"I like to think that I'm on the kids' side in my fiction," Canadian author Kit Pearson said in her essay in the Seventh Book of Junior Authors and Illustrators; "perhaps that's because I have such strong memories of being nine to twelve years old." Having won numerous honors for her fiction, Pearson is well-known for her stories that usually feature pre-teen girls as protagonists. But although these characters face problems that Pearson's audience can easily relate to, "to call them 'problem novels' would misrepresent them," according to Gwyneth Evans in her Twentieth-Century Young Adult Writers article: "the difficulties and dilemmas the girls encounter are treated as part of the fabric of life, and the world of each novel is larger than the immediate concerns of its protagonists."

Pearson's family moved back and forth between Edmonton and Vancouver while she was a child. Born in Edmonton, she lived...