It's the book club for kids.
The book club for kids.
It's the book club for kids.
It's the book club for kids podcast.
It's a bonus edition of the book club for kids podcast.
Hi, I'm Kitty Felde.
Last week we took you to Key West for a conversation about Jennifer L Holmes novel Turtle in Paradise.
Jenny says it's really the second book in a trilogy of sorts.
Turtle in Paradise, um, Kind of grew out of the book that preceded it, Penny from Heaven.
Coming up on this bonus edition, more of our conversation with writer Jennifer Holm.
Well, Jenny, let's start at the beginning.
Where did the inspiration for Turtle in Paradise come from?
There's a little throwaway line in Penny from Heaven.
Penny from Heaven takes place in New Jersey in 1953, and she has a grandmother that's from Key West.
And in the book, her grandmother has a little throwaway paragraph about how she misses Key West.
And that eventually turned into Turtle in Paradise.
Because I wrote that little scene?
Because my nana, my great-grandmother, was from Key West.
She's a Key West conch.
And the conchs were the people who originally were from the Bahamas and they were conch fishermen.
And a lot of Bahamians actually moved to Key West in the late 1800s.
And my great grandmother was one of them.
I grew up with an image of Key West as a bit of a quiet backwater.
And it wasn't the bustling town that we know of today.
And it kind of transformed to a tourist town as part of a sort of pseudo-WPA effort in the 1930s.
And then it kind of died, and it came back roaring in the 70s.
What kind of research did you have to do to really get a handle on what Key West was like during the Depression?
So for the research for Turtle in Paradise, I did a couple of things.
One is that I started with family history, which is I talked to my mom.
I talked to my cousins who live in Key West.
I talked to the family who was alive to get all of their memories.
We had some oral histories in the family of kids growing up during the Great Depression that I got to read, looked at photos.
And then that was just sort of the very first step into it.
Then I went and parked myself in the Key West Historical Society for a while.
And you just kind of have to go and sit in an archive and start to wade through papers.
And I started to get a feel for the times, you know, just read everything I could get my hands on.
And then what happens when you're just in the town or in a town and telling people you're doing research, you're connected usually.
So my family still lives in Key West.
And the librarian, the head of the archive at the Key West Historical Society.
I was asking him to recommend people I could talk to.
You know, elderly people who had lived through the Great Depression.
And some of them I was connected to by my family.
They were children of, you know, my cousins from the Depression who had grown up there and they were still alive and in their 80s.
And then probably one of the best interviews I got was Tom Hambright, who runs the Historical Society, said there's this wonderful woman and i think you should talk to her and i think you're related to her.
And it turned out i was in fact um, we were what you might call shirt string cousins and i went over to her house and she broke out the big um, we're related to the curry family.
If you walk around key west there are curries everywhere.
Um, she brought out the big curry genealogy and poked my name on the page and I just spent a lot of time with her.
And it turned out that my great-grandmother had actually lived in one of the houses that she owned.
The house she was living in next to
So I really kind of got to sink back into time.
So let's talk a little bit about Turtle.
Where did she come from as a character?
So she kind of grew out a little bit of...
She kind of sprang inspired by my mother.
So my mother grew up in New Jersey in the 1950s.
She was, in fact, the inspiration for Penny from Heaven.
And she used to.
She would go down in the summers to Key West with her, her grandma, my great grandmother, because they wanted to go back and see the family.
And she hated it because you know she was living in New Brunswick, New Jersey, which was very metropolitan outside of New York City and kind of you know, pretty hip northeast.
And then she would take this two or three day car drive with her grandparents back in the days when there were no Nintendo DSs or iPads to entertain the children, no air conditioning.
And she'd go to this quiet little backwater island where everything was strange.
And probably the one story that was the most inspirational, was she always kind of thought that the The Key West relatives had a lot of strange rituals, and one of them was they always told her, her mother especially told her to shake out her shoes in the morning before she put them on.
And she always thought this was a little nuts, until one morning she shook out her shoes and out popped a scorpion.
Because scorpions live in Key West and they like to hide in little dark places like your shoes and mailboxes is another popular place.
So I was just trying to imagine what would it be like for a kind of a Northeasterner girl to be thrust onto this island life.
Well, Turtle's not the name you hear every day on the street.
Where did her name come from?
So there's this whole...
Tradition in Key West of nicknaming, a really pretty solid tradition in the early part of the century.
A local historian went through and published two books of nicknames and people were often given nicknames and some of them were salty and some of them were funny, like from pork chop to you know, a kitty or something like that.
And I wanted to sort of extend the nicknaming style narrative a bit.
And turtles in Key West are a thing that was a hub for turtle farming.
Basically, they would catch big sea turtles and then process them in Key West.
So growing up, the cheapest meat in Key West was turtle meat, which apparently tastes like chicken.
Everybody told me a little tougher.
So if you had a peculiar nickname, what would it be?
My dad called me Princess Peaky Poe.
So that was the family nickname.
I don't know if that was a good nickname or not.
And the other nickname I would have would probably be Fern F-E-R-N, because that became a family joke when I was little.
I couldn't write my name properly.
I thought my name was Jenny Fern, because everybody called me Jenny, J-E-N and I.
I thought my name was Jenny Fur Home, F-E-R.
I'm Jennifer Louise Home, actually.
So my brothers thought this was very amusing and for many years called me Fern when they were teasing me.
So you told us how Turtle in Paradise came out of an earlier novel.
Tell us where Full of Beans came from.
Yeah, so that was great.
That was the most wonderful sort of birth of a book I've ever experienced, like a sequel, even though it was a prequel.
So I was writing Turtle in Paradise when my oldest son was born.
He's 13 now.
And he was kind of the inspiration in the book for the diaper gang because he was an incredibly colicky baby.
So I longed for a troop of babysitters to walk him around.
And many years later, he had to do a book report.
And in classic kid fashion, he left his book at school.
So he said, hey, why don't you read my book?
And he had never he'd resisted reading his mother's books.
And he he finally read Turtle in Paradise and he liked it.
And he said, I wish you could write another book about Beans.
He's the best character.
And how did the diaper gang get started?
And he said, and I even have an idea for the title.
You should call it Full of Beans.
And so for the very first time in my life, I listened to my kid.
Thanks, Jenny.
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Send us an email to kitty at bookclubforkidsorg.
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Again, that email is kitty at bookclubforkids.org.
I'm Kitty Felde.
Thanks so much for listening.
Thank you.
