Boxcar Children Mysteries Prequel Written by Patricia MacLachlan

Seventy years after its debut, the Boxcar Children series is  getting a prequel, written by Newbery Medalist, Patricia MacLachlan.

 In The Boxcar Children Beginning: The Aldens of Fair Meadow Farm, Patricia MacLachlan, author of Sarah Plain and Tall, provides what she calls “the beginning before the beginning."  Gertrude Chandler Warner wrote the series about four siblings who live alone in a railroad car in the woods.

According to Publisher's Weekly, the book will be available on September 1 from Albert Whitman.  It will give a backstory to the series, which debuted in 1942 and has grown to more than 150 titles across a variety of formats, including beginning readers, graphic novels, and special editions.

Warner  thought up the plot of the original novel one day while she was home sick from her teaching job.  Since then the Boxcar Children Mysteries has more than 50 million copies in print worldwide.


Patricia MacLachlan
Photo:  John MacLachlan

Senior editor, Wendy McClure, has been at the
editorial helm of the series for the past decade; she explains that the prequel was sparked in part by letters that the publisher has received from readers over the years. “There are a couple of questions that readers always ask,” she says. “One of them is, ‘What happened to the parents?’ We realized that there was a story there and decided that it was time it was told.”
 

MacLachlan was an easy choice, according to McClure:



We knew from the start she’d be perfect. She writes so beautifully about families and about families coming together in unusual ways. She had great insight into the young characters.

When approached, MacLachlan says, she willingly took on the task. “A door opened and I decided to walk through it and see how it goes,” she says. “I like these children a great deal, which made it easier to write about them.” MacLachlan says that she did find the prospect of writing a prequel a bit daunting, but it provided her with some boundaries, too. “I did invent the parents, but in a sense I knew what kind of parents they had been, because of who their children are. The siblings are thoughtful and kind, and they take care of each other.”

Patricia MacLachlan and Nancy Stewart
IL Reading Council Conference (2012)

In preparation for writing The Boxcar Children Beginning, MacLachlan read a number of the series’ installments – and listened to her son read them to her six-year-old granddaughter. “I sat on the edge of her bed as he read the books, and I was able to hear her reaction to them,” she says. “This helped draw me into the lives of these characters. ”

The author also drew from her own grandparents to create the prequel, in which the Aldens share their farmhouse with another family that has lost its home in the Depression. “My grandparents took in a lot of people who had lost their jobs during [that time],” she says. “So I was able to use their lives as well."

Though she has finished the novel, MacLachlan says the Alden children haven’t entirely disappeared from her life. “I sometimes dream of them going back to the farm,” she says. “I’m not exactly sure where that comes from. I guess they have in a sense become part of my family.”