FOILED

Illustrated by Michael Cavallaro

First Second, Spring 2010

ISBN# 1596432799

A graphic novel, first of two, about a New York City high school fencer who finds out she is the Last Defender of Faerie, illustrations by Mike Cavallero–see the book trailer!

A Junior Library Guild book choice

FOILED began when my then eleven-year-old granddaughter Maddison became an avid fencer. But the story was also about my days as a college fencer and the time that I lost my foil on a date in Grand Central Station.  Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction or sometimes a true story becomes even bigger in the remaking of it.

I planned to send the story to an anthology I’d signed up for. As I read the opening few pages to Maddison, who wanted to hear more, I ran into trouble. The story kept threatening to become bigger than the anthology’s word limit. It wanted to be—gulp!—a novel.  I stopped writing, and thought Maddison would never forgive me. Until, that is, I sold the story as a graphic novel.

Now I had long wanted to write a graphic novel. I loved Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, Mike Mignola’s HellBoy, Linda Medley’s Castle Waiting, and Art Spiegelman’s Maus. For ten or so years, I had tried to sell the idea of me doing a graphic novel to the editors I knew. But not one of them thought the graphic novel was something I—or they—could produce successfully.

Finally my agent had me meet with the head of the newly-formed First/Second Books, an imprint dedicated exclusively to the graphic novel. We had so much in common besides just being interested in comics. And he loved the start of FOILED and encouraged me to turn it into a gn. I began work on the book, thinking: This is going to be fun. How hard can it be? The short answer was:  very hard. The learning curve was huge.

And Maddison? Well, she turned fifteen when the book came out. She’s a ballet dancer now, not a fencer. Still, she has seen the pictures, read the script. “That’s me!” she tells me proudly. And remembering my days as a college fencer, I think, “And me!”

As for the illustrations by Mike Cavallero, he put his heart and soul into them, and I adore this, my first graphic novel.

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