I think that that's part of how people have responded to The Tiger Rising. It's what I call my dark child. It's gotten sandwiched in between two overachieving, tap-dance-performing kids - Winn-Dixie and Despereaux.

Have you, in truth, ever seen something so heartbreakingly lovely? What are we to make of a world where stars shine bright in the midst of so much darkness and gloom?

It seems to be that way with most things. No one to do the really disagreeable jobs except oneself.

You don't realize what you're going to get, and you can't prepare yourself for it.

A friend of mine said Winn-Dixie is the way that people want the world to be and Tiger Rising is the way that it is.

The Tiger Rising is, again, about a motherless child. His name is Rob Horton. He is dealing with the death of his mother, when he and his father move to a new town. And two things happen the same day that Rob gets sent home. One is he meets a girl named Sistine Bailey, who is what my mother would call "a piece of work," and he finds a real tiger in a cage in the woods behind the motel where he lives with his dad. And that's the story: what happens with the Sistine tiger, the real tiger and Rob's grief.

The image I had was very clear, and so in that way The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane began like other books.