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I am writing a parallel novel to Le Nouvel Houdini, but one that is “twisted”. What do I mean by twisted? It is a new novel that is just weird enough, but not overly so, to get teenagers to raise eyebrows while reading it, while taking the original plot of the book in another direction entirely.
In the first chapter of Houdini, if you know the book, Brandon has to stay with his grandmother because his sister can’t watch him while his parents go on a vacation to Hawaii. In my twisted first chapter, Brandon has to stay by himself because his sister has to go on a research trip to Canada and Mexico from the University of Fleas in Thornton, CO. She needs to collect fleas and bring them back to the university to get a degree in Flea Research.
His sister is pretty “canon” but Brandon is “moche”. She’s got a glamorous university career going , traveling all over the world, and Brandon is stuck in high school with no interest in anything academic and no real hope of traveling himself. The problem is compounded because Brandon is afraid to be alone, and his grandmother refused to watch him, saying, while spitting, that he is a jerk and who would want to watch such a rude kid for a week.
So, one way to look at this kind of parallel novel, the twisted kind, is to say that we don’t try to create it with the class, which any of us who have tried that knows doesn’t work. Creating a parallel novel in class is literally impossible because of time factors and the managing during class of too many conflicting ideas.
That’s the story line so far. It’s more interesting to the kids, and so I am learning to quickly read through a chapter of one of the novels we have, such as they are, get a quiz grade and maybe a dictée out of it, and then move right into the new parallel twisted version of the chapter.
The more I do this, the more I see that if we don’t give the kids really stupid stuff to read that is twisted and slightly off center, they won’t read it. I don’t know what that says about the kids in our society.
I will also write, from each chapter of this new parallel novel, a Twisted Dictée – that is, a slightly demented version of some aspect of the first chapter of the Twisted Novel. Doing this should help me slip in a ton of really good new grammar, because the kids will need to focus on it and learn it to figure out the wacko information.
I’m just working on these ideas, trying to keep up with any new ideas that pop up here at the end of the year to test them before next year.
I am very happy, by the way, as I sent four kids out yesterday. They were clearly not in the mood to focus on the first chapter of Houdini, so I just sent them down to the people in the building who deal with such issues, who have the ironical name “Student Advisors”. I have never done that before. Of course, this touches on the Pig Kid discussion. We had a great class without them.