I know you have horses on your Tennessee farm. Horses are very important to the main character, Ada, and her journey. are super, but having children love Ada is so much better. which is probably good, because it kept me from being afraid to do the work.Īnd can I say how much I love that readers are loving my book? I really mean this. It took me a full nine drafts - nine times where I went all the way through the manuscript, moving scenes, deleting scenes - really big revisions. That said, it was WAY harder to write the sequel than I ever thought it would be.

I thought that the first book would show Ada’s journey toward safety, and the second would show her journey from safety to healing.

You can actually see that on page 3 of the first book, where Ada says, “This story I’m telling starts out four years ago, at the beginning of the summer of 1939-.” She’s retelling both stories from the end of the what would be the second one, in May of 1943. I’d never written a true sequel before, but I felt all along that Ada’s was a two-book story. Parnassus bookseller for young readers and author of The Devil’s Backboneĭid you know when you were writing The War That Saved My Life, that there would be a sequel?Īctually, I did. I hope you’ll enjoy this interview, and I can’t wait for you to discover her new book. Meanwhile, I had the opportunity to ask Bradley a few questions. The public will get their hands on Bradley’s new book when it officially comes out on October 3, 2017, but you can get an early copy - which Bradley will sign for you! - at the book signing party hosted by the Midsouth chapter of the Society of Children’s Books Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) this Friday, September 29, at the Embassy Suites in Cool Springs. It’s an amazing novel, and now the highly anticipated sequel, The War I Finally Won, is almost here. That’s how much people adore the Newbery Honor Award-winning story of Ada, a brave girl who starts out trapped by her own cruel mother in a London flat during World War II and journeys to a new life in the countryside.

It has been a staff pick by our junior booksellers. When someone picks it up to look at the back cover, other customers lean in to say how great it is. Children, their parents, and their grandparents come in to tell us how much they loved it. The War That Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley may be the most widely loved novel in the Advancing Readers section of our store right now.

The war that finally won