On her blog, Gail Gauthier recently mentioned how her book “My Life Among the Aliens” is based on her experiences as a suburban mom.
I was shocked. When I write, I try to go back to middle school, so my books are definitely from the kids point of view.
Gauthier is SO GOOD at sounding like a kid that I would have figured she did the same thing. (But with a chapter called “How Mom Saved the Planet” I should have suspected something.)
However she does it, she knows her kid talk and her kid thinking.
Here are a few examples:
“I have noticed over the years that Dad is a lot better at thinking of reasons for not doing things than he is at thinking of reasons for doing them.”
On the subject of mothers: “They won’t let you play in the street and they tell you to go to bed when they know you’re not tired.”
Birthday presents: “I got a baseball glove that is now too small for me, a space coloring book that I let somebody borrow and never saw again, a bike horn that I never got a chance to use, a lunch box with a Thermos bottle that leaked, a decorate-your-own t-shirt that I never did and now it doesn’t fit anymore, a bug net that my mother sat on the handle and bent and school clothes from Brendan’s mother.”
“[Dad] says that if everyone gave up the first time something didn’t work right, we’d still be living in caves. That would be neat.”
Wow, all this and aliens, too. What a book!
Filed under: book review, kidlit
