Book Buzz: Winging It by Megan Wagner Lloyd
“I’ve moved a lot, including back and forth across the country three times! When I moved to the Washington, DC, area, I learned about luna moths—beautiful and short-lived moths who can only be found on the eastern side of the country. This helped me realize that there would be special and unique things about my new home. Since so many kids deal with the difficult experience of moving, I thought this might be the beginning of a new story idea.”
― Megan Wagner Lloyd, Creator Q & A, Discussion Guide
What booksellers are saying about Winging It
- Luna is twelve and moving across the country with her dad to live with the grandmother she barely knows, where she has to make new friends and face the legacy of her late mother. Winging It is a beautiful story about family, friendship, and discovering what makes you who you are. I was especially touched by the way Luna slowly connected with her grandmother.
― Beth Seufer Buss, Bookmarks in Winston-Salem, North Carolina | BUY
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Winging It was a very good book with a plot that kept me on my toes! It always had me wondering what would happen next. The book is relatable to what some people are going through in life right now. Overall, I found the book to be amazing. I would recommend it for kids and even young adults!
― Mandy Harris, Angel Wings Bookstore in Oxford, North Carolina | BUY
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Go on Luna’s journey of self-growth as she navigates a life-changing move across the country with her father, surviving a new middle school while still mourning her long deceased mother and getting to know her seemingly aloof grandmother along with her very rigid rules. I devoured Winging It by Megan Wagner Lloyd and Michelle Mee Nutter in one sitting because the character development was so good that I was instantly invested in Luna’s well-being, relationships and her nature hunting ways. Beautiful illustrations, great story line and satisfying feel good ending! Now I’m off to search for the ever elusive Luna Moth…
― Barb Rascon, Page 158 Books in Wake Forest, North Carolina | BUY
About Megan Wagner Lloyd
Megan Wagner Lloyd is the co-creator, with Michelle Mee Nutter, of Allergic and Squished, both instant bestsellers. Megan is also the co-creator, with Abhi Alwar, of the Super Pancake graphic novel series and is the author of Haven, a novel, and several picture books. She lives in the Washington, DC, area. Visit her online at meganwagnerlloyd.com.
Michelle Mee Nutter is the co-creator, with Megan Wagner Lloyd, of Allergic and Squished, both instant bestsellers. Michelle graduated with a degree in illustration from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Her work has been recognized by the Society of Illustrators, 3×3, Creative Quarterly, and more. Michelle lives in Boston. Visit her online at michellemee.com.
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“[It’s] often not what you get around stories that involve African Americans. Most of us cannot trace our histories all the way back to a slave ship or to a particular country in Africa because the records of the enslaved were not recorded in detail. So it’s incredible and very powerful that these descendants know the actual stories of their ancestors that came from Africa.
Last Chance LIVE’s premise was inspired by real-world death penalty reform efforts to raise the minimum age for capital punishment. Last Chance LIVE’s protagonist, Eternity Price, was inspired by a little girl I met during my undergraduate years at the University of Pennsylvania. While at Penn, I volunteered in Head Start classrooms in a West Philadelphia public school, and met a fouryear-old girl whose vivacious spirit deeply impacted me. I spent years contemplating how she was growing up in an impoverished neighborhood right next to an Ivy League university, but she would likely be unable to access most of its privileges and resources—and the trajectory of her life would likely be very different than the lives of most Penn students. To my knowledge, that little girl has not experienced or done anything like what Eternity has, but she and Eternity both grew up in the shadow of power and privilege. My hope for this young girl, and all children, is that they have what Eternity never did—confidence in who they are and what they are worth, and a community that reinforces this truth. I hope seeing America’s reflection in Last Chance LIVE! helps us ascribe more value to these children, and less value to “great television.” 
Those three years of sixth, seventh, and eighth grade are a time of learning who you are as a person. They’re still kids. They play kickball, pull pranks on each other. But they’re also having their first serious relationships, starting to drink or experiment with drugs, questioning their place in the larger world….I want to teach empathy. I want people to understand the viewpoints of others, and that we are better together than apart. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you that 10 years ago. It took me writing a few books—and coming to that theme every time, naturally, as a writer—to understand. 
I first saw a bog body in the British Museum, and I just thought, How amazing. This is a real person who lived and breathed 1000s of years ago, and I can still see him, and we can learn so much about him and his life, from his body and from studying him. And his people buried him in this place where I think they knew that he would be preserved, and I can imagine them, you know, hoping that maybe we would understand them. One day, I visited the bog where he was found. I really learned so much from that landscape, which today is quite degraded from its former state, but it’s still breathtaking to see, and there are spots of real biodiversity that could come back if protected properly. So I really got obsessed with bogs themselves and with the moss that creates the bogs, and the way it can operate as a colony, not as a single organism. And I really wanted in this book to talk about the non human world. I think that people tend to think that we always drive events on the earth, but there are many other organisms here that have huge impact on us, in our lives, and I really wanted to share that too. 
Cinderella and I had an odd relationship when I was a child. The fairy tale is stuffed full of iconic imagery–those glass slippers! That magical dress! The looming, thrilling deadline of Midnight! 
I wrote it in a month-long spurt, and sent it to the publisher. I didn’t do any research for the book, but I drew upon years of personal experience, and the history of disabled people that I studied at university helped me, too. I was conscious that it was special in the sense that I knew Shaka was a protagonist of a kind that hadn’t been written before.”
There are books whose urgency barely needs to be articulated because it’s so evident within the work itself, and Hunchback seemed to me like one of those: it burns itself right into the mind of the reader. It’s a cinematic work, that conjures up a dense and vivid world with very little, so the language needed a lot of honing, to make sure that it was hitting all of those imagistic notes in the way that they needed to. I’d say the principal narrative voice came to me quite quickly and intuitively, but there are lots of shifts of register within the span of the book, which took quite a lot of time and attention to capture. ”
Queer fandom was “one of the first fault lines, I suppose you could say, of me beginning to question all the things that I had been taught,” says Sen, who came to realize that they were nonbinary through the material, which felt as eye-opening as it did illicit. “I was not supposed to be there,” Sen remembers with a laugh, “and every time my dad found out, he would block the website and I would have to go and find another one.”
I’ve always considered myself a pragmatic optimist, and part of that is my day job. My career has been in government. And I think you kind of have to be a bit of an optimist to sort of throw your entire life into that, because if you don’t believe that the world can be better, then what are you doing? What are you doing with your life? So I like to say that working in government is sort of trying to think about what the world should be, and science fiction is sort of like thinking about what the world could be. And so there’s sort of an interesting intersection between the two. So, yeah, no, I think I’m fundamentally an optimist, but obviously, it’s hard to be in this world and not see everything that’s going on and feel very concerned. And so I think that’s where the little bits of darkness come in.
What I really enjoy about writing love stories is the little moments that feel just as important as the big love declarations. I think it’s the acts of service, the little thoughtful things that each character will do for the other. In each of my books, there’s a moment that I can narrow down to, of consideration and thoughtfulness in a physical, tangible way. The way that Bo [Out on a Limb] goes about splitting their expenses. It’s not a grand declaration of love, but it’s respect, and it’s an understanding and communication, and it’s showing somebody who is really capable of having awkward conversations when wanting to take care of somebody. And wanting to look after someone with respect in mind. Or like Caleb in Out of the Woods, when Sarah is upset because they’re going camping and they don’t have any electricity. She doesn’t bring her Kindle, but he brings it, and he buys her a solar charger. It’s this little way of like letting someone know that they’re seen and their past influences matter
I’ve always been a writer who puts character first, and when I embarked on writing this novel, I was prepared for some deep character dives. But Buckeye is larger in scope and size than anything I’d ever attempted, and I had no idea of the depths that awaited me… What I learned–what I keep learning, as a writer–is that when you bring a lot of characters together, a story emerges, and it’s not always the story you thought you were going to write.
When it comes to emotionality in the book, I wanted to portray how — this goes along with the ambiguity — multiple contradictory feelings can exist simultaneously within one person, and how our feelings may change over the day, over an hour, and over a year and a lifetime. Even the simplest things can be the hardest to say. For example, Bo really wants to tell Hans how proud he is. He tries to say it throughout the whole book. It was super frustrating to write. “Come on, Bo! You can do it!” It’s a simple and good emotion, right? You think that it should be easy, but a lifetime of normative training combined with the recurring conflicting aspects of the relationship get in the way. And in this sense, I was very inspired by my own father and grandfather. My grandfather told me how proud he was of my father and how well he’d done in life and so on, but he couldn’t tell my father that. But of course I did, and it made my dad happy. But there’s something that makes certain feelings really hard to express.
One of the things that I love about reading and writing fanfiction is the immersion. I don’t have to explain to you what The Force is or what a lightsaber is. In fact, I don’t have to know what it is myself, but we can use these magics and sci-fi things to move the story along. We don’t have to set anything up. I never felt like I was someone who knew how to set anything up. I didn’t ever need to flex that muscle of world-building as a writer. I didn’t have to describe a new political climate or create a new magic system…One of the things that’s really exciting to me about Rose in Chains is that opportunity to take something that worked really well and meant a lot to me and getting to actually flex those world-building muscles now. Even beyond the Rose in Chains trilogy, if I wanted to continue writing fantasy, it doesn’t feel as daunting anymore. It’s another new genre to play with, and that’s the fun part.
There are many examples of this kind of thing throughout history. I was actually inspired by a specific historical event; I came across the true story of a village in Oxfordshire in the 1700s in which a great rumor was said to be spreading that five sisters had been “seized with frequent barking in the manner of dogs.” I was obviously fascinated to imagine how the girls’ community would have responded to their case, and how this rumor spreading might easily have become dangerous and even violent…I agree [that the] incredibly sinister aspect of Shirley Jackson’s work, the vilification of the mundane…is definitely terrain that The Hounding shares with Jackson’s stories. Like her, I’m very interested in thinking about the everyday awfulness of people, but I also wanted to try to understand even my most detestable characters. I really wanted to find a degree of sympathy for all of them in order to inhabit their thoughts and feelings.
They were such extraordinarily different people in the way they related to the world and other people. He was this awkward and lonely man before he met her, living quite a dislocated life, and she was this livewire and such a compelling, energetic, positive presence. [There’s] something about how a marriage like that works, then putting that marriage in this extreme scenario, to the ultimate test.
