The story centres around a girl called Skye, who is sent to a camp for troubled teenagers after her sister dies in an accident. However, once she is at the camp she starts receiving text messages from someone pretending to be her dead sister.
My thoughts
I really enjoyed Sue Wallman's debut. It kept me guessing throughout with the mystery element as it is slowly unveiled what happened the previous summer. This meant I really struggled to put the book down and read it in one sitting. I loved that the teens are very real within the story and relateable complete with all their character quirks and flaws. I also loved that the book properly captured the feelings of guilt felt by Skye after her sister's death. This is definitely a book I'll be recommending to others.
Guest Post from Sue Wallman: Journey from draft to final printed
copy
I started Lying
About Last Summer after picking myself up from the hideous disappointment of my
previous book not making it through an acquisitions process.
My writing group at the
time consisted of four of us, so I had three people reading my chapters and giving feedback. They were very
supportive. I’ll always remember Emma Rea (who wrote Top Dog) telling us that
she’d been thinking about writerly despair and she’d come
to the conclusion that it was like an athlete with a sports injury. It was part
of the job and it was always going to happen from time to time.
About halfway
through my first draft, still in quite a bad writerly place, I went on a Bound
Bound retreat (there was no time to write – it was more of an intensive
bootcamp) and learned how to up my game in terms of editing and understanding
plot and character. I also met a great group of writers.
I kept going until the
manuscript was ready to send to my agent, Becky Bagnell. She came back with her
usual optimism followed by tactful criticisms: “I think there are several
places where the story could be strengthened…” I went away and became obsessed
with the story, working on it whenever I could. Wherever I went, my laptop or a
notebook came with me.
After Becky decided
it was ready to be submitted to a few editors, I won a manuscript critique in a
Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators raffle. It was with editor Natalie
Doherty at Penguin Random House. I wanted her to say she thought it was the
best book she’d ever read.
That didn’t happen. Instead
she suggested things that she felt would make it better. Quite big things that
would take time to fix. Like making Skye and Luisa sisters, rather than
cousins. I’d read so many books about sisters and I’d wanted to do something
different, but I could see that making them sisters might give the story more
of an emotional punch. I was flattened. But
after discussing it with Becky, I knuckled down again. I felt like a character
in a film montage, pushing myself to achieve something against the odds –
except in a film you know it’s going to work out ok.
But then – A
TWO-BOOK DEAL with Scholastic! A
fantastically enthusiastic editorial team. Lucy Rogers and Lena McCauley guided
me through more edits – these were relatively minor. I upped the emotion
further, made some things clearer and added a lot of rain at the end.
On 19th March 2016 I
saw the printed book in the Scholastic offices. Today – the day I’m writing this
blogpost – I’ve seen the book in a bookshop, my local Waterstones, for the
first time. In my daydreams I always thought these moments would be shrieky,
but for me they weren’t. They were moments of quiet deep-down happiness.
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