SEE YOU ON A STARRY NIGHT by Lisa Shroeder

A good story about new beginnings and making friends.

Description from the publisher:

Juliet has just moved to a beachside town with her newly separated mother and her moody older sister. When she meets their new neighbor, Emma, the girls form an instant bond. Emma's big family takes Juliet in, and the girls have fun together, starting with the night they throw bottles with secret messages into the sea.

Then someone writes back to Juliet's message. An email arrives, inviting her to join the Starry Beach Club. All she has to do is make someone else's wish come true.

So Juliet and Emma set off to help as many other people as they can. It's fun! But as Juliet spends more and more time away from home, enjoying her new town and Emma's family more than her own mom and sister, she starts feeling lost. It's been easy to find others to help. But maybe her star would shine a little brighter if she brought it closer to home.

See You on a Starry Night, written by Lisa Shroeder, was published by Scholastic Press in 2018.

Why you want to read this book… 

This is a lovely story about new beginnings – or how to cope when your life completely changes. Juliet’s friendships and feelings are portrayed in a realistic way. This novel follows the everyday experiences of Juliet, but it’s never boring. Small mysteries, interesting details and conflicts create a richly textured story. I appreciated the connections to the art of Vincent Van Gogh.

Opening:

Casper, my old, white, kitty, sat perched on my nightstand, studying me like I might unpack a can of tuna any second. Poor cat. No tuna here, just all of the moving boxes marked Juliet.

If you’re a writer… 

One of the cool (and quirky) things about this book is Juliet’s habit of making lists! A great model if you’re interested in incorporating lists into a novel. I also really liked the way memories are incorporated in the story to reveal more about her character. Here's part of one of Juliet's lists:

Some of my other wishes

·        World peace

·        Life on Mars

·        For animals to live forever

·        A library in every neighborhood

If you’re a teacher…

There are so many great possibilities for activities related to this book:  writing a message in a bottle, writing lists using the headings of Juliet’s lists as prompts, finding out the meanings of interesting words, and planning a wish come true for someone like Juliet and Emma do in this story.  I really liked the emphasis on doing good deeds and how caring the girls were in this story.

But the more time that went by, the more I knew the chances of that happening were really, really small.

Smaller than a ladybug’s wing.

Smaller than a watermelon seed.

Smaller than the tip of a fine-point pen.

Some related music for inspiration (or to use as a writing prompt):

Start your school year off right with a list of good books to read from Marvelous Middle Grade Monday at Greg Pattridge's blog.

Marvelous Middle Grade Monday: September 17

I think I learn most of the history I know from reading fiction! I really enjoyed this fictionalized story about the plan to save children from the bombings in Britain during World War II. This book is another one of the nominees for the Ontario Library Association’s Silver Birch Award.

Here’s the Amazon description:

In July 1940, a British government-sponsored program called Children's Overseas Reception Board -- or CORB -- was set up to send children from Britain to Canada and other Commonwealth countries, in order to rescue them from the bombings of British cities. The City of Benares was a luxury liner that was recruited in September 1940 to transport 90 of these children to Canada, along with the ship's regular passenger complement. A convoy of ships including The Benares set off from Liverpool in mid-September and approximately six hundred miles out, after the naval escorts had withdrawn, the ship was torpedoed by a German U-boat and sank in about half an hour. Only thirteen of the CORB children survived the sinking. As a result of this tragedy, the program was cancelled.

September 17 is a novel that tells the story of three of the children that were on board the City of Benares, as they experience and survive the disaster and wait to be rescued. One lifeboat was not picked up by the destroyer sent to make the rescue, and was at sea with 46 passengers, children and adults for eight days until it was picked up near the Irish coast. Two teenaged girls held onto an overturned lifeboat for 18 hours before they were picked up, while another family, including two children not on the CORB program, floated on a tiny raft for hours before being rescued. The characters whose adventures are described are all real, though some conversations and encounters have been fictionalized by author Amanda Lewis.

September 17 by Amanda West Lewis, Red Deer Press, Markham, Ontario, 2013.

My Take:

It was so interesting to learn about the City of Benares and the CORB experiment, and how children might have reacted and experienced the events! I found the book a little slow to get started, but this changed as the trip got underway. There were quite a few characters to keep track of, but they all had different stories and perspectives.

From a writer’s perspective, I’d look closely at how actual facts were embedded into the story to make a compelling narrative.

Opening Line:

“A heavy clod of wet earth fell on Ken’s head. His hands began to shake.”

Quotes:

“He’d been so focused on drawing that he’d forgotten completely where he was.”

“As she stood staring out over the concrete breakers, she imagined the German boats landing on her beach that wasn’t a beach anymore.”

“The raft soared up to the top of each wave and then came smashing down, slamming their bodies with the impact.”

“There was no moon, and the stars covered every part of the sky and were reflected in every part of the water. He was living in a bowl of stars.”

Other Info:

Amanda West Lewis has written five books for young people. She enjoys many different creative pursuits such as writing, directing theatre, and calligraphy. She is the artistic director of the Ottawa Children’s Theatre.

She is married to author Tim Wynne-Jones.

On her website, Amanda West Lewis says, "As a writer, I love the extraordinary complexity, subtlety and magic of language."

For more, visit Amanda West Lewis ’s website.

Looking for more Marvelous Middle Grade Monday books? Visit Shannon Messenger’s blog for a list of bloggers reviewing great books today! Shannon is the founder of Marvelous Middle Grade Monday and the author of the Keeper of the Lost Cities series.

F is for Friendships in Middle Grade Novels

Between the ages of 9 and 14, kids are starting to explore relationships with people outside their families. They're thinking about how to be a good friend, who is not a real friend, and which friends they want to hang with. Someone might be your best friend for one day, and then not the next.  

How can you use friends to develop your middle grade story?

Create conflict. Tension between friends increases conflict. For example, in Leslie Margolis’ novel, Girl's Best Friend, dog-walker Maggie Brooklyn gets stuck working with her ex-best friend to solve a mystery. Talk about conflict! Other ways to create tension? Being too busy for friends, wanting friends when you don't have them, jealousy of a good friend...there are so many. Brainstorm for your own unique friend-related conflict.

Sidekick or support. Friends don’t always mean conflict. They can help solve a mystery or provide support on an adventure (think about Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson books). Supporting friends make the main character seem more well-rounded, emotional or empathetic. They can also add humor or depth as part of a subplot. What if the sidekick always messes up? Or bails out the main character?

Provide information. A friend's different point of view can be a way for the author to add things that can't be shown through the main character. Conversations between a character and a good friend are one way to add in some backstory without creating an info dump. Something a friend has noticed might be an important clue. Just be sure not to rely on the friend too much or too often; the main character should take centre stage.

More tips on using friends in your story:

Beware of cliches. In books where the main character is a boy, one of the good friends is often a girl, to the point where it’s almost becoming a formula. I think this is much less common in real life than in the world of books, because authors want the book to appeal to girls as well as boys. Watch out for stereotypes like the Hermione effect (smart girl sidekick).  

Friends aren’t always people. Middle graders have strong feelings for pets, other living creatures and even inanimate objects, so you can be create in the friendships you choose to include in your novel. For example, Bobbie Pyron’s A Dog’s Way Home focuses on the relationship between a girl and her dog. In Drizzle by Kathleen Van Cleve, the main character has a unique relationship with a plant.

Friends change with the situation. In real life, kid’s friendships may be related to the activities they do. They may have one group of friends at school, but a different group of friends on their soccer team or at dance class.

Be realistic. According to at least one reader I talked to, it’s annoying when a character in a book has only one friend. In real life, kids interact with many different peers in different ways. Capturing the flavour of that complexity in your story, even in a simple way, might add to the story believability.

Do you have any tips or suggestions for using friendships to strengthen a story? Have you read any good books where a friendship was essential to the story?

Links

*As usual, if you have any links to other posts or resources on this subject, I'd be happy to add them to the list for our reference.

At Plot to Punctuation, there’s a great post on using a sidekick character in your writing. 

For more material and insights on friendships between girls, a blog by psychologist Irene Levine, author of Best Friends Forever: Surviving a Breakup with Your Best Friend, explores friendships between women of all ages, including teens and preteens. A couple of nteresting articles:

Preteen worries: My family, my friends and me

Friendship by the book: An interview with Alexa Young, author of Frenemies

At Fuel Your Writing, freelancer Kolina gives some tips on how to use your own friends to improve your novels.