Patricia Reilly Giff, popular and prolific children’s author, dies at 86

When Patricia Reilly Giff was a girl — roughly the age of the millions of children who would one day devour her books — she did not join in schoolyard games of hide-and-seek. Instead, she would take shelter under a cherry tree, an open book in her hands.

Mrs. Giff had “wanted to write from the first time I picked up a book and read,” she later said. But only in her early 40s, when she was established in her career as a reading teacher and when her children had reached school age, did she act on her abiding ambition. As she carved out the necessary time in her day to write, her husband carved out the necessary space in their home, combining two adjacent closets into a tiny studio.