Was (1996), and he went on to write four other inventive teen novels, including Godless, the National Book Award-winning story of a boy who starts a religion by worshipping the town water tower. Hautman launched his writing career in 1993 with a mystery, Drawing Dead, and followed it with a series of crime novels. I wanted to write about that kind of pain, about a kid who lost his best friend and couldn’t make that transition. As you get older, friendship becomes more complex, it changes. Nearly every kid has someone they call their best friend, Hautman says. Young readers will surely relate to Doug’s feeling of adolescent invisibility, his exasperation with the seemingly clueless adults he encounters daily and his singular focus on his best friend, Andy. Despite Doug’s moral lapses and odd behaviors, Hautman succeeds in making him a sympathetic character. That’s quite a caveat, but an understandable one: the narrator of Invisible is Doug Hanson, a witty kid with a knack for model-railroad building and a host of disturbing hobbies and behaviors, including an unhealthy fascination with fire and an unsavory habit of spying on a female classmate. He adds, In a sick, depressing way, it was a joy to write. The author says most of his books take several years to write, but when he got the idea for Invisible, I wrote the first draft in five weeks. For National Book Award-winning author Pete Hautman, the experience of writing his latest young adult novel, Invisible, was an intense and unusually speedy one.
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