The Herald-Palladium, 9/5/2010

Balliett brings ‘Danger’ to Three Oaks

Children’s author sets her latest novel in the village

By JEREMY D. BONFIGLIO
H-P Features Writer

THREE OAKS — “We’ve got to go to Drier’s!”

Blue Balliett didn’t understand the excitement when the friend she was staying with in Lakeside made this declaration one August afternoon. Since she did gather that it had something to do with ham and that night’s dinner, Balliett agreed to tag along. Then she walked into Drier’s Meat Market – the only meat market in the country to be designated a National Historic Site – and her decade-long love affair with the village of Three Oaks began.

“I remember very clearly thinking ‘Where am I?’” Balliett says by telephone from her home in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. “It was amazing. The way the door opened and closed. The family members behind the counter. The floor covered with sawdust. I was just really captivated by it.”

Balliett’s three previous books – “Chasing Vermeer,” “The Wright 3” and “The Calder Game” – have sold millions of copies and established her as one of the country’s leading children’s book authors.

Three Oaks is the setting of her new middle-grade book, “The Danger Box,” which was released by Scholastic on Wednesday. Balliett dedicated it “To the children of Three Oaks,” and she will return to the village Thursday for a series of events with students in grades 4 through 7 to kick off her book tour.

“All of my books are set in real places, and most of the ingredients – even though the stories are fiction – are real,” Balliett says. “They’re either pieces of my life or things I’ve found and been delighted by and wanted to share. Three Oaks just felt both so real and so unspoiled by the kind of big city input that takes the flavor out of small towns. It was just hard to believe that you can be in the roar and bustle of Chicago and a little over an hour later you’re out in Three Oaks. They’re such different worlds.”

“Three Oaks has one main street … On either side of Elm Street – that’s the one with the stores – are parallel streets with blocks of wooden houses, two to the west and three to the east.” – excerpted from “The Danger Box”

“The Danger Box” is a mystery targeted for ages 9 and older whose hero – an observant yet visually impaired 12-year-old boy named Zoomy – comes into possession of a mysterious notebook possibly belonging to a world-famous scientist.
Balliett says she came up with the idea for the character and the mystery itself after visiting the 2007 Charles Darwin exhibition at the Field Museum in Chicago.

“I was really fascinated by being introduced to Charles Darwin as a person and not just a scientist,” she says. “The more I read, the more I realized he had some really unusual sides to him that made his childhood difficult and were qualities that might make him look like somebody who had some real weaknesses in this day and age – yet look where his thinking took him. That idea, his science aside, was something I thought I would love to share with kids.”

Balliett then stumbled upon another piece of information that sold her on the story.

“It has been kept really quiet and I’m not sure why, but the notebook that Darwin carried with him when he got off the Beagle on the Galápagos Islands is gone, it disappeared 25 years ago,” Balliett says. “I think it’s now classified as stolen. As soon as I knew that I thought, ‘Oh my gosh. I absolutely have to write this book,’ and I knew exactly where I wanted that notebook to show up.”

“Journalists from all over the United States started showing up in Three Oaks and that was good for business. Very good.”

The release of “The Danger Box” has certainly created excitement throughout the village of some 2,000 permanent residents, and the potential impact from Balliett fans is just now starting to show.

Erik Nieman, directory of the Three Oaks Township Library, where much of the action in the book takes place, is already getting calls about the unusual space that is described by Zoomy as being “like a skinny person in a giant pair of pants.”

“It’s just a huge shock to me that the library plays such a part in the book,” Nieman says. “I never expected that. I know we’ve had quite a few calls already, and I think we will get a lot more visitors here because of it.”

Just how many visitors and how the village reacts to its newfound fame is anybody’s guess, but other small towns have certainly benefited from literary tourism.

Six years ago, author Stephenie Meyer introduced the world to Bella Swan, a 17-year-old who moves to the logging town of Forks, Wash., and is torn between the love of vampire Edward Cullen and werewolf Jacob Black. Even before the books spawned the “Twilight” film franchise, Forks was getting more than 100 visitors a day, prompting its Chamber of Commerce to include a “Twilight Points of Interest” section on its website.

Garry Lange, who just retired as the River Valley Elementary School principal on Monday, doesn’t expect to see “The Danger Box” bus tours rolling down Elm Street, but the lifelong resident does know that Balliett’s involvement with the town has been a gift.

“I think a few hardcore fans will want to make the trek,” Lange says. “Certainly people who live close by might decide to come check out the library/museum. But the real impact has been with these kids. This all has just been such a rare opportunity for the kids, for a school to experience. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us.”

“I’m at home in the library … Maybe that’s because it’s part of the history of Three Oaks, and Three Oaks is a part of me.”

After Balliett’s experience at Drier’s, she and her husband, Bill Klein, began making regular trips to Three Oaks. She had decided to use the village as a setting long before the story came to her. As she did for her first three mysteries, which were all set in Hyde Park, Balliett decided to do a lot of watching and listening. She soon realized that there was no being anonymous in Three Oaks.

“I didn’t want anybody to be surprised in the wrong way by my writing about their world,” Balliett says, “so I decided I should just be very open.”

That’s when she introduced herself to Lange.

“I wanted to bring the children in on it from the beginning, and that was a brand-new way of working for me,” says Balliett, who taught third grade for 10 years at the University of Chicago’s Laboratory Schools. “I got into the classrooms and asked them what details about Three Oaks they thought should go into the book, and they told me various things and stories about their lives. It was very moving, actually.

“I did promise the kids that when the book was written and it came out, I would start my book tour in Three Oaks, and that’s what I’m doing. I just wanted them to be part of taking the book out into the world. I look at it as launching the book together because it’s their book.”

“Stick your finger straight out from the tip of your nose: That’s how far I can focus clearly.”

The students Balliett first met as fifth-graders are now in seventh grade, and Lange says their excitement over the book has been palpable. And they aren’t the only ones.

Teachers have been passing around advance copies, and Nieman has ordered an unprecedented six books for the Three Oaks Township Library – although he expects that might not be nearly enough. And while Balliett isn’t doing a book signing this visit, she has plans to come back later in the fall “to share some of the stories from the book tour” with her Three Oaks friends.

“It will be really interesting to see what happens with Three Oaks,” Balliett says. “I have heard from my publisher that there have been some people who have already made pilgrimages. Whatever happens, I just hope it’s what’s good for Three Oaks.”

jbonfiglio@TheH-P.com