Anne Nesbet: Hello. My name is Anne Nesbet, and I'm the author of Daring Darleen, Queen of the Screen. My day job is actually teaching film history; and in particular, the really early days of film history. And, one week, we were studying the young women who made all of these adventure serials that were quite a craze during the teens, so around the time 1913 to 1918 or so. And I was walking to class to give a talk about this and suddenly I thought, "You know, actually, this would be a fun topic for a kid's book," because that's my other hat, is writing novels for kids.

So the first thing I thought of, of course, was my characters. Darleen Darling is somebody who has grown up in the early cinema world, so she was already making films since she was very tiny, these early films. And there she was Darling Darleen, a child star who gets into trouble with kittens and jam and so on.

But now that it's the teens and these adventure serials have taken off, her family, who runs a studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey, has decided that it's time for her to grow up a little bit and become one of those heroines. And so she loses the L in Darling and becomes Daring Darleen, and starts making these adventure serial films. This period of time is when film became a big business and started having all these tie-ins with newspapers and boatloads of contests for fans, and so on and so forth. In order to get people coming back week after week, to see another episode of the Dangers of Darleen, the family decides that they're going to stage a big publicity stunt and have Darleen fake kidnapped at the opening of the New Strand Theater in April, 1914, in New York City. And of course, the kidnapping goes somewhat awry and she finds herself not in a fake kidnapping, but in a real one. And with another girl, Victorine Berryman, who's a poor little rich girl, an heiress whose grandmother has just died. And all of these supposed relatives are now trying to grab her and her fortune. So the two girls, who come from incredibly different backgrounds and have very different views of the world, have to work together and be very brave and use all sorts of tricky stunts to get themselves out of the clutches of those kidnappers, again and again.

All my books are really about friendship and often friendships between people who may, at first sight, not have a lot in common, who turn out to be the truest kind of friends, because they see the potential in each other. And that's something that Victorine and Darleen are able to do for each other.

Now I'd like to read a little bit from Daring Darleen, Queen of the Screen. Here's a little bit of that:

"But acting," said Victorine, "If I'm an actress, I'll be acting. Oh dear, I --" "Victorine Berryman, don't start fretting again," said Darleen, "Acting is definitely not the same as lying."

Victorine tipped her head to the side, "Is that true?" she asked, "Maybe it's true. I don't know. I thought I had everything so clearly sorted out, but now I wonder. Grandmama used to laugh at me, now and again. She said I was an onion sort of person, and she loved me for it, but she wondered whether it might be hard for me sometimes, you know, being an onion."

Darleen stared. An onion? "Why would she say such a thing? Did you make her cry a lot?"

Victorine laughed right out loud, "No,no," she said, "Oh dear, that's not what she meant by it at all! She meant I'm just layer after layer of the same thing -- consistently Victorine all the way down. Like an onion."