As an adult, if you knew a family like Sara-Kate's you wouldn't hesitate to get them some help by instantly making a phone call, but as the story drew you in to the girls friendship and magical make believe world, part of you was with them not wanting them to be discovered, just wanting Sara-Kate's mother to get well and for them to have enough to get by. The story does a good job making you see the problems from the children's viewpoint. When snow comes it isn't just the elf village that suffers. Hillary begins to suspect something is wrong in Sara-Kate's house, but she has promised not to tell and she does what she can to help. Houses made of leaves and twigs and a bicycle wheel turned in to a ferris wheel appear by magic and the girls absorb themselves in daily care of the elves habitat, and they live in hope of catching a glimpse of the magic. Sara-Kate gradually trusts Hillary enough to let her help with an elf village that is in her back garden. Her dad isn't around and her mum isn't seen outside the house. Sara-Kate wears odd clothes and looks uncared for. Hillary becomes friends with Sara-Kate, a girl who everyone at school laughs at and avoids. She lives with her husband, Richard Lisle, on the Rhode Island coast, the scene for Black Duck(2006), The Crying Rocks (2003) and The Art of Keeping Cool, which won the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction in 2001. Lisle’s novels for children have received Italy’s Premio Andersen Award, Holland’s Zilveren Griffel, and Notable and Best Book distinction from the American Library Association, among other honors. Theater productions of the story have also been mounted in Australia and The Netherlands.
It continues to be performed throughout the U.S. Her fourth novel, Afternoon of the Elves (Orchard Books) won a 1990 Newbery Honor award and was adapted as a play by the Seattle Children’s Theater in 1993. In 1984, The Dancing Cats of Appesap, her first novel for children, was published by Bradbury Press (Macmillan.) Subsequently, she has published sixteen other novels.
With the birth of her daughter, Lisle turned from journalism to writing projects she could accomplish at home. This was the beginning of a reporting career that extended over the next ten years. She later enrolled in journalism courses at Georgia State University.
She lived and worked for the next several years in Atlanta, Georgia, organizing food-buying cooperatives in the city’s public housing projects, and teaching in an early-childcare center. Janet Taylor Lisle was born in Englewood, New Jersey, and grew up in Farmington, Connecticut, spending summers on the Rhode Island coast.The eldest child and only daughter of an advertising executive and an architect, she attended local schools and at fifteen entered The Ethel Walker School, a girl’s boarding school in Simsbury, Connecticut.Īfter graduation from Smith College, she joined VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America).
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