About half way through writing The Water Castle, my upcoming book from Walker-Bloomsbury, I realized that the present-day narrative needed to be balanced by and bounced off a historical narrative. Set in 1908 while Robert Peary and Matthew Henson searched for the North Pole, it told the story of the inhabitants of the castle a century before the main narrative. I loved researching the time period. For me history classes had been primarily about major events and figures, but now I was finding out how people lived. I was discovering things like what kind of clothes people wore, how they got from place to place, and where they shopped. My husband, a friend, and I took a trip to the Thomas Edison National Historical Park so that I could see what a chemistry lab of the time looked like. This type of research energized me.

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