Sharon Creech is an award-winning author of young adult and children’s literature and was the first American author to win both the American Library Association’s Newbery Medal and the British Carnegie Medal. She has been nominated for and won many additional writing awards in both her native United States and abroad. Creech “often embeds serious topics into her stories,” and she does not shy away from difficult themes and topics that are of interest to young readers (“Sharon Creech Facts for Kids.” Kiddle). The Great Unexpected deals with many such topics. The protagonist, Naomi Deane, is an orphan, and she finds the body of her guardian, Joe, after his death. She also deals with sometimes crippling anxiety and jealousy, even around her best friend, Lizzie. Adults in the novel can be deceptive, vengeful, withholding, and even scary.

Though Creech initially began her career as an author by writing novels for adults, she relished exploring younger voices so much that she shifted focus. Creech told one interviewer: “I’ve enjoyed exploring those worlds so much that I have continued to write about young people who are on that cusp of childhood and young adulthood, when so much is possible” (“

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