In the July/August 2014 Horn Book Magazine, reviewer Dean Schneider talked to author Deborah Wiles about constructing the second entry in her Sixties "documentary novel" trilogy. Read the starred review of Revolution here.

Dean Schneider: How do you keep the sheer scale of your narrative in control — the documents, the voices, the historical perspective, the interspersed essays — in order to shape a cohesive story?

Deborah Wiles: We each live lives of immense scale. I wanted to offer readers a rich, immersive, meaningful experience of the way we live. The “outer story” — the world’s history — informs the “inner story” — an individual’s history, and vice versa. We can’t have one without the other. Controlling the narrative means widely gathering resources, being awake to what’s happening in each story moment, and allowing the particular historical events, people, and places of the day to have their say through the parallel voices and experiences of my characters.

From the July/August 2014 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.