California Book Awards
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Katherine Sturtevant, Author of At the Sign of the Star
Silver Medal Winner for Young Adult, 2001 California Book Awards
I am, and as far as I can remember always have been, one of those people who think every spare moment must be filled with reading. As a child I spent recess lying on the grass with a novel, and reached for my book before I got out of bed on Saturday mornings. Though I grew up in a perfectly happy family, my temperament, in collision with my environment, meant that I was often an unhappy child. So I read to escape. I opened stories that took place in colonial Connecticut or revolutionary Boston or in the Europe of World War II, and I was gone. No more unfinished homework, no more teasing classmates, no more contemptuous brother.
The worlds I visited fascinated me. The past is untouchable; everything that can happen there already has. That makes it a wonderful place to travel. And there has always been for me an unutterable charm about the objects of museum exhibits: kitchen spit, snuff box, ration card. The characters I read about were the people I wanted to be – the strong, those who could somehow adapt, and find a way to fit into the worlds in which they lived – something I found difficult to do myself.
At the Sign of the Star is an outgrowth of my early reading years. Set in 17th-century London, it tells the story of a bookseller's daughter who turns to the printed page as she copes with family upheaval. Meg is strong, but not strong enough to change her father's mind. She's confident, but not so self-assured that she never has a moment of doubt. Yet she finds a way for herself, in the course of the novel. This is the sort of story I feel compelled to write: the kind filled with mixture, gradation, ambivalence. The stories that satisfy me – when I'm reading and when I'm writing – are the sort in which every victory is a compromise and every defeat has a tincture of hope.
As I wrote At the Sign of the Star, I was able to revel in unintelligible riddles and hair-raising recipes, in chipped type and non-standardized spelling. I held in my hand actual books printed in the 1670s, relics of Restoration London, things Meg might actually have touched. Building this sort of bridge between the past, filled as it is with thought-provoking difference, and the difficult present, in which we must all find a way to live, is for me the most deeply rewarding work possible.
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Marwan Muasher
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