Keeping violence mild for younger readers

Photo by Aldric RIVAT on Unsplash

In this book, we are introduced to a character named Sophie. She’s a distant relative (through marriage) and is in a desperate situation when she encounters the girls.

Sophie is the younger sister of Anna Dahlia and Zoe’s aunt’s husband, how’s that for a confusing family tree. Basically, she’s a relative, but not close to the family. Also, she has been away for years, and her immediate family hasn’t heard from her at all. Sophie’s husband passed away leaving her with his gambling debts. The casino took her home, and some loan-sharks are threatening her. The book starts off with a prologue about how she was trying to cheat at a game of craps and lost everything. The final roll would have won her enough to pay off her debts and move along, but somehow she ended up losing, so she ran and caught the last train of the night from Monaco. Eventually, she ends up in the same town the girls are visiting.

Toward the end of the story, Sophie ends up following the kids as they cross the city on their own on the Metro, they are headed to their cousin Thibault’s house. Sophie suspects they are carrying a valuable piece of jewelry, something that she might be able to sell to get the loan-sharks off her back.

At the end of the book, she confronts the kids using a stun gun to intimidate them. This was a difficult choice to make. In a story for older readers, it would have been easy enough to give Sophie a gun or a knife, in the scene at the end of the book, she is basically robbing the kids, so she would need something to give her power over them. A stun gun is still a dangerous item, but it felt less dangerous than some of the other options. Most of the time the stun gun is mentioned, Sophie uses it for show rather than inflicting it on someone.

I went through several re-writes trying to balance enough of a threat to coerce the girls without being unnecessarily scary. Something that wouldn’t give younger readers nightmares, but try to keep them on the edge of the story as they read the climax. I also made sure that none of the kid characters was directly affected by the stun gun, although one of the adults does get zapped.

One of the key factors I keep in mind while writing these stories is to give the kids adult-sized challenges that they have to find their way through. My intent is to let kids see characters in the story that they can identify with solve problems that are bigger than they imagined they could deal with.