Coman, Carolyn 1951-

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Coman, Carolyn 1951-

Personal

Born 1951, in Evanston, IL; married Stephen Roxburgh (a editor and publisher); children: Anna, David. Education: Hampshire College, degree; studied bookbinding with Arno Werner.

Addresses

Home—PA.

Career

Writer. Bookbinder in partnership with Nancy Southworth, 1975-84; former editor for Heinemann (educational publisher). Writing instructor at Harvard Extension and Harvard Summer School, Cambridge, MA; Vermont College M.F.A. Writing for Children Program, 1998—; Hamline College M.F.A. in Writing for Children and Young Adults; and Whole Novel Workshops.

Awards, Honors

Newbery Honor Award, and National Book Award finalist, both 1996, Dorothy Canfield Fisher Children's Book Award nominee, 1997, and Iowa Teen Award nominee, 1999, all for What Jamie Saw; National Book Award finalist, School Library Journal Best Books of the Year citation, Book Links Lasting Connections citation, and Booklist Top of the List citation, all 2000, and Michael L. Printz Honor Book designation, and Best Book for Young Adults selection, ALA Young Adult Library Services Association, both 2001, all for Many Stones.

Writings

(With Judy Dater) Body and Soul: Ten American Women, photographs by Judy Dater, Hill & Co. (Boston, MA), 1988.

Losing Things at Mr. Mudd's, illustrated by Lance Hidy, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1992.

Tell Me Everything, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1993.

What Jamie Saw, Front Street (Asheville, NC), 1995.

Bee and Jacky, Front Street (Asheville, NC), 1998.

Many Stones, Front Street (Asheville, NC), 2000.

The Big House, illustrated by Rob Shepperson, Front Street (Asheville, NC), 2004.

Sneaking Suspicions (sequel to The Big House), illustrated by Rob Shepperson, Front Street (Asheville, NC), 2007.

Sidelights

The author of young-adult novels that include What Jamie Saw and Bee and Jacky, as well as of middle-grade fiction, Carolyn Coman is known for her distinctive voice and resilient protagonists. Honored with a National Book Award nomination and Newbery Honor Book designation, among other honors, she explores the darker side of growing up: dealing with a parent's abandonment through death in Tell Me Everything, abuse by a stepparent in What Jamie Saw, sibling incest in Bee and Jacky, and a political-inspired tragedy in Many Stones. Coman's characters are sometimes damaged; some have been the victims of abuse or neglect, while others, driven by their inner demons, inflict abuse on those they love. "As with the people in my life," Coman explained on the Front Street Books Web site, "some characters are easier to know and love than others. It's necessary for me to love them because as a writer I am often called upon to look at and say hard things. And the only way to do that without being cruel or disdainful is to have an understanding of and compassion for the wide range of what it means to be a human being."

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Coman was born in Evanston, Illinois, and attended Douglass College of Rutgers University before transferring to Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she majored in writing. After college, she apprenticed with master bookbinder Arno Werner and worked as a bookbinder for almost a decade, eventually supplementing this with a job as an editor at an educational publishing house. As Coman admitted to Teenreads.com contributor Tammy Currier, "I chose bookbinding because it kept me close to books and gave me a way of earning my living on more or less my own terms. I tried to believe that making books would somehow satisfy my desire to write them, but of course it didn't. Eventually I had to face up to the fact that nothing would do but writing."

Like many writers for younger readers, Coman did not set out to write juvenile or young-adult literature. She had written several stories and a novel before she realized that she was writing about children and often from the point of view of a child. Her first book, Body and Soul: Ten American Women, is cowritten with photographer Judy Dater and examines the diverse lives of ten American women. The subjects range from a Utah homemaker whose husband was killed in a battle with police because of his refusal to send his children to a public school, to a poverty-stricken Massachusetts woman who has worked to overcome a history of sexual abuse. "Although their personal circumstances differ," explained a Publishers Weekly contributor in a review of Body and Soul, "these individuals all demonstrate notable integrity."

Coman's second work was the picture book Losing Things at Mr. Mudd's, and it marked her first work for children. Intended for children under the age of ten, the book finds six-year-old Lucy meeting with continual frustration while visiting the museum-like home of her relative Mr. Mudd. She cannot even sit in the antique chairs in Mr. Mudd's house for fear of damaging them. As a Publishers Weekly critic explained, "a ruby ring and a ‘lost’ tooth prove the catalysts for a confrontation between the girl and her host … that brings greater tolerance and understanding to both participants."

With Tell Me Everything Coman begins exploring the problems and potentials of teenaged life. The novel's protagonist, twelve-year-old Roz Jacoby, has had a difficult life. Recently orphaned, she is a child of rape who never knew her father, and she has grown up socially isolated due to her mom's unorthodox religious beliefs. Roz's mom was killed in an accident while trying to rescue a boy who had lost his way, and now Roz lives with her Vietnam-veteran uncle, a man suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Hoping to come to terms with her loss and create a normal life, Roz begins to obsess about the boy her mother died trying to save. In Tell Me Everything "Coman's narrative skills are made bold by the unimpeachable truths of grief," declared a Publishers Weekly reviewer, "and she distills the process of accepting death into an act of discovery."

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Coman's Newbery Honor Book, What Jamie Saw, also focuses on the issue of character, both in its development and in its realization. The novel begins with a direct, vivid image of child abuse. Nine-year-old Jamie watches as his stepfather, Van, picks up his baby sister Nin, and throws her across the room. Fortunately, Nin is rescued by her mother Patty, and soon Jamie, Patty, and Nin are fleeing into the night, ultimately finding refuge in New Hampshire with Patty's friend Earl. Now Jamie stops attending third grade and Patty gives up her job as a grocery bagger. The two of them only begin to turn their lives around through the intervention of Jamie's teacher, Mrs. Desrochers. The author "depicts with visceral clarity the reactions of both Jamie and his mother," Susan Dove Lempke observed in a Booklist assessment, "capturing their jitteriness and the love that carries them through the moments when they take their fear out on each other." According to a Publishers Weekly critic, Coman "so deftly slips into the skin of her main character that [Jamie] … seems almost to be dictating to her." "I don't create characters so much as I make room inside my mind and heart for them to come and get me …," the novelist explained in her Front Street Books essay. "When they are finally willing to speak to me, I listen carefully to the sounds of their voices, and to what they are trying to say."

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In Bee and Jacky Coman tackles another difficult subject: serial sexual abuse between brother and sister. When thirteen-year-old Bee and seventeen-year-old-Jacky are left alone at home on Memorial Day weekend, they take the opportunity to reenact a game they began playing years before. The original game was distilled from their father's wartime service in Vietnam and their mother's inability to deal with her husband's mental and physical scars; it began with Jacky's "search-and-rescue" of Bee and ended with him attacking and raping his sister. The reenactment of the game now awakens Bee's suppressed memories, causing her to lose control of herself: she hallucinates, propositions her older brother, and removes her clothes before she goes outside.

As they had with What Jamie Saw, critics commented on Coman's capacity to create and maintain understanding for all her characters, perpetrators as well as victims, in Bee and Jacky According to a Kirkus Reviews writer, "Bee sees, and makes readers see too, that Jacky is no monster, just a soul tortured by fear," while Booklist contributor Stephanie Zvirin celebrated the author's "remarkable ability to elicit sympathy for all the characters—even Jacky, vicious and angry on the one hand, yet clearly horrified at what he's done to his vulnerable sister." A Publishers Weekly critic called Bee and Jacky "the literary equivalent of a Diane Arbus photograph: it presents a sharp, shocking picture of pathology, but leaves it to the audience to imagine the world beyond the frame."

Many Stones was inspired by the murder of Amy Biehl, a Fulbright scholarship recipient working in South Africa. Here Coman confronts an overtly political issue—the killing of an American girl working in racially segregated South Africa—in the context of a damaged family relationship. Laura Morgan was working as a volunteer at a school near Cape Town when she was murdered in an apparently senseless act of violence. A year later, Laura's younger sister Berry and Berry's estranged father come to South Africa to view the unveiling of a monument constructed in Laura's honor. Berry has resented her father ever since he divorced her mother years before and began associating with a series of other women. In order to make sense of Laura's death and finally connect with her dad, Berry must come to understand both the dark and bloody history of apartheid in South Africa and the family dynamics that have brought her to her present state of mind. In Many Stones "Coman makes no slick parallels between the political reconciliation and Berry's personal struggle with her father,"

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stated Hazel Rochman in Booklist, "except, perhaps, to show that both are difficult, incomplete." "Part coming-of-age, part tragedy, this realistic novel is not a light read," concluded School Library Journal critic Angela J. Reynolds, the reviewer going on to call Many Stones "a solid and powerful exploration into the mind of a grieving teen." "In the simplest words, as hard as stones," commented Rochman in her New York Times Book Review appraisal of the novel, "Coman connects a white American family's anguish with a nation's struggle to come to terms with its savage past."

With the middle-grade novels The Big House and Sneaking Suspicions, Coman turns from the darker themes that populate her work for teens. Inspired by childhood memories of her late brother, and the games they shared as children, these stories mix humor with a nostalgia-tinged text. "A lot of the dialogue came from my father's voice in my head," Coman explained to Teaching PreK-8 online interviewer Jessica Rae Patton. "He was someone who used a lot of old-fashioned expressions he loved." In The Big House readers meet Ivy and Ray, siblings who are being trained in their parents' grifter lifestyle. When Mom and Dad are jailed and charged with embezzling funds from a children's charity, the children are sent to live with Marietta and Lionel Noland, the couple responsible for the arrest of Ivy and Ray's parents. Determined to clear their parents of the crime, the siblings begin snooping around the Noland's lavish mansion home and in the process discover a series of bizarre and sometimes startling clues. Ivy and Ray return in Sneaking Suspicions, as they join their now-released parents on a trip to the Florida Everglades to seek out a distant cousin who may have a valuable family relic. Reviewing The Big House, which features artwork by Rob Shepperson, Horn Book reviewer Christine M. Hepperman dubbed Coman's setting "comically gloomy" and recommended the novel to fans of Lemony Snicket. In Publishers Weekly, a reviewer wrote that "Coman … displays her versatility, with this sly comedy," and School Library Journal critic B. Allison Gray dubbed The Big House "an enjoyable romp of a mystery." In the "pleasantly rambling" Sneaking Suspicions, the siblings' further adventures are enlivened by "Ivy's constant attempts to decipher the world," according to a Kirkus Reviews writer. In Booklist Rochman maintained that Shepperson's pen-and-ink drawings "feed the slapstick" of Coman's tale.

"I'm happy to be writing books that are considered young adult," Coman explained in an interview posted on the Penguin Putnam Web site. "I've written enough now to know that I come back over and over to childhood and adolescent issues. It's something that really interests and concerns me, so when I get an idea for a story, I just go with it. I couldn't have been more graciously and more warmly received, and if all my books end up being in that genre, wonderful."

Biographical and Critical Sources

PERIODICALS

Booklist, September 15, 1993, Jeanne Triner, review of Tell Me Everything, p. 150; December 15, 1995, Susan Dove Lempke, review of What Jamie Saw, p. 703; October 1, 1998, Stephanie Zvirin, review of Bee and Jacky, p. 324; April 1, 1999, p. 1383; December 1, 2000, Stephanie Zvirin, review of Many Stones, p. 692; January 1, 2001, Hazel Rochman, interview with Coman, pp. 938-939; September 15, 2004, Ilene Cooper, review of The Big House, p. 242; September 15, 2007, Hazel Rochman, review of Sneaking Suspicions, p. 66.

Book Report, May-June, 1994, Margaret Zinz Jantzen, review of Tell Me Everything, pp. 42-43.

English Journal, September, 1994, Lois Stover, review of Tell Me Everything, p. 87.

Horn Book, January-February, 1994, Nancy Vasilakis, review of Tell Me Everything, p. 72; March-April, 1996, Nancy Vasilakis, review of What Jamie Saw, p. 194; November, 1998, Susan P. Bloom, review of Bee andJacky, p. 726; January, 2001, review of Many Stones, p. 89; January-February, 2005, Christine M. Heppermann, review of The Big House, p. 91.

Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 1998, review of Bee and Jacky, pp. 1381-1382; September 1, 2004, review of The Big House, p. 862; September 1, 2007, review of Sneaking Suspicions.

New York Times Book Review, January 16, 1994, Erin Kelly, review of Tell Me Everything; February 11, 1996, Janet Bode, review of What Jamie Saw, p. 25; November 19, 2000, Hazel Rochman, "Truth and Reconciliation."

Publishers Weekly, March 11, 1988, review of Body and Soul: Ten American Women, pp. 92-93; June 15, 1992, review of Losing Things at Mr. Mudd's, p. 101; September 20, 1993, review of Tell Me Everything, p. 73; August 28, 1995, review of What Jamie Saw, p. 114; August 31, 1998, review of Bee and Jacky, p. 77; October 30, 2000, review of Many Stones, p. 76; September 6, 2004, review of The Big House, p. 63.

Riverbank Review, spring, 2001, Jenny Sawyer, review of Many Stones, p. 44.

School Library Journal, September, 1988, Dorcas Hand, review of Body and Soul, p. 212; November, 1998, Miriam Lang Budin, review of Bee and Jacky, p. 119; November, 2000, Angela J. Reynolds, review of Many Stones, p. 150; October, 2003, Jennifer Ralston, review of What Jamie Saw, p. 98; November, 2004, B. Allison Gray, review of The Big House, p. 138.

Times Educational Supplement, December 6, 1996, Geraldine Brennan, "Tulip the Battered Flower," p. 17.

Voice of Youth Advocates, December, 1998, Cynthia L. Blinn, review of Bee and Jacky, p. 353.