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She received the 2008 Newbery Medal for her children's book entitled Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village, and the 2013 Newbery Honor for her children's book, Splendors and Glooms.She also won the 2016 Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction, the 2016 National Jewish Book Award, and the Sydney Taylor Book Award for her young adult book, The Hired Girl. Her other published books are The Hero Schliemann: The Dreamer Who Dug For Troy (2006), A Drowned Maiden's Hair: A Melodrama (2006), which won a Cybils Award that year, The Bearskinner: A Tale of the Brothers Grimm (2007), The Night Fairy (2010), and Princess Cora and the Crocodile (2017).
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You have a remarkable ability to create an atmosphere that really transports readers into the world of your stories, and Victorian England as you have painted it in Splendors and Glooms is no exception. What kind of research did you do for this novel that helped you create such a true portrait of life at that time? The detail is reminiscent in some ways to the marvelous descriptions in Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!
In one way this was an easy book to research, because I developed a passion for Victorian novels early in life. When I was in fourth or fifth grade, my father bought me a slim volume containing abridged versions of several of Dickens's novels: A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Great Expectations. I read and reread these stories. I found them haunting and terrifying and triumphant. They satisfied a peculiar hunger in me - and still do. Splendors and Glooms is my homage to Dickens.
I still read and reread Dickens. I love the Victorians: the Brontes, Eliot, Trollope, Collins, and Gaskell. Decades of pleasure reading have taught me the difference between a hansom cab and a hackney coach; I know about Lucifer matches, pattens, hartshorn, and pounce. Which is not to say that when I embarked upon ...
A lifelong lover of history and literature, Jennieke Cohen studied English history at Cambridge University before receiving her undergraduate degree from the University of California, Davis. After interning with a literary ... (more)
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Splendors and Glooms
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It's a pipe dream of many an aspiring author: publish your debut novel, claim a spot on the New York Times bestseller list, and rack up an astonishing array of awards, including a Newbery Honor. For Kate DiCamillo, ... (more)
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Splendors and Glooms
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