Poison and Polka Dots

Susannah Appelbaum and Nova Ren Suma Cast a Spell

by Nina Shengold and photographs by Jennifer May, October 29, 2009

I’ve always been fascinated with poisoning. It’s a hard thing to talk about at a dinner party,” says Susannah Appelbaum. She describes a mushroom known as the inky cap that’s not dangerous at all unless it’s combined with alcohol. “So the way you poison someone is to make a mushroom dinner and pour them a lot of wine. You eat the food too, but don’t drink anything,” she says with a knowing smile. “Poison is sly.”

When Applebaum was around four, she tasted an alluring blue flower in her aunt’s garden and wound up in the hospital for three days. Several years later, she took to crossing an old railroad trestle near her New Paltz home. “This was in the pre-Rail Trail days, so there were ties missing, it felt very dangerous. I used to look down and think, What if there was a little man living under there?”

Appelbaum’s debut novel, Poisons of Caux: The Hollow Bettle (Knopf Books for Young Readers) features trestlemen, a trained crow, a wild boar, some exceedingly scurvy knaves, and a mysterious jewel. Her feisty young heroine, Ivy Manx, has a way with plants, both healing and lethal—a valuable skill in a land where the rule is “Poison or be poisoned.”

Tall, striking, and regally poised, the author resembles a fairy-tale princess whose basket of apples may not be entirely safe. She’s the daughter of poet, SUNY New Paltz philosophy professor, and Codhill Press publisher David Appelbaum; her mother died when she was eight. A voracious reader, young Susannah wasn’t allowed inside her father’s office, but “I’d peer around the door at his writing table—the same table he still uses—piled with messy papers. He was a pipe smoker back then, so there was a haze in the room. It was a place that was very intriguing.”

When David Appelbaum went to teach at the Sorbonne for two years, his teenage daughter learned French by the “sink or swim” method. She attended NYU, traveled abroad, and found work as a magazine editor, shunning New Paltz for 13 years. “But like some twist of fate in a story, I guess I was destined to raise my kids on the same playground I played on,” she says. She and her husband moved back here nine years ago and just built a house, which he designed; the paint on the porch is still wet.