Jake Burt's new novel for kids is Greetings from Witness Protection!.From his Q&A with Deborah Kalb:
Q: How did you come up with the idea for Greetings from Witness Protection! and for your main character, Nicki?--Marshal Zeringue
A: As a teacher, one of the most onerous parts of my job is proctoring standardized tests. It's basically cycling around my classroom for predetermined chunks of time, telling kids, "Sorry, I'm not allowed to answer that," every so often.
In one particularly boring stretch (I think it was during the quantitative reasoning section), I started thinking about the phrase, "high stakes testing." I asked myself, "For whom might this test have the highest stakes?"
From there, I jumped to a kid in witness protection - she endangers her family if she fails, and she endangers her family if she succeeds spectacularly.
Once I started letting that idea roll around in my head, Nicki (the novel's protagonist) just sort of ...[read on]