Caroline B. Cooney - 1947
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Read another essay on Caroline B. Cooney by North
Carolina student Dana Keck.
I. Upbringing, Education, Family and Professional Life Caroline B. Cooney was born May 10, 1947 in Old Greenwich, Connecticut. In Cooney's younger years, she
was very involved in school and other activities. She played the piano, directed a choir, and had a job as a church organist at the age of fifteen. Cooney loved to read and she especially enjoyed reading the
Hardy Boys and Cherry Ames. Reading influenced her life greatly, especially a character in Cherry Ames. Cooney got the idea of going to nursing school from the
student nurse in this book. Cooney graduated from Greenwich High School in 1965 and moved onto her college years. Cooney went to Indiana University from 1965-1966. She later attended Massachusetts
General Hospital of Nurses during the years of 1966 and 1967. Cooney also married in 1967 at the age of twenty. She joined the University of Connecticut in 1968 as a music major,
although she did not complete this degree. She now has three children named Louisa, Sayre, and Harold. Later, she divorced her husband.
Cooney loved to write and she did not find it a difficult task. She once stated, "I love writing and do not know why it is considered such a difficult, agonizing profession. I love
all of it, thinking up the plots, getting to know the kids in the story, their parents, backyards, pizza toppings." Even though she loved writing, she had a rocky time starting
her writing career. When Cooney wrote stories and sent them to the publishers, they always got returned. She finally got a story put into Seventeen Magazine. She continued
thinking of stories but she now wrote the outline and sent that in instead of writing out the whole story. In 1979, her first book, Safe as a Grave, was published. Cooney now lives in
New York and she continues to write very thrilling, suspenseful stories. II. Literary Works Summarized
Caroline Cooney has written over thirty books in her lifetime so far. Some of her more famous books include: The Voice on the Radio, Burning Up, and The Terrorist. The Voice on the Radio
tells of a girl who saw her face on a milk carton and realized it was her own face. Her family was not her real family and she felt torn between her biological
parents and her family now. She had a boyfriend named Reeve whom she liked very much and she even thought of marrying him. Reeve had an opportunity to be on a college radio
as a disc jockey. He accepted the offer, but he never had much to say on the air. One day, while his mind was running blank, he began to tell the life story of his girlfriend. She later
tunes to the station and hears her life being told to everyone. Through all the confusion, Reeve forgot to change her name. She sat there paralyzed, not knowing what to do. In 1999, Burning Up
was published. It tells a story about a fifteen year old girl, Macey Clare, who lived mostly with her grandparents. She does a project about a barn that
mysteriously burnt down many years earlier. After investigating slightly, she found out that the town's only African-American teacher had lived in that barn. Her boyfriend and
she tried to investigate further but no one would speak, including those closest to her, her grandparents. She found out that her relatives probably had something to do with the
burning of the barn. The book explains in a riveting manner how she solves this mystery. The Terrorist, published in 1997, tells of a girl attending an international high school in
London. Her eleven-year-old brother is mysteriously killed by a package that was handed to him on the subway on his way to school. It looked as though it was an act of terrorism.
Laura, the young girl, starts suspecting everyone, including her friends. While trying to solve this mystery, she becomes involved in her classmates plan for her family and herself
to flee to Iran. Some how these two occurrences are tied together and Laura must solve how. III. List of Literary Works Save as a Grave (Published 1979) IV. Sources
Rear View Mirror (Published 1980)
Camp Girl Meets Boy (Published 1991)
Camp Reunion (Published 1991)
The Cheerleader (Published 1991)
Face On The Milk Carton (Published 1991)
Operation: Homefront (Published 1992)
The Return Of The Vampire (Published 1992)
Vampires Promise (Published 1993)
Forbidden (Published 1993)
Flight Number 116 Is Down (Published 1993)
Whatever Happened To Janie (Published 1993)
Unforgettable (Published 1994)
Emergency Room (Published 1994)
Twins (Published 1994)
Driver's Ed (Published 1994)
The Fog (Published 1995)
Freeze Tag (Published 1995)
Twenty Pageants Later (Published 1995)
Night School (Published 1995)
Both Sides Of Time (Published 1995)
Flash Fire (Published 1995)
Out Of Time (Published 1996)
The Voice On The Radio (Published 1996)
Perfume (Published 1997)The Stranger (Published 1997)
Wanted! (Published 1997)
The Terrorist (Published 1997)
What Child Is This? : A Christmas Story (Published 1997)
Prisoner Of Time (Published 1998)
Hush Little Baby (Published 1999)
Burning Up (Published 1999)
http://www.pazsaz.com/coonold.html
http://www.randomhouse.com/teachers/authors/caro.html
This essay was submitted by a student of Rita Achenbach, a teacher at Fuquay-Varina High School in Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina.