I like collecting. Mostly things like pens, books, spices and tropical fevers, but lately also “lean-in” moments. These happen when I’m reading out loud to students and I notice that they’ve become spellbound (for previous posts on this subject, see here, here and here). It’s tricky to explain what I mean by spellbound, not least because we tend to picture “hooked” as someone being excited about what they read. It’s almost the opposite. When a kid is engaged with a story, they go very quiet.* They look at you, but not at you. Their head is tilted as if they want to catch your every word with all their senses. And they’re still. These kids constantly fiddle and jitter and hum, but when they’re spellbound they might as well be carved in stone.

This is an extremely valuable indicator for writers because we desperately want to know what hooks. I’ve recently added another moment to my collection, from two girls I call the Straw-stack Sisters. We are reading Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild, in which three adopted girls living in a found family decide to become stage actors to help with the household budget. Like our previous book (On the Banks of Plum Creek), it is thick with vocabulary that the Straw-stack Sisters don’t know from personal experience. But we’ve been okay because a) they get little prizes for completing their weekly reader quizzes, b) we’ve been using the 1975 movie to help them picture the scenes and characters, and c) I’m the tutor and I say it’s either this or grammar worksheets.

So, without further ado, here is their latest spellbound moment:

Pauline, the oldest girl in the book, is the first to be hired and she does a great job playing the lead in Alice in Wonderland. Her performance is such a success that it goes to her head and suddenly lovely, caring, sensible Pauline is ordering her sisters around, treating her stage things with deliberate carelessness, insulting her understudy Winifred, and stamping her foot and shouting at the Director.

The Straw-stack Sisters drank this in. They were waiting for the other shoe to drop, which of course it does when the Director tells Winifred to play the lead and demotes Pauline to understudy. The book’s illustration of Pauline weeping on the bathroom floor produced happy sighs from the Straw-stack Sisters and immediate demands to watch this scene in the movie because they wanted more.**

With this growing collection of spellbound moments,*** a tentative analysis can be performed. One possibility is that these readers want to know what happens when someone does something they themselves are considering. What I mean is that, in this case, they seem to recognise Pauline’s behaviour and suspect that it’s not acceptable, but they need confirmation. For someone trying to navigate the difficult social world, having the unwritten moral codes spelt out for them in a story can be very powerful.

Worth watching for in future spellbound moments.

*Might apply to adults, too, but they are so good at masking their boredom that they make terrible subjects for minor literary experiments.

**Alas, the movie does not have the weeping-on-the-bathroom-floor scene. It does, however, have Pauline redeeming herself by helping Winifred with her makeup, which is a far better resolution.

***As samples go, it’s small. But this is ongoing qualitative research.