Ask the Author: Laura A. Woollett
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Laura A. Woollett
Thanks for your question! My story is similar to yours in that I grew up in South Windsor, CT and read the articles in the paper, especially the articles in 1991 when Rick Davey announced that Little Miss 1565 had been identified. It's heart-wrenching to imagine that no one knew this little girl. And equally sad to think of the Cook family, who (at the time) went home never knowing what had happened to Eleanor.
Flash forward to 2005, when I was in graduate school studying children's literature. I became very interested in nonfiction for kids. It was so much better than most of the informational books I had access to in the 1980s and 1990s. Contemporary nonfiction history for kids has characters. Chapters have cliff hangers. There is rising tension and plot. These books read like dramatic fiction, but every word is throughly researched and true. I wanted to write a book like Jim Murphy's Blizzard and Jennifer Armstrong's Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World: The Extraordinary True Story of Shackleton and the Endurance. It was actually my mother who reminded me of the story of the Hartford circus fire. I feel honored to be able to share this history with young people in a way that does not shy away from the tragedy, but that is sensitively told.
Flash forward to 2005, when I was in graduate school studying children's literature. I became very interested in nonfiction for kids. It was so much better than most of the informational books I had access to in the 1980s and 1990s. Contemporary nonfiction history for kids has characters. Chapters have cliff hangers. There is rising tension and plot. These books read like dramatic fiction, but every word is throughly researched and true. I wanted to write a book like Jim Murphy's Blizzard and Jennifer Armstrong's Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World: The Extraordinary True Story of Shackleton and the Endurance. It was actually my mother who reminded me of the story of the Hartford circus fire. I feel honored to be able to share this history with young people in a way that does not shy away from the tragedy, but that is sensitively told.
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