CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — Shari Becker grew up in a Jewish family in Montreal and now lives in Boston, where she is married and is raising two daughters with her husband John. Her first YA (young adult) novel has been published and there’s a fascinating story behind it I found out during a recent interview.
Titled The Stellow Project, “the book’s genesis began post Hurricane Sandy,” Becker told San Diego Jewish World “The hurricane that fall of 2012 hit just before I was supposed to drive home, from Michigan to Boston. I got halfway home, when I hit the first detour sign. It sent me hours out of my way. Entire highways were decimated. I was totally lost in the countryside. At night. In the dark. Just me and my girls. The GPS wouldn’t work. The detour signs were few and far between. And it seemed like I was just getting farther and farther off track.”
“I started to cry in the car and called my husband begging him to try and help me figure out where I was,” Becker continued. “Afterwards, I couldn’t’t stop thinking about my crazy drive home, about our changing weather and climate change. What did it mean for the world? I started to think about what it might mean for a girl who has health challenges. What would it mean to be someone who has to live in a climate controlled space. I envisioned a scene in my head about a girl stuck in a glass house. And I wrote it down. That was beginning of my YA novel.”
”My publisher Skyscape and its PR department is calling the novel a climate fiction book,” she told me. “Cli-fi.”
”The Stellow Project” features two main characters whose parents are scientists and doctors trying to solve climate change issues. The incentive is climate, but the outcome is science fiction, so the novel combines a little bit of both sci-fi and cli-fi, Becker said. “There are no aliens or trips into outer space, but the work being done in the labs is definitely out there,” Becker added.
When I asked the novelist about her Jewish upbringing in Montreal and her life in Boston now, she told me that she was raised ”conservadox” in a Kosher home.
”I attended Jewish day schools through highschool” she said, noting that her two daughters attend a Reform Jewish Day School in the Boston area.
“We try to celebrate as many Jewish holidays as we can with friends and family, and we are preparing for my older daughter’s bat mitzvah, so we are spending much more time at our temple this year,” Becker said.
There might be a sequel in store for her first YA novel, Becker told me.
“Originally this was written as a stand-alone book, with the possibility of a sequel,” she said. “I love that it has an open ending, but a lot of readers are really anxious to know what happens next. I recently sent in a proposal for a sequel, and I’m hopeful the publisher will pick it up.”
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Bloom, based in Taiwan, is an inveterate web surfer and email correspondent. He may be contacted via dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com