89 pages • 2 hours read
Monica HesseGirl in the Blue Coat
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Discussion/Analysis Prompt
Monica Hesse is a columnist with The Washington Post and the author of several novels. Before writing Girl in the Blue Coat, Hesse wrote two science-fiction novels.
In this Author Q&A with The Washington Independent Review of Books, Hesse explains how her experience as a journalist prepared her well to make the jump from science fiction to historical fiction. She says that:
“It’s a big leap, but it’s also a total un-leap. I’m a journalist by trade, so research is my comfort zone. It was reassuring to work on a book where, when I wasn’t sure what should happen to my fictional characters, I got to go and find out what did happen in real life. And when I thought, ‘Well, this chapter would be much easier to resolve if I knew whether color film existed in World War II Europe,’ it felt natural to put on my reporter costume and call around until I could find an obscure vintage film expert who could say, ‘But, of course. You want Kodachrome or Agfacolor, or maybe Agfachrome, but first let’s have a detailed conversation about the specific dates of your book’s events and who your characters are, because that would impact which camera film they’ve [stet] be most likely to get.
