Chatham mom and author Yvonne Ventresca won the 2015 Crystal Kite Award from the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (Atlantic region) for her YA thriller, Pandemic, a white-knuckle tale of what happens when a quick-spreading fatal disease hits a fictional NJ suburb. Ventresca’s story was directly inspired by living in Chatham during the swine flu pandemic of 2009.
"Parents lined up outside the local middle school to have their children vaccinated. At this point, the disease was known to be only as deadly as the regular seasonal flu,” says Ventresca. “The local health department coordinating the event ran out of vaccines about halfway through the line. It made me wonder what it would’ve been like if that flu had been more lethal.” She changed a lot of the names, including that of her NJ suburb. “It felt like bad karma to unleash deadly bird flu on my hometown, so Chatham became the fictional town of Portico in the story.”
For more info: yvonneventresca.com/books
