The Great Good Summer (17 page)

Author's Note

N
early every piece of this story is fictional, including the characters, their adventure, and the little town of Loomer, Texas. But the fires that set Ivy and Paul's great-good summer in motion were based on the all-too-real Bastrop County Complex fires that burned in September and October 2011.

Those blazes—born of a terrible and unlucky combination of drought, high winds, and record-breaking temperatures—killed two people, burned more than 1,600 homes to the ground, devastated beautiful old loblolly pine forests, and turned countless lives on end.

The fires in this book took place eight months after the Bastrop fires, but in my imagination they were very much the same in their catastrophic impact on both people and place.

Also shaped by reality was Paul's sorrow over the end of NASA's Space Shuttle program. After thirty years and 135 flights, NASA launched its last shuttle missions in 2011. The Space Shuttle Atlantis—the one Ivy and Paul would have seen during their visit to the Kennedy Space Center—bears the distinction of having made the final flight. It was the Space Shuttle Endeavour that flew piggy­back on a 747 jumbo jet to its new home at the California Science Center in Los Angeles, the museum Paul referred to. It passed over central Texas in September 2012. From the church steps in Loomer, Ivy and Paul would have had quite a view.

Acknowledgments

E
ven fiction requires the generosity of experts. My friend Brian Anderson imparted both scientific and religious insight, something only a Renaissance man could do. Linda and Jerry Bernfeld were my eyes on the ground in Florida and at the John F. Kennedy Space Center. Tara Gonzalez provided Tallahassee tips, and Rachel Barry Hobson and Greg Leitich Smith offered their own NASA notes. Any misinterpretations of science, space, religion, or Florida are mine, in spite of this help.

I started this story on retreat at the Texas gulf coast, with friends to whom I'm ever grateful: Kathi Appelt, Anne Bustard, Rebecca Kai Dotlich, Jeanette Ingold, and Lindsey Lane. Early readers included my sister Chris, my niece Nina, and my daughter Willa, who read the whole thing aloud to me so I could hear it as a twelve-year-old might.

My critique partners—Anne, Lindsey, and Bethany—are each wise, wonderful, and in this book in many ways. I'm a lucky duck to have them. Likewise, the camaraderie of friends I've found within EMLA, Austin's SCBWI, my Poetry Sisters, and the Circle of Word Lovers.

Starry-eyed thanks to Allyn Johnston and Andrea Beebe Welch at Beach Lane Books, who, with laser focus and wicked intuition, bring out the best in me and in my work. Art director Lauren Rille delivered beauty beyond measure, and the whole Simon & Schuster team made this book better than it was when they got it.

Marla Frazee is one of the best creative partners in all the world. I love that we've been given this memorable glimpse of Ivy and Paul through her eyes.

And speaking of collaboration, this book wouldn't exist without Audrey Glassman Vernick. She's great-good in every way.

Erin Murphy, whom I call both agent and friend, is receptive, honest, and somehow both grounded and visionary—my own personal Hubble Space Telescope.

My family—including Pam and Rob Garton, Chris and Pete Coppolillo, the Scanlon clan, and my beloved niece, nephews, aunts, uncles, and cousins—make up my favorite constellation.

And finally, thanks to my husband Kirk, who is exceedingly tolerant and encouraging of me and my career. And you too, Finlay and Willa, are also tolerant and encouraging and the very reason I write for kids. You three are smack dab in the middle of my universe.

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Beach Lane Books

An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing Division

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2015 by Liz Garton Scanlon

Jacket illustration copyright © 2015 by Marla Frazee

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The text for this book is set in Fairfield Lt Std.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Scanlon, Elizabeth Garton.

The great good summer / Liz Garton Scanlon.—First edition.

p. cm.

Summary: Loomer, Texas, twelve-year-old Ivy Green, whose mother may have run off with a charismatic preacher to Panhandle, Florida, and classmate Paul Dobbs, who wants to see a Space Shuttle before the program is scrapped, team up for a summer adventure that is full of surprises.

ISBN 978-1-4814-1147-9 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-4814-1149-3 (eBook)

[1. Runaways—Fiction. 2. Bus travel—Fiction. 3. Christian life—Fiction. 4. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 5. Friendship—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.S2798Gre 2015

[Fic]—dc23

2014014988