Gale - A Study Guide for Joyce McDonalds Swallowing Stones

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Joyce McDonald

1997

Joyce McDonald's 1997 novel Swallowing Stones is her second foray into the world of young-adult literature. In the work, seventeen-year-old Michael MacKenzie aimlessly shoots a rifle into the air, only to find out the next day that the bullet killed a man who was working on his roof a mile away. The story is told in sections that alternately focus on Michael and Jenna Ward, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the man who was killed. The work thus has two protagonists, both Michael and Jenna, making it somewhat unconventional. Jenna struggles with anxiety attacks after the death of her father, while Michael is consumed by intense feelings of guilt that he compares to the feeling of swallowing a stone. As Michael and Jenna suffer in their own ways, the themes of guilt, chance, and intuition are explored throughout the work, as are the social issues of gun control and teenage mental health. Swallowing Stones has been lauded by critics for the emotional depth with which McDonald has portrayed her characters.

McDonald was born on August 4, 1946, in San Francisco, California, but was raised in Chat-ham, New Jersey. Books were important to her from a young age. She has stated that in her childhood, her mother would read to her every night before bed, a tradition that she has kept up on her own ever since. McDonald studied English in college, receiving both her bachelor's and master's degrees in English from the University of Iowa, in 1972 and 1974 respectively.

After university McDonald embarked on a career in the publishing industry. She was a production assistant at Charles Scribner's Sons from 1976 to 1978, a production editor at Springer-Verlag from 1978 to 1980, and a free-lance editor from 1980 to 1984. In 1984 McDonald started her own small publishing press in New Jersey, McDonald Publishing Company/Shoe Tree Press, which she ran from 1984 to 1989. She then went on to work as an editor for Betterway Publications from 1989 to 1990.

In the late 1980s McDonald began shifting her career from publishing and editing to writing and teaching. Her first book, a children's work titled Mail-Order Kid, was published in 1988. In 1989 she became an adjunct lecturer at Drew University, in Madison, New Jersey, a position she would hold until 2000. She also worked as an assistant professor of English at East Stroudsburg University, in Pennsylvania, from 1990 to 1996. She went back to school during this time and completed her doctorate in English at Drew University in 1994. While at Drew, McDonald was awarded the Helen LePage and William Hale Chamberlain Prize for her PhD dissertation, The Incommunicable Past: Willa Cather's Pastoral Modes and the Southern Literary Imagination. The prize acknowledges a dissertation that is singularly distinguished by creative thought and excellent prose style. During that period she also wrote and published another children's book, Homebody (1991), and her first young-adult novel, Comfort Creek (1996).

In 1997 McDonald's second young-adult work, Swallowing Stones, was published. It was named one of the American Library Association's Top Ten Best Books for Young Adults and one of Booklist's 100 Best of the Best 19662003. In 2001 she published what is perhaps her best-known work to date, a young-adult novel called Shades of Simon Gray. That work was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award. Her young-adult novels Shadow People and Devil on My Heels were published in 2000 and 2004.

For eight years beginning in 2002, McDonald taught at Spalding University's brief-residency MFA in Writing Program, in Louisville, Kentucky. She also served for twelve years on the Rutgers University Council on Children's Literature. She lives in Forks Township, Pennsylvania, with her husband, Hubert McDonald, where she continues to write and teach.

Swallowing Stones begins with a description of a bullet flying through the air on a hot summer day in the fictional town of Briarwood, New Jersey. A fifteen-year-old girl named Jenna Ward looks up at her father, Charlie Ward, as he is making repairs on the roof of their house. Just as he looks up from his work to wave at Jenna, he suddenly collapses, his body goes entirely limp, and he rolls off of the roof to land at Jenna's feet. It is implied here that the cause of his collapse was his being hit by the previously mentioned bullet.

Meanwhile, on the other side of town a high-school senior named Michael MacKenzie and his best friend, Joe Sadowski, admire the.45-70 Winchester rifle that Michael has just received that day in honor of his seventeenth birthday, which also happens to be the Fourth of July. Because Michael could not wait to fire the gun, he has just shot one single bullet aimlessly into the air. It is implied that that bullet is the same one that hit Charlie Ward. This has taken place during a large pool and barbecue party that Michael's parents have thrown for his birthday, though Joe and Michael snuck off into the woods to fire the gun where no one would see.