For Immediate Release
7 October 2007

Pat Murphy's First Children's Novel: The Wild Girls

The Wild Girls is Pat Murphy's first children's novel.

Twelve-year-old Joan is sure that she is going to be miserable when her family moves from Connecticut to California. Then she meets a girl who calls herself Fox and lives with her author dad in a rundown house in the middle of the woods. Joan and Fox become friends and begin writing stories together. The Wild Girls is about friendship, the power of story, and how coming of age means finding your own answers-rather than simply taking adults on faith.

"I wrote this book for the twelve-year-old I once was," says Murphy. "When I was a girl, I felt that I did not belong in the well-manicured world of the suburbs. Like Fox and Joan, I struggled with family issues. When I was young, I didn't meet anyone like Fox's dad Gus or the girl's writing instructor Verla Volante. But I now know that the world is filled with such people-and I've done my best to become one of them. This book came from the joy of imagining what meeting Verla and Gus would have been like when I was Joan's age."

"This novel has characters who learn to tell the truth, which is the hardest lesson of all. And along the way, they paint their faces, walk on stilts, rule over foxes, occasionally throw rocks,... and fly. I loved it."

— Jane Yolen