Another novel “Number the Stars” takes place in a different era and culture but tells a similar narrative and focuses on the theme of the role that each person plays in the lives of the people they interact with. “Summer to Die” her first novel was a fictional reenactment of the death of her sister Helen and what the experience was like to the young girl and the family. While her novels take a variety of styles and content forms, they all deal with the same important aspect of human connections. In her Gooney Bird series, she writes of a girl who goes to a new school and tries to fit in yet not lose her identity, individuality, and personality through it all. Having been a person that moved around quite a lot during her childhood and adult life, she loves to write about various themes that involve multicultural aspects such as the Holocaust, murder, terminal illness and racism. Lois Lowry debuted her writing career with “A Summer to Die” a standalone novel that came out in 1977, soon after her divorce was finalized. Her marriage ended in 1977 and she went back to Cambridge where she lives to this day writing her children’s fantasy novels. She went back to college while living in Maine, got her post graduate degree and decided to become a professional author, which had always been a childhood dream that she first expressed through scribble poems and stories in notebooks. She got married to a Naval officer while she was a sophomore, and her odyssey continued taking her to Massachusetts, South Carolina, Florida, Connecticut before she settled down in Maine.

As such, she pent much of her early life in a solitary existence which she filled with her vivid imagination and books that perhaps informed her choice of career.

She was born the second child of three siblings and could never connect with her elder family oriented sister Helen, or her little brother Jon that was always doing something with her father. When she was eleven she lived for a brief period in Tokyo, spent her high school years in New York and went to college at Brown in Rhode Island. She was born to career military officer based in Hawaii and spent her childhood moving across different states of the US such as Pennsylvania, New York, and Rhode Island. “Gooney Bird” is a series of children’s novels by Lois Lowry the American author who has made a name for herself writing children’s fantasy such as the “Given Quartet”, The “Tate” series, the “Sam Krupnik” series, and the “Anastasia Krupnik” series.

Gooney bird greene by lois lowry