While growing up in Queens, Margo Rabb and her sister, Jackie, used to play games of make-believe, including one called Lending Library: The pair made up fake library cards and checked out books from each other's rooms. At other times, they pretended to be detectives and snooped in neighbors' windows. Sometimes they acted out scenes from the Little House on the Prairie series. "We were such geeks," Jackie Rabb recalls. "What little girls make up libraries?" Given this childhood, it's not hard to imagine how Margo Rabb came up with Missing Persons, a four-part young-adult series about two well-read Jewish girls from Queens who run away from home and embark on a series of crime-solving adventures in America's heartland. "I don't think there's much out there in YA literature about Jewish girls from Queens," Margo says. Aside from being sprightly, humorous romps, Rabb's books, published under the moniker M. E. Rabb, touch on serious themes as well: Her two sleuthing protagonists lost both parents early, like Margo and Jackie did. "When I started thinking about doing young-adult novels, a lot of my literary friends said I was selling out, which I thought was interesting because [young-adult] books had been so important to me as a kid," Margo says.
-- A.L.
