“…like threading a fistful of needles at once.” Maryrose Wood Talks the Art of the Sequel with a Whole New Bad Badger Novel!

I have a thing for morose badgers.

Maybe morose isn’t quite the right word. Circumspect? Yes, that sounds a bit better. I have a thing for circumspect badgers, with vast interior lives and a healthy dose of social awkwardness/anxiety. Happily, such badgers seem to abound within the pages of children’s literature. And of those badgers, few can hold a candle to that most patient and enduring of characters, Septimus of Bad Badger.

There is a possibility that you neglected to read Bad Badger last year. I forgive you, but I would also advise you to mend your ways, find yourself a copy, and sink into one of the most charming reads of 2025. I am of the opinion that you would find this particularly useful since this year I’m pleased as punch to announce that there will be a sequel released, called Bad Badger: A Family Story, on May 5th. Once again we’ll be meeting Septimus the badger and his best friend Gully, a seagull who recently had babies on his home. The plot is as follows:

As Septimus and Gully grow from friends into a family, they weather the challenges of parenting, managing unexpected guests, and navigating the parameters of friendship. To help raise a trio of gull chicks is a rare task for a badger, even a badger as unusual as Septimus. 

With three spotted fluff balls underfoot, hiding in his phonograph, and pecking at his seashell collection, Septimus has his hands full. To be perfectly frank about it: living with chicks is a lot to get used to. Especially when Gully is off fishing all day while Septimus—Papa Septimus—is left in charge. 

Just when it seems Septimus might get a bit of the bird-free, badger-only alone time he needs, a knock at the door brings a big surprise: eight visiting forest badgers! As the chicks take to burrowing underground and gobbling up worms with their new badger family, Gully worries they will never learn to take flight. Can Septimus find a way to give the chicks a proper liftoff? Or will their family fall apart instead?

Bad Badger: A Family Story is about stretching your wings and discovering what it means to be family—spots and all.

It’s already garnered THREE starred reviews from Kirkus, Booklist, and School Library Journal too! So today I’m pleased beyond measure to speak with author Maryrose Wood about continuing the adventures of this chosen family:

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Betsy Bird: Maryrose! It’s been a day or two since I’ve seen you in person. Happily, I’ve your delightful books to read through instead. And here, at last, we have the sequel to last year’s incalculably charming BAD BADGER. Now I was VERY fond of that book, but BAD BADGER: A FAMILY STORY? I think I’m an even bigger fan, if that’s possible. Let’s get down to the nitty gritty on its creation. Did you always intend to make a BAD BADGER sequel from the start or was this a surprise to you? 

Maryrose Wood: That’s incredibly nice to hear, Betsy, thank you. Sequels are challenging! You need a fresh set of problems for your protagonist, and you also have to deliver yet another bout of transformation, from a new starting point to a new end point, while still making the book feel knit into the same world as its predecessor. It’s like threading a fistful of needles at once.

Anyway, to answer your question: I wrote the first book on my own, rather privately, and handed it off to my brilliant agent, Molly Ker Hawn. The completed manuscript ultimately found a home at Union Square Kids. While acquiring it, the team there asked if I would do a sequel, and I said yes. So from the moment we sold the book I knew there would be at least two. The exact contours of what that second story would be took me a while and some messing about to discover, but I’ll tell that whole story in a minute.

BB: You know, I don’t think I ever had a chance to ask you this when the first book came out, so I will now. Where did Septimus and Gully come from in the first place? What’s the origin story of BAD BADGER to begin with? 

Maryrose: It was quite personal. I’m a native New Yorker who’d moved to Los Angeles for a few years. Then I moved again, this time to Orange County, about an hour south of Los Angeles, where I didn’t really know anyone except my son and his fiancée. I had a lot of solitude and a lot of access to nature, both of which I generally like, but I also had to make a whole new set of friends, if I wanted to have local friends.

So there I am in Southern California, feeling a bit dislocated. I spent a lot of time walking on beaches. Seagulls and seashells and glorious sunsets were all very much on my mind, but so was this theme of friendship: the making and managing and sustaining of friendships, the complexity of getting to know people and letting them get to know you, all that stuff.

All that, plus my love of animal stories, led to Bad Badger: A Love Story. I knew it had to be middle grade, though it is a little shorter than the books I’d been writing previously. Friendship is profoundly important to kids. And the challenge of relating to one another in a compassionate way exists at every age, too.

BB: There’s also just this overwhelming kindness to the book. Everyone is literally trying to do their best (except, possibly, the babies when they go through the throes of adolescence) and everyone is so kind to one another. Hearing that, a bystander might think that means the book is without conflict. Not at all! Conflict abounds, but so much of it is in Septimus’s head. This general sense of goodwill is fascinating to me. How conscious a decision was it to go that route? 

Maryrose: I really love this framing of Bad Badger: A Family Story, so thank you for that. It was very much my conscious intention to avoid easy “villains” and instead let the necessary conflict and stakes arise from Septimus’s ongoing need to learn how to better relate to others and himself, but this time in a family context.

 In Bad Badger: A Family Story, Septimus and Gully have indeed made a family together.  Their intentions are nothing but good, but that doesn’t save them from being overwhelmed by the work of caring for three endlessly chirping chicks! Help soon arrives, but it arrives on its own terms, when a muddy, smelly, loud and annoying and completely loving gang of badgers arrive from the nearby forest. It’s the relatives from out of town! And they want to dig a burrow in the yard! What do we do now?

I hope this sounds funny, because the book is often funny, but I also hope it strikes a real note of recognition. We all know what a family should be: a refuge of love and nurture, for adults and children alike. A home base that’s soft enough to feel safe in, but firm enough to support the formation of character that is part of growing to healthy maturity. I mean, that’s a great vision and a true one. But what about the daily circus of mess and chaos, and the endless working out of competing needs? How do we accept that even within families, there may be different sets of values at play? And what about the arrival of teenaged eyeroll and snark when those flight feathers finally start to come in?

Families come in a wide range, but families are where most kids live, and where we all spring from. The family drama is something to look at with compassion and humor and curiosity, and I hope this book does that and sparks conversations about it, too. Like Septimus and Gully, I think most of us do try to do our best. We raise our chicks, we make mistakes, we ask forgiveness and forgive others as best we can. If that’s not a high-stakes adventure, full of triumphs and failures, big risks and big rewards, I don’t know what is.

BB: Were there any ideas with this sequel that you initially wanted to include but just didn’t pan out in the end? Or did you have this all figured out from the start, easy peasy? 

Maryrose: *laughing through tears* Oh, Betsy, Betsy! What writer has it all figured out from the start? What halfway serious attempt at writing a novel is easy peasy, badger squeezy? I have to tell you that my first messy first draft of Bad Badger: A Family Story contained an entire cast of dachshund characters who lived next door, blasting German opera and driving Septimus mad. They were funny, but it was absolutely the wrong story. I showed it to my stalwart editor, Tracey Keevan, who was such a diplomat and asked good questions and made some suggestions that I liked a great deal. But I knew I had more work to do.

I went home, tore it all apart, cut the dogs and reconceived the plot, and wrote a new draft that rose in a much more heartfelt way from what I finally understood the book was about. I hope I’ve cured anyone of the idea that this job gets easier! This is my 20^th year as a published author, and I like to think that I have a handle on what I’m doing, but honestly, it is so archeological sometimes. You dig and dig and gather up fragments, and a lot of it looks like junk. Only later, when you’ve kicked off your muddy boots and put your magnifying glasses on, can you start to fully understand what you’ve excavated and how all the pieces fit together. A writer can’t be afraid to make a big mess, to really crack the thing open and find out what the book wants to be. That includes cracking yourself open, too.

BB: Here’s a stumper: Do you see yourself more as a Septimus or more as a Gully? 

Maryrose: Ha! Well in both books we spend a lot of time deeply burrowed in Septimus’s head, so that must come from somewhere. I share his ongoing and often fretful inner monologue and his sudden bursts of enthusiasm, and I humbly aspire to his profound decency. His longing for badger-alone time in the midst of company? His longing for company when he’s spent too much time alone? His love of opera and all things Italian? Me, me, and also me.

But overall, I’m probably more of a Gully. Gully is a bit careful, a bit of an observer; she likes to check out the situation before plunging in. She has a writer’s temperament in that sense. But when she’s in her own element, she’s completely free, ecstatically so, and is full of deep feeling once you get to know her. She’s also a devoted mother, and although my two kids are adults now, the experience of being a mother will always be central to my sense of identity and purpose. There’s an early scene in Bad Badger: A Family Story in which Gully inadvertently misses a key moment in her chicks’ lives and is absolutely heartbroken about it. That scene just tore me up to write because I related to it so much.

BB: Naturally, one has to wonder if there are even more BAD BADGERs in the works. Is this it, or can we hope to see Septimus again sometime soon (because I REALLY want to know more about his actual family)?

Maryrose: Well, as you know, it’s the readers who make these decisions, ultimately. If there’s a readership for a third book about Septimus and Gully, I’m eager to do one. I freely confess that I do have a third book living in my head, one that might satisfy some of those questions you have! I remain optimistic that it will take flight when the time is right, just like those three awkward seagull chicks manage to do.     

BB: Marvelous! And finally, what other things are you working on these days? What else is going on in your life?

Maryrose: Like Septimus, I’ve been exploring my family roots. I spend most of my time in southern Italy, not far from the town where my maternal grandparents came from, and where my mother and my uncle spent their early childhoods before they all emigrated to the United States in the mid-1930s. Once in New York City, my grandfather found work as a concrete laborer and my grandmother sewed in the garment factories. It was arduous. I am awestruck at the courage they had, and the sense of hope, to leave everything they knew behind and try to build a better life in the United States. I’m proud to be the daughter and granddaughter of immigrants. 

On the writing front: I have a new middle grade book underway that I’m very excited about. It’s not an animal story this time, but the main character is not exactly a human, either! I continue to teach and mentor the marvelous writers in my Path of the Storyteller program. And it’s still too soon to spill the actual fagioli, but let me just accidentally let slip that I have not forgotten about my Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place readers, and have long been mulling over what would be the exact right project to jump back into that world. Announcements will be forthcoming!

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Oh ho ho ho ho!

Darned if that didn’t feel like a scoop of some sort.

Well, ask a great writer questions and you may get yourself some beautifully written answers. If you’re lucky, of course. And today? I think we’re all feeling exceedingly lucky. A big thank you to Maryrose Wood for taking so much time and energy to answer my questions with such aplomb. Thanks too to Nathan Siegel and the team at Union Square for helping to put this all together. As I mentioned before, Bad Badger: A Family Story is on shelves everywhere, May 5th. Seek it out and find it. It’s a true treat.

Filed under: Best Books, Best Books of 2026, Interviews