Tim Federle’s YA novel Better Late Than Ever is a fave.

Actually all of his books are. In a 2017 interview with The Advocate Federle said: 

I never studied writing formally, so any level of craft is a co-production between me and my editor at Simon & Schuster, David Gale. In terms of unwrapping details, I don’t outline before writing, so a lot of the “surprises” are coming as I write them — I have ADHD, so it’s the only way to keep myself interested in the endless drafts a novel takes. I remember having the biggest crush on the guy in the sweater on the cover of A Separate Peace. And then somebody revealed that the other guy was behind him hidden in the tree and I gay-gasped. But, yeah, I think a lot of YA fiction stands on the shoulder of the books that cover before it.

 

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Entertainment Weekly: 

The new Disney+ musical comedy that stars newcomer Rueby Wood as Nate Foster, a small town kid with big Broadway dreams. But there’s only one problem for the aspiring theater star: he can’t even land a part in his school play. So when his parents leave town, Nate and his BFF Libby (Aria Brooks) sneak off to New York City for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to prove everyone wrong.

Based on the book of the same name by Tim Federle, the movie is a celebration of theater kids everywhere — and it also features a big High School Musical: The Musical: The Seriesreunion, as writer/director/producer Federle cast star Joshua Bassett as Nate’s older brother (see below). “Joshua Bassett has been this good luck charm for me since he was cast as the very first series regular in HSMTMTS, and it was a joy when he signed on to this very different role of Nate’s jock older brother,” Federle tells EW. “It was really full-circle. I knew that Josh had this dream of living in New York City in an apartment with no air conditioning and just writing songs all day, and I was like, if you come do this movie, you’re going to get paid to live in New York City for a summer. And he was like, ‘I’m in!'”

Federle was proud to see Bassett grow from the former newcomer on HSMTMTS into the older mentor for the young actors on the set of this movie. “When he first started on High School Musical, he was hired at 17 and it was his big break,” Federle says. “And it was so cool to see Rueby and Aria, who watched the series and were fans of Josh, look up to Josh now.”

When Federle first wrote Better Nate Than Ever as a novel almost a decade ago, he was inspired by his own experiences growing up as a theater kid in a small town with big aspirations. “It sort of came from my backyard, literally and proverbially, because at the time I was dancing on Broadway and I was working on Billy Elliot and it felt like a really far leap from my days as this Pittsburgh theater kid who dreamed of coming to New York,” he says. “I first came to New York when I was 14 with my mom on this trip to see Broadway shows, and I got this idea because I felt like dancers can’t dance forever. I was like, what am I going to do if I don’t keep dancing? I decided to quietly write this pretty autobiographical novel without knowing what I was doing, and I just wrote from the heart.”

Adapting his own book for the movie allowed Federle to change “quite a lot” from the page to screen while still making sure he kept the spirit of: “What if John Hughes had directed Billy Elliot?”

 

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