If you're looking for Day Five of the Minette's Feast Blog Tour, you're in the right spot.
Minette’s Feast by
Susanna Reich, illustrated by
Amy Bates, is a lovely picture book with a Parisian setting and a charming story. A woman living in Paris and studying French
cuisine adopts a cat, Minette, that far prefers the results of her own food prep—hunting for birds and mice—to the
cassoulets,
soufflés, and
pates her owner makes. She is finally won over, at least temporarily, by the leftovers from a dish that had taken three days to marinate.
The descriptions and illustrations of home, cooking, and food, food, food give
Minette’s Feast the potential to become a comfort book, so it doesn’t matter that many young readers won’t know who the woman referred to in the book’s subtitle —“The Delicious Story of Julia Child and Her Cat”—is. Furthermore, Minette holds her own as a character. She does, after all, turn up her nose at meals prepared by a student at “Le Cordon Bleu, the famous cooking school.” Whether or not she will be won over to fine human food provides the narrative drive for this sweet piece of creative nonfiction.
That is what
Minette’s Feast seems to be to me—
creative nonfiction for kids. Creative nonfiction, as I first saw it defined years ago, is nonfiction that reads like fiction. It is written using “elements
borrowed from fiction to tell true stories,” as nonfiction children’s writer
Melissa Stewart wrote
earlier this year. Descriptive language (“Julia and Paul were charmed by Minette’s delicate whiskers, her superior nose, and her quick little paws.”), dialogue (“
Une maison sans chat, c’est la vie sans soleil!”), and the use of scenes (“And every time they went out for a walk, they enjoyed a fine, fine meal. They nibbled croissants in cafes where cats curled on chairs…”) are all examples of writing elements usually associated with fiction that a writer of creative nonfiction may choose to use.
In fact, in
Lee Gutkind's collection of essays by writers of creative nonfiction,
Keep It Real, scenes are described as the building blocks of creative nonfiction. They then need to be placed in some kind of order, or frame. In the case of
Minette's Feast, Susannah Reich uses a traditional story frame to organize her scenes. A
story is an account or retelling of something that happened told in a way that expresses meaning. That's why a beginning, middle, and end are so important to stories. We see the world of the story in the beginning, then a change or disturbance to that world in the middle, and the result of that change or disturbance in the end. We see what
happened.
Minette's Feast does read like a story--it's an account with a beginning, middle, and end of something that happened to Julia Child or to her cat, depending on which character you prefer to see as the protagonist. We also understand its meaning. This cat wouldn't eat Julia
Child's cooking, for crying out loud!
Complete little stories turn up in all our lives (the story of how our parents met, the story of how we wrecked our new bikes, the story of how we came to settle into a career), but they aren’t always easily recognizable. And they don’t necessarily have any great significance or meaning beyond what happened to us. Creative nonfiction writers who choose to use a story frame have to recognize the potential for story while they are doing their research. In her author’s note to Minette’s Feast, Susanna tells of having wanted to write about Julia Child for children “but I could never figure out how to make the story interesting to children.” She read Child’s memoir, My Life in France, “and discovered Minette, who inspired Julia’s lifelong love of cats. As a cat lover myself, I knew I had finally found my story.”
