Must-Read Middle Grade Roundup

Aurora: What was your inspiration behind When the World Turned Upside Down?

K. Ibura: The contemporary world was the inspiration for When the World Turned Upside Down. I was literally writing it while the pandemic and the recent explosion of conversations about social justice ignited. At first, when I first pitched the book, it was solely about the pandemic. I’m so inspired by young people and I was thinking about their lives during these unprecedented times. I think I was under a bit of quarantine fever to stand at the beginning of this unprecedented time in all our lives and decide, Yeah, I’m going to write a book about this. I actually had already written the outline and was working on the sample pages when George Floyd was murdered. A few days had passed and I found myself in tears on a conference call and I thought, this book has to include social justice topics. So the plot of the book was rewritten to reflect the tumultuous reckonings of 2020.

Please describe the content of When the World Turned Upside Down and what can readers expect from it. 

When the World Turned Upside Down is layered. It focuses on four distinct characters and the unique situations that they are encountering as a result of the pandemic. Readers can expect to take an intimate look at four families’ lives as they wrestle with quarantine and all the complex emotions and personal impact that comes from isolation. Embedded in each of these stories is a quest for identity and self-definition. Each character has to reckon with who they are and how they want to show up in their friendship and in the larger community. On a larger level the book is about finding an authentic place from which you can influence the world. So these three levels—intimate/personal, interpersonal, and communal—are all interwoven as the characters discover a blueprint for having their voices heard as they participate in racial justice work in an age-appropriate way.

Why do you feel middle-grade books with powerful and unique themes are so popular and have such a voice right now? 

I think 2020 was a year of Emergence. We became aware of so many voices and so many communities in 2020—and that has continued in 2021. But that level of emergence doesn’t come from nowhere. The voices that broke onto the national and global stage were grounded in conversations that have been ongoing for many, many years. In the recent decade, I think we’ve been growing in our understanding of children’s voices and identities. Seeing children operate to build equity and change in the areas of education, financial access, the environment and more demonstrates the level of awareness and analysis that children possess. And if children possess this level of awareness, then so should their education, and so should their literature, and so should their conversations at home so that we are expanding possibilities of understanding and empathy among younger and younger children.

What’s next for you in the bookish world? 

What’s next for me in the book world is a young adult novel about a girl with superpowers. In my background, I’ve written a lot of speculative stories for adults. So this new book will be part of a two-book fantasy novel that’s set in the real world. I’m very excited about bringing it to readers in 2022. 

Who is your current favorite writer? Why? 

I’m strong enough to admit that I have fallen off the reading bandwagon. I am so obsessed with my games on my phone that I am woefully behind in reading. Even when I am reading, I’ve always struggled with this question. I think it’s because I find so much value in so many different writers (and my memory is horrible so I’m always paranoid that I won’t remember to mention something or someone I absolutely loved.) So rather than talk about my favorite book, I’ll talk about three books I read while writing When the World Turned Upside Down. The first is Billie Holiday’s Lady Sings the Blues, which she told to a writer she knew and he wrote it down. The book is rambling and has no structure and isn’t easy to read, but there is one section where she talks about how hard it was for her to travel with a group of white musicians. They all had a great relationship, but whenever it was time to eat or time to find a room for the night, there were major problems. When they entered a restaurant, they never knew if she would be served, or told to eat in the kitchen, or if there would be a fight and everyone would get thrown out—resulting in everyone going hungry. She became sick on this trip and somehow, I remember reading it and thinking, wow, I wonder how my parents dealt with this. Then my next thought was, wait a minute, if my parents grew up in segregated America, then I am in the first generation of Black people in this country not to live in segregation. The thought just blew my mind. We talk a lot about the civil rights movement, like it’s stuck in history, but we are just one generation removed from those times and clearly, much of the thinking fueling segregation and violence against nonwhite communities is alive and well. Then there were two books I read specifically for this book. I wanted to see what social justice really could mean for young people. So I read This Book Is Anti-Racist and Not Your Idea. Both these books are for young people. This Book Is Anti-Racist is a chapter book and Not My Idea is a picture book. Both books look to expand children’s ideas of identity, race, and equity—and encourage them to make up their own minds about the world around them.

Any writing advice for aspiring writers?  

Write! And then write some more. And then write even more. I run an accountability group for writers and the biggest thing I tell them is “keep going.” Writing is exhausting and solitary work. Not to say it is not full of delight and magic and creative adventure. It is full of so many wonderful discoveries, but they only come if you show up again and again and again. Mastery builds over time—and it requires you to make one tiny improvement after the other. I say all the time that there are many talented people with an interesting way with words and a unique story to tell. But whether or not they tell it depends on how much commitment they have, how much grit they have, and how long they will hang in there as they develop their skills and find their way through the literary landscape.

Next up, author Lilliam Rivera!