With Love from Spain, Melanie Martin

Hey! I’m so glad that you clicked onto this page! I’m Carol Weston and I could tell you where I was born and where I went to school, but you can find all that out at carolweston.com. What I really want to tell you is that I love writing Melanie Martin books–and I hope you love reading them.Melanie is smart and funny and gets embarrassed easily. She likes doodling and making up little poems. She keeps a diary everywhere she goes. She also worries a lot; she can’t help it. Melanie lives in New York City with her art teacher mom, history buff dad, and little brother Matt the Brat. The Martin family (or the four M’s: Melanie, Matt, Miranda and Marc) love to travel. Melanie has different crushes, but just one best friend, Cecily. She also has a new enemy, Susan. Mel calls her Suze the Ooze because she’s always saying, "No offense but…" and then saying mean awful terrible things. It drives Mel crazy! Melanie’s stuffed animal is a hedgehog, Hedgie, who is cute cute cute but sometimes gets lost.In every book, Melanie goes someplace different. Melanie is ten when the family goes to Italy and Holland, and eleven when she discovers Spain and Manhattan. If you read her diaries, here’s what you get: 1. A sneak peek at a girl’s most private personal thoughts (this can be fascinating stuff whether you’re a girl or a boy) and2. A tour of every site that Melanie visits (from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, to Anne Frank’s house, to a bullring, to the Empire State Building). When I write these books, I do my best to make them funny and suspenseful. Thanks to Matt the Brat, every diary is also loaded with silly jokes. Like: "Where do hamsters go on vacation?" "Hamsterdam!" I try to share cool facts about different countries and cultures too. When the family goes to art museums, for instance, the mom tells stories about Vermeer or van Gogh. (But, shhhh, Melanie and Matt always play their favorite museum game: Point Out the Naked People!)You can also learn foreign languages with Melanie. Spanish is español which she spells out as S Pon Yole. But watch out. Once Melanie wanted to tell a boy she was embarrassed, so she said she was embarazada and, uh oh, that meant she was pregnant! And that was really embarrassing!!! You can read the books in any order, but here’s how I wrote them:The Diary of Melanie Martin (they go to Italy)Melanie Martin Goes Dutch (they go to the Netherlands)With Love from Spain, Melanie Martin (they go to Spain)Melanie in Manhattan (they stay home and Melanie finds out that it’s harder than you think to like two boys at one time!)The diaries are about family, friendship, and first love, and they can all double as travel guides. I promise you’ll like them! If you want to write me, my email is at carolweston.com. And you know what? I’ll write you back!Ciao for now–Carol Weston P.S. If you still want answers, I grew up in Armonk, New York; I live in Manhattan with my husband, two daughters, and cat; I studied French and Spanish literature at Yale; I earned an M.A. from Middlebury; I’m the "Dear Carol" advice columnist of Girls’ Life; my books for older kids include Girltalk, For Girls Only, and For Teens Only; and I love visiting schools! Ooops, teachers would call that a run-on sentence! 🙂