Outside In

Outside In

by Karen Romano Young
Outside In

Outside In

by Karen Romano Young

eBook

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Overview

Chérie Witkowski is twelve, and she doesn't want to turn thirteen this year. This is the year, 1968, that everything -- absolutely everything-seems to be changing. At home her parents are expecting a new baby, her mother is fixing up the house so they can sell it and move who-knows-where, and everyone is starting to tease her about the boy next door. Meanwhile her newspaper route brings the changes of the outside world crashing in on her: the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and the disappearance of a girl from a few towns away -- a girl who more braids like Chérie, who was about the same age as Chérie, who could have been Chérie.

Suddenly Chérie is scared; nothing seems safe and simple anymore. She longs for easier fears-for playing hide-and-seek in the dark, skipping school, daredevil bike tricks..She builds her own inside world: an elaborate elf house under a bush, complete with staircases, elevators, and carefully designed furniture.

But you can't keep the outside world away forever, especially when you're delivering the daily paper. And maybe Chérie has the strength to deal with it after all, and even to change some of the bad to good...


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780062034335
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date: 01/17/2024
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 220
File size: 4 MB
Age Range: 1 - 12 Years

About the Author

When Karen Romano Young was growing up, she and her sisters and brother spent most of their time exploring the wetlands down the road. The mill there was home to a woman who taught her about the wetlands and only once yelled at her for destroying frog eggs by stepping on them. These days the author lives near a marsh full of frogs in Bethel, Connecticut, with her husband, three children, two guinea pigs, a dog, and a cat.

In Her Own Words...

"My first published writing was a poem called My Secret Place. I wrote it in fourth grade, and it appeared in my local paper and in a book of 100 poems written by children in our school district. The place in the poem was a shady spot under trees, but more important was what I did there: write!

"I've kept a diary since I was nine, and as a child I wrote poems and stories and lots of letters. If I wasn't writing, I was reading. Everyone around me read-to themselves, to each other, to me. My grandmother has this saying framed on her wall: "Richer than 1, you will never be, for I had a mother who read to me." I'll add to that: My mother took me to the library-the Fairfield Children's Library in Fairfield, Connecticut, where I grew up. Once I was too old to have a child's card, I even worked there, looking after the picture books and children's novels all the way through high school and even on vacations home from my school, Syracuse University.

"Part of my college education was a semester in England, where I did an independent study of storytelling and folklore (especially, different versions of "Rumpelstiltskin") that took me all over the country reading and telling stories to children. At the end of college my English boyfriend, Mark Young, immigrated, and we got married in Connecticut.

"My first job was writing for Scholastic's news magazines-the ones kids use in their classrooms to learn about the news and lots of other things. What a cool job: interviewing all sorts of people, doing tons of research, writing on a very short deadline. It was hard and colorful and lively and exciting, and I spent every day in New York City. I had gone to college to learn to be a teacher-but now I was hooked on writing for a living and never went back to teaching.

"After our daughter Bethany was born, I decided I didn't need a New York office--or even a spot under the trees--to be able to write. I stayed home and worked in the spare bedroom. I wrote for all kinds of children's magazines, covering everything from rock climbing to rocket science.

"Around the time Sam was born, I began writing nonfiction books. I've written about so many different things, but I especially love writing about people and all the different ways they live their lives: high-wire artists, Arctic scientists, a lady who tap-danced across the Golden Gate Bridge, and a man who walked all the way around the world.

"When Emily was born, writing time was tight. But I had lots of time to think. During high school I had written a picture book called The Blue Volkswagen. Now I began thinking about where that old Beetle might be these days. One day I took the kids to the library. Outside, a woman was selling prints of her photographs. One of them showed an old Beetle sitting in the doorway of a barn. I bought it, took it home, and began writing a story in the twenty minutes a day I had to myself. I didn't write about my real self or about anything that had really happened to me, but I tried to think of my story as I would have felt or acted if I were Daisy living in that farmhouse at that time. After The Beetle and Me came Video, and more and more stories after that.

"My husband, children, dog, cat, guinea pigs, and I have a small, noisy, weird house in the Connecticut woods. Our lives are full of books, and we all read every chance we get. I write everyplace: in the kitchen, in the car, in the barn, in the school parking lot, in the Reading Room at the New York Public Library, at the beach. I write and write and write...."

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

I was almost home, but someone was after me.

Inside the houses around the circle there was light, light and noise seeping out the cracks around the windows. Outside, it was dark, dark and silent. If you didn't want to get caught, you stayed out of the window light, out of the light and silent.

I could be quieter barefoot, but April in Connecticut was too cold for bare feet. On the toes of my orange Converse low-tops, I hardly dented the grass. Even my breath made no sound. I held my mouth open and breathed right up into my eardrums, letting the air in and out with no blows or puffs or sighs.

It was no use. The one chasing me stayed close. At the corner of the Rankins' house I sank to my knees in the shadows and willed him away: Go. Go.

I saw the glint of his eyes. If it was Pete Asconti, he wouldn't know it was me yet, couldn't run to home base and yell, "I call Chérie in the Rankins' bushes." He wasn't near enough to recognize me, not with my braids stuck down the back of my shirt, the blondeness hidden. I shrank into the shadow of the house and waited, my heart pounding.

A crash, a crunch, and someone half dived, half fell through the bushes and landed behind me. He had me around the neck. I threw my elbows back hard into his chest. "Get off me!" I huffed.

I pummeled my attacker as silently as possible. Was I still invisible inside the forsythia hedge? Or had he given away my hiding place?

"I've come to suck your blood," Dave said. He was always being some darn thing from whatever book he'd read lately. Guess this week it was Dracula again.

I elbowed him away. "Stay down!" I whispered.

"What doyou think I am, a moron?"

I nodded. "Ass-contl," I said. "You smell." He did: of grass and ground and cherry Life Savers. He had straight, coarse dark brown hair and pointed ears like an elf's, eyes so dark brown they were almost black. His brother, Pete, was high-school handsome, but Dave was seventh-grade cute, more my style.

I fingered a thin branch on the underside of the bush and broke it off silently in my fist, tucked it into the kangaroo pocket of my sweatshirt beside my pink rubber ball.

"It's cold," said Dave, sitting closer.

"So go get a coat."

"And get caught?"

"You're going to if you keep talking."

"You're the one talking."

We leaned against the wall of the Rankins' house and heard the theme music to the seven o'clock news, the clothes dryer bumping around in the basement. I tucked more twigs in my pocket.

At home base my third-grade sister, Aimée, ran past Pete, shrieking, "Get away from me!"

I nudged Dave with my elbow. He nudged back. "That's all Martin Luther King was doing," he said. "Going in for a coat."

"A coat?" 1 thought about Dr. King in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was shot. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., ASSASSINATED, said today's Bridgefield Bell.

"He was cold." Dave pointed an imaginary gun. "Then ping! Blam!"

"You're a pig," I said. In the light from the Ascontis' deck, I saw Pete looking toward us. I tucked my head down so there wouldn't be any glint from my glasses, but Pete came walking our way. He was after us.

Dave scrambled behind me through the bushes, away from home. When Pete got to the Rankins' bushes, we were gone. I could see his eyes, dark like Dave's, but he couldn't see us.

" Oh, lovebirds! Come out wherever you are!" That Pete, such a comedian. And that big goonball Sandy DeLuna snickered. Sandy was already home free. By now they all were. I stopped near the corner of the Rankins' house and rested my hand on the wooden siding. Suddenly there was Dracula breath in my ear and Dave's little finger touched mine, keeping track of me.

"Dave and Chérie are off in the bushes somewhere," Pete announced to his audience. "And we all know what they're doing, don't we? Davey's giving his darling Cherry a big wet kiss-" Dave yanked his hand away from mine.

Pete moved steadily away from home base, off to the right. On the left, I crawled through the damp leaves as though Vietnamese bullets were zipping over my head.

When Pete faced me, I held still on the ground. He turned. I leaped to my feet, Dave at my heels.

1 pounded across the ground and bellowed, "Home free! Chérie! " Pete's hand slammed against my back. He might have started arguing that I was It if Dave hadn't crashed into him.

Pete hung over his brother, dark hair bristling above dark eyebrows, his cheeks pink the way Sandy's older sister, Lucy, liked them, fist back, grinning. Dave kicked away and sprang to the top of the steps. Aimée and her little friend Pammy got out of the way. Pammy was giggling, but Aimée fidgeted, serious, worrying.

"Tie goes to the runner," Dave said.

"You're It," said Pete. "And don't try to cheat your way out of it. Your girlfriend can be It with you if you want."

"I'm not-" I began.

"At least he has a girlfriend," said Pammy. "Not like you, ugly creep."

Aimée held her breath. Pete raised his fist over Pammy. Aimée pulled her friend away.

"Yes, Dave is one lucky guy," said Pete.

I jumped off the steps and landed on his back, my arms around his neck tight enough to choke him, my knees in his ribs. "Take it back!"

Pete backed up against the house, laughing, pressing me into the splintery yellow shingles. I slid onto the deck, bounced up again. I advanced on Pete, my hands reaching like claws toward his middle.

"Get him, Chérie." Dave laughed. "You know where."

"Don't, Chérie! You'll hurt him!" Aimée's face had a frantic look, her brown eyes wide and overflowing. "Don't!"

Everyone stopped. Everyone sighed. Everyone watched to see what 1 would do...

Outside In. Copyright © by Karen Young. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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