Kathryn Reiss

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Kathryn Reiss (born December 4,1957-) is an American author of children's and YA fiction. Three of her most popular novels are Time Windows (1991), Dreadful Sorry (1993), and PaperQuake (1998).

[edit] Biography

Kathryn Reiss was born in Massachusetts, to Edmund Reiss and Dorothy Molnar. When she was a young girl, she moved to Ohio, where she grew up. After graduating from the University of Michigan, she moved to Bonn, Germany, where she wrote the rough draft of her very first novel, Time Windows, dedicated to her parents, and her husband Tom Strychacz. After Time Windows had been accepted for publication in Harcourt Inc., she continued writing, her second novel being The Glass House People (1992).

Her third novel, Dreadful Sorry (1993), was the second book to be named a YALSA's "Popular Paperback for Young Adults." In it, a seventeen-year-old girl named Molly witnesses events through the eyes of Clementine Horn, who lived in her father's house years before, and it's up to her to find out what happened to Clementine and repair her past mistakes. Pale Phoenix (1994) brings back Miranda Browne, the main character in Time Windows, which won the Mystery Writers of America's prestigious "Edgar Allan Poe" award for best Young Adult Mystery. Her fourth novel, PaperQuake:A Puzzle, , won YALSA' "Popular Paperback for Young Adults," just like Time Windows and Dreadful Sorry.

After PaperQuake was published, Reiss wrote two books for the American Girls Collection: Riddle of the Prairie Bride and The Strange Case of Baby H. After the publication of those books, she published Paint by Magic,taking her first male narrator-and first point of view-Connor, to 1926 to find out what causes the strange acts on his mother. Sweet Miss Honeywell's Revenge, which involved a dollhouse like Time Windows, was published two years later. Afterwards, she wrote her first murder mystery(the second novel in which she wrote in first person point of view), Blackthorn Winter: A Murder Mystery.

Reiss is noted for her wonderfully wicked plots and twists, including seeing events of a house's past through a dollhouse windows (Time Windows), reincarnation (Dreadful Sorry),learning about the past through paper (Paperquake),and murders (Blackthorn Winter). Although she doesn't associate with murders, impostors, or kidnappers, she finds "neck prickling" a thrill and chill.

Currently, Ms. Reiss is living in Northern California with her husband and five children, where she teaches creative writing at Mills College.