The author of several highly acclaimed books for younger readers, Adele Griffin has blended a realistic style with a focus on family to fashion what she called "total escapism" in an interview with Edward T. Sullivan in Voice of Youth Advocates. "If a book can get you so absorbed that you don't even realize that it's gotten darker in the room and you need to turn on a light because you spent the last three hours being completely immersed in that story--that's a good story," Griffin told Sullivan. Many such good stories have come from Griffin in the course of only a few years; with her third novel, Sons of Liberty, she became a National Book Award finalist. Griffin is, according to Sullivan, "one of today's best writers of middle grade fiction."

Griffin did not initially intend to become a writer, but a job out of college at...