Sara Zarr's Blog - Posts Tagged "ya-reads"

My second book, Sweethearts, came out 13 years ago this month. This feels almost impossible to believe!

What I remember about writing it: my first book, Story of a Girl, had been sold in a two-book deal, and, well, that meant I had to write a second book! It took approximately a billion years (okay, five) to write my first book, and now I had to write #2 in about a year.

Right around the time started thinking about new ideas, I got this email from my childhood sweethearts, who I hadn't seen since maybe third grade. We talked on the phone that night, two thirty-five-year-olds, and he'd been through a lot in the intervening years. He said something that hit me hard: during some of his hardest years in adolescence, I was his only uncomplicated good memory from childhood.

How could I not write a book about that?

A couple of years and seven drafts later, Sweethearts came out, and it's always going to be a special one to me and to a lot of readers.

You can usually find a good ebook deal on this one, and if you like audiobooks, I did the narration myself on this one (and several more of my books), so you can be assured it sounds exactly like I meant it to when I wrote it.

xo
SZ