Kate Hannigan: Hi, my name's Kate Hannigan and I'm the author of The League of Secret Heroes, a three-book series, and the book titles are Cape, Mask and Boots. It's an historical fantasy. Often, authors will sit down and write a book based on just trying to answer a simple question, and that's kind of how this three-book series came to be for me. I, just one day, was poking around and I was thinking about, "What's up with Wonder Woman? When did she show up? When did she join the fellas in the superhero canon?"

And when I looked it up, I realized her debut was December 1941, which, if you're interested in history, you know that that's when Pearl Harbor was bombed, and the United States was pulled into World War II. So going with those two really distinct threads, comic book heroes and the war, I just started thinking about how fun it would be to have superpowers and be a kid superhero, trying to do your part to fight the bad guys. And also the remarkable real life people of World War II, who were doing essentially super heroic things. So I'm a history nerd and I like with books for kids to wrap historical things in fun, accessible things. So the idea of looking at historical figures doing fascinating things and wrapping it in a superhero story, just kind of made sense to me.

It was really fun looking at the war history and the superhero history. So I was looking at the code crackers and some of the spies and most exciting to me was getting to meet the WASPs, the Women Air Force Service Pilots. My background's journalism, so I really like to talk to human beings about things. So I actually flew down to Sweetwater, Texas to attend a WASP annual gathering, and these women were in their nineties. I met one in particular, Jane Doyle, who I put in the book. She gave me permission and her family gave me permission, so I sat down and interviewed her. Another thing I like kids to be reminded of that history doesn't have to be this dusty thing from the past. That it can be something living and breathing, and we just have to talk to people and hear those stories. So that's what I tried to do with this series.

One thing that's fun about the book, that it's a mashup of history and superheroes, but it's also a mashup of traditional storytelling, the written novel, but also the graphic novel comic book vibe. It felt organic to me that as I'm sitting here researching the earliest superheroes from 1939, 1940, I was looking at these old, old comic books, and so I decided to write four chapters in each of the books in graphic novel comic book format. So I think kids might have some fun with that. They're reading along and then the chapter jumps into... usually I saved it for the battle scenes because it seems more fun to me to have a big pow rather than me trying to explain. "And pow. Someone hit someone in the stomach" or something like that. So I had a lot of fun with that. So it is a graphic novel, traditional novel mashup, as well as being a history and superhero mashup. It was a fun thing to write and I hope people find it's a fun thing to read.