The Compromise: An American Novel
Author's log of writing The Compromise
How is The Compromise teachable? A recent article in Edutopia gives advice on how to teach novels like The Hunger Games, Divergent, and 1984. Dystopian novels are very common in the high school curriculum. Historical fiction, on the other hand, is grounded as much in actual history as in speculation. Why isn’t historical fiction in…
Metafiction raises the fictional world off the page. It becomes visible when the author aludes to the artificiality of the fiction itself. Do I do this? You bet. But before I own up to it, I’d like to work with its dimensions. I’d like to explore metafiction including alusions to the constructed nature of language…
Christmas Eve the girls at the Columbian Female Academy perform German, English, and Spanish songs near the Christmas tree, a new decoration in 1844. Then the girls go caroling through the streets while in search of a Black family that adopted a baby. They take a basket of food and eventually find the carpenter’s house….
Photo by Edwin Andrade on Unsplash This is the space where a book comes to light — the classroom. Years in the teaching profession trained me to think alongside the minds of others, mostly youth and immigrant adults. They are processing, making, questioning, and sometimes lapping up the American Dream. No doubt, The Compromise is written for them. Teachers are conductors and…
A couple is united and their offspring survive. Goodness is rewarded. Writing for a young adult audience, I have placed this novel in the area of romance. In its sentimental forms, that genre is publicly derided and critically ignored. I do not want my readers to wile away their hours reading an impossibly glamorized romance….