The Turning (Greenwillow Books, 2018) by Emily Whitman is SO good! It’s compelling from the first line to the end. I had so much sympathy for the main character. And his family.
Aran is a selkie. He lives at sea with the clan. But unlike the others he is always in longlimbs as he has no selkie skin to transform him into a seal. He prays to the moon to give him one so he can dive without needing to surface for breath, so he can swim long distances and keep up with the others. Then he finds out his mother has kept a secret from him and he may never get a pelt. Aran will risk everything to be a full selkie–even living on land.
What a magical story of a convincing world! (The book has a cool cover too.) You really don’t want to miss reading this book that has been chosen as a Junior Library Guild Selection.
Read Emily’s About Me to learn some of the inspiration for this book. The author has also written YA books–you can read about them here.
Author: Susan Uhlig
The weird thing about writing fiction is you don’t necessarily know what happens next.
The weird thing about writing
Unique Character Names
“Hi, my name is…”
I just went through a student assignment where most character names ended in the E sound. Some were spelled with a Y; others with IE. Not only does it get confusing with the same endings, but Gracie, Vicky, Lorie, Murphy, Bobby are also the same number of syllables. At least they started with different letters.
Varying your character names will help your reader keep track of who’s who.
But don’t just think about beginnings and endings, or number of syllables.
Think about different cultures and ethnicities.
Look at this fact: “The proportion of non-Hispanic white children in the U.S. has declined from 61 percent of all children in 2000 to 51 percent in 2016.” More from the same source here.
What about where you live? Or where you are setting your story? Who are the people there? When my daughter’s family moved to southern Georgia, my white grandchildren were the minority among a sea of black children. Where we raised our girls there was a significant Asian population. We spent a year in a town in New Jersey that had a large Jewish population. Where we live now there are many people from the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe.
I’m not suggesting you appropriate anyone’s culture, but surely in your main character’s classroom or among his/her friends, not everyone will look/be just like your character.
Don’t forget religious influences.
Names may be inspired by parents’ faith or customs. Biblical names are often popular in our country. Although the US has often been called a Christian nation, that has changed too. Read some of the statistics here from 2016. And again it varies state by state. As the above link states: “No state is less religiously diverse than Mississippi.”
Popular culture can contribute to unusual names.
This site has 100 unusual or surprising baby names of 2018. Some come from TV; while others are from history; and others are names of fruit. Those children may be off to school in four or five years.
Here’s a fun resource: popular baby names by birth year.
Place names are popular.
I’ve met both boy and girl Londons. There’s Paris and Brooklyn. Austin and Hudson. Here’s a list of over 100 place names.
Consider the meaning of names.
This can be helpful in creating character traits or the ironic opposite. My name means graceful lily. I’ve never felt particularly graceful or flowerlike. Your child/teen main character may know the meaning of his/her name, too.
Scifi and fantasy often have made-up names.
And some authors seem to go overboard into making them hard to pronounce. Sometimes names just have unique spellings. Here’s an article about fantasy name generators. Science fiction writers don’t have to feel left out–here’s one for scifi character names.
Names that almost weren’t.
Some names become household words. For fun and inspiration look at these twelve who almost were something less.
Literature adds to reality. It does not simply describe it.
Literature adds to reality
Inkling
Inkling (Alfred A. Knopf, 2018) by Kenneth Oppel is a book I’m not quite sure how to describe. We’ve got a nonhuman, but likable main character, who is an inkblot. Seriously! He’s discovered by a boy named Ethan, who names him Inkling. Ethan’s sister Sarah who has Down’s Syndrome meets Inkling too although she calls him Lucy. We’ve got lots of drawing, both good and bad. We’ve got problems, kid-sized and adult. It’s funny. It’s sad. It’s touching.There’s a bad guy. But with some help Ethan and Inkling win in the end. And so do some other people.
This is a fun and satisfying story. Looking at it several weeks after I finished it, I find it hard not to pick the book up and read it again.
Kenneth Oppel is an award winning author. You can read about him here. See his awards here and check out his books here.
The illustrations (inside and out) are done by Sydney Smith. You can see a bunch of the illustrator’s covers here.