Rebecca Cantrell (aka Bekka Black) Discusses iDrakula

If you are a teenager, you probably enjoy reading the Twilight books and watching the movies. 

But do you know the story of Dracula? Now author Bekka Black has taken that story and modernized it. No longer is it set in 1897 England, but in 2010 New York. Instead of the story being told the "normal" way, it is told through emails, texts, web browser screens and PDF files. 

If you are a teenager and a resident of the HHH school district, and would like to  and get community service credits, you are in luck. There are a few seats left. Tomorrow night from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m., at the Dix Hills branch, you can read the book iDrakula and then on January 27 at the same time, you can come up with questions for the author. On February 3 at the same time, you will Skype with Cantrell—get to see her and talk to her, even though she is all the way in Hawaii and it is five hours earlier there.

How did Black (real name: Rebecca Cantrell) come up with the idea? She was on a book tour in Los Angeles, and she saw a table of teenage girls at a restaurant and none of them were talking to each other. Why not? They were all sitting there with their phones, texting each other.

"Communication as we know it has changed," Cantrell said. "Kids nowadays are experiencing all of their lives on their phones. But they aren't talking to each other. Kids today are reading, but they are reading their phone screens. They are reading texts, reading emails, reading information on the web. It's an entirely different way of thinking, of communicating. When we speak we use inflection, facial expressions to make our points known. You can't do that with texts. All that is lost."

And that inspired Cantrell to put a new spin on Dracula. She used a pseudonym when writing iDrakula, because she didn't want the teenagers reading the book to try picking up her adult fiction works. Cantrell said that the book is written for teenagers and most of the people who write to her are teenage girls.

Rebecca Cantrell has had a very interesting life. She was born and raised in a tiny town in Alaska (Talkeetna), where she had 17 people in her class and had 18 hours of darkness every day for four months of the year, where they got so much snow during the winter that she and her family would have to shovel the snow off their roof so that their house didn't collapse.

"During the winter we didn't see the sun at all during the school day," Cantrell said. "We went to school in the dark and came home in the dark. The weather was really harsh," she added.

So when she was dared to apply for an exchange program in Berlin, she did, thinking she would never get chosen, since she didn't know the German language and didn't know anything about Berlin. Maybe her calmness paid off, because she was given a full scholarship. She received her high school diploma from the John F. Kennedy Schule in Berlin and studied at the Freie Universität in Berlin and the Georg August Universität in Göttingen before graduating from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Her mother, three sisters and her brothers still live in Alaska, and Cantrell does visit them, but now she is enjoying the sun and the warmth of the Big Island in Hawaii.

"The Northern Lights are gorgeous and the there are beautiful mountains where I grew up, but I'm not a fan of the cold," Cantrell said.

Her three years in Berlin made her fluent in German and gave her the inspiration to write two historical fiction novels set in pre-WWII Germany: the Hannah Vogel mystery series, A Trace of Smoke and A Night of Long Knives. 

"When I lived in Berlin the Wall was up and it was a fascinating time to be there. You could look over the Wall into Communist Europe. You could see the bullet holes from the tanks during WWII. The whole history of Europe was right there in a few miles," she said.

If you want to get iDrakula from the HHH Library, go here. You can also always get it at Barnes & Noble

Next up for Cantrell (as Bekka Black) is iFrankenstein, which will hopefully be out for Halloween.  I can't wait!