Tag Archive for James Preller The Fall

REPOST: Current Events Force Me to Remember Another Teen Suicide and the Book I Wrote About It

Eight years ago, I published an upper midde-grade/YA titled The Fall. It was inspired on the day I read about the suicide of a 12-year-old girl, Rebecca Ann Sedwick, who was “terrorized on social media.” 

My book is written from the point of view of a boy, Sam, who had participated in some of that online bullying. Across time, he writes in his journal: remembering, recounting, reflecting, and ultimately owning it. 

The book begins: “Two weeks before Morgan Mallen threw herself off the water tower, I might have typed a message on her social medial page that said, “Just die! Die! Die! No one cares about you anyway!”

It’s a story that has generated a lot of powerful letters from students, usually in 8th grade; if you are interested in investigating a few of those letters, just click on “The Fall” under categories on the right sidebar and scroll. 

I re-share this post because nearly a week has passed since we learned about yet another horrific teen suicide, a 14-year-old girl named Adriana Kuch. 

The reasons for suicide are complex and ultimately unknowable. But so much comes back to how we treat each other. Our sense of compassion and empathy, which is a social skill that can be cultivated. Reading helps. Literature helps. 

I see much of the world’s cruelty as a direct result of a failure of the imagination. A failure to recognize the humanity in others. 

We must do better. 

This morning in February 2023 I am conflicted about sharing this blog post. But I do know that my book has helped some readers in the past. Perhaps it can help someone again. This all makes me so sorry and so sad.

 

Previously Posted . . . 

It began almost twenty-five years ago when I first started writing the Jigsaw Jones Mystery Series. I’d drop quick references to actual books that my characters were reading. Bunnicula, Shiloh, Nate the Great, and so on. Sometimes I’d do more with it, as in The Great Sled Race, where Jigsaw’s class is reading Stone Fox by John Reynolds Gardiner. In another example, The Case of the Buried Treasure, the students in room 201 had to do a “story maps” assignment based on Wolf in the Snow, the 2018 Caldecott Medal Winner by Matthew Cordell. This strategy was a nod of appreciation and a  way to connect the real world with Jigsaw’s fictional world. Maybe a reader would think, Hey, I read that book, too

I carried on that tradition over to longer works for middle-grade readers and beyond. It wasn’t a plan, exactly, it just sort of happened. In some ways, it poses a good question for a writer to ask of any character: What book would this person love? In Blood Mountain, there’s a former marine with PTSD. He’s living off the grid in the mountains. The dog-eared book he carries around is Lau Tsu’s Tao Te Ching. The fact of that book served as an entrance point into the struggles and mindset of the character.

For The Fall, I used Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. There was a time in our world when seemingly everyone read that book — I remember grabbing it off an older sister’s bookshelf. I decided to make The Bell Jar an important book for Morgan Mallen. It was fascinating for me to read it again through the eyes of that character. After Morgan’s death, by suicide, the book finds its way to The Fall’s narrator, Sam.

Here’s one passage where Plath’s book comes into play:

Morgan had marked up The Bell Jar here and there, little checkmarks and passages underlined.

The evocative, transcendent cover of the Japanese translation of THE FALL.

I never found my name in it. There was no secret message. Believe me, I looked.

“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead” was underlined in red.

There was a loopy star next to “I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come.”

(Oh, Morgan.)

Another star: “I had nothing to look forward to.”

It was that kind of book, and I guess Morgan was that kind of girl. There was a sadness inside her, a darkness I couldn’t touch. Strange as it seems, all the while I imagined her reading those words, dragging her pen under important sentences, drawing stars in the margins.

Reading is the most alone thing in the world.

But she was with me the whole time.

Weirdness. The book brought us closer, across time and impossible distance. We shared this.

=

 

ABOUT THE FALL . . . 

 

 “Readers will put this puzzle together, eager to see whether Sam ultimately accepts his role in Morgan’s death, and wanting to see the whole story of what one person could have, and should have, done for Morgan. Pair this with Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why (2007).” — Booklist.

“Told through journal entries, Preller’s latest novel expertly captures the protagonist’s voice, complete with all of its sarcasm, indifference, and, at the same time, genuine remorse.” — School Library Journal.

“With its timely, important message and engaging prose style, Sam’s journal ought to find a large readership.” (Fiction. 10-16) — Kirkus.

 “It was 2:55 am as I finally gave up on the notion of sleep.  Having started reading THE FALL by James Preller earlier in the day, I knew sleep would not come until I had finished Sam’s story.  Now, having turned the last page, it still haunts me and will for quite some time.”Guys Lit Wire.

“I didn’t realize the emotional impact this book had on me until the very last sentence when it brought tears to my eyes. This was a heartbreaking and beautiful story about friendship, bullying, and the aftermath of all of it.” — Expresso Reads.

NOMINATED FOR THE SAKURA MEDAL IN JAPAN!

YALSA “QUICK PICK” FOR RELUCTANT YOUNG ADULT READERS!

 

Fingertreeprint

“I’m a little worried about how much I’ve been thinking about my fingerprints. All the places I’ve been, the things and people I’ve touched, the marks I’ve left behind.”The Fall, JP 

 

 

In my writing, here and there, I’ve frequently returned to the idea/metaphor of fingerprints. Probably most cogently in The Fall, a book about identity and figuring out who you are (among other things). 

And I’ve also been writing about trees (Blood Mountain, mostly, and in some new work not yet published). Not only writing, but trying to learn about them. Reading, stopping to look, researching. 

So when I saw this meme, it resonated. 

 

 

 

                      

Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” as It Figures in My Book, “The Fall”

It began almost twenty-five years ago when I first started writing the Jigsaw Jones Mystery Series. I’d drop quick references to actual books that my characters were reading. Bunnicula, Shiloh, Nate the Great, and so on. Sometimes I’d do more with it, as in The Great Sled Race, where Jigsaw’s class is reading Stone Fox by John Reynolds Gardiner. In another example, The Case of the Buried Treasure, the students in room 201 had to do a “story maps” assignment based on Wolf in the Snow, the 2018 Caldecott Medal Winner by Matthew Cordell. This strategy was a nod of appreciation and a  way to connect the real world with Jigsaw’s fictional world. Maybe a reader would think, Hey, I read that book, too

I carried on that tradition over to longer works for middle-grade readers and beyond. It wasn’t a plan, exactly, it just sort of happened. In some ways, it poses a good question for a writer to ask of any character: What book would this person love? In Blood Mountain, there’s a former marine with PTSD. He’s living off the grid in the mountains. The dog-eared book he carries around is Lau Tsu’s Tao Te Ching. The fact of that book served as an entrance point into the struggles and mindset of the character.

For The Fall, I used Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. There was a time in our world when seemingly everyone read that book — I remember grabbing it off an older sister’s bookshelf. I decided to make The Bell Jar an important book for Morgan Mallen. It was fascinating for me to read it again through the eyes of that character. After Morgan’s death, by suicide, the book finds its way to The Fall’s narrator, Sam.

Here’s one passage where Plath’s book comes into play:

Morgan had marked up The Bell Jar here and there, little checkmarks and passages underlined.

The evocative, transcendent cover of the Japanese translation of THE FALL.

I never found my name in it. There was no secret message. Believe me, I looked.

“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead” was underlined in red.

There was a loopy star next to “I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come.”

(Oh, Morgan.)

Another star: “I had nothing to look forward to.”

It was that kind of book, and I guess Morgan was that kind of girl. There was a sadness inside her, a darkness I couldn’t touch. Strange as it seems, all the while I imagined her reading those words, dragging her pen under important sentences, drawing stars in the margins.

Reading is the most alone thing in the world.

But she was with me the whole time.

Weirdness. The book brought us closer, across time and impossible distance. We shared this.

=

 

ABOUT THE FALL . . . 

 

 “Readers will put this puzzle together, eager to see whether Sam ultimately accepts his role in Morgan’s death, and wanting to see the whole story of what one person could have, and should have, done for Morgan. Pair this with Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why (2007).” — Booklist.

“Told through journal entries, Preller’s latest novel expertly captures the protagonist’s voice, complete with all of its sarcasm, indifference, and, at the same time, genuine remorse.” — School Library Journal.

“With its timely, important message and engaging prose style, Sam’s journal ought to find a large readership.” (Fiction. 10-16) — Kirkus.

 “It was 2:55 am as I finally gave up on the notion of sleep.  Having started reading THE FALL by James Preller earlier in the day, I knew sleep would not come until I had finished Sam’s story.  Now, having turned the last page, it still haunts me and will for quite some time.”Guys Lit Wire.

“I didn’t realize the emotional impact this book had on me until the very last sentence when it brought tears to my eyes. This was a heartbreaking and beautiful story about friendship, bullying, and the aftermath of all of it.” — Expresso Reads.

NOMINATED FOR THE SAKURA MEDAL IN JAPAN!

YALSA “QUICK PICK” FOR RELUCTANT YOUNG ADULT READERS!

 

True Confessions: Falling Out of Love with Your Own Book . . . And Back Again

I’ve found that my relationship with each book I’ve written changes over time. This must be true for other writers. We work intensely on the manuscript, through the endless revisions and copyedits, deeply engaged, and then the book goes out into the world. Done, finished. We’re proud, thrilled, hopeful. Our minds then turn to the next task, radars up, our occupation of daydreams and research.

Meanwhile, the world does what it does.

9781250090546.IN01I’ve found that my feelings about the book shift in subtle ways according to the response it receives. The reviews, certainly. There are sales reports and Amazon rankings and the craziness of GoodReads and the tone in my editor’s voice, who gives good news or says little.

Should I ask? I decide not to ask. Better not to ask.

And worst of all, that slippery thing: The Buzz Factor. Likes and shares and retweets and the cold, clammy horror of being ignored on social media.

You learn, once again, that you have not written an “it” book. Entertainment Weekly will not be calling. Oprah isn’t enthralled. Even Betsy Bird doesn’t seem to care.

Friends kindly ask, “How’s the book doing?”

And I think: Gee, I don’t know, but whatever it is doing, it is doing it very, very quietly. Because after all it’s a book — a silent slothlike creature moving stealthily about the forest, unaccompanied by fanfare and timbrels.

The feeling, accurate or not, is this: I made a book and the world just shrugged. It can be dispiriting. A vague disappointment settles into the pit of the stomach. A small distance creeps in between the book and me.

Stupid, I know.

And, in fact, monumentally stupid because before all that outside stuff wedged between us, I knew I had written a good book. Maybe even a very good book. Even so, the world so often yawns. Life goes on pretty much exactly as before.

The response to the book can create a rift between author and object. Maybe I don’t love it as much anymore. Maybe something’s wrong with it, or wrong with me. The perceived world’s indifference gets in the way.

Then time passes.

And for some reason I pick up the book I wrote four years ago and leaf through the pages. Parts surprise me. There are passages where I think: Hey, that’s pretty good. And in that moment, the book returns to me, it comes back like a bounding, beloved hound that had crawled under the fence for one long, wretched night.

Returned home again. Found.

So to celebrate that reunion, and the good things — and the extraordinary things, nominated for the Sakura Medal in Japan — that the world has given back about The Fall, I thought I’d share a small section of the story. It is a book about hard things written in short, accessible chapters. Here’s one example, where Sam writes in his journal about Morgan, who has died. He describes a moment between them that never happened. At least, not in the way he imagines.

 

Scan 2

(Don’t worry, folks. Here’s a blow up that you can actually see with human eyes.)

Scan 3

Scan 5

 

Author Event, Today, June 11th, 3:00 @ Barnes & Noble, Colonie Center

COME SEE US!

Local Author Roundup Flyer

Barnes & Noble, 131 Colonie Center, Suite 355, Albany, NY 12205 – (518)-438-1728

Joseph Bruchac – Saratoga Springs, NY: Joseph Bruchac is an Abenaki writer and traditional storyteller. Author of over 130 books, his experiences include running a college program in a maximum security prison and teaching in West Africa.

Code Talker: Throughout World War II Navajo code talkers sent messages in an unbreakable code that used their native language. This is the tale of Ned Begay, a sixteen-year-old code talker. His grueling journey is eye-opening and inspiring.

Nancy Castaldo – NY: Nancy Castaldo is the author of several nonfiction books for curious kids, the Regional Advisor for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, and a reviewer for the Historical Novel Society. See more at www.nancycastaldo.com.

The Story of Seeds: Something as small as a seed can have a worldwide impact. Castaldo chronicles where our food comes from, and more importantly, where it is going as she digs deeper into the importance of seeds in our world.

Eric Devine – Waterford, NY: Eric Devine’s Young Adult fiction has been listed by YALSA, Booklist, and the Junior Library Guild. He is also a veteran high school English teacher.
More at: ericdevine.org, facebook.com/ericdevineauthor, or Twitter: @eric_devine

Press Play: When Greg captures footage of brutal and bloody hazing by his town’s championship- winning lacrosse team, he knows he has evidence that could damage as much as it could save. Is revealing the truth worth the cost?

Laura Diamond – Albany, NY: Laura is a board certified psychiatrist and author of young adult fantasy, dystopian, & contemporary novels. When she’s not writing, she’s working at the hospital and catering to her feline furbaby overlords.

The Zodiac Collector: For Anne, the Renaissance Faire means another ruined birthday for her and her twin sister, Mary. This year, she conjures up a spell that will make their birthday party a whirlwind event. Little do they know that it’s a literal request.

James Preller – Delmar, NY: James Preller is an award-winning author. He has published a wide- variety of books for all ages, from picture books to young adult, including the popular “Jigsaw Jones” mystery series and BYSTANDER.

The Fall: In this heartbreaking and beautiful story about friendship and bullying, told through journal entries, Sam explores and ultimately accepts his role in Morgan’s death. “With its timely, important message . . . Sam’s journal ought to find a large readership.” — Kirkus.