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In The Tenth Mistake of Hank Hooperman, Gennifer Choldenko, author of such middle-grade stalwarts as the Newbery Honor–winning Al Capone Does My Shirts and sequels, tracks the fortunes of an eleven-year-old boy and his little sister in foster care when their mother disappears. Again.

Roger Sutton: The first thing I thought of when I read Hank Hooperman’s story was something Betsy Byars once said about writing for children. She said her first rule was to get rid of the parents.

Gennifer Choldenko: [laughs] Yep.

RS: Which is something you have done here.

GC: Yes.

RS: How did you decide when to begin the story? You could have started it when Hank and Boo’s mom left. Or months before that. How do you pick a starting point?

GC: I like to start on the day when things change for my character. But in this case, I had initially begun the story too late, when Hank and Boo arrive at Lou Ann’s. Someone in my critique group suggested I begin when Hank and Boo were alone in their apartment, and she was right. For me, I’m most concerned with starting at a point that will draw the reader into the story and help them bond with the characters. I write for kids. You can’t be long-winded.

RS: Right. And you've got to give readers someplace right from the start where they'll want to keep going.

GC: The page-turn, just like in picture books, is key for me. I try to develop a narrative drive so powerful that I can't wait to write the next chapter.

RS: How much did you know going in? I know from reading the afterword that this is based, in some senses, on your own situation as a child even though it’s not your story, right?

GC: Right. It’s not my story. My older brother, Grey, who I modeled Hank after, read The Tenth Mistake of Hank Hooperman and said, “This is fiction.” And it is fiction. But I developed the relationship between Boo and Hank based on the relationship I had with Grey when we were young. Like Hank, my brother was good at making up games for me. In the book Hank made up a game for Boo called "Winner, Winner, Lunch and Dinner," which they played to find spare change in the apartment. And when they were successful, they walked over to the convenience store and bought their favorite foods. In real life when my parents were gone, my brother would create Disneyland in his room. He would build tunnels out of chairs and sheets and have stations with blindfolds and bowls of weird foods to smell and towels you swung from. I tried to channel my brother when I wrote.

RS: So, in this case how much did you know about what was going to happen at the end of the story?

GC: I knew that the children’s mom was an alcoholic. And unfortunately, I know a lot about what it’s like to have parents with alcoholism, so I drew from my personal experience in developing her character. What I hadn’t expected was how intense the book felt to write. And that made me worried about launching it. And it made me long for a hopeful ending. The character Ray was inspired by my elementary school best friend Jeri’s dad, Ray Sandoval. Ray was a big-hearted, welcoming person, and I could imagine him reaching out to Hank. Even so, the ending is not what Hank wants. But it is, I believe, what the reader wants.

RS: Yeah, I liked the fact that you had Ray agree to take them in, but Hank is still leaving his options open at the end.

GC: I thought that was important because he really loves his mom. His mom is deeply flawed, and we see her as more flawed than maybe he does. But his goal throughout is keeping their small family unit together.

RS: In real life you were in a similar dynamic with your older brother, Grey, and the main lens of your story is through the brother. What was it like taking on the other side of the story from when you were a child? From the point of view of the caretaker sibling rather than the younger child.

GC: My brother is the hero, the caretaker, and then in his mid-twenties he became the patriarch of our family. He’s important to me, so I spend a lot of time thinking about him. It wasn’t a big leap to see things from his perspective.

RS: Did it change how you saw your own childhood in writing about the relationship between Hank and Boo?

GC: Yes, it did which surprised me. I found it very emotional to write Boo. At age three, Boo charmed everyone she met. She knew that her mother was not going to be there for her, so she made it her business to be the lovable child who attracted others to care of her. It was a primitive instinct born of need. (My daughter, who I adopted as an eight-month-old from an orphanage in China did the same thing when she first came to live with us.) And of course, the relationship Boo had with Hank was the most important one of all. This touched a nerve. There was a lot of truth in it.

RS: Truth about your childhood?

GC: Yeah.

RS: And when Boo meets Lou Ann, it’s almost like she knows exactly what to do, instinctively.

GC: Instinctively, yes, because she's got her feelers out for people to take care of her. She does what Lou Ann wants, and Lou Ann thinks she's a doll. She's quite effective, Boo.

RS: You could have made Lou Ann a pretty simple character, but instead you made her incredibly complicated. Ray is kind of an all-around hero, and Lou Ann is a mixture. She's not a wicked stepmother. But she's not a good fairy, either.

GC: No, she's not.

RS: In books for middle-grade kids, we're so used to seeing adults as being one thing or the other. There are some things about Lou Ann that, while her heart is in the right place, are, to me, genuinely unlikable.

GC: Oh, absolutely. But the unlikable parts of Lou Ann felt true. I think it’s important to create characters who aren’t all good or all bad, because that’s what kids will experience in life. Nuanced character development helps to create characters who leap off the page, characters who remind a reader of people they know.

RS: Your first middle-grade novel was Notes from a Liar and Her Dog, which was published in 2001. That's almost twenty-five years ago. And you've been publishing steadily throughout those years. How is the work of getting published different now? On the one hand, you have a track record. On the other hand, kids are changing; publishing is changing. What's different now about publishing for middle grade?

GC: When Al Capone Does My Shirts launched it was 2004, the year Facebook started. There was no Instagram, no TikTok, no Twitter (X). Social media as we know it today didn’t exist. So launching a book then was very different than it is now. But in terms of publishing, I’ve been lucky that all of my editors are old-school. They make me do lots of revisions, which I appreciate because good critical input improves my work. And given how much busier editors are now, I’m grateful they carve out the time for this important work. Otherwise, I think publishing is harder now. Even if you have a track record, you aren’t necessarily going to get a lot of marketing support. The responsibility to get the word out is more on the author than it was twenty-five years ago.

RS: Do you have a sense of the audience changing? We are seeing middle-grade novels featuring, say, girls getting crushes on other girls and identifying as lesbian, and twenty-five years ago I don't think you would have seen this in middle grade. YA for sure, but middle grade, no. Do you have a sense of your readers changing? I'm not trying to make us feel old, but there have been two or three generations of middle graders since Al Capone.

GC: In some ways, things are much better. The number of incredible books I’ve read written by diverse authors is exhilarating. In terms of LGBTQ for middle-grade readers, not all eight- to twelve-year-old kids are dealing with gender and sexuality questions, but some are. And there should be books available for those kids. The difficulty now is twofold. Reading scores have dropped since the pandemic, so there’s a pushback against longer novels. After Harry Potter it was okay to write 400-page books. But now it isn’t. The other issue is digital competition has intensified. And that means you have to work harder to write a book that kids really want to read.

RS: Short chapters help too.

GC: Right. It’s important for kids to be able to say, “Hey I read two chapters today.” When you don’t have a lot of reading experience, that is a colossal achievement. My goal is to write novels that have emotional resonance. When kids bond deeply with a character, then reading isn’t a chore, it’s a pleasure. I listen to audio books when I walk the dog. I don’t have a yard, so I walk the dog a lot. When I’m listening to a book I really love, the walks get longer and longer. Sometimes the dog lies down and refuses to go further.

RS: Do you find any difference in the letters you get from kids between now and twenty-five years ago?

GC: No, I don’t think so. It’s harder to be a child now. Kids feel the pressures of social media, global warming, the increase in gun violence, and the divisions in our country. There is a lot more anxiety in the kid population than there was twenty-five years ago. Even so, at their core, kids are still kids and the letters I receive are just as charming as they ever were. My all-time favorite letter? “I was going to write to Roald Dahl, but he was dead, so I wrote to you instead.”

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