I have had the pleasure of hosting Linda Thieman on her virtual book tour this month with Pump Up Your Book Promotion, and when I asked her if she wanted to write an article for DivineCaroline, this is what she had to say:
As an author, one occasionally gets the question, “What book have you read that greatly influenced you?” I almost hate to divulge my little secret because I am Linda Thieman and I write a chapter book series for ages seven to ten called Katie & Kimble. The Katie & Kimble: A Ghost Story books are full of humor and love, friendship, and healing. So one might be right in questioning it when I admit how heavily I was influenced, in my life and in my writing, by Mario Puzo’s ultra-violent novel, The Godfather.
Let me set the stage for a moment. It was late summer and I was starting ninth grade. I had just turned fourteen, and we had just moved back to Iowa. I was miserable, lonely and bored out of my mind. My dad, an avid reader, always had books lying around the house. So one day on my way out the door to catch the bus, I grabbed a beat-up, old paperback copy of The Godfather. Wow. Was that ever a story! I read on the bus, I read during study hall, and I read during enforced lunch-time recess. I could not put that book down.
Whereas I’ll admit I was shocked by all the sex and violence—well, mostly the violence, truth be told—what this novel really did was it got me thinking about the nature of power. I thought, at that young age, that if being the most powerful man in New York City meant that you had no freedom, your family was always living under the threat of violence, and that you constantly had to live in fear that you would lose everything and everyone you cared about, then I decided that I wanted no part in pursuing that kind of power. If that was what power was, then I did not want power. After much consideration, I concluded that this could clearly not be what “real” power was all about. Thus, I set upon a life-long path of trying to determine the true nature of power, and trying to make all my interactions with my students and my readers empowering ones.
In the case of Katie, who is almost nine when she moves into the house where Kimble, the ghost of a ten-year-old girl, lives, meeting Kimble sets Katie off on the path to her own personal power. Kimble needs help in understanding why she is trapped in this ghostly form, and Katie decides that she can offer Kimble the help she needs. Katie gradually grows into her true power as she makes decisions on her own, and chooses helping Kimble heal over the very real fear of parental disapproval. Kimble, with each story, becomes less of a victim stuck in a ghostly form that she doesn’t understand as she becomes more able to make conscious choices about where she is and why she is there.
Secondly, The Godfather influenced me greatly in terms of story structure. I had noticed, when I was younger and reading Nancy Drew books, that each chapter ended on some kind of a suspenseful note. Nancy was seemingly in peril and so it would drive you to read the next chapter. But Puzo handled this technique a bit differently. He wrote long sections, each developing specific characters and storylines. They started out rather slowly, but by the time you were at the end of the section, it was absolutely excruciating to be cut off. Then he’d start all over again and you didn’t think he could possibly regain the interest he’d just given up. But he always did.
