Max's Heart

1. The writer Anne Lamott talks about how it’s really cool if you take two characters who hate each other and then put them in an elevator and the elevator gets stuck.

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2. My mom had a drinking problem when I was in middle school, and it broke my heart.

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3. I heard a lecture about robots.  Now I’m no robot geek. I know nothing about robots. But the guy doing the lecture, I won’t name names (Adam Gac) said something so brilliant, it stayed with me.  He said: Any story about robots is really asking what it’s like to be human.

 

So I said to myself Hmm… and I started dreaming,

And what came to me was this 12-year-old poet named Max, who’s scrawny because of a hole in his heart, and this girl named Proctor, who’s big and would play football if they’d let her. Max and Proctor used to be best friends and are now enemies. So here are our two characters who hate each other. They don’t get on an elevator; instead, they’re thrown together on a canoe trip in the Maine wilderness. When a bear chases them, they paddle downriver only to get separated from the group.

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So it's Max and Proctor, lost and alone, save for my special ingredient: the robot. Max stopped speaking because of his mom and her drinking. Max's father gave him the robot therapy dog to help him heal. At first glance, Ziggy seems ridiculous: a techno-bot in the wilds of Maine, but it just might be that Ziggy can get Max speaking again.

 

So that’s our Max book. A boy, a girl, and a robot lost in the Maine wilderness.

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Will they find their way out?