When I was little, my Polish grandpa took me for walks through the alleys of Chicago. I would collect treasures—rubber bands and marbles, perfectly good pencils, maple leaves and robins’ eggs—and take them home to put in a box under my bed. I think that’s what being a writer is like. The treasures I collect now are bits of information fantasies memories, and imaginings, and I take them and put them in a story.

I write historical fiction, novels that may be about made up characters and events but take place in a real time or place.

Watch for this new book in April. In Alchemy and Meggy Swann, Meggy is newly come to London with her only friend, a goose named Louise. Meggy's mother was glad to be rid of her; her father, who sent for her, doesn't want her after all.
Francine in The Loud Silence of Francine Green is an eighth-grader at All Saints School for Girls, which she calls the Sinless Academy for the Maidenly, in Los Angeles. It is 1949. Russia has just tested its first atomic weapon. President Truman has called for the development of the hydrogen bomb. Communists are in power in Russia and China and, some say, in Hollywood. Francine has never questioned authority. The new girl at school, Sophie Bowman, questions everything from the existence of God to the wisdom of waging war with nuclear weapons. Sophie changes Francine’s life.
Lonely, proud, and superior, Matilda Bone was raised by a priest to know a lot about Heaven and Hell but not much about this world. Sent to be assistant to Red Peg the Bonesetter in the medical quarter of a medieval town, she learns to cherish and enjoy this life instead of merely waiting for the next.
Rodzina is a novel of the orphan trains, which took orphaned and homeless children from the slums of big cities to new lives in the west. Rodzina, big, sad, and angry, travels west from Chicago looking for someone to belong to.
In The Ballad of Lucy Whipple, Lucy is dragged unhappily from her home in Massachusetts to the gold fields of California. She misses her dog, her grandparents, and her public library and wants to go home. Eventually Lucy learns where home really is.
Alyce, in The Midwife’s Apprentice, is a homeless girl known only as Brat who longs for a name, a full belly, and a place in the world. She takes refuge in the warmth of a dung heap one night, where she is found by the village midwife. Brat changes her name to Alyce and sets about making her dreams come true.
Catherine, Called Birdy is a medieval girl with no power and little value in a brutal world. This is the diary of her 14th year when her father tries to arrange her marriage and Catherine struggles to avoid it.
My books have been translated into eleven different languages.