Caroline Starr Rose

picture book and middle-grade author

Classroom Connections: Alone by Megan E. Freeman

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form / genre: middle grade verse novel; survival story
age range: 10 and up
Megan E. Freeman’s website

This exciting story of tenacity, determination, and ingenuity is hard to put down, and thank heavens nothing happens to the dog.
— NPR

Madeleine relates her own riveting, immersive story in believable detail, her increasingly sophisticated thoughts, as years pass, sweeping down spare pages in thin lines of verse in this Hatchet for a new age. . . . Suspenseful, fast-paced, and brief enough to engage even reluctant readers.
― Kirkus Reviews

The novel is gripping and the plot fast-paced…This is a tense, engrossing survival story on par with classics such as Hatchet.
— Booklist   

Please tell us about your book.

Perfect for fans of Hatchet and the I Survived series, Alone is a harrowing middle grade novel-in-verse from a Pushcart Prize–nominated poet that tells the story of a young girl who wakes up one day to find herself utterly alone in her small Colorado town.

When twelve-year-old Maddie hatches a scheme for a secret sleepover with her two best friends, she ends up waking up to a nightmare. She’s alone—left behind in a town that has been mysteriously evacuated and abandoned.

With no one to rely on, no power, and no working phone lines or internet access, Maddie slowly learns to survive on her own. Her only companions are a Rottweiler named George and all the books she can read. After a rough start, Maddie learns to trust her own ingenuity and invents clever ways to survive in a place that has been deserted and forgotten.

As months pass, she escapes natural disasters, looters, and wild animals. But Maddie’s most formidable enemy is the crushing loneliness she faces every day. Can Maddie’s stubborn will to survive carry her through the most frightening experience of her life?

What inspired you to write this story?

When my daughter was in fifth grade, we were in a mother-daughter book club and we read Island of the Blue Dolphins. In the discussion afterward, we talked about how challenging it was for Karana to survive on the island alone, and I started thinking about what it would be like for a contemporary middle school student to find themselves in a similar situation. I couldn’t get the idea out of my head, and it became the seed that grew into ALONE.

Could you share with readers how you conducted your research or share a few interesting tidbits you learned while researching?

I had to learn what would happen in a town if all the power went out and how it would affect things like heating and cooling and running water. I talked to an expert who works at a water conservancy district and learned that if an entire power grid shut down, it would also impact the ability to have running water and indoor plumbing, since water management systems depend on electricity to operate. I had to figure out what my main character, Maddie, would do about cleaning and cooking and flushing the toilet when the power goes out and there is no running water. 

I also had to research emergency communication plans and learn some of the language that is used in planning for national emergencies. Through online research I was able to find actual federal documents that are used in planning for national emergencies. By reading those documents, I learned terms and phrases and planning strategies that would be used in a real emergency situation. 

What are some special challenges associated with paralleling your book with a classic? 

In Island of the Blue Dolphins, once Karana’s tribe leaves the island, she has no way to communicate with them. Any interactions she has with other humans happen only when people occasionally come to the island to hunt and fish. But my story is set in the 21st century, so Maddie and her family would have cell phones and telephones and computers and all sorts of ways to communicate with each other. I knew that I had to figure out a way to not only isolate Maddie geographically, but also isolate her technologically, so that she could have no connection to the outside world and the outside world could have no connection to her.

What topics does your book touch upon that would make it a perfect fit for the classroom?

Maddie has to overcome all sorts of challenges, and she has to rely on herself for everything from food to first aid to entertainment to comfort. She essentially has to become her own parent, doctor, chef, consoler, and protector. And all the while, she struggles with wondering if she’s making the right decisions or if she should be doing something differently to try to get out of her situation. Some themes to explore might be perseverance, resilience, family (including divorce and stepfamilies), independence, hope, and fear. Maddie also comforts and entertains herself in many creative ways, inventing games to play alone, reading books, making art, and exploring on hikes and bike rides. 

It could be fun in a classroom for students to imagine what they might do if they found themselves in Maddie’s shoes:

  • What might be exciting about being all alone in a town? 
  • What might be frightening? 
  • Which of Maddie’s choices do you agree with and which ones would you make differently? 
  • What kind of animal would you want to be stranded with?

Some higher level questions could include:

  • Maddie finds a lot of comfort in reading books from the library, and she is surprised to discover that she loves poetry. Why might poetry be comforting during challenging times?
  • The poet Emily Dickinson creates a metaphor for hope by comparing it to a bird (“Hope is the thing with feathers”). What other metaphors might describe hope? What are some metaphors that could describe fear, loneliness, perseverance, and love?
  • The poet Mary Oliver asks the readers of her poem “The Summer Day” what they will do with their “one wild and precious life.” Why do you think she calls life “wild and precious”? What other adjectives could be used to describe life? How would you answer Mary Oliver’s question?
  • Maddie’s feelings about her family are complicated, and they change over the course of the story. How do family dynamics impact a person’s perception of themselves and their place in the world?

Writing and Reading Links

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Say it ain’t so, Kurt Vonnegut!
6 Punctuation Marks Hated by Famous Authors :: Mental Floss

“Being creative is not so much the desire to do something as the listening to that which wants to be done.”
Art takes you where it wants you to go :: Austin Kleon

I adored Summer of My German Soldier. Thank you, Bette Greene, for speaking into my childhood in such a meaningful way.
Obituary: Bette Greene :: Publisher’s Weekly

“The thing is, children don’t live in a world without death and guilt and sadness. They live among these things, just as we do. They are trying to process them, just as we are. Anyone who has been a child knows this.”
What Magical Stories Do by Hayley Chewins :: The Nerdy Book Club

“Sometimes I want to find that professor—the one who made it seem like I was bound to fall behind—and tell him that despite how much his class changed me as a writer, it also changed me as a mother. I’ve spent years unraveling a lie that I had to prove my worth by doing all the things at once.”
The Lies I No Longer Believe :: Coffee and Crumbs

Whatever genre I’m writing in, the sound of my text is secondary only to meaning.  That is especially true in picture books.  In my mind, for a picture-book text to work, it must sing. 
A Text That Sings :: Marion Dane Bauer

Straight from the Source: Susan Kusel on Writing Historical Fiction

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Susan Kusel has turned a life as a book lover into many careers as an author, librarian, and buyer for a bookstore. She has served on many book award committees including the Caldecott Medal and the Sydney Taylor Book Award. She loves biking, cross-stitching and of course, reading.

Thank you so much for inviting me to your blog. I love talking about research and historical fiction.

You’re welcome! Thank you for joining us today. What typically comes first for you: a character? An era? A story idea? How do you proceed from there?

Usually, I get fascinated by a time period or an event and then develop characters around that. But The Passover Guest was exactly the opposite. Because it was an adaptation, I already knew what the basic plot was going to be. Then, with the help of my wonderful editor, Neal Porter, we decided on the place and time period. And after that, I started researching as hard as I could.

What kinds of sources do you use?

I love primary sources. The more, the better. For The Passover Guest, these included as many things as I could find from the 1930’s such as maps, postcards, guidebooks, newspaper articles and countless photographs. I also relied on oral histories from people who were alive at the time. I researched what days the cherry blossoms were in peak bloom and when that coincided with the first night of Passover during the Great Depression to figure out exactly when to set the book. I examined which buildings were in existence in the 1930’s in D.C. to determine what the main character would see. And I spent a lot of time walking over the actual ground covered in the book, visiting the monuments and buildings and walking in the footsteps of my main character. I even took a walking trip through DC with my editor and another with the book’s illustrator.

What is your favorite thing about research?

Librarians are professional researchers, which means I actually have a degree in doing research effectively. I absolutely love research. I love digging and finding unusual facts. I love going through old folders no one has touched in a long time. I love making obscure connections. I love it all. I usually do research for other people, so it’s amazingly fun to do research for my own work.

What’s your least favorite thing about research?

That it can’t go on forever. If you are writing historical fiction, you have to let go.

Obviously, you need to stay true to the time period, but you also have to sometimes let the teeny tiny details go so that the story will work.

What are some obstacles writing historical fiction brings?

You can’t do everything you want to because you have to follow what actually happened historically. For example, I really wanted a female rabbi in The Passover Guest. The first American female rabbi was Sally Preisand, who was ordained in 1972. It wasn’t realistic to have a woman rabbi in a book set in the 1930’s, as much as I wanted to.

Because life isn’t always clear cut, the motives behind our actions don’t always make sense, but stories need to follow a logical path. What sorts of decisions have you had to make about “muddy” historical figures or events in order for your book to work?

There are a few places where we took a bit of artistic license in The Passover Guest. The book is set on April 10, 1933, and there is wine on the seder table because of a crucial plot point. However, Prohibition was in effect until December 5, 1933. I decided that this was okay because even during Prohibition, alcohol for religious purposes was allowed.

The other place in the book that had a little artistic license is the Hooverville in the opening pages. There was in fact a desegrated shantytown in Washington D.C. in the early 1930’s called the Bonus Army. However, their location was in Anacostia Flats. We moved them to the National Mall to make the visual setting of the book work better.