Thieves' Gambit, Ep. 5: Complicated Family Relationships
In Episode 5, Erin and Anne-Marie examine the complicated family relationships in Thieves’ Gambit and explore why to use them, how to introduce them for maximum effect, and how to leverage those relationships to create more tension without taking away the main character’s agency.
Things we mention in the podcast:
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Writing Middle Grade for Picture Book Authors class
Jan 18: Stacey Lee, KILL HER TWICE
Feb 25: Michael Leali, THE TRUTH ABOUT TRIANGLES
Mar 25, Randy Ribay, EVERYTHING WE NEVER HAD
April 22, Lindsay Lackey, FARTHER THAN THE MOON.
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Erin Nuttall: Like every time you turn the page, the volume goes higher. By the time we're at the end, we're not at 11, we're at like 111.
[Music intro]
[00:00:09] Anne-Marie Strohman: Welcome to season two of the Kid Lit Craft Podcast. This season we're doing a deep dive into Kayvion Lewis's YA thriller Thieves’ Gambit. Today we're focusing on complicated family relationships. I'm Anne-Marie Strohman and I write for children and young adults well as short stories for adults.
[00:00:26] Erin Nuttall: I am Erin Nuttall and I write for young adults primarily.
[00:00:32] Anne-Marie Strohman: On Kid Lit Craft, we look at mentor texts to discover the mechanics of how writers do what they do so we can apply it to our own writing. And before we get started, we wanted to let you know three important pieces of information.
First: the new Kid Lit Craft website design launched on Friday, and I don't know if you've seen it yet, Erin, but it is beautiful.
[00:00:52] Erin Nuttall: I haven't. I need to look.
[00:00:54] Anne-Marie Strohman: Go look! Go look! Okay.
And second: If you like this podcast, we're jumping into a new program in the spring called Ask the Author Book Club, which will be a live conversation with various authors about the craft and process of their books. So, we'll—I'll read a chosen book. You can submit your questions and then come to a live Zoom meeting where we'll interview the author and dig deep into craft, and we'll also have a live Q&A at the end of the session.
[00:01:23] Erin Nuttall: I am super stoked about that because I just… You know how nerdy I am about craft, It’s just so fun. I think it'll be really fun to explore with different authors and explore with our listeners. So super excited.
[00:01:38] Anne-Marie Strohman: So if you especially liked our interview with Martine Levitt at the end of last season, that will give you a flavor for the kind of depth we get into. And our first guest in January is gonna be award-winning YA author Stacey Lee. And we're gonna talk about her YA historical murder mystery Kill Her Twice.
It's got dual point of view, suspense, beautifully written scenes, character voice for days…
[00:02:02] Erin Nuttall: Oh, for sure.
[00:02:03] Anne-Marie Strohman: Even if you're not working on a mystery yourself, you'll learn a ton from Stacey. And I know Erin, this book is right in your wheelhouse.
[00:02:10] Erin Nuttall: Oh for, oh yeah, I read it right after it came out and I loved it and I gave it to my daughter and she loved it and we just ate it up. Voice for days is a great way to explain it. I mean, Stacy really excels in voice and in history. I love history. I have a degree in history and it's a really fun time period that I don't think we get to see a lot in a really fun place that we don't see a lot.
It's LA in the late twenties, early thirties. There's a lot of Hollywood going on. It's just really, really fun.
[00:02:43] Anne-Marie Strohman: So you can head over to kidlitcraft.com and click on Book Clubs to register.
And last, number three is registration is also open for our winter classes. I'll be teaching writing middle grade for picture book authors, and I'm particularly excited for a new class called Revise a Novel With Me.
So if you have a novel that you're ready to revise, come and join in the fun. And you can find out more at kidlitcraft.com and click on Classes. Alright, announcement's over.
So back to the Thieves’ Gambit. Erin, we usually start with vocabulary, but since I think we've all seen or experienced complicated family relationships or dynamics, let's skip right to the topic at hand. We'll be looking at how to put these dynamics on the page, but let's start with why. Why are complicated family relationships, why are they great story fodder?
[00:03:35] Erin Nuttall: It's great story fodder because there's, because of the complications, right? Stories that don't have complications are boring and families…That's all we are, we're just a bundle of complications. People's lives are messy and, readers like to see that reflected in the stories they read, but also when you have family strife, these are important relationships.
These are relationships that, especially for teens and children, these are the main relationships. And so if there's some family strife, there is definitely some tension. And something this book is really good at is tension and adding tension, adding tension. So anytime you can add some tension, it's a great idea and the family is a fantastic way to do that.
[00:04:24] Anne-Marie Strohman: So I used to hear the advice really often that books should be so kid focused. You should cut the parents, kill them off, do what Disney does all the time. And having adults around particularly takes away agency that kids have. Do you think that's true in novels you're reading now, or are families playing a more present role?
[00:04:43] Erin Nuttall: That is definitely true, that that used to be the wisdom. I don't think it is the wisdom anymore. I do see a lot more family interactions in what I've been reading. And yeah, I mean, it makes sense, you know, how are you gonna save the world if you can just go run and ask your mom to come and do it for you? Right? So I get why that used to be the common way that, to give kids, especially teens, action. But even if you look at Magic Treehouse, you know, they travel through time without their mom.
And that's fine. You can have adventures without the parents. But not having any relationship with the parents 'cause they’re dead or because they, otherwise incapable of being a parent for some reason. Then you miss out on the opportunity to add that tension, to add that real world factor. And even if you are writing fantasy or sci-fi or a heist book that really isn't based in reality as much as maybe a coming of age story, then it's okay. You still can use families. You can still use those relationships to deepen characters and to again, add tension.
[00:05:58] Anne-Marie Strohman: Yeah. And I feel like Lewis does—she does create isolation here, but she uses that removal of the mom as a part of the story. And I feel like when books have, we see the effects of a parent who's estranged or a parent who has passed away that if that's used even subtly a little bit in the story, it makes the story richer.
I think it's—it's less common now to just see if they're—they're just gone and it
doesn't have any effect.
[00:06:25] Erin Nuttall: Oh, for sure. And yeah, she does isolate. I mean, the mom gets kidnapped early on and in plenty of books that would, or plenty of stories, right, that would be unrealistic and you wouldn't really believe it, or that the kid maybe even had the ability to get the mom back. But because of the nature of Ross and her life and what she's been trained to do her whole life then we don't have to suspend our disbelief.
We're like, yeah, that's right. That makes sense. Her mom get kidnapped. Of course she does. Yeah. They live this dangerous life. Of course she does. And so we'll talk about it later, but one of the things that Lewis does that's really fantastic is even though Mom is not physically present, she is psychologically present for Ross and emotionally present for Ross all the time.
Mom's voice is in Ross's head all the time. And, you know, teens and moms and their relationships are really, really interesting because for so long, Mom is it. Mom tells you everything and you are like, yeah, this is, this is the gospel. Right? You just believe everything and that your mom is a superhero and that you wanna be just like her and, and all of the wonderful things that you get when kids are little. And then at some point kids turn into teenagers and biologically they want to start pulling away. And—and it's good and it's healthy and it also adds a lot of tension, right? For a story, for this to happen.
And this story really explores a lot of that. The idea of Ross and her mom, who are super close physically, emotionally. She's basically Ross's only friend. And then once she's gone and Ross has to make all these decisions on her own. It changes things, right? It adds depth.
And then we'll also learn a little bit more about Mom and some of her choices that maybe—
[Laughter]
[00:08:22] Anne-Marie Strohman: Definitely be careful.
[00:08:24] Erin Nuttall: Maybe weren't the gospel. They—they weren't the best which is good too because, you know, moms don't always make the right choice. Spoiler alert.
[00:08:35] Anne-Marie Strohman: I mean, I do, but.
[00:08:37] Erin Nuttall: Well, yeah, you and me, obviously we're—we're the exceptions to that.
[00:08:42] Anne-Marie Strohman: So let's look specifically at what Lewis does to introduce and shape this relationship. So how does Ross feel about her mom at the beginning and what is their relationship like?
[00:08:53] Erin Nuttall: So in this setup of the story and of the initial setup of Ross's character we learn right away that Ross idolizes her mom. I mean, even in the very first line, which we've talked about quite a bit, I mean, its such a powerful first line. “A Quest can't trust anyone in this world except for a Quest.”
And right now we just, you know, on the first line, we just think that that's the narrator's belief system. But then very soon we learn that that's what Ross's mom has taught her. And the second line is, “So when a Quest, particularly Mama Quest, tells me to curl up like a Twizzler, twisted into a pretzel inside a cabinet so small, it would be illegal to keep your dog in a cage the same size, I trust she has good reason for it. Or at least, whatever I'm stealing is gonna be worth it.” And so right there, we understand how much trust Ross places in her mom. But we also learn about mom's personality as we go along in these first two chapters. And so in the beginning of chapter two, she says, “The first words out of Mom's mouth after a job are never ‘Are you okay, Ross?’ Instead it's ‘You have it?’”. So we also understand that Ross understands that in her mom's priority hierarchy the job is number one.
And I suppose it could be sold that Mama Quest trusts Ross, that she's all right. But it's not really how it comes across. Right? I think that that's kind of a hard sell.
[00:10:33] Anne-Marie Strohman: Ross doesn't feel it that way, and that's really what matters is that Ross feels like for her mom, the job is more important than her. And whether or not that's true her perception and experience of that really colors her relationship with her mom.
[00:10:50] Erin Nuttall: Oh, for sure. And it also gives the reader to understand what Mama Quest's expectations of Ross are and the level of pressure that she's under. Because we have just read in the chapter before how tricky it was for Ross to get the item and to get away. And then, she was very close to getting hurt and yet her mom is immediately concerned with the item that they were stealing.
Ross mentions her mom frequently throughout the story and a lot of times they are sort of throwaway lines or lines where Ross is describing herself through the lens of her mom. On page 14, she's talking about games and she says she'd never played Yazi. “Family game night lost its charm when Mom refused to stop cheating.” So we learned that for Mom, the end justifies the means. Right? And then right after that we see Ross is talking about her agility practice that she has, and she said, “Last month I set a personal best at six and a half feet” of like, jumping from one object to a mat.
Just like. Which feels like a lot to me. But anyway, she says “Afterward Mom told me she could jump seven and a half feet when she was my age.” So yeah, Mom's—Mom's a little bit competitive. Yeah. Or a lot. Or she wants to put Ross in her place or all of the above. And so we learned a lot about Mom right off and how Ross feels about her mom. And how Ross feels in her relationship with her mom. And yet with all of this difficulty, we still know that Ross just thinks her mom is—is the bee's knees, .
[00:12:45] Anne-Marie Strohman: She really threads that needle that there's a deep love between them very clearly, and yet Ross is noticing and bringing up all these different little things about her mom's character that are not that savory.
[00:13:01] Erin Nuttall: No, you definitely think, whew, Ross, that's difficult. You know, that would be a difficult way to grow up for sure.
[00:13:10] Anne-Marie Strohman: So Mom is such a strong character and she really dominates Ross's life. And we talked a little bit last time about Ross's desire to make friends and be a normal kid, and how she was willing to sacrifice her relationship with her mom to do it. And I think that's where that she really desperately loves her mom and feels constrained by her mom comes into play. We do get that sense that she feels trapped in this life that her mom has created for her and eliminated choice. Talk to us about that.
[00:13:40] Erin Nuttall: Yeah, so it is, I—I just think it's just really well done. This relationship between Ross and her mom is really well done. And it is what a lot of teenagers feel like, I think, is that, yeah, they love their mom. They love their mom, but they also want more freedom. And moms aren't always ready to give it at the pace that kids want.
I mean, speaking from experience. And so it's a very relatable relationship even though what we have is this not so relatable story that we're in. We're in this very fancy world of where there's also danger, like everything is just really, I think I've said it a million times, high octane, but I think that that really describes what we have is we have this story where everything is way up here and yet it…personal relationships are right in that sweet spot of normal.
[00:14:42] Anne-Marie Strohman: Well, and it's a little bit inverted, right? Because most kids are like, I would like to go travel to Europe by myself to go do something fantastic. And the mom's like, and you know, normal Mom would be like not the way that you think you're gonna do that.
[00:14:55] Erin Nuttall: Right.
[00:14:56] Anne-Marie Strohman: And Ross's mom is like, go to Europe and do this heist, but you can't do anything else, right? So she constrains her life in a different way that I think makes it exciting to read.
[00:15:06] Erin Nuttall: Oh yeah. I— I think that duality of normal and super not normal is part of what makes this book really fun to read. But yeah, so part of that is Ross, in the beginning we find out that she has applied to do gymnastics camp. For the summer. She just wants to do gymnastics camp for the summer.
She knows her mom's gonna be super mad. She's really hoping that her mom will forgive her. Is this just for the summer? So while she's sitting like a pretzel in this cabinet, waiting for the next part of their heist she gets an email notification inviting her to the camp and she's super excited. And then almost immediately after that, she gets a text notification and she said, “This time it was for Mom, almost like she sensed what I was about to look at and virtually slapped my hand away.” It's a great image. You're imagining her curled up, you're imagining the bright phone light in her face, in this dark cupboard.
And her dream of going to gymnastics camp is about to be realized. And then Mom slaps her hand away, like… I like it. So we also learn about her home life a little bit early on. And she says, “My whole damn house was a thieves’ paradise. A reminder of what I was born for. The job, the family. Those should be the only thing I ever lived for.”
And I think if you have a kid whose parents have different expectations than what the kid wants, then that sentence right there is gonna be like, oh yeah, that's how my parents are.
[00:16:45] Anne-Marie Strohman: Yeah. So in those initial pages of setting up, we do get this real strong sense of Ross feeling constrained and it mirrors that constraint of being in the cabinet, right? She's like a pretzel in this cabinet. Very tight. And that's how she feels in her life.
She feels very restricted. And her family…like this is not just a secret hope, right? It's very explicit, but you know, she sees it in the house around her, but she's also told that this was what her life needs to be.
[00:17:17] Erin Nuttall: She is, she is. Her mom tells her on page 23, “Rosalyn, the family doesn't leave you. Family doesn't lie to you. Family, you can trust. Everyone wants something. A lot of times, things that belong to other people. People will play you like a violin to get whatever it is they need from you. People you think are your friends, people you think you can trust, they'll snap your heart in half and leave you to die.
You're smarter than that baby girl. If you're not yet, then I'm smart enough to make that choice for you because I love you. So no, you're not going anywhere. Not without me. Final decision.”
[00:17:57] Anne-Marie Strohman: Oh, Mom.
[00:17:58] Erin Nuttall: Mom, Mom, Mom.
[00:18:00] Anne-Marie Strohman: And Kayvion Lewis knocking it outta the park, right? Like it's this really amped up version of what we have the sense of, and then it's explicit. We know from reading the whole book, family doesn't leave you, family doesn't lie to you, family you can trust is not actually true.
[00:18:18] Erin Nuttall: Right. This is really a fantastic quote from Mom in that as the reader, we think Mom's serious at the beginning. When we're reading page 23, we believe her and Ross believes her. And it's not till later that we're like, oh Mom, betrayal city. And so this is just this really fantastic setup for that. And yeah, I just think it's just really well done. The other thing we've talked a little bit about in the past is that nothing is really hidden in this story. There's not a lot of subtlety of like where you have to guess how people are feeling or what is expected and how appropriate it is in this book and how well done it is.
Because sometimes you read that and you're like, okay, okay, I hear you. You know? But I don't feel that reading this. And I think it's because of all of the later reveals.
[00:19:14] Anne-Marie Strohman: Yeah, I, two things. I do think it's because of the later reveals and it's, you know, this, these first chapters are so well crafted to set up what comes later, but also if this had been on page two, it would've felt very heavy handed. But because we have that first line. Then we get the perception of Mom filtered through Ross, and then we get this unfiltered view of Mom. We're like, we've been led here.
[00:19:42] Erin Nuttall: Yeah, that makes sense.
[00:19:42] Anne-Marie Strohman: And I think it's much more effective because she's given us these seeds that have sprouted and now we see like the full tree right here.
[00:19:51] Erin Nuttall: And that actually helps us as a reader, to trust Ross.
[00:19:55] Anne-Marie Strohman: Mm-hmm.
[00:19:55] Erin Nuttall: As well, because now we see that her perception of her mom is also the reality that Mom is showing.
[00:20:03] Anne-Marie Strohman: Absolutely. So we're told that these are thieving families and family is so important. So tell us a little bit about the rest of Ross's family. Who are they and how do those larger family dynamics work?
[00:20:17] Erin Nuttall: So they live in The Bahamas and it's Ross and her mom, and Ross's mom's much younger sister, Ross's auntie. And she and Ross get along well but it's very clear that auntie's not in charge. We also hear about grandparents, that they started or maybe continued, I'm not sure, this thieving enterprise.
But we don't meet them. And we don't know a lot about them except that Ross seems to have a decent relationship with them. Maybe not a close relationship. And there is a mysterious rift between the grandparents and Mom, which I find really interesting because Mom is so set on the fact that family is the only is…
And so for Ross family is really mom and auntie, and auntie is, I don't know, do you get like 10 years older than Ross? Maybe? That was kind of…
[00:21:17] Anne-Marie Strohman: Something like that. She's an ally for Ross in a number of cases. Like Ross can get feedback from her or get help from her in these very kind of limited ways. But she is an outside of the thieves’ gambit ally for her, and really outside of her relationship with her mother in a way as well.
[00:21:35] Erin Nuttall: Right. But I do think it's really important that it's clear that she is not the person in power in their branch of the family. I will say I just bought the second book that comes after this and I'm excited to read it. I haven't started it yet. I'm excited to read it and I'm interested to see if we learn more about the grandparents in that book 'cause we really don't hear a ton about them in this book other than there's that mysterious rift.
[00:22:04] Anne-Marie Strohman: So narratively in this one we have a controlling mom, an aunt who is set up to be an ally and no real other adults or family in her daily world. And it seems like this helps Lewis in a few ways. It helps her focus those early sections so she doesn't have to introduce a lot of characters. Right? Once we get into the gambit, there are so many important characters. It's nice to have that contrast with fewer characters in the beginning.
[00:22:30] Erin Nuttall: With the fewer characters, we get to know Ross really well and her mom as well.
[00:22:36] Anne-Marie Strohman: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And that. That limited number of characters there also really creates this pressure cooker life. For Ross, she's the only one who's gonna carry on this thieving enterprise. After her mom and aunt age out, she doesn't have siblings to diffuse some of the responsibility. And it isolates her so that her need for friends and companionship is greater than it would be if she had a real community or a more widespread community with her family.
[00:23:03] Erin Nuttall: Oh, for sure. And I think that is what we see in the beginning with the appeal of the gymnastics camp. She has this imagination where she's like hanging out with the friends at the camp. And it's a very poignant idea. And you can really, really feel Ross's loneliness especially in the beginning.
You can feel it throughout the book, but she sets it up so well in the beginning that actually even though we don't see it as often, we still know that it's there as the story goes on.
[00:23:38] Anne-Marie Strohman: Yeah. And such a relatable feeling to want to connect with others and to have a life and world outside your family too.
[00:23:45] Erin Nuttall: For sure. And I mean I think that's why like extracurriculars and whatnot for kids in high school and middle school is important because they do get to have those different relationships and in a way that's different than just sitting next to someone at school. So I think most kids probably can relate to Ross's desires.
[00:24:08] Anne-Marie Strohman: So let's go back to this idea that Mama Quest really helps Lewis explore: the theme of trust. We know that Ross has been taught to trust her mom and only her mom, and sometimes her auntie. So how does Lewis play with this idea, the theme of trust in that relationship with Ross's mom?
[00:24:27] Erin Nuttall: Well, as we talked about in, I think it was episode two, but don't quote me, trust is the main theme for the book. And so there's a lot of exploration of that. And Ross having to deal with learning how to trust and who to trust and maybe who not to trust. That's one of her big obstacles as she explores relationships with her peers and the gambit.
And as she tries to break away from her mom as well 'cause she is still relying on that bedrock of her mom through most of the story. Which, ah, it, you know, ends up adding a lot of tension and a lot of emotion later in the story. Because spoiler alert, Mom betrays Ross. I know I've mentioned it already in this episode, but still it's just such a big surprise that Mom betrays Ross to such a giant extent.
[00:25:27] Anne-Marie Strohman: And this is another example of Lewis taking an already deeply explored theme up a notch.
[00:25:33] Erin Nuttall: Yes. Yes. That is what happens. Like every time you turn the page, the volume goes higher. By the time we're at the end, we're not at 11, we're at like 111.
[00:25:43] Anne-Marie Strohman: So start us off with that, the betrayal, the kind of first moment of betrayal that Ross experiences about Mom.
[00:25:51] Erin Nuttall: So the first betrayal happens to Ross when she is eight, although she does not realize that it's her mom who does the actual betraying, but she finds out it's her mom at the end of the story. But it's a betrayal that sticks with her. So let me tell you a little bit about it so you can understand.
So when Ross and Noelia, who we haven't met yet, but she is from another thieving family who is in the gambit with Ross, they were best friends when they were like eight. And they were at a ski camp together and they just had so much fun. And Ross finally had somebody whose life was mirrored to hers and she could relate to who had an, a demanding parent and a weird life, right? And so they had a great time. And then at the time Ross believes that Noelia betrays her. And at the end of the story, we find out that it was actually Mom who set up Ross and Noelia so that they would believe that each one of them betrayed the other and ruined this friendship in order to teach Ross a lesson that she could only trust her family.
And it was a good lesson ‘cause Ross really, she really swallowed it, you know, hook, line and sinker. But Ross finds out towards the end of the story that that is what had happened. That she and Noelia were bitter enemies and didn't need to be. They could have been friends this whole time, and Mom had ruined that.
[00:27:28] Anne-Marie Strohman: That is crushing. And it works as a huge betrayal because Lewis has set up this emotional relationship with the mom and these emotional stakes of her mom being kidnapped and trying to get her back. Mom has been the steadiest part of her life. Mom set it up so that she was the steadiest part of her life, and now she starts to realize that she can't trust that one person she knows she can trust.
[00:27:53] Erin Nuttall: Right. So this whole house of cards that Mom set up and that Ross believed was a house of bricks of trust between Ross and her mom has now started to collapse. But of course we gotta turn it up a notch. So..
[00:28:14] Anne-Marie Strohman: I should know to expect this from Kayvion Lewis. She takes something that's already huge and extreme and makes it bigger and more extreme. How does she do that here?
[00:28:23] Erin Nuttall: So she has mom betray Ross in another way as she has a second betrayal. Ross finds out that mom staged her own kidnapping. And…
[00:28:36] Anne-Marie Strohman: Bomb.
[00:28:37] Erin Nuttall: I know, and it's so bad because throughout the entire story, anytime Ross starts to get distracted or starts to trust other people, anytime there's a mom's voice back in her head that she can't trust anyone and that she needs to be saved.
Ross is constantly looking to save her mom. It's really, really prominent in her thoughts, and drives all of her actions. And now all of a sudden, guess what? She wasn’t ever in danger. She never was. No one was gonna kill her.
So the billion dollars wasn't even a thing. The whole thing, all of this trauma, and difficulty that Ross had been through was for nothing.
[00:29:20] Anne-Marie Strohman: What a twist. And it's such a bigger betrayal, and we can anticipate that Ross might not know what to do now, and we talked about this in our theme episode, right? That the book ends with the line. “Luckily, I had a new rule number one: Trust no one.”
[00:29:35] Erin Nuttall: That's right. And her mom leads her to this. And not only, I mean, I think because—because we want to trust our parents. And because her mom had emphasized this so much, I think Ross was willing, like she was open to seeing that maybe her mom had a good reason. But then this is her mom's response, she says on page 359, “’I wasn't trying to hurt you,’ Mom insisted putting her hands up. ‘I never put you in any danger,’” which is not a hundred percent true. Oh, but here's the rest of it. “‘I never put you in any danger I knew you couldn't handle. You're fine, aren't you?’” And then Ross thinks “fine. Was this what she called fine? My sanity, my emotions. Those were both dangerously close to being permanently dented.”
And then Ross realizes that this was all part of a bigger play for her mom to keep her under her thumb for the rest of her life. If her mom had been successful and Ross had never found out that the kidnapping was staged, then Ross would be under her mom's thumb forever.
She would never feel free to leave. She would never feel free to be her own person. She would never feel free to make friends have a romance, have a life. That her mom would control her for the rest of her life because she would always be worried that something like this would happen again, which is really the worst part of the betrayal because you gotta let your kids grow up, even though you might not want them to. You gotta let 'em grow up and that's what the kids want too. They wanna grow up. So as a kid reading this, you totally can understand what a huge, huge burden that would be on Ross. And she's a huge hypocrite, which kids hate.
[00:31:31] Anne-Marie Strohman: Also that.
[00:31:33] Erin Nuttall: If anyone hates hypocrisy. If anyone hates hypocrisy, it's teenagers, which is fair. It's fair.
[00:31:42] Anne-Marie Strohman: Well, and Lewis set the mom up so well, where we get what we realized later is that blatant lie at the beginning. That your family will never lie to you and that you can only trust your family. And she just turns that on its head.
[00:31:57] Erin Nuttall: And then it was all manipulation on, on her mom's part. Like, oh, that's not trust. That's the opposite.
[00:32:05] Anne-Marie Strohman: Right. And so we get then back to that last line where she learns from that trust no one. So Erin, what are you taking away from today's episode?
[00:32:19] Erin Nuttall: I think how exciting it can be to turn it up a notch in for sure, right in the, in the heist part. Right. But that's not like new information, but to do so in the emotional arc, um, is something I think we can sometimes be scared of doing. Do we wanna ruin that mother-daughter relationship?
Because that's, you know, but think about the story payoff for that. It's huge. What about you? I.
[00:32:50] Anne-Marie Strohman: I am gonna take away what we were talking about with the quote on page 23, where the mom is really explicit about what she thinks Ross should do and the idea that that can work because of leading up to it, because it confirms something that we already have seen from Ross's perspective. And that using that, I think I shy away from making those big claims or like having someone actually say the thing aloud. And so this, I think gives me an avenue to do that in the right moments by not having it be the only time we hear it. Right? That it's, that that can be a confirmation of something I've seeded through a portion of the story.
[00:33:35] Erin Nuttall: With that, I do really like this idea that we are understanding that Ross is reliable to us as the reader. Because it would be really easy to be like, okay, Ross, like, you know, you're telling us this stuff.
[00:33:50] Anne-Marie Strohman: You're so dramatic.
[00:33:52] Erin Nuttall: Yeah. And you could do the opposite as well. Like you could, instead of having the mom say something that upheld Ross's, what Ross has told us, that we could see that maybe Ross sees the world a little differently than reality. So that would also be a way if you had an unreliable narrator, that you could show your reader that maybe you don't wanna trust this person, but fully we'll see. Well, you know, keep reading, find out.
[00:34:24] Anne-Marie Strohman: Unreliable narrators sound scary to write, but someday, someday.
[00:34:28] Erin Nuttall: Scary and fun. Okay, so Anne-Marie, what is this episode's Cool Gadget? I always love this portion of this season.
[00:34:38] Anne-Marie Strohman: So this one's not so much a gadget, but a cool use of an ordinary item. The humble bobby pin. Early in the novel after Ross has been invited to the gambit, she's asking her auntie about it in this training room in her house, which is a great moment of world building where they're just in a conversation in this kind of wacky room with all these heisty things in it, practice things.
[00:35:01] Erin Nuttall: All these heisty things.
[00:35:05] Anne-Marie Strohman: So her auntie grabs a pair of handcuffs from a box of practice locks and picks them with a bobby pin and then handcuffs Ross with her hands behind her back. And here's what the narration says “On instinct I double-Dutch jumped the cuffs and fished my own bobby pin out of my braids. I had enough in there to build a little castle.” So then she unlocks the handcuffs slowly during this conversation and we see that it's just not a big deal. She picks these locks really easily.
Then later in the novel, during the gambit, she finds out that Devroe has a tie pin that's perfect for picking locks. So we get a, another kind of common object that can do the same thing. And then Taiyō has lock picking glasses, which are kind of fun. And Ross has some multi-use lock picks that she sews into the pockets of her jackets and she uses those to unlock the over 30 different locks on the door. She needs to get through the start of the gambit. So lots of lock picking going on.
[00:36:03] Erin Nuttall: Right. Well you got to, you got, you got a—a thieves gambit. So.
[00:36:08] Anne-Marie Strohman: Yes, there's gonna be some lock picking. So late in the book, Ross has been handcuffed to a hotel balcony, railing high up on the outside of the railing. And she's in a position where she can't reach the bobby pins in her hair without her feet slipping 'cause she tries it. Of course. Then some kids come out on the next balcony and she asks them to send her bobby pins.
And she has the idea that they probably have a dart gun. And so they send Nerf darts to her with bobby pins inserted into them. And so she does get this bobby pin, and this time she unclicks the cuffs, and it happens in half a sentence. And this is cool for a few reasons. First, it's a great use of an ordinary item. It's also a great use of a kid focused item, this dart gun that comes in, and it's clever.
[00:36:59] Erin Nuttall: It was such a fun scene that to have the juxtaposition of Ross like hanging off the balcony in danger, mortal danger. And then you have these two little kids on the other balcony who are just being little kids and using a dart gun, which I thought was really, really fun.
[00:37:20] Anne-Marie Strohman: And it's also cool, I will tell you, that because Kayvion sets up Ross's skills, picking locks with bobby pins, and even more specifically picking handcuff locks with bobby pins. So in that first scene, we know she's capable of it and that it takes her a bit of time. And in the second scene, she uses that skill but with a twist, because she's not able to get her own bobby pin so she has to be creative in getting a bobby pin. And we also don't need to see that whole unlocking process 'cause we've seen it before. It can just happen really quickly in that sentence so that the pacing of the scene doesn't slow down. And you won't be surprised that even though Ross has solved this problem, she walks into the hall and faces even more problems.
It's… She uses it as just the first in a series of obstacles. So for me, it's not just the gadget itself, but the way she sets it up and pays it off so effectively. And we could just kind of see like, that's a nice arc. We see the bobby pins at the beginning, picking the handcuff locks.
We see it at the end. Oh, ta-da. But again, she like amps it. She gives us what we know, and then she amps it up after that.
[00:38:28] Erin Nuttall: Right. Well, and even the use of the dart gun is just another amp up, right? Like…
[00:38:36] Anne-Marie Strohman: Adds a creative element to it.
[00:38:37] Erin Nuttall: It's super creative. I thought it was really, really cute. I like the little nod to there are regular people in this hotel.
[00:38:47] Anne-Marie Strohman: Yes. Also that, yeah, there's, it's a great scene.
That's it for today. If you're enjoying this podcast, you can find more content like this at kidlitcraft.com where you can find more information and register for the Ask the Author book club, and our class offerings. You can also sign up for our newsletter, for great craft tips, info on upcoming events and more.
[Music outro]
[00:39:12] Anne-Marie Strohman: Find us on social media @KidLitCraft, and you can support this podcast on Patreon. We've also got t-shirts, which you can find at Cotton Bureau, and there'll be a link in the show notes.
[00:39:23] Erin Nuttall: Please download episodes; like, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen; and let your writer friends know about the podcast. We can't wait to nerd out with you.
[00:39:33] Anne-Marie Strohman: Thanks for joining us. See you next time.
