‘FALLING FROM GRACE’

Jane Godwin, author of ‘Falling from Grace’, talks to the Year 7s

The class of year 7 was fortunate enough to have been visited by the author Jane Godwin last Tuesday through video call. She’s a Melbourne based author and publisher at Penguin Books Australia, who has written over 25 books in the children’s and young adults’ genre, including the novel we studied in class, ‘Falling from Grace’. During the online gathering, Jane described how she became an author and her inspiration for this book specifically. She explained about how she took key characteristics from those around her and distributed them into the characters in her novel. Kip, one of the narrators, was partly based off of her son, they share a passion for music and appear a lot older than they actually are. Grace and Annie’s relationship is also resemblant to that of Jane and her older sister, who had a medical condition when they were both really young, and although she came out fit as a fiddle, she felt a sense of responsibility concerning her sister’s security.  She explained how the setting, Point Nepean and its unpredictable weather patterns alludes to the temperamental nature of the plot. Jane Godwin also hosted a Q and A about the process of writing a novel and the characters in the story. Gaining the author’s perspective after reading the novel gave the cohort a deeper understanding of her intentions, how to impute those concepts into our own creative writing and the work behind creating a novel.

Abigail Spencer 7B