The Idea that Snuck Up on Me: An Exclusive Guest Post from Beth Lincoln, Author of The Swifts, the Overall Winner of Our 2023 Children’s and YA Book Awards

A delightfully quirky story of wordplay and mystery by Beth Lincoln, this book celebrates individuality and is certain to become an instant classic as soon as readers meet the Swift family. A sparkling debut, The Swifts is the perfect read for fans of Lemony Snicket, Roald Dahl, and The Mysterious Benedict Society, full of mischief, mayhem, and mystery. Keep reading for a guest post from Beth Lincoln about the inspiration behind this story and what books her characters would recommend.
Ideas have personalities of their own. Some ideas come at you from the front, charging out of the underbrush with their heads down and their teeth bared. Others sneak up on you, following you as you blithely wander through life, picking flowers and commenting on the view. The Swifts was — were — the latter kind of idea. They trailed me for years before I finally managed to pin them down on paper. For a long time, they were just a game I played with my imagination; I liked to write down words from the dictionary that I thought were interesting and see if I could build an interesting character out of them.  

Shenanigan was one of the first. She showed up with her arms folded, tapping her foot, asking, ‘now what?’ The rest followed, and then The House turned up, because I needed somewhere to put everyone. Despite Shenanigan’s impatience, I never actually expected that I would write a book. I’m a person who starts projects and then abandons them when something newer and shinier inevitably distracts me. It wasn’t until I was accepted into Penguin’s WriteNow mentorship program in the UK, with 5 chapters and a plot outline, that I realized Shenanigan had somehow managed to get her way — I was going to write a book about her after all.  

The Swifts is full of all the things I love most in fiction. These things are, in no particular order: rambling old houses, terrible puns, flamboyant characters, ridiculous murders, booby traps, ghosts, wordplay, incompetent detectives, very competent detectives, detectives who just want their lunch, puzzles, mazes, and bad jokes. But amongst the clutter and chaos of the plot, I had an opportunity to talk about language, and in particular, names. Names are an indicator of so many things; our family history, our cultural background, our faith, our gender, our class. While many of us choose our own names later in life — as my character Erf did — for most of us our names are given to us at birth and are outside of our control. Talking about names is a great way to talk about family expectation, and about the difficulties and rewards of forging one’s own identity. That’s hard enough even without the expectation of growing up to match your Dictionary definition, like the Swifts.  

Book Recommendations From Beth Lincoln
The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin, The All The Wrong Questions series by Lemony Snicket, Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor, The Song Walker by Zillah Bethel