Linda Crew grounds her fiction for young adults firmly in the real world, but also in her own optimistic world view. A native of Corvallis, Oregon who can boast an ancestor who traveled westward via a wagon train traveling the Oregon Trail in the 1860s, Crew imbues her award-winning novels with a strong sense of place, family and happy endings. "You like to feel that things are going to turn out okay in the end," she maintained in an interview with Authors and Artists for Young Adults (AAYA). "Don't you hate to get invested in characters and then realize, 'Oh, this is going to be one of these stories where the author is going to make me love all these people and then kill them all'"" Crew's upbeat fiction is drawn from her own experience of life, defined by her personal attitude. "I don't just try to be...