The Seven-Year-Old With the Praying Mantis

I warned you about her.

Her name is Ellie Silva. She's seven. She has warm olive skin and serious dark eyes and braids that are always a little bit undone. She's small for her age. She's smarter than most of the adults around her. And she has a pet praying mantis named Martha.

Martha showed up uninvited. I'm not being cute about that. I didn't plan her, didn't outline her, didn't see her coming.

One minute I was writing a lonely kid in a billionaire's penthouse, and the next minute there was a terrarium in the corner with a praying mantis in it, and the kid was naming her Martha and feeding her crickets and explaining her to the new nanny with the kind of authority that only a seven-year-old can muster.

Before anyone comes for me: yes, I looked it up. Keeping a pet praying mantis is legal in Colorado. Turns out it's not even illegal in New Jersey, which surprised me because I'm originally from Jersey and everything is illegal there. (Except pizza). You're not supposed to catch wild ones in NJ and keep them, though. Which is exactly what Ellie did. On a penthouse balcony. In Denver. Also, I'd like to meet the person brave enough to tell Rafe Silva his daughter can't keep her bug. Or better yet, tell Raya.

That's the thing about writing kids. You never know what they're going to do or say. And that makes them an absolute blast to write.

I've had kids in almost every book I've written. (Maybe all of them? I'd have to go back and check, but I think so.) That's not an accident. I was an elementary school teacher before I was a published author, and I spent years surrounded by kids who said the most unexpected, devastating, hilarious things on a daily basis. Raised one of my own, too. (Let's not talk about the fact that my kid is now almost the same age as this book's hero. Nope. Not talking about that.)

So putting a child in a story has always felt natural to me. Family and kids and love...that's what life is about, at least for me. And that's what my books are about, too, when you strip away everything else.

But here's what I've learned over a couple decades of writing children in books: just dropping a kid into a story doesn't make the story richer. Any author can give the hero a cute moppet who says adorable things and tugs at heartstrings on command. You've read those kids. Stock characters. Walking plot devices in tiny sneakers. They exist to make the hero look like a good dad or to create a convenient obstacle for the heroine. They're flat.

Ellie is not flat.

Ellie walked in and became a person. She has her own rules about the world, and she follows them with the ruthless logic of a child who's been disappointed enough times to build a system. She has opinions. She tests adults to see if they're real, because in her experience, most of the adults in her life are employees, and employees leave. She's lonely in a way that no amount of money can fix. In fact, the money makes it worse. When your home is a penthouse with hallways that are too long and rooms that are too big and the only sounds are careful footsteps of people who aren't you...that's a special kind of alone.

But she has Martha.

Martha the praying mantis turned out to be one of the most important characters in the book, which is a sentence I never expected to write. But here's what happened. Ellie latched onto Martha because Martha is a predator. A hunter. Small and still and beautiful and absolutely lethal if you're a cricket. And when Ellie needed to make sense of what Raya does (Raya being the close-protection specialist I talked about in one of my recent posts, the woman who walked into my head first), she used Martha to do it.

A child's brain is an incredible thing. Ellie didn't process her bodyguard-nanny through adult logic. She processed her through the only predator she already loved and understood. Martha protects by hunting. Raya protects by...well, it's more complicated than that, but in a seven-year-old's framework, the parallel works. And it gave Ellie a way to be okay with things that might otherwise have been terrifying.

That's not something I planned. That's something Ellie did on her own, after Martha showed up uninvited. And it ended up serving the story in ways I couldn't have engineered if I'd tried.

This is what I mean about the magic. This is the thing I couldn't have manufactured during the years when the voices were quiet. A flat character doesn't surprise you. A stock kid doesn't walk into a scene with a praying mantis and restructure your entire emotional architecture. But a real one? A real one takes the story somewhere you didn't know it needed to go.

Ellie made me cry, too. More than once. Not sad crying (well, some sad crying). The good kind, where you're sitting at your keyboard and your throat is swelling and your eyes are burning and you think, yes, this, this is it, this is why I do this.

My ex-husband used to catch me crying at the keyboard and shake his head. He didn't get it. But some of you do.

The book is called The Billionaire's Ninja Nanny. The series is called Broke to Billionaires. There's a love story at the center and a suspense plot wrapped around it. But when you close the book, the thing that's going to stay with you? It's going to be a seven-year-old with serious eyes and undone braids and a praying mantis named Martha, who drew a picture of her family and included the bug.

She's going to wreck you. Consider yourself warned.

Next time: the man behind the empire. (He screamed when the mantis got out. He calls it a "sound of surprise." Ellie has receipts.)