Though her books deal realistically with contemporary problems, Doris Buchanan Smith resists being typecast as an "issues author." When an Atlanta friend remarked that her previous books had dealt with "death, divorce, drugs, delinquency, and dyslexia," she dropped the notion that the protagonist of Last Was Lloyd would have diabetes. Neither would the next hero/heroine have epilepsy as one teacher had suggested. Smith explains that her books begin with a character and then the character has problems, because people do in real life. She does not invent a character because she wants to write about a problem. In fact, she came to be a children's writer by accident (or gentle coercion). As she says, "I came to write for children as innocent as a virgin, not even knowing that children's literature was a field. I sort of stumbled into it, or was pushed, in one of those...