Marie Arnold: Hello. My name is Marie Arnold and I am the author of The Year I Flew Away. I first got the idea to do The Year I Flew Away when I remembered just how much I wanted a friend when I first got to this country. The initial idea sprang from the question of how far would you go to have friends? That's where our main character has to make that decision. Exactly how far she's going to go in order to have friends and be welcomed and accepted.

I'm from Haiti. I'm an immigrant. And I came to America to live in Brooklyn just like our main character, Gabrielle. So we have actually a lot in common. She wanted friends. She wanted to belong. And she had this picture in her head of what an American looked like and I was the same way. And I was always trying to fit in, so that we have in common. The differences between me and Gabrielle is that she's far more brave than I am. She displays her courage throughout the book in ways that I would never have thought to have done. So I'm trying to, in a lot of ways, become as brave as she is. So there's definitely a difference between us. She's just much cooler too.

Writing for a middle grade audience was something I've always wanted to do because it's such a fun time in life where everything has its own built-in urgency and fun and adventure can be found in every single corner. And I think middle grade is a great place to start really honing into your imagination and pushing beyond your boundaries and just exploring. So I love that age. I was a voracious reader, so I was really, really excited to start writing books about the age that I was when I started reading books in English, so that's why I chose it because I have a connection to middle grade books because those were the first books I read in America, so that connection is still there.

What I would love my readers to walk away with at the end of this book is this sense of acceptance of themselves. That it's completely okay to not look like everyone else, or to speak like everyone else, or to eat the same food that everyone else eats. It's okay to be yourself and that your uniqueness isn't a weakness, but an actual strength. You are not alone and it's okay to be different and it's a good thing. And now I have the ultimate pleasure of reading to you a brief passage from The Year I Flew Away:

It takes hard work to eat nine mangoes back to back, but that's just what I'm going to do. I'm about to become mango champion of my village. My best friend, Stephanie, stacks mangoes in front of me. The boys assemble their stacks in front of Paul, the boy I will be racing against. This match has been a long time coming. The kids pile the mango next to each of us. Paul looks like he thinks he's going to win because he is a boy, but I know I will win. I have been training and today is not his day. Today is mine.