Pam Muñoz Ryan

"We had such a great time hosting Pam Muñoz Ryan at Hicklebee's February 24th! The event was an exclusive one for teachers and educators only and the atmosphere was very friendly. As everyone was arriving, we had a lovely array savory and sweet food items. We even had sparkling peach-, grape-, and blood orange-flavored Italian soda. It was delicious!

We kicked off the event with an enjoyable 'Speed Read' with nine of Ryan's books.  A Speed Read is an idea of a game we got a few years back where we have 90 seconds to shout out some pretty hilarious sentence combinations from 3 different books. Someone in the audience shouts out a random page number, after making sure all of the books actually have said number. Then, the books are opened to that specific page, and the person holding them reads aloud the first sentence their eyes see. It’s an exciting activity that can make for some very entertaining story snippets.

After that, one of our advisors, Mary Ann talked a little bit about TAB and the event. Then, I introduced Pam Muñoz Ryan, and the evening got underway.

Ryan told us all about receiving her inspiration for her newest book, Echo, and how she’d started out researching the first ever successful desegregation case, the Lemon Grove Incident, in Southern California, aiming to write short novel about it’s success. However, she soon realized that the time period in which the case happened was rich with untold secrets and stories. As she was looking in old yearbooks of the Lemon Grove School, she found a picture of the school’s very own Harmonica Band, a phenomenon she soon discovered was more than common in the 1920's. There used to be Harmonica Bands all over the place, from San Diego to Pennsylvania. Eventually, Ryan began to wonder where the harmonica craze was coming from. Her research took her to wartime Germany and a question about a six-pointed star engraved on manufactured harmonicas. These tales wove together in her head until she had 3 different characters: Ivy in California, Mike in Pennsylvania, and Friedrich in Germany. Echo goes on to tell how their stories are entangled.

Later on, Ryan took questions from our very attentive audience regarding her writing process and some other books she's written. One woman asked if she could play the harmonica she had written so much about, to which Ryan answered by serenading us with her harmonica skills.

All too soon, it was time to start wrapping up the event. We finished with some book-signing and picture-taking before sending our guests on their way.

At the end of the night, we’d had a great time hosting Pam Muñoz Ryan at Hicklebee's!!