Monday, April 22, 2013



Fire & Ice, the YA imprint of Melange Books, will be publishing White Pine: My Year as a Lumberjack and a River Rat in January of 2014.

White Pine is an historical fiction set at the end of the nineteenth century. Sevy Anderson's father breaks his leg in a sawmill accident, and so the fourteen-year-old has to take his place with the lumberjacks and river rats who harvested the forests of Wisconsin and Minnesota. The men of the Northwoods live hard and on the edge, and Sevy must prove his worth in the company of legends. The novel is also about first love and dreams that endure, and it is in the tradition of Harry Mazer's novels for boys.

This novel is near and dear to my heart and written in honor of Wisconsin, a state to which I moved as an adult and which has become my home. As a family, we were geocaching on a summer's day many years ago when we came upon a building along the river that had once housed a lumber company's offices. It is one of the few remaining edifices in our town that date back to the lumberjack era. It inspired a family conversation about the history of our region, about the rivers, sawmills, and lumberjacks and about how traces of what has gone before can still be seen by looking closely.

I am so excited to see this book in print!

1 comment:

  1. Hey this is fun to see! I may have my book published on Fire and Ice too, am still looking over the contract, and I looked at your author page. Narnia has special meaning for me as well, for it turned me into a reader when I was ten and is, I think, the best set of books for young people ever written. When I was in Junior High, a LONG time ago in the early seventies, we moved to Butte Montana. There I had one friend, and we read Walter Farley and Chincoteague together. I tried to follow your blog but it gave me a message about Facebook sharing things and I didn't understand what they meant by that. Anyway, here's my blog on Wordpress, if you're interested in checking it out! http://snovalleyhobbit.wordpress.com/

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