A tale of theft, blackmail, adultery, anti-Semitism and a possible murder, written at an 8-year-old reading level
What I Saw and How I Lied. By Judy Blundell. Scholastic, 284 pp., $16.99. Ages: See discussion below.
By Janice Harayda
What would you do if you were a publisher who knew that reading test scores were declining as children were seeing more sex and violent crimes in the media? Maybe play both sides against the middle as Scholastic has done with What I Saw and How I Lied, the winner of the 2008 National Book Award for young people’s literature.
This stylish literary thriller deals with subjects appropriate for the 13-to-18-year-old age range that the publisher recommends on its site — theft, blackmail, adultery, anti-Semitism and a possible murder. But Judy Blundell writes at a third-grade reading level in the novel, according to the readability statistics on Microsoft Word.
So who, exactly, is this book for? Much of the content is too mature for 8-year-olds. But the reading level is too low for the sophisticated adolescent and teenage girls likely gravitate to its glamorous, noir-ish cover, which shows a thin, beautiful model applying red lipstick. Blundell is condescending to them even if they enjoy its page-turner of a plot: Anyone who is ready for the subjects covered in this novel is also ready for a higher reading level.
Evie Spooner is 15 years old when her stepfather, Joe, returns from Austria in 1947, having overstayed the end of the war for murky reasons. Evie’s seductive mother has quit her job at Lord & Taylor – “Either that or get fired”— because veterans needed jobs. And she’s surprised her husband by learning to make Sunday suppers and perform other domestic tasks. “Son of a bitch,” Joe says of the change.
But the glow of the family reunion fades after Joe packs up the three of them for what he casts as an overdue Florida vacation. They settle into a Palm Beach hotel (aptly named Le Mirage), nearly deserted in the off-season. And Evie becomes swept up in a riptide of events that involves looted gold, a hurricane, an inquest into a possible homicide and her crush on a seductive 23-year-old who says he served with Joe overseas.
The plotting is tight and ingenious until an improbable last scene, and well-supported by details that evoke the era (including the chocolate cigarettes that Evie buys to “practice smoking”). And the book deals with larger issues than whether a murder occurred: What is loyalty? What do we owe the dead? Do truth and justice differ and, if so, how?
Questions like these appeal strongly to adolescents and teenagers, and this book could provide a framework for exploring them. As for their reading test scores: They’re not likely to improve if more publishers — encouraged by the National Book Award for this novel — put a senior prom dress on a third-grader’s soccer shorts.
Best line: A warning heard on the radio as a hurricane approaches Palm Beach: “Watch out for flying coconuts.”
Worst line: No. 1: “Our pipsqueak attorney had turned into a pretty decent linebacker.” It’s a stretch that a 15-year-old girl living in 1947 would know enough about linebackers to use the word in this way. No. 2: “Lana Turner was every man’s dream, sultry and blond. It was Lana filling out a sweater at a drugstore that got her a Hollywood contract.” That Turner was discovered at a drugstore is a myth. Even if the teenagers of 1947 believed the myth, the book is perpetuating this legend for a new generation of readers.
About the reading level: The reading level comes from the Flesch-Kincaid readability statistics that are part of the spell-checker on any recent version of Microsoft Word. To find it, I entered a minimum of 300 words from each of the following two-page sections of What I Saw and How I Lied: pages 36-37 (Grade 4.2), pages 136-137 (Grade 2.6) and pages 236-237 (3.7). I also entered all of last two pages (Grade 3.0). The post “Does Mitch Albom Think He’s Jesus?” lists the reading levels of authors and tells how to use Word to find the level of a book.
Furthermore: What I Saw and How I Lied
won a 2008 National Book Award. The National Book Foundation.
has posted an excerpt from and the citation for the novel on its site.
© 2009 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com
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Pingback by What I Saw and How I Lied « Yabg’s Blog — January 17, 2009 @ 2:05 pm |
I picked up this book over the weekend and enjoyed it a lot — great pacing and foreshadowing. But it was definitely a strange sensation reading about noir type topics in such simple language. When I was a teenager, I didn’t mind if I didn’t understand every word in a book, because it made me feel adult trying to figure it out, either by the context or by looking it up. There is not much fear of young adults encountering challenging words in this book, or learning anything new and different about language.
I agree with you about the improbability of the last scene.
Comment by sarahsk — February 2, 2009 @ 7:31 pm |
I was definitely the same way as a teenager. In some ways, I enjoyed my parents’ books more than those for my age group, because I loved encountering adult realms of experience that I hadn’t known existed.
Right now publishers (and maybe educators, too) seem to think that if you don’t dumb down novels, teenagers won’t read them. I’m not sure that’s true. You could argue that because of what teenagers see on the Web and elsewhere, novels for them ought to be getting more “adult,” not less.
I’d love to know if there’s been any research in this area (whether the subject matter, reading level of the text, or something else matters most to children).
Jan
Comment by 1minutebookreviewswordpresscom — February 2, 2009 @ 8:49 pm |