Introducing Maddy Lederman, author of Edna in the Desert

​From time to time an editor or and author will contact me to review a book and talk about it on Dr. Bickmore’s YA Wednesday. Currently, I am trying to highlight one author a month. Remember, the primary goal is to talk about research, theme, activities, and genres that a university professor might include in a Young Adult literature course or teacher or librarian might use with adolescents. Nevertheless, authors and their novels are the life blood of what we think about. I can’t cover them all and I try to spend time with books that catch my interest. To get in the queue, I have to think the book has some literary quality, kids will like it, and it would be a good addition to a classroom library.

I love it when I come across a novel from a small press that is worthy of a bigger audience. This is without question the case with Maddy Lederman’s novel Edna in the Desert. I have to admit that the tag line on the cover (Can a Beverly Hills teen survive without a smart phone, Internet, and TV?) caught my eye and caused me to ponder my addiction to social media, not to mention the way my preservice students and graduate students seem to be completely connection to their various devices. 

I remember teaching before cell phones were an issue in the classroom and –after the change. It was perfectly timed with when I was out of the classroom for three years working on my doctorate. When I returned the cell phone crisis was in full swing and many schools and districts didn’t have policies that addressed the issue constructively. In my opinion, it was too late. I used to joke that the new way I could tell that students weren’t paying attention was that their hands were under the desk working away on their texting skills. Before that, it was sneaking notes or just doodling. I believe there are proper and important ways that cell phone technology can be incorporated into the classroom. I tried hard not to be afraid of the phones even when I didn’t have a clue what to do about it. When many of them had internet access, I started to encourage my students to use their phones during vocabulary activities—there were never enough dictionaries anyway. The students proved to be lightning fast searching for definitions and they stayed on task. Okay, they stayed on task at least as much as they had before.  I am pretty sure that a few more ventured to engage, because of the new toy.

Lederman poses a situation that more of us would like to see imposed on some of our nonresponsive teens.  A forced hiatus from technology. As adolescent seemed locked on their various devices, they appear lost in their particular worlds. In reality, they are probably more attuned to the world around them than we imagine or would like to give them credit for taking in. Nevertheless, is there something to be gained with a camping trip without technology? What would a 10 day vacation be like if both parents and kids were untethered from technology for the duration of the trip? Lederman’s character, Edna, takes a pause that is much longer than she thinks she can survive. A forced timeout for the summer with her Grandmother in the desert opens her mind to other forms of information input—both emotional and pragmatic. 

Adults in my generation—those that graduated from college before the invention of the personal computer—often think that we have lost something about ourselves in the age of technology. Do the generations after us have the same sense of value in a prolonged casual discussion at the dinner table? I know that occasionally, I think better if I get out a pen and a yellow legal pad as I plan a unit or a new paper. Revision used to be a much slower process when I was in college. I used to write on one side of a page, skipping every other line, knowing that my spelling was so bad that my first editing task would be with a dictionary. Do our students have any sense of that type of revision?

Lederman’s text explores a teen confronting relationships while the tether to technology is served. I think this is a novel that will help students and teachers start conversations about the ways the digital world has altered our culture, our modes of communication, our access to information, and our relationships with people; those within our own generation and across others.   

In the document below you can find Maddy's responses to a set of interview questions.

Thanks Maddy for writing such an engaging book. You can find out more about Maddy through some of the following media sources:
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Twitter maddylederman.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/edna.in.the.desert/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ednainthedesert/
Introducing Maddy Lederman.