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Monday, November 10, 2008
Book-Award Finalist Set On Island
[UPDATE: Judy Blundell’s young adult novel wins the National Book Award. Link: National Book Foundation.]
An eerie, off-season Palm Beach, circa 1947, is the setting for Judy Blundell’s What I Saw and How I Lied, one of this year’s 5 National Book Award finalists for Young People’s Literature.
Blundell’s story is rich and complex, with themes of bigotry, jealousy, murder and bad weather. Well, she is writing about Florida, after all. (She thanks The Palm Beach Post’s research staff for providing “exhaustive accounts” of the 1947 hurricane.)
And her writing is so evocative you can almost smell the “shower of orange petals” as it falls onto protagonist Evie’s head.
“We learned that the bright flowers were bougainvillea and how to plan around a thunderstorm every day at four. We had never seen rain like that, pounding so hard it seemed to jump off the sidewalks straight back into the sky. We liked the breeze off the ocean at night, and the tiny green lizards, and the smell of night-blooming jasmine,” Evie says.
The author, who spent 5 years in Palm Beach County when her husband worked at the Norton Museum of Art, also writes under the name Jude Watson.
The National Book Award winners will be announced Wednesday, Nov. 19. Here are links to short interviews with Blundell: National Book Foundation and Publisher’s Weekly.
Photo © Paul Llewellyn
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