After 29 years in the private sector as a sales and marketing executive, the company where I
worked was the victim of a hostile takeover. The result was, my position was taken over by an
individual at the company which absorbed us, and I received a generous buyout (and I had no
complaints with that). That financial freedom left me in a position to reassess my career, and to
consider going in a different direction without having to worry about what a new job might pay.
And so, I took a year off, earned a master’s degree in education and hired on as a classroom
teacher with a school district in suburban Chicago. My charge was to teach 8 th grade social
studies. However, each teacher was also assigned to teach an extended period of reading, which
included time for students to read on their own, plus 10-15 minutes of read-aloud.
At the time I began teaching, I had also had traditionally published a couple of nonfiction
titles related to the history of American railroads, and over the next 20 years published 20 more,
plus, to date five PI mysteries and two young adult novels. I mention this only to indicate that
writing was in my DNA.
Over the years teaching reading—I eventually earned a certification as a reading
instructor—I noticed that, in general, it was much more challenging to find books the boys were
interested in reading, or, indeed, to get them to read much of anything associated with the
school’s standard curriculum. That reluctance to read was a problem, because the state of Illinois
measured student reading proficiency by means of an achievement test Illinois Standards
Achievement Test, or ISAT, administered to 8 th graders. Our district, like many others, was
having difficulty meeting the state’s mandated goals at an acceptable level. And so, I offered to
head up a pilot program aimed at improving reading skills for students who did not meet the
minimum standards. As it turned out, all the students in my revised class were boys. So, I
thought, how can I find something these boys can, and will, read?
What I found was that there simply were not enough books on our library’s shelves to
interest them. If that seems hard to believe, take a walk through the young adult section in your
local Barnes & Noble. Based on my own observation, about three-quarters of the books shelved
there are written by women for girls. And I have no quarrel with that. But I thought I could do
something to address the imbalance.
With that in mind, I laid out and subsequently wrote a YA novel called Gideon’s Ghost. I
was a story about a somewhat sheltered 14-year-old boy named Gary, whose father was severely
injured—and later dies—as a result of injuries sustained in an automobile accident. For various
reasons, Gary is shipped off to spend the summer with his grandparents in a small town in
Oklahoma. Over the course of that summer, Gary is forced by circumstances to learn what it
means to grow up, as he experiences first, hostility toward him for being an “outsider,” and later,
what it’s like to fall in love, to take a first drink of alcohol, and even, when an emergency arises,
to drive a car. It is, in other words, a coming-of-age story, which I hoped would resonate with
boys the same age as Gary (and my eighth graders).
I followed up Gideon’s Ghost with a second YA novel called Connor’s War, set in 1968
during the Vietnam War. This time, the protagonist is a 15-year-old named Connor. Connor’s
father is a United States Navy pilot whose plane is shot down while flying a mission over North
Vietnam. Connor’s mom is a navy doctor who is called to active duty in Okinawa to treat the
numerous military personnel injured during the Tet Offensive which took place earlier that same
year. And so, with nobody to look after him at home, Connor finds himself in the care of his
grandfather, a circuit court judge in rural Kansas. And like Gary, Connor must deal, first, with
many uncertainties, including not knowing whether his father was killed in action or is a prisoner
of war and being uprooted from his familiar surroundings in California to a very small setting in
the American Midwest. Over the course of his stay, his world is further shaken by the
assassination of Robert Kennedy, and the revelation that his grandfather is dying from a terminal
cancer.
The point of these books (apart from sneaking in a few history lessons) is to place the
protagonists in situations where they must face, and deal with their own problems. No 1950s-era
Ward Cleaver or Jim Anderson to solve Connor and Gary’s problems. They are required to
empower themselves and resolve their various conflicts.
So. Why did I write these books? And why do I plan to write more like them? Because I
believe that even reluctant readers will pick up a book that speaks to their individual concerns
and does so in a manner that is both entertaining and—key idea here—empowering. My students
did not want to read stories by Mark Twain and O Henry, cleverly written as they might be,
because they could not relate to the subject matter. They did want to read about characters their
own age in situations they could picture themselves. And that was what I was trying to give
them. And at the end of the year, all those boys met the state standard for reading.
By Greg Stout
Greg Stout is the author of Gideon’s Ghost, and Connor’s War, both young adult novels set in small-town America in the mid-1960s, and Lost Little Girl, a detective novel set in Nashville, Tennessee, which received the 2022 Shamus Award for best first PI novel. His latest PI novel, Long Time Gone, was released in December 2024. He is also the author of 23 nonfiction railroad histories. His next release, Goodbye is Forever, is now also available. Greg resides with his wife Carol, and two ornery cats, Wallace and Gromit, in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, where he is a member of the Heartland Writers Guild, the Southeast Missouri Writers Guild and is a member of the board of directors for the Missouri Writers Guild.
