Teenreads.com -- THE FRUIT BOWL PROJECT by Sarah Durkee

THE FRUIT BOWL PROJECT
Sarah Durkee
Yearling
Fiction
ISBN-10: 0385733852
ISBN-13: 9780385733854
160 pages

A hot afternoon in a sixth grade classroom. A room full of students taking a test. A boy nudges a girl's arm and causes her to mark the test. She goes ballistic. Later, in the cafeteria, another boy tells a joke and the first boy laughs so hard milk comes out of his nose.

How would you tell this story?

When rock star Nick Thompson comes to visit the West Side Middle School, this is the writing assignment he sets the class. Take a simple, ordinary story and make it exciting. Find your own voice, he urges them, tell the story in your own way. And they do. From first-person narratives, to screenplays, to haikus; as aliens, as a psychic, as the teacher; even in measurements, each member of the class writes the same story but tells it in a different way. The result is a collection of intriguing essays and stories that highlight voice, style, perspective and language.

THE FRUIT BOWL PROJECT by Sarah Durkee is really unique in its exploration of writing. The same story, told over and over in so many different voices, begins to take on a life of its own, as well as revealing the personalities of the characters who wrote each entry. This would be a great book to use with a writing class in order to give students an indication of the wide range of the possibilities inherent in even the most basic ideas. In fact, while I was reading the novel, I kept wishing that there was a nonfiction book out there that encompassed this idea: set a classroom of kids to write about a scene in all different kinds of ways.

For me, the framework story about the students who wrote the pieces and their encounter with the rock star was unnecessary. Both the individual stories and the project as a whole were understandable without the framework. In addition, I found the individual stories to be stronger and better written than the overall framework, which may have been too short for what it was trying to accomplish.

Overall, however, THE FRUIT BOWL PROJECT is an intriguing, original idea, and one that should offer young readers much food for thought.

--- Reviewed by Paula Jolin

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