Born in California, raised in Delaware and Nebraska, Lise McClendon was born into an academic family where her father was a university botany professor. She credits her mother with her first strong commitment to reading, the summer she was eleven and her mother made her "lie down and read!" for an hour after lunch. Mother really does know best. Many trips to the library on bicycle, Nancy Drew mysteries, Daphne Du Maurier gothics, and adventure novels like My Side of the Mountain, marked that summer and the beginning of a lifelong love of books.