Natalie and Annie become friends and decide to spend their summer spying on their neighbors. What begins as a game turns serious when their findings are revealed to the neighborhood, and when the girls discover unexpected things about each other. While the girls learn that it’s sometimes helpful to reveal secrets, they also learn a lesson about the importance of privacy.

About Stephanie Watson
I was born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota. When I was a kid, my favorite thing was performing in plays at the Children’s Theatre Company in town. The dancing and music, costumes and lights brought my favorite stories — Pippi Longstocking, Alice in Wonderland, the Velveteen Rabbit — to life in a way that felt like some sort of magic trick. It was like stepping into the pages of the books I had read at bedtime and meeting all the funny characters. I think that in part, it was this daily contact with storytelling that made me want to eventually create my own stories.
I attended public school in Minneapolis through high school, then enrolled in Sarah Lawrence College in New York to study theater, dance and writing. I enjoyed the short stories and novels I read in my writing classes, but between assignments I would go back to the books I loved best as a kid: Harriet the Spy, Mary Poppins, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, the Ramona Quimby series. By the time I graduated from college, I knew I wanted to write for children in the spirit of these special books.

I started writing Elvis & Olive with a desire to tell a good story, but no idea if I could do it, and no clue what it would be about. So I kept the writing a secret from everyone. And soon, the whole story was about secrets.