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Growing up in Los Altos, Rie Neal couldn’t help but learn about outer space, whether she wanted to or not. Her grandfather and father worked at nearby NASA Ames, with her grandfather in particular having a zeal for it.
“I got dragged on a lot of questionably authorized tours, especially by my grandpa,” Neal said with a laugh. Years later, in adulthood, she returned to NASA when her grandfather took her husband there for the first time and was able to more fully appreciate it from a newcomer’s perspective.
“I got to see it all from his point of view. He was like, ‘Wow, this is so amazing!’ I grew up taking it for granted and it is really cool,” Neal said. By then, she’d developed an affection for science fiction and now, as a writer, has made a name for herself as author of books featuring space-loving kids.
Her latest, “Space for Saffron,” was recently published by Aladdin/Simon & Schuster, with illustrations by Sara Gianassi.
The middle-grade novel follows Saffron, a science-obsessed 10-year-old who moves suddenly with her moms from the Midwest to Silicon Valley to help out at her grandmother’s struggling coffee shop.
Bright and impulsive Saffron loves to experiment but has a habit of accidentally getting herself into some messy (literally) situations. In the Bay Area town of “Oakdale,” she’s hoping for a fresh start and a place she can fit in and be herself. She’s intimidated by some of the projects her new classmates are working on for the school’s STEM Expo, but inspiration strikes when she thinks of a brilliant plan to help her excel at the fair and perhaps even save Gram’s coffee shop at the same time. If she can pull it off, she might just feel like she’s found a “space” in which to belong.
Neal, who went to Almond Elementary School, Egan Junior High School and Los Altos High School, is also raising her own children in Los Altos. Part of the inspiration for “Space for Saffron” came from a memory of volunteering for her younger daughter’s STEM event at Covington Elementary School years ago.
“It was a really cool experience for me getting to see all the different projects. I made a lot of assumptions about it going into it and it blew my mind because it was different in a lot of ways,” she said. As reflected in the book, there were some participants with amazing projects who were clearly very enthusiastic about science. There were also projects that must have cost hundreds of dollars, paid for by parents and brought by kids who had zero interest in them and didn’t want to be there at all. Then there were students who likely didn’t have the resources or support to create anything elaborate.
“There were income disparities, interest disparities, disparities in the support from home — I think the fact that there were so many different types of experiences struck me,” Neal said. “One little girl in particular stands out in my mind; she partially inspired this book in and of herself” — a child who felt the homemade bouncy balls she’d made weren’t very impressive.
“They were amazing! What struck me was that she felt it wasn’t good enough,” Neal said.
In the book, Saffron feels embarrassed of her old-fashioned model volcano when she sees some of the higher-tech, higher-budget projects her classmates are working on.
“She’s comparing it to everything around her and kind of has a shame spiral.
Neal said. “This book is written for anyone who’s ever felt that way, about anything they do.”
Neal herself has sometimes felt similarly because of the struggles of navigating life with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), she said. As a child, she identified with Beverly Cleary’s beloved Ramona Quimby character, who, like Saffron, is imaginative and prone to getting into sticky situations.
“Just seeing that was really important and meaningful to me,” she said. She also felt a kinship with the title character from “Anne of Green Gables.” It was one of her life’s greatest thrills when she got to play Anne in a local theater production at age 16.
“Any time I see a character who thinks a little bit differently, I see myself,” she said. As an author, she strives to create characters that readers can see themselves in, too.
“It lets you know that you have a place in the world, exactly as you are,” she said.
Before she was a published author, Neal embarked on several career paths, including as an audiologist. Thanks to that work, “I realized how little the general population really understands what it’s like to be a deaf or hard-of-hearing kid,” she said. “Knowing how important it is to see yourself represented in books, I wanted kids to be able to see that part of themselves represented.”
In “Space for Saffron,” Saffron uses a hearing aid. In Neal’s chapter-book series “Astrid the Astronaut,” the title character dreams of being the first hard-of-hearing astronaut in space. Neal also strives to help shine a light on other books that offer inclusivity and representation.
“There are quite a few wonderful books out there, many of them written by deaf authors, and I do whatever I can to promote those,” she said, including keeping a list of books featuring deaf and hard-of-hearing characters on her website.
In addition to her experience at the STEM Expo, there are some other elements of “Space for Saffron” inspired by Neal’s own life. The character of Gram was partially inspired by Neal’s husband’s supportive, vivacious aunt. Neal had a mix of Coffee & More in Sunnyvale and Red Rock Coffee in Mountain View in her mind when dreaming up the layout for Gram’s coffee shop, and the owners of several local bookstores get shouts-out in the book.
While she’s written longer books for older middle-grade and YA readers that haven’t yet been published, she does have a special fondness for honing the particular skills needed to make chapter books and earlier-middle-grade books like hers successful.
“The shorter the book you write, the more it forces you to really understand your plot points,” she said. “It really has made me a better writer.”
Though Neal has loved writing since childhood, she took her time before pursuing it professionally.
It was when her beloved grandpa died in 2015 that things changed for her, bringing it all back around to his enthusiasm for science.
“At his funeral I saw so many people speak about how passionate he was about his work for NASA,” she recalled, realizing, “I don’t necessarily have that kind of passion for anything except writing.” She decided the time was right to go for it and in 2016 landed an agent, followed by a book deal.
“It’s good for anything creative to not necessarily to be your plan A,” she said, not only because it’s financially tenuous, but because “real life experience informs art, and I have had so many cool experiences in my life that I never would have necessarily had if I had not pursued other things before I started seriously pursuing writing.”
“Space for Saffron” was published in February by Aladdin/Simon & Schuster.
More information is available at rienealwrites.com.
