Kate Albus: Hi, I'm Kate Albus, and I'm the author of A Place to Hang the Moon. This book is for middle grade readers, and it's what's called historical fiction, which means that not everything in the story is made up from my own imagination; parts of it actually happened in real life a long time ago. In the case of A Place to Hang the Moon, the real-life part of the story is something that happened in England during World War II. At the beginning of the war, people in England were afraid that their cities might get bombed. So what they did was send their kids out to the countryside where they thought they'd be safer until the war was over. More than a million children got onto trains, usually with their teachers, and were picked up in the countryside to be cared for by strangers for months or even years.

I actually learned about the evacuations as a child reading C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The reason that the Pevensies were sent to the professor's house, where they found the magical wardrobe, was that they were being evacuated because of the war. And that little tidbit stayed with me ever since, because I've always thought that was a pretty extraordinary historical event and one that would make a great story.

So, A Place to Hang the Moon is about Edmond, Anna, and William Pearce, three siblings who are orphaned by their not especially nice grandmother at the beginning of the war. They need a guardian and they cook up a plan to get evacuated from London, just like a million other kids are doing, and head off on a train with the children of a local school. They don't tell anybody, but what they're hoping is that whoever they land with in the countryside just happens to be the sort of loving family that they've always dreamt of and that that person or family just happens to want to keep them forever as well.

At its heart, I think, A Place to Hang the Moon is a story about family. Not just the family that you're given, but the family that you hope for and the family that you choose. It's also about stories and very much about the ways that both family and stories can sustain us in the darkest of times. So I hope that's what readers will take away with them.

Now I'd like to share the very beginning of A Place to Hang the Moon:

Chapter I. Funeral receptions can be tough spots to find enjoyment but eleven-year-old Edmund Pearce was doing his best. He was intent on the iced buns. Some of them had gone squashy on one side or the other. Some had lost their icing when a neighboring bun had been removed and a few had been sadly neglected in the icing department from the start. Undaunted, Edmund picked through the pile, finding two that met with his approval.

He shoved one into each of his trouser pockets and; scooping up a handful of custard cream cookies to round out the meal, navigated through the crowd until he found a vacant armchair. There he settled, quite content, despite the occasion. It helped that he'd never cared for his grandmother anyway. On the other side of the room, Anna Pearce sat cross-legged on the floor between a corner cabinet and a brocade settee. The settee's occupants didn't notice the nine-year-old tucked under the weighty scroll of its arm. Anna had nearly finished Mary Poppins and she preferred its company to that of the unfamiliar elderly ladies perched on the settee or any of the other guests. Like her brother, Anna I had managed to find enjoyment at the funeral reception.