Story Secrets: CHASING BROOKLYN by Lisa Schroeder

I'm very pleased to welcome Lisa Schroeder to Story Secrets to talk about CHASING BROOKLYN, a gorgeous verse novel just released by Simon Pulse and a companion to her very popular I HEART YOU, YOU HAUNT ME.

Lisa and I met a couple of years ago at the second annual Kidlit Blogger Conference, and she just made the northwest trek from P-land to Seattle for our December SCBWI WWA meeting to talk about writing YA along with Liz Gallagher. (And I got a signed copy! Yay!)

Welcome, Lisa!

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CHASING BROOKLYN is about a girl who is still struggling with the death of her boyfriend, Lucca, from a year ago. Then, a friend of hers, Gabe, dies of a drug overdose and her world gets even darker. Gabe begins to haunt her, and she doesn’t know why. Lucca begins to haunt his brother, Nico, trying to get him to help Brooklyn. Told from two points of view, Nico and Brooklyn, we see them dealing with their pain and the ghosts in their own different ways, until they realize they might actually be able to help each other.


What inspired CHASING BROOKLYN?
My first YA novel, I HEART YOU, YOU HAUNT ME, has been fairly successful and I had many teens writing to me, asking me to write another book “just like that.” I approached my editor about doing a sequel, but he felt like we left Ava in a good place. He suggested we might have Ava appear in another book, however, and perhaps make it more of a companion novel. So I started thinking about what made sense, and I thought Ava might be there to comfort to someone else experiencing a difficult loss. And that’s how it started.


How did you come up with the idea to write from two points of view?
This might be terrible to say, but some of the details as to HOW I came up with the two narrators are a bit fuzzy at this point. I remember thinking that it needed to be different from I HEART YOU. It couldn’t really be another book about a girl being haunted by her dead boyfriend. And I think at some point, I decided adding in that second narrator would really help the book to be different. And wow, it was fun to write from a male POV for a change.

Read the rest!