Charlotte’s Ghosts: The Mystery of the Vanishing Boy follows a grieving middle school girl who moves across the country and meets a ghost on the Civil War Battlefield near her new home. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

The original idea for Charlotte’s Ghosts began almost exactly as the story opens, I was running with my dog on a Civil War Battlefield in Virginia, although it wasn’t Manassas. The enormity of the tragedy that occurred there overwhelmed me; of the people lost, and the effect those losses would have had on the families of the young men who gave their lives. In a time with no genetic testing, and when dog-tags were not standard issue, I wondered about the difficulty of the task of identifying those who were killed. I couldn’t imagine the grief associated with not knowing what happened to a brother, father, son or husband of that era. Or, to be the ghost of someone who could not rest because they would never be reunited with their loved ones.

Charlotte struggles with losing her father, moving across the country, and starting a new school all at once at a challenging time in childhood. What were some driving ideals behind your character’s development?

Charlotte adored her father. For her, losing him knocked the very Earth off its axis. To honor him, and to keep his memory alive, she tries to stay true to the ideals he instilled in her: duty, courage, honor. Those are hard ideals to uphold. By rediscovering the depth and strength of his love for her, and hers for him, she is able to help Jeremy, and despite the distractions that tempt her to give up on all that he taught her, she finds her place in a new world without him. In the end it is experiencing Jeremy’s grief, and remembering her father’s love for her, even after he is gone, that connects her to Jeremy and that moves them both to the beginning of healing.

What were some educational aspects that were important for you to include in this children’s book?

The story originally explored the role of Southern intransigence around slavery. As the story evolved, I realized that the most genuine information the story could convey was the indiscriminate horror of war. The US Civil War was the bloodiest war in American history in which hundreds of thousands of people suffered, were injured, or died. The tragedy of war is not just in the battles, but the privations and destruction that war causes. The true horror of war is the same for those who fight it, and those who witness it as civilians, no matter the weapons or the reasons for it.

Also, I hoped readers would learn a little about life in the 1860s by comparing a world without cell phones, electricity, mass communication, or even grocery stores to their own lives. Life for Jeremy and Charlotte could not have been more different, but the pain they experienced was equally devastating.

Will this book be the start of a series or are you working on a different story?

I am currently working on a totally new story that definitely has series potential, but unrelated to Charlotte and Jeremy. It involves a secret intelligence agency that is composed entirely of animals.

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