importance of a spy network in johnny tremain

IMPORTANCE OF A SPY NETWORK IN JOHNNY TREMAIN FULL

In fact I saw that the manuscript had energy and charm. I’d recalled it as clumsy, silly, rather pointless: an interesting exercise, not a potential book.

For my NaNoWriMo novel, I gave my somewhat naive fantasy to the mother and made my protagonist a girl who was roughly my age when the Vietnam War ended. I had a younger brother, but I wondered what it would be like if we adopted an orphaned girl and I were to get a sister as well. Now there were news stories about South Vietnamese families desperately trying to get to safety in rickety boats launched into the South China Sea and about orphaned children evacuated in planes. withdrew its military and economic support and the South Vietnamese government collapsed. When I was 12, the war ended after the U.S. I knew hardly anything about what was going on, but I took in the danger and the violence. On the evening news, there was frightening footage of soldiers pushing through jungle underbrush, explosions.

The Vietnam War was part of the anxious backdrop of my own childhood in the 1970s. The wisp of a situation I decided on was that of a young girl whose mother decides she wants to adopt a refugee orphan from Vietnam. I figured that would help me get out of my way and write freely and fast. To approach the daunting task, I chose a story for children, precisely because it was something I wasn’t invested in and didn’t see as important. I did it for National Novel Writing Month, which famously requires writing 50,000 words in 30 days. But between the first and second novels, I drafted a novel for children. One was about a loner living beneath the radar in New York City another about a love triangle at an East Coast boarding school a third, about childbirth. I did grow up to write novels for adults, not so much about marriages and wars, as it turned out, but rather shaped by all sorts of influences and experiences-and reading-I couldn’t have imagined at six or ten or even fifteen.

IMPORTANCE OF A SPY NETWORK IN JOHNNY TREMAIN FULL

I was a serious kid, and childhood, as far as I was concerned, was a temporary holding area until I reached my true home of adulthood, where I would organize my life the way I saw fit, understand things like politics and geography, and write fat books full of adult business: marriages and wars, most probably. Even when I was six or seven years old, a massive reader, and a kid who wanted to write novels one day, I saw myself writing for adults only that seemed serious to me. I never imagined I’d write a novel for children.

Importance of a spy network in johnny tremain