SHELBY, N.C.,None — Growing up in Shelby, Joanna Pearson was raised on Southern culture and steeped in the customs of small-town teen social circles.
The class of 1998 Shelby High School graduate brought that world to life in her debut young adult novel, "The Rites and Wrongs of Janice Wills," released this month by Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic Press and the American publisher of the bestselling Harry Potter series.
"It's basically the story of a high school girl who's kind of hypercritical, kind of down on herself, living in a small town not unlike Shelby," Pearson said. "Her coping method is to envision herself as an anthropologist."
Janice Wills is a 16-year-old in the fictional North Carolina town of Melva who observes her classmates' social rituals with a bemused detachment and chronicles them in scholarly texts as an aspiring anthropologist. But her participation in the town's Miss Livermush pageant and her courtship by classmate Jimmy Denton takes her to the center of a world she was once content to merely study.
"I think she falls into a great tradition of unreliable narrators," Pearson said. "She thinks of herself as quite objective and quite a scientist," but her sardonic commentary betrays her as a member of the study group.
In the 224-page "Rites," Melva doesn't always mirror the City of Pleasant Living. But Pearson said Shelby residents will find some similarities to their hometown in the book.
"I drew from Shelby, but in many ways, I think I drew from sort of a universal vision of adolescence in small towns," she said. "I think there's a lot of bits of Shelby in the book. All the characters and all the things that happen are purely invented from my mind."
The Miss Livermush pageant is a rite of passage for teenage girls in Melva. Pearson proudly appropriated the name of Shelby's popular liver sausage to lend some Southern authenticity to the ritual.
"Really, I wanted her to have some sort of local, small-town tradition that basically she was dreading based on her own fear of participation," Pearson said. "So, I thought, why not just borrow from Shelby?"
The author's biography inside the book notes that Pearson "grew up in the actual Livermush Capital of the World -- Shelby, North Carolina."
After graduating from Shelby High, Pearson attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on a Morehead scholarship. She graduated with a master's of fine arts in poetry and completed medical school at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., where she is now a second-year psychiatry resident. Her father, Dr. Larry Pearson, is a Shelby dermatologist.
Pearson began writing "Rites" in the summer of 2008 while working on her master's. A prolific poet, she sought to create a longer work of fiction with broader appeal.
"I wanted to do something very different that would be fun - a whole different mental exercise than writing a poem," she said.
The first draft of the story took about two months. Pearson found a literary agent and went through a revisions process that took roughly a year before Arthur A. Levine Books bought the manuscript.
The publishing process was "so much harder than I anticipated," Pearson said. "I really underestimated how hard it is."
Early reception to the book has been positive, with glowing assessments from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews. Pearson is now working to promote the book, with an appearance planned at September's Bookmarks Festival of Books in Winston-Salem.
Pearson said she'll continue writing young-adult fiction, but there are no plans for a series based on the plucky protagonist of "Rites and Wrongs."
"I think I would try to go in a different direction next time," she said, "but Janice was a lot of fun to create."
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