Monday, February 01, 2016

Coffee with a canine: Leza Lowitz & Bingo and Memo.

Featured at Coffee with a Canine: Leza Lowitz & Bingo and Memo.

The author, on how she and Bingo and Memo were united:
It’s a modern love story: Shogo found Memo on the Internet. It was just after the earthquake and tsunami, and she was rescued from the mountains outside of Tokyo. When she got picked up, she gave birth to eight puppies in the rescue truck. All the pups were adopted, but Mama dog was still waiting for a forever home. She looked exactly like our previous rescue dog, Aska, who we’d brought with us to Tokyo from San Francisco, so Shogo was kind of stalking her online to see if she’d get adopted. When she didn’t, we decided to take the plunge. The little one, Bingo, was connected to Memo by some kind of invisible string, even though she wasn’t one of Memo’s pups. There was...[read on]
About Lowitz's new novel Up from the Sea, from the publisher:
A powerful novel-in-verse about how one teen boy survives the March 2011 tsunami that devastates his coastal Japanese village.

On that fateful day, Kai loses nearly everyone and everything he cares about. When he’s offered a trip to New York to meet kids whose lives were changed by 9/11, Kai realizes he also has a chance to look for his estranged American father. Visiting Ground Zero on its tenth anniversary, Kai learns that the only way to make something good come out of the disaster back home is to return there and help rebuild his town.

Heartrending yet hopeful, Up from the Sea is a story about loss, survival, and starting anew.

Fans of Jame Richards’s Three Rivers Rising and teens who read Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust as middle graders will embrace this moving story. An author’s note includes numerous sources detailing actual events portrayed in the story.
Visit Leza Lowitz's website.

The Page 69 Test: Up From the Sea.

Coffee with a Canine: Leza Lowitz & Bingo and Memo.

--Marshal Zeringue