Meet Linda
Linda Joan Smith is the author of The Peach Thief, an upper middle-grade historical novel from Candlewick Press (March 2025). She loves to time travel via the magic of books, and writes about the past for today’s kids so that they can do the same. Linda formerly worked as editor of Country Home magazine, freelanced for other national publications, and wrote garden books, yet her most fulfilling roles have been as a parent and library fundraiser. Born and raised in southern California, she graduated from Amherst College and has enjoyed living in Arizona, Massachusetts, and Iowa. She now calls the central coast of California her home, where she writes, grows boysenberries, works on an old house with her husband, and has lively discussions about books with her daughter. She once longed to be a paleontologist, climb Mount Everest, or earn a Michelin Star, but now dreams of making a difference to young readers, one story at a time.
Click here for my press kit.Reading, Writing, and Me
Growing up, I aspired to be many things: An explorer! A chef! A paleontologist! Writer wasn’t on the list. But as is true for many authors, I loved books from an early age.
I count myself lucky to have had a mom and dad and teachers who read to me, and fervently wish that every kid around the world had the same good fortune—along with easy access to a library. For my sisters and me, walking to our town’s Carnegie library each week, then hauling home the maximum number of books we were allowed to borrow (thirteen!), was an eagerly anticipated event—even more so when our TV broke and our parents took two years to replace it. Our media influencer wasn’t someone on the internet; it was the children’s librarian!
The Best Books
In fourth grade my teacher, Mrs. Luginbill, read us Where the Red Fern Grows, a book about a boy and his beloved hounds, Little Ann and Old Dan, that nearly broke my nine-year-old heart. Swept away by the emotional power in that story, I begged for a copy of my own. I began to read (and reread) more and more—out on the prickly lawn, in my bed, traveling in the car—until I was rarely without a book in my hands. I loved historical fiction as well as books about time-travel: stories that magically transported me to times and places of the past, so I could experience what life and people then were like. Part of me has always felt like I was born in the wrong century! I also devoured stories in which kids or teens had to fend for themselves in the world. Perhaps I wanted to know that I, too, had the strength it would take to survive alone in the wilderness or under other dire circumstances.
Stories about strong girls and women always drew me in, as I chafed at the limits that were placed on girls. I couldn’t fully articulate that frustration then, but I latched onto role models that came my way: wacky Pippi Longstocking (strong enough to lift her own horse!), real-life Annie Oakley (a better shot than her husband!), Meg Murry in A Wrinkle in Time (fighting evil across time and space!), Karana in The Island of the Blue Dolphins (surviving alone on San Nicolas Island!).
Confusing Times
When I was midway through sixth grade, we moved from a rural town ringed by orange groves, where I loved my friends and school, to a suburb of Los Angeles where kids were more sophisticated and cliquey. I hated it there that first year, and hated my parents for making us move. Life went from being carefree and fun to being…complicated. Confusing. Confounding. I went from being a girl who enjoyed catching pollywogs in mossy drainage ditches, fly-fishing with her dad and grandpa, drawing spaceships with my friend George on the school bus, and winning pushup competitions with boys in my class, to wanting to be a girl that boys would like…as a girl.
I made close friends, but my maturing self, my grades, and my schoolwork suffered. So much was changing, both in me and around me. I still had books to sweep me away (how I l loved retreating to the Arthurian world of The Crystal Cave), but I lost my academic enthusiasm until late into high school, when a demanding English teacher, Mr. Fraser, somehow managed to revive it.
Photo credit: William Stites
Writing for Real
Though I wrote lots of papers in college, it wasn’t until I began working as editor of Country Home magazine that I really started learning to be a writer. I had many dream assignments that drew on my affinity for the past, including two that intersected with my ongoing love of children’s books. I visited with illustrator and author Tommy DePaola in his home, and spent days with Tasha Tudor, whose watercolor illustrations in so many books had tinted my childhood with images of an earlier New England. For my favorite assignment of all, I traveled the length of the Oregon Trail with my future husband and wrote about it. What a thrill for a lover of history.
Over time, I wrote more and more about gardens, then wrote three books about them. But I never forgot the books that had meant so much to me as a child and teen: powerful stories that changed my life. And as I read the work of other wonderful children’s authors with my daughter, I began to dream anew. Of writing books of a different sort. Of opening the door to that time between childhood and adulthood when so much changes. Of touching someone’s heart, the way the authors of my childhood had touched mine.
I’m still working to realize that dream.