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Greetings! July's featured book is Lizard Love by Wendy Townsend, Front Street Books 2008.

To me, Lizard Love is a love story about Grace and her lizard, Spot. I love this book so much because I feel adolescence is such a hard time, and a time where it is so important to feel heard, understood and loved. In this book Grace realizes that although she may not be able to fully connect in the deepest way to her mom, her grandparents, nor her friends she can feel that special attachment to Spot. I think this is a story of hope, of love and of finding a way to connect with another soul in the deepest way, no matter what. I love, love, love this book and knowing Wendy personally I can tell you, this woman adores reptiles! Beckie Weinheimer

*Bank St. College List of Best Books of 2009

*"In her debut novel, Townsend displays a remarkable narrative gift. ...[H:]er language really comes alive when talking about the natural world; her sensuous herpetological descriptions are unflinching, evocative, and positively elegant. Even the minor characterizations are full and complex, and the relationships drawn among them resonate with the honesty of adolescence. Though Grace’s naïveté seems surprising at first, this story will still find an enthusiastic audience among young people walking the daily tightrope between fitting in and growing up."
Starred review** —Booklist

And Now an interview with Wendy Townsend, Lizard Lover, Author and Very Cool Person!

•What is your novel about?
I think it has to do with how adolescence can be a seriously uncomfortable time. Grace (my character) can’t stand it that she is becoming a young woman –she wants to stay that cute little girl in the white dress who ran around barefoot on her grandparents’ farm, playing with frogs and turtles and baby birds.

•Is LIZARD LOVE based on your life?
Yes, though only the grandparents are real; the mother is based on my mother, but everyone else is made up. Most of the animal characters are real.

•Are there parts that really happened—are the truth?
Let’s see… Most of the Prologue is pretty real. I did walk out of a pet shop with a baby reticulated python who had lost most of his skin. I got a tour behind the scenes at the Bronx Zoo. My iguana friend at Grace’s age was a female; Spot came later in my life and he never did bite me. (Though it is true that lone male iguanas will sometimes bite female keepers at that time of the month.) Oh –and I did ride the subway to go to a Friends’ school.

•What books influenced your work on LIZARD LOVE?
THE LANGUAGE OF GOLDFISH and RASCAL. In the first story, the girl is struggling so hard with becoming a young woman she has to go into therapy. What’s funny is that I read this book again and again, feeling there was something very important in it that would inform my story, yet I didn’t figure out what it was until much later. RASCAL is about an extraordinary friendship between a boy and a raccoon –it is totally autobiographical, the author even uses his own name for the boy character. As with Grace and Spot, the boy, Sterling, eats, sleeps and plays with Rascal.

•Are you Grace?
No and yes. It’s true that first books are particularly autobiographical. LIZARD LOVE started out as a memoir and I wrote the Prologue while I was in the Vermont College MFA Program. Making the leap into fiction was very difficult for me. Grace finally took on a life of her own, but it was a struggle and I’m not so sure I really succeeded.

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