This month, in honor of Veterans Day (Nov. 11), I thought I would revisit a conversation I had with Rosanne Parry earlier this year. Rosanne is the author of the middle-grade novel Heart of a Shepherd, the story of one boy’s year on the home front, running the family ranch while his dad is deployed to Iraq.
In an interview on my blog, Rosanne described the genesis of this story: “About eight years ago, I wrote a sonnet about my dad teaching my son to play chess. I was afraid the attempt would finish my dad off. The two of them are very close, but you could not find more different personalities. My father loves math, logic, and strategy. My son, at 6, loved a good battle and never met an inanimate object he could not engage in conversation.”
The sonnet evolved into a short story about a boy and his grandfather playing chess on the back porch of a ranch. The characters in that story led ultimately to the novel: “When the US returned to war in Iraq in 2003, I began remembering what is was like to have my husband deployed there in Desert Storm, and I noticed how hard it was on rural communities to lose their reservists to deployment. That gave me a framework to make a larger story about a boy and his grandpa living on a ranch.”
Rosanne added, “You can’t write about war without having some sad parts in the book, so yes, this story has some sad moments. It also has funny moments and adventure and, I hope, some ideas worth talking about afterward.”
Rosanne’s website contains links to a variety of resources for parents, teachers, and kids, including:
Things a Kid Can Do to Support a Military Family
How Teachers Can Support a Child of a Deployed Soldier
Book Recommendations for the Tender-Hearted Reader
and a discussion guide for Heart of a Shepherd.
You can also find out more about Heart of a Shepherd here.
Portions of the interview with Rosanne originally appeared at the writerjenn blog.
Comments
1 Rosanne Parry // Nov 10, 2009 at 5:43 pm
Thanks for the mention, Jenn!
Two other books that make a great veteran’s day read for middle graders are Bull Rider by Suzanne Morgan Williams and Operation Yes by Sarah Lewis Holmes.
Leave a Comment