The Animal, the Vegetable, & John D Jones

It was supposed to be a great vacation for  everyone. Clara and Deanie were thrilled about spending  time with their father now that the divorce was  final. But they're surprised and horrified at  having to share Dad with his girl friend and her  stuck-up son right in the same beach house! And for his  part, John D. Jones can't stand the arrangement  either, especially the squabbling girls, whom he dubs  the Animal and the  Vegetable.



When Clara falls asleep on her plastic raft and is  washed out to sea, everyone is hopeful until the  float turns up without her. It's the first time  they've all pulled together But is it too late to  reveal their true feelings?

When she was a young girl living in Charlotte, North Carolina, Betsy Byars thought being a writer was a boring career, and never imagined she'd become an author one day. But years later, while her husband attended graduate school, Byars started writing articles for The Saturday Evening Post, Look, and other magazines. And as her family grew and her children began to read, Betsy Byars began to write books for young readers. She learned that her childhood preconceptions about writing were incorrect and that there was more to being a writer than just sitting in front of a typewriter all day. In fact, she discovered firsthand that it was exciting and stimulating to create her own stories and characters.

Betsy Byars's first children's book was published in 1962, after it had been rejected nine times. Since then, Byars has won the Newbery Award and the National Book Award and has received glowing reviews for her many novels and picture books. Kirkus Reviews has called Byars "a master of perfectly chosen incident and phrase." And The New York Times Book Review noted, "Byars has the uncanny ability to know the secret lives, the outward postures, and the exact words her characters would surely use." Today, Byars's books continue to be favorites with children both in the U.S. and abroad, and they appear on numerous state reading lists.

Well-known for her Blossom Family Quintet, Betsy Byars says she never intended to write more than one book about the lovable Blossom family. "Early in my career I decided not to do sequels. I know that children enjoy them, but I valued the feeling that this was the only time I would write about these characters. I felt it gave me an added incentive to do my best by them, to tell readers everything I knew, to hold nothing back. That worked for twenty-five years, and while I was very fond of certain characters and hated to say good-bye to them, I never had any real problem going on to something new."

Though Byars started her first Blossom book, The Not-Just-Anybody Family, "with the same plan in mind--one set of characters, one book," she soon realized she felt differently about these characters and knew their story could not be contained in just one book. "I found I had been captured by the family as surely as if they'd thrown a net over me," she says.

"When four of the Blossom books had been published I got to feeling lonely for the family, and it occurred to me that there was yet another story to tell. I remembered that when I was a child, I had a dog named Mac, and Mac was put on trial for murder--his victim was someone's pet chicken." This episode was the inspiration for Wanted...Mud Blossom, in which Pap Blossom's dog Mud gets in big trouble when a pet hamster disappears.

Of the Blossom books, Byars admits, "This time I guess it took me five books to tell all I knew about these characters and to do my absolute best by a family I came to care a great deal about. Of course, when I finished the fourth book, I said there wouldn't be any more, and I was wrong.
So. . . "

Betsy Byars, a native of Charlotte, North Carolina, received a degree in English from Queens College there. Currently, she lives in Clemson, SC with her husband, a college professor. They have four grown children--one son and three daughters--and five grandchildren. "My own hobbies," Byars says, "are rather quiet. I like to read and do needlework, and I love animals. But my husband has some very interesting hobbies, and through him, I've learned to fly and earned my pilot's license. Together, we fly all over the United States. Since our children are all grown now, we also travel a great deal in Europe, but we take commercial flights because our plane is not really equipped to make transatlantic flights."