The Secret Life of Amanda K. Woods

for ages 10 to 14

This is the story that's closest to my own childhood in a small town in northern Wisconsin. I began to write it from an event that really happened. When I was eleven, I sent away to get a foreign pen pal. Soon, I got a letter from a boy in France. But there had been a mixup in the system somewhere: my new pen pal was 17. I was sure he wouldn't write to me if he thought I was a little girl--so I stole one of my 17-year-old sister's glamorous photos and mailed it to the boy in France.

Amanda's secret life includes a lot of things like that, things she does that nobody else knows about, things she thinks that she doesn't feel she can tell anyone. She fears she'll never be as popular as her beautiful older sister, and she worries that she's not very smart. Her father loves her, but doesn't talk to her much, and her critical mother thinks she's just average.

Amanda has sorrows, but she also has hopes and the hopes are forcing her to grow--to reach out and make friends, to become not just plain old soft Amanda Woods, but Amanda K. Woods, with the K. like a sword in the middle of her name.

A 13-year-old reader writes about the book: "Amanda was so much like me. She often did things that I do in real life, which I thought nobody else did but me. The Secret Life of Amanda K. Woods is one of my favorite books."