If you happen to come into the library on Tuesday or Thursday, you may see Librarian Assistant Lisa Greenwald reading to her sixth grade book club, or discussing a novel selected by her Middle School activity group. On the heels of Harry Potter and into the new, Twilight-inspired Paranormal Romance section at Barnes and Noble, Greenwald says her students are living in “the golden age of Young Adult Literature.” These students are also among an emerging voice on the YAL scene. Since the November release of Sweet Treats and Secret Crushes, her second novel from Amulet Press in as many years, Ms. Greenwald has been busy with bookstore readings, school visits, minding her new baby, and, of course, writing her next work.

Sweet Treats and Secret Crushes begins with three seventh-grade BFFs on the eve of Valentine’s Day; all eagerly await the special day and the developments it may at last bring to their secret crushes. But all Cupid’s arrows are thwarted when a snowstorm brings the rarely unwelcomed news that school is closed. Needing an alternative, the girls decide to bake special fortune cookies and distribute them to neighbors in their Brooklyn apartment building. Largely set over one day, the novel explores the relationships these girls build with each other and with their immediate community, who live near, but not otherwise close to one another. As Ms. Greenwald puts it simply, “They want to make their building friendlier….They want to make a change in the world.”

This latest novel picks up on the theme of her prior work, My Life in Pink and Green, published last year. This story also features a seventh-grade protagonist, Lucy Desberg, who transforms her family’s fledgling pharmacy into an “eco-spa” and brings the kind of green that both saves the business and arouses environmental awareness. The story was inspired from Ms. Greenwald’s work with Rhonda Rigrodsky, Director of Library Services, who also sponsors the BWL Earth Club. Many young readers can relate to Lucy’s frustrations: “I can’t wait for the day when adults take kids seriously,” she says.

Perhaps Ms. Greenwald can make such credible characters because, as she says, “I sometimes feel like I’m in middle school myself. I can get back to that feeling very easily.” While there are inherent limitations to being in this “middle” period, Ms. Greenwald chooses to focus on what kids this age can do. Her website features concrete, planet-saving tips; her characters are truly acting locally while thinking globally. “It’s a hard age,” she says, “but a great age. They take an interest in things in ways that may be more genuine. In Middle School, there’s more learning just to learn.” Citing this trend among the independent reading projects in BWL’s Middle School, she says, “At BWL, kids are encouraged to read for pleasure.”

Ms. Greenwald’s perseverance provides a model for her students. After two years in YAL with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, she made the financially risky choice to pursue a Master of Fine Arts at the New School, with a concentration on writing for children. Out of this emerged her first novel, which received thirty rejections and remains unpublished—for now. My Life in Pink and Green had six rejections before it was approved by Amulet Press. She admits, “You have to have a thick skin. I don’t really have one, but I try!”

Her coming work chronicles two high school girls who are making a documentary about their classmates and the exciting exposure of those, she says, “whose talents aren’t necessarily recognized.” This taps, tangentially at least, into her high own school experience. “When I went to high school, I was not the best in math or science,” she recalls, “but I wanted to do something and prove that I could do something. Now, I’ve done something significant that I’m proud about.”