Thieves' Gambit, Ep. 6: Introducing a Big Cast of Characters
Introducing a lot of characters can lead to a muddle in readers’ minds. Erin and Anne-Marie explore why you may want to use a big cast, identify pitfalls to avoid, and break down how Kayvion Lewis introduces the nine teen thieves in Thieves’ Gambit in a way that draws readers in rather than confuses them.
Books we mention in this episode (affiliate links):
One of Us is Lying by Karen McManus
The Thousandth Floor by Katharine McGee
Inheritance Games by Jennifer Lynn Barnes (also see Erin’s craft article on pacing and plot in Inheritance Games)
First Rule of Climate Club by Carrie Firestone
Harbor Me by Jacqueline Woodson
How it Went Down by Kekla Magoon
The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall (also see Anne-Marie’s craft article on POV in The Penderwicks)
Get your copy of THIEVES’ GAMBIT from Bookshop.org and support the podcast!
Find more content like this at kidlitcraft.com
Sign up for our Ask the Author Book Club, featuring Michael Leali (Feb), Randy Ribay (Mar), and Lindsay Lackey (Apr) at kidlitcraft.com/book-club
Buy T-shirts and sweatshirts (click on “small logo” or “big logo” for a range of styles)
Email us at podcast@kidlitcraft.com
Sign up for our newsletter
Transcript
[00:00:00] Erin Nuttall: I mean, nobody wants to be that girl, but so often we are.
[Music intro]
[00:00:06] Anne-Marie Strohman: Welcome to season two, episode six 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 introducing a big group of characters. I'm Anne-Marie Strohman and I write for children and young adults as well as short stories for adults.
[00:00:25] Erin Nuttall: And I'm Erin Nuttall and I write stories for young adults.
[00:00:29] 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 we are more than just a podcast. Our website has over 400 craft articles. We offer novel writing and revision classes. We also have a live Ask the Author book club coming up this spring and you can find out more about all of it at kidlitcraft.com.
So Erin, let's start with the big cast of characters. I don't think we need to define any of those terms in our usual vocabulary session. But I have to confess, big casts kind of scare me. I am most comfortable with a main character and a few big side characters, and maybe a friend or two.
How about you?
[00:01:12] Erin Nuttall: As you know, I love to do the big cast of characters. So this was a fun one to break down this book and see how Kayvion Lewis set it up because you are right to be scared. It can be scary.
[00:01:27] Anne-Marie Strohman: There are some tricks.
[00:01:28] Erin Nuttall: There are definitely some tricks because it is really easy to lose your reader in introducing a whole bunch of characters. They don't remember who is who. They don't know them well or at all, so they don't care. And those are kind of the two big issues that you need to look for is you need to introduce them in a way that is distinct and give the reader enough to care at least a little bit, care enough to keep reading, even if they are a tiny bit confused about who is who.
Hopefully they're not confused, but you know, you're not in everybody's brain. So you don't know. But if you can get 'em to care a little bit, then they'll keep reading. And then hopefully get to know your characters better.
[00:02:14] Anne-Marie Strohman: Okay. Well we are gonna talk in detail about how to do that on the page, but before we get there, what are some of the benefits of having a big cast or a big group of secondary characters who are all in a lot of scenes?
[00:02:27] Erin Nuttall: I think there are a lot of benefits. One is that it's fun to see how different kids interact. I personally really like conversations where you have a lot of people, playing off each other and responding to each other. I find those really interesting if they're done well.
[00:02:46] Anne-Marie Strohman: Those are tricky too.
[00:02:47] Erin Nuttall: Yeah, they can be really tricky. And then a big cast gives you a lot of different personalities to explore and a lot of different reactions to explore.
If you think about some really popular books in the last handful of years, and there's like, One of Us Is Lying. You have five or six kids who are all together a lot. The Thousandth Floor. That one is, again, a big handful of kids. And you really see things from all of their perspectives. Six of Crows is a little older, but oh man, it's a good one for a big cast. Inheritance Games: super popular. You've got all those brothers, you've got the sisters. You've got the friends. Like you have a lot. You have all the bad guys, you got a lot going on there. And it's engaging and it's fun.
And especially if you're in a book like Thieves’ Gambit where everything is cranked up, it makes the characters on par with the story, if that makes sense. If you just had the one or two and then you had this massive, I mean, you could do it obviously, but it's more fun to do it with a lot of kids.
[00:03:53] Anne-Marie Strohman: I was thinking of some middle grade examples. So First Rule of Climate Club by Carrie Firestone has a class full of kids.
[00:04:01] Erin Nuttall: Hmm.
[00:04:01] Anne-Marie Strohman: And then Harbor Me by Jacqueline Woodson also has a group of kids who each tell each other's stories.
[00:04:07] Erin Nuttall: Oh, right.
[00:04:08] Anne-Marie Strohman: So there are a lot of different personalities and perspectives on the world that you get by having more in that group, even though you do still have a central character.
And I think all of the examples, or most of the examples? No, some of your examples don't have a central character.
[00:04:22] Erin Nuttall: Actually, most of my examples do not.
[00:04:24] Anne-Marie Strohman: Yeah. Inheritance Games does, and this one does that we're looking at today.
[00:04:27] Erin Nuttall: Yeah, yeah. So it is an interesting way you can do it because you don't have to have a main character.
[00:04:33] Anne-Marie Strohman: No, but I was thinking of Kekla Magoon's, How It Went Down, which is an—an older book, but that is a multi-point of view character where there's not really a main character. There's an event and all the different characters experience this event and we see that event in the aftermath from each of their perspectives. I think there's something like 18…
[00:04:53] Erin Nuttall: There's a lot.
[00:04:54] Anne-Marie Strohman: I wanna say 30 perspectives. I dunno, it's a lot. Uh. But it's, it's a masterclass in having a huge cast of characters. And it really matters for that book because it's about perspective and witnessing and reliability and how we engage as communities. So it's another one of those things where the choices that she makes really matter to the story itself.
[00:05:18] Erin Nuttall: Right. Well, because they all witnessed a crime and then to see how every individual responds to that is interesting to explore. So there is that, but yeah, One of Us is Lying, Thousandth Floor, Six of Crows. They all are multi POV. And in some ways I really feel like that is an easier way to do a big cast of characters because each point of view you get to see the interiority of each character. So even if they're only briefly seen in someone else's point of view you soon get to see their desire lines, their internal view of the world. And so it is a really common way to handle a big cast of characters. And I think that is why, because you get to really dive deep into each one.
[00:06:02] Anne-Marie Strohman: There's a cost though too that when you shift to the reader's attention, there's—there's a little bump.
[00:06:07] Erin Nuttall: Right.
[00:06:07] Anne-Marie Strohman: so if another character's perspective isn't as interesting as the previous character, their attention might flag. So you really have to be careful with that.
And in something like Six of Crows where the world is so expansive and it's this giant fantasy realm, you kind of have to have more than one point of view because you need people to be in different places at different times for all the pieces of the story to come together.
[00:06:29] Erin Nuttall: Oh, for sure. Yes. And you're right there is that, there is that risk where you might be like in a character’s perspective that you're like, oh, this guy's so boring. So yes, there is that, there's the risk that your character voices don't— aren't differentiated enough. And so you're like, wait, who's talking again? Who are we in again? That's a really tricky one.
[00:06:49] Anne-Marie Strohman: We've talked about first person point of view and multiple point of view, for each, first person. But what about a third person point of view or something omniscient? I was thinking of The Penderwicks, a middle grade novel where there's a very voicey, omniscient narrator who feels like a character in the beginning, but then the narrator slips into close third perspective with each of the four Penderwick sisters at different points. So it's still one narrator, but we get that interiority and that internal perspective.
[00:07:18] Erin Nuttall: Right. That tends to be a more common thing to do for middle grade than you do for YA. YA tends to be more immediate, more first person, more present tense. One that is super well done is Julie Barry's The Lovely War. So there is a YA one that I can think of that is really well done that has that third person and also has an omniscient narrator. Actually has more than one omniscient narrator. It has the cast of the Roman or maybe Greek gods who are the narrators and they are omniscient and they are in the heavens peering down and talking about their favorite characters.
And when they do that, they go into really close third for that character. And that was just a really interesting way to do a—a big cast of characters. But also most of the big cast was the gods. She only had like, I mean, I guess it was maybe three or four POVs, but. Anyway, it, most of the time for YA, you have first person.
[00:08:24] Anne-Marie Strohman: So in this book we are just in Ross's point of view and let's look a little bit more closely about how Lewis handles this big cast of character in the thieves’ gambit from this first person point of view. I found the reading experience seamless. Lewis didn't suffer from any of the big pitfalls of this big cast. And she really leaned into the benefits. So talk to us a little bit about how the point of view piece works here.
[00:08:50] Erin Nuttall: So first, as we mentioned in our last episode, we get to know Ross first really well. So we have the beginning of the book. We meet Ross. We meet her mom, we understand her life, we understand her desires. And then Mom gets kidnapped and her desire shifts a little bit, but we also, well more than a little bit, her desire shifts from gymnastics camp to saving her mom.
But we know and like, and trust Ross. And so now once she's in the gambit, we're introduced to everybody else and we're introduced through her perspective, we believe her. And—and then it also lets us as the reader take a breath to meet these people. It's almost as though we are ourselves are in that room meeting those people.
Right? Because in some ways we become Ross as we're reading and as we're introduced to these people,
[00:09:47] Anne-Marie Strohman: Yeah. So we're really talking about this scene where Ross is locked in a room. There are 30 plus locks on the door that she has to pick out of this kind of cell she's in to get into this main room. She was on a flight here and we find out later that someone she noticed on the flight is one of the competitors in the gambit. So we have a little introduction early that we don't realize is an introduction. But she gets into the room and, tell us a little bit about this room and kind of how we get to the characters. Does she walk in on all of them at once and give us the rundown? How does this work?
[00:10:24] Erin Nuttall: So Ross is expecting to open the door into a dungeon which I really like. But she doesn't. Or she says a very nice dungeon. It's a windowless room with at least a dozen doors. And then there's armchair and velvet sofas and everything's, and they're all positioned in a circle. And there's no one else in the room except one person.
And the— the first thing that is, she looks at her and then Ross narrates “Noelia Boschert, as if things couldn't get any worse.” And then right after that, “Noelia Boschert was the one person on the planet I would've paid money to never see again.” Which is a great introduction to another character because now my curiosity is peaked. What's up with Noelia? Why? Why is she the one person on earth that Ross would never want to see again?
[00:11:22] Anne-Marie Strohman: I think it's Boschert.
[00:11:24] Erin Nuttall: Aren't you so smart? You can read. Now I feel like my kid who I'm like, oh yeah, let me tell you how to actually pronounce that.
[00:11:34] Anne-Marie Strohman: I know you would care later. You would be like, why didn't you tell me?
[00:11:37] Erin Nuttall: I know. Yeah. No, it's good. I, but so, it's funny what the mind does. 'cause I've read this book and I've read Boschert a million times, and in my mind it's boar shirt. So there you go.
[00:11:48] Anne-Marie Strohman: I do stuff like that all the time.
[00:11:50] Erin Nuttall: So why is Noelia, the last person that Ross wants to see? And then here we get the a little bit of backstory, which is super nice, and it's the backstory that we talked about in the last episode, which is that Noelia and Ross were good friends when they were little, and then Mom tricks them both into thinking that they betrayed each other. Right? And at this point, all they think is the other one betrayed the other one. So we're not surprised to hear that “Noelia had been a recurring cockroach that kept crawling into the corners of my life ever since.”
And we also find out that they have spent the intervening time trying to undermine one another. So we get a very strong introduction to Noelia, which is important because Noelia is one of the most important of the group of gambit competitors of this group of characters.
[00:12:46] Anne-Marie Strohman: So tell us a little bit about their interaction. Right, so we've got, she enters the room, she sees Noelia, we hear her internal thoughts. We get a brief physical description of Noelia. We hear this backstory for the first time, and we find out about the intervening years.
[00:13:01] Erin Nuttall: And their first interaction is snarky. They're both a little snarky to each other, but then almost simultaneously they notice the bottoms of each other's shoes. And they find out that they both like shoes with quirky bottoms, which is not something that ever would've occurred to me that existed.
But it's fun that it exists and that these girls who have a lot of money spend it on shoes with, with quirky bottoms. And so they see that they have this thing in common and they're both kind of annoyed.
[00:13:32] Anne-Marie Strohman: And it gives us, as readers this idea that we see the conflict, we understand the backstory and this conflict, but we see this little tiny bit of connection and it gives us a, a sense of their relationship that they're, you know, if you have a villain who is, or a nemesis who's not connected to the main character at all, they're not really a nemesis. There has to be some kind of connection for this antagonistic relationship to work.
[00:13:59] Erin Nuttall: Right. And we have the connection that Ross believes Noelia betrayed her, and we have the connection that they actually both have the same taste in shoes. So we have these two opposing forces, so that's really, that's like extra nice.
[00:14:15] Anne-Marie Strohman: So I really like this idea of just introducing us to the nemesis in isolation right away before giving us all the other characters. Does this seem like an advantage to you?
[00:14:27] Erin Nuttall: It does seem like an advantage as it turns out. Because she turns out to be so important as an nemesis and then later as an ally it is nice to get the backstory. And then, like I mentioned, the backstory also underlines the trust issues that Ross has. And as a reader, we need to have feelings about Noelia and preferably the same feelings that Ross has. And so this is a great way to do that.
[00:14:54] Anne-Marie Strohman: And I think her being alone in the room is actually really important for this. I know at, when we were both at VCFA, we heard a lot about pause button violations, right? Where you're in the middle of a scene and you pause to give a lot of backstory or tell a lot of information and then move forward in the scene. And if you had a room with six or eight competitors in it, or more than that…
[00:15:19] Erin Nuttall: Mm-hmm
[00:15:20] Anne-Marie Strohman: And Ross is focused just on Noelia, you're much more likely to have a situation where you're just, okay, everybody freeze so I can, you know, face the audience and tell you all this information and then we'll go back into the scene.
And so by just isolating that, that she's able to have a conversation, we're not worrying about what else is happening in the room. Lewis doesn't have to like, use sound to show us that there's a number of people in the room or describe everybody in the room. She keeps us really focused on that relationship by just having Noelia in the room.
[00:15:55] Erin Nuttall: Right, for sure. And yeah, you don't have to worry about what conversations are happening around that she's not being privy to. I really like how she has done the setup because we are going to meet in a matter of, I don't know, less than 10 pages, I think, a whole bunch of kids.
And yet we as the reader have the time and the space to internalize these characters and to understand their importance in the story.
[00:16:21] Anne-Marie Strohman: And Noelia has bested her at the very beginning.
[00:16:27] Erin Nuttall: She has because above each door, the door that they come out of, there's a clock that says how long it took them to get through those 30 locks. And Noelia is not only already there, she's there sitting legs crossed. So I don't remember what the time difference was. But it was…
[00:16:45] Anne-Marie Strohman: That's gotta rankle, right?
[00:16:46] Erin Nuttall: It, it does, yeah.
[00:16:48] Anne-Marie Strohman: Your frenemy is already beating you at the gambit, and you are desperate to beat the gambit. Or win the gambit.
[00:16:54] Erin Nuttall: Yeah. So for sure that it is, it is a great introduction to a nemesis and one who plays such an important role.
[00:17:02] Anne-Marie Strohman: Okay, so now we have the skinny on Noelia and the room does not stay empty. Who else does Ross meet and how?
[00:17:09] Erin Nuttall: So the first one who comes in next is she says, “the white boy from my plane. Flipped his hair back and turned to see the screen above him.” And then she does a brief description of him. She says, “I hadn't noticed before, but he was wearing dark eyeliner, unstrapped suspenders, swung over his pant legs.
It was a casual look. Maybe he was trying to appear casual. Casual people are approachable.” So we get his physical description, which is nice. But we also get Ross's interpretation of his physical description, which gives us as the reader something interesting to latch onto. She goes on to expand a little bit more.
His accent was standard American, a little bit more about his physical description. and then he fishes a deck of cards out of his pocket. And so now we also have this physical object that becomes part of him as a character. And then she says this, “you know, I'd never seen someone so disappointed to not find themselves in immediate danger. He almost seemed annoyed.” So he too is expecting a dungeon, maybe a torture chamber of some kind that he had to escape. Which is important, she notices his interaction with Noelia. And, and that is important because we, again, see the importance of Noelia to Ross. And so right after that, we get a, a girl and we get a short physical description of her.
Everything is the same. We get a short physical description. We are looking at, we get a little bit about her, like Ross attributing a motive to her a little bit. And then we see her interaction with Noelia. And so that is, is nice 'cause we have the same things happening again with the next person.
[00:18:57] Anne-Marie Strohman: And she highlights too um, the American accent. She says, I, I was pretty sure she was Hindi. So we have the, the international flavor of the competition in there as well. And we know that she was with Noelia in Switzerland. So we have that kind of international vibe happening and we also don't have any names yet.
[00:19:16] Erin Nuttall: Right, other than Noelia's we do not. Which is nice because we actually will get to the names a little bit later. So there are more kids we get a very quick description of, of four kids right in a row. 1, 2, 3, 4. Physical description, race, gender, clothing, hair, accessory. And then Ross gives them a nickname which is helpful cause we don't have a, a proper name, right?
[00:19:42] Anne-Marie Strohman: Mm-hmm.
[00:19:43] Erin Nuttall: And we get a, a personality feature through Ross's perspective. And then I will say, I really liked how she did these personality features because she used alliteration, which was like, you know, not required. But she totally did. So she's saucy, smug, smirk, shivered, scramble, scary scattering, sociopath.
And then my favorite blood lust. Because if you really wanna underline your alliteration throw in one that isn't. And so we get four kids and we follow the same pattern and so we see them really quickly, right?
[00:20:22] Anne-Marie Strohman: And it mentioned we get Ross's perspective on these people and it also, all of these descriptions and what she notices. It's showing us her observational skills too. And this is important to the thieving competition.
It's also very nice to have a character that notices things. I've written characters that don't notice a lot and it's, can be very difficult when you're in first person.
[00:20:42] Erin Nuttall: Oh, for sure.
[00:20:42] Anne-Marie Strohman: That is that character attribute and that skill that she has is really helpful to Lewis in giving us the lowdown on each of these characters because Ross would analyze them. She would notice all of these things because of her career and because of her personality.
[00:21:00] Erin Nuttall: And they are her competition that she is going to defeat, It is nice. When you have those kind of less observant characters it's tricky to inform the reader while keeping the character in character.
[00:21:14] Anne-Marie Strohman: Yeah, it's hard.
[00:21:15] Erin Nuttall: We, we’ll have to do another episode on that sometime.
[00:21:19] Anne-Marie Strohman: So we had a very long description and encounter with Noelia, and then each new character gets a little less time. Lewis is really being careful with how she's pacing this scene. If she spent the same amount of time with each character, we would get things very long and bogged down, and it would also make each character feel equally important.
[00:21:37] Erin Nuttall: And Yawns-ville, right?
[00:21:39] Anne-Marie Strohman: Yeah, right? Speed it up. Speed it up. Um, we’ve met almost everyone at this point, but there is one more. Maybe the best for last.
[00:21:50] Erin Nuttall: Yes, for sure. The best for last in my opinion, as the romantic of, of the two of us. So. Lewis bookends Noelia at the beginning, who is the nemesis, and then Devroe at the end, who is the romantic interest. And it's, I'll—I'll read you the encounters because they're really fun. So the deck of cards is more than just a prop for our American white guy because he ends up using it as, as a way to interact with some of the other contestants and they end up scattering. So Ross decides to help pick up the cards, which was a very calculated move on her part, which I also thought was interesting, but that's a side note. But she says, “I leaned over to pick up a card, but another hand reached at the same time, warm fingers brushed over mine. My head shot up and I was breathlessly face to face with a new boy. My heart skipped. Another Black person. Finally.” So we get a lot of information in one, two, three sentences? And we get that, okay, this dude, he could break her heart or, or win her heart, or, you know, we've got, it's her heart's doing stuff. It's skipping. So…
[00:23:11] Anne-Marie Strohman: Even before she sees him, right? Warm fingers brushing over mine. Like that gives us like, oh, this is the, something's happening here. This, there's chemistry here. Even before she sees him.
[00:23:22] Erin Nuttall: Yes. I mean, her heart waits to see him. 'Cause you know, it doesn't wanna waste time if it's, if you're not gonna be attracted, but for sure. Yeah. And then we get Ross's take. And her take is pretty positive. he's got a British accent. Who doesn't love that? She says he's the sharpest dressed of all, showing off his Rolex, perfectly sponged hair, beyond handsome and he knew it. But then a little bit of Ross's calculating personality is shown, she says, and “used it to his advantage whenever he could.” So she is not just giving him a pass 'cause he's so hot. She's still in competitor mode and in fact, she says, “I mentally chided myself. Ross Quest was not going to be that girl who started swooning over the hot guy after five minutes.”
I mean, nobody wants to be that girl, but so often we are.
[Laughter]
[00:24:19] Anne-Marie Strohman: Denial, denial, denial.
[00:24:21] Erin Nuttall: So then Devroe shows himself to be actually quite a bit different than Ross because he sees he's last and he immediately suggests that they tell each other their names and countries. And Ross is like, I'm not here to make friends. Right? They all jump on board with this idea.
They realize that that more information is better than no information. So we have two and a half pages, so not very long, and we get quite a bit more about each character. We also get their relation to each other and to Ross, you know, where they're from, what their names are.
We get a little bit more of Ross's perspective. So what we have initially is we have a physical description and Ross's perspective on them. And maybe like a specific attribute. And that's it. We get very little at the beginning. And then it's a second introduction where we get more.
None of it is a lot except for Noelia and the backstory. But we get enough where we can keep track of the characters and we can be like, oh, this person is interesting. I wanna learn more about them. And that’s really what you need to keep people reading, when you have a really big cast of characters.
[00:25:34] Anne-Marie Strohman: Yeah. And she's made them all very different from each other too, right? We have the built in international that they're gonna be from different places and have different accents and then she makes them personality wise and characteristics different as well.
[00:25:51] Erin Nuttall: Right. And there's race differences and they are all rich. Possibly with the exception of Mylo, 'cause he's…And maybe Taiyō, 'cause we have a couple who don't come from families of, so we have a little bit of that. But they also show their wealth in different ways. And they show what's important to them in different ways. So they're all very unique, which is helpful.
[00:26:16] Anne-Marie Strohman: Mm-hmm. And as we've talked about in another episode, we do have situations where they're grouped together in smaller groups. So we get to know some of those characters more than we do the competitors that are working in other groups.
[00:26:32] Erin Nuttall: Yes. So it turns out through the rest of the story that there are a handful of kids who gravitate to each other and much to Ross's dismay, they end up having to work together in groups. It's like on other reality shows where they're like, okay, and now you're going to all build a dress together. And everybody's like, no, I hate working in groups. And that's how they, that's definitely how Ross felt.
[00:27:01] Anne-Marie Strohman: I mean, that's real life too, right?
[00:27:03] Erin Nuttall: I know when your teacher would be like, okay, now let's get into groups. And you're like, great. Now I'm doing the work of four people.
[00:27:10] Anne-Marie Strohman: Well, you are, I'm lazing. No, I'm just kidding. Okay, so.
Lewis has really haloed the two most important characters in this intro section, but she's given us enough information about the other characters that we're gonna be able to keep track of them. And I think your note about the objects that they have, that's a really helpful concrete way to connect to character. Uh, mention that object again and we'll pull up that character in our minds. So even if we don't remember them all the way, she's given us things to link back to next time we see the character. and as you mentioned that two and a half pages of the second introduction where we find out the names, that just reinforces the people that we've met.
[00:27:50] Erin Nuttall: Right, and as you mentioned, this is a great way to do pacing because it would be really boring if we just had one introduction of each of them. Then it was long and they were all the same, right? Like you said. So I don't know about you, but for me it helps to learn things incrementally.
And so to get a little bit and then to be like, okay, I'm good here. All right. And then to get a little bit more and be like, oh, I can build on what I learned before. So I think that's helpful.
[00:28:19] Anne-Marie Strohman: Yeah, she's very sure handed in how she does this. And I feel like, again, it's, I said this at the beginning, it was a seamless reading experience. I didn't feel lost with any of the characters I was able to follow, and I knew, you know, even by that second introduction, I was like, oh, she's not gonna let me forget who these people are. She's not gonna make just a random crowd. I'm gonna be able to identify these different characters as I go through the story.
[00:28:45] Erin Nuttall: I do think that it, the way she does it gives the reader a lot of trust in her as the author and the writer that we can rely on her to help us keep track. And that is nice to have as a reader because sometimes you get a big group and you're like, uh. And you don't know if you wanna keep reading or not because the author hasn't set that up that you trust her as an author or it’s so early in the book that you don't know who's important and who's not, if you just dropped into a big group of kids. She does a, a fantastic job, If any, if you're looking to introduce a big group of characters, this is a great book to study.
[00:29:29] Anne-Marie Strohman: Awesome. So Erin, what are you taking away from this episode?
[00:29:32] Erin Nuttall: You know, I agree with you. It was a seamless reading. And so when we talked about doing this book as a podcast and really taking it apart I was excited to really pay better attention and see how she introduced us to the big cast 'cause like I said, I do like to write a big cast, and it can be really tricky.
So I was excited to see that. And I hadn't noticed the second introduction as like a separate piece. I did notice that she had, and because of the way I read now, I am, I'm always looking for craft, but I don't always notice everything, especially if the story's really involved and exciting.
I hadn't noticed the second introduction, and that is what I think I'm gonna take away is that, that second introduction is really a helpful piece to reminding the reader of who people are and building on what the reader already knows about the characters. What about you?
[00:30:26] Anne-Marie Strohman: Oh, well, I was gonna say about yours that, you know, we get them each individually and then we see them interacting as a group, even just for a short time. And that can help to see people in action too, instead of just the static introductions we get at first.
[00:30:40] Erin Nuttall: Right. And I do think that that's really helpful, like where Ross is noticing how they interact with Noelia specifically.
[00:30:47] Anne-Marie Strohman: Mm-hmm
[00:30:48] Erin Nuttall: It sets Noelia up as a leader in this group, but it also gives us some of that interacting. ‘Cause there's people she ignores, there's people that she's like, come be my bestie. And then we see Ross's interpretation of that. So there's a lot going on.
[00:31:04] Anne-Marie Strohman: It's a lot. Every page of this book has a lot going on. My thing that I'm taking away kind of goes along with that, where I am, I have this image in my mind of how it's laid out where we get the bigger part of Noelia and the bigger part of Devroe at the end, and then all the other people in between, and just how much that halos each of those characters and how important that can be because it gives us a priority.
Just the, the amount of space given to each character gives a little bit of priority to the characters. It helps us know which ones we should pay more attention to and which ones less at this point in the story. Because we have limited capacities in our little brains, and if everyone has equal weight, like our brains are gonna have trouble with that.
And so that idea of haloing the most important characters and also splitting them up. If it had been Noelia and then Devroe and then everybody else, it would not have worked.
[00:31:59] Erin Nuttall: It's true.
[00:32:00] Anne-Marie Strohman: We needed that separation between those two. Yeah. The bookending those characters.
[00:32:05] Erin Nuttall: For sure. So great. I am so glad when we both learn something and when we learn different things, it's very exciting. Okay, so what is this episode's Cool Gadget?
[00:32:16] Anne-Marie Strohman: This is, for the second week in a row, less a gadget and more technique. But last week with the bobby pins, I got interested in this technique because it's in the first chapter and it foreshadows something that happens late in the book, and we'll talk about the later thing next week. I'll save that. But for today, it's this concept of a jigsaw job.
So at the start, when Ross is on the initial heist, stuck in the cabinet in the mansion, her job is to get a vase out.
[00:32:45] Erin Nuttall: Right.
[00:32:46] Anne-Marie Strohman: Uh, but her mom's been working this job for weeks, and here is what she says on page five. “She called this a jigsaw job. Piece by piece. She smuggled in shards of a replica and assembled it. For someone as skilled as Mom switching the real one with a fake was child's play.
Unfortunately, the owner was rightfully concerned about theft. Security searched the staff each day when they left.” Mom’s pretending to be a maid. “Mom could move the vase around inside the house, but she wasn't going to get it out. That was my job.” And so this idea of having kinda a little bit more of like a plan for the heist, like a concept of this jigsaw job is so clever and especially because she introduces it so early and then it comes into play so much later in the book. Every time we talk about this book, I'm in awe about how much she has set up in these first few pages of the book.
[00:33:43] Erin Nuttall: It. It is really surprising, like. because you think, oh, this is just some fun heist you know, and, and you don't think, well, this is literature, right? But she uses the craft, and that's what makes it such a successful fun book. Because, you know, we've read books before. Everybody has where it's supposed to be a fun book and you're like, there's just something off, there's something missing. It falls flat. And I think that's the part that is missing and that, that Thieves’ Gambit has, is that she uses the tools of literature to make the story able to bear the weight of the fun.
[00:34:21] Anne-Marie Strohman: Absolutely. I love it. I love it.
[Music outro]
[00:34:25] Anne-Marie Strohman: So that's it for today. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more content like this at kidlitcraft.com, including our new Ask the Author book club, and some upcoming classes. You can find us on social media @KidLitCraft, and you can support this podcast on Patreon. We've also got t-shirts and drinkware and phone cases, and you can find those at Cotton Bureau. We'll have a link in the show notes.
[00:34:52] Erin Nuttall: And just an extra little plug for Anne-Marie's classes. Totally sign up for 'em. If this is something you're interested in, learning more about the craft of writing and how to become a better writer, you could not find a better teacher. She's fantastic.
[00:35:06] Anne-Marie Strohman: Oh thanks.
[00:35:07] Erin Nuttall: Well, I just tell the truth, so. Please download episodes; like, rate, and review us on Apple Podcast or wherever you listen; and let your writer friends know about the podcast or your grandma, or your book club or whoever you think might enjoy, because we can't wait to nerd out with you.
[00:35:23] Anne-Marie Strohman: Thanks for joining us. See you next time.
