Check out our interview with Joy McCullough, the author of "Kestrel Takes Flight."
What was your inspiration behind your most recent book?
Kestrel Takes Flight began with unsold picture book about all the different kinds of penguins. While researching that book, I learned about fairy penguins, the smallest species of penguin, which live in Australia, where they are endangered by an invasive species of fox, but are protected from those foxes by enormous white livestock guardian dogs called Maremmas, who are trained specially for that purpose. Of course I immediately thought this had the makings of an excellent middle grade novel. But I wasn't the only one.
Often when a book is announced with a very similar premise to what one is working on, an agent or editor will soothe the author, assuring them it's all in the execution and of course their book will be different. But when a middle grade novel was announced with the exact same premise as the one I was working on - an American girl moving to Australia because her mom had gotten a job helping to train the Maremma dogs protecting the fairy penguins...I knew it was just too close. I took a step back and assessed what I loved about the book I’d been working on. And while fairy penguins and foxes and angelic bodyguard dogs were of course magical, the real heart of the story was the girl and her mother, escaping from an emotionally abusive home, and learning what love and family should really feel like.
So I did some research on other kinds of conservation dogs and I learned about Karelian bear dogs, originally used in Russia for bear hunting, and a woman in Montana who has developed a way of training these dogs to reduce human-bear encounters. And as it turned out, my mother-daughter story worked just as well in Montana!
What does Reading Rainbow mean to you?
I grew up in a home with hundreds of books – maybe thousands. But I didn’t realize until I went away to college that they were 99% authored by straight, cis, white men. It has been important to me as a parent, as well as in my own person reading, to make sure my shelves are filled with books by and for and about people of all different identities. I know there is still work to be done, but I am so grateful that my queer kid has grown up in a time where she could find people like her in the books on our shelves, and in the media she watches.
Why do you feel representation of a variety of people is so important when it comes to writing books?
Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop pioneered the idea that books can be windows or mirrors – that is they can give the reader a window into an experience unlike their own, or they can be a mirror for a reader that reflects their experience back to them. I am a cis white lady and so my main characters are generally cis white people, as I don’t want to take up space outside my lane, but I am very intentional about making sure the world they live in includes people with a wide variety of racial, gender, religious, and sexual identities. In Kestrel Takes Flight, Kes becomes friends with a boy whose Guatemalan mother is currently stuck in Guatemala and unable to join her family in the US. Readers will notice Guatemala connections pop up in a lot of my books – that’s because I lived in Guatemala for a year, married a Guatemalan, and have two bicultural, bilingual kids.
Tell us a little more about the book and why you decided to write it.
Kestrel Takes Flight is a middle grade novel-in-verse about Kestrel, a girl who has grown up with her single mother and her controlling, religious grandfather. When her mother whisks Kestrel away from everything she's ever known to go live on a ranch training conservation dogs, Kestrel is furious. She's afraid of the dogs, and doesn't yet understand how abusive her grandfather really is. But as the community and even the dogs start to show Kestrel and her mom what family can really feel like, Kestrel starts to wonder if she wants to return to Grandfather after all.
The emotional and spiritual abuse parts of this book are tough, but I feel strongly there’s very little we can’t approach in middle grade, as long as we do it with care. My bottom line is that if there are kids experiencing something – discrimination, abuse, mental health issues, whatever – then they deserve to be able to find stories that reflect their experiences back to them, validate their feelings, and give them the hope of seeing a character survive. I think this is important both for the kids who experience these things, and for friends or family members who want to understand a kid who is experiencing these things.
What can fans expect from your book?
A mother-daughter story; a very honest depiction of what emotional abuse feels like to a child; sparse verse that leaves lots of space for the reader to feel and fill in what is safe for them to experience; and lots and lots of dogs.
What's up next for you in the bookish world?
This is a very big year for me! Kestrel Takes Flight is my first book release of the year, followed by Team Awkward #3 (MG) in June, How to Train Your Evil Robot (PB) in July, Suffer a Witch (adult) in August, and Team Awkward #4 (MG) in December! So I’ve got something coming for pretty much everyone this year! And I’m currently working on a co-authored middle grade with Hannah V. Sawyerr, which is coming in 2027.
