February Recommendations - Train wrecks, peacock pies and creating conflict
Adult Book Recommendation
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
Spoiler alert—there is a mild spoiler about the tone of the ending below.
This is a brick of book—540 pages of dense prose—but so worth it. Barbara Kingsolver is a master storyteller and world builder. In this modern retelling of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfied, Kingsolver delves into the world of institutionalized poverty and the foster care system. The voice of the main character, Demon Copperhead, is unique, funny and compelling and kept drawing me back into the story even when I felt the need to put the book down because I could see yet another train wreck coming in his life. I sometimes wanted someone to read the next ten pages and tell me what happened so I didn’t have to go through the bad parts with him, but it was always worth sticking with it. Here’s the spoiler—I wish someone had told me in advance that the story ends on a hopeful note. Knowing that would have made it easier to watch the train wrecks!
Children's Book Recommendation
Alice Fleck’s Recipe for Disaster by Rachelle Delaney
I have enjoyed all of Rachelle Delaney’s middle-grade novels and this one didn’t disappoint. Alice Fleck and her food-historian father love cooking recipes from the past like medieval peacock pie. But she’s learned to keep her hobby a secret from her classmates if she doesn’t wanted to be branded as weird. So when her father’s new girlfriend enters them in a reality TV show cooking contest, Alice is more than a little freaked out. This book has many of the usual tropes of a middle-grade novel—struggles with making new friends, accepting a parent’s love interest, and getting ready for middle school—and they are all dealt with well. But what made the book stand out is the behind the scenes detail about the cooking contest and filming of a reality TV show.
Behind the Scenes
Creating conflict
In my school presentations, I always tell my students that life is great without conflict but a book without a problem is boring. When I’m plotting a book I think about my character’s strengths and more importantly, their weaknesses, because that will often lead to conflict. Lauren has difficulty dealing with change, so in Penguin Days I sent her family to a new setting (a farm in North Dakota) with new people (cousins she doesn’t know). Another source of conflict is thinking about what a character most wants and then setting up obstacles to make that a challenge. In Slug Days, Lauren wants a friend. Her challenges are internal (her difficulty interacting with other students) and external (one of her classmates is a right little stinker). She needs to overcome both in order to get what she wants.
