A Place for Meg got the Paris Book Festival’s Honorable Mention Award!
I entered my book, A Place for Meg, in the Paris Book Festival. It got an Honorable Mention for my YA (Young Adult) category. Now, I’m hoping that I can go to the Paris Book Festival to receive my certificate. The information I just got from their website is that I need to plan to go to Paris on April 12, 13, and 14, 2024, and it only costs 5 € to get into the event at the Grand Palais Éphémère.
A Place for Meg is a fun book about a high school junior, Meg, who moves from a small town to a big city. When I was a junior in high school, I, too, moved from a small town to a big city. And, since that was such an important part of my life, I decided to write about it. But the book is only an imaginary glimpse of what it was like for me when I moved to Portland, Oregon, and had to make new friends.
I was shy, wanting to blend in, and found myself in a world of activity. Have you ever walked into a store or a mall, and all the different colors and bright lights are so overwhelming that you need to just stand and stare? Get your bearings? Try to understand what’s happening around you?
Well, that was what it was like for me to walk into a big city high school. And that was how it was for Meg as she moved from Emmetville, a fictional place, to Portland and tried to figure out her new world.
In a way, to be able to adjust to her new environment, she had to change who she was. Change her perspective on what school was supposed to be like. Change her friends. Change how she relates to the people around her.
But, always, there’s a bit of her old self under the surface. Because her old life, her old friends, and her old school, Emmetville High School, is still there and will always be. The memories of the fun times try to pull her back. Sometimes it can, and sometimes opening the new world for her means forgetting pieces of her old world. And once she realizes that she can’t go home and needs to be open to new experiences, she gets involved with thespians who are putting on The Taming of the Shrew.
Through all her new experiences, a new person emerges like a butterfly from a chrysalis. Blending her old life with her new one, Meg finds that even though she will never be the person she used to be, she can bring out all she is.
It’s possible that A Place for Meg got the Honorable Mention award because not many people entered their book into the competition, or it got the award because of the theme of how difficult it can be to find your own place within your world. It was a fun book to write, and I’m excited to be able to finish my second book in the series: Meg on Stage.
For a link to buy the book, please click here for Barnes & Noble and here for Amazon.
