We are thrilled to be a stop on author Kate Messner’s Sugar and Ice blog tour! Sugar and Ice will be released on December 7, 2010 and you can find more information about Kate and her books at KateMessner.com or at her LiveJournal blog.
For Claire Boucher, life is all about skating on the frozen cow pond and in the annual Maple Show right before the big pancake breakfast on her family’s maple farm. But all that changes when Claire is offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity-a scholarship to train with the elite skaters in Lake Placid. Tossed into a world of mean girls on ice, where competition is everything, Claire soon realizes that her sweet dream-come-true has sharper edges than she could have imagined. Can she find the strength to stand up to the people who want her to fail and the courage to decide which dream she wants to follow?
Sugar and Ice was a book that happened by accident.
In the summer of 2008, my daughter heard about a basic skills figure skating day camp at the Olympic Center in Lake Placid. She’s not a competitive skater, but it sounded like fun and wasn’t too far a drive, so we signed her up. I had big plans to drop her off for the day and head for the coffee shop across the street to finish revising The Brilliant Fall of Gianna Z., which was due to my editor in a couple weeks.
But I missed the fine print…the part that said when I signed the girl up for skating camp, I was also signing myself up for a parent education program. I tied her skates on the first day and picked up my backpack to head for the coffee shop, only to be handed a thick “skater-mom” folder and directed back to my seat. What followed was a parade of experts, talking about everything from thousand dollar blades to sewing sequins more effectively.
“Wait!” I thought. “There’s been a mistake! My daughter doesn’t even skate in competitions…”
But when the next speaker was a sports psychologist who specializes in working with skaters and their families, I stopped wishing for my latte and took out my notebook. Her insights and stories were fascinating, and I couldn’t help thinking that a story was falling into my lap.
What if a girl with no interest in competition were suddenly plunked into the middle of this uber-competitive world? I paged through my notebook, the part where I keep a list of places I love and might want to use as a setting some day, and that’s where I discovered Claire, the main character of Sugar and Ice, a small town girl whose family runs a maple farm near the Canadian border.
I scribbled notes all through that weekend and would return to the Olympic Center numerous times for research while I was writing. I sat at the Empire State Games and Junior Nationals competitions and collected skating details in my notebook, jotting down details about the girls’ outfits, making notes on their music. I asked questions about the moves, and inter
viewed skaters. I spent several afternoons listening in as a high-level coach wor
ked with his skaters on the ice; I wrote down the kinds of things he told them
about how to hold their shoulders, the words he used to encourage them and to push them harder.
More than two years after that door closed at the Olympic Center, trapping me in the parent education session, Sugar and Ice is being released from Bloombury/Walker, and I couldn’t be more thankful.
I am a huge figure skating fanatic so I absolutely love the background story of how this book came to be. Very cool!