Cover Reveal: Breakout by Kate Messner
Hi, Kate Messner! Welcome back to Watch.
Connect. Read.! It is always a good day when you drop by to celebrate books and
reading. Thank you for sharing Breakout’s
cover and for finishing my sentences.
Kate Messner: Hi, Mr. Schu! Thanks so much for inviting
me to help share the new cover art! Breakout
is different from anything I’ve ever written, so it’s exciting (and a little
scary!) to know that it’ll be out in the world soon.
Explore Kate's website. |
Breakout’s cover illustration is from
illustrator Christopher Silas Neal, which is such a gift. Chris and I have done
several picture books together with Chronicle Books, and I’ve always admired
the art he’s done for novels as well. He’s the cover artist for Laurie Halse
Anderson’s Seeds of America Trilogy and so many other books that have caught my
eye. I especially love what Chris can do with light and darkness on a book
cover, so when my Bloomsbury editor asked if I had any ideas for Breakout’s
cover art, I asked – okay, begged –
for her to reach out to Chris. Happily, he was available and interested!
Chris started the cover illustration process by reading the manuscript and sending Bloomsbury a few concept sketches.
We had some great discussions about these
ideas. It’s important for a novel’s cover to make the right kind of promise
about what readers will find inside. Ultimately, we wanted to make sure this
one telegraphed that Breakout is a
book for older elementary & middle school readers, with mystery, suspense,
and also some big ideas to think about Here’s one of Chris’s early cover
concepts, fleshed out.
Editor Mary Kate Castellani and I loved the
look of this one but were a little worried about showing the two girls running,
even though the book culminates with a race. Would readers get the impression
that the girls were the ones who’d broken out of prison? Around the time we
were having these conversations, Chris and I were both speaking at the
Gaithersburg Book Festival in Maryland. It’s not typical for authors and
illustrators to collaborate directly on cover art – usually editors and art
directors facilitate those conversations – but Chris and I got talking on a
shuttle bus back to the hotel from the festival’s author-illustrator reception.
In that fifteen-minute ride, we tossed around a whole bunch of ideas.
What if there’s a helicopter on the cover?
And a search light that illuminates the
scene below?
Maybe it lights up Owen’s tree fort!
That conversation ultimately led to the
final cover, which I really love, because I do think it makes the right promise
to readers. This is a story with a lot of tension, where things that are
supposed to be familiar and safe, suddenly look different in the glare of a
search light.
Breakout
tells the story of a small-town prison break. The three main characters are
Nora Tucker, whose Dad is the prison superintendent, her best friend Lizzie
Bruno, whose grandmother is a civilian worker there, and Elidee Jones, who’s
just moved to town with her mom to be closer to her brother, who is an inmate.
Here’s the official jacket description from Bloomsbury:
Nora Tucker is looking forward to summer
vacation in Wolf Creek – two months of swimming, popsicles, and brushing up on
her journalism skills for the school paper. But when two inmates break out of
the town’s maximum security prison, everything changes. Doors are locked,
helicopters fly over the woods, and police patrol the school grounds. Worst of
all, everyone is on edge, and fear brings out the worst in some people Nora’s
known her whole life. Even if the inmates are caught, she worries that home
might never feel the same. Told in letters, poems, text messages, news
stories, and comics – a series of documents Nora’s collected for the Wolf Creek
Community Time Capsule Project – BREAKOUT is a thrilling story that will leave readers thinking about who’s really
welcome in the places we call home.
I wrote Breakout while a thousand law enforcement officers were scouring
the woods and mountains near my house, searching for two convicted murderers
who escaped from Clinton Correctional Facility in June of 2015.
I live fourteen miles from the prison, so
helicopters circled over practically every night during the 23-day manhunt.
Before my careers in teaching and writing, I was a TV news reporter, and
whenever something big is going on, I still feel that tug to go see what’s
happening for myself. So I drove to Dannemora and hung out at the coffee shop
and market across from the prison.
For three days, I sat at a table with my
coffee and my notebook, and I listened to people’s stories. A cashier told me
how her son wouldn’t sleep in his own room at night. The manager told me they
were so busy she’d run out of bottled water and had to call the Pepsi guy to
bring more. State police who had come from downstate talked about what they
were missing at home, now that they were here, searching our woods. A little
boy came in wearing rubber boots with his Halloween firefighter costume and
announced that he was going to help. New York City reporters from the Times and the Daily News wondered how we survived up here with such crummy cell
service. And inmates’ families told me they were scared. They worried that all
the inmates would end up suffering because of those two who’d escaped.
Breakout is a fictional
story, set in a fictional town, but it was inspired by many of the stories I
heard in the coffee shop that week.
On June 5, 2018, I’ll be out on book tour,
sharing this story with readers, and I couldn’t be more excited about that.
We’re going to talk about how a ripped-from-the-headlines story like this comes
together, through research, brainstorming, drafting, and revising. I’m looking
forward to showing kids all the different drafts and sharing how I discovered
that a novel-in-documents was the way this story wanted to be told. We’re going
to play around with some writing, too -- telling a story through different
points of view. I love the way stories like this can help kids understand how
other people’s perspectives might be different from their own. My greatest hope
is that Breakout is one of those stories that builds empathy and challenges
kids to ask questions about privilege and perspective.
Reading is sometimes a great comfort and sometimes the opposite. The most important books in my life fall in both of those categories, I think. Some are dog-eared childhood favorites that always filled me with magic and made me believe that everything would be all right. But some books that have had the biggest impact on me are stories that made me uncomfortable. Those stories pushed me out of my comfort zone, and I think Breakout may fall into that category for many readers, too.
Mr. Schu, you should have asked me what
I’ve been reading lately (because I always love to talk about that!) There are some amazing books coming out this
school year, and I’ve had the chance to read some of those a bit early. Tracey
Baptiste’s RISE OF THE JUMBIES is an amazing sequel to THE JUMBIES. Jumbies are
these terrifying creatures from Trinidad’s folklore. They’re featured in RISE,
too, along with a sparkling team of black mermaids. Loree Griffin Burns has a
new Scientists in the Field book called LIFE ON SURTSEY: ICELAND’S UPSTART
ISLAND, which is my favorite of all of Loree’s books so far. And right now I’m
halfway through Justina Ireland’s YA novel DREAD NATION, which is an alternate
history of Post-Reconstruction America where special schools train black and
Native girls to fight zombies that rose from the dead at the end of the Civil
War. Personally, I think this is the alternative history HBO should be doing
instead of Confederacy. It’s an
incredible page-turner and I think it’ll be a powerful conversation starter in
classrooms, too.
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