A Satisfying Leap, a guest post by Toni Buzzeo

With incredulity. That’s how you might respond to the secret I am about to reveal. My brand-new emotionally complex and deeply researched historical middle-grade novel, Light Comes to Shadow Mountain (Holiday House, July 11, 2023), started life on the page—and in my mind—as a picture book. Unless, of course, you know me. If so, then you know that I have published thirty-one picture books to date, and thus you wouldn’t blink twice. 

It does still astonish me, however. It’s not that I didn’t always want to publish novels. In fact, the second children’s manuscript I ever wrote—in 1996—was a middle-grade novel I never submitted (more about that one later). But picture book writing and publishing has been the niche of the children’s book world I have happily occupied for a bit longer than two decades.

Then along came Cora Mae Tipton, living in the dark and beautiful mountains of Eastern Kentucky in 1937. At the same time Cora took residence in my mind, my longtime editor and friend, Kelly Loughman, landed at Holiday House in New York City. 

Things got complicated.

As I always do, I started my project (even then titled Light Comes to Shadow Mountain) with a premise and, above all, a character, complete with a distinctive voice and style. Although it’s essential to know your main character and what makes them unique when you write a picture book, there is not an abundance of space or text available for description. So, a picture book writer telegraphs these things through the character’s actions which revolve around their one central problem or goal. 

In my picture book version of LCTSM, Cora was a high-energy and focused girl who wanted to win the county reading contest but was hampered by the lack of electricity on her mountain. Meanwhile kids competing off the mountain lived in a brightly lit and thoroughly modern world. Cora’s gumption is evident as she enacts workarounds that finally allow her to triumph just as electricity simultaneously comes up the mountainside. And there the story ends.

I revised and revised until my critique partners and I loved it. Off it went to Kelly at Holiday House. But then came Kelly’s irritatingly hesitant response. (I write that with a great deal of love, of course!)

She asked me these ten questions and acknowledged that there were far too many questions for one picture book to address:

What does it mean for a child to stop living her life by the sun, moon, and perhaps a lantern or firelight? 

What does it mean for her mother and her father and her jack-in-the-box twin brothers?

 How does school change? 

Are family duties done differently, now that they have the ability to see well past sunset?

If appliances came on the scene nearly immediately following the grid connection, what does their arrival mean for Cora Mae? (And, most likely, her mother?) 

Do Cora Mae, her family, and neighbors find, as we do now with the Internet, that things are easier—and yet somehow busier—with electricity?

Are they more productive? 

Is more expected of them?

Do they expect more from themselves?

Are the days “longer”?

In a subsequent phone conversation Kelly suggested that maybe this needed to be a middle-grade novel. Nope, I said in the privacy of my own mind. This is a picture book! I kept right on believing that—or pretending to—while the manuscript sat untended in its file on my Macbook Air for four years . . .

. . . until I decided maybe I’d really like to learn novel-writing skills and enrolled in the Breakout Novel Intensive. However, the essential requirement to attend was to submit the first fifty (!) pages of a novel. Hello? What I had in my files was that second manuscript of mine from back in 1996—a Colonial time travel–from 1996, but I didn’t feel up to the learning challenge required to make time travel succeed. 

So cue the music! I wrote to Kelly and asked her if she remembered that long-ago Kentucky picture book and her suggestion that it become a middle-grade novel. Not only did she remember it, she said, she’d thought of it often over the years and yes, why yes, she would love to work on it with me as a middle-grade novel.

It wasn’t long before I realized that even with the Shadow Mountain project, I had a considerable amount of writing and learning to do! It took me two more years and a Breakout Novel Graduate Learning Retreat to write and revise a full draft of a book once again titled Light Comes to Shadow Mountain. I submitted that manuscript to Kelly and we dug in—for two additional years. 

As it turns out, there is an endless amount of space and text available in a novel to build character, and to expand on their journey, both inner and outer, and to create an additional cast of fully realized characters along with an inhabitable world for those characters and the reader to walk around in. There is space and necessity for subplots and for permutations of main problems and adjacent problems.  Put simply, it’s an awful lot different from and a different type of challenge from writing a picture book.

I learned so much more about Cora and her pursuit of electricity for her unelectrified mountain home. I hadn’t known at the outset that while her outer journey was her effort to bring light to Shadow Mountain, her inner journey was to understand and respect her own mother’s refusal, as the mountain’s resident herbalist, to allow that eventuality. 

I spent months uncovering subplots and researching adjacent stories. What was the Frontier Nursing Service and what role did it play in these mountains? How did the Pack Horse Library Project impact the lives of Eastern Kentucky children in the 1930s? What was the role of the Rural Electrification Administration in bringing electricity to the 10% of the country that was dark? How would that all work, in a practical sense, for a community like Spruce Lick and Shadow Mountain? What would the teacher be reading aloud to her class in 1937? What tales were told in those mountains that a girl like Cora might tell her brothers? And what about all those questions Kelly had asked?

As it turned out, the book still ends when electrification is nearly set to arrive on Shadow Mountain—thanks to Cora. Even the title leaves no mystery there! But those questions of Kelly’s inform so much of the dialogue, discord, and effort throughout the novel. The answers to them paint a picture of what Cora wants for her future and what her mother fears. 
The years to publication passed in a constancy of hard work. I’m not complaining, though, not one bit. I loved writing Light Comes to Shadow Mountain, so much, in fact, that Kelly and I have started work on another middle-grade novel. Remember that second manuscript I wrote in 1996—the Colonial time travel novel? Stay tuned!

Meet the author

Toni Buzzeo is a New York Times bestselling children’s author of thirty-one picture books and board books, and her first middle grade novel, Light Comes to Shadow Mountain, a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard selection. A former librarian and writing teacher, Toni and her books have won many awards, including a 2013 Caldecott Honor for One Cool Friend, illustrated by David Small. Her fictional characters sing with her deep understanding of human emotion. Endlessly enthusiastic, Toni draws on her career experiences as a school librarian in crafting her books and speaking with young audiences in schools and libraries. Toni lives in Arlington, Massachusetts just downstairs from her two lovable grandchildren (endless sources of inspiration!). You can find her on Twitter @ToniBuzzeo and on Instagram @arlingtonnonna

About Light Comes to Shadow Mountain

Cora Mae Tipton is determined to light up her Appalachian community in this historical fiction novel from an award-winning author and former librarian.

It’s 1937 and the government is pushing to bring electricity to the mountains of southeastern Kentucky. It’s all Cora can think of; radios with news from around the world, machines that keep food cold, lightbulbs by which to read at night! Cora figures she can help spread the word by starting a school newspaper and convincing her neighbors to support the Rural Electrification Act.

But resistance to change isn’t easy to overcome, especially when it starts at home. Cora’s mother is a fierce opponent of electrification. She argues that protecting the landscape of the holler—the trees, the streams, the land that provides for their way of life—is their responsibility. But Cora just can’t let go of wanting more.

Lyrical, literary, and deeply heartfelt, this debut novel from an award-winning author-librarian speaks to family, friendship, and loss through the spirited perspective of a girl eager for an electrified existence, but most of all, the light of her mother’s love and acceptance.

Back matter includes an Author’s Note; further information on the Rural Electrification Act, the herbs and plants of Appalachia, the Pack Horse Library Project, and more; and a “Quick Questions” historical trivia section for readers.

A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection

ISBN-13: 9780823453849
Publisher: Holiday House
Publication date: 07/11/2023
Age Range: 8 – 12 Years

Filed under: Guest Post