Then I just went back to writing about love affairs in Hong Kong and collecting rejection slips."
1.
On December 27, 1955 she married Robert Moore Oneal, a plastic surgeon. "It was only after I'd married, had two children, and had begun to write stories for them that I discovered what I both liked and could do. The first books came out of these stories created expressly for them."1
War Work is a story of three young people living in a Midwestern town during World War II. Their detective efforts help uncover black market activities and a plot to blow up a local bomber plant. The book received the Friends of American Writers Award.
A year later The Improbable Adventures of Marvelous O'Hara Soapstone was published. It is the story of Marvelous, the pig, who meant to win a blue ribbon for the Soapstones, but blows her chance by biting the judge at the fair.
In Turtle and Snail, published in 1979, Oneal tells several episodes of friendships between a turtle and a snail.
"I began writing for children when my own two were small. My characters aged along with them. Eventually everyone reached adolescence, but my characters remained there, because I found I was deeply interested in exploring this brief time of life, these few years when everything is in the process of becoming what it will be."2
"I feel a responsibility to make children understand that adolescence is a self-absorbed world--this may be why I always have islands in my books--but it's not a place you can stay forever.
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