A WORD FROM THE AUTHORA letter from Jillian Cantor, author of The Hours Count and MargotMy favorite

A WORD FROM THE AUTHORA letter from Jillian Cantor, author of The Hours Count and MargotMy favorite place to go as a kid was my local library. Every summer my mom would take my sister and me, let us check out ten books (the limit at the time), and then promise to bring us back when the books were all read to check out ten more. For me, that would usually be two or three days later. I’d spend my entire summer vacation devouring books outside by our pool, staying up late into the night reading in bed. One summer, when I was maybe eleven or twelve, I read through every single age-appropriate book the library owned by mid-July. The librarian then started setting aside adult books for me; she’d have a pile already waiting when I showed up to return my previous ten. I think that was the summer I read through Stephen King.As an adult and a mom, I make just as many trips to my local library. My kids started young, going to story times as toddlers and leaving with overflowing armfuls of picture books. Now they have bigger arms, and they check out bigger books, but still, we always leave the library with piles of books almost too much to carry. When we moved a few years back, one of the first things we did was find our closest library.  A few years ago, on one of those many library trips with my kids, I grabbed a book for myself, as I often do. It was an anthology of women’s letters, and it was perfect to read through a little at a time with my busy kids in the house. I didn’t know it then, but this anthology would become the starting point for my new novel, The Hours Count, which re-imagines the years leading up to the arrest and execution of the Rosenbergs through the eyes of a fictional neighbor.There were two letters in that anthology that really gave me the inspiration for my novel. The first was a letter a woman wrote to her friend in the early 1950s about her experience of giving birth. She recounted how she smoked cigarettes the whole time she was in labor and how she was knocked out for the actual birth. Though I found these details shocking, I learned they were not so shocking for the time, and it made me start to think about how motherhood was different (and the same) in the 1950s. The second letter was the one that Ethel and Julius Rosenberg wrote to their sons on the morning of their execution in 1953, imploring them to remember that they were innocent.Even after I returned the anthology to library, I wanted to know more, and so I checked out a book about the Rosenbergs’ case. As I began to research, I quickly came to believe that Ethel really was innocent. The only evidence against her was her brother’s testimony that she typed up notes, which years later, he admitted was a lie. I also learned that when she executed, Ethel’s sons were just six and ten (only a little older than my own sons at the time). And I read that on the day Ethel was first arrested she left her sons with a neighbor. This was where my novel began to take shape, as I invented a fictional neighbor, Millie Stein, with which to tell my story.In The Hours Count, my fictional Millie is also a young mother, struggling with her child who won’t speak and a suffocating marriage. But when she moves into Knickerbocker Village in 1947, she befriends Ethel Rosenberg. My novel is ultimately an exploration of motherhood and friendship in the late 1940s and early 1950s, but it is set against the backdrop of the true and terrifying historical events that unfolded as the Rosenbergs were arrested and then executed, leaving their two young sons orphaned in 1953.  When The Hours Count is published this October, I look forward to visiting it in my local library, where I hope other voracious readers and frequent library-goers like myself will pick it up. In the meantime, I’m still making weekly trips to the library with my kids. I know, somewhere inside, there is already another book waiting for me that could lead to the idea for my next novel.   -- source link
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