In our September/October issue, HB editorial assistant Shoshana Flax asked Katherine Applegate about the impetus for her touching new novel Crenshaw. Read the full starred review of Crenshaw here.

Shoshana Flax: Which came first: the idea of writing about an imaginary friend or about a boy and his family dealing with poverty? How did one lead to the other?

Katherine Applegate: We’re in chicken-or-egg territory here, but I suspect the imaginary friend came first. The inspiration probably dates back some forty-odd years, when I first viewed the brilliant Jimmy Stewart movie Harvey, which features a large, invisible rabbit. While I’ve never had an imaginary friend myself, it seemed like an intriguing premise for a novel, especially if the main character, Jackson, was a practical, just-the-facts kind of kid, one facing intractable, grown-up problems such as poverty and hunger. I wrote Crenshaw because I wanted librarians to have a story they could hand to kids like Jackson, kids for whom uncertainty is the only certain thing in their young lives.

From the September/October 2015 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.