Meet-the-Author Recording with Nic Stone

Jackpot |

Nic Stone introduces and shares some of the backstory for creating Jackpot.

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Nic Stone: Hi, this is Nic Stone, author of Jackpot, a book about making your own luck in the world. Jackpot is about a 17 year old high school senior named Rico. She's the poor kid in an upper middle class area and she works at a gas station to help her mother cover the bills because her mother, even with two jobs, doesn't make enough money to keep them above water.

So, there's a night that on her job at this gas station, Rico sells a lottery ticket worth a lot of money.
It's worth like $106 million and the winner doesn't come forward to claim the ticket. Rico decides she's going to embark on a journey to find the person she believes she sold the winning ticket to. In order to help her out, she enlists the assistance of the only other person in the store when she sold the ticket. That happens to be the richest boy in school. Shenanigans ensue, they start on this journey, and of course as they get to know each other, they begin to see each other's situations a little differently.

Rico has done a good job of hiding how little she has, but there comes a point where she can't anymore.
As she gets to know this guy whose name is Van, she begins to realize that despite the fact that he has what seems like everything, there are some holes in his life too. At its heart, Jackpot is a story about what happens when a have and a have-not have to work together to solve a problem. It really touches on the things that make us human no matter how much or how little is in our bank accounts.

This Meet-the-Author Recording with Nic Stone was exclusively created in March 2020 by TeachingBooks with thanks to Penguin Random House.