Samantha van Leer
Samantha van Leer is a junior in high school. She conceived the idea for Between the Lines and pitched it to her mom, Jodi Picoult, who was in the middle of a book tour. In her spare time, Samantha can be found playing softball, doing contemporary dance, acting and singing in musicals, and cuddling on the ground with her two dogs, Dudley and Oliver—for whom the prince in this fairy tale was named.
“No one ever asks a kid for her opinion, but it seems to me that growing up means you stop hoping for the best, and start expecting the worst. So how do you tell an adult that maybe everything wrong with the world stems from the fact that she's stopped believing the impossible can happen?”
Samantha van Leer