This image is the cover for the book How I Became a Writer and Oggie Learned to Drive

How I Became a Writer and Oggie Learned to Drive

Winner of Italy’s 2006 Premio Andersen Award: A young writer’s fantasy world becomes dangerously entangled with reality
Eleven-year-old Archie and his six-year-old brother, Oggie, are constantly going back and forth between their mother’s home and the apartment that their father shares with his girlfriend. To distract Oggie from the turbulence of endlessly bouncing from “Saturn” to “Jupiter” and back again, Archie invents a fantastic story about the Mysterious Mole People. When Oggie’s wallet is stolen by kids from a local gang, Archie tries to retrieve it and becomes increasingly ensnared in the gang’s dangerous activities. Even worse, he soon finds that his fictitious mole story is merging with the darkness of real life in a very frightening way.

Janet Taylor Lisle

Janet Taylor Lisle (b. 1947) is an author of children’s fiction. After growing up in Connecticut, Lisle graduated from Smith College and spent a year working for the volunteer group VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) before becoming a journalist. She found that she loved writing human interest and “slice of life” stories, and honed the skills for observation and dialogue that would later serve her in her fiction. Lisle took a fiction writing course in 1981, and then submitted a manuscript to Richard Jackson, a children’s book editor at Bradbury Press who was impressed with her storytelling. Working with Jackson, Lisle published her first novel, The Dancing Cats of Applesap, in 1984. Since then she has written more than a dozen books for young readers, including The Great Dimpole Oak (1987) and Afternoon of the Elves (1989), which won a Newbery Honor. Her most recent novel is Highway Cats (2008).

Open Road Integrated Media