I’m sitting on my bedroom floor with a book in front of me, eagerly awaiting my father’s entrance into the room. I am five years old, and there is just enough time for some reading before bedtime. I would say a story, but this particular book was too long for me to finish in just one night. I trace the drawing on the bright red cover of the book and look up as my dad walks in. He sits down on the floor and I lean against him. The book is Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, a Hale family favorite. My dad read it as a child, my sister read it as a child, and now it is my turn. Well, this isn’t my first time hearing the story, but tonight I tell my dad that I want to do the reading instead of just listening to him. 

We open the book and I survey the paragraphs in front of me. At 48 pages, this is the longest book I have read so far, but I’m excited for the challenge. I follow the words with my finger to keep myself on track. Each page takes a painstaking amount of time to get through, but my dad waits patiently while I sound out long words and look at the pictures. After a while, we put the book down. It is late for me, and my dad promises we can finish it the next night.

Just as my dad said, we pick Mike Mulligan back up the very next night. As we neared the end of the book, Mike Mulligan and his steam shovel were working on digging a hole that would become the foundation for the new city hall. However, Mike Mulligan forgot to leave a way for his steam shovel to get out of the hole they had just dug.

This is my first experience with a climax of a story, although I don’t know it yet. I feel the suspense build in my stomach – will Mike Mulligan find a way to get his trusty steam shovel out of the hole? My dad urges me to keep reading. He’s read the story several times, both himself as a child, to my older sister, and to me. Yes, I’ve heard the story before, but somehow reading the book myself instead of having it read to me elevates the suspense I feel.

I return to the words on the page, pushing my apprehension aside. My dad patiently listens as I read about how Mike Mulligan works out a deal with the townspeople so that his steam shovel can be repurposed as the town boiler, a part of the city hall building. This solves the main conflict. I breathe a sigh of relief and turn to my dad, telling him how happy I am that the story ended on a happy note.

In this way, before I even knew what a plot structure or literary element was, I learned how authors create emotion in their readers through conflict and resolution. It will be a few years before these terms become a part of my vocabulary, but it always helps me to remember how I felt reading Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel when analyzing specific elements of a piece of literature.