"I'm a late bloomer," Karen Cushman told Amy Umland Love of Publishers Weekly. "It takes some time, but I always bloom." The Newbery Award-winning author of novels for young people was alluding to the fact that she was fifty-three when her first book was published. That book, Catherine, Called Birdy, which is about the adventures of a thirteen-year-old girl as she struggles to live her own life in the medieval world, won several literary awards. The experience of writing it and the success that it enjoyed spurred Cushman to write her second novel in a six-month outburst of creative energy. The Midwife's Tale, also set in the Middle Ages, earned its author more honors, including the prestigious 1996 Newbery Medal, one of the highest awards in fiction for young readers. Karen Cushman had come out of nowhere to become a successful author of young adult novels.

The older of...