Stepsister(108)
Acknowledgements
Stepsister is a story I’ve wanted to tell for years. That I finally get to is because of many wonderful people and I can never thank them enough, but I’m going to try anyway.
Thank you to Mallory Kass, my awesome editor, for her intelligence, huge heart, sense of humor, and affection for ugly stepsisters, balky horses, high-strung authors, and other difficult creatures. Isabelle and I are so lucky to have our very own Tanaquill in you – minus the sharp teeth and talons!
A huge, heartfelt thank you to Dick Robinson, Ellie Berger, David Levithan, Tracy van Straaten, Lori Benton, Amanda Maciel, Rachel Feld, Lizette Serrano, Lauren Donovan, Alan Smagler and his team, Elizabeth Parisi, Maeve Norton, Melissa Schirmer, and the rest of my Scholastic family for your incredible enthusiasm for Stepsister, and for your lovely welcome to my new home. A very special thank you to Jane Harris, Emma Matthewson, Jenny Jacoby, and the whole Hot Key team for bringing the story to my UK readers. It all means the world to me.
Thank you to Graham Taylor and Negeen Yazdi at Endeavor Content, Bruna Papandrea at Made Up Stories, and Lynette Howell Taylor at 51 Entertainment, for working to bring Stepsister to film. I am so proud to be partnering with all of you, and so excited for what’s to come. A huge thank you to film agent Sylvie Rabineau at WME, and Ken Kleinberg and Alex Plitt at Kleinman, Lange, Cuddy & Carlo, for your excellent counsel and guidance.
Thank you to my wonderful agent, Steve Malk at Writers House, for believing in Stepsister, and all my stories, and me. Wherever you go, go with all your heart, Confucius tells us. I get to tell stories, to follow my heart every day, because I have Steve as my traveling companion on the writer’s journey. Thank you, too, to my foreign rights agent, the amazing Cecilia de la Campa, for bringing Stepsister to readers across the world.
Thank you to illustrator Retta Scott for the Big Golden Books’ Cinderella. Thank you to my grandmother Mary for reading it to me five million times. Thank you to Pablo Picasso. His saying “I am always doing things I cannot do. That’s how I get to do them”, inspired a similar remark from the Marquis de la Chance when he first meets Isabelle, and has always inspired me.
Thank you to my lovely family – Doug, Daisy, Wilfriede, and Megan – for reading early versions of the story and giving me valuable feedback and encouragement. An extra thank you to Doug for the cool tagline. Thanks most of all for putting up with me, guys. You teach me every day what real beauty is all about.
Thank you to the fairy godparents – to the countless generations of storytellers who told the ancient tales to sleepy-eyed children gathered around the fire at night, and to the collectors like Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm who preserved them in writing. Because of these elders, the old stories endured, as vital and relevant today as they were centuries ago.
Fairytales were so important to me as a child. They still are. They’re entertaining, instructive, and inspiring, but more importantly, they’re truthful.
The world conspires in a thousand ways to tell us that we’re not enough, that we’re less than, that life’s one big, long party on the beach and we’re not invited. Dark woods? What dark woods? Wolves? What wolves? Don’t worry about them. Just buy this, eat that, wear those, and you’ll get on the invite list. You’ll be cool. Hot. Liked. Loved. Happy.
Fairy tales give it to us straight. They tell us something profound and essential – that the woods are real, and dark, and full of wolves. That we will, at times, find ourselves hopelessly lost in them. But these tales also tell us that we are all we need, that we have all we need – guts, smarts, and maybe a pocketful of breadcrumbs – to find our way home.
And that brings me to my last thank you – it’s to you, dear reader. Thank you for loving words and stories as much as I do. Thank you for your lovely posts and emails. Thank you for being part of my own fairytale. You are everything I ever wished for.