


The two protagonists Bryce and Julianna are neighbors. She also wrote the standalone teen romance Flipped in a he-said she-said style, with the two protagonists alternately presenting their perspective on a shared set of events.
Sherman 2 attack of the tagger series#
In 20 Van Draanen wrote Shredderman, a four-īook series for younger readers about a fifth grade boy who assumes a secret identity to help him win the battle for truth and justice. Runaway, a companion book to the Sammy Keyes series, is about a girl named Holly who tries to escape from her latest foster home. The eighteen-book series follows the adventures of a disenfranchised teen as she navigates middle school and life. Sammy Keyes and the Hotel Thief, which inaugurated the Sammy Keyes series in 1998, won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Juvenile Mystery from the Mystery Writers of America in 1999.

Van Draanen lives in San Luis Obispo, California with her husband Mark Parsons and two sons, Colton and Connor. Before she became a full-time writer she was a high school math teacher and computer science teacher. Van Draanen is the daughter of two chemists who immigrated from the Netherlands. Wendelin turned to writing to alleviate stress and she published her first book in 1997, titled How I Survived Being a Girl. In college, the Van Draanen family business was burned down, leading to financial hardship. Other early influences include Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, and Encyclopedia Brown. Bradbury's work inspired Van Draanen to write How I Survived Being a Girl, which was published by HarperCollins in 1997. According to the author, the book was "about the magic of growing up and reminded me of all the wonderful mischief my brothers and I got into when we were young". One of her very early influences was Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. Van Draanen was born in Chicago, Illinois.
