Soon after, Sonnenblick asked Day Bue's owners if they might donate the 4,000 remaining copies of the book to Super Sibs, an Illinois-based organization that seeks to 'honor, support, and recognize brothers and sisters of children with cancer.' And they did an amazingly beautiful job.'ĭay Bue printed 5,000 copies of Drums, Girls, & Dangerous Pie, but at the end of June, the company went under. I chose Day Bue because they loved it the way I loved it. After he wrote the book and shopped it to publishers, he had to choose between a 'huge publisher and a small publisher.

'It's such a wacky story,' Sonnenblick told BTW in a recent phone interview from his home in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. After receiving recognition from both librarians and independent booksellers, Sonnenblick decided to self-publish the book, and it was picked up for distribution by Scholastic, which recently agreed to republish Drums, Girls & Dangerous Pie in fall 2005 and to publish Sonnenblick's second novel as well. Luckily for Sonnenblick, fate played a hand: Not only was the book nominated for the Best Books for Young Adults award, it was an Autumn 2004 Book Sense Children's Pick.

This meant his debut novel - about a boy whose younger brother has cancer - could very well go out of print, and as a result, lose its eligibility for the YALSA nomination. The problem was, the book's original publisher, Day Bue Publishers, went out of business four weeks after the book was published. Not that Sonnenblick wasn't honored to be nominated - he was. Usually, when an author's book is nominated for an award it is cause for celebration, but for author and eighth-grade English teacher Jordan Sonnenblick - whose book, Drums, Girls & Dangerous Pie, was nominated in July 2004 for the Young Adult Library Services Association's (YALSA, a division of the American Library Association) 2005 Bests Books for Young Adults - it was cause for panic.

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