When Jacqueline West was growing up in River Falls, Wis., she used to stare out the window as her school bus rumbled past a certain crumbling Victorian house. It was a creepy place, in its way, with a sagging porch and peeling green paint. The owner was a doctor who was also an amateur inventor, and all kinds of gadgets and thingamajigs whirred and spun in the overgrown yard.
"I started imagining what kind of family lived in a house that looked like that," West said recently. "I knew that the setting had this sort of haunted, Gothic history to it, but the family was really scientific and logical. And so I wanted to play with that contrast."
Years later, that house became the setting for "The Shadows," the first in a planned series of five books for young adults called "The Books of Elsewhere." "The Shadows" came out last summer and rocketed to the New York Times bestseller list its very first week.
In a starred review, Publishers Weekly said the book's "suspenseful plot and insight into childhood loneliness" would have readers anxiously awaiting the next in the series. Wait no longer; West's second book, "Spellbound," came out this month, and it picks up right where the first one left off.
Both books feature Olive, an 11-year-old girl who lives in a mysterious Victorian house with her so-intellectual-they're- almost-clueless mathematician parents. Olive is a shy loner. Through prowling the many rooms -- all stuffed with the antique belongings of the previous owners -- she discovers that the house is abundantly haunted. The cats can talk. The paintings on the walls can be entered (if she wears the correct pair of magical spectacles) and, once inside a painting, she can walk around and talk with the people in the picture.
West is a poet and singer; writing for children had not been part of any plan. "When I started working on this, I was trying to do everything at once," she said. "I was doing arts writing, short fiction, poetry, and then I started to write 'The Shadows,' just because that was a story I had been waiting to tell."
She toyed with the manuscript off and on for eight years before it became a book.
"Olive, in a way, is a reaction to a lot of the kid-hero literary characters, the really spunky, sassy, self-reliant kid that has kind of become common in kids' fiction," she said. "A lot more of the kids who I know are more the shy, polite, not quite so self-confident kids, and I really wanted to write a character who those kids would find relatable. So that's Olive. She doesn't believe she has the kinds of talents or resources that she actually does."
