Cover Reveal Q&A: Gennifer Choldenko’s LAST NIGHT AT THE CARNIVAL GRAVEYARD

Newbery Honor winner Gennifer Choldenko has a new book out next summer with an intriguing title: Last Night at the Carnival Graveyard. Today we’ll take a look at the cover for the first time. But before we get to that, I had a few questions for Gennifer.

Travis: What was the inspiration for LAST NIGHT AT THE CARNIVAL GRAVEYARD?

Gennifer Choldenko: Sometimes it’s easy to trace a book’s origin.  Other times, not so much. Here’s my best guess of where Last Night at the Carnival Graveyard came from.  My younger daughter gave me a stuffed dinosaur to celebrate a novel I wrote during the pandemic — a novel I am unlikely to publish.  I put the dinosaur on the top shelf of a bookshelf in my office and every once and a while I’d glance up and see him staring down at me.  He seemed to be saying try again.  One day out of the blue I began writing from the point of view of Crusher, an audio animatronic dinosaur who had been left behind at a now defunct toy store.

A few pages later Noah, an eleven-year-old boy who had been home sick from school for nine long months, appeared on the page.  Noah’s best friend was on the verge of ghosting him, and Noah was desperate to get him back. I don’t really know where Noah came from. It may be that I’d been thinking about a friend who had recently received a difficult diagnosis.  Whenever I talked to her, it felt like my life was moving a hundred miles an hour and her life had come to a virtual standstill.

Travis: What was the trickiest part of writing this book?

Gennifer Choldenko: The trickiest part of writing Last Night at the Carnival Graveyard was figuring out how the themes of Crusher’s story wove together with the themes of Noah’s story.  The breakthrough came when I realized that weaving together was not the same as replicating. 

Travis: What’s your favorite carnival ride or game?

Gennifer Choldenko: When you asked my favorite carnival ride or game I immediately thought of my favorite carnival food.  Banana flavored snow cones! 

Often you can get snow cones but banana flavored?  That is a rare delicacy.  Walking around a carnival while eating my banana flavored snow cone.  Simply sublime. 

Travis: Thank you, Gennifer! And now, a first look at the cover. Last Night at the Carnival Graveyard comes out August 24, 2027. Published by Feiwel & Friends (Macmillan). Tom Cole is the cover artist. Neil Swaab is the designer.

(Click to enlarge)

About the book (from the publisher)

Noah has missed the first semester of middle school, while he and his anxious parents wait for signs his leukemia is in remission. On a night he can’t sleep, he spies an unusual procession when he looks out his window: A T-rex pulling a wagon full of toys. Are his eyes decieving him?

When he shares this news to his best friend, Jerad, he worries that Jerad will think he’s making it all up. But Jerad remembers the T-rex, named Crusher, that used to stand in the local toy store. The store had to close and the owner retired, but could some toys, even Crusher, have been left behind?

Told from the points of view of Noah, a kid who wants to put illness behind him, and Crusher, a mechanical T-rex with a gentle heart who wants to find homes for the toys left behind, Last Night at the Carnival Graveyard is part mystery, part adventure, and all heart.

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Filed under: Cover Reveal