Chance – Background

Chance: the story behind this book

Reading with my kids before bedtime when they were younger was one of the great pleasures of parenthood for me. It gave me the chance to read lots of books that I thoroughly enjoyed and an excuse to catch up on authors that I missed out on when I was younger. Reading together was always more than just reading. There were questions that popped up, explanations about words, places and events, digressions into personal matters and memories stirred up by what we were reading – all of which added immensely to the experience. The reading routine also provided an opportunity for my children and me to share experiences and develop a common perspective about the world. The universes created by Roald Dahl, Beverly Cleary, Phillip Pullman, C. S. Lewis, J. K. Rowling and so many others occupy similar regions of our respective psyches and that commonality helps bridge the divergent experiences of our individual existences.

Not everything we read, of course, was great. There were disappointments. These were the books that wasted our time and devalued our daily ritual. The duds, perhaps, planted in my mind the seed of the idea of writing a book for bedtime reading, not only because they made me feel that even I could do better, but by tarnishing a sacred a routine, they called out for personal effort to atone for the harm done. The seed, however, must have been planted rather deep because the idea emerged not consciously but in a dream involving a book I authored about a mysterious force which mysteriously entered the body of a character through his fingertips. I awoke with the sense that I was given a story that I was meant to record. But dreams, while seeming so compelling and substantial while you are in them, evaporate like fairy dust, leaving only bits and fragments that make you wonder what made them so captivating and intense.

What eventually emerged was not the science fiction book I thought I was writing, although the mysterious fingertip-invaders remained in place, but instead a story about the more ordinary events in the ordinary life of an ordinary boy who happened to be experiencing something extraordinary at an eventful period in his life. While the hero is a twelve-year-old whose concerns and preoccupations might be of most interest to readers of a similar age, the underlying themes of the book are by no means juvenile. Jeremy copes with injustice, loss and events beyond his comprehension, and in the process, he learns something about who he is and what his place is in the world. But above of all Chance is meant to be absorbing and fun to read and to make readers laugh, wonder and reflect – because that’s the kind of book I wanted to read with my children. I am publishing it now, about a decade after I wrote the original version, in the hope other parents may derive a similar pleasure reading it with their children and teachers may find it a useful vehicle for helping students to expand their reading skills.