theme

Hi Gabs,

When you were young,
your parents may have read you stories that ended with “the moral of this story
is…”

That moral was a message that you could glean from the
overall story. For instance, from The Three Little Pigs we learned
about the importance of planning a project well. We know this, because we learned that
building a brick house works, while building a straw house is
short-sighted.

In a book report, you could state that one
theme for The Three Little Pigs is that good planning can lead to
success.

But we could also say the theme was about making
smart choices.

As you can see, a theme isn’t something
that's stated outright; it often appears as a lesson or message that the reader
understands by reading between the lines.

A book of fiction
can have many themes. Why? Because different people can find different meanings in
books.