About this item
It isn't that Abby Carson can't do her schoolwork. She just doesn't like doing it. And consequently, Abby will have to repeat sixth grade - unless she meets some specific conditions, including taking on an extra credit project: find a pen pal in a distant country. But when Abby's first letter arrives at a small school in Afghanistan, complications arise. The elders agree that any letters going back to America must be written well, but the only qualified English-speaking student is a boy. And in this village, it's not proper for a boy to correspond with a girl. So, Sadeed's sister will dictate and sign the letters for him. But what about the villagers who believe that girls should not be anywhere near a school? And what about those who believe that any contact with Americans is...unhealthy? As letters flow back and forth - between the prairies of Illinois and the mountains of central Asia, across cultural and religious divides, through the minefields of different lifestyles and traditions - a small group of children begin to speak and listen to each other. And in just a few short weeks, they make important discoveries about their communities, about their world, and most of all, about themselves.
About the Author
I was born in Camden, New Jersey in 1949 and lived in Oaklyn and Cherry Hill until the middle of sixth grade. Then we moved to Springfield, Illinois. My parents were avid readers and they gave that love of books and reading to me and to all my brothers and sisters. I didn't think about being a writer at all back then, but I did love to read. I'm certain there's a link between reading good books and becoming a writer. I don't know a single writer who wasn't a reader first. Before moving to Illinois, and even afterwards, our family spent summers at a cabin on a lake in Maine. There was no TV there, no phone, no doorbell - and email wasn't even invented. All day there was time to swim and fish and mess around outside, and every night, there was time to read. I know those quiet summers helped me begin to think like a writer. During my senior year at Springfield High School my English teacher handed back a poem I'd written. Two things were amazing about that paper. First, I'd gotten an A - a rare event in this teacher's class. And she'd also written in large, scrawly red writing, "Andrew - this poem is so funny. This should be published!" That praise sent me off to Northwestern University feeling like I was a pretty good writer, and occasionally professors there also encouraged me and complimented the essays I was required to write as a literature major. But I didn't write much on my own - just some poetry now and then. I learned to play guitar and began writing songs, but again, only when I felt like it. Writing felt like hard work - something that's still true today.After the songwriting came my first job in publishing. I worked for a small publisher who specialized in how-to books, the kind of books that have photos with informative captions below each one. The book in which my name first appeared in print is called A Country Christmas Treasury. I'd built a number of the projects featured in the book, and I was listed as one of the "craftspeople"on the acknowlegements page, in tiny, tiny type.In 1990 I began trying to write a story about a boy who makes up a new word. That book eventually became my first novel, Frindle, published in 1996, and you can read the whole story of how it developed on another web site, frindle.com. Frindle became popular, more popular than any of my books before or since - at least so far. And it had the eventual effect of turning me into a full-time writer. I've learned that I need time and a quiet place to think and write. These days, I spend a lot of my time sitting in a small shed about seventy feet from my back door at our home in Massachusetts. There's a woodstove in there for the cold winters, and an air conditioner for the hot summers. There's a desk and chair, and I carry a laptop computer back and forth. But there's no TV, no phone, no doorbell, no email. And the woodstove and the pine board walls make the place
