Last year, I attended the Historical Novel Society conference in San Diego. Sounds fun, doesn’t it? It was! I met a lot of characters, both on the page and at the dinner table. After the keynote speech on Saturday evening, we had a costume pageant. About twenty authors dressed up as their characters and walked across the stage as an announcer explained the costume. Velvet. Brocade. Taffeta. Lace. Embroidery. Ruffles. Scooping necklines. You can imagine how gorgeous some of the costumes were!
Fortunately, I didn’t take myself too seriously. I pretended to shoot an arrow into the audience, and I had them all laughing with me. After the ruffles and taffeta, my outfit looked pretty ridiculous.
Clearly, I was out of place. Almost all the other books took place in England, France, or North America. When you hear “historical novel,” that’s what you expect, right? Lush costumes, poufy sleeves, jeweled crowns, sweeping skirts. After all, our U.S. heritage is mostly from Europe.
But YA readers don’t see the world that way. Today’s young adults are growing up in a multicultural society and a global world. In school, they learn about Japan and India, the Apaches and the Incas. They read books set in Nigeria and Vietnam and China. Their classmates and neighbors may be from Iran or Israel or Venezuela.
Why read historical fiction set in an unfamiliar country? Why not? The best historical fiction lets us explore the long-ago and the far-away. The farther away the setting is from my own life, the more it fascinates me—and the more I learn.
_____________________________________________
Son of Venice is the sequel to Daughter of Xanadu (Read my review!). This novel continues the story of Marco Polo and Emmajin, granddaughter of Khubilai Khan, after the Great Khan sends her on a voyage to the West.
, the fictional diary of a 16-year-old girl who hunts down the reason for a typhoid epidemic in 1906.
Starting my research for 
(2004), an epic tale of love, kidnapping, and white Indians, won the 2005 American Book Award.
has quickly become one of my favorite books ever. I'm still a bit puzzled as to why it's titled Waterfall though, but I'll let that detail go for now. If you love historical fiction this is a MUST READ for you, and if you don't like historical or have never been able to get into it, or maybe you have just never tried it, I dare you to read this and NOT love it. 
, takes place in New York City during the 1930’s and 1940’s, so finding the balance of just the right amount of detail was a task I set for myself in my narrative. Although I didn’t write about whales my novel does involve the worlds of stage combat and competitive fencing - subjects that if I wasn’t careful with could easily overwhelm readers with to much information about the differences between a saber, a foil, and an épée. My challenge was to place these worlds in the time of the 1930s/40s and in the place of New York City.
I had read the book By the Sword, by Richard Cohen, and it was a great reference work on the history of competitive fencing and dueling but I wanted something more specific, something sensory. I decided to interview a fencing master, named Joe Brodeth, who at the time was both the fencing coach at St. John’s University and an instructor at a fencing salle called Metropolis Fencing that I happened to fence at. I had taken lessons from Joe before in Italian épée and foil - because he’s one of the few teachers of the technique left and it is my style of fencing. He was then near 80 years old and still teaching and fencing himself and loved to tell stories about fencing, both about competition and about the development of the sport. I asked him if he’d let me interview him about fencing in the 1940s so that I could write the scene about the épée tournament, and he agreed.
and the forthcoming 
and The Springsweet. She always picks truth; dares are too easy.