Born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1962, award-winning young adult author Chris Lynch grew up in the Jamaica Plains district of that same city. The fifth of seven children, Lynch was raised by his widowed mother after his father died when the author was five years old. Referring to his mother, Lynch once said in an interview with Artists and Authors for Young Adults (AAYA), "she did a good job of covering it up, but things were pretty lean back then.

We were definitely a free cheese family, though I never felt deprived as a kid." After attending Catholic elementary and middle schools, Lynch found high school an abrupt change. While he described his early educational experience as "nurturing" in the AAYA interview, he explained that "I hated high school—every minute. It was rigid, kind of a factory. An all-boy's football factory. Nothing like...