"First, let me say that as a child I made a conscious decision not to be a writer because I thought writers had all the answers," maintained Patricia MacLachlan in an interview with Ann Courtney for Language Arts. MacLachlan's writing career was thus put on hold for the first thirty-five years of her life. "I didn't begin writing stories as a child, as many writers did," she related in Junior Literary Guild. "Probably it was because I was afraid of putting my own feelings and thoughts on a page for everyone to read. This still is a scary part of writing."

This fear of opening up in front of others is far from evident in the award-winning and critically praised juvenile novels MacLachlan writes. Her simple, compassionate stories, including Sarah, Plain and Tall and The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt, portray a cast of individualistic children on...