“…an engrossing mystery,” School Library Journal. More Than Good Enough (Flux Books) is a Florida Book Awards medalist, which Kirkus calls, “compelling and emotionally nuanced.” Chappell’s newest YA novel is Snowbirds (Simon Pulse).

Chappell’s second novel, Narc (Flux Books) is currently optioned for film. Her debut young adult novel, Total Constant Order (HarperTeen) is a NYPL Book For The Teen Age and a VOYA Perfect Ten. She wrote about Florida girls who didn’t want to grow up.Ĭhappell now lives in Brooklyn, New York. They said: write something that you’d actually want to read. She wrote about elves and other dimensions. Chappell became known as the girl-who-writes-about-teenagers. She studied fiction of all forms at the University of Miami: from black-and-white monster movies to ultra-serious plays. She put it down on paper, as she’d done since she could pick up a Crayola (starting with hand-stapled “horse books” on notepaper, which forced her unfortunate readers to turn the pages backwards). It was the treeless land of strip malls and sun-baked parking lots.

Miami was no longer a home for wharf rats. The beach began to build fancy cafes and velvet-roped clubs. In high school, her city started taking cues from those neon-soaked television shows. Her friends were raccoons and foxes, opossums and burrowing owls, bats and blue crabs that scuttled up into the trees. The hall closet was a time machine that could zap back to the days of brontos and T-Rex. She spent a lot of time talking to invisible creatures. As a kid, she climbed the oaks in her backyard near the bay and imagined that their branches were the scaly skins of flying dragons.

Now, Lucy plunges into a search for her best friend-while also hiding her own secret, which could put her in even more danger.Crissa-Jean Chappell was born in Miami, Florida. Wracked by guilt, Lucy knows that she should have been watching out for Alice, but instead, she was kissing Faron, an Older Order boy shunned by his society. Then, one night after just such a party, Alice vanishes. Lucy is part of a different sect, in which teens aren't allowed such bold experimentation, and she's fighting to keep up as Alice races from one wild party to the next. At sixteen, Alice is in the middle of 'Rumspringa,' a season in which Amish teens try out forbidden temptations, in order to get them out of their system. Lucy will grab your heart and run away with it.' - Robin MacCready, winner of the Edgar award for BuriedĮvery year, Lucy waits eagerly for the arrival of the 'snowbirds,' the Old Order Amish who come trundling into Florida on buses from the north, bringing Lucy's best friend Alice, with whom she's spent every winter she can remember. ' Snowbirds will turn your image of the Amish upside down.

Snowbirds by Crissa-Jean Chappell