Interview with Annabel Monaghan, author of new YA novel, A Girl Named Digit

You know that feeling you get from holding a new book in your hands, excited by the promise of the first few pages?  That’s how I felt when I first read A Girl Named Digit by Annabel Monaghan.  It was a Saturday morning.  My Kindle and I crept downstairs in the dim morning light and hid under a blanket on the far end of the couch in the sunroom, pretending that we were still asleep.  In that way, I disappeared from my family’s radar for the better part of the morning, and by the time they found me and begged for breakfast, I was already hooked on Digit.

            

And that was good news, because before reading her novel, I was already hooked on Annabel Monaghan.

Annabel and I met in a novel writing workshop at Sarah Lawrence College in the Fall of 2010.  She was there to workshop a project called Digit, and since her novel was completed and the rest of ours were not, we read her manuscript first.  In person, Annabel is funny and self-deprecating and humble and smart.  She’s the one you want to sit next to in class so that you can pass notes back and forth and give each other meaningful eye rolls, as if a continuing education course at a local college is the same setting as your high school biology lab.  (Which, in a way, it is.) By week two, we had our own little inside jokes. As I sank into my couch, I desperately hoped that her book would live up to the real her. Continue reading here.