Book Description
There is something evil in the air. Fourteen-year-old Bobby senses it. Who is that man he saw arguing with his pretty new English teacher? And what was the real reason she missed school for days afterward? Bobby knows he should mind his own business, but times are confusing. World War II has just ended and the world is changing. Bobby’s world, especially. There’s his relationship with Joanie, for one—why does being her friend feel awkward all of a sudden? And then there are his buddies, the junior varsity Edenville Owls—a group of basketball players in need of a leader. Can they help each other off the court as well as they can on it? They will need to. Something evil is in the air.

Robert B. Parker brings the same powerful storyline and spare, atmospheric prose to his first novel for young readers that he does to his New York Times best selling Spenser novels. A perfect fit.

 

From The Boston Herald 10 April 2007

It’s no big mystery why Robert B. Parker decided to write a book for young adults.

“My wife and my agent both thought it was a good idea,” said Parker, the critically acclaimed crime writer and author of the wildly successful Boston private-eye “Spenser” series. “When the two women in my life suggest something, how can I resist? I do what I’m told.”

So Parker, who lives in Cambridge, took on the adolescent set in “Edenville Owls,” (Philomel Books, $17.99), which hits bookstores April 24.

Set in September of 1945, “Edenville Owls” centers on 14-year-old Bobby Murphy, who finds himself at the beginning of a lot of things - new school year, member of a new basketball team and new feelings for his old friend Joanie. But when he sees his teacher, Miss Delaney, talking to a suspicious man and then later at school with bruises on her face, things turn dangerous.

The prolific Parker, who can churn out a book in about two months (“10 pages a day,” he said, “whether it’s a mystery, western or young adult book”), said writing about teenagers for teenagers presented new challenges.

“You have to narrow your language range,” he said. “Which is something that’s completely opposite when you’re writing for adults. Also, you know, I’ve been around for 70-something years now and I know things you can’t possibly know when you are 14. So you have to figure out ways to keep that knowledge out of that, whereas in so many of my other novels, I would try to find ways to get that knowledge in.”

Parker also had to censor himself.

“I’m writing about an adolescent boy and girl, yet can’t allude to sex or swear,” he said. “I remember when 15, I was a foul-mouthed letch. I thought of very little but baseball and sex and not in that order. Of course, I had more success in baseball than the other sport, but that’s a different story.”

There were other limitations, too.

“You forget, but when you’re 15, you are limited in transportation, how you follow people,” he said. “Bobby can’t drive a car, so I had to think of other ways he could get things done.”

Parker, who writes only first drafts - “the first time is as a good as it’s going to get” is under contract for two more young adult books and is working on adult books as well - “six unpublished in the queue,” he said.

“I am all over where the money is,” Parker said, laughing. “ ‘Edenville Owls’ is a good stretch, to write something I haven’t before. Plus young adult novels last forever.”