The Next Generation of Weirdos: A Guest Post by Kate McKinnon
We’ve laughed with her for a decade on Saturday Night Live, and now we can introduce Kate McKinnon to the next generation — this time, on the page. The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science is full of all the quirks and quips that made Kate McKinnon a comedy legend, bound and packaged for the most imaginative young readers in your life. Read on for an exclusive guest post from Kate on why she wanted to write this book and where the story started for her.
Hardcover $17.99
The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science
The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science
In Stock Online
Hardcover $17.99
From beloved Saturday Night Live alum Kate McKinnon comes a madcap new adventure about three sisters, a ravenous worm, and a mysterious mad scientist.
From beloved Saturday Night Live alum Kate McKinnon comes a madcap new adventure about three sisters, a ravenous worm, and a mysterious mad scientist.
I began writing The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science in my mid-twenties. Throughout the decade that I worked at Saturday Night Live, I tried to stop thinking about it—it was very distracting!—but it wouldn’t leave me alone until finally I found myself with enough time on my hands to finish it.
It began with my longtime obsession with Victorian botanical and anatomical prints. These illustrations (and their fonts, OH, the FONTS!) fill me with a sense of wonder—the kind of wonder that the great naturalists of the the 19th century must have felt, exploring the bizarre miracles of the natural when so much had yet to be explored, when there was still room for wonder.
This led me to wanting to write about mad science. I’ve always thought that mad science is a perfect genre for middle grade because it is magic-plus: it’s fantastical, but it retains the tantalizing notion that it might be true—it’s science! Mad science is also perfect for middle grade because it begs the questions on every twelve year-old’s mind: “What do I do when I don’t fit in with the people around me? What do I do when I have too many big ideas, too much curiosity, too much energy?” Mad science is also perfect for young readers because it begs the question of our time: will we use our knowledge to live sustainably, or will our greed destroy our planet, and us in the process?
I started writing about three little misfits at the turn of the century who come under the tutelage of a benevolent mad scientist named Millicent Quibb: a woman who lives inside a menagerie of marvelous unnatural creatures, a woman who has spent her life fighting the excesses of a shadowy cabal of greedy mad scientists; a woman with worms in her hair and giant mussels in her bathtub—a cross between my own nature-loving, solar-architect father and my hilarious social-worker mother. They knew that I was weird, and they let me run with it—they let me take home my clam shells from the seafood restaurant and put them in the tub, they let me house an iguana in my suburban bedroom, they let me go to school dressed as Pippi Longstocking. They let me be me.
My veiled mission has been to give a private nod to the next generation of weirdos—to make them feel less alone, to make them feel like they do, in fact, have something important to contribute. Indeed, I believe that it is our weirdos who will save us. Our youth have been saddled with an uncertain future, riddled with problems not of their own making—the least we can do is give them the confidence to get out there and fix it.
