Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my mother and father for teaching me how to write.

My mother taught me to write in the fifth, sixth, and seventh grades. Rather than allowing me to type my own essays, she would insist on taking dictation from me, freely editing my words and ideas as I spoke. I learned a great deal about quality and content and rhetoric from these sessions. And of course, my essays during this period were brilliant, because my mother has a PhD.

My father’s instruction began in eighth grade. I would write an essay, bring it to my father, and then I would run back to my room and shut the door and pray. Then I would hear, “ADAM!” I would slink down to my parents’ room, where my father was sitting in a great big chair and staring at the essay. I would stand before him, and—every time, without fail—he would intone, “Tell me what you were trying to say.” It was usually at this point that I began to cry. Because I knew that the next three to six hours would be devoted to writing and rewriting and rewriting again.

If it weren’t for these experiences with my father, I know I would not be a writer today, because my editor, the brilliant Julie Strauss-Gabel, has standards even higher than my father’s. Yes, she makes me cry sometimes. But I love her for it. And my readers should, too.

My little brother did not teach me how to write. He taught me just about everything else of importance, though. The relationship between Jorinda and Joringel is drawn, in no small part, from ours.

Sarah Burnes, my agent, found me in a first-grade classroom and changed my life, like some Wise Woman from a fairy tale. I will never be able to thank her enough.

The team at Penguin has also been utterly magical. As has my assistant, Vanessa DeJesus.

And Lauren Mancia, my wife, reads my books before they are books, when they are malformed and protean and nonsensical. And she is honest with me about how malformed and protean and nonsensical they are. Which I don’t really like. But she also laughs out loud at the jokes in my books. And for that I am eternally, profoundly grateful. For that and for everything.