Linda Joy Singleton
A longtime collector of vintage juvenile novels in the "Nancy Drew," "Trixie Belden," "Judy Bolton," and other series, Linda Joy Singleton eventually translated all that reading into writing. Beginning her writing career penning middle-grade fiction, Singleton has contributed titles to the ongoing "Sweet Valley Twins," "Sweet Dreams," and "Pick Yourself a Dream Date" series. In 1994 her own series, the "My Sister the Ghost" books—which Singleton described on her home page as "a spooky series about twins"—was released and was followed by her "Cheer Squad" series. In 2000 Singleton shifted genres, moving to science fiction with her popular "Regeneration" books, and she has gone on to produce several other series as well as stand-alone books published both in print and e-book format. Discussing her preference for series novels with Patricia M. Newman in California Kids!, Singleton noted: "When you read a series, the characters become your friends…. It's nice when a book doesn't stop at the end."
In the "Regeneration" series, Singleton focuses on five children—Varina, Chase, Eric, Allison, and Sandee—who suddenly learn that each of them have been cloned from other individuals, strangers. Realizing that the scientist who created them wishes their destruction, the children team together, and soon they learn that each of them has been given a special power. Each of the "Regeneration" novels, which include Regeneration, The Search, and The Killer, follows one of the children as they grapple with their power and find adventure. Her "Seer" novels, which include Don't Die Dragonfly and Last Dance, move into the supernatural as they focus on sixteen-year-old psychic Sabine Rose, who tries to hide her ability to solve crimes but continues to become drawn into mystery.
In Don't Die Dragonfly Sabine is haunted by a vision about a girl with a dragonfly tattoo and becomes determined to find and warn her, while Last Dance finds her road trip with goth friend Opal veering off course when a restless ghost named Chloe begins to haunt her. Enthusiastic about Singleton's series, Reviewer's Bookwatch contributor Charisse Floyd wrote of Don't Die Dragonfly that "the surprising twists and page-turning cliffhangers literally pulsate with dramatic tension, and the novel's pace … runs full-throttle." While noting that the prose in Last Dance is standard genre fare, School Library Journal contributor Jessie Platt added that several "sections are quite poetic and help reinforce the eerie mood."
A psychic teen trying to help her ailing grandmother travels to California hoping to locate a book of family remedies and winds up in the middle of a generations-old mystery. (Cover illustration by Linda Novak.)
Singleton once told SATA: "I wrote my first two-hundred-page novel on blue-lined note paper when I was eleven years old. It was a romantic suspense called 'Holiday Terror,' and I was especially proud of the gruesome scene where a body is discovered. I was always reading and writing as a kid. Mostly, I would start a story, write several chapters, get bored with it, and begin a new story. I enjoyed reading my stories aloud to my mother—and I still do. When I was fourteen, I was too young to take a writing course at a college, so my father took it instead. He helped me submit some stories to American Girl magazine, which gave me my first rejection experiences. I've learned not to get too upset over rejections; instead I consider each one a step closer to my goal.
"A job, marriages, and two children filled my life until I was twenty-seven—that's when I renewed my childhood dream of writing. I joined Romance Writers of America, attended a weekly critique group, read avidly, and learned as much as I could from writing workshops. Then in 1988, my dream came true—I sold my first book to Willowisp Press! Almost Twins is a juvenile story about girls who pretend to be twins. I continued to sell books after that, mostly teen romances for Bantam's "Sweet Dreams" line. But it wasn't until 1994 that my BIGGEST dream came true.
"As a kid, I loved Nancy Drew, Judy Bolton, Penny Parker, and other girl series books. I even corresponded with Judy Bolton's author, Margaret Sutton. More than anything, I wanted a series of my own. And that happened in 1994 when my agent sold 'My Sister, the Ghost' to Avon books for publication in 1995, letting me add my own series books to the thousands of others in my collection." By 2005, according to Newman, Singleton had amassed over four thousand series books, several from the classic girls' series of the 1920s and 1930s.
