Going Going

"Readers who cherish historic buildings and traditions will feel a strong kinship to the highly motivated Texas teen at the center of Nye's (Habibi) novel, who wants her distaste for large franchise establishments known. On her 16th birthday, Florrie starts a campaign, urging family members, friends, classmates and citizens of San Antonio to boycott business chains and begin frequenting locally owned shops and restaurants such as her mother's Mexican diner, El Viento. (The girl 'loved old things in a way that even she could not understand.') Leading demonstrations and protests against such establishments as Wal-Mart, Florrie makes her voice heard, gains publicity for her cause and in doing so, piques the interest of a cute boy, Ramsey, whose father ironically manages a Marriott. While the novel succeeds in showing that one person can make a difference, readers may be a bit disappointed that Florrie's relationships with the other characters are not as well developed as her passion for saving small businesses. Her brief romance with Ramsey is sketchily defined as are her feelings for an old flame, Zip, who is always ready and willing to lend a helping hand and sympathetic ear. While the author hints that there is more to Florrie than meets the eye, only one side of the heroine is thoroughly explored, the side that abhors change and longs to preserve the past. Ages 12-up." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Nye brings close the sorrow of historic landmarks obliterated in one's hometown, and teen conservationists everywhere will recognize the arguments." Hazel Rochman, Booklist

From the author of "Habibi" comes this effervescent, timely, and romantic novel by one of the nation's most beloved poets. On her 16th birthday, Florrie makes a wish that changes not only her but her family as well.

Naomi Shihab Nye was named a National Book Award finalist for 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East.The author has been honored with a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, the I.B. Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, and four Pushcart Prizes. Her award-winning picture books for children include Sitti's Secrets,illustrated by Nancy Carpenter, and Come with Me,illustrated by Dan Yaccarino. Naomi Shihab Nye is the author of a novel, Habibi,and the editor of seven critically acclaimed poetry anthologies for young people. She lives with her family in San Antonio, Texas.

In Her Own Words...

Since books have been some of my best friends all my life, being involved in the making of books is the luckiest, happiest thing I can imagine.

The day Virginia Duncan, my editor for many years now, wrote me her first note stands among my most shining days. She had read some of my poems and asked if I had thought of writing children's books. This is what I tell young writers: when you send your poems out into the world, you have no idea what friends they might find. Thank you, Virginia.

As a child I read all the time. I got lost and found in books, and still do. They are my refuge, escape, my endless journey. (At this moment I have fourteen books on my bedside table and forty-eight books stacked on my dresser.)

I was also fascinated by my mother's small red diary that she had kept as a girl. Her penmanship was exquisitely and perfectly slanted, a talent I did not inherit. She rarely wrote more than "Saw movie. Got new dress." I wanted to know more details. What color was the dress?I would beg, during our steamy afternoons as she peeled peaches for cobbler and I lay on the floor thumbing through her early life. "I have no idea!" she'd exclaim. "You think I can remember everything?"

I started keeping my own notebooks because I wanted to remember everything. The quilt, the cherry tree, the creek. The neat whop of a baseball rammed perfectly with a bat. My father's funny Palestinian stories. The feeling of a breeze as my brother and I rode our bicycles down the hill. The blood-red stain of a ripe strawberry on my fingertips; the rich smell of earth at Mueller's Organic Farm a few blocks from our house.

How lucky we were to have a farm in our neighborhood! My first job was picking berries. I thought about poems as I meandered among damp rows. Thirty-four summers later my photographer-husband, Michael, our son, Madison, and I went to pick berries there again-same farm, same fields, same farmers. Suddenly everything in my life connected.

Familiar sights, sounds, smells have always been my necessities. Let someone else think about future goals and professional lives! I will keep track of the bucket and the hoe, billowing leaves, and the clouds drifting in from the horizon.

Whenever someone asks why I write about "ordinary things," I wonder, "Well, what do you have in YOUR life?" Writing saved me when my family moved to Jerusalem, my father's hometown, and during my years at Trinity University in Texas. I have spent twenty-five years working as a visiting writer with students of all ages. I write essays as well as poems, children's books and songs as well as novels and stories for teens. Material is everywhere, free as air.

Now my husband, son, and I live in a house nearly a hundred years old, a block from the little river, in downtown San Antonio. We have a large wrap-around front porch with a swing, good to read in. The most important thing to me about any room is: how are the reading lamps? The new basketball court in our backyard was finished the same week our terrific Spurs team won the 1999 NBA Championship. Sometimes things fit together! Reading and writing help us see all the many ways this is true.