Malinda Lo

This week, my First Sentence Tour starring the 2009 Debutantes continues with Erin Dionne, whose second novel, The Total Tragedy of a Girl Named Hamlet, came out in January.

What’s one of your favorite first sentences from one of your favorite books?

ED: First sentence of Charlotte’s Web, by E.B. White:

Where’s Papa going with that axe?

Why do you think that first sentence works so well?

ED: It works because it has drama, mystery, a little danger, and drops you RIGHT into the middle of the action — all in six words!

Why did you choose to start your book with this first sentence:

I hadn’t figured out a way to stop time, join the circus, or make myself invisible.

ED: Originally, I set Total Tragedy two weeks before school started — and the book went through several drafts that way. Thankfully, before my editor saw it, I realized that I was starting the story too early — it was taking waaay too long to gear up. So I chopped the first 12 pages and reworked the opening to begin right as Hamlet, her mom, and Dezzie are walking in to the first day of school. The humiliation Hamlet feels at her family comes across right away (at least, that’s the goal).

About The Total Tragedy of a Girl Named Hamlet

Hamlet Kennedy just wants to be your average, happy, vanilla eighth grader. But with Shakespearean scholar parents who dress in Elizabethan regalia and generally go about in public as if it were the sixteenth century, that’s not terribly easy. It gets worse when they decide that Hamlet’s genius 7-year-old sister will attend middle school with her — and even worse when the Shakespeare project is announced and her sister is named the new math tutor. By the time an in-class recitation reveals that our heroine is an extraordinary Shakespearean actress, Hamlet can no longer hide from the fact that she — like her family — is anything but average.

About Erin Dionne

Erin Dionne’s debut novel, Models Don’t Eat Chocolate Cookies, was inspired by events that occurred in seventh grade, when she wore a scary peach bridesmaid dress in her cousin’s wedding and threw up on her gym teacher’s shoes (not at the same event). Although humiliating at the time, these experiences are working for her now. Erin lives outside of Boston with her husband and daughter, and a very insistent dog named Grafton. She roots for the Red Sox, teaches English at an art college, and sometimes eats chocolate cookies.