With tensions rising between the kingdoms of Westria and Austlind, Molly and Tobias accompany King Alaric to Cortova, where he hopes to form an alliance with King Gonzalo—an alliance that would be sealed by Alaric’s marriage to Gonzalo’s daughter, Elizabetta.  But the devious Gonzalo has many surprises up his sleeve, beginning with the revelation that Alaric is not the only suitor.

As the days pass, Alaric is trapped in a nightmarish bidding war, in which the price keeps spiraling up and the terms become ever more outrageous, yet he can’t afford to walk away.  Then comes the first attempt on Alaric’s life.

Through it all, Molly is powerless to help him, for her magical Gift sends her nothing now but terrible forebodings, and visions of an enormous cat who speaks in metaphors of chess.  As for Princess Elizabetta, who is as clever as she is beautiful—is she really Molly’s friend, or just another player in her father’s crafty game?

The thrilling story that began with the acclaimed novels The Silver Bowl and The Cup and the Crown comes to a spectacular and surprising conclusion in The Princess of Cortova.

“When I was twelve,” she began, “I was that sort of voracious reader who ran up against the public library’s 40-book borrowing limit every week. Reading meant one thing: ­disappearing into Green Gables or some post-nuclear society as soon as I got home and emerging only in time for dinner.”  But now that she was in college, Angela went on, reading for pleasure (as opposed to assigned reading done with highlighter in hand) was “less common, and a lot more complicated.”  One student she interviewed asked for the definition of “reading for fun.”  Many said they read articles online but didn’t commit to books because they didn’t have the time.

“Here’s how I read,” Angela went on.  “My homepage is the website of The New York Times. I open my browser several times a day, and I read a few articles each time. I read screenplays, essays, and blogs about fashion, food, economics, technology, and journalism. I check my Facebook and Twitter feeds and my Tumblr dashboard multiple times a day. There I might find a link to a magazine feature about squid jigging (how you catch the slippery cephalopod), which will lead me to a Wikipedia article on giant squid, and eventually to a news article about thousands of Humboldt squid washing up on the beaches of San Clemente.”

Clearly, the pressure of schoolwork and other activities leaves little time for pleasure reading.  I remember this from my own college days, how deeply I missed those private hours immersed in a fictional world.  But it seems there’s more going on than the busyness of the college years.  “While we haven’t lost the desire to read,” another student said, “the cultural center of our generation has shifted away from books, toward social media, Hollywood, and TV.”

The “What They’re Reading on College Campuses” column in The Chronicle of Higher Education “fizzled out last spring,” Angela writes, “after tracking college students’ reading habits for four decades — a reflection both of the fragmented nature of our reading choices and of changes in the bookselling business.”

But when they do read, what are their choices?  Classics, as you might expect (though, “I’m not reading Proust because I want to know whether Swann’s romance works out,” one cynical student said. “I’m reading it because it’s Proust, and it looks good on my coffee table.”)  They read contemporary literary fiction, such as Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides and American Pastoral by Philip Roth.

But they’re also reading young adult fiction like The Hunger Games and the Twilight series.  “You’re more likely to hear a werewolf howl than Allen Ginsberg,” Angela quotes Washington Post book critic Ron Charles. “Here we have a generation of young adults away from home for the first time, free to enjoy the most experimental period of their lives, yet they’re choosing books like 13-year-old girls . . . Where are the Germaine Greers, the Jerry Rubins, the Hunter Thompsons, the Richard Brautigans — those challenging, annoying, offensive, sometimes silly, always polemic authors whom young people used to adore to their parents’ dismay?”

“I sometimes think we never escape the 13-year-old reader we were,” Angela quotes author and creative writing professor Chang-rae Lee. “That’s when everything forms — passion, knowledge, a certain sense of aesthetic, direction, an affinity begins to form. And maybe it’s also the time when we’re most open.  We all have a primal moment of reading, where we read something and the world explodes, and it’s brighter and all that.”

“That is the moment to which students try to return, again and again,” Angela says in closing.  “We can engage with current events and big ideas online. When it comes to literature, we love the books that remind us what it’s like to love reading.”

I couldn’t stop thinking about this, long after I put the magazine away and went back to my kindle.  The world of books and publishing is changing rapidly, no doubt about it.  How and what readers read is changing too.  So what does that mean for those of us who write for children and young adults?  According to Don Troop, who wrote the column in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “A piece of advice to would-be authors: If you want your books to appeal to the college crowd, aim low.”

I beg to disagree.  I think writers of books for young readers are teaching them to love the act of reading—taking them to places they’ve never been, giving them new experiences, opening their eyes to countless new ideas.  If college and post-college readers are distracted by countless other forms of content—as clearly they are—then we have to aim higher, not lower.  We must give them books that are fresh and new, that make their spirits soar, that they can’t wait to share with their friends.  We can compete with sneezing panda and the latest polling results.  We just need to write books that remind young adults “what it’s like to love reading.”

For the complete article by Angela Wu, go to the Princeton Alumni Weekly online at http://paw.princeton.edu/issues/2012/01/18/pages/1490/index.xml?page=1&.

In the second book of the trilogy, Molly explores the source and nature of her ever-changing magical gift. Sent by king Alaric on a crucial mission, she is drawn to Harrowsgode, the mysterious walled city where her grandfather was born and from which he later escaped. What she discovers there will alter the direction of her life and challenge her considerable ingenuity and courage. With the help of Tobias, a rat-catcher named Richard, and a clever and devoted raven, Molly gains her own freedom in a most unexpected way, and changes the city of Harrowsgode forever.

“The fast-moving adventure is wildly creative, and suspense builds on every page . . . A story to be cherished and read again and again.”

–School Library Journal

“Stanley’s storytelling is polished, her imaginary world clearly constructed. She doesn’t shy away from serious subjects, but her light touch enables readers to ponder them as part of the whole rather than as overt messages about life, love and politics. Savvy readers will suspect (or hope) that Molly’s story will continue, but this section of her saga comes to a satisfying end.

Richly imagined and elegantly conveyed, this is a worthy successor to Molly’s star-studded debut.”

–Kirkus

“The story is not predictable, nor is it simple.  Stanley’s characters are complex; even a minor player like the rat catcher is memorable–funny, wise, and even heroic.  Molly’s friendships and loyalties change realistically and are tested in ways that readers will recognize from their own lives.  It is the suspense of the plot that propels the reader through the story, but Stanley enriches that suspense with humor, strong sensory details, and an intelligent, engaging heroine.”

–The Horn Book

Recognition & Awards

2013 Children’s Book Committee/Bank Street College of Education Best Children’s Books of the Year

I’m stealing a line from Sharon Creech because it’s so good and so apt: Love may not last, but tinkering goes on forever.

There’s a point when a manuscript is done—or at least when the story is all there, and the characters are worked out, and there are no more sleepless nights ahead where you’re wondering how you’re going to resolve a certain tricky plot point—but you know in your heart that it isn’t done at all, not in the least; the real fun is about to begin.  There many words to describe what follows: revising, editing, polishing, tightening.  And it’s by far my favorite part of writing.

You start over from the beginning and read, and make little changes, and take out huge swaths of text you once thought were brilliant, only now you see they aren’t.  You find you didn’t really understand a scene here or a character there—and now that you think about it, you know exactly what needs to be done.  You stop and sneer at a sloppy metaphor, a rough transition.  Sometimes you spend hours, even a whole day, wrestling with a problematic chapter.  And bit by bit, day by day, you move through the book to the end.  Then you start over again.

This time, you find fewer problems.  And you start coming across paragraphs, pages, whole chapters where the work really shows: it’s tight, clean, well-thought out.  Bravo, you say to yourself—until you come upon some dreadful cliché (how had you missed that one?), followed by a repeated word, then a loosey-goosey paragraph.  You keep working, feeling warm and fuzzy about this thing you wrote, wanting it to look its best, like your child going off to a party—all scrubbed and shiny.

At some point you wonder if you might just keep on doing this for the rest of your life: reading the same book over and over, making it a little bit better each time.  Like Dorothy in the field of poppies, you are helplessly drawn into it—until at some point your editor says, enough already! And you know you have to let it go.

Even then you know in the back of your mind that, like our grown children, manuscripts come back to visit—bearing editor’s notes, copy editor’s queries, and one final time as galley proofs.  Each of these visits brings an opportunity.  While you’re addressing your editor’s concerns, you can always get in there and change a few other things.

Having just sent The Raven of Harrowsgode off to Wonderful Editor, I am feeling a sort of empty nest, a sense of incompletion, and a deep longing to get that baby back into my hands, to begin again that wonderful dance of words and ideas, to tinker to my heart’s content—or until Wonderful Editor says, enough!

Lately I’ve been noticing a disturbing tendency, not among mainstream reviewers but in bloggers reviewing books online, to conflate the author with the characters. Let me cite a couple of examples.

My book BELLA AT MIDNIGHT is set in the high Middle Ages. Though it’s a fantasy with invented kings and countries, it’s as historically accurate as I could make it in terms of customs, lifestyle, and beliefs. That means, among other things, that my characters see the world through a veil of superstition and magical thinking. Thus, in the scene where Bella is born, I have the midwife urging the family to open all the drawers and cabinets, and unbind their hair, in order to speed the birth. I feel sure my readers understand that I don’t think this is a practical obstetric practice, that I’m just reflecting the period and having a little fun.  But when it comes to matters of religion, some readers seem to have trouble separating the writer from the characters.   Since most common people in medieval Europe were religious in a simplistic and literal way, interpreting anything they didn’t understand as a curse or a miracle wrought by God, I gave my characters these views.   Yet several reviewers seemed to feel that I was “pushing” my personal religious beliefs.  This couldn’t be farther from the truth.

In SAVING SKY I created a family of old hippies, living off the grid in rural New Mexico. The parents reflect my personal values in many ways: they’ll move heaven and earth to protect their children, they read to them, they teach them to be generous, kind, self-sufficient, and responsible. But because this is set in Santa Fe, woo-woo capital of America, and because these are old hippies, they’ve created their own new-age religion. They celebrate Solstice by lighting farolitos, they hold blessings for the dead and believe their spirits go up into the sky and become stars—metaphorically speaking. These ceremonies comfort the children, and the scenes are sweet and tender.  But it’s not me; it’s something I made up.   Yet again, a reviewer implied that I had some pretty weird beliefs.

Perhaps the most troubling review came from a child. She loved, loved, loved my books, only she “had a feeling” that I wasn’t a Christian, and that really upset her because she only wanted to read books written by Christians. It left me speechless and sad, thinking of the long list of great books she was turning her back on.

The truth is, it doesn’t matter who the author is. One of the titles I included in a short and quirky list of recommended books for kids (on this website, under About/Questions I am Frequently Asked) is by an author whose political and religious views are diametrically opposed to mine. I don’t care. His book isn’t a tract on his view of the world; it’s a marvelous, imaginative, riveting, thoughtful story. And that’s what it’s all about.

To prepare, we did long hikes, then longer hikes, then even longer hikes, all at high altitude.  Finally, on September 15—a date carefully chosen to avoid the heat and monsoon rains of summer and the potential snows of autumn—we met at 6 am for the ascent.  Some of us were a little nervous, myself included.

Three non-members joined us: a super-hiker who’d done Baldy before, plus Lauren’s husband and one of his hiking buddies.  They were all stronger and more experienced than we, but were patient with our slow pace.  (It felt reasonably brisk to me, but then running up a steep, rocky trail seems kind of over the top.)

What had seemed so daunting when we began turned out to be quite doable.  We reached the top with comparative ease and were rewarded by an incredible view, as far as the Colorado border.  The skies were clear and blue, there was a soft breeze, and we were elated.  We ate our peanut-butter sandwiches then headed back down.

The long return hike was the hardest part.  Marj handed out Alieve to grateful fellow hikers.  We stopped to rest a little more often.  And that last couple of miles going straight down was tough on aging knees.  In total, it took us ten hours and we were ready to drop by the end.  Yet the next morning I rose like the phoenix out of the flames: spry, rested, free of tension, positively euphoric (yes, it was those famous endorphins).

When Lauren first proposed the Baldy hike, I was a little reluctant to push myself that hard.  But I discovered that setting a tough goal and working toward it, then finally achieving it, was extremely satisfying, better even than the “runner’s high” that came with it.  Looking back, I realized that it was really nothing new; the goal-setting just took a different form.  For the last thirty-plus years, with every book I’ve written or illustrated, I’ve set out on an arduous voyage, wondering if I could meet the standards I set for myself.  It’s always been a little scary, and always a thrill when I managed to jump over that bar.  And each time, with the next book, I always set it a little bit higher.

by Diane Stanley

HarperCollins Publishers

In the second book of the trilogy, Molly explores the source and nature of her ever-changing magical gift. Sent by king Alaric on a crucial mission, she is drawn to Harrowsgode, the mysterious walled city where her grandfather was born and from which he later escaped. What she discovers there will alter the direction of her life and challenge her considerable ingenuity and courage. With the help of Tobias, a rat-catcher named Richard, and a clever and devoted raven, Molly gains her own freedom in a most unexpected way, and changes the city of Harrowsgode forever.

The final book in the trilogy, The Princess of Cortova, brings the series to a startling conclusion.  It will be published in the fall of 2013.

“The fast-moving adventure is wildly creative, and suspense builds on every page . . . A story to be cherished and read again and again.”

–School Library Journal

“The story is not predictable, nor is it simple.  Stanley’s characters are complex; even a minor player like the rat catcher is memorable–funny, wise, and even heroic.  Molly’s friendships and loyalties change realistically and are tested in ways that readers will recognize from their own lives.  It is the suspense of the plot that propels the reader through the story, but Stanley enriches that suspense with humor, strong sensory details, and an intelligent, engaging heroine.”

–The Horn Book

“Stanley’s storytelling is polished, her imaginary world clearly constructed. She doesn’t shy away from serious subjects, but her light touch enables readers to ponder them as part of the whole rather than as overt messages about life, love and politics. Savvy readers will suspect (or hope) that Molly’s story will continue, but this section of her saga comes to a satisfying end.

Richly imagined and elegantly conveyed, this is a worthy successor to Molly’s star-studded debut.”

–Kirkus          

Change is good.  It gives you the chance to discover new things and new people.  I think it keeps you young.  And so, after twenty-five years of living in Texas, my husband and I decamped, said a tearful goodbye to wonderful friends, and moved next door to New Mexico.

I soon found that living here was changing me.  I am more in touch with nature than I’ve ever been before.  I always know what phase the moon is in.  I notice as the sun’s arc changes from summer to winter.  I know to expect the summer monsoon rains to start when the first rufous hummingbirds arrive.  I recognize bear tracks when I see them.  I know that after a summer rain the air smells like tarragon. With four distinct seasons, a glorious climate, bright blue skies and clear nights, you just want to be outside.

Things I now do that I rarely did before moving to New Mexico (or didn’t do at all): downhill skiing, cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, gardening, whitewater rafting, and hiking.

This blog, though I’ve taken my time in getting to the point, is about the hiking—particularly about my women’s hiking group, tentatively (and quite appropriately) named the Walkie-Talkies.  We started with a small group of friends who wanted to hike on a regular basis.  Friends of friends were added, some left, new people joined, and in time we built a core group of about eight women, enough to have a few in town and eager to hike every week.

We go out every Wednesday morning, summer and winter, sometimes for a couple of hours, sometimes all day.  We climb up into the piñon-clad mountains, go out in the desert where there are petroglyphs, walk along rivers and through meadows.  We have gear—have we got gear!—from ice cleats, snowshoes, and gaiters to poles (collapsible, good for travel), backpacks, camelbacks, and first-aid packs.  We, the Walkie-Talkies, are prepared!

Somehow, in the process of enjoying nature and getting fit, we’ve turned into a group of friends who support, inform, and inspire each other.  Let me say this unequivocally: these women are fabulous. They are bright, interesting, caring, accomplished, beautiful, and generous. It’s not overstating to say that they’ve changed my life.

We’ve always had bear tracks and scat around our house, but they always visited at night.  They demolished our bird feeders, trampled our garden—one even left a nose-print on the glass of our entry area window.  But we never actually saw one till this year.  Apparently the long, snowy winter followed by a short spring affected the growth of certain berries they eat.  This year,  hungry bears were everywhere.  This year, they came in the daytime.

This is Goldie, standing on our wall.  He/she is a black bear, but 50% of black bears in the Rocky Mountains are colors other than black—brown, cinnamon, or blonde like this one.  You have to admit it’s a beautiful animal.  This picture made the front page of the local paper.

We’ve only had one more daytime visit (gone too fast to get the camera out).  But we’re careful to bring our feeders in at night.