'Lightning' strikes: Cape Cod author Lauren Wolk launches sequel to book 'Wolf Hollow'

Young readers aren’t the only ones who have been helped and comforted by the worlds and characters Lauren Wolk has imagined for her books.

The Centerville author purposefully navigates challenging life topics such as bullying, loneliness and moral courage in her novels and has been thanked by children for the difference that addressing such issues can make for them.

But as Wolk's own world has grown more challenging, writing the books has helped her to cope, as well.

Her new, fourth novel “My Own Lightning” will be available Tuesday, with local launch parties Tuesday in Sandwich and Wednesday in Centerville. Wolk calls the book one of her “pandemic projects” because of when she did most of the writing and rewriting.

But the idea to create a sequel to her Newbery Honor-winning “Wolf Hollow” from 2016 took hold well before infections began — and before the artist and poet “retired” in December as longtime associate director of the Cultural Center of Cape Cod to focus on her writing and other personal projects.

It was shortly after her father died in 2018 that Wolk first thought of revisiting the 1940s Pennsylvania farm and family she had created for “Wolf Hollow” based on the farm where her mother grew up. Wolk had spent enough time at that beloved location in her life that she says it “was so much a part of my DNA” and she wanted to return to the fictional homage as well as that close-knit family.

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After her father’s death, “it was a very, very bad time for me and I think I was looking for comfort. I was looking for stability,” she says of choosing to write the sequel. “It was all about family and about relationships and about being among people who would support me no matter what. I wanted to go back to that place.”

The loss of her father was only part of that need, though, as troubling issues arose around her in the country and the world. “It was a time when I felt like there were a lot of things in my life beyond my control and boy, we hadn't even reached the pandemic yet.”

What happens in the sequel of 'Wolf Hollow'?

“Wolf Hollow” had come to a clear conclusion, though, for 12-year-old Annabelle and her family, so what would be next? “I kept imagining Annabelle living a new chapter of her life based on the experiences she'd had, the mistakes she made, the relationships she'd lost and and I thought, well, you know, I'm going to consider it.”

Wolk says she was warned off writing a sequel for how challenging it could be, and the author did find it hard for various reasons.

“The pandemic was not a good time to try something new and difficult,” she says, but she also struggled with how much to tell of the previous book, where to take the family and what themes to explore. Wolk acknowledges eventually cutting multiple characters and subplots (several of which reflected world events, including a refugee family).

She and her editor recognized that the relationship between Annabelle and bully Andy “was at the heart of everything,” she says, “so once I really focused on that, it became a lot easier.”

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In “My Own Lightning,” Annabelle is actually struck by lightning and as she recovers realizes she has been given some heightened senses. That situation, Wolk says, was based on an NPR story she heard and then researched about people gaining amazing gifts — suddenly being able to play the piano or speak a foreign language — after a lightning strike.

Annabelle’s gift unexpectedly connects her to Andy, the boy who threatened her and her family in “Wolf Hollow” and Wolk explored the idea of second chances and not assuming you know someone until you learn more about them. That theme, too, was connected to the real-world heightened tensions among Americans in the past few years.

Writing the book “felt like a safe place but it was not just the pandemic, it was the whole social justice movement and all the horrors that were going on, have always been and are still going on with that, the incredible things that we were seeing on the news every night or more directly in our lives,” she says. “And what Annabelle discovers about giving people a second chance and looking beyond the obvious, that was all very much influenced by what was going on in our society at the time.”

Wolk talks about the “political social war that we've been going through for years now, where people I thought I knew in one way, turned out to be something else entirely. And I of course started thinking, well, I must feel the same way to them, we’re on opposite sides of issues and I always thought we had common ground there. So it was really tough."

And she changed her own thinking. "I just was looking at how our society was going so tribal and I started to think, ‘All right, I am not going to make snap judgments about people anymore. I'm going to understand them thoroughly before I decide anything about them.’ And that's what Annabelle ends up doing. So she really helped me work my way through all that.”

What do young people want to read?

Based on feedback she’s gotten from young readers on her past books — which also include “Beyond the Bright Sea,” winner of the 2018 Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction, and “Echo Mountain” (2020) — Wolk acknowledges she does feel a responsibility to try to help children work through tough issues, too, and “speak the truth as I see it.”

She gratefully recalls one comment from a girl who told her that reading about how Ellie dealt with troubles during the Depression in “Echo Mountain” helped convince her that she would be able to get through the pandemic.

“I feel drawn toward weightier topics and sadness and darkness, as well as light and joy,” Wolk says. “I think kids need a balanced diet of all these things, and I've heard from a lot of them that they really appreciated the respect that's inherent in giving them a book about weightier issues because I know they can handle it. They’re being bombarded with very troubling information about the world and from all angles … and I believe that you have to equip them with what they need in order to navigate a world like that.”

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And that can mean, she notes, “looking hard at darker issues, troubling issues, difficult issues, and seeing how young protagonists like Annabelle — and hopefully my other ones in my other books — deal with them, even if they make mistakes along the way.”

Choosing a bully as a main character was a tough call, Wolk says, because she didn’t want to “let him off the hook” too much.

“I believe in standing up to bullies and making them take responsibility for their actions. Absolutely, 100%. On the other hand. it's so easy to be dismissive about people and to decide they're just one thing and not to try any harder to find out to look at their motives or their lives to understand them and how some grow and evolve.

“So that's what I wanted Annabelle to do, and that's what I have pledged to try and do in my own life,” she adds. “That’s what I think we all need to do because without empathy, without understanding, without an attempt to put ourselves in each other's shoes, we’re completely lost.”

Even more projects

Wolk says she wrote a second book during the pandemic that has been put aside for now (set in 1959 Cotuit) and is working on another about a girl named Hannah who lives on an apple farm in western Massachusetts and finds a baby. “And I don’t know where that’s going,” she says.

There’s yet another book idea germinating, plus a picture book and she’s writing a screenplay with her son. She’s about to launch “My Own Lightning” locally and with virtual appearances for distant fans, then an in-person book tour that will include California, Oklahoma and Colorado.

She just helped realize the installation of tablets of poetry on some Barnstable walking trails for Earth Day and is preparing to curate an art exhibit next fall at the Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis.

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So four months beyond her job at the cultural center has hardly been “retirement” and Wolk says her full life as a writer often feels like being inside a kaleidoscope. But becoming a successful novelist was also a dream of her father’s and she keeps that in mind.

“He wanted many of the things that have come true for me, and so I feel like, not only do I count my blessings every single day because this is what I've always wanted, but I know how lucky I am,” she says. “The kaleidoscope is a good place to be. … I'm happy to be in the beautiful, colorful chaos of my life.”

To see Lauren Wolk launch ‘My Own Lightning’

When: 4 to 5 p.m. Tuesday

Where: Sandwich Public Library, 142 Main St., (co-hosted by Titcomb's Bookshop)

Information: https://www.titcombsbookshop.com/

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When: 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. Wednesday

Where: Centerville Public Library (co-hosting with Bread + Roses Bookshop & Café), 585 Main St.

Information: https://www.centervillelibrary.org/, https://www.brcapecod.com/

Contact Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll at kdriscoll@capecodonline.com. Follow on Twitter: @KathiSDCCT.

This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Cape Cod author Lauren Wolk's 'Lightning' sequel to 'Wolf Hollow'