Happy Publication Day to THE WAR LANTERN and a Q & A with Deborah Kalb!

 

It's publication day for THE WAR LANTERN! Hurray!

It's been a journey getting here, and thank you to everyone who has helped me along the way, including my publisher DCB Young Readers. You'll find many things I have to say about this new book in previous blog posts here.

For today, I'm going to bask in the arrival of my sixteenth book for young readers! It's been the most challenging and rewarding book of my career, and took three years of research and travel to museums and archives across the UK and Canada to write it.

BONUS: U.S. Blogger Deborah Kalb has kindly posted our Q & A today, you'll find it here!

A SHORT EXCERPT:

Q: ... did you learn anything that especially surprised you?

"There were many surprises during the research for THE WAR LANTERN, but one aspect of the story that I really hadn’t considered before I began, was the experience of writing about my grandparents. 

Their generation, often called “The Lost Generation,” lived through WWI as young adults then endured WWII as parents with children old enough to go to war. As I researched and wrote about them, I was surprised by how much their trauma had to be part of the story, too. It took me ages to capture their final act of love at the end of Marcus’s story, and I was rewriting that moment up to the final edits. I hope I got it right."

There's a NEW YouTube BOOK TRAILER TOO!

HOT OFF THE PRESS: The Children's Book Council (NYC) selected THE WAR LANTERN as a HOT OFF THE PRESS book for October, 2026!