When I first started in children's publishing, I was surrounded by amazing middle-grade projects: Percy Jackson, Artemis Fowl, Bartimaeus. Over the years, I've had a hard time finding middle-grade novels that I wanted to edit. At Hyperion, I worked on books in the three series just mentioned, along with the first books in Robin Mellom's The Classroom series. In my three years at Simon & Schuster, I've edited just three middle-grade books: Red Butterfly and the two Miles Taylor books. Happily, I've just doubled that figure by acquiring the first three books in acclaimed novelist Scarlett Thomas's Worldquake Sequence.
The first book, Dragon's Green, reminded me of all the things I loved about Percy, Artemis, and Bartimaeus: unforgettable characters, twisty plot, and brilliant world-building. Add to the mix Roald Dahl-esque adults and Harry Potter-like food descriptions and I was sold. Scarlett tackles big ideas in the way that Philip Pullman does with the writing elegance of Katherine Rundell.
Dragon's Green comes out in Summer 2017.
