Ever since she was a child, Vivian Vande Velde has been entertaining herself by making up stories. She would borrow elements of her favorite tales, as she once recalled: "I might take part of the Cinderella story here, part of the legend of Ivanhoe there, throw in a dash of Superman," with the result that "most of my stories were a mish-mash." As a professional writer today, Vande Velde brings the same inventiveness to her fiction, often taking the characters and plots of traditional tales and investing them with her own lively brand of humor. Offbeat, fantastic, and even sarcastic, Vande Velde's books contain intriguing, suspenseful situations and provocative messages that give a twist to conventional themes and story types. As a result, Christy Tyson noted in Voice of Youth Advocates, books such as Vande Velde's Dragon's Bait and User Unfriendly "have been very popular."

Vande Velde was...