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Suzanne Fisher Staples: The Setting Is the Story. By Megan Lynn Isaac. Scarecrow Studies in Young Adult Literature, no. 37. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010.
Reviewed by Greta D. Little
In this comprehensive treatment of the seven books written by Staples over the last twenty years, Megan Isaac begins with a brief introduction to her life and her development as a writer. Drawing on her personal conversations with Staples as well as her memoir, The Green Dog: A Mostly True Story, Isaac focuses on the determined writer who worked as a journalist in South Asia and later as a consultant for USAID studying women of rural Pakistan, a project that gave Staples insight into their lives and customs. As she told Isaac, "The most important thing I did was learning to speak Urdu. It made me able to understand nuance, to listen to stories about people's lives, to take part in relationships" (8). When she turned to writing fiction, these experiences informed her writing and helped give her work the geographical and cultural details that made her settings such an essential part of the story. Readers of Staples's fiction will immediately understand the aptness of the "Setting Is the Story" subtitle. Staples's gift is her ability to create unfamiliar worlds, bringing to life the people of that world and their culture.
Most of Isaac's book is devoted to Staples's best-known works, the Pakistani trilogy. The three books, Shabanu, Haveli, and The House of Djinn, trace the life of a young girl from the desert who is married into a prominent family and...