Scott Douglas says in his new Quiet, Please: Dispatches From a Public Librarian that the creator of the Dewey Decimal system and several other famous librarians had one thing in common: “they were all elitist wimps.” One-Minute Book Reviews will review the book tomorrow.
(c) 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
10 Discussion Questions for Book Clubs
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House
This reading group was not authorized or approved by the author, publisher or agent for the book. This guide is copyrighted by Janice Harayda, and its sale or reproduction in any form is illegal except by public libraries that many reproduce it for use in their in-house reading groups. Reading groups that wish to use this guide should link to this site or use “Contact” page on One-Minute Book Reviews to learn how to request permission to reproduce the guide.
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House is a sparkling exception to the rule that bestsellers tend to become dated within a generation. This modern classic first appeared in 1946 and has never lost the droll charm that made it in an international hit. Eric Hodgins (1899–1971) satirizes the modern lust for property in a comic tale of Jim Blandings, a Manhattan advertising executive, and his wife, Muriel, who decide on a whim to buy and restore a 170-year-old farmhouse in Connecticut. When house turns out to be too decrepit to restore, the couple resolve to tear it down and build another on the site. This decision sets up a plot in which they square off against bankers, lawyers, architects, contractors, hostile neighbors and the local historical society – all the people who still bedevil home-buyers. Cartoonist and children’s author William Steig (1907–2003) adds to the comedy with more than three dozen fanciful drawings.
Questions For Reading Groups
1. Yesterday’s bestsellers tend to look outdated quickly, and comic novels age faster then others because so much humor hinges on references to current events. Most novels from the era of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House have gone out of print. Why do you think this one still appeals to people?
2. Eric Hodgins tweaks the naiveté of Jim and Muriel Blandings throughout his book. Did you find the two appealing even though they often make bad decisions? Why?
3. Many contemporary novelists make heavy use of brand names in describing new homes. Hodgins doesn’t. Why do you think he avoided filling his book with references to specific products? How does his novel benefit or suffer from this approach?
4. Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House satirizes the modern lust for property. But it lampoons other things, too. What are some of them?
5. Jim and Muriel Blandings tangle with tradespeople and others. But their main antagonist is the house they are building. How does Hodgins give the place enough character to keep you from feeling as though you’re reading an extended article in Better Homes and Gardens?
6. Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House was published at the beginning of the baby boom, when families were expanding. How do you think people might react to the novel if it were appearing in print for the first time today?
7. Much of the humor in this book springs from its tone. Sometimes the tone is ironic:
“The evil days were behind them. The delays had been galling; the mistakes costly. The experience had been bitterly won, but it won it was. Their plans were perfect, their money was in sight, and now, thank God, work had at last begun. Nothing was so cozy, Mrs. Blandings thought, as the sight of workmen plying their trade on behalf of a home …” [Page 141]
At other times, the humor is more direct and involves local speech or a play on words, as when a man refers the Lansdale Historical society as “the Hysterical Society.” [Page 178] How would you describe the overall tone of the novel? How well does it serves the book?
8. What do William Steig’s drawings add to the novel? What do you think Steig was trying to do with them? Was he trying stick closely to the text or add a dimension?
9. Other satirical novels that you may have read include Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary and Christopher Buckley’s Thank You for Smoking. All of these differ in many ways from Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. How would you compare their humor? What do they all the book have in common? What makes all of them work?
Extras:
10. Roger Kimball, co-editor of The New Criterion, wrote that the 1948 movie Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House with Cary Grant and Myrna Loy is “charming … but nothing compared with the novel.” [The Wall Street Journal, March 11, 2006] If you’ve seen the movie, do you agree or disagree?
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. By Eric Hodgins. Illustrated by William Steig. Simon & Schuster, 228 pp., $12, paperback.
A review of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House appeared on One-Minute Book Reviews, www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com on April TK, 2007, and is archived with the April posts and in the “Novels” category.
Movie Links: Eric Hodgins’s novel inspired two movies. The first was the 1948 Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House with Cary Grant and Myrna Loy www.imdb.com/tt0040613/. The second was the 1986 The Money Pit with Tom Hans and Shelley Long www.imdb.com/title/tt0091541/.
If you found this guide helpful, please bookmark this site or subscribe to the RSS feed to avoid missing others. The Totally Unathorized Reading Group Guides cover fiction, nonfiction and poety and are posted often but not on a regular schedule, because they are created only for books that need or deserve them.
© 2007 By Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
Saying goodbye to furry and feathered creatures with help from Mister Rogers, Judith Viorst, Margaret Wise Bown and others
By Janice Harayda
A popular Easter tradition during my childhood was bringing home baby chicks that died soon after the holiday in a suburban basement. This practice may survive mainly in all those yellow marshmallow candies made in the unlucky chicks’ image. But other kinds of animal deaths abound in this season of new life. Some good books about the casualties:
Nonfiction
Mister Rogers’ First Experiences: When a Pet Dies (Putnam, $5.99, paperback). By Fred Rogers. Photographs by Jim Judkis. Ages 3–6.
Fred Rogers (1928–2003) did more than host the popular PBS show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. He also wrote “First Experiences,” a picture book series that offers children a gentle introduction to situations such as moving, making friends, and going to the doctor. When a Pet Dies is typical. Rogers speaks directly to children about how they may feel about losing a pet and answers basic questions such as, “What is dying?” His message is that when sad things happen, “the best place to be is near someone you love … someone who can understand how you are feeling.”
Fiction
The Tenth Good Thing About Barney (Aladdin, $5.99, paperback). By Judith Viorst. Illustrated by Erik Blegvad. Ages 4–9.
Many books talk “at” children about the loss of pets. Not The Tenth Good Thing About Barney, a lovely picture book by the author of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. It involves a boy who grieves for his dead cat and finds comfort in his mother’s suggestion that he say “ten good things about Barney” at the backyard burial. Viorst’s poetic but clear text includes a conversation between the boy and his friend, Annie, about whether heaven exists. He says no, she says yes, and the book suggests that both have a right to their views. Blegvad’s superb black-and-white drawings add layers of emotion and touches of whimsy that show that sadness doesn’t mean you can never have fun.
The Accident (Clarion, varied prices). By Carol Carrick. Pictures by Donald Carrick. Ages 5-9.
Child psychologists will tell you that a death, if always upsetting, is typically more traumatic if the child has witnessed it, partly because it increases the potential for guilt. And The Accident isn’t just an excellent picture book — it is one of the few that deals with such a situation. The authors use a well-written text and subdued art to tell the story of a boy who sees his beloved dog killed by a pick-up truck while they are walking along a highway. Sad and angry, Christopher keeps replaying the accident in his mind, trying to pretend it didn’t happen, until his sympathetic father helps him find a fitting way to express his grief and begin to feel better. The Accident is out-of-print but worth tracking down for a child who is struggling with this kind of loss. (If you can’t find the book online or at your library, you can ask the library to get it for you through an inter-library loan.)
The Dead Bird (Aladdin, 1987, with a new edition due out in May 2007, varied prices). By Margaret Wise Brown. Illustrated by Remy Charlip. Ages 3 and up.
This book is about the size of Goodnight Moon and offers further evidence of Brown’s genius. The story couldn’t be simpler: Four children find a dead bird, take it into the woods, and bury it amid wildflowers under a stone that says “Here Lies a Bird That Is Dead.” But this story is no less powerful because it is so brief. Charlip uses only a few colors for the art – chiefly blue-green and yellow – and on some pages, no pictures, just a sentence or two on a field of white. The missing colors suggest loss while the blue-green tones symbolize the new life that is emerging beside it. And Brown’s text has a similarly understated drama, especially in the last line, which tells what the children did after the burial: “And every day, until they forgot, they went and sang to their little dead bird and put fresh flowers on his grave.” What makes that line remarkable is that “until they forgot” slipped into the middle. Children do forget some animals, even people, who have died. Many authors ignore this and offer false “comfort” and “reassurance,” doling out sappy clichés suggesting children will “never forget” what they have lost. By contrast, The Dead Bird brims with honesty. Nearly 70 years after it appeared, it remains far better than many newer releases, partly because Brown knew that children don’t need false comfort: They need truth.
Many libraries have other good books on the death of a pet, including books for older children. One is Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World’s Worst Dog (Morrow, 2006), the true story of the life and death of beloved Labrador retriever, which may appeal to many teenagers. If you don’t see the kind of book you need on today’s list, ask a children’s librarian for suggestions.
A new review of a book or books for children or teenagers appears on this site every Saturday. One-Minute Book Reviews does not accept advertising or free books from publishers, so all reviews offer an independent evaluation that is not influenced by marketing concerns. One-Minute Book Reviews also offers reading group guides and discussion questions for some books, including the most recent Newbery Medal winner, The Higher Power of Lucky. You can find these guides archived in the “Totally Unauthorized Reading Group Guides” category on One-Minute Book Reviews. All reviews are written by Janice Harayda www.janiceharayda.com, a former book columnist for Glamour, book editor of the Plain Dealer and vice-president of the National Book Critics Circle http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com.
© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
10 Discussion Questions
Stuart: A Life Backwards
This reading group guide was not authorized or approved by the author, publisher, or agent for the book. This guide is copyrighted by Janice Harayda, and its sale or reproduction in any form is illegal except by public libraries that may reproduce it for use in their in-house reading groups. Other reading groups that would like to use this guide should link to this site or the “Contact” page on One-Minute Book Reviews to learn how to request permission to reproduce the guide.
“Charming” isn’t a word often applied to books about “an ex-homeless, ex-junkie psychopath,” as Alexander Masters describes his subject in Stuart: A Life Backwards. But it fits this biography of an intelligent and self-aware but physically and mentally impaired man – half Jekyll, half Hyde — whom the author met when both were living in or near Cambridge, England.
Masters has enriched his tragicomic story with quirky, New Yorker-ish line drawings of Stuart Clive Shorter and others in which people’s heads seem too big for their bodies. And whether or not the distortion was intentional, it’s a visual metaphor for the man described on its pages: Stuart was a someone whose brain always seemed to be about to burst out of his body and, apparently, in the end, did.
Questions For Reading Groups
1. One of the challenges faced by any biographer of a violent criminal is: How can you depict someone’s terrible crimes accurately while also maintaining enough sympathy for the person that people will keep reading? How does Masters do this?
2. Masters found that Stuart changed constantly and acted in “amazingly inconsistent” ways. “At first I thought he was lying or stupid,” Masters said in an interview. [“The Madman on Level D,” by Anne Garvey, the Times of London, June 10, 2005.] Did you ever think Stuart was “lying or stupid,” too? What changed your mind? How would you interpret Stuart’s behavior?
3. Stuart has an unusual narrative structure for a biography – it moves backwards. Masters begins when Stuart is an adult – “an ex-homeless, ex-junkie psychopath” – and doesn’t give his date of birth until Chapter 25. [Pages 1 and 291] But the story doesn’t always move in a straight chronological line. Masters describes some of Stuart’s ancestors in Chapter 24 before he tells you when his subject was born in Chapter 25. How well does this structure works?
4. Masters often criticizes mental-health professionals or popular views of mental illness, such as when he writes: “ … It is wrong to assume that a failed [suicide] bid is, as the nauseating cliché will have it, only ‘a cry for help.’ It could be – is usually in Stuart’s case – just the opposite. Its failure is the result of too great desperation to get the job done.” [Page 160] How did Stuart affect your ideas about mental illness or any aspect of it, such as suicidal tendencies?
5. One of the characteristics of great biographies is that they are usually “about” more than one person’s life. They may deal with subject’s profession or social circle or the era in which he or she lived. What is Stuart “about” besides Stuart?
6. Stuart disliked a version of the book that Masters showed him. He called it “boring” and wanted something “like what Tom Clancy writes.” [Page 1] How do you think Stuart would have liked the final book?
7. Biographies typically include only photographs of their subject and others. What do Masters’s drawings add to the book?
8. Masters is an advocate for the homeless who has worked in hostels for them and run a street newspaper. Biographers who support a cause are sometimes faulted by critics ax-grinding, special pleading, or slanting their facts. Has Masters done any of those things? How does he keep Stuart’s story fro becoming strident or sentimental?
9. Critics have disagreed on whether Stuart is biography, memoir, or something else, such as a true-crime story. Blurbs on the cover of the hardcover edition call the book a “biography.” The directors of the National Book Critics Circle said that Stuart “defies categorization” and named it a finalist for the 2007 NBCC award in the autobiography/memoirs category. You can find one board member’s comments on this issue by searching for the words “Stuart: A Life Backwards” on Critical Mass www.bookcriticle.blogspot.com. How would you categorize the book? How do such classifications affect your perceptions of Stuart and other books?
If you have time …
10. Stuart resembles James Boswell’s Life of Johnson, the first great modern biography, in that it may tell you as much about its author as it does about its subject. So you might enjoy comparing the two books. Is fair to say that Masters was Stuart’s Boswell? Why or why not? What does Masters have in common with Boswell?
Vital statistics
Hardcover edition: Stuart: A Life Backwards. By Alexander Masters. Delacorte, 300 pp., $20. Published: June 2006. Paperback edition: Delta, 320 pp., $12, paperback. To be released in May 2007.
A review of Stuart: A Life Backwards appeared on One-Minute Book Reviews on March 22, 2007, and is archived with the March 2007 posts and in the “Biographies” category on www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com.
Other reviews: “Shaking Down a Violent Jekyll to Find the Gentle Hyde,” Michiko Kakutani, the New York Times, June 9, 2006, p. E.2:36.
Most reading group guides come from publishers or sites that accept advertising from them. One-Minute Book Reviews does not accept free books or promotional materials or ads from publishers. All of its reading guides offer an independent evaluation of books that is not influenced by marketing concerns.
If you found this review helpful, please check the “Totally Unauthorized Reading Group Guides” category on One-Minute Book Reviews for others and bookmark the site so you don’t miss forthcoming guides. I would also be grateful if you would forward a link to others who might like the site.
Links: Alexander Masters site: http://www.alexandermasters.net/new/
[Note: SNAP Preview is enabled on One-Minute Book Reviews. This means that you can see an example of the art in Stuart just by putting your cursor on the preceding link to Masters's site. You don't have to click on the link and go to his site.] Publisher’s site: www.bantamdell.com Critical Mass, the blog of the board of directors of National Book Critics Circle http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/. Click on the Critical Mass link, then search the site for “Stuart: A Life Backwards” for posts on why the book was a finalist for its 2007 NBCC awards.
© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
10 Discussion Questions for Reading Groups
About Deborah Garrison’s The Second Child: Poems
This reading group was not authorized by the author, publisher, or agent for the book. This guide is copyrighted by Janice Harayda, and its sale or reproduction is illegal except by public libraries that many reproduce it for use in their in-house reading groups. Reading groups that wish to use this guide should send links to members or use the “Contact” page on One-Minute Book Reviews to learn how to request permission to reproduce it.
Deborah Garrison’s The Second Child is a collection of 33 poems about the intersection of work and motherhood in an age of large and small anxieties – from fears of another terrorist attack to regrets about missed chances to be playground monitor. A former senior editor of the New Yorker, Garrison is an editor at Alfred A. Knopf and Pantheon books. She also wrote A Working Girl Can’t Win: And Other Poems (Random House, 1998).
Questions For Reading Groups about The Second Child
1) The title poem in a collection often expresses a theme or the prevailing mood of a book. Is this true in The Second Child? What ideas in the poem “The Second Child” recur in different forms in other poems in the collection?
2) One of the strongest poems in this book, “September Poem,” deals with the events of Sept. 11, 2001. After the attacks, Garrison decides to have another child. But she says didn’t do that for the obvious reason that when people die “ … we want, crudely pining,/ To replace them with more people.” Why did she have another child? How does this poem differ from other things you’ve read about Sept. 11? What does this poem show you that newspaper and other reports didn’t?
3) The dust jacket of The Second Child calls the book “a meditation on the extraordinariness resident in the everyday – nursing babies, missing the past, knowing when to lead a child and knowing when to let go.” What are some poems in which Garrison shows the extraordinary in the ordinary? What details illustrate that quality?
4) David Orr said that what’s known as “the New Yorker poem” consists “basically of an epiphany-centered lyric.” [“Annals of Poetry, The New York Times Book Review, March 11, 2007, p. 31.) Seven poems in The Second Child appeared first in the New Yorker. Do those poems fit that definition? Which poems involve an epiphany?
5) Some poems in The Second Child, such as “A Drink in the Night,” resemble anecdotes in verse. How does Garrison turn these into something more than cute the stories about children that you might find in a women’s magazine? In “A Drink in the Night,” does she use the invented “cup” as a metaphor for something else? What?
6) One of Garrison’s more unusual poems is “Sestina for the Working Mother.” A sestina is a fixed verse form in which six end-words recur in a set order in six stanzas and a three-line envoi (a coda or postscript). This centuries-old form might seem an odd choice for a modern woman who reflects, in part, on her reduced opportunities to listen to public radio and be a PTA mother. Why might Garrison have written a sestina instead of, say, a sonnet or haiku? How do the lives of working mothers resemble sestinas? For example, do mothers do tasks that may vary in order from one day to the next?
7) Garrison uses other traditional forms, such as the sonnet. But she doesn’t follow the familiar rhyme scheme the Shakespearean sonnet, abab cdcd efef gg. The end-words don’t start to rhyme until Lines 7 and 8 in “Unbidden Sonnet With Evergreen” and until Line 11 in “Song After Everyone’s Asleep.” What might explain this? Do the changes in rhyme relate to shifts in the tone or ideas of the poem?
You could argue that the most Shakespearean poem in The Second Child is the first, “On New Terms,” which uses the blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) that Shakespeare often used. In this poem some words or syllables rhyme in unexpected places (“most/ghost"). How do the forms of these sonnets add to or detract from their effects? Could Garrison be using these forms to express something about the role of women caught between traditional and new roles? [If you see an emoticon instead of the number 8 in front of this question, it is accidental.]
9) Although often meditative, the poems in this book can also be jaunty. The Cole Porter-ish “Goodbye, New York” sounds like a Broadway show tune: “You were the pickles, you were the jar/ you were the prize fight we watched in a bar.” It sounds that way partly because Garrison uses the bouncy anapestic meter (two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed) instead of the iambic (one unstressed followed by one stressed) of “On New Terms.” Anapestic is one of the most popular meters in children’s poems. You can almost hear an echo of “A Visit From St. Nicholas” in lines like: “my skyline, my byline, my buzzer and door/ now you’re the dream we lived before.” Have you read any children’s poems that use anapestic meter? (Hint: This was Dr. Seuss’s favorite.) Do you see other places where Garrison uses meter to achieve an effect?
10) If you’ve read A Working Girl Can’t Win, how does The Second Child resemble or differ from that one in tone and content? How is Garrison evolving as a poet?
Vital statistics:
The Second Child: Poems. By Deborah Garrison. Random House, 76 pp., $19.95.
A Working Girl Can’t Win: And Other Poems. By Deborah Garrison. Modern Library, 80 pp., $7.95 , paperback. www.randomhouse.com
A review of The Second Child appeared on One-Minute Book Reviews on March 12, 2007, and is archived in the “Poetry” category and with the March posts.
Your book group may also want to read:
Late for Work. By David Tucker. Mariner, 64 pp., $12, paperback. Tucker, a newspaper editor, writes about his work in a witty and poignant book of poems that won Breadloaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Poetry Prize. www.houghtonmifflinbooks/mariner/
Late Wife: Poems. By Claudia Emerson. LSU Press/Southern Messenger Poets Series, $54 pp., $16.95, paperback. Emerson writes about divorce and remarriage in a collection that won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. www.lsu.edu/lsupress/
Reference Books:
The Poetry Dictionary: Second Edition. By John Drury. Foreword by Dana Goia. Writer’s Digest Books, 374 pp., $14.99, paperback. A guide to the different types of poetry (including the most common rhymes, meters, stanzas, and more) with more than 250 poems that illustrate the terms. This book describes many forms or techniques that Garrison uses, such as sonnet, end-rhyme, and sestina.
If this guide helped you, please check the “Totally Unauthorized Reading Group Guides” category on One-Minute Book Reviews for others and forward this link to members of book clubs. One-Minute Book Reviews does not accept free books or other promotional materials from editors, publishers, agents, or authors. And its reviews and reading group guides are completely independent and do not reflect the marketing concerns that may influence creators of other guides.
© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
A gripping neo-Gothic novel snubbed by the American Library Association
A Drowned Maiden’s Hair: A Melodrama. By Laura Amy Schlitz. Candlewick, 389 pp., $15.99. Ages 10 & up. [See further discussion of these ages below.]
By Janice Harayda
Do Christian themes kill your chances of winning top honors from American Library Association? You might think so after reading two also-rans for the 2007 Newbery Medal for the “most distinguished” work of children’s literature, Kate DiCamillo’s The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane and Laura Amy Schlitz’s A Drowned Maiden’s Hair.
The winner, The Higher Power of Lucky, has many virtues discussed in a Feb. 19 review on this site, particularly its vibrant descriptions of the Mojave Desert and engaging illustrations by Matt Phelan. But Susan Patron’s underdeveloped plot helps to make her novel at best a B/B-minus book.
DiCamillo’s Christian allegory, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, doesn’t have that problem. Neither does A Drowned Maiden’s Hair, a gripping neo-Gothic first novel that has more complex themes and shows a stronger command of language and storytelling than the winner.
Then why did Schitz’s novel get shut out of the medals? Consider the plot: In 1909 a high-spirited 11-year-old named Maud Flynn rejoices when she learns she is to be adopted by a trio of unmarried sisters who promise her treats like “ready-made dresses” and bacon instead the gritty oatmeal served at the Barbary Asylum for Orphans.
But Maud grows uneasy when she learns that the women are fake spiritualists who expect her to take part in séances intended to con the rich widow Eleanor Lambert into thinking that she’s hearing from her dead daughter. A sister named Hyacinth tells Maud: “Any minister worth his salt would tell her she would see her daughter in heaven. But Eleanor Lambert doesn’t want to see her daughter in heaven. She wants her now.” Hyacinth adds that Mrs. Lambert “wants to resurrect the dead – which is impossible.”
Anyone who has read The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane may see a theme emerging: While DiCamillo’s novel implicitly affirms the possibility of resurrection, Schlitz’s explicitly denies it. And A Drowned Maiden’s Hair goes further by casting the superintendent of the Barbary Asylum as a religious hypocrite who treats children cruelly while displaying a picture of Jesus and the words: “Suffer the Little Children to Come Unto Me.” The ALA might have snubbed DiCamillo’s novel for fear of appearing to promote Christianity (although many librarians have no trouble recommending The Chronicles of Narnia, also regarded as a Chrisitan allegory). But Schlitz doesn’t promote it. Has even a historically appropriate mention of religious hypocrisy become taboo? Must authors shun any mention of Christianity to win an ALA award? Books about other faiths don’t seem to face the same obstacles. A Caldecott Honor citation went in 2006 to Zen Shorts, a picture book about Buddhism.
A Drowned Maiden’s Hair isn’t flawless. From a literary standpoint, Schlitz makes two big mistakes. Children may not notice one because the story is so suspenseful: Schlitz tells her story from Maud’s point of view but sometimes credits her heroine with ideas that are unrealistic for her. At the orphanage Maud led a life so sheltered that she can’t remember ever having gone outside at night. But she soon encourages one of her new caretakers to wear her hair in a pompadour because it’s “stylish.” How would she know? Maud also reflects that the books at the orphanage were “mostly moral tales.” This is an accurate but adult characterization of what she would have been reading. The problem becomes clear when you compare A Drowned Maiden’s Hair with another novel about a distant era, Little House on the Prairie, which works so beautifully, in part, because Laura Ingalls Wilder never makes such slips: She tells you only what Laura, her young heroine, would have seen or thought. Children love the book partly because they understand – even if they can’t express it — that it shows the world from their point of view.
The second mistake Schlitz makes is that she has Maud’s older brother, Samm’l, adopted by other parents, appear early in the book and promise to send for her after he gets his own farm, though Maud never sees or hears from him again after that. Parents, I ask you: If you promise your child something like this, will your child forget it? No, and the readers of this book aren’t going to forget it, either. Schlitz seems to have inserted a scene involving the brother either because she wanted to add background about Maud without larding the novel with exposition or because she is setting up a sequel. Either way, it’s a cheat.
None of this spoils the pleasure of reading the novel. Schlitz has spent much of her life working as a professional storyteller. And as befits that background, she grabs your attention with a terrific beginning and sustains a level of suspense as high as you are likely to find in any children’s novel of 2006. And A Drowned Maiden’s Hair does more than tell a captivating story. It asks children to consider large questions such as: What does it mean to be “good”? To what degree are you responsible for your own actions if adults require you to act a certain way? Can material comforts – like pretty clothes and ice-cream sodas – bring happiness? And, yes, is there life after death?
“People throw the word ‘classic’ about rather a lot,” Megan Cox Gordon wrote in the Wall Street Journal, ‘but A Drowned Maiden’s Hair genuinely deserves to become one.” Fortunately, when librarians have snubbed worthy books, such as Tuck Everlasting, children usually have the last word.
Best line: The first: “On the morning of the best day of her life, Maud Flynn was in the outhouse, singing ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic.’”
Worst line: Maud’s comment: “Pompadours are stylish. And a pompadour would make your face look taller.”
Age level: The moral questions raised by this novel justify the “ages 10 and up” recommendation from the publisher. But the story would fascinate many younger children, too (and has no sex or “bad words” that would rule it out in some homes). One way to think of A Drowned Maiden’s Hair is that it’s a good book for children who loved the period details of “Little House” series (typically recommended for ages 6–9) but recently have outgrown it and are ready for a story that is more challenging.
Published: October 2006
Furthermore: Schlitz also wrote the biography The Hero Schliemann: The Dreamer Who Dug for Troy (Candlewick, 2006, ages 9-12), illustrated by Robert Byrd. [Note: I haven't read The Hero Schliemann. Can any parents, teachers, or librarians comment on the book for visitors who might like to know more about Schlitz's work? Jan]
Links: www.candlewick.com
© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
Why the Totally Unauthorized Reading Group Guides on One-Minute Book Reviews Are Different From Others
Most reading group guides are designed to sell books. They come from publishers or Web sites that accept advertising from them. The guides many contain many thoughtful questions. But their primary purpose is to promote books. They do not encourage you to examine the strengths and weaknesses of an author’s work. They are marketing tools for publishers.
The new reading group guides on One-Minute Book Reviews are different. They are designed for intelligent readers who know that not all books are good or deserve only praise. They encourage you to explore both the faults and virtues of books. They do this in many ways, including by citing negative reviews or obvious defects in an author’s writing when appropriate. They also come from a site that doesn’t accept free books or advertising from publishers and, for that reason, never faces pressures to slant a guide in the direction most favorable to a book.
Some guides on One-Minute Book Reviews are stand-alone lists of discussion questions and supporting material. Others supplement guides you may find elsewhere. All reflect the deep literary experience and perspective of Janice Harayda, an award-winning journalist and novelist who has been book editor of the Plain Dealer and vice-president for awards of the National Book Critics Circle. You can find them in the “Totally Unauthorized Reading Groups” category on this site, which includes guides to The Birthday Party: A Memoir of Survival, by Stanley Alpert; The Higher Power of Lucky, the 2007 Newbery Medal Winner by Susan Patron; and A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, by Ishmael Beah.
If the discussions at your reading are dull or uninspired, you may want to bookmark this site or forward a link to members of your club. Thank you for visiting One-Minute Book Reviews.
(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
Discussion Questions for A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Solider
by Ishmael Beah
Source: One-Minute Book Reviews
www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com
This reading group was not authorized or approved by the author, publisher, or agent for the book. This guide is copyrighted by Janice Harayda, and its reproduction in any form is illegal except by public libraries, which may use it in their in-house reading groups. Other book clubs that wish to use this guide should link to it or check “Contact” page to learn how to request permission to reproduce it.
A Long Way Gone is a memoir by Ishmael Beah, who claims that he joined the government army in Sierra Leone to save his life after rebels destroyed his village and separated him from his parents. A review of this book appeared on Feb. 27, 2007, on One-Minute Book Reviews www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com and is archived in the “Memoirs” category and with the February 2007 posts on that site. [Note: Since this guide appeared, many of the claims in A Long Way Gone have been disputed by reputable journalists, and the publisher of the book has produced no proof that Beah was ever a child soldier.]
The publisher of A Long Way Gone has posted an extensive reading group guide to the book at www.fsgbooks.com that contains questions your club may want to use as a starting point for its discussions. That guide includes samples of the praise the book has received from respected authors or critics. Like most publishers’ promotional materials, the online guide does not encourage criticism of the book, cite concerns raised by reviewers, or suggest that you are reading anything other than a flawless work. The following Totally Unauthorized Reading Group Guide is not intended to be comprehensive but only to raise questions not covered by publisher’s guide.
Questions For Reading Groups About A Long Way Gone
1) Beah, now in his mid-20s, focuses on the upheavals that began when he was 12 and also covers some earlier events. How good is your memory for events in your life that occurred when you were that age? Can you recall events from that long ago in the detail Beah describes, including such things as hand gestures and a speaker’s pauses? If not, are you willing to give Beah credit for remembering them? Why or why not?
2) John Corry, who has reported from West Africa, wrote in the Wall Street Journal: “It is permissible to wonder whether Mr. Beah is accurately recalling events and people and what they said.” (Feb. 10, 2007, page P8.) Do you agree with Corry? If so, what are some of the things it’s permissible to question? Do your questions affect your overall view of A Long Way Gone? Corry is a senior editor of American Spectator, a conservative magazine. Do you believe that critics’ liberal or conservative biases affect their reviews? How might liberal and conservative critics have reviewed this book differently?
3) Corry noted in his review that, perhaps to forestall questions about the book, Beah writes: “To this day, I have an excellent photographic memory that enables me to remember details of the day-to-day moments of my life, indelibly.” [Page 51] Did you ever know anyone who had a “photographic memory”? Was the person sometimes able to recall events in the detail described in A Long Way Gone?
4) Beah says that the army supplied the young conscripts with “white capsules,” presumably amphetamines, to help them stay alert. He adds that the child soldiers also had easy access to other drugs. [Page 121] Beah writes:
“In the daytime, instead of playing soccer in the village square, I took turns at guarding posts around the village, smoking marijuana and sniffing, brown brown, cocaine mixed with gunpowder, which was always spread out on the table, and of course the white capsules, as I had become addicted to them.” [Page 121]
Are you willing to share with your group whether or not you ever took drugs and how they affected your perceptions of events? Or how drugs have affected the memory of someone you know who used them?
5) Beah describes in one scene how he and friends “lay in the dirt” on a coffee farm near a ruined village and eavesdropped on rebels who played cards and chatted “for hours.” [Page 97] He adds that he heard one rebel say his group had just burned three villages:
“Another rebel, the only one dressed in full army gear, agreed with him. ‘Yes, three is impressive, in just a few hours in the afternoon.’ He paused, playing with the side of his G3 weapon. ‘I especially enjoyed burning this village. We caught everyone here. No one escaped. That is how good it was. We carried out the command and executed everyone. Commander will be pleased when he gets here.’ He nodded, looking at the rest of the rebels, who had stopped the game to listen to him. They all agreed with him, nodding their heads. They gave each other high fives and resumed their game.” [p. 97]
Does it seem to you that Beah and his friends could have been close enough to overhear that conversation yet avoid detection “for hours” by the rebels? Or that if the boys could see a rebel “nod,” and others “nodding” in agreement, that the rebels could not see them? What are some possible explanations for how Beah could have observed a conversation in such detail while avoiding detection himself?
6) When this book was published, Beah worked for a respected international organization, Human Rights Watch www.hrw.org. He has also described his experiences at the United Nations and in other settings likely to have included experts who could have confirmed at least part of what he says. How does this affect your view of A Long Way Gone?
7) Beah is a young writer who has clearly survived tragedies that go beyond anything most of us will experience in our lives. Do you believe that because of his youth or suffering he should be held to different literary or journalistic standards than writers who are older or have not suffered as much? Or do you believe that there are standards that all authors should uphold? What are they?
Vital statistics:
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. By Ishmael Beah. Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Sarah Crichton, 229 pp., $22. Published: February 2007.
Your book group may also want to read:
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda (Picador, 1999) by Philip Gourevitch. This award-winning book describes the Rwandan genocide, which took place during a time that partly overlaps with that of A Long Way Gone. It also involves some similar events, such as machete killings. But Gourevitch places such events in a wider social and political context than Beah does. Comparing We Wish to Inform You … with A Long Way Gone may enrich your understanding of how events in Sierra Leone fit into the broader pattern of African history during the 1990s. It may also suggest ways Beah could have developed his story differently – for example, by adding more background about the events in his country – without sacrificing narrative power.
As a high school student, Beah wrote an essay about his experiences as a boy solider that appears on the web site for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation www.wagingpeace.org. Search the site for his name or “When Good Comes From Bad.”
If you found this guide helpful, you may also want to check the “Totally Unauthorized Reading Group Guides” category on this site for others.
© 2007 By Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
Russell Freedman’s books help children get excited about the lives of great men and women
By Janice Harayda
If you’re looking for good biographies for 9-to-12-year-olds, I have two words for you: Russell Freedman.
Many authors have written captivating nonfiction for preteens, including the prolific and much-admired James Cross Giblin, who won the Washington Post-Children’s Book Guild Award for his body of work. But Freedman’s work is the gold standard for the sort of book known as the “photobiography,” a heavily illustrated book that takes a documentary approach to history. Along with other books, photobiographies can help 9-to-12-year-olds make the transition from simple chapter books to more complex works that may or may not have pictures.
Freedman is best known for his elegant Newbery Medal–winning Lincoln: A Photobiography (Clarion, 1987). But he has also written many other acclaimed biographies for 9-to-12-year-olds, including Eleanor Roosevelt: A Life of Discovery (Clarion, 1987), Martha Graham: A Dancer’s Life (Clarion, 1998), Babe Didrikson Zaharias: The Making of a Champion (Clarion, 1999), and The Voice That Challenged: Marian Anderson and the Struggle for Equal Rights (Clarion, 2006). Freedman’s books tend to be as beautifully designed as they are well-written, so they make wonderful birthday and holiday gifts.
Parents and grandparents: This post was inspired by a visitor searching for “a biography for a 9-year-old.” If you can’t find what you need, why not leave a comment with your question or send an e-mail message to the address on the “Contact” page? Many teachers and librarians visit this site. So if I can’t answer your question, they may be able to help. Please put your question in the e-mail subject heading. One-Minute Book reviews is a noncommercial site that does not accept advertising or free books, so its recommendations aren’t influenced by marketing concerns.
Links: www.clarionbooks.com
© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
What happened to the review of A Drowned Maiden’s Hair, the children’s novel that many people thought should have won the 2007 Newbery Medal?
A new review of a book for children or teenagers appears every Saturday on One-Minute Book Reviews with all reviews permanently archived in the “Children’s Books” category. But since Feb. 25 I’ve written more than a half dozen unplanned posts about the uproar over the 2007 Newbery Medal winner, Susan Patron’s The Higher Power of Lucky, which angered some librarians with use of the word “scrotum” on the first page. These posts have included a book review, a reading group guide, and a list of reasons why the American Library Association might have given the novel its most prestigious award for children’s literature.
So the review of Laura Amy Schlitz’s A Drowned Maiden’s Hair that was supposed to appear today will be posted on Saturday March 10. Comments on other children’s books may appear later today or tomorrow. In the meantime, if you’re looking for some light entertainment, you may enjoy my two posts about the amusing search terms people have used to find my comments on the The Higher Power of Lucky. My favorite terms include “lucky scrotum,” “a character named scrotum,” and — yes — “janice harayda scrotum.”
(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
On Friday I posted a list of the funniest search terms that people have used to find my site since Monday, when I began blogging about Susan Patron’s The Higher Power of Lucky, winner of the 2007 Newbery Medal from the American Library Association. A few more turned up over the weekend:
a character named scrotum
scrotum literary award
susan patron scrotum
janice harayda scrotum
I thought that the “janice harayda scrotum” came from a wag who had read my original post about the keywords, entitled “Barbara Walters Scrotum.” But I found accidentally that it had been used by a minister to whom I described a few of my seven or eight posts on The Higher Power of Lucky, including a review and a reading group guide. If ministers have no problem with “the s word,” why do some librarians?
By the way, I love that one of the links to my original review of The Higher Power of Lucky came from a site called Depraved Librarian http: www.depravedlibrarian.blogspot.com/. I never thought of librarians as “depraved. ” But if patrons keep asking librarians to help them find that book with “a character named scrotum,” it could take a toll on their sanity, don’t you think?
(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
The most amusing keywords or keyphrases of the week
I have blogged frequently this week about Susan Patron’s The Higher Power of Lucky, which uses the word “scrotum” on the first page and won the American Library Association’s 2007 Newbery Medal for the most distinguished work of children’s literature. My posts included a comment about a segment of The View on which Barbara Walters read aloud a dictionary definition of “scrotum.”
People have entered some pretty funny keywords or keyphrases into their search bars as a result all of this. And because a lot of those people have ended up at One-Minute Book Reviews, their search terms have showed up on my “Blog Stats” page. Some of the most amusing appear below. My blog stats don’t show which of these terms originally included a plus sign or the word “and.” Some of these terms appeared in quotes and some didn’t.
lucky scrotum
patron scrotum
Barbara Walters scrotum
library scrotum
Newbery scrotum
scrotum book
view walters scrotum book
For those of you who may want to keep your “scrotum” in perspective, I posted a detailed review of The Higher Power of Lucky on Monday and a reading group guide to the book on Thursday.
On Wednesday, Feb. 28, I will announce on this site the finalists for the first annual Delete Key Awards, which recognize the year’s worst writing in books. The announcement will include examples of bad writing from from books on the short list. You may find some of these funny, too. The winner of the Delete Key Awards will be announced on March 15, the Ideas of March.
© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
What were those librarians thinking? A former book awards judge offers possible answers
By Janice Harayda
First, I have no inside knowledge of the workings of committee that gave the 2007 Newbery Medal to The Higher Power of Lucky, which uses the word “scrotum” on the first page. Second, if I did have it, I would be skeptical, because the leakers in book awards contests are often judges who are sore that their choices didn’t win.
But I have followed the American Library Association’s awards for years and, as a journalist, and have interviewed former members of the Caldecott committee, which awards the prizes for picture books. I have also served as vice-president for awards of the National Book Critics Circle and, as such, helped to judge its annual awards program.
Based on that experience, I’d like to offer a half dozen possible reasons why the Newbery judges might have given the 2007 medal to Susan Patron’s The Higher Power of Lucky:
1) The majority of the Newbery committe thought The Higher Power of Lucky really was the most distinguished work of children’s literature published in 2006. If so, I disagree. But the committee made a defensible choice. This was not one of those ALA awards — and there have been more than a few of these — that make you say, “Was the medal winner threatening to go public with Britney Spears-type crotch shots of the Newbery committee members?” I am fully prepared to believe that somebody did have crotch shots of the librarians during the years when they gave no award to Tuck Everlasting and only an Honor Book citation to Charlotte’s Web.
2) The librarians thought that the word “scrotum” was no big deal in a novel for 9-to-11-year-olds given that you regularly hear 3- and 4-year-olds saying “penis” and “vagina.” If so, I agree.
3) The Higher Power of Lucky is upbeat. The ALA committees tend to favor books that are upbeat, unlike the judges of adult books, who often seem to equate bleakness with meaning. This could explain why the organization didn’t honor Tuck Everlasting. Although Patron’s heroine doesn’t have an easy life, The Higher Power of Lucky has a happy ending.
4) Apart from its use of “scrotum,” The Higher Power of Lucky won’t offend anybody. Yes, that’s a big “apart from.” But this is plausible. The ALA choices don’t really honor the most distinguished books for children so much as the most distinguished books that librarians can recommend to everybody. And Patron’s book meets the current tests of ideological “correctness” (with, for example, a young heroine who likes science and isn’t afraid of snakes).
5) Book awards often to go everybody’s second choice. Again, this happens in book contests of all kinds. Often prize judges disagree so strongly about which book should win that they all have to abandon their first choices and pick a title that everybody can agree on. So the award goes to everybody’s second choice instead of a few people’s first. Kate DiCamillo’s The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane is much richer and more complex than The Higher Power of Lucky. But it is so clearly a Christian allegory – with a full-page picture of a crucified rabbit and many biblical parallels – that you can see how librarians who preferred it might have had trouble building a consensus.
6) Susan Patron is a librarian and the librarians were “taking care of their own.” Could be. Patron has worked for years as a librarian in Los Angeles, which has one of the largest public libraries in the country. I would be surprised if she hadn’t served on Newbery or Caldecott committees or didn’t know some of the librarians who helped her get nominated. And personal ties can play a role in who wins book awards. Undercutting this idea is that the ALA didn’t “take care of” Laura Amy Schlitz, a Baltimore librarian who wrote the gripping A Drowned Maiden’s Hair, the Wall Street Journal called “a classic” and was many people’s first choice for the award.
Which explanation is most likely? I don’t know. But I do know that every bookstore and library has many books that children could enjoy as much as The Higher Power of Lucky. Most of those books will never win medals from anyone.
For a review of The Higher Power of Lucky, please see the Feb. 19 post on One-Minute Book Reviews, archived in the Children’s Books category. You can find more information in the Reading Group Guide to the novel posted on this site yesterday.
© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
10 Discussion Questions for Young Readers
The Higher Power of Lucky
By Susan Patron with Illustrations by Matt Phelan
Winner of the 2007 Newbery Medal
Libraries may reproduce this guide for use in their reading programs as long as the byline, copyright line, and URL for One-Minute Book Reviews appear on it. Others who want to use this guide should link to this site or request permission from the e-mail address on the “Contact” page.
By Janice Harayda
© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
One-Minute Book Reviews
www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com
Lucky Trimble, age 10, lives with her dog in a cozy trailer that looks like a “shiny aluminum canned ham.” And she wants to stay there – at least until she becomes a world-famous scientist. But Lucky worries that her guardian will go back to France and she’ll have to go to orphanage. To avoid that fate, Lucky decides to run away. This decision brings results that are at first worse, and then much better, than anything she had imagined.
Question 1
This book is about a 10-year-old fifth-grader named Lucky. Lucky’s mother has died, her father isn’t around, and she lives with her guardian, Brigitte. You might say, “Lucky doesn’t sound lucky to me.” Why do you think Susan Patron (pa-TRONE) gave her that name? What are some of the ways Lucky is lucky?
Question 2
At first, you might think that Lucky doesn’t have any family, because she doesn’t live with relatives like parents, grandparents, or brothers and sisters. But after a while you may see that Lucky has created her own kind of “family.” Who are some of the members? What does this book teach you about families?
Question 3
Lucky eavesdrops on people who go to meetings and talk about the bad things that happened because they drank too much liquor. She notices that some people talk fast and get straight to the point of what they have to say. A man named Short Sammy is different. He doesn’t “head right to the good part” of his story:
“To stretch it out and get more suspense going for the big ending, he veered off and told about the old days when he was broke and couldn’t afford to buy rum, so he made homemade liquor from cereal box raisins and any kind of fruit he could scrounge up. This was the usual roundabout way he talked, and Lucky had noticed that it made people stay interested, even if the story had got quite a bit longer than if someone else had been telling it.” [Page 2]
Is Susan Patron sometimes like Short Sammy? Does she veer off and talk about Lucky’s “old days” to keep you interested? When does she this? What do you learn about Lucky from the stories of her “old days”? Would you have been as interested in Lucky if you didn’t know about those things?
Question 4
Lucky overhears people talking at meetings about finding a “Higher Power” that helped them feel more in control of their lives. She wishes she could find one, too.
“Being ten and a half, Lucky felt like she had no control over her life – partly because she wasn’t grown up yet – but that if she found her Higher Power it would guide her in the right direction.” [Page 5]
Later Lucky sees ants working together in an ant colony. She thinks that “to an ant, its Higher Power might be the whole colony itself.” [Page 21] Does this tell you anything about what kind of “Higher Power” Lucky wants to find? Does she eventually find it? What is the “Higher Power” of Lucky?
Question 5
Lucky lives in a desert in California called the Mojave. What did you learn about the desert from The Higher Power of Lucky? Why do you think Susan Patron chose to have Lucky live there? What are some things that Lucky could do where she lives that you couldn’t do where you live?
Question 6
You may have noticed that the weather in the desert plays big role in The Higher Power of Lucky. Weather is important in a lot of other stories, too. That’s partly because the weather affects what the characters can – and can’t – do. And storms are often symbols of emotions. In this book the desert gets hit by a storm with “fifty-five-mile- per-hour winds.” [Page 94] Do you think that Lucky’s feelings were ever stormy, too? When? At the end of the book, what happened to the windstorm? What has happened to any stormy feelings that Lucky might have had?
Question 7
Lucky has a friend named Lincoln who loves to tie knots. He “knows how to tie a million different ones, plus bends and hitches.” [Page 17] You can look at those knots in many ways. For example, the knots could symbolize Lincoln’s feelings. Lincoln may at times feel tied up in knots because his parents disagree about whether he should be thinking about becoming president. The knots could also remind you of the “bends and hitches” in the plot of this book. The most interesting knot is “the
Ten-Strand Round Knot” that Lincoln gives Lucky. [Page 67]
“The neat round buttonlike knot had no cord ends sticking out that might unwind.” [Page 68]
You could see this round knot as a symbol of the life Lucky wants – one with no loose ends. A circle can also symbolize “unbroken love.” What do you think the round knot represents to Lucky? What have you seen in your own life that’s a circle and means “unbroken love”?
Question 8
Susan Patron uses the word “scrotum” on the first page of The Higher Power of Lucky and elsewhere in it. [Pages 1, 6, 7, 132] She explains that a scrotum is “a little sac” in a man or animal that “has in it the sperm to make a baby.” [Page 132] Some adults thought that she shouldn’t have put that word in a book for people your age.
Do you agree or disagree with those adults? Why?
Question 9
Some librarians have said that they aren’t going to get The Higher Power of Lucky for their libraries because it has the word “scrotum” in it. What would you say to those librarians?
Question 10
Characters often have names that tell you something about them. In the past you may have read picture books about a dog named Spot the Pup. Even if you haven’t read those books, you could probably figure out that Spot has … spots! Many characters in the Harry Potter novels also have names that tell you something about them. You can learn more about their names by searching the Internet for “Meanings of Harry Potter Character Names.” What books have you read that have characters whose names help you understand them? When you read a book, always ask yourself: Why does a character have this name? The author of a book may be giving you a clue to a theme of the book.
Vital statistics:
The Higher Power of Lucky. By Susan Patron. Illustrated by Matt Phelan. Atheneum: A Richard Jackson Book, 134 pp., $21.99.
Links: www.simonsays.com
If you found this guide helpful, please consider adding One-Minute Book Reviews to the “Ready Reference” links at your library, so patrons can find other guides and reviews. One-Minute Book Reviews accepts no advertising and has been approved by, and appears on, Open Directory lists. Janice Harayda is an award-winning journalist who has been the book columnist for Glamour, the book editor of The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, and a vice-president of the National Book Critics Circle.
The guide is copyrighted by Janice Harayda. It is illegal for any person or institution, including students and schools, to copy or sell this guide. This guide may be reproduced only by library staff members for use in library reading groups. Please link to One-Minute Book Reviews if you want others to know about this guide and do not work for a library.
(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
The last word on scrotums …
Okay, I’ve just about exhausted what I have to say about scrotums, at least until I get to Dr. Phil’s vasectomy reversal (yes, he had one) which his wife, Robin, discusses in her Inside My Heart (Nelson, 2006), soon to be reviewed on One-Minute Book Reviews.
A couple of final thoughts about Susan Patron’s Newbery Medal–winning The Higher Power of Lucky, reviewed at length in this space on Monday, Feb. 19:
1) Want to encourage your library to carry The Higher Power of Lucky? Make a formal request that the library buy the book. At most public libraries, any cardholder can do this by filling out a postcard at the checkout desk. You may also be able to do this online by logging onto the library’s Web site. Don’t give the staff an opportunity to say, “We didn’t think this book is right for our patrons.” Tell your library that you’re a patron, and it’s right for you. If you have a child with a library card, it would be even more brilliant to get your child to request The Higher Power of Lucky. This would achieve two things. First, you will be teaching your child about the wonderful range of services offered by public libraries, which often include buying books that you request. Second, you will force the library to choose between buying the book and breaking the heart of your adorable child, who may be requesting the purchase of a book for the first time. And if the library doesn’t buy the book, you could have your child ask a librarian to explain why it couldn’t buy the book. As I said … brilliant, isn’t it?
2) Want to find out what you missed if you didn’t see Barbara Walters’s discussion of Susan Patron’s book on The View today (Feb. 20)? Go to the blog Watching the View http://www.watchingtheview.com/feb-20-recap-banned-childrens-book. This site has an amusing recap of the show on which Barbara Walters apparently read aloud a dictionary definition of “scrotum” … just in case you were still unclear about which part of the male anatomy Patron was describing.
Postscript: This turned out not to be my last word on scrotums. Since writing this post, I have published reading group guide to The Higher Power of Lucky and thoughts on why the book might have received the Newbery despite its use of the word “scrotum.” Both of these posts appeared on Feb. 22. If you don’t see them on the main page of this site, you will find them archived in the “Children’s Books” category on One-Minute Book Reviews. My original review of The Higher Power of Lucky appeared on Feb. 19 and evaluated, among other things, how the word “scrotum” fits into the novel as a whole.
© 2006 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
A postscript to yesterday’s review of The Higher Power of Lucky: Next week (Feb. 25-March 3) is Freedom to Read Week in Canada, which “encourages Canadians to reaffirm their commitment to intellectual freedom.” And because big books tend to appear simultaneously in the U.S. and north of the border, we may assume that the 2007 Newbery winner is there or on the way. Don’t you wonder if any Canadian librarians will dare to speak out against Susan Patron’s novel during Freedom to Read Week?
(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
A tempest swirls around this year’s winner of the most prestigious award for children’s literature
Did you see the article in yesterday’s New York Times about the controversy surrounding the 2007 Newbery Medal winner, The Higher Power of Lucky, which uses the word “scrotum” on the first page? A review that evaluates both the controvery and the literary merits of the book will appear later today on One-Minute Book Reviews. Technorati is often slow in listing posts. If you’re interested in finding out what the fuss is about, please bookmark this site or keep checking back. I hope to post this review by early afternoon.
If you are a member of the media seeking a quote from an expert who is not a teacher or librarian but knows this book well, or from someone who has been a judge for a national literary awards program, use the e-mail address on the “Contact” page of this site to get in touch with me.
(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
One-Minute Book Reviews is an independent literary blog created by Janice Harayda, an award-winning journalist who has been the book columnist for Glamour, the book editor of The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, and vice-president for awards of the National Book Critics Circle.