A book is a gift you can open again and again.
Garrison Keillor

Succeed and Soar‘s “Authors Speak” series invites writers to answer questions about their artforms and special inspirations.

Welcome Suzy Robison 

Susy, what phrase inspires your writing and life?

For ten years I was the Director of Volunteers for the Homeless Children’s Education Fund. During that time, I learned that:

Susy, share how these words helped your writing and your life. 

About eight years before I retired in 2019, I imagined that my retirement project would be to write a young adult historical novel set in India in 1952 that teens might like to read.
I was five-years-old when my family moved to India. My memory of the day we arrived was when our car was surrounded by begging children my age crying out for money.

At a retreat when I was thirty, the teacher spoke about compassion and asked us to meditate on finding a compassionate heart. I searched back through my life and discovered that my compassion for others was first germinated at that moment with the children in Bombay.

In addition to the experiences of a girl who moves to India with her father when she is fifteen-years-old Halley and the Mystery of the Lost Girls is about the beauty and dangers of the real world as reflected off the sights, tastes, smells and sounds that children and teens experience when they move to a new school, a new town, or a new country.

Sample Text

Chapter One: From paragraph 3:  Halley held onto the ends of her streamers and watched each one uncurl spiraling down toward her aunt, blending into a weaving of hundreds of thin paper strips that interlocked in the middle. Like a glorious, multicolored, abstract tapestry it linked them to the shore. She tossed her last one and waved just as the ship began to move.

Review

Your book is beautiful — the weaving in of animals and Indian culture so seemingly effortless — and just enough. Your use of color and imagery is wonderful.  The mother’s death imbuing the experience is deeply felt.  Her connection with friends and the tinge of first love all believable.  The way you get us to relax as we near the end and then Bam!  Incredible adventure and great character to follow and all the emphasis on nature and animals makes the book a joy to read despite the very grim matter of child trafficking.

• Professor Jane McCafferty, Carnegie Mellon University

Halley and the Mystery of the Lost Girls can be ordered through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Independent bookstores.

Susy Robison received a BA in English from the University of California, Berkeley but didn’t begin writing fiction until 2019 after years of directing volunteer programs in Pittsburgh. Her first novel was published in 2024. She and her husband love to hang out with their adult son and daughter every Sunday evening.