The Fruit Bowl Project
Grade 5-8–A new teacher who is an admitted dork reveals to her eighth-grade Writers' Workshop students that she is related to rock superstar Nick Thompson. Not much impresses these savvy New York City kids, but they are suitably wowed. Nick, a songwriter, is invited to teach the class. He contends that a song is like a bowl of fruit, and that he needs to figure out how to paint it, using words as colors. There are infinite ways to create the canvas, using style, voice, genre, and much more. He challenges the students to each write a piece based on only seven simple elements: school, sixth grade, a reading test, a dropped pencil, an angry girl, lunch, and milk out the nose. The balance of the novel consists of the students' 50 projects, ranging from rap to haiku, monologue, fairy tales, a screenplay, etc. Durkee captures the students' jargon and behavior but the plot and its many characters are undifferentiated and undeveloped. Teachers and aspiring writers will enjoy the many clever ways a story can be told, while readers more interested in character development or plot are likely to give up after a few selections.–Connie Tyrrell Burns, Mahoney Middle School, South Portland, MECopyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.