Madelyn Rosenberg (Fiction ’02) and her friend and co-author Wendy Wan-Long Shang, are finalists for two awards for their middle-grade novel This Is Just a Test (Scholastic)! The book, which was also a Sydney Taylor honor winner, is a finalist for the Children’s and Teen Choice Book Awards and the New-York Historical Society’s Children’s Book Prize. Set in the 1980s, This Is Just a Test is the humorous tale of David Da-Wei Horowitz, a Chinese-American-Jewish kid trying to juggle friendships and cultural identities while studying for his bar mitzvah against Cold War fears of nuclear annihilation.
Congrats, Madelyn and Wendy!
Madelyn Rosenberg and Wendy Wan-Long Shang have been friends for about a decade. They met through the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and got to know each other in a critique group in Northern Virginia, where they both live.
Wendy grew up in Northern Virginia, the only Asian kid at her elementary school. Madelyn grew up in Southwest Virginia and was one of the only Jewish kids in hers. They fused their “only” backgrounds in their Chinese-American-Jewish main character, David Da-Wei Horowitz.
Wendy is also the author of The Great Wall of Lucy Wu and The Way Home Looks Now. A lawyer by training, she is a research and communications associate with the Pretrial Justice Institute. Madelyn is a freelance writer and the author of ten books for children including How to Behave at a Tea Party, Nanny X, and Take Care.
