In THE SUMMER EXPERIMENT, best friends Roberta and Marilee have a master plan for beating Henry Horton Harris Helmsby in the annual science fair --- proving that aliens exist! In this guest article, author Cathie Pelletier tells Kidsreads the reasons she chose Allagash, Maine as the setting of her book --- and, eerily, the reasons that a UFO sighting in the area isn't actually that unbelievable.
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I am from the tiny town of Allagash, Maine, and have returned here after many years of living in Tennessee and Canada. I was born in this house my father built, on the banks of the St. John River. You can’t drive through town since it’s at the very end of the road in Northern Maine. When I was the age that Robbie McKinnon is in THE SUMMER EXPERIMENT, the town was quite bustling with about 750 people. But now the school is closed and there are only about 200 people living here. So I decided to fill the town with people again for my story, just as it was when I was a kid.
When I was a young girl, I was always trying to create interesting and fun things to do, especially when school was out for the summer. I lived 5 miles from the tiny town and so my best friend down the road was the only kid I saw all summer. We played on the shores of the river, once building a raft and floating away until our mothers saw us and made us come to shore! We held funerals for dead butterflies and snakes. And we played back on the mountain, looking for bird nests and hornet nests. My friend’s name was Doris, not Marilee as it is in the book. Her parents weren’t divorced, but her father had died when she was 5 years old. Like the girls in the story, we got up each morning looking for adventure in a place that wasn’t very adventurous. We had to create excitement, just as Robbie and Marilee do in the novel.
Thinking back to how isolated our world was then, it’s wild that I went on to write books and Doris moved to Connecticut where she worked for a company that eventually built parts for the International Space Station. Each time I see it go over Allagash, I think of her. We’re still in close touch, thanks to Facebook.
So when I decided to write a middle grade book, I knew my character had to be a lot like the little girl I used to be and she would have a good friend like Doris, so I could rely on my childhood memories to shape the book. However, Roberta is a science nerd and I surely wasn’t! I had started writing when I was 9 years old, so my passion was for books and reading. I got decent grades in science class, but that doesn’t mean I had the kind of brain that Henry Horton Harris Helmsby does in the novel. I knew I could learn new things about the world through Roberta’s eyes, and I did.
Just as it says in THE SUMMER EXPERIMENT, our town is famous for an event that supposedly took place on the famous Allagash Waterway, back in 1976. Four men from Vermont, art students at the time, claim to have been taken aboard a spacecraft and examined. Is it true? I have no reason to disbelieve them. They went on to honorable professions, with much to lose and nothing to gain from concocting such a tale. But I will say this: since I have moved back to Allagash --- and I mean, it’s a very remote area in the wilderness --- I have seen things in the night sky that defy explanation. I study the stars, as Robbie does, so I’m quite familiar with what flies, shoots, falls and orbits. But one night in particular, I had my brother watching with me as an enormous craft floated over our heads, silently, soundlessly, as if it were a huge boat and we were watching it from underwater. We have no idea what it was. I saw it come across the sky, very fast, as two round white lights. At first I thought, “Castor and Pollux,” the stars in Gemini, until I realized the lights were moving. So I called my brother, who lives next door. We saw the craft hovering on the mountain before it moved upriver and then turned toward us and floated over our houses and our heads. We estimated it to be the size of a football field. Certainly a UFO, but what?
When I decided to write a middle grade novel and put two little science-nerd girls in it, I knew I had my subject matter, and my setting: Allagash, Maine. That place aliens love to visit.
Cathie Pelletier was born and raised on the banks of the St. John River, at the end of the road in Northern Maine. She is the author of many novels, including THE FUNERAL MAKERS (NYTBR Notable Book), THE WEIGHT OF WINTER (winner of the New England Book Award) and RUNNING THE BULLS (winner of the Paterson Prize for Fiction). After years of living in Nashville, Tennessee; Toronto, Canada; and Eastman, Quebec, she has returned to Allagash, Maine and the family homestead where she was born.
