Note from Maile:

As a kid, I was a reader above all else, and was happiest sprawled sideways across an armchair with a book. I read and re-read D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths until the words and the illustrations were burned in my brain. I was home sick when I read Treasure Island, and I can still feel the chill and horror of the Black Spot. A Wrinkle in Time became battered and waterlogged when I took it down a river, reading it in the raft, ignoring the scenery. I loved the possibilities in the books, the idea that anything could happen. You could travel through time as easily as an ant stepping from one end of a piece of thread to the other, if the ends were simply brought together. You could walk through a wardrobe into another world.

That’s one of the reasons writing The Apothecary has been such a joy. I got to enter, again, into that pre-adult world in which nothing is ruled out. If you allow for the possibilities, and don’t let preconceptions get in the way of your belief and desire, amazing things can happen. It’s a book about a boy confronting his destiny, and about a girl finding an extraordinary new life and about an apothecary who wants to free the world from the looming threat of nuclear disaster. He isn’t an ordinary apothecary, and, through him, Janie and Benjamin discover that things like invisibility and flight are entirely possible.

Nothing could make me happier than introducing you to Janie and Benjamin, and to Ian Schoenherr’s beautiful illustrations. I hope spending time with them gives you as much pleasure as it’s given me.

Very best,
Maile Meloy