The paperback edition of The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic has just been released! If you order through The Rabbit Room store (only $6), I’m signing all copies before they ship for Christmas.

“Framed as an account written by Professor Barnabas Quill, ‘Historian of the Island at the Center of Everything,’ Trafton’s debut is a lively adventure about magical pots, pepper, manners, poison-tongued jumping tortoises, poetic soldiers, and downtrodden yet resilient heroine Persimmony Smudge. . . . Trafton imbues her tale with a delightful sense of fun and fascinating, well-rounded characters—playful wordsmithing and flowing dialogue make this an excellent choice for bedtime read-aloud.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

This past September, I was asked to talk about my love for children’s literature at Hutchmoot, an annual celebration of stories, music, and art hosted by the Nashville-based creative community known as The Rabbit Room. Here is what I said:

I grew up in a book-loving family. Bookshelves oozed over the walls of our home, spreading farther and farther into the unused spaces as the years went by. We went to the library on Saturdays and brought home towers of books. One of the books my mother read aloud to me when I was ten was The Neverending Story, but this was one of those rare occasions when the movie version actually left a deeper imprint on my imagination. It was one of the defining films of my childhood—with its wonderful hint that those stories I was reading in books had an immense and fragile and beautiful reality behind them, and that I was always on the verge of falling into that other world, or seeing it fall into mine.

My father read The Chronicles of Narnia to me (many times), and it filled me with a sense of the grand Story-ness of life—a feeling reinforced years later when I read The Lord of the Rings for the first time as a college freshman. I spent hours curled up on my bed with a profound longing in my heart, as if the veil had been pulled back for an instant on the Epic that I knew the world really possessed, if only I could live always in this glorious awareness of it.

“The supreme adventure is being born,” said G. K. Chesterton. “Our existence may cease to be a song; it may cease even to be a beautiful lament. Our existence may not be an intelligible justice, or even a recognizable wrong. But our existence is still a story.”

Continue reading "The Art of Play"

Why I write fantasy for children

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the third book in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series, begins with a picture. It hangs on the wall of the guest room where Edmund, Lucy, and Eustace are sitting, and in it a green dragon-shaped ship with a purple sail dances on sun-splattered waves of green and purple and blue. But as the children are looking at it, something magical happens: the picture becomes a window. They see a real ship, they hear the roar of the waves, they feel the salty wind in their faces, and suddenly they are pulled through the frame and into an adventure that will take them to the end of the world, where Aslan’s country lies.

A great book is like that: it not only shows you a new window into the world, it yanks you right through the window.

Continue reading "Picture Windows"