No Vampires and No Dystopia: Houston’s Caroline Leech Writes Historical Fiction for Young Adults

Michael Hagerty

Young adult novels these days are all vampires and dystopia. Think the Twilight series or The Hunger Games, just to name a few.

But local writer Caroline Leech has chosen to set her first two young adult novels somewhere very real – World War II Scotland.

Her latest book, In Another Time, is out this week and tells a love story against the backdrop of the very real-life scenario of the Women's Timber Corps, a group of women who worked as lumberjacks to support the war effort.

Her first book, Wait for Me, tells the story of a young woman near the end of the war. She's shocked when a young German POW is assigned to work on her father's farm.

Leech wrote that book while participating in National Novel Writing Month, where participants commit to writing 50,000 words of a rough draft in the month of November. Leech completed her first draft then put it away until she needed an entry for a writing contest. Fast forward to her publishing her debut novel in January 2017.

In the audio above, producer Michael Hagerty talks with Leech on the occasion of her first book’s publication back in 2017.