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People Are Slow To Change
The Catchings Press follows a 15-year-old girl navigating race, integration, gender expectations, and the Vietnam War after her family moves to a small Texas town to run its newspaper. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
We’re still navigating the things that Annette Calvert was navigating more than 50 years ago. Racial justice, gender expectations, and war are national issues, but also local, and very personal. As the reviewer says, Annette’s fight is essentially about “who gets to make choices and who’s expected to obey.” We’re still deciding this today.
How did the idea of a family-owned newspaper shape the story?
My parents owned a newspaper when I was a child, so I saw what it was like to run a family business that’s enmeshed in the local community. People really do pull their ads because of a single story! A novel about a family trying to cover the news and still stay in business, not to mention keep the family from falling apart, seemed too good an idea to pass up.
How did you develop Sam as both a father and newspaper publisher?
Let’s face it: At home, Sam is kind of a jerk! He [spoiler alert] tries to manipulate his wife with a “family vote,” and, when Danny gets bullied at school, tells his son to suck it up. But at work, he’s shrewd and smart and decent: He doesn’t hesitate to cover the school board’s shenanigans, and insists on publishing, against his staff’s objections, a wedding story about a local African-American girl, a decision that costs him a major advertiser. Eventually, Sam realizes that the issues facing the town and the nation are issues he and his family are facing, too.
If Annette could see the world today, what do you think would surprise her most?
I think what would surprise her most is not how much things have improved in the areas of racism, sexism, and bullying, but of how that progress is slowly being clawed back. But maybe I’m saying that because I’m writing this in 2026, in a world unravelling before our eyes. Near the end of the novel (don’t worry: no spoilers), Annette realizes “people are small, and narrow, and slow to change.” But I’d like to think she retains the optimism she had when she told Danny, in one of his darkest moments, “As long as people dream of a better world, the world has to get better.”
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On a hot day in 1968, while lining up for the daily dress check at school, Annette Calvert yanks out her hem. The dress represents everything she’s been simmering about since her father, an ambitious journalist, bought the newspaper in Catchings, Texas: the rule-crazy high school; the powerful businessmen pulling their ads from her family’s paper; the war on TV.
Annette is tired of trying to obey an impossible rule. One week into her junior year, she gets hundreds of students to sign a petition against the dress code and presents it at a packed school board meeting that her father, afraid he’ll lose more ads, forbids her to attend.
Set against a backdrop of national turmoil not unlike that of today, The Catchings Press is about a young girl coming into her own, and a celebration of the small battles we wage in life that cause the world to change.
The Catchings Press
Robin McMillion’s The Catchings Press is a thoughtful historical fiction novel set in small-town Texas during the upheaval of the late 1960s. Fifteen-year-old Annette Calvert is uprooted from Houston when her father buys a semi-weekly newspaper in Catchings, a community where tradition carries real authority and everybody seems to know everybody else’s business. Annette quickly discovers that moving has dropped her into the middle of conflicts over school integration, race, gender expectations, the Vietnam War, and the limits adults place on young people. At the same time, her family is learning that owning a newspaper means much more than putting stories on a page. Reporting the truth can cost advertisers, friendships, and social standing. The result is a coming-of-age historical fiction story in which national tensions become intensely personal.
One of the book’s strongest elements is the way the Catchings Press itself becomes part of the story. McMillion gives readers the clatter of the Linotype, the smell of hot type, the financial pressure of keeping a local paper alive, and the constant question of how far a publisher should go when the truth threatens the bottom line. Sam and Marian Calvert gradually find themselves confronting school officials, closed meetings, discriminatory customs, and advertisers willing to use money as leverage. That gives this historical fiction novel about journalism an appealing tension between everyday family life and larger questions about civic responsibility. Annette watches all of it, and her growing understanding of what journalism can accomplish becomes just as important as anything she learns in school. The novel makes local news feel consequential because, in Catchings, it clearly is.
Annette also gives the book much of its warmth. She’s funny, observant, occasionally insecure, and still young enough to discover that her assumptions about other people don’t always survive contact with their experiences. Her friendship and attraction to Bobby Calhoun gradually expose the distance between her relatively privileged life and his experience as a Black student in a recently integrated school. Meanwhile, her brother Danny’s antiwar idealism, Manuel Ramirez’s treatment at school, Marian’s return to reporting, and the increasingly oppressive behavior of Superintendent Bic Harold and teacher Fred Frasier give the novel several overlapping sources of conflict. McMillion handles these threads as parts of the same 1960s coming-of-age story, showing how racism, sexism, bullying, political power, and family expectations can all spring from the desire to decide how somebody else should live. Annette’s fight against the school dress code eventually becomes less about hemlines than about recognizing who gets to make choices and who’s expected to obey.
What stayed with me most about The Catchings Press is its interest in small acts of resistance. Annette doesn’t become a different person overnight, and Catchings doesn’t suddenly transform into an ideal community. Change comes through reporting, uncomfortable conversations, public meetings, a student petition, a parent willing to speak up, and people deciding that fear has had enough influence over their choices. This historical coming-of-age novel has a satisfying sense of scale. The novel connects one Texas family’s turbulent year with the much larger struggles of the 1960s without losing sight of ordinary details, relationships, humor, and consequences. It’s a story about journalism, family, first love, civic courage, and the slow process of learning that speaking up can matter even when the battle seems small.
We Choose Our Own Destinies
The Children of the Children follows a young man searching for answers and belonging, who found hope in an apocalyptic religious cult, one that his children would later try to escape. What was the initial idea behind this story, and how did that transform as you were writing the novel?
I got the idea for this story not long after the Cold War ended. Freedom seemed to be breaking out everywhere. What a difference a few decades have made. Authoritarianism is on the advance all over the world. So the novel became darker. Early in the story, Father Joseph says, “You give people a choice – freedom for themselves but also for their enemies, or subjugation for their enemies but also for themselves – and they’ll choose subjugation.” But it doesn’t have to be this way. I believe we choose our own destinies, both as an individual and as a society.
What kind of research did you do for this novel to ensure you captured the essence of the story’s theme?
My main research was as an observer of human behavior. I’ve watched as family and friends have joined religions and left religions, trying to understand the evolution of their views and my own. I also re-read parts of the Bible, familiar to me for years, with a more open mind, asking myself not how the words could be used to comfort or inspire, but to control. Telling people that the Bible is infallible is like putting a gun in their hands. Who knows what they’ll do with it. In fact, Father Joseph’s Letters to his followers were the easiest part of this novel to write, because there were so many verses that, read the right way (or perhaps I should say the wrong way), could be used to back up what he was saying.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
The main theme I tried to explore was the religious theme. Religion gets to the core of who we are as human beings, offering answers to where we come from, how to live our lives, and where we go after we die. But religion can be used against us. Abuse in extremist religion isn’t just possible, it’s practically inevitable. If a religious leader’s followers believe the Bible is infallible, then that leader can use nearly anything from the Bible to justify his actions.
A second theme in the novel is how national and even international events can shape decisions that people make about their personal lives, in ways they may not realize. Danny drops out of U.S. society at the height of the Vietnam War; years later, his son tries to escape a cult as East Europeans are escaping communism. The Children of the Children is set against a backdrop of world events. This was deliberate.
Were you able to achieve everything you wanted with the characters in the novel?
I think there’s a mistaken idea that people join cults because they’re “messed up,” or had a bad childhood, or are on drugs. By telling ourselves that, we insulate ourselves from the disturbing truth: Anyone can become susceptible to cults or to cult-like thinking. I showed where Danny, Deborah, and other characters were in their lives before they joined the Fishermen, and where they ended up at the end of the novel. Yes, I achieved what I wanted to.
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Danny Calvert thinks part of American society is about to crash and burn. Capitalism, if he’s lucky. But when a college friend dies in jail, he joins an apocalyptic religious cult and begins printing the increasingly dark writings of its charismatic leader. Father Joseph says “unless you become like children, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
But “become like children” means just that. Father Joseph moves his followers to Europe to avoid scrutiny, and controls them such that Danny isn’t allowed to marry Deborah, the woman he loves, but is forced to marry someone else. He has children by both women, and they’re as determined to escape the world they grew up in as Danny was to escape his own world years ago.
Set during the last years of the Cold War, and inspired by real events, The Children of the Children explores the price that people pay for following a leader who demands unquestioning belief, and the price their children pay to break free.
The Children of the Children
The novel begins in Prague in 1989, just as the communist world is unraveling. A boy without a country insists he is American, though he has never set foot on U.S. soil. From there, the story peels back through decades to reveal the world of the Fishermen, a cult that swept up young seekers during the Vietnam War era and carried their children across borders and generations. We meet Danny Calvert, later known as Jacob, and trace his fall into the group’s grip. Through family ties, betrayals, faith, and disillusionment, the novel lays bare the long shadow of belief systems built on control, secrecy, and survival. It is as much a story about America’s restless search for meaning as it is about the people trapped within one man’s vision.
Reading this book pulled me into an emotional whirlwind. The writing has a plainness that makes the events feel raw and real. The characters stumble into mistakes, get swept up in causes, and try desperately to make sense of their lives. At times, the prose feels almost documentary-like, which adds to the authenticity. But what struck me hardest were the emotional beats. The despair of losing friends, the pull of a community that feels like love until it is revealed as control. The book made me angry and sad, sometimes within the same page. I found myself wanting to shout at the characters to run, while also understanding why they stayed.
The ideas in the book stirred up a lot for me. It’s about more than just a cult. It’s about how easily people can be convinced to give up their freedom for belonging. It asks how much of ourselves we’re willing to sacrifice for an answer to our confusion. The story lingers on faith, not just religious faith but faith in movements, in leaders, in utopias. And it questions whether that hunger for truth and certainty is ever really satisfied. The way the children carry the weight of their parents’ choices made me think about inheritance, not of money or property, but of wounds and beliefs.
The Children of the Children is not for someone looking for light entertainment. It’s heavy, sometimes heartbreaking, and often unsettling. But it’s powerful. I’d recommend it to readers who are drawn to history, who want to understand the human cost of movements that promise salvation, and who aren’t afraid to sit with discomfort. If you want a story that makes you feel, reflect, and maybe even question your own certainties, you’ll enjoy reading this book.
Pages: 368 | ASIN: B0FSSVGMWV
