"The Wonder of Us"

Kim Culbertson is the award-winning author of the YA novels Songs for a Teenage Nomad, Instructions for a Broken Heart, Catch a Falling Star, The Possibility of Now, and The Wonder of Us.

She applied the Page 69 Test to The Wonder of Us and reported the following:

From page 69:

“Been meaning to ask you, why the Seven Ancient Wonders?”

Like Will is used to being asked how tall he is, this is one of the questions I get asked the most. Maybe it’s a strange sort of hobby, loving the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, if you’re not a seventy-year-old archaeologist or something. Of course, people always forget that the seventy-year-old archaeologist first fell in love with the ancient world at some point in her life…

Northern California girls Abby and Riya have been friends since preschool, but when Riya moves to Berlin for her junior year of high school, their friendship starts to fall apart. In an attempt to save it, Riya sends Abby an invitation to explore Europe with her, to create some new Wonders, other than those ancient ones Abby spends all her time studying. In The Wonder of Us, my third novel with Scholastic, I wanted to explore the sometimes challenging nature of evolving friendships. So often, our first loves outside our families are with friends and this felt like an interesting and important topic to me. I taught high school for 18 years and watched how complex childhood friendships could be when they hit the teen years. And I love to travel, especially because travel reframes things for me in my own life. So, I thought setting this story of these two girls against the backdrop of their hometown and then six European cities would allow the best sort of road trip exploration to happen.

Visit Kim Culbertson's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Kim Culbertson and Maya.

--Marshal Zeringue