03/27/2012
Krista Van Dolzer (KristaVanDolzer on QT) has signed with agent Kate Testerman of KT Literary.
My critique partners were the ones who helped me stay on course. They believed in this manuscript in a way that I didn't always believe in it myself. I'd send them a blubbering e-mail with almost every full rejection, and they'd send me wonderful e-mails back with all kinds of encouragement and enthusiasm.
Twelve-year-old Ella Mae is a sensible girl. She eats her vegetables, especially asparagus, and only tunes in to watch that new show I Love Lucy if Dragnet isn’t on. So when her auntie Mildred starts spouting nonsense about deoxyribo-something-or-other and how some egghead scientist can regenerate her dead son from the blood on his old dog tags, Ella Mae doesn’t believe her. Or at least she doesn’t until a man steps out of that bio-pod and drips yellow-green slime on the floor.
Problem is, the man isn’t her cousin. He’s Japanese.
Ella Mae knows she should hate him, but she was just a baby when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor . Besides, she can’t bring herself to hate a man who can’t remember his own name. Her indifference even turns to friendliness after she teaches the man English and defends him from the reverend’s talk of H-E-double-toothpicks and abominations with a well-aimed wad of spit. But when the man’s memories resurface, memories about the war and what really happened on the day his blood splashed on her cousin’s dog tags, Ella Mae learns the hard way what it means to be human—and what it means to be a friend.