How does Breakout relate to your larger body of work? What drew you to these themes of mystery, heist, and even suspense in your latest novels ( Hide and Seek, Manhunt)?Īs a reader, I’ve always loved exciting stories that keep me up late at night while I’m reading, but also leave me thinking about big ideas after the last page is turned. It allowed me to explore issues of privilege and perspective so much more than I’d have been able to with a single point of view. I came up with the idea of a novel-in-documents…a series of letters, text messages, photographs, comics, petitions, recorded conversations, and even recipes that Nora collects for her community time capsule project. But when I shared this draft with writer friends, they were intrigued by the other characters, so I started thinking this story might be better served by an unconventional structure. It was written in first person, narrated by Nora Tucker, the prison superintendent’s daughter. My first draft of Breakout had a more traditional structure. Why did you choose to tell the story in letters, poems, text messages, news stories, and comics? Everyone had a story, and that was the spark for the novel that would become Breakout. I sat at the coffee shop across the street from the prison and talked with people-police officers who had just come in from searching the woods, neighbors of the prison whose kids weren’t sleeping at night, relatives of inmates who couldn’t visit their loved ones while the prison was on lockdown. So after the escape, I spent several days hanging around the prison in Dannemora. But as a former journalist-I was a TV news reporter and producer for seven years-I was absolutely fascinated. As a person who lives just fourteen miles from the prison, I was completely unnerved by the idea of two murderers lurking in the woods.

The spark for this novel was a real-life prison break, when the escape of two inmates from Clinton Correctional Facility in Northern New York in June of 2015 launched a 23-day manhunt, all through the Adirondack Mountains and beyond. What inspired you to come up with the plot and characters for this novel? Our Storytelling & Advocacy Coordinator spoke with Kate Messner, an award-winning author of children's books and middle-grade novels and a long-time World Read Aloud Day advocate (or WRADvocate) about her writing process, the power of reading aloud, and her latest novel, Breakout, which hits the shelves on June 5th this year.

Breakout kate messner audiobook