Enthralling Skype with Author, Marieke Nijkamp
At the beginning of the school year, I planned a skype session for each of the three book groups that I run. On Monday, the high school book group had their chance to talk to an author. Marieke Nijkamp is Dutch and her first published book This is Where it Ends is all American. It is written from the point of view of several characters who experience 54 minutes of school when a student pulls a gun out during a school assembly and proceeds to kill and wound many. This skype session like all the ones that I do began with Nijkamp talking for 15 minutes about how she came to write this book (she was visiting the US during the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting), all the research that she did (she talked to American friends who experienced a shooting at their school), and how much she has grown to love the characters in the book (she knew ahead of time which characters would live and which would die). Then I left 15 minutes open to questions from the students. I don't ask...