Your characters were fairly young when the series started. Did you do that with the idea of picking up an audience that would grow along with the series?
I receive fan mail from every possible age: kids who aren’t in junior high school yet, and people who are seventy or eighty years old. But I made the characters young, frankly, because I wanted them to be innocents. I wanted the characters themselves to look at the world around them with as much amazement as I could muster—the Candide “gimmick,” in a sense. But it was also to emphasize their change.
My editor was commenting on how much, in the fourth book, the characters have grown, and how much the readers’ view of things in this world has changed from the first book. It’s not because the things themselves have changed, but because the characters whose eyes we’re seeing these things through have changed. So while there are still things they look at and say, “Golly!” on the other hand, there are things I had them doing in the first book that they’re quite used to now, and don’t at all see the way they saw them then.
One picks up the fourth book and realizes that these are much more sophisticated and wordly characters in many ways.
That’s the key. They are more sophisticated and in some ways more wordly, bu in a lot of others they are still small-town country folk, with the attitudes, opinions, and beliefs of Emond’s Field. They haven’t gotten rid of all that.
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