Sitting on Top of the World
by Cheryl King
Genre: Teen Historical Fiction
Fourteen-year-old
June Baker never in a million years thought she’d be dressing like
a boy, sneaking into a hobo camp, and jumping onto a moving freight
train to travel across the state of Tennessee. But that’s what she
has to do to find work so her family’s farm can survive.
It’s
1933, and the Great Depression is spreading misery throughout
America. Where once June was sitting on top of the world, now she’s
carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders. Once she was
picking fruit from the pawpaw trees, and now she’s picking up the
pieces of a family torn apart. Once she was climbing and falling from
trees, and now she’s jumping from moving trains.
June
knows the risks. What she doesn’t know is that the railroad bull
she’s falling for has a devastating secret that will change the
course of her life.
Journey
with June in Sitting
on Top of the World, a
historical fiction tale about family, friendship, love, loss, and
hope.
Sitting
on Top of the World bridges
the gap between middle grade and young adult and is a book that
middle school and high school teachers can be proud to include in
their classroom library or in reading instruction.
Content
warning: Some instances of physical violence, death, mention of
suicide, mention of miscarriage, and characters encounter racial
bigotry.
Cheryl King is a born-and-raised Texan, Harry Potter fanatic, chocolate lover, and word nerd. By day she is a dyslexia therapist, but at night – look out: She enjoys writing flash- and micro-fiction for writing contests like NYCMidnight and has two of her short writing pieces accepted for publication. This is her first published novel.
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GUEST POST
The origins of Sitting on Top of the World
Sitting on Top of the World began as a 1,000-word flash fiction story (that, incidentally, was never actually written). See, what happened was … I’ve been writing for NYCMidnight writing challenges for a couple of years now – I highly recommend it to all writers. The way the challenges work is that on the Friday night before the challenge begins, they send writers the prompts, which include a genre.
On the eve of the reveal of the prompts one time, I went to bed thinking about which genre would be the most difficult for me (I wanted to get a head-start coming up with a story), and I landed on historical fiction. So, of course, instead of sleeping, I lay there thinking about what kind of story I’d write if I got historical fiction as my challenge genre, and I remembered something I’d read years before about hobos of the Great Depression and the thrill – and danger – of train hopping. And I thought, what if I had a sweet but gritty teen girl risking her life going train hopping to help her family? I basically wrote that 1,000-word story in my head that night. I needed a reason she was taking this risk – family tragedy; I needed stakes – losing the family farm; I needed an ending that packed a punch – the flash fiction piece was going to end with the main character making the leap up into the train car, but wait ’til you see how the book ends!
The next night, when the prompts arrived in my in-box, I sadly did not get historical fiction (I think that time around it was sci-fi or thriller), but I couldn’t shake the idea and the character I had begun building. Eventually, I started typing and outlining and researching, and that story idea grew into 25 chapters!
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