Kathie: Hi Sylvia, and thank you for taking some time to chat with me today. Before we get started, thank you SO much for writing this book. As the mom of a kid with a milk allergy, I’ve been waiting for a book like this one that addresses the feelings and experiences that a child with food allergies can face, and you’ve done such a great job capturing them.
Can you please give us a brief synopsis?
Thank you, Kathie. Coping with food allergies is difficult, especially with milk, because, whoa, ice cream is a whole food group for kids. But I believe that what feels like a terrible restriction when children are young, can ultimately make them more conscious and disciplined about eating and ultimately other things too.
The synopsis: After an allergic reaction to pizza in kindergarten, Ella gets homeschooled till grade 5 when she returns to class with an anxiety over public speaking but also, happily, a best friend, Zenia. Together they decide to tackle the CN Tower Climb for World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Zenia’s in it for the cute boys already signed up. But Ella turns the climb into a metaphor for conquering her fear. She’s going to climb to the top and present her poem on food allergies over the city of Toronto. After that, how hard can it be to present to the class? She trains to climb and she trains to present and when a trace of wrong food spoils her plan, she’s ultimately strong enough to recover and conquer.
You can catch a more succinct précis here in this booktrailer, starring one of my grandchildren (I have nine who all live close by and a son who is a one-man video production company: epilogueproductions.com)
Kathie: Why was it important to you to write about a main character with food allergies?
Sylvia:
My daughter wanted me to write something that normalized kids like my own two grandchildren who need to navigate multiple food allergies. I watched my grandson go from a confident toddler to someone who froze over every bite of food and couldn’t be apart from his mom, his protector. The anxiety spilled over into other things. A talented athlete, he couldn’t attend team sports. My outgoing younger granddaughter seemed to cope better. But recently she suffered a reaction after sneaking peanut butter cookie crumbs at my house, long story. The depression and guilt she (and I) felt, overwhelmed us. I wanted desperately to help kids with this problem and like many writers, I believe the answer to every problem can come from a book.
Sylvia:
Kathie: Adolescence can be challenging for many kids with allergies, not only because they don’t want to stand out from their peers but because they’re also learning to deal with them independently. Why do you think we haven’t seen them addressed more in middle-grade books?
Sylvia:
In the past allergic people were often characterized as sickly and weak in a non-dramatic way.
Hayfever’s not that exciting. Today people may find coping/catering around the rising number of food allergies to be a bother—they also confuse them with diet trends—so perhaps the topic seems un-entertaining. Or even frightening, I know one editor thought an allergic reaction was too scary for kids to read about. But what happens when they have to live through one? This is not an imaginary dragon. With pandemic school shutdowns I had the luxury of reading the story to two of my non-allergic grandchildren who enjoyed Blue to the Sky as a medical drama. They found the milk testing chapter fascinating and they liked the poetry.
Sylvia:
Kathie: How would you describe Ella in five adjectives, and what’s one thing you most admire about her?
Sylvia:
Creative, anxious, brave, loving, strong. I enjoy her quirkiness, how she plays classical music in her head as a sound track to her emotions, how she explodes into rhyming poetry and how she assumes the world, her mother especially, will come to see things her way.
Kathie: What was one of your favourite scenes to write and why?
Sylvia:
My favourite scene to write was the CN Tower climb. For one, it’s the dark moment of the story that Ella has so built up in her mind to be her pinnacle triumph.
Also like Ella, two of my other grandchildren and I had trained on the Chedoke Stairs. The characters Ella meets along the CN Tower climb are bits of people I’ve met while training or read about having made the climb. As a lazy exerciser, I loved poking fun at the over-achieving fitness buffs who work out excessively for the climb. At the Burlington Go Train stairs, I watched my friend try to help a blind guy who was attempting to go down an up escalator with a coffee in one hand and his white cane in the other. He became so angry with her! I needed to capture him in a story. I felt winded and tired along with Ella, and I worked to make the reader as confused as Ella as to whether she was getting a cold or having a reaction because it can be that confusing.
Kathie: Is there something interesting you learned while writing this book that you can share with us?
Sylvia:
In volunteering with Hamilton Youth Poets for research, I saw first hand how poetry changed the young writers’ lives. I watched how kids conquered stage fright and became more confident through participation in Slam competitions. Spoken word poetry especially is an accessible form of writing for everyone, no segues needed, not so much attention to tenses and grammar, and also wildly fun even if the rhythm and rhyme aren’t quite right. The ultimate lesson I learned is that it is your passion(s) that help you cope.
Kathie: Can you tell us a bit about your writing process – do you have a plan or outline ahead of time, or do you let the story unfold as you write?
Sylvia:
In the past when I’ve had contracts and oh, so much pressure for deadlines, I bluffed chapter outlines mostly for the publisher. Once you’ve outlined, however, psychologically you feel you’ve written the book, and yet you haven’t. Now I aim for a three point plan, beginning, climax and end and then it’s all allowing my character to grow in between those points as the tensions rise. I’m blessed with many writing friends and we workshop our stories together, chapter by chapter. We also act as beta readers for each other when we have a whole book. So many rewrites later the story goes to an agent.
Kathie: Do you have any other upcoming writing projects you can share with us?
Sylvia:
I’m writing a three-book series about alien octopus who have chosen Earth as the perfect planet to relocate to—they’ve used up their own home. They body jump into urban animals and in almost a dumb-bunny style make realizations about humans and how they treat the world. What I’m aiming for is high humour and hope for how, going forward, we will conserve and save our planet. I think too many kids are depressed and paralyzed by the ticking countdown of climate change. They need to know we can fix this and we will fix it. The aliens ultimately recognize this in the human species.
Kathie: Where can we go to learn more about you and your writing?
Sylvia:
My website URL is sylviamcnicoll.com and I have a youtube channel @SylviaMcNicoll but really the best way to learn about my writing is by reading my work which is available at most libraries and your favourite bookstores.
Kathie: Thanks again for answering my questions and for writing this book. I wish you a successful release, and I sincerely hope it finds its way into the hands of many young readers, especially those young readers with food allergies who may never have seen themselves in a story before.
Sylvia McNicoll is the author of dozens of middle grade and young adult novels, such as Crush, Candy,
Corpse, Body Swap, and The Great Mistake Mystery series. She has won numerous awards for her books
including Forest of Reading’s Silver Birch Award, a MYRCA award, Creative Burlington’s inaugural Arts
Recognition Award, and six Hamilton Arts Awards. She currently lives in Burlington, Ontario. For more
about McNicoll, visit sylviamcnicoll.com.
