There are lots of reasons not to go into the family business.
One of those reasons is that the family is almost too good at its business.
Fred McKissack was born with the writer gene. His parents are Patricia C. and Fredrick L. McKissack, authors of more than 100 award-winning and acclaim-accruing books for children and young adults.
So Fred McKissack Jr. decided to try newspaper writing instead.
His first job was covering the St. Louis-area high school sports scene.
“I wanted to be James Baldwin,” he said, “but I didn’t have enough money to live in New York, much less Paris. I also didn’t think I had the talent to be a novelist. So I took a job writing for the St. Louis Suburban Journals more on a whim. It was tough, on-the-job training because I didn’t study journalism, but I loved the process and the idea that journalism – yes, even prep sports – is a noble thing.”
McKissack’s journalistic odyssey took him to Fort Wayne a few years back, when he won some awards as an editorial writer on the staff of this very paper. But the lure of a life of letters (which is to say, a life of writing books) proved too strong.
Now, four years into his career as an author, McKissack has decisively stepped out of his parents’ shadow (although he is loath to describe it in precisely that way, which is why I went ahead and did it for him).
McKissack’s novel for young adults, “Shooting Star” (Athenaeum; $16.99), is a critical hit, earning praise from every publication that has reviewed it, including Kirkus Reviews, School Library Journal and a scrappy community daily called the Washington Post.
“Shooting Star” tells the story of a high school football player named Jomo Rogers who is seduced by the deceptively easy gains promised by steroids.
The book is well-plotted, fast-paced and utterly convincing in its depictions of high school sports and players of high school sports.
Of course, I am not now nor have I ever been a high school sportsman. But I have read enough stilted young-adult fiction to be able to say that McKissack’s book is alive in its words.
It is full of humor and wordplay that you will recognize as uniquely McKissack’s, but only if you know McKissack. Otherwise, you will enjoy it as you enjoy less personalized humor and wordplay.
McKissack said he worked closely on the book with Caitlyn Dlouhy, executive editor at Atheneum Books for Young Readers.
At one point in the editing process, McKissack expressed to Dlouhy his misgivings about entering a field on which his parents had put such a distinctive stamp.
“She stopped me and said, ‘I don’t have a lot of time to waste on something like that,’ ” McKissack recalls. “ ‘I am taking you on as a writer because I believe you have the talent to pull this off.’ ”
McKissack said Dlouhy and his wife, Lisa Beringer McKissack (also an author and the director of the social sciences program at Ivy Tech) were instrumental in helping him over such self-imposed hurdles.
Of course, McKissack is like a lot of creative types, in that every accolade serves only to remind him of the likelihood of a looming disappointment.
Still, when Dlouhy called him on his cell phone to inform him that the book was the recipient of a starred review from Kirkus, he gave himself leave to jump up and down. In the parking lot of Afdent.
To people walking nearby, McKissack “must have looked like a man who had really enjoyed his dental work,” he said.
The only sour note in this so-far perfect scenario has been struck by a mother in suburban Tulsa, Okla., who allegedly wants the book banned or severely restricted because of the profanity in it.
There is indeed some blue language in the book but nothing that anyone who has ever been in a locker room hasn’t heard.
McKissack, who has a kindergartner of his own, said it is a parent’s right to decide that she doesn’t want her child to read a book, and it is her right to inform other parents of her misgivings about a book. But it should not be her right to keep the book away from all young adults.
McKissack said the profanity used among the teenage characters in “Shooting Star” is never directed at adults and it is never employed in a titillating fashion.
He laments that parents rarely complain about the violence in young-adult fiction, a lamentation that echoes across the length and breadth of our popular culture.
McKissack said his next book will be a dystopia with a game show at its core.
In fact, when I interviewed McKissack, he was waiting to hear what Dlouhy thought of a first draft.
Fred being Fred, he was worried that she’d hate it.
Not likely.