“Whereas Emily really helped me round out the learning disability portion and make sure May remained active rather than passive even while trapped inside alone.” “Nicole urged me to flesh out the details of May’s world-what kind of clothing she wore, what kind of food she ate-so the reader could really picture her world,” Rose says. at Schwartz & Wade, and Rose believes the narrative benefited from the influence of not one but two editors: Nicole Geiger at Tricycle, and Emily Seise at Schwartz & Wade. Fortunately, Random House found a home for May B. was sold to Tricycle Press after an auction however, Random House shuttered Tricycle in 2011 right before the book’s scheduled publication. “I had only ever read two verse novels, so it felt like a real risk-but I remember feeling it was the most honest thing I’d ever created.” It was such a breakthrough, as if I had been struck by lightning,” Rose recalls. And I decided to mirror the voice of these women in verse. “The language was so spare and matter-of-fact. So Rose reread the primary source accounts. The prose version felt distant and lifeless. The decision to write in verse emerged from frustration with initial drafts. “Those are the books that helped me to find who I was going to be,” Rose says.
“I was struck by the kids’ quirkiness, irreverence, and honesty.” She credits the authors she read at a similar age-Laura Ingalls Wilder, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Beverly Cleary, and Lloyd Alexander-with shaping her both as a person and a writer.
However, the desire to write for younger readers came from teaching. Rose says she always knew she wanted to write. She quickly secured an agent, Michelle Humphrey at the Martha Kaplan Agency, and in another four months she had a book deal. (Random/Schwartz & Wade), a historical novel in verse set in the 19th-century, about a 12-year-old girl left to fend for herself during a brutal Kansas winter.
Her husband, a Presbyterian minister, and two sons, now nine and 11, cheered her along, and four months later Rose completed the manuscript for May B.
In 2009, with nearly a dozen unpublished manuscripts, stacks of rejections, and no leads, Caroline Starr Rose seized what she terms a “you only live once” conviction and quit her job teaching middle-school social studies to write full-time.
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