Customer Reviews

The Fruit Bowl Project: Fifty Ways to Tell a Story

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As a public middle school teacher, I was lucky enough to have come across this gem of a book while preparing to teach a new writing class. I found it to be a delightfully written, brilliantly fun examination of the concepts of genre and style, cleverly disguised as an entertaining story about a rock star's visit to high school and his assertion that writing is "like a bowl of fruit" that can be painted an infinite number of ways. Inspired by this, the students set out to tell a single, absurdly simple story in as many ways as they can--to wonderfully amusing results.

The Fruit Bowl Project turned out to be the perfect spark to my class. Every single student, down to the most stubbornly reluctant writer, loved reading it--indeed, they devoured it. Inspired by Durkee's book, we set out to produce our own "Fruit Bowl Project," which we did, with fantastic results. I have before never had the absolute pleasure to guide a class that was so enthusiastic, inspired, and joyful about writing as this one was as a result of sharing this book--and along the way we learned a lot about style and genre too.

I would recommend The Fruit Bowl Project without reservation to ANY teacher, though especially to teachers of literature and writing. But I would also recommend it to any middle-school-through-high-school aged student who's looking for an entertaining, slyly humorous, and wonderfully-written book to read for the sheer fun of it.

One day, Ms. Vallis, the literature teacher at West Side Middle School, waltzes into the eighth grade writers' workshop and announces that her cousin's husband is none other than rock star Nick Thompson. Not only that, Nick is coming to their class to talk about writing. The kids are, of course, thrilled when Nick comes, and they hang onto his every word. Nick tells them that a work of literature is like a bowl of fruit: a million artists can paint the same bowl of fruit and none of the pictures will come out the same.

Nick gives the kids two weeks to complete a seemingly simple assignment: They must write a story about a boy who drops a pencil during a reading test and then bumps a girl's arm as he picks it up, causing her to make a mark on her test. After the test, the same boy tells his friend a joke over lunch, which makes his friend laugh so hard that chocolate milk shoots out of his nose, all over both the boys' chicken nuggets.

Of course, each of the kids writes a completely different story. Kids turn in raps, haiku, monologues, screenplays, fairy tales, newspaper articles, sonnets, horror stories, and even a Broadway musical. The story is told from the point of view of the first boy, the second boy, the girl, the teacher, and a chicken nugget. One student tells the story entirely in math, while another makes a crossword puzzle. All in all, the kids tell the story 50 times (hence the subtitle of the book).

The best part of The Fruit Bowl Project is the kids' stories. You'd think after hearing the same story 50 times, I'd get a bit sick of it, but I never once checked how many pages were left. It also helps that some of the best stories are placed near the end of the book.

The story is supposedly targeted for 9-12 year olds, but teenagers and adults can enjoy it too. However, I think that the book was written to be a classroom aid, rather than a piece of realistic fiction, since there are very few 8th graders who can write as well as the kids in the book.

My only complaint is that I wish the author had fleshed out the kids' characters a bit more. There are 46 pages leading up to the stories and barely any of the kids are introduced in any depth. I know that it's hard to introduce 51 characters in 46 pages, but I think that the story would have benefited either from shortening the beginning part so that none of the kids were introduced or expanding upon it so that more of the kids were introduced.

So, if you want to read something funny, or you're just looking for some inspiration, check this book out!