Award-winning author Kathleen Karr is noted for her historical novels for young teens that successfully blend humorous and suspenseful plots with boldly drawn characters. Her settings range from New York City to the American West, and she is equally comfortable in the nineteenth century as she is in the twentieth. Karr's characters range widely; her protagonists range from young and feisty pioneer girls traveling the Oregon Trail to a young boxer driven to battle his opponents in the Lower East Side of nineteenth-century New York. "I love trying to recreate a time period, to take readers into the past just like a time machine," Karr noted in an interview with Authors and Artists for Young Adults (AAYA). "It is my goal to make young readers feel they are really there in a different era and to show that people living then were as interesting--and maybe more so--than people...