Sonya Hartnett
Sonya Hartnett (also works under the pseudonym Cameron S. Redfern) is, or was, something of an Australian child prodigy author. She wrote her first novel at the age of thirteen, and had it published at fifteen. Her books have also been published in Europe and North America. Her novels have been published traditionally as young adult fiction, but her writing often crosses the divide and is also enjoyed by adults.
"I chose to narrate the story through a child because people like children, they WANT to like them," says Sonya Hartnett of THURSDAY'S CHILD, her brilliantly original coming-of-age story set during the Great Depression. "Harper [the young narrator] is the reason you get sucked into the characters. Even I, who like to distance myself from my characters, felt protective of her."
The acclaimed author of several award-winning young adult novels--the first written when she was just 13--Australian native Sonya Hartnett says she wrote THURSDAY'S CHILD in a mere three months. "It just pulled itself together," she says. "I'd wanted to set a story in the Depression for some time, in an isolated community that was strongly supportive. Once the dual ideas of the boy who tunneled and the young girl as narrator gelled, it almost wrote itself--I had the cast, I had the setting, I just said 'go.' " Accustomed to writing about edgy young adult characters, Sonya Hartnett says that identifying with a seven-year-old protagonist was a challenge at first. "I found her difficult to approach," she admits. "I'm not really used to children. But once I started, I found you could have fun with her: she could tell lies, she could deny the truth." Whereas most children know "only what adults want them to know," the author discovered she could bypass that limitation by "turning Harper into an eavesdropper and giving her older siblings to reveal realities."
In her second book with Candlewick Press, WHAT THE BIRDS SEE, Sonya Hartnett once again creates a portrait of childhood. This time the subject is Adrian, a nine-year-old boy living in the suburbs with his gran and Uncle. For Adrian, childhood is shaped by fear: his dread of quicksand, shopping centers, and self-combustion. Then one day, three neighborhood children vanish--an incident based on a real case in Australia in the 1960s--and Adrian comes to see just how tenuous his safety net is. In speaking about Adrian, the author provocatively reveals parallels between herself and her character. She says, "Adrian is me in many respects, and many of the things that happen to him happened to me."
Sonya Hartnett's consistently inspired writing has built her a legion of devotees. Of THURSDAY'S CHILD, Newbery Honor-winning author Carolyn Coman says, "Hartnett's beautifully rendered vision drew me in from the very start and carried me along, above and under ground, to the very end. This book amazed me." The achingly beautiful WHAT THE BIRDS SEE has just as quickly garnered critical acclaim. Notes PUBLISHERS WEEKLY in a starred review, "Hartnett again captures the ineffable fragility of childhood in this keenly observed tale. . . . Sophisticated readers will appreciate the work's acuity and poetic integrity." Sonya Hartnett's third young adult novel, STRIPES OF THE SIDESTEP WOLF was named an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults.
Sonya Hartnett lives near Melbourne, Australia. Her most recent novels are SURRENDER, a mesmerizing psychological thriller, and THE SILVER DONKEY, a gently told fable for middle-grade readers.
“She despised the sadness that hung inside her like old lace.”
“Just a few more minutes here, I suggest: life hates to leave, worried what it might miss. But Vernon, closer, is shaking his head. This is all.”
“She doesn't understand that doors, walls, fences, ceilings - they're helpless to keep out what determinedly desires to get in.”
“Every atom in me feels composed of lead. This is what dying is: a pull to the ground.”
“My life was pouring out my feet and seeping through cracks in the floor; yet still I knelt and did not move, for fear she'd let go my hands. Let me stay, I wanted to beg: Please don't make me go.”
“Time crawled past on leaden hands and knees.”
“I thought about how stupid it is, that all of us are born destined to desire somebody else, though desire brings with it such disappointment and pain. Humankind's history must be scored bloody with heartbreak. This hankering for affection is a blight upon us.”
“We both knew that what I said was the truth, as well as being a lie. The pure and honest answer was pinging between us, hovering above the weeds.”
“We walked into the forests which encircled the town. I have never liked them, their dark throat, their sullen height, their slump-shouldered gloom. But Evangeline walked steadily into their maw, and I followed her. She wanted to see the swathes which, years ago, the firebug had burned. The furnaced forest was green again, though here and there stood leafless trunks cindered to the core; on the scruffy dirt lay stiff black limbs tangled in morning-glory. Evangeline touched her palm to the charcoal, murmured, 'Poor things.”
“Life is lived on the inside. What's outside doesn't matter.”
“I suppose that's what happens when you make other people's lives miserable: life gets miserable back at you.”
“Affection makes fools. Always, without exception, love digs a channel that's sooner or later flooded by the briny water of despair.”
“I looked along the aisle and saw her, and it was as if I saw her for the first time. Everything changed. The ancient featureless interior of me spangled orange, mint, cat-blue. I looked back to the window immediately, my face damp, my breath caught. And worried I would never have the courage to look at her again.”
“Evangeline's obliviousness was a reason to like her rather than not: I liked least those schoolfellows whose awareness of me invariably caused misery.”
“I would always be lonely, but no more alone.”
“Yeah, reflections! The same, but different. Like twins - like blood brothers! And when you need something bad done, like punishment or revenge, you'll just ask me, and I will do it -”
“You're not supposed to have iron bars around you - no one is supposed to have that. You're supposed to fall down hills and get lonely, and find your own food and get wet when it rains. That's what happens when you're alive.”
“It is scary, sometimes, Tomas admitted. But the scary bits are what make you brave.”
“And she's striken with sudden nostalgia for the life she's been so eager to pack away, she wishes there was some way of being everything at once–grown and sure and clever, young and protected and new.”
“...it's stupid to be that way, so easily hurt; it's better to be like a plank of wood, an emotional mule. It's best not to feel,...best to have your nerve endings cauterized.”
“No bird in a cage ever speaks. What is there to say? The sky is everywhere, churning above its head, blue and endless, calling out to it. But the caged bird can't answer anything except 'I cannot'.”
“How does one craft happiness out of something as important, as complicated, as unrepeatable and as easily damaged as life?”
“There is nothing that is more beautiful than everything else in the world.”
“Nothing was easy, and sometimes she failed, and sometimes she thought that the fairy stories were right, that there must indeed be easier ways of living happily ever after; but defeat is a poor ending to any tale, so she kept trying.”
“Love is like moonlight or thunder, or rain on a tin roof in the middle of the night; it is one of those things in life that is truly worth knowing.”
“I want my life to be mystifying," she declared, although she didn't know what she meant.”
“She is not a musical girl nor, intrinsically, a joyful girl; but the music of the four Swedes shook something awake inside her, and when she heard it she felt airborne and strong.”
“Justin is twenty-four years old: the world will never be more suited to him than it is now, he will never feel more embraced by life or have greater faith in his right to exist. The earth and the oxygen, the cities and lights, the nights and the beaches seem created for him and for those like him.”
“I am dying: it's a beautiful word. Like the long slow sigh of the cello: dying. But the sound of it is the only beautiful thing about it.”
“More than this, I believe that the only lastingly important form of writing is writing for children. It is writing that is carried in the reader's heart for a lifetime; it is writing that speaks to the future.”
“She had witnessed the world's most beautiful things, and allowed herself to grow old and unlovely. She had felt the heat of a leviathan's roar, and the warmth within a cat's paw. She had conversed with the wind and had wiped soldier's tears. She had made people see, she'd seen herself in the sea. Butterflies had landed on her wrists, she had planted trees. She had loved, and let love go. So she smiled.”
“Though she'd try to do otherwise, she had never been able to stop cluttering her present with her past. Now somebody she didn't know would pack her treasures into plastic bags and carry them away. A life, at its end, is a pile of cloth and paper, and goods that can be bagged and labelled. None of the best things - the voice and the laugh, the tilt of the head, the things seen and felt and spoken - are allowed to stay behind.”