PLATTSBURGH — “One summer. 46 peaks. A second chance to make things right.”
Kate Messner’s novel-in-verse “The Trouble with Heroes” is about a boy, a dog, and the healing power of nature.
The boy, Finn Connelly, is a wisp away from failing 7th grade and vandalizer of a 46er’s headstone. The dog, Seymour, belonged to the deceased 46er.
Finn gets offered a deal by the legendary mountain climber’s daughter that can solve all his problems.
Messner mined the Adirondacks and its culture for this stand-alone work, which has more twists and turns than an Adirondack switchback.
GRANITE RECIPES
Finn’s grandmother’s chocolate shop is very loosely based on Adirondack Chocolate, one of Messner’s favs.
“It’s where his mom had worked as a teenager,” she said.
“Now, they’ve come back to Lake Placid. His mom is helping out his grandmother. It’s struggling as so many businesses did struggle during the COVID-19 Pandemic and the time that follows. Finn recognizes that things are looking tenuous. He has this brainstorm. He gets home from a hike one day. He’s starving like you always are after you climb a mountain. He has always loved to bake. So, he comes up with this recipe sort of a spin-off on chocolate chip cookies that he feels represents the mountains he just climbed, Cascade and Porter.”
The orange-toffee variation recipe for Cascade & Porter cookies is in the book.
“I included the recipes instead of just mentioning that Finn made them for a couple of reasons. One, this is primary a novel in verse, but it’s really a multi-modal novel. I also include letters and text messages and photographs that Finn sends his mom while he is hiking,” she said.
From past multi-modal book experiences with schools, kids reading her books snacked on themed cookies.
“It’s the way we encounter information in the real world, too, right,” she said.
“We read all kinds of things in our everyday lives. It’s also a format that is really appealing to reluctant readers. If they open a book and see that it is straight prose, they’re opening a book and encountering this wall of text that can feel kind of intimidating. Whereas novels in verse, multi-modal novels have a little bit more white space. They can feel a little friendlier to a reader who doesn’t know if they’re up to reading a big, fat book. The story always dictates the structure for me. It felt like the right way to tell the story.”
Finn’s poems really evolve as the book goes on.
“He’s forced to write this poetry project for 7th grade English,” she said.
“Of course as a former 7th grade English teacher, I know that there are kids who are resistant to writing poetry. Finn is especially hesitant about this project because the theme of it is what makes a hero. It’s a touchy subject for him because of his dad. So he puts it off, puts it off, puts it off, and ends up with an incomplete in English as well as physical ed because he’s not showing up for gym class that he has to make up. That really informs the structure of this book as well.”
Messner provided a scaffolding where Finn has to write these poems.
“He doesn’t want to write about heroes, but he has to,” she said.
“He keeps trying to dance around it. He tries every kid trick in the book. He tries right in the opening pages, he’s like here are eight haiku. He’s just rattling them off. Here are my poems. Of course, you can’t whip off haiku that aren’t really haiku anyway because they don’t really fit the format. and eventually little by little, he realizes that writing poetry is not a bad way to explore the world, and explore himself and his family, too.”
“The Trouble with Heroes” has racked three-starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews, Publisher’s Weekly and Booklist.
It’s a book that champions that no kid is ever a lost cause.
“It’s also a love letter to the Adirondacks and one that I think local kids will love because they’re going to read this and recognize the setting and say, ‘I went down that trail’ or ‘Ooh, I remember seeing the view from that summit, too,’” she said.
Messner will appear June 3, 7 p.m., at the Peru Free Library for a “The Trouble with Heroes” book club. Readers can pick up the book in advance.
“We will have a discussion at the library and you get to know secrets behind the book and things like that,” she said.