Margaret Finnegan: Hi there. I'm Margaret Finnegan and I'm the author of New Kids and Underdogs. Now, this book is about a fifth grader named Robin who wants to do agility training with her dogs. If you're unfamiliar with dog agility, it's a sport where dogs learn to run an obstacle course. So they learn to jump through tires and cross planks and things like that, and if they're really good, they can compete against other dogs. And Robin's interest in this activity leads her into an unlikely friendship with three what you might call underdogs. The story was inspired by two things. One, like the main character, I moved just a lot when I was a kid, and so I wanted to write a story about the challenges, but also the gifts of always being the new kid. The second reason I wrote this book is because I actually took dog agility training classes with my own dog for a while, and it was just so fun and so exciting that I thought readers would really like learning about it.

My favorite part of creating the book was writing about the dogs, and that is because I just love dogs, but that part of a novel also presented a challenge. I realized that the book would get boring really fast if I was just describing how the dogs were learning to do the activities on the obstacle course. So I had to think to myself, "What is the story beyond the dog training and who are the characters and how can I keep readers really interested in their story for the entire length of the book?" I didn't have to do a ton of research for the book because, as I mentioned, I already knew what it was like to always be the new kid, and I also knew what it was like to do agility training. I could draw from those experiences, which is why you sometimes hear teachers and writers saying that you should write what you know.

And the reason that that is good advice is because your experiences, they give you a depth of knowledge and understanding that's unlike anything else. However, I did have to do a little bit of research, and that is because one of the dogs in the book is hearing and visually impaired. Now, usually when you teach dogs, you use verbal signals or you do hand gestures that the dogs look at, but a dog like Sunday, the dog who is visually and hearing impaired, isn't going to be able to learn with those kind of strategies. So I had to go on the internet, which was really fun, and learn how you would teach a dog like Sunday, and that's how I discovered something called touch training.

In touch training, placing your hand on the dog's rump, for example, might signal your dog to do one thing, but if you put your hand on your dog's chest, that might be a signal for your dog to do something else. It's an entirely different but wonderful way in which we can communicate with dogs who have special needs like those described in the book and I just felt really grateful and lucky that I got to learn about something that I otherwise wouldn't know anything about, and I guess that learning was also one of the joys of writing this book.