The Hunger Games for second graders

Last week, all my second and third graders were asking me for The Hunger Games, which I don't have in my elementary school library. So I read them Hansel and Gretel. At first, I wondered why it popped into my head, but it makes weird sense: kids fighting for their survival in the woods, violent deaths, same initial letters.

And then this weekend I started reading The Uses of Enchantment, by Bruno Bettelheim. I know Maurice Sendak has called him "Beno Brutalheim" and I know that there are many more recent feminist discussions of fairy tales that I probably should read, but I wanted to start by seeing what Bruno had to say for himself, and I came across this passage, just a few pages into the book:

The acquisition of skills, including the ability to read, becomes devalued when what one has learned to read adds nothing of importance to one's life. We all tend to assess the future merits of an activity on the basis of what it offers now. But this is especially true of the child, who, much more than the adult, lives in the present, and, although he has anxieties about his future, has only the vaguest notions of what it may require or be like. The idea that learning to read may enable one later to enrich one's life is experienced as an empty promise when the stories the child listens to, or is reading at the moment, are vacuous.

That perfectly expresses my criticism of so many reading curricula, including the one used at my school.

I think this is going to be an important book in my professional life.

The good news and the bad news about the Hunger Games

The bad news is that Katniss is played by a white girl, even though the book describes her as olive-skinned and dark-haired.

The good news is that a number of significant characters are played by people of color.

The bad news is that some audience members were so offended that Rue and Thresh were played by black people, even though the book describes both characters as dark-skinned, that they posted predictably but still infuriatingly stupid comments in Twitter. (Lenny Kravitz as Cinna was not as big a deal, apparently, although there was some stuff about him on Twitter when the movie posters first came out.)

The good news is that Rue and Thresh elicited the most powerful emotional reactions of any characters in the film, and that isn't allowed to happen in the mainstream media as often as it should be.

The bad news is that Rue and Thresh were sort of magical negroes.

The good news is that the book is better than the movie, because it spends more time developing Rue and Thresh's characters. Oh yeah, and in the book, we could see Katniss as a woman of color.

At least, that's what I got out of the debate. I also like the New Yorker blog post, which talks about how rarely blackness is equated with innocence and how often white readers just assume everyone's white--at least everyone they find themselves caring about.

I wonder what Suzanne Collins will eventually say, if she says anything.

Review: Tall Story by Candy Gourlay

At the children's literature discussion last Wednesday, Cheryl read the first few sentences of Tall Story, and someone who hadn't read it was like, that narration is so teenage boy:

"Rush hour.
So many armpits, so little deoderant. The whole world is heading out to Heathrow to meet long-lost relatives. I am wedged between the tummies of the two fattest men in the world.
Rank" (1).

Guess what? The narrator is a girl! I loved Andi for being a 13-year-old girl whose main problem is that her parents are making her switch schools just when she made point guard on the basketball team. Her problem is not, "Oh no, all my girlfriends are getting into hair and make-up and boys and I just want to be a tom boy." Thank you, Candy Gourlay!

However, it took me a little while to warm up to Andi. I thought it was cool that she was a pint-sized point guard with spikey hair who didn't mind being mistaken for a boy. But I didn't click with her instantly.

What drew me into the book was her brother, Bernardo, who lives halfway around the world in the Philippines and is 8 feet tall. Eight feet tall! Andi's mom wants Bernardo to join her new family in London, but you know how immigration is. The paperwork finally goes through near the beginning of the book. This is great news, but complicated, because 1) Bernardo's mom doesn't know he's 8 feet tall, and 2) the people of the town where Bernardo lives believe he's their savior. How can the savior abandon his people?

The chapters alternate between Andi's and Bernardo's perspectives, and Bernardo's side of the story is what won me over. He describes a town carved out of the mountains by giants, populated with larger-than-life tailors, barbers, and witches. While Andi tells a straightforward story of adolescent angst, Bernardo is a secretive, sensitive narrator with a strange, almost magical story to tell.

The only problem with these alternating chapters is that they don't go in chronological order. The novel starts with Bernardo and Andi meeting at the airport. I thought of this as sort of the midpoint of the narrative. After starting in the middle, the narrative goes back a few years to the last time that Bernardo saw his mom, then it goes forward a few years to when Andi finds out that her family is moving. And it keeps zig-zagging around like that so it wasn't always clear when things are happening.

At other times, the author uses the alternating view points to great effect. When Bernardo shows up in England, we see his velcro suit and sandals with black socks through Andi's eyes and we hear his broken English through Andi's ears. But in the next chapter, we get to hear Bernardo's true voice, the way he sounds in his head. It's a multifaceted look at the immigration experience. Very smart.

By the end of the novel I was racing through the short chapters. There were near-death experiences, rabid dogs, earthquakes, curses, and season-ending basketball games. I wish the beginning of the novel introduced the themes and plot lines a little more elegantly, only because I really want kids to stick with this story. What the book lacks in narrative structure it more than makes up for in voice and vision.

Strange Chemistry

How beautiful is this cover art? I'm really excited for this publisher's debut in Sept. Meanwhile, I'm liking their lists of essential YA fantasy.

The book is Blackwood by Gwenda Bond and the artwork is by Steven Wood. Apparently, it's about Roanoke Colony. From the blurb:

Miranda, a misfit girl from the island’s most infamous family, and Phillips, an exiled teen criminal who hears the voices of the dead, must dodge everyone from federal agents to long-dead alchemists as they work to uncover the secrets of the new Lost Colony.

Sold?

Now I love E. Lockhart forever

I think I already loved E. Lockhart, but she did exactly what I hoped she would do in her decision: choose Chime and take Daughter down a peg. Love this line:

"the incredibly romantic ending of Chime had great strength, because it wasn’t a fantasy of a bad man tamed—it was the fantasy of loving a deeply good man, and how healing that can be."

And on a timely note, I think Hunger Games demonstrates that when you put the damaged bad boy and the nurturing nice guy in the same book, the nice boy wins.

Never fear, white people are here.

I could relate this to children's books--how many characters of color exist in children's literature just to help the white character have some kind of revelation?--but I think everyone should read what Teju Cole says about the White Savior Industrial Complex, whether it has anything to do with kidlit or not.

Elephant and Piggie and the fear of death

Psyched about the Slate Book Review but not sure what to make of this essay on Elephant and Piggie. Is the author serious? Or taking things a little too seriously?