Author Interview: Lee Gjertsen Malone

Lee Gjertsen Malone

Good morning! I’m so excited to have Lee Gjertsen Malone on my blog today.

Lee is the author of two super fun middle grade books, THE LAST BOY AT ST. EDITH’S (Aladdin/Simon & Schuster, 2016), and CAMP SHADY CROOK (Aladdin/Simon & Schuster, 2019).

I was fortunate to get to know Lee back in 2015 through the debut group The Sweet Sixteens. Not only does she write middle grade novels, but she is a freelance journalist who has covered some fascinating topics. I’ve always been impressed with her strong sense of self as an author, and her encouragement to other authors to be an advocate for their own books.

Today, we’ll be talking about her latest book, CAMP SHADY CROOK. You can find my review of it HERE on Goodreads (but spoiler alert, I loved it!).

All right!! Let’s get this party started! (I’ll be in green bold)

Welcome, Lee! Please tell us about your book.

It’s called Camp Shady Crook and it’s about two kids, Archie and Vivian, who both come to a very run down camp in Vermont with the same idea — of conning the other kids. They end up competing with each other for dominance but things spiral out of control and they have to figure out how to make them right again.

  Such a fun concept! What inspired you to write Camp Shady Crook and your awesomely devious characters, Archie and Vivian?

I’ve always been intrigued by smart criminals like con artists — even though I’m an extremely law abiding person myself. But it’s fun to put yourself inside the head of someone doing bad things. Archie came to me first. The first chapter, which is written from his perspective, is almost exactly like very first pages I wrote to get them down, since I was supposed to working on something else at the time (isn’t that always the way.) But I had this image of this boy getting on a bus to camp pretending to be rich.

Vivian came later, in part because her motivations for the cons are murkier, tied up less with the need for money and more with her how her self-esteem took a hit at school thanks to a false friend.

But they both are having that unique summer camp experience where you get to be someone different than you are at home, which is what intrigued me the most about the setting. Where else, as a kid, do you get to try on new personalities for size? Especially if you live in the same town and go to the same school with the same people year after year.

Summer camp is SUCH a fun setting. I never got to experience this, but I love the idea of trying on a new personality. How about you? Did you ever attend a summer camp? 

Well, I never attended a traditional summer camp. I actually went to nerd camp — a summer program on a college campus (in my case, Franklin and Marshall in Lancaster, Pa) where you could take college level courses. I went the summers I was 14, 15, and 16, and took Archaeology, Geology, and Psychology. Studied hard, made wonderful lifelong friends and got my first kiss. And I wouldn’t change a thing.

I wouldn’t have really liked the “cabin in the woods” kind of camp when I was a kid, though I remember being jealous when I was 10 or 11 about kids who got to go away for weeks. Not about the camp part as much as the idea of being away and on your own in a different place. I had major fantasies of skipping town. That’s why my favorite book was From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. I literally had full daydreams of getting on the train to Manhattan and going to live in a museum, though I think I would have picked Natural History instead of the Met.

  I loved that book, too! While I thought it would be way cool to live in a museum, I knew I didn’t have the guts to pull something like that off. And same with all the cons that Archie and Vivian pull off in Camp Shady Crook! They are so clever! How did you come up with them?

Well, believe or not, there’s actually a science to cons. Why they work, and what kind of people take the bait. And many cons — including some in the book — have been around for years. Archie’s whole persona is based on a con called “The Spanish Prisoner” (though most of us might think of it as “the Nigerian Prince” nowadays) and there’s another con in the book called “the Melon Drop.” For many of them I took the kinds of cons Archie would have read about in his research and put a kid spin on them. I’d like to think that anyone who actually knew anything about cons would recognize quite a few of the techniques Archie and Vivian use.  

Fascinating! And so creative. So I’m imagining that you did a bit or research when writing this book. What is the most surprising thing you had to research?

I love research so I always do a ton — sometimes I have to make myself stop researching just so I get actual writing done!

Haha! I may know something about such delay tactics.