walked, and the husband dying on the deck after spearing his veins with a paint stick.) Do you have any personal philosophy on when violence works or doesn’t? What’s your opinion as a reader? What about as an author? Have you every thrown away a provocative or haunting scene because it didn’t earn the right to be in the story—and if so, why did it not earn that right?

  I don’t have a philosophy about it. There are things in books and movies that are too scary or horrible or upsetting for me. I can’t really take torture, in books or movies; I get nightmares. But otherwise it’s kind of case by case. The Apothecary has a character who grew up during the Japanese invasion of Nanking. There was one scene in her memory that was too scary and I took it out. But I think it’s okay to have a version of a terrible historical event in the book. Kids understand that the world is dangerous and unfair. Reading is one of the ways you deal with that, and practice being brave.

• FICTION WRITERS REVIEW - https://fictionwritersreview.com/interview/the-rebel-from-helena-an-interview-with-maile-meloy-2/

  INTERVIEWS | JUNE 14, 2017

  The Rebel from Helena: An Interview with Maile Meloy
  Maile Meloy in an interview From the Archives: "I think you have to find an emotional connection to the story, to make anyone else care about it, but I would find writing only what I know to be limiting."

  by JOSHUA BODWELL
  Editor’s Note: As we approach our tenth year of publishing Fiction Writers Review, we’ve decided to curate a series of “From the Archives” posts that we’ll re-publish each week or so during 2017. Some of these features are editor favorites, some tie in with a new book out from an author whose worked we’ve covered in the past, and some are first conversations with debut authors who are now household names.

  This week we’ve returned to Joshua Bodwell’s interview with Maile Meloy, which was originally published on December 25th of 2009. Meloy’s new novel, Do Not Become Alarmed, was published by Riverhead last week.

  In 1993, the late David Foster Wallace published “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” in The Review of Contemporary Fiction. The essay, later collected in Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, ponders television’s influence on American fiction and postulates a somewhat surprising theory. After considering the ironic, postmodernist work of writers such as John Barth, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon, Wallace concludes:

  The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. […] Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval… The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama…

  If Wallace was right, then author Maile Meloy is not only a rebel, she might just be leading the quiet revolution. In both her short stories and novels, Meloy has a gift for animating the seemingly banal. She possesses the ability to skirt the edge of sentimentality and melodrama, then elevate the entire work to high art.

  Maile Meloy was born and raised in Helena, Montana, in the early 1970s. It was a childhood without television, and by the time Meloy was ten years old her father had her reading Jane Eyre and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Though she was an early reader of the classics, Meloy didn’t pursue writing until many years later.

  While studying at Harvard, Meloy took a fiction-writing workshop taught by Richard Ford. The Pulitzer Prize–winning author saw talent in the young writer and encouraged her to study at the University of California-Irvine with his longtime friend Geoffrey Wolff. By the time her run at Irvine was drawing to a close, Meloy was already represented by ICM über-agent Amanda “Binky” Urban. Soon enough, Sarah McGrath, then an editor at Scribner, called.

  Meloy made a heady literary debut with the story collection Half in Love (Scribner, 2002). By that time, Meloy’s fiction had appeared in the Best New American Voices 2000, which was edited by Tobias Wolff. She had also been published in the New Yorker, and her story “Aqua Boulevard” had not only appeared in the Paris Review, but had won the journal’s prestigious Aga Khan Prize for Fiction.

  Meloy’s first novel, Liars and Saints (Scribner, 2003), appeared one year after her story collection and garnered critical praise and strong sales. Three years later, her second novel, A Family Daughter (Scribner, 2006), was followed by awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim and the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2003, Meloy won the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction, and in 2007 she was one of twenty-one authors chosen by Granta as the “Best of Young American Novelists.”

  Throughout this streak of publications and awards, Meloy’s fresh handling of contemporary realism did not go unnoticed by critics. When Liars and Saints was published, the Boston Globe opined that Meloy might be “the first great American realist of the twenty-first century.” The New York Times Magazine called Meloy’s writing “meticulous realism.”

  When the author’s second collection, Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It (Riverhead, 2009), was published this past summer, it landed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. Applauding her stories, reviewer Curtis Sittenfeld noted “a kind of banal, daily desperation animates many of Meloy’s characters.” And the Los Angeles Times (now Meloy’s hometown paper) wrote that the new collection was “more evidence of Meloy’s fluency as a realist writer, of her Chekhovian resistance to resolving the existential dilemmas posed in her stories.”

  Easy answers, it seems, are nonexistent in Maile Meloy’s writing. Her character’s struggles resonate long after a story’s conclusion. Through prose that is concise, confident, and empathetic, she evokes, as Wallace wrote, the “plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions” of life, and treats them with “reverence and conviction.” If Meloy’s new collection is any evidence of what we can expect in the future, it would appear the rebellion Wallace predicted nearly two decades ago is in its ascendancy. Vive la révolution!

  The following interview with Meloy was conducted via email. After the interview had wrapped, the New York Times Book Review named Meloy’s new collection, Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It to their list of ‘The 10 Best Books of 2009’ and called her stories “concise yet fine-grained narratives.”

  Interview
  JOSHUA BODWELL: Can you remember back to a short story collection that had a formative effect on you? A collection that made you feel as though you were reading for the first time?

  MAILE MELOY: The Collected Stories of John Cheever made me feel that way, in my early twenties. I carried it around for months, and still remember where I was when I was reading different parts of it. I was trying to learn how to write stories then, and I felt like I should have a bracelet that said “What Would Cheever Do?”

  But the first story collection in my memory is a book of Isaac Asimov short stories on tape that we listened to on a long car ride when I was really young. I remember being absolutely riveted, staring at the back of the front passenger seat, as a woman fell in love with her domestic robot, Tony. I don’t remember the whole plot of any of the stories, but I remember the feelings of suspense and heartbreak, and the need to know what happened next.

  Where do your own short stories typically begin? A scene or situation? A narrator’s voice?

  They almost always begin with a scene or a situation, often very small, always involving at least two people. But the stories don’t go unless I have the voice. It’s like a getting into a car with a tricky clutch, and you can either get it in gear or you can’t. I think the voice has a lot to do with whether I can get the story in gear and make it go.

  All of the stories in Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It remain surprisingly close to the sentiment of the book’s title: the characters are often torn between what they have and what they want. Did you discover this theme in your stories once you started gathering them together, or did you arrive at the theme first and then write stories toward it?

  The stories were all written at different times, over several years, and I didn’t think I had a collection for a long time, and I didn’t realize how much they had in common thematically until I read them all together. My editor, Sarah McGrath, suggested the title, which had always been there near the end of one of the stories, waiting to be noticed. It’s from the A.R. Ammons poem that is the epigraph of the book, and I think it’s the kind of title that adds something to the book, and helps bring it together.

  halfinloveYour first collection, Half in Love, was published seven years ago. Do you see any significant differences between the stories in that collection and the stories in Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It?

  The titles reflect the big difference: Half in Love is more about people who can’t help but withhold part of themselves, and Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It is about people who don’t want anything withheld from them. It’s a more assertive book in a way.

  The stories are also longer, and I’m older, and I’ve tried to do things I couldn’t do in Half in Love. I think “Liliana” might be my first comic story. It started out being my first ghost story, but I couldn’t help finding a real explanation for the appearance of the dead grandmother at the door.

  Neither Half in Love nor Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It feature the ubiquitous “title story.” Can you share your thoughts on titling these two collections?

  I’ve never had a story title that could serve as the title for a whole book, but both titles were existing phrases within the books. In my story, the phrase is about a crush, but “half in love” is also from the Keats poem “Ode to a Nightingale”: “and I have been half in love with easeful death.” So the phrase had both sex and death in it, and that seemed appropriate to the collection.

  I’m very slow about titles, and I welcome suggestions from people who’ve read early drafts. Sarah, my editor, usually comes up with a very long list—I don’t know how she does it. My favorite suggestion for Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, from a friend who’s a comedy writer, was Here Comes Mr. Hockey: The Gordy Howe Story. That still makes me laugh.

  In Half in Love there is a nearly even balance between stories written in the first-person and third-person points of view (as well as one second-person story, the stunning “Ranch Girl,” your first story to appear in the New Yorker). However, in Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It there is just a single first-person story, “Liliana,” which whetted the appetites of your fans when it appeared in the Paris Review a few months before the collection hit the shelves. Can you talk about your decisions surrounding the point of view in a story? Have you ever “saved” a story by changing the point of view?

  If a story works, it’s usually because I’ve found the right voice for it, and the voice and the narration are so entwined that it tends to stay the way I started it. But a few times I’ve changed the narration halfway through. A story in Half in Love called “Four Lean Hounds, ca. 1976” started out in first-person, and it’s a story about a man whose best friend dies in an accident while they’re diving together. In trying to comfort his friend’s wife, he ends up sleeping with her. Geoffrey Wolff pointed out to me that if the story is told in first-person, you don’t know whether to trust the narrator or not. Maybe he’s lying. Maybe he killed the guy. I didn’t want that kind of confusion—I wanted a story that was true as it was told. First-person suggests unreliability so easily, and unreliability might be the most effective use of it, in short stories. I tend to write narrators who are telling the truth even if the characters aren’t, which might be why almost all of these stories are in third-person: for the authority.

  “Ranch Girl” didn’t work until I started it in the second-person. The New Yorker asked to change it to third-person, and I agreed, but I always liked it better in second and changed it back for the book.

  What I’ve never done is to write an omniscient short story with multiple perspectives, and I would so love to. I read Ivan Bunin’s “The Gentleman from San Francisco” a year or two ago and fell in love with it and thought I must write an omniscient short story, ideally a Russian one, right now. I tried and tried, and kept failing. Close-third is as close as I’ve gotten. Someday, though.

  You have a great gift for writing both from the male point of view (as in your masterful “Aqua Boulevard”) and about men (as in the story that opens your new collection, “Travis, B.”). There is a wonderful line in “Tome,” the first story in Half in Love, where the narrator, a competent female attorney, says, “I thought, That’s what it’s like to be a man. If I were a man I could explain the law and people would listen and say ‘Okay.’ It would be so restful.” Is there a little bit of the author in that declaration? Is that why two of Half in Love’s six first-person stories are told in a man’s voice, as well as the only first-person story in your new collection? Can you share your thoughts about both female authors writing as men, and male authors writing from a female perspective?

  I didn’t realize there were so many male protagonists until I put all the stories together. I think part of the reason I like a male perspective is that it gets me out of myself. I wrote “Aqua Boulevard” at a time when I was working on “Tome” and other stories about women in the west, and I felt like I had that voice down pretty well, but I was so tired of it. So I started a monologue, not knowing where it was going, in the voice of a 70-year-old Frenchman (mimicking a 70-year-old Frenchman I know and love), just to get out of the rhythm of my own voice. And it was hugely freeing. So then I had to add other characters and make something happen.

  liarsandsaintsYou have published two novels between your two story collections. Do you think your work as a novelist has affected your short story writing?

  Having written two novels might be the reason the stories are a little longer now. But I think that writing short stories has affected the novels more: both novels have slightly story-like chapters, and I think writing short stories trains you to a kind of efficiency, because everything needs to count.

  In Curtis Sittenfeld’s review of Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It in the New York Times Book Review, she praises your restraint and says, “She is impressively concise, disciplined in length and scope.” Can you talk about your process of working with this restraint? Do you write long first drafts in order to tighten in successive drafts? Or are your first drafts spare?

  They’re spare. I often start with not that much more than dialogue. Then I have to go back and put in details about what things look like and where everyone is and what they’re wearing. What happens between people is the most interesting thing to me. I have to make sure that readers can see the scene, and feel it, but I don’t really care what the trees look like. I can make myself care if the trees are really important.

  In 2007, Granta named you as one of twenty-one authors on their list “Best of Young American Novelists.” You followed this honor with the publication of a collection of short stories—a collection of stories that landed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, nonetheless. How do you feel about the seemingly endless debate about the state of the short story in America?

  I love short stories—writing them and reading them—and so many wonderful writers are writing so many good ones. It’s true there’s a vastly shrunken marketplace, but that doesn’t stop everyone.

  family_daughterThe funny thing is that the Granta list of novelists is the reason I have this story collection, now. I was working on a novel when they called and told me about the list, and they needed a short story within a month. I didn’t have any stories, so I got out the five or six that I’d abandoned for some reason, and started working on them. I finished one of them for Granta, but I’d gotten interested in the others. Time had passed, and I saw ways to fix them. I stopped writing the novel, and got used to the short-story pace again, and wrote some new stories, and then I realized I might have a book.

  Your stories (as well as your novels) span the globe and time. In addition to your many present-day and domestic settings, in your two collections of stories we experience retired men in Paris, a soldier in London during World War II, diplomats in Saudi Arabia, aristocrats in South America, and a Connecticut power plant in 1975. These stories carry the authority of experience. Can you talk a bit about your research process, as well as how you push beyond the maxim “Write what you know.”

  I think you have to find an emotional connection to the story, to make anyone else care about it, but I would find writing only what I know to be limiting. All of the stories you mention above came from fragments of things people told me—about pranks on the pager phones in a power plant, for example, or about inheritance in Argentina. I start with those details, which feel real, and seem promising, and start writing around them. I tend to write what seems like the emotional story between the characters first, and then check the parts I got wrong, and add more details later. I’ve been thinking about a novel lately that would require more advance research than anything I’ve done so far, and I don’t know how that process might change if I do it.

  Andre Dubus used to say that he liked to read the first line of every story in a collection, and then go back and read each story in its entirety in the order the author had selected. How important has both sequencing and overall cohesion been to you with your two collections?

  I spent a lot of time on the sequence, and wrote an essay about it for Amazon, which you can read here. It’s felt, with both collections, like a puzzle with only one answer. There are stories that need to go early and stories that can’t go early. It’s what makes it a book, and gives it a shape.

  Speaking of Dubus, Half in Love has two stories that feature the same characters; a technique Dubus was fond of employing. In your story “Garrison Junction,” we meet the young couple Gina and Chase. They are unmarried and Gina is newly pregnant. Then we meet the couple again near the end of the collection, but they are much older this time and the exploits of their teenage daughter, Amy, take center stage, as noted in the story’s title, “Thirteen & a Half.” Can you talk about these two stories and your decision to link them?

  It wasn’t a decision I made until the stories were in a book, and could resonate with each other within the book. I think it was a tiny step toward novel-writing, at a time when I wasn’t sure I could write a novel. There were two other linked stories in my original draft of the collection, but they didn’t really fit, and I took them out and they became the first two chapters of Liars and Saints.

  In addition to your writing being exceptionally powerful in its concision, you have a great technical gift for plotting and pacing. Can you take your story “Red from Green” (which first appeared in the New Yorker) and explain why you chose not to resolve the story within the envelope of the central action—fifteen-year-old Sam Turner’s awkward rafting trip with her attorney father and a client—and instead pushed the action ahead by many months to end at the east coast boarding school Sam has left Montana to attend?

  I wanted Sam to have time—for the consequences of her decision to leave home to have settled in, and for her understanding of what happened to have deepened, and taken on context. I needed her to grow up a little, before the story could end.

  On the flip side of “Red from Green,” the action in “The Girlfriend”—where a father painfully questions the girlfriend of a boy who murdered his daughter—you have compressed the entire story into a very short span of time (with some flashbacks) and in one location (a hotel room). Why did you use this technique here rather than, say, jump ahead at the end of the story and show the father reflecting back on the confrontation in the hotel?

  I wanted him to discover what he discovers about his daughter’s death in the course of the story. If he were reflecting back, then the story would begin with him already knowing everything. I wanted him to come to the information as the reader does. As a reader, you think it’s one kind of story, and then it’s another—and in a way, that’s true for him, too.

  After thinking about your story “Red from Green,” I realized how many of your stories include attorneys. In addition to that story, I can think of “Tome,” “Garrison Junction,” “Kite Whistler Aquamarine,” “Thirteen & a Half,” and “Travis, B.” Did I miss any? Why do you think you’ve included so many attorneys in your writing?

  The easy answer is that I grew up with a lot of lawyers around, so it’s a job for which I have a vocabulary at hand. But the deeper answer is that being a small-town lawyer with a varied practice—there are no corporate lawyers in the stories—is a job that puts you in contact with extraordinary circumstances. Ordinary people deal with lawyers only when something crucial and possibly extreme is happening in their lives, and so it’s rich territory for stories. And lawyers are themselves good storytellers, or should be: they have to build a narrative and convince an audience that it’s true.

  When fantasizing about an “ideal reader” in his 1968 interview with the Paris Review, John Updike said: “When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a country-ish teenaged boy finding them, and having them speak to him.” Do you have any sort of “ideal reader” or audience in mind when you write?

  That’s a lovely quotation, but I don’t really have an imaginary reader like that. I write sometimes for people I know, putting in things that might please or entertain them, but I don’t think about them all the time. When it’s going well, I just feel like I’m inside the story, figuring out what the people in it do next.

  Is there someone outside your field who inspires you?

  Chad Ochocinco of the Cincinnati Bengals. And the acrobats in Cirque du Soleil.

  Your stories are set all over the country and all over the world, but where is your ideal workspace?

  I have a chair that tilts back like an astronaut chair, and a desk that comes over on an arm, with a laptop on it. I started using that set-up because it was easier on my shoulders to be in the tilted-back position, but now I can’t compose anything beyond an email if I’m sitting up straight. Sideways on a couch with a lap desk works in a pinch.

QUOTE: "At its best moments, 'Do Not Become Alarmed' captures the anxiety of being the kind of parent with the least right to be anxious, a rich American one, the feeling that even our best efforts (the most enormous, cocooning cruise ship!) cannot safeguard us from danger. It's an interesting notion, but because Meloy ventures half-heartedly into her ambitious themes, it barely emerges. 'Their parents are American,' one local character thinks. 'They don't know anything.' This book is supposed to be a sally against that blindness. It only seems like proof of it."
Byline: Charles Finch

Do Not Become Alarmed

By Maile Meloy

Riverhead. 342 pp. $27

---

Well. Here's a novel, "Do Not Become Alarmed" by Maile Meloy, that feels, in every respect, like it should be a literary event, a big summer book. Its author is held in very high regard, rightly; it has a strong premise, a vacation that goes frighteningly awry; it addresses big topics, money, race, privilege, and its plot lines involve high stakes, kidnapping, adultery, death. Its characters are granted space to change and grow - something we demand very strictly of fictional people, if less often of real ones. Its writing is uniformly excellent.

So what happened?

"Do Not Become Alarmed," Meloy's fifth book for adults - she has also written middle-grade fiction - concerns two American families on a cruise to Central America. The mothers, Liv and Nora, are cousins, although close as sisters. Each has a husband and two children. Spread among them are various individuals (a borderline-autistic child, a famous actor, a diabetic) who demand slightly specialized varieties of love from the women.

The mood is one of peril. "The disaster will be the thing you don't expect," Liv, the book's best character, thinks. "So you just have to expect (BEGIN ITAL)everything(END ITAL)." Meloy offers a few teasing moments of unease, before finally delivering an actual disaster: the pair's four children wander off from a beach where they've stopped (strongly implied to be in Costa Rica) with two friends made on board, Argentines. In search of an innocuous adventure - as their parents were, in planning the trip - they fall into the hands of drug dealers. Now, Liv and Nora, who live in the weird simultaneous state of utter anxiety and utter security that so many affluent American mothers and fathers do, can begin to freak out in earnest.

Meloy's best work is her short fiction, particularly the lithe, lean stories, as alive and elusive as fish in a stream, of the masterful "Half in Love." But the novel asks for different strengths. Meloy is too gifted and curious to be boring, and innumerable stray lines glimmer from the pages of "Do Not Become Alarmed" - when, for instance, Liv feels overlooked sexually and then wonders at herself about having believed erroneously that "motherhood had cauterized her vanity" or when she ponders the choice to become a parent in the first place: "How could you know? It was a decision made at the brink of a widening abyss, based on rumors from the other side."

But despite these moments, the book is essentially a write-off. To begin with, it's a thriller without thrills. The parents' pursuit of their children is hysterical but static, mistaking emotion for action, while the children's experience itself is implausible and dull. (The book constantly tells on itself, as bad ones always do. "A man had shot a gun in them, like in a movie," one of the children thinks. Yep.) The drug dealers are outlandishly stupid characters. Liv, Nora and their families are more carefully wrought, but they're in too farfetched a situation to achieve escape velocity from the novel they're stuck in. Never do they feel, even briefly, as though they could exist before the book's first page or after its last.

These may seem like technical problems, but in fact they spring from the book's bedrock failure, which lies in its design, its desultory attempts at bigness, at significance. "The karmic bus had mowed her down," Liv thinks. "She was being punished for living in a false world, spongy and insulated from the reality around her. For living in a house with an alarm system, in a neighborhood where the only Latinos were gardeners."

This should be a first premise, not a conclusion. Ever since David Foster Wallace published his unsurpassable nonfiction novella "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," the cruise ship has come to represent something peculiarly awful about American culture, something to do with the indefensible gap between the ship's extravagances and the impoverished shores it primly and massively grazes, before departing again for the safety of open water. The novelists Adam Haslett, T.C. Boyle and Lydia Millet have all alit upon it as a useful symbol in just the past few years, the cosseted catatonia, the anhedonic hedonism. The eating.

Meloy is content to deploy that symbol without investigating it. Again and again, "Do Not Become Alarmed" trots out a vague sense of social responsibility, while focusing emotionally on a handful of nervous Americans. There's something ugly about that; the whole project, in a way, replicates the colonialism it deplores, plundering Central America for its sense of risk, then returning home with a safe little keepsake frisson of fear, of self-doubt. The book's few native characters are indistinct, idealized and therefore oddly dehumanized, except for one, a guide, who is endowed with such preternatural sexual skill that his depiction veers - although I have no doubt of Meloy's goodwill - treacherously close to the racism of an earlier time.

At its best moments, "Do Not Become Alarmed" captures the anxiety of being the kind of parent with the least right to be anxious, a rich American one, the feeling that even our best efforts (the most enormous, cocooning cruise ship!) cannot safeguard us from danger. It's an interesting notion, but because Meloy ventures half-heartedly into her ambitious themes, it barely emerges. "Their parents are American," one local character thinks. "They don't know anything." This book is supposed to be a sally against that blindness. It only seems like proof of it.

---

Finch is the author, most recently, of "The Inheritance."

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 8th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Finch, Charles. "Book World: Maile Meloy's 'Do Not Become Alarmed': This summer's big literary novel?" Washington Post, 8 June 2017. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A494776460/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d3d2fb5b. Accessed 9 Aug. 2021.

Byline:

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, Oct 16, 2013 (Marketwired via COMTEX) -- Today Byliner publishes Devotion: A Rat Story ($1.99), by Maile Meloy. Hailed by The New Yorker as "a wise and astonishing conjurer of convincing realities," Meloy is one of our country's most celebrated fiction writers. In her scalp-prickling Byliner Original Devotion: A Rat Story, she shows how easily an everyday reality -- a young woman's struggle for an independent life -- can become a nightmare, toothy monsters included.

It's not easy being twenty-something in America, with the economy down and jobs scarce, especially if you're also a single mother. An art school graduate with a four-year-old daughter, Eleanor is desperate to move out of her parents' house at last. When a tiny yellow bungalow comes on the market, with a yard and a tree for climbing, it seems perfect for the two of them, and mysteriously affordable. Not until Eleanor enters the house to unpack does she realize she has made a terrible -- and terrifying -- mistake.

Eleanor hadn't met the next-door neighbors, and didn't know what lived there with them -- seething through the house, multiplying daily, fat and hungry and spreading out into the neighborhood. When Eleanor tries to confront the onslaught, she is told that these "pets" are not the ones intruding -- she is.

An engrossing, exquisitely unsettling tale from an American literary treasure, Devotion will leave you suspicious of your neighbors and fearful of what's lurking in your backyard, in your living room -- or even in your own head.

About the Author: Maile Meloy is the author of the novels Liars and Saints and A Family Daughter, the young adult novels The Apothecary and The Apprentices, and the story collections Half in Love and Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, which was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2009 by the New York Times Book Review. Meloy's stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Granta. She was chosen as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists in 2007 and has received the PEN/Malamud Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

About Byliner: Byliner works directly with the world's best writers to deliver great stories to readers. Named "one of the 10 Most Innovative Media Companies in the World" (Fast Company), Byliner is a subscription reading service and digital publisher of award-winning short fiction and nonfiction. A Byliner subscription provides unlimited access to more than 30,000 stories by hundreds of bestselling authors, as well as personalized story suggestions based on your reading time and interests. The entire library of Byliner Originals -- including bestselling e-books by Amy Tan, Nick Hornby, Margaret Atwood, Jon Krakauer, Ann Patchett, Nicole Krauss, Alexandra Fuller, Richard Russo, and Sebastian Junger -- is available in the subscription service and through the major digital bookstores.

Devotion: A Rat Story is available for $1.99 as a Kindle Single at Amazon, a Quick Read at Apple's iBookstore, a Nook Snap at BarnesAndNoble.com, and a Short Read at Kobo. The story is free to Byliner subscribers at Byliner.com. For an Advance Reading Copy or to schedule an interview with Maile Meloy, please contact Clare Hertel at clare@byliner.com, 505-474-6783.

The following files are available for download:

-- Byliner Publishes Maile Meloy's DEVOTION: A Rat Story
For an Advance Reading Copy or to schedule an interview with Maile Meloy, please contact: Clare Hertel clare@byliner.com 505-474-6783
SOURCE: Byliner

mailto:clare@byliner.com
(C) 2013 Marketwire L.P. All rights reserved.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 COMTEX News Network, Inc.. News provided by Comtex.
http://www.comtexnews.com
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 8th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Byliner Publishes Maile Meloy's Devotion: A Rat Story." Internet Wire, 16 Oct. 2013. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A345734025/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4d64f520. Accessed 9 Aug. 2021.

QUOTE: Beloved characters, lyric prose, and exotic settings continue to characterize Meloy's distinguished world-building," in this second installment. Augusta, added: "Series readers will pore over the death-defying escapes and hope the third book reunites the trio more successfully."
MELOY, Maile. The Apprentices. illus. by Ian Schoenherr. 368p. Putnam. June 2013. Tr $16.99. ISBN 978-0-399-16245-9.

Gr 5-9--It is 1954, and 16-year-old Janie attends a private school in New Hampshire. When her roommate's father, Mr. Magnusson, kidnaps her and holds her hostage on a Malay island, Janie's friends Benjamin and Pip come after her. Despite living on three different continents, the friends share a special bond. In The Apothecary (Putnam, 2011), they harnessed the Pharmacopoeia, a magical apothecary manual, to stop Russia's first nuclear weapons test. Janie then returned home with her parents, Pip became a London actor, and Benjamin pursued humanitarian work in Asia. Now Benjamin must decide how the Pharmacopoeia might rescue Janie and stop Magnusson's plans for his own weapon. Nuanced secondary characters like Magnusson's wife and another apothecary named Jin Lo round out a detailed story. Beloved characters, lyric prose, and exotic settings continue to characterize Meloy's distinguished world-building. However, the three friends spend the novel adrift and alone, physically and metaphorically, and readers may find this sequel less emotionally satisfying than the first book. With more active escape scenes and only a few pages spent together, Janie and her friends seem frozen in fight-or-flight mode, and little character development occurs in the book. Janie manages to resolve her relationship quandary with Benjamin, but Pip is broadly sketched, and the ending is abrupt. Numerous story threads that weave characters and globetrotting adventures together flash by with confusing rapidity. Series readers will pore over the death-defying escapes and hope the third book reunites the trio more successfully.--Caitlin Augusta, Stratford Library Association, CT

Augusta, Caitlin

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 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 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Augusta, Caitlin. "Meloy, Maile. The Apprentices." School Library Journal, vol. 59, no. 6, 2013, p. 134+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A332378447/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c29891c1. Accessed 9 Aug. 2021.

QUOTE: "cerebral fantasy with enough action to keep readers on their toes."
MELOY, Maile. The After-Room. 432p. (Apothecary: Bk. 3). Putnam. Nov. 2015. Tr $17.99. ISBN 9780399175442.

Gr 5-9--In this trilogy finale, the remaining conspirators push aside sadness to fight nuclear proliferation using the magical Pharmacopeia book. It's 1955, and Benjamin and Janie drown in alternating tides of grief and confusion. Benjamin's new acquaintance Doyle claims Benjamin can contact his dead father in a liminal place called the After-room, but Janie worries deeply about Doyle and this kind of magic. Even as they head to Rome for more adventures, their old friend Jin Lo tracks down the missing nuclear weapon in the China seas, needing the magical help only they can provide. In the final novel, their work requires greater sacrifice and dedication of purpose. Events move at a whirlwind pace. Alternating chapters from events in the United States and China keep the dramatic tension tight even as the book's tone is painted by grief and the losses suffered in The Apprentices (Penguin, 2013). Tire nuclear weapon hunt, while crucial, seems less epic than Benjamin's and Janie's prior quests. Their use of magic is more practiced and less wondrous. Nonetheless, secondary characters like Doyle and Jin Lo's friend Ned are gems, and everyone's wanderings somehow collapse back in as neatly as a Chinese fan. For Benjamin and Janie, life holds great meaning. Readers will find much to contemplate in their journey. Pair this with Maggie Stiefvater's "The Raven Cycle" books (Scholastic) for fantasy above the common order. VERDICT A cerebral fantasy with enough action to keep readers on their toes. Purchase to complete the trilogy.--Caitlin Augusta, Stratford Library Association, CT

Augusta, Caitlin

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 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 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Augusta, Caitlin. "Meloy, Maile. The After-Room." School Library Journal, vol. 61, no. 10, 2015, p. 93. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A431724864/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=13b98423. Accessed 9 Aug. 2021.

QUOTE: "This sober and well-constructed adventure accurately conveys the geopolitical instability of the era and is leavened with just enough magic, chaste romance and humor to appeal to middle-grade readers through teens."
Meloy, Maile THE APPRENTICES Putnam (Children's Fiction) $16.99 6, 4 ISBN: 978-0-399-16245-9

"Our work is an ongoing struggle with unintended consequences," says Marcus Burrows, the titular apothecary of Meloy's previous novel for young adults (2011). The work to which he refers is using alchemy to halt the spread of nuclear weapons in the 1950s, and in this sequel, he is joined in his quest again by the resourceful and quick-witted 16-year-old Janie Scott. Meloy's deft exposition sets the stage swiftly, so that when the boarding school where Janie has been sent for safekeeping is quickly revealed as a treacherous place and her bogus expulsion in the second chapter plunges her into action, readers already understand her history. The narration shifts among Janie and her allies: Benjamin Burrows, the apothecary's brave son; Pip, the wily London con artist; and Jin Lo, the tortured Chinese chemist. This mirrors their experiences when they discover an elixir that enables them to see through one another's eyes while they cross the globe to reunite, head off nuclear disaster and cope with the fallout from their own alchemical experimentation. The denouement leaves room for both optimism and a third (as yet unconfirmed) installment. This sober and well-constructed adventure accurately conveys the geopolitical instability of the era and is leavened with just enough magic, chaste romance and humor to appeal to middle-grade readers through teens. (art not seen) (Historical fantasy. 10-14)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 8th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Meloy, Maile: THE APPRENTICES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2013. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A328141761/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=48480349. Accessed 9 Aug. 2021.

QUOTE: "As with the previous novel in the series, The Apprentices (2013), Meloy excels at bringing readers quickly up to speed on the characters' histories, and she achingly conveys the razor-thin line between the elation and despair of first love," noted a Kirkus Reviews critic who concluded: "This series finale wraps up most of its loose ends in a satisfying bow, leaving just enough room for imaginative middle-grade readers and teens to conjure up their own futures for Janie and Benjamin."
Meloy, Maile THE AFTER-ROOM Putnam (Children's Fiction) $17.99 11, 3 ISBN: 978-0-399-17544-2

Orpheus and Eurydice as incipient Cold War spies. In the third and final adventure in Meloy's Apothecary series, "the universe is doing its work, and we are only part of it....We are the vessel through which it flows." Benjamin Burrows, now orphaned, lives with Janie Scott and her parents. He and Janie are going through the motions of high school life in 1955 Ann Arbor, but grief and depression make him sympathetically remote. When Benjamin confides that he has contacted his father in the After-Room (a vague purgatorial space between the natural and supernatural realms), Janie is both panicked and intrigued. As they pursue answers about the afterlife, the universe reunites the pair with many of their old friends (Vili, Pip, Jin Lo) in the service of preventing another nuclear disaster. Meanwhile, the teenagers and their allies find themselves alternately pursued by the carabinieri, the Mafia, the United States Navy, Chinese pirates, and their fatal nemesis, Danby. As with the previous novel in the series, The Apprentices (2013), Meloy excels at bringing readers quickly up to speed on the characters' histories, and she achingly conveys the razor-thin line between the elation and despair of first love. This series finale wraps up most of its loose ends in a satisfying bow, leaving just enough room for imaginative middle-grade readers and teens to conjure up their own futures for Janie and Benjamin. (Historical fantasy. 10-14)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 8th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Meloy, Maile: THE AFTER-ROOM." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2015. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A428372703/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a83c3962. Accessed 9 Aug. 2021.

QUOTE: "This writer can apparently do it all--New Yorker stories, children's books, award-winning literary novels, and now, a tautly plotted and culturally savvy emotional thriller. Do not start this book after dinner or you will almost certainly be up all night."
Meloy, Maile DO NOT BECOME ALARMED Riverhead (Adult Fiction) $27.00 6, 6 ISBN: 978-0-7352-1652-5

Three families on a cruise are separated from their children during a shore excursion in Central America."On the walk to the buffet, Nora linked her arm through Liv's and put her head on her shoulder, making Liv feel excessively tall. 'I love you,' Nora said. 'This was a genius idea.' "But the fun part of this cruise is almost over for these cousins from Southern California. After cautiously staying aboard in Acapulco for fear of "beheadings and food-borne pathogens," at the next port the husbands are invited to golf by a new Argentinian friend, while Nora, Liv, and their brood of young children sign up for a zip-line tour of the rain forest. The Argentine's wife and her teenagers decide to join them. When the van breaks down on the way, the guide suggests an impromptu swim at a nearby beach, and soon after, all six kids disappear. The remainder of the book follows the children and the adults separately, also bringing in a seventh child, an impoverished South American 10-year-old making her way north to New York with her uncle. The plot unfolds with terrifying realism, made even more potent by Meloy's (The After-Room, 2015, etc.) sharp and economical character development. Every one of nearly 20 important characters is clearly distinguished by some memorable trait--among the kids, a Type 1 diabetic and his big boss-lady sister, a spectrum-y genius and a bunny-loving 6-year-old; among the adults, a mega-hot black Hollywood movie star and a neurotic, high-strung white studio exec--yet achieves three-dimensionality. Even the Latin American characters, who could easily become stereotypes (the tour guide, the drug lord, the maid, etc.), are more than that. This writer can apparently do it all--New Yorker stories, children's books, award-winning literary novels, and now, a tautly plotted and culturally savvy emotional thriller. Do not start this book after dinner or you will almost certainly be up all night.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 8th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Meloy, Maile: DO NOT BECOME ALARMED." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2017. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A480922083/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=01ee9a10. Accessed 9 Aug. 2021.

QUOTE: "It's impossible not to adore the intrepid octopus, drawn realistically, with expressive eyes that tug on the heartstrings," noted Booklist reviewer Emily Graham of the picture book. "Readers will get a great glimpse into the capabilities of the wonderfully brainy octopus in this sweet meditation on the tradeoffs between living in safe comfort and making your own way in the world."
The Octopus Escapes. By Maile Meloy. Illus. by Felicita Sala. May 2021. 40p. Putnam, $17.99 (9781984812698). PreS-Gr. 1.

The octopus is fond of life in his comfortable cave, catching crabs and drifting about the ever-changing ocean currents, so he's shocked when a diver whisks him away to an enormous aquarium. There are some positives to his captivity, though: he is given intriguing tests, watches humans wander by, and never wants for food. It's not long, however, before the intelligent octopus grows bored, longing for his home, and realizes it's time to escape. He squeezes and slides his way out of his tank, through the aquarium, and back out to sea, finally settling again in his wilder--but more rewarding--watery world. It's impossible not to adore the intrepid octopus, drawn realistically, with expressive eyes that tug on the heartstrings. Salas vibrant illustrations teem with life when focused on the ocean habitat and are appropriately subdued in the more austere aquarium. Readers will get a great glimpse into the capabilities of the wonderfully brainy octopus in this sweet meditation on the tradeoffs between living in safe comfort and making your own way in the world.--Emily Graham

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 8th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Graham, Emily. "The Octopus Escapes." Booklist, vol. 117, no. 15, 1 Apr. 2021, p. 67. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A660111348/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7c0daf7e. Accessed 9 Aug. 2021.

QUOTE: "satisfying home-away-home narrative. The critic further observed: "This effort to see the world from the viewpoint of a captive species reflects actual experiences of some octopuses resident in New Zealand aquariums. Offers an opportunity for conversation with young readers about the roles of zoos and aquariums."
Meloy, Maile THE OCTOPUS ESCAPES Putnam (Children's None) $17.99 5, 11 ISBN: 978-1-984812-69-8

Captured and confined for display to visitors in an aquarium, an octopus tires of his unvarying routine there and escapes to return to the ocean home he loves.

This satisfying home-away-home narrative imagines life from an octopus’s perspective. The story begins and ends in his comfortable cave, where he can watch sea creatures going about their business and feel the variety of water currents. His love for hiding in small spaces leads to capture. He’s bored in his new home in a “glass house that wasn’t a cave.” For entertainment, he’s given manipulatives, and the food is regular but unvarying—and certainly no challenge to catch. He’s taught to take pictures of and with the aquarium visitors. With no good way to communicate his feelings to his keeper, he leaves, slithering out of his tank and under a door to a convenient pier from which he can return to the water—and, after a long swim, to his home. The relatively simple text is nicely interwoven with cheerful illustrations, sometimes set on spreads, sometimes interrupted with vignettes, and sometimes on a page opposite a full-bleed image. It would read and show well to a group. This effort to see the world from the viewpoint of a captive species reflects actual experiences of some octopuses resident in New Zealand aquariums.

Offers an opportunity for conversation with young readers about the roles of zoos and aquariums. (Picture book. 3-7)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 8th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Meloy, Maile: THE OCTOPUS ESCAPES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2021, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A658194466/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9d8ed0ce. Accessed 9 Aug. 2021.

Finch, Charles. "Book World: Maile Meloy's 'Do Not Become Alarmed': This summer's big literary novel?" Washington Post, 8 June 2017. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A494776460/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d3d2fb5b. Accessed 9 Aug. 2021. "Byliner Publishes Maile Meloy's Devotion: A Rat Story." Internet Wire, 16 Oct. 2013. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A345734025/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4d64f520. Accessed 9 Aug. 2021. Augusta, Caitlin. "Meloy, Maile. The Apprentices." School Library Journal, vol. 59, no. 6, 2013, p. 134+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A332378447/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c29891c1. Accessed 9 Aug. 2021. Augusta, Caitlin. "Meloy, Maile. The After-Room." School Library Journal, vol. 61, no. 10, 2015, p. 93. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A431724864/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=13b98423. Accessed 9 Aug. 2021. "Meloy, Maile: THE APPRENTICES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2013. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A328141761/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=48480349. Accessed 9 Aug. 2021. "Meloy, Maile: THE AFTER-ROOM." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2015. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A428372703/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a83c3962. Accessed 9 Aug. 2021. "Meloy, Maile: DO NOT BECOME ALARMED." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2017. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A480922083/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=01ee9a10. Accessed 9 Aug. 2021. Graham, Emily. "The Octopus Escapes." Booklist, vol. 117, no. 15, 1 Apr. 2021, p. 67. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A660111348/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7c0daf7e. Accessed 9 Aug. 2021. "Meloy, Maile: THE OCTOPUS ESCAPES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2021, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A658194466/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9d8ed0ce. Accessed 9 Aug. 2021.

Word Count