How did you come to know Charlie?
Searching for Lottie is a contemporary mystery about a 7th grader doing a school research project about the girl she was named after -- a young violinist who disappeared during the Holocaust. Much of the story is based on my own family's history. My middle name is Lotte (German spelling for Lottie), and I grew up looking at the "real" Lottie's photograph and wondering what her life might have been. So, in many ways, Charlie's search is my own. Charlie's character, her stubborn determination and sense of humor, as well as her growing relationship with her pesky older brother, draws upon my own wonderful daughter and her brothers.
What do you think is Charlie's most admirable quality?
Nana Rose always says: "if at first you don't succeed, try try again," and Charlie has inherited her grandmother's strong compass for optimism and determination. Charlie hopes to become First Chair of the school orchestra, believing that she must live up to Lottie's legacy. She practice and practices on her violin and tries as hard as she can to succeed -- but eventually, Charlie realizes that the best way to honor Lottie's legacy is to follow her own path in life.
Is there anything you wish Charlie would have changed or done differently in her story?
Not one thing! Charlie follows every lead to unravel the mystery of her great-aunt Lottie. While she isn't able to solve every aspect of the mystery, she is able to access family stories and preserve memories in a wonderful way that brings her family closer together.
What do you think Charlie can offer to other children that are experiencing similar situations to what she went through?
Searching for Lottie is very much meant to help kids think about their own family's history. All families have stories, and I strongly believe that kids have the ability to help discover and preserve these important legacies.
How did you research Charlie and the circumstances she found herself in?
I actually did the genealogy research, along with Charlie, to see if I could discover what had happened to the "real" Lottie and other relatives who did not manage to escape Europe before the Second World War. Like Charlie, I was able to use the resources of the internet as well as looking closer at family documents and mementos. And I had the exact same problems deciphering the old German and Hungarian writing! I was glad to be able to give Lottie's story a more hopeful ending, though, in the book.
What was the hardest scene to write about Charlie?
The hardest scene, and one which still resonates with great emotion, is where Charlie sees that Nana Rose has placed an advertisement in the newspaper, many years after the war, still looking for her lost sister. This is one of the many points in the novel that was taken directly from my own family's experience. I too, found a newspaper ad placed by my relative who had survived and was still searching for her lost niece decades later, though she knew she had likely perished. As we see even today, sometimes families separated by war and displacement are indeed reunited years later.
Who do you think was Charlie's biggest supporter and why?One of the important subplots in Searching for Lottie is Charlie's growing collaboration with her older brother, Jake. She realizes that they don't have the close relationship that Nana Rose had with her sister and wishes that could change. By the end of the book, Jake joins Charlie's search and gives her some much needed moral support -- and I imagine them becoming lifelong buddies instead of sibling rivals.
Why do you think some children feel such a strong connection to the relatives that came before them?
Searching for Lottie was inspired in part by my son's school research project about his refugee grandmother. I could see how much it meant to him to learn about our family, and I believe that a vital part of growing up for kids is to learn about their own family's past and heritage.
What do you think Charlie is doing at the present time?
