Lady's Knight

by Amie Kaufman, Meagan Spooner

In Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner’s young adult fantasy romantic comedy, Gwen, a blacksmith’s daughter who dreams of becoming a knight, joins forces with Lady Isobelle, who wants control over her own future. Their effort to challenge the rules of a marriage tournament turns chivalric expectations upside down while making room for adventure, humor, and a growing romance.

Big Idea

Stories can challenge who is allowed to be a hero—and who gets to decide someone else’s future. Lady’s Knight also demonstrates how writers alternate action, comedy, and emotional vulnerability to shape a reader’s experience of time.

Discussion Questions

1.How do Gwen and Isobelle challenge different expectations about gender, social class, and acceptable behavior? Where do their struggles overlap, and where do they differ?
2.How does the marriage tournament turn a person’s future into a prize? How do Gwen and Isobelle challenge the assumptions behind that arrangement?
3.What does the novel suggest makes someone worthy of being called a knight? Consider the relationship between public recognition, practical skill, courage, and care for others.
4.How does humor affect your response to the restrictions Gwen and Isobelle face? Choose a moment when comedy makes a serious issue clearer—or more complicated.
5.Where does the storytelling move quickly, and where does it linger? How do those changes influence your understanding of Gwen and Isobelle’s relationship?

Lesson Plan

⏱ 45 minutes📦 Copies of the novel, a teacher-selected excerpt, paper, pencils, highlighters or colored pencils, a timer, and optional sticky notes.

Learning Goals

Analyze how scene development, sentence structure, and detail affect narrative pacing.
Explain how Gwen and Isobelle’s choices develop themes of agency, gender expectations, and heroism.
Write contrasting versions of a narrative moment using deliberate pacing techniques.
Support an interpretation with textual evidence and revise writing using peer feedback.

Activity Steps

1.Introduce the central question: Who controls the pace of a tournament—and who controls the choices it supposedly settles? Briefly review Gwen’s ambitions and Isobelle’s stake in the outcome. Establish respectful discussion norms around gender, class, and relationships. Allow 5 minutes.
2.Read a teacher-selected tournament-related excerpt. Students mark action, dialogue, interior reflection, and description with different symbols, then identify where reading seems to accelerate or slow. Allow 8 minutes.
3.In pairs, create a six-box storyboard for an imagined moment before a tournament event: Gwen prepares to act, Isobelle recognizes a complication, and one of them makes a consequential choice. Keep the moment consistent with what the class has read and label it as an invented scene. Allow 7 minutes.
4.Individually write two versions of the moment, approximately 100–130 words each. Make the first urgent through selective detail and rapid exchanges; make the second reflective through expanded perception, hesitation, or interior thought. Allow 12 minutes.
5.Exchange drafts. Partners underline three choices that affect pace and explain how each version presents Gwen’s or Isobelle’s agency differently. Writers revise one paragraph. Allow 8 minutes.
6.Share selected revisions and complete an exit ticket: identify one pacing technique, explain its effect, and connect it to a specific moment in the published novel. Allow 5 minutes.

Standards Connections

ELA: CCSS.RL.7.3 — Analyze how elements of a story interact, including how a high-pressure setting shapes characters’ decisions.
ELA: CCSS.RL.9-10.5 — Analyze how an author’s structural choices and manipulation of time create effects such as tension or surprise.
ELA: CCSS.W.7-12.3 — Grade-specific narrative-writing standards addressing effective technique, well-chosen details, and structured event sequences.
ELA: CCSS.SL.7-12.1 — Grade-specific collaborative-discussion standards emphasizing preparation, evidence, and engagement with different perspectives.
SEL: Social awareness and responsible decision-making — Examine restrictive expectations, consider others’ perspectives, and evaluate choices involving autonomy and fairness.

Printable Teacher’s Guide

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Grades 7-12 Ready to print

Pace-Write-Read Study with Pace-Write It!

Lady’s Knight offers a lively way to study pacing because its tournament adventure and developing romance create different kinds of anticipation. Readers want to know what Gwen can accomplish in a world that restricts her ambitions, but they also want to understand what Gwen and Isobelle will choose for themselves and for each other. A tournament supplies visible stakes and forward momentum; a conversation, hesitation, or private realization can make a much smaller interval feel equally consequential. In this Pace-Write-Read study, students move from noticing a craft choice to testing it in their own writing and then reading their work aloud. Track how the novel’s comic treatment of chivalric conventions interacts with action and emotional stakes. Rather than assuming that short sentences always mean speed or description always means delay, ask what each passage makes readers anticipate, notice, or reconsider. Use brief passages from the class edition so students can ground every claim in evidence. Some workshop categories—such as graphics, gamification, and a dummy—are adaptation tools rather than necessarily features of the published novel. For younger readers, provide a scene frame and a short excerpt; for older readers, ask how pacing also exposes the power structures behind the tournament and its promised marriage.

Element	How to notice or teach it in the novel
1. Pacing	Compare a tournament-related passage with a quieter exchange between Gwen and Isobelle. Identify how much story time each passage covers and what readers are encouraged to anticipate.
2. Plot	Map how Gwen’s desire for knighthood intersects with Isobelle’s desire to determine her future. Distinguish events that merely occur from decisions that cause the next complication.
3. Prosody	Read a comic exchange and an action passage aloud, testing stress, breath, and pauses. Explain how oral delivery makes the prose’s urgency or comic timing audible.
4. Word	Collect words associated with blacksmithing, knighthood, and noble status from an assigned excerpt. Discuss how a precise verb or status-bearing title can convey information faster than a lengthy explanation.
5. Concept	State the central reversal: a would-be female knight and a noblewoman challenge a system that treats marriage as a tournament reward. Ask how this premise creates both comic possibilities and serious stakes.
6. Voice & Worldview	Find language that invites readers to question conventional ideas about heroic knights or obedient noblewomen. Discuss how the novel’s comic attitude helps establish its view of power and fairness.
7. Point of View	In a selected scene, establish whose perceptions and thoughts readers can access. Rewrite a few lines through the other young woman’s perspective and note how changed access alters suspense.
8. Setting & Place	Contrast Gwen’s blacksmithing background with the tournament’s public world of rank and reputation. Identify how each environment affects what she can do, what others expect, and how quickly conflict develops.
9. Original Characters	Examine how Gwen’s practical background and Isobelle’s personal objectives complicate familiar knight-and-lady roles. Ask students to identify choices that make them individuals rather than simply reversed stereotypes.
10. Dialogue	Annotate an exchange between Gwen and Isobelle for its surface purpose and underlying stakes. Notice where a reply advances their plans, changes their relationship, or delays an uncomfortable admission.
11. Details	Choose a small physical or social detail from a preparation or tournament passage. Explain whether it establishes competence, signals danger, reveals status, or plants an expectation.
12. Descriptions	Study how a descriptive passage directs attention toward equipment, surroundings, or a character’s reaction. Remove one sentence experimentally and explain what the reader gains in speed but loses in understanding.
13. Firsts	Track an early moment when Gwen or Isobelle attempts something unfamiliar or sees the other differently. Discuss why a first experience may deserve more narrative space than a repeated routine.
14. Immediacy & Engagement	Locate a passage that places readers close to Gwen’s immediate problem. Identify the concrete goal, obstacle, and uncertainty that make the scene engaging without requiring nonstop action.
15. Story Scenes, Summaries & Structures	Mark where the novel dramatizes an interaction moment by moment and where it compresses elapsed time. Ask why a particular choice or exchange receives a full scene while transitional material moves faster.
16. Tension / Suspense / Surprise	Separate concern about a tournament outcome from concern about personal exposure, social consequences, or romantic uncertainty. Explain how an excerpt sustains one kind of tension while temporarily resolving another.
17. Flashback, Flash-Forward, Cliffhanger	Look for references to earlier experience, imagined future consequences, and unresolved scene endings; distinguish these from formal flashbacks or flash-forwards. If a device is absent from the selected passage, test it in a student adaptation rather than claiming the novel uses it there.
18. Page Turns and Chapter Breaks	Examine several chapter endings in the class edition and record the question, decision, or emotional shift each leaves behind. Distinguish purposeful chapter structure from page boundaries that vary by edition.
19. Pace & Creativity	Rewrite a moment of preparation as either a brisk sequence or a close examination of one difficult action. Compare how each choice changes readers’ impression of Gwen’s resourcefulness.
20. Play	Identify how the story plays with expectations attached to the words knight, lady, and prize. Invent an alternative chivalric rule and discuss how it would change both the humor and the conflict.
21. Performance	Consider how tournament participants and spectators perform recognizable social roles. Perform a short exchange twice—once with public confidence and once with private uncertainty—to explore the gap between appearance and feeling.
22. Personality	Select a reaction that reveals Gwen’s or Isobelle’s personality under pressure. Explain how the reaction changes the scene’s pace through impulsiveness, hesitation, defiance, or wit.
23. Humor	Find a comic moment involving a mismatch between chivalric ideals and practical reality. Study the setup, timing, and payoff, then explain whether the joke releases tension or exposes an unfair expectation.
24. Pause	Locate a hesitation, observation, or silence within an otherwise active scene. Discuss how pausing can intensify anticipation or give Gwen and Isobelle’s emotional stakes room to register.
25. Poetry / Poetic Devices	Search an excerpt for figurative language, sound patterns, or striking contrasts rather than assuming it contains verse. Explain how one verified example shapes mood, emphasis, or reading speed.
26. Repetition	Track recurring references to knighthood, duty, marriage, or reputation across assigned chapters. Ask whether repetition reinforces the social rules or shows how the characters’ understanding of them changes.
27. Rhythm	Compare sentence-length patterns in an action passage and a personal exchange. Read both aloud to test how variation—not simply shortness—creates momentum, interruption, or emotional weight.
28. Punctuation	Inspect the punctuation in a dialogue-heavy excerpt, noting how sentences end and interruptions or pauses are marked. Change the punctuation in a student-written imitation and discuss the effect on timing and tone.
29. Questions	List the reader questions a scene creates about Gwen’s prospects and Isobelle’s freedom. Distinguish questions answered immediately from those that carry readers into later chapters.
30. Compare-Contrast	Compare the constraints associated with Gwen’s social position and Isobelle’s noble status. Examine how their different resources and vulnerabilities create contrasting rhythms of action and negotiation.
31. Objects	Choose a tool, piece of equipment, or status-bearing object actually present in an excerpt. Trace how handling or noticing it reveals skill, power, vulnerability, or an approaching problem.
32. Threes	Check whether a passage uses three actions, details, or escalating beats; do not assume a pattern exists. Then write an invented three-beat preparation sequence for Gwen and make the final beat complicate her plan.
33. Lists	Create a list of what Gwen must manage to pursue knighthood and what Isobelle risks in resisting the tournament’s marriage logic. Transform one list into prose and test whether accumulation feels efficient, overwhelming, or comic.
34. White Space & Negative Space	Examine paragraphing and any section breaks in the class edition for shifts in speaker, focus, or time. Also discuss what remains unsaid in a Gwen–Isobelle exchange and how readers infer meaning from that omission.
35. Art & Graphics	If available, analyze the edition’s cover as a visual interpretation of the romantic-comedy adventure premise, not as evidence of interior illustration. Create a six-panel adaptation and compare which prose details images can convey immediately.
36. Interactives & Gamification	Treat the tournament as a system of rules, rewards, and restricted participation. Build a classroom choice map showing how Gwen and Isobelle might respond to an obstacle, while distinguishing student-created branches from the published plot.
37. Placement	Identify where a selected scene reveals a crucial intention or complication. Move that information earlier or later in a brief outline and predict how the change affects suspense and sympathy.
38. Form	Discuss how combining tournament adventure with romantic comedy creates expectations about action, attraction, setbacks, and resolution. Adapt a short moment into a script to see how losing interior narration changes its pace.
39. Dummy	Use a folded-paper mock-up as a planning tool, not as a claim about the novel’s production. Allocate panels or pages to an invented Gwen-and-Isobelle scene, varying the space devoted to action, reaction, and revelation.
40. Passion	Connect Gwen’s commitment to knighthood and Isobelle’s determination to shape her future with the choices that propel the plot. Ask students to identify where a deeply held desire makes a quiet scene feel urgent.

Pace-Write It!

20-minute Pace-Write-Read task: Before the Signal. Minutes 0–3: Read a brief, teacher-selected passage involving tournament preparation or anticipation; identify one technique that accelerates events and one that holds attention on a significant moment. Minutes 3–5: Plan an invented, canon-consistent scene in which Gwen is about to act and Isobelle communicates something that affects her next choice; use only information the class has already read. Minutes 5–11: Write 120–160 words, moving quickly through preparation, slowing around the communication, and ending with a decision rather than the event’s outcome. Minutes 11–15: Read drafts aloud in pairs; listeners mark where urgency increases and where the emotional stakes become clearest. Minutes 15–18: Revise three sentences using changes in detail, syntax, dialogue, or paragraphing. Minutes 18–20: Share one before-and-after sentence and explain how the revision connects pacing to Gwen’s ambition or Isobelle’s agency. Label all invented dialogue and events as student-created, not quotations or missing scenes from the book.

Classroom Activities

One Tournament Moment, Two Speeds

Students study a brief tournament-related passage, then write two original versions of an imagined moment consistent with Gwen and Isobelle’s situation. One version races toward an outcome; the other slows down around a meaningful choice. Students annotate their pacing decisions and discuss how speed can emphasize either spectacle or personal agency. Use invented dialogue rather than presenting it as text from the novel.

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