SOURCE CITATION
"Wendelin Van draanen." Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults, 2nd ed., 8 vols. Gale Group, 2002. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2007.
Photograph provided by Random House.

BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
Wendelin Van Draanen is the author of the popular "Sammy Keyes" mystery series for young readers, featuring an indomitable tomboy with a penchant for landing herself in trouble. The misunderstood heroine, whose formal name is Samantha, often starts out as the primary suspect in some sort of minor crime and finds the real culprit through efforts to clear her own name. The junior-high schooler also combats some tough family and social situations with the same sense of humor and adventure. Van Draanen's first book in the series--only her second novel ever published--won the Edgar Award for Best Children's Mystery in 1999. "The audience I have in mind is the kid who's coming to a place where they have to make decisions on their own," the writer once told Authors and Artists for Young Adults (AAYA). "I try to shed a little light on the merits of being good, heroic, and honest. I hope that kids come away from reading my work with a little more strength and belief in themselves and the sense that they can shape their own destiny."

Until she was in the fourth grade and her sister was born, Van Draanen grew up the sole daughter in a family with three children, having an older and a younger brother. The situation provided the inspiration for her intrepid, tomboy protagonists of her books, though the future author described her own juvenile persona as tentative and shy. "My parents immigrated to the United States, so there was always something 'foreign' about our family," Van Draanen once said. "I never really felt like I fit in unless I was with my family." Still, she admitted to a daring streak when backed up by her siblings. "I did a lot of 'boy stuff,'" she recalled. "We spied on the neighbors, played in the school yard across the street--roller-skating, kickball, dodgeball, hide 'n' seek--we also loved to go swimming at the Plunge (community pool) and ride bikes. Indoor activities included reading (loved mysteries) and endless hours of chess. We also had chores, chores, chores!"

Like other shy children, Van Draanen found comfort in the world of books. She particularly enjoyed popular teen sleuth series, including "Nancy Drew" titles, the "Hardy Boys" mysteries, and the "Encyclopedia Brown" books. "My father would read to us at bedtime," she once noted. "He'd gather my brothers and me up in a bed and read from a collection of stories for children. We relished storytime and the way he read. My mother did this, too, but I remember the times with my father the best." Van Draanen remembered learning to read at an early age, thanks to one of her siblings. "I began to read by watching my older brother learn to read. I'd hang over his shoulder while he got help from my mother, and that's how I picked it up. My mother worked with all of us, teaching us reading and mathematics at a very early age. One of my favorite pictures of me as a young girl was taken at the age of about eighteen months--I'm sitting on the toilet, feet dangling, engrossed in a book that's in my lap."

Entering adolescence was a time of added uncertainty for Van Draanen, however. Her coming-of-age adventures would form the basis for the comical problems she later forces Sammy Keyes to suffer. "I liked elementary school, but beginning in junior high I felt terribly awkward and on the outskirts of social circles," she remembered in AAYA. "I guess you'd call me a straight-A student. Academics were important in our family. I liked learning." She remained rather shy throughout her teens, and did not even have her first date until the night of her senior prom.

Van Draanen looked forward to an impressive career. "My parents were both chemists, so I was sure I'd become something scientific," she once said. "I really wanted to be a singer, but was much too shy to put that forward, so I stuck to science and math. I certainly did not want to be a writer! It seemed so dull!" But when she was in college, a catastrophe in her family inadvertently opened up a new door for her: their family business was destroyed by arson, and she took time off from school to help her family recover. For a time, they were financially ruined, and Van Draanen was troubled by feelings of anger and helplessness. She began to have problems sleeping, and to help alleviate some of the stress, she decided to write about the incident, with the hope of turning it into a screenplay.

Van Draanen discovered that writing was not only cathartic but enjoyable. What she found most rewarding, she would later note, was the ability to create a happy ending, to have her characters make positive gains through personal difficulties. Van Draanen would eventually find her vocation as a teacher of computer science to high schoolers, but she also had ten finished novels, each around four hundred pages long, by the mid-1990s. By then she had married and had begun a family of her own in California.

Van Draanen was inspired to try her hand at writing for children as a result of a chance gift. "My husband gave me Dandelion Wine (by Ray Bradbury) and told me it was one of his favorite books. I read it and it reminded me of all the wonderful mischief my brothers and I got into when we were young, and decided it would be fun to write a book like Dandelion Wine about my experiences growing up." The result was How I Survived Being a Girl, published in 1997. One of Van Draanen's works for young readers outside of her "Sammy Keyes" series, the novel features a heroine with pointed similarities to Samantha. Carolyn, the narrator of How I Survived Being a Girl, is a tomboy who feels herself somewhat alienated from the girls in her neighborhood and at school. She much prefers tagging along with her brothers and their friends, especially a neighbor boy named Charlie. During the summer of her twelfth year, Carolyn spies on neighbors, digs foxholes with Charlie, steals a book, and helps her brother with his paper route.

The setting of How I Survived Being a Girl is vague, but reviewers seemed to agree that Van Draanen placed her story at some point in the relatively recent past. Girls must still wear dresses to school, for instance, and are strongly discouraged from becoming newspaper carriers--official and unofficial biases that had vanished by the end of the 1970s. Carolyn manages to skirt the skirt issue by wearing shorts under hers; meanwhile, she derides her peers who play with dolls and wear frilly, impractical clothes. Yet as she begins a new school year in September, Carolyn finds that some of her attitudes are beginning to change. She sees Charlie in a new way, and starts to speak out and become more politically active. She even starts a petition drive to force some changes at her school. When a baby sister arrives in her family, this softens her attitude, too. "I tell her . . . how being a girl is actually all right once you figure out that you should break some of the rules instead of just living with them," says Carolyn at the end.

A Publishers Weekly review called How I Survived Being a Girl an "energetic first novel" and "a sunny, funny look at a girl with a smart mouth and scabby knees." Writing in School Library Journal, Kathleen Odean found some fault with the premise that a new sibling can bring out an adolescent girl's feminine instincts. "Perhaps the unspecified time setting . . . makes it inevitable that she will be 'tamed a bit,' as she puts it," remarked Odean. Yet a Kirkus Reviews assessment praised Van Draanen's style and the narrative voice of her alter ego, Carolyn. "Her irreverent narration is engaging," stated the reviewer about the book's heroine, "and she's refreshingly astute about family and neighborhood dynamics."

Van Draanen found that "I loved writing in the voice of a twelve-year-old so much that I haven't gone back, and have no desire to go back, to writing for adults," she once stated. Instead, she began writing the teen-detective story that would evolve into her popular and much-praised series. The first of these arrived in 1998 with Sammy Keyes and the Hotel Thief. In this book, readers are introduced to the feisty, intelligent title character who lives with her grandmother in a seniors-only apartment building. Because of circumstance, Sammy is forced to sneak around just to get to school; naturally, her social life is severely curtailed as well. Sammy lives with her grandmother, readers learn, because her mother, to whom she refers as "Lady Lana," has moved to Hollywood.

Sammy has some formidable enemies. One is the nosy Mrs. Graybill, who lives down the hall; another is a girl, Heather, who torments her daily at school. To keep herself amused at home, Sammy often observes the goings-on of the outside world with a pair of binoculars from her fifth-floor window. "Usually you just see people looking out their windows, pointing to stuff on the street or talking on the phone," Sammy states, "but sometimes you can see people yelling at each other, which is really strange because you can't hear anything."

Sammy is particularly fascinated by the shady Heavenly Hotel across the street, and one afternoon spots a fourth-floor resident moving about a room rather quickly. She then sees the man rifling through a purse while wearing gloves. As Sammy tells it: "And I'm trying to get a better look at his face through all his bushy brown hair and beard, when he stuffs a wad of money from the purse into his jacket pocket and then looks up. Right at me. For a second there I don't think he believed his eyes. He kind of leaned into the window and stared, and I stared right back through the binoculars. Then I did something really, really stupid. I waved."

The man flees the room, and she wonders whether she has just witnessed a crime and if she ought to tell someone about it. But her grandmother is making dinner, and she can't call 911 from the kitchen; getting to a police station is also problematic. Then, her grandmother calls her into the kitchen and reminds her to feed the cat. When the doorbell rings, Sammy is so agitated that she does not quietly make for the closet, as is her usual drill when an unexpected visitor arrives. "This time, though, I jumped. I jumped and yelped like a puppy. And all of a sudden my heart's pounding because I know who it is," Sammy panics. "It's the guy I saw at the Heavenly Hotel, come to shut me up for good."

Eventually, Sammy manages to tell the police, who fail to take her seriously at first. Meanwhile, Heather is plotting against her at school, but Sammy's cleverness uncovers the plot in time. She also learns that a burglar has indeed been stealing from purses in the neighborhood. Other characters in the book include a pair of comical detectives, her friend Marissa, a local DJ, and an eccentric astrologer who is also a robbery victim. They all help Sammy bring the thief to justice. "The solution will likely come as a surprise, and the sleuth delights from start to finish," asserted a Publishers Weekly reviewer of Sammy Keyes and the Hotel Thief. In her Horn Book review, Martha V. Parravano described Van Draanen's protagonist as "one tough, smart, resourceful seventh grader," and compared the heroine and structure of the lighthearted detective novel to popular adult mystery writers such as Sue Grafton, who are adept at "making the investigator's character and private life at least as interesting and complex as the plot," noted Parravano.

Van Draanen followed the success of the first "Sammy Keyes" book with a second that same year, Sammy Keyes and the Skeleton Man. As it opens around Halloween time, Sammy still lives with her grandmother and is eagerly outfitting herself as the Marsh Monster for the holiday. While trick-or-treating, she and her friends bravely approach the "Bush House," a scary manse with wildly overgrown shrubbery. But then Sammy is nearly knocked down by a man wearing a skeleton costume and carrying a pillowcase. She and her friends advance and discover a fire in the house, and Sammy puts it out. They also find that a burglary has just taken place, and several valuable books are missing from the house.

Sammy, naturally, finds herself drawn into the drama and wants to solve the whodunit. She learns that the Bush House is neglected because its owners, the LeBard brothers, are feuding with one another. Once again, her cleverness helps her find a solution, and also helps her keep one step ahead of Heather, who continues to plot against her. Sammy, for instance, sneaks into Heather's Halloween party and plants a baby monitor in her room--which provides Sammy with evidence that Heather has been making prank phone calls in Sammy's name. Yet Sammy's natural talent for making friends also helps her forge an unusual bond with Chauncy LeBard, and she even gets the two warring brothers to agree to talk. In the end, she unmasks the skeleton man and recovers the missing rarities. Parravano, reviewing the story for Horn Book, praised it as a "highly readable mystery (that) hits the ground running." Critic Lynda Short also offered positive words in School Library Journal: "Readers will enjoy the mystery, hijinks, plotting, and adult comeuppance."

Van Draanen's third entry in the series, Sammy Keyes and the Sisters of Mercy, was published in 1999. Still walking that fine line between intellectual brilliance and juvenile delinquency, Sammy finds herself sentenced to twenty hours of detention, which she must fulfill by helping out at the local Roman Catholic church. One day, cleaning the windows of St. Mary's, she sees a girl she does not know and approaches her, but the girl vanishes and Sammy is suddenly alerted to the distress of Father Mayhew, who has just discovered his valuable ivory cross missing. Sammy, of course, is the first suspect in the theft. Yet other possible culprits surface as well, and in order to clear her own name, she resolves to catch the thief herself. On another day, she again sees the mysterious girl at the church's soup kitchen and eventually learns that she is homeless.

Again, Van Draanen tries to make Sammy a typical adolescent. There is more enmity with Heather, and she is determined to beat her foe in the local softball league championships. In the end, it is Sammy's offer to help a group of musical nuns who do missionary work out of an old school bus that helps solve the mystery of Father Mayhew's missing cross. "As always, quirky characters are Van Draanen's strength," remarked Kay Weisman in a Booklist review. An assessment from Jennifer Ralston in School Library Journal praised the main plot of Sammy Keyes and the Sisters of Mercy as well as the other story lines, both recurring and new. Ralston noted the story lines provide "depth and interest to an already engrossing mystery while capturing the angst of junior high school." Beth E. Anderson, reviewing it for Voice of Youth Advocates, commended Van Draanen's heroine. "Sammy is genuine, funny, devoted to her friends and blessed with a strength of character that lets her reach for a peaceful solution," Anderson wrote.

Van Draanen wrote another title in the series that also appeared in 1999, Sammy Keyes and the Runaway Elf. Set during the Christmas season, Sammy is still in seventh grade and becomes involved in her community's holiday parade. She is assigned to the "Canine Calendar Float" and is charged with babysitting a famous Pomeranian, the calendar cover dog, Marique. Parade chaos ensues, however, when a trio of culprits dressed as the Three Kings throw cats onto the hound-laden float. The prized Marique vanishes, and its owner, wealthy Mrs. Landvogt, blackmails Sammy into finding Marique in order to avoid paying the fifty thousand dollar ransom demanded. An elfin girl, Elyssa, turns out to be a runaway, and Van Draanen weaves her plight and the dognapping together and ties it up with another satisfying conclusion. Once again, however, several suspects must first be eliminated and comical plot twists steered through. This time, Sammy manages to befriend the formidable Mrs. Graybill, too. Remarking upon Sammy's penchant for making friends both younger and much older than herself, School Library Journal reviewer Linda Bindner noted that "Van Draanen handles the relationships with style and sensitivity."

A fifth book in the series, Sammy Keyes and the Curse of Moustache Mary, was published in 2000, followed by Sammy Keyes and the Hollywood Mummy in 2001. Reviewing the latter title in School Library Journal, critic Wanda Meyers-Hines noted that it is "clever and fast-paced, and . . . filled with cliff-hanger chapter endings and characters with secrets." As with all of her books, Van Draanen finds that the complex plots seem to come to her slowly. "I get an idea and just let it stew and stew in my brain until it's boiling over," she once said. "Then I start writing and can't stop until the story's out." She conducts all of her research herself and then sits down to writing in her inimitable character's voice. "I need to be able to get into the 'Sammy-zone,' where I feel like I'm channeling her. I work best when the computer can just suck me in and trap me. That's when things start cookin'!"

Van Draanen took a break from her "Sammy Keyes" books with the 2001 title, Flipped, a romantic comedy with alternating chapters told from the point of view of the boy and girl. Both seven when they meet, Bryce and Juli have formed an ambiguous relationship over the years: for her it is love at first sight, but for him it is definitely not a match made in heaven. Next door neighbors, they are thrown into each other's lives. Now in the eighth grade, Juli's fight against the cutting down of an old tree forces Bryce to re-evaluate his opinion of her. A contributor for Kirkus Reviews felt that the novel is a "highly agreeable romantic comedy," and a reviewer for Publishers Weekly was equally enthusiastic: "With a charismatic leading lady kids will flip over, a compelling dynamic between the two narrators and a resonant ending . . . this novel is a great deal larger than the sum of its parts."

The success of her career as an author led Van Draanen to give up her teaching job. "This is my first year as a full-time writer," she said in the summer of 2000. "All those years before I'd get up when my husband got ready for work (5:00 AM) and just stumble over to the computer to get in an hour or two before I had to get the kids up (I have a six year old and a nine year old) and go off to teach school. I still get up early with my husband and find that early morning is still my most productive time." She plans to continue writing for adolescents. "They're growing, they're changing, and they're receptive to making the world a better place," Van Draanen enthused. "They have big dreams that they want to reach for. I try to give them the strength to believe that--with determination, thought, and persistence--they can attain them. Growing up's not easy. Everyone feels awkward through adolescence, but when you're a kid it seems that you're the only one who's not fitting in. Everyone else seems to have it together, or be comfortable with themselves. It's not true, but that's how we feel when we're kids.

"It's my goal to get kids through those awkward years and onto adulthood safely. The choices they make in the areas of honesty, convictions, friendships, and compassion now will effect them their entire lives."

PERSONAL INFORMATION
Married; children: two sons. Avocation: Reading, running, and playing in a rock band. Addresses: Home--California. Agent--c/o Knopf, 201 East 50th St., New York, NY 10022.

CAREER
Writer and former educator.