Don't Judge a Book by its Cover
Denise Fleck, 2013
Dog Ear Publishing
24 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781457517587
Summary
It’s a sad fact…kids of all ages tease others based on their looks, what they wear and where they live. It’s another disheartening fact that dogs in black coats are less likely to be adopted from Animal Shelters.
Did you know that older, gentle, loving dogs who know their manners are generally over-looked by humans with blinders on while they search for an adorable puppy who will soil and chew up their house? Did it ever occur to you that man’s (and woman’s) four-legged best friend faces similar stereotypes to what people face? Does the mention of a specific breed or seeing a large dog make you cringe? Looking beyond what one sees on the outside is truly canine in that dogs do not judge others based on their income, beauty or status. They love unconditionally, live in the moment and rejoice in all kindnesses shown them.
That is what Don’t Judge a Book by its Cover teaches children and reminds adults who share this story with them. These are lessons no one is too young or too old to learn and practice and when explained through the eyes of a young girl and her first fur-ever friend, it becomes a heartwarming tale of love, kindness and friendship. It will make the most jaded of us take notice of any indiscretions we may show in the unfair judging of an individual based on the way he or she appears to only our eyes.
Mary-Alice and her friends like pretty clothes and hanging with the in-crowd, but when she requests a puppy for her birthday, her parents decide the fluffy one with the pink bow in the pet store may not be the best choice. Instead Mary-Alice ends up at the local Animal Shelter where she not only saves the life of a loving older dog, but learns that once you look beyond the plain cover of things, you can be treated to the true joys that lie underneath!
Looking beyond the cover is truly canine in that dogs do not judge others based on their income, beauty or status. They live in the moment rejoicing in every kindness they are shown. Humans, young and not-so-young, can learn pawmazing lessons from our four-legged friends and when they Don’t Judge a Book by its Cover.
Author Bio
• Birth—March 3, 1961
• Where—Winter Park,Florida, USA
• Education—University of Southern California
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California
Author Denise Fleck was raised by a Great Dane and has spent her life loving animals having been dog mom to 11 and cat mom to 1. After a successful turn as a Motion Picture Studio Publicist, she followed her heart volunteering at animal shelters and teaching people to take better care of their four-legged friends.
In addition to sharing Pet Safety Tips in magazines, on TV and radio, through her company Sunny-dog Ink, she teaches Pet First-Aid/CPR to pet parents, trainers, groomers, pet sitters and any one interested in helping animals live longer, happier, healthier lives. She can also be found instilling her own passion for our furry, feathered, finned & scaled friends in high school students through an after-school Animal Care program she teaches weekly.
Denise’s own black Labrador Retriever, Mr. Rico, was the inspiration for Don’t Judge a Book by its Cover, but she and her husband Paul are currently owned by two Japanese Akitas—Haiku & Bonsai—who have stories of their own to share, so stay tuned. (From the author.)
Visit the author on Sunny Dog Ink.
Follow Denise on Facebook.
Book Reviews
My favorite books from my childhood that I remember the most clearly are ones that told a moral tale, wrapped up in an imaginative story. The Little Red Hen was one I asked to have read to me over and over, and aside from making me love chickens (as friends not food!) I really do believe it helped me understand me the value of patience, hard work, and the fruit—delicious bread—I’d get to eat as the result of my labors. When an acquaintance I admire told me she’d written a children’s book, I was intrigued. Author Denise Fleck is not only a talented writer, she is the Past President of the Volunteers of the Burbank Animal Shelter, has her own line of pet first-aid kits, and she’s been on many TV shows demonstrating Pet First-Aid & CPCR. While she has written a series of animal care pocket guides, her latest book is a beautifully illustrated children’s story, Don’t Judge a Book by its Cover. Here’s more about this modern moral tale which can help teach children not to make judgements based solely on appearances—not just pets, but people too…. Mary-Alice and her friends like pretty clothes and hanging with the in-crowd, but when she requests a puppy for her birthday, her parents decide the fluffy one with the pink bow in the pet store may not be the best choice. Instead Mary-Alice ends up at the local Animal Shelter where she not only saves the life of a loving older dog, but learns that once you look beyond the plain cover of things, you can be treated to the true joys that lie underneath! Looking beyond the cover is truly canine in that dogs do not judge others based on their income, beauty or status. They live in the moment rejoicing in every kindness they are shown. Humans, young and not-so-young, can learn pawmazing lessons from our four-legged friends and when they Don’t Judge a Book by its Cover.
Jennifer
Author Denise Fleck’s new children’s book Don’t Judge a Book by its Cover, follows the main character Mary-Alice and her search for her very own “pawmazing” companion. Fleck uses her main character to teach readers that there is always more than what meets the eye.... Don’t Judge a Book by its Cover is the first in what will be a series of illustrated children’s storybooks…. Its message is "Pets are part of the family," Fleck says. Be sure to buy this book and look out for the rest of the series coming soon.
Cara Meyers - Global Animal
This book is a MUST have for both children and adults!! It delivers the important messsage about not judging others by their appearance or preconceived prejudices. This is especially true for our animals which have no voice. This book helps speak for the abandoned animals that need love and a family yet are overlooked for multiple reasons. If all children read this book we can begin to change the world as generations grow up with new found compassion. More than just a book this is a guide to becoming a better human thus creating a better world. 5.0 out of 5 stars AMAZING!!
Lindsay Neumann
This book is excellent for children. It teaches a valuable lesson that is often forgotten. The author also stresses the importance of adopting from an animal shelter. She sets you straight and squashes the misconceptions often associated with shelter animals. It's a great read and entertaining. Artwork is also captivating. I know it will be a book that my children reach for often at story time. Thank you for writing a book for children that champions our furry homeless friends!
Brenda Castaneda
Discussion Questions
1. Have you ever judged a person, animal or anything by what it looked like or what someone else told you about him/it?
2. What did you find out after you got to know the person or animal? Did you feelings change?
3. If you see a book or DVD with a picture on the cover that you like, are you more likely to buy it? What if it was just a plain wrapper—would you consider reading or watching it?
4. Why do you think it is harder for older dogs to get adopted?
5. When a pet gets old, is it okay to just give it away or abandon it? Explain your thoughts.
6. If you were walking down a line of cats or dogs, which color fur coats would most quickly attract your eye?
7. Have you ever formed an opinion about animal based only on his breed or name? How about a person based on where they came from, their accent, the color of their skin or hair or their name? How do you feel about this decision you made and did you change it?
8. What can you do to not misjudge in the future?
9. What is your picture of an Animal Shelter? Do you think it is a good place to adopt a pet from?
10. Do pet stores in your neighborhood sell dogs and cats? Do you know where the stores get those pets from?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)
Acea and the Animal Kingdom
Kyle Shoop, 2013
321 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781480207677
Summary
Welcome to the Animal Kingdom—where mystery and adventure roam free!
Twelve-year-old Acea Bishop was always the nerdy kid who would rather go to the library during recess to read about animals instead of playing basketball like the other boys. Now, after being kidnapped and waking up inside of an ancient kingdom strangely resembling a zoo, Acea is running from those same animals he used to love reading about.
Worse yet? Acea's not just on a quest to get home—his mom and the dad-he-never-knew are both being held hostage inside by an evil sorcerer with a vendetta. Realizing that his odds of survival and freeing his parents are slim, Acea raises an army of animals to combat the sorcerer and regain control of the kingdom.
Follow Acea as he travels through the exotic zoo habitats in rooms labeled "aquarium," "safari," "jungle," "aviary," and "terrarium." Unlock secrets with Acea located deep inside the Animal Kingdom which reveal the kingdom's mysterious past and hold the key to Acea's fate.
Acea has secrets. Big ones. He just doesn't know it yet.
Author Bio
• Birth—1984
• Where—Phoenix, Arizona, USA
• Raised—Mukilteo,Washington
• Education—B.A., Brigham young University; J.D.,
Gonzaga University
• Currently—lives in Herriman, Utah
Kyle Shoop is the author of the Acea Bishop series. He lives in Utah with his wife and children. After spending several years volunteering in his wife’s elementary classrooms, he was inspired to write this first book of the series, Acea and the Animal Kingdom. The first in a planned trilogy, the second book is expected in 2014. In addition to writing novels, Kyle is also a practicing attorney. (From the author.)
Visit the author's website.
Follow Kyle on Facebook.
Book Reviews
This book is pretty cool! There are a lot of interesting twists and mechanisms that really drive the story. It reminded me a lot of Harry Potter. I really like how Vesuvius was drawn, as much as we don’t want to like a villain, a story without a good villain is kind of "blah." I recommend the book—I know you’ll love it!
Youth reviewer - MommaSaysRead.com
Even though it only Shoop’s freshman endeavor Acea and the Animal Kingdom is one of the better novels for young readers I’ve seen. Shoop is already a terrific storyteller, with a wonderfully vivid imagination which will suck readers into the novel for a fun, slightly scary, always exciting, emotional ride. It’s not surprising then to find this novel is fun, exciting, a little scary, imaginative, unique, relatable and educational; in short, all the things you want from a middle-grade novel.
Christopher Taylor - Lunatic or Genius Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What was your favorite zoo room and why?
2. Did you learn anything new about any of the animals in the book?
3. Were animal characteristics effectively used in the book to move the plot forward, rather than feeling like a lesson about animals?
4. Did you find the use of the first person point of view helpful in creating mystery and tension?
5. Often times, a fantasy-adventure novel relies upon the reader being able to have a clear vision of the world in his/her head—did the author adequately describe each of the rooms to allow this?
6. If you were Acea, how would you have felt once you learned about why you were brought to the Animal Kingdom, and the Kingdom's mysterious history?
7. The name of the second book is Acea and the Seven Ancient Wonders. If you haven't read the first chapter of this book (which is at the end of Acea and the Animal Kingdom), what do you think is behind the "Exit" door? If you have read the first chapter of book two, what would you have had behind the door? What do you think will happen in the second book?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)
Wonder
R.J. Palacio, 2012
Random House Childrens
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375869020
Summary
I won't describe what I look like. Whatever you're thinking, it's probably worse.
August Pullman was born with a facial deformity that, up until now, has prevented him from going to a mainstream school. Starting 5th grade at Beecher Prep, he wants nothing more than to be treated as an ordinary kid—but his new classmates can’t get past Auggie’s extraordinary face.
Wonder begins from Auggie’s point of view, but soon switches to include his classmates, his sister, her boyfriend, and others. These perspectives converge in a portrait of one community’s struggle with empathy, compassion, and acceptance.
R.J. Palacio has called her debut novel “a meditation on kindness” —indeed, every reader will come away with a greater appreciation for the simple courage of friendship. Auggie is a hero to root for, a diamond in the rough who proves that you can’t blend in when you were born to stand out.
Winner of the 2013 E. B. White Read-Aloud Award for Middle Reader. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
R. J. Palacio lives in NYC with her husband, two sons, and two dogs. For more than twenty years, she was an art director and graphic designer, designing book jackets for other people while waiting for the perfect time in her life to start writing her own novel. But one day several years ago, a chance encounter with an extraordinary child in front of an ice cream store made R. J. realize that the perfect time to write that novel had finally come. Wonder is her first novel. She did not design the cover, but she sure does love it. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Rich and memorable...It's Auggie and the rest of the children who are the real heart of 'Wonder,' and Palacio captures the voices of girls and boys, fifth graders and teenagers, with equal skill.
New York Times
What makes R.J. Palacio's debut novel so remarkable, and so lovely, is the uncommon generosity with which she tells Auggie's story…The result is a beautiful, funny and sometimes sob-making story of quiet transformation.
Wall Street Journal
The breakout publishing sensation of 2012 will come courtesy of Palacio [and] is destined to go the way of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and then some.
London Times
I think every mother and father would be better for having read it. Auggie's parents — who are never named in the book, and don't even get to narrate a chapter of their own — are powerful examples not only of how to shelter and strengthen a child with heartbreaking facial anomalies, but also of how to be a loving advocate to any kid.
Huffington Post (January, 2012)
It's in the bigger themes that Palacio's writing shines. This book is a glorious exploration of the nature of friendship, tenacity, fear, and most importantly, kindness.
Huffington Post (March, 2012)
The Top 10 Things We Love This Week: In a wonder of a debut, Palacio has written a crackling page-turner filled with characters you can't help but root for.
Entertainment Weekly
Auggie Pullman was born with severe facial deformities—no outer ears, eyes in the wrong place, his skin "melted"—and he's learned to steel himself against the horrified reactions he produces in strangers.... Few first novels pack more of a punch: it's a rare story with the power to open eyes-and hearts-to what it's like to be singled out for a difference you can't control, when all you want is to be just another face in the crowd. (Ages 8-12).
Publishers Weekly
Everyone grows and develops as the story progresses, especially the middle school students. This is a fast read and would be a great discussion starter about love, support, and judging people on their appearance. A well-written, thought-provoking book. (Grades 4–7)—Nancy P. Reeder, Heathwood Hall Episcopal School, Columbia, SC
School Library Journal
Palacio divides the novel into eight parts, interspersing Auggie's first-person narrative with the voices of family members and classmates, wisely expanding the story beyond Auggie's viewpoint and demonstrating that Auggie's arrival at school doesn't test only him, it affects everyone in the community. Auggie may be finding his place in the world, but that world must find a way to make room for him, too. A memorable story of kindness, courage and wonder. (Fiction. 8-14)
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What do you think of the line "Don’t judge a boy by his face" which appears on the back cover of the book? Did this affect how much you wanted to read the story? How much did this line give away about the story you were about to read?
2. Throughout Wonder, Auggie describes the way that many people react to seeing his face for the first time: by immediately looking away. Have you ever been in a situation where you have responded like this to seeing someone different? Having now read Wonder, how do you feel about this now?
3. Auggie’s face is not fully described until quite far on in the story, in Via’s chapter "August: Through the Peephole." How close was this description to your own mental picture of Auggie? Did you have a picture of his face in your mind while reading the book? Did this description alter that picture?
4. How would you describe Auggie as a person in the first few chapters of the book? What about the final few chapters? Has he changed significantly? Are there any experiences or episodes during the story that you think had a particular effect on him? If so, how?
5. In the chapter "Costumes" Auggie describes the astronaut helmet that he wore constantly as a younger child. We later learn that Miranda was the one to give Auggie the helmet, and is proud of the gift, but that it was Auggie’s father who threw it away. What do you think the helmet signifies to each of these characters and why do you think they all view it so differently?
6. Star Wars is one of Auggie’s passions. Why do you think this is? Do you see any reasons for Auggie to identify with these characters, or to aspire to be like them?
7. Auggie’s parents bring Auggie around to the idea of attending school by joking with him about Mr Tushman’s name, and telling him about their old college professor, Bobbie Butt. To what extent is humour used as a tool throughout Wonder to diffuse difficult or tense situations, or to convey a part of the story that would otherwise be depressing or sad? Look at the chapter, "How I Came To Life."
8. What did you think of Via as a character? Did you empathise with her? Why do you think Via was so angry to learn that Auggie cut off his Padawan braid? Do you think Via’s own attitude towards her brother changes throughout the story?
9. Look at the emails between Mr Tushman, Julian’s parents and Jack’s parents in the chapter "Letters, Emails, Facebook, Texts." Up to this point in the story we have seen how the children at Auggie’s school have reacted to him. Is Mrs Albans’ attitude towards Auggie different? What do you make of her statement that Auggie is handicapped? Do you think she is correct in saying that asking "ordinary" children, such as Julian, to befriend Auggie places a burden on them?
10. The author has explained that she was inspired to write Wonder after an experience at a local ice cream parlour, very similar to the scene described in the chapter "Carvel," where Jack sees Auggie for the first time. In this scene, Jack’s babysitter Veronica chooses to get up and quickly walk Jack and his little brother Jamie away from Auggie, rather than risk Jamie saying something rude or hurtful. What do you think you would have done, if put in that position?
11. The precepts (rules to live by)
"When given the choice between being right or being kind, choose kind." —Dr. Wayne Dyer
"Your deeds are your monuments." —Inscription on ancient Egyptian tomb
"Have no friends not equal to yourself." —Confucius
"Fortune favors the bold." —Virgil
"No man is an island, entire of itself." —John Donne
"It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers." —James Thurber
"Kind words do not cost much. Yet they accomplish much." —Blaise Pascal
"What is beautiful is good, and who is good will soon be beautiful." —Sappho
"Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as you ever can." —John Wesley
"Just follow the day and reach for the sun." —The Polyphonic Spree
"Everyone deserves a standing ovation because we all overcometh the world." —Auggie Pullman
(Questions from the author's website.)
Bud, Not Buddy
Christopher Paul Curtis, 1999
Random House Children's Books
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780553494105
Summary
It's 1936, in Flint, Michigan. Times may be hard, and ten-year-old Bud may be a motherless boy on the run, but Bud's got a few things going for him:
1. He has his own suitcase filled with his own important, secret things.
2. He's the author of Bud Caldwell's Rules and Things for Having a Funner Life and Making a Better Liar Out of Yourself.
3. His momma never told him who his father was, but she left a clue: flyers of Herman E. Calloway and his famous band, the Dusky Devastators of the Depression!!!!!!
Bud's got an idea that those flyers will lead him to his father. Once he decides to hit the road and find this mystery man, nothing can stop him—not hunger, not fear, not vampires, not even Herman E. Calloway himself.
Bud, Not Buddy is full of laugh-out-loud humor and wonderful characters, hitting the high notes of jazz and sounding the deeper tones of the Great Depression. Once again Christopher Paul Curtis, author of the award-winning novel The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963, takes readers on a heartwarming and unforgettable journey. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 10, 1953
• Where—Flint, Michigan, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Michigan-Flint
• Awards—Newbery Medal (2); Coretta Scott King Award
• Currently—N/A
Christopher Paul Curtis is an American children's author and a Newbery Medal winner who wrote The Watsons Go to Birmingham: 1963 and the critically acclaimed Bud, Not Buddy. Bud, Not Buddy is the first novel to receive both the Coretta Scott King Award and the Newbery Medal. His book Elijah of Buxton (winner of the Scott O'Dell Historical Fiction Award, the Coretta Scott King Award, and a Newbery Honor) is set in a free Black community in Ontario that was founded in 1849 by runaway slaves. His latest book, The Mighty Miss Malone, was released in January of 2012.
Biography
Christopher Paul Curtis was born in Flint, Michigan, on May 10, 1953 to Dr. Herman Elmer Curtis, a chiropodist and factory worker/supervisor, and Leslie Jane Curtis, an educator. Curtis is an alumnus of the University of Michigan-Flint (UM-Flint). Curtis is the father of two daughters, Ayaan Leslie, born in 2010, and Ebyaan Hothan, born in 2012 to Curtis and his wife, Habon Aden Curtis. Christopher modeled characters in Bud, Not Buddy after his two grandfathers—Earl “Lefty” Lewis, a Negro league baseball pitcher, and 1930s bandleader Herman E. Curtis, Sr., of Herman Curtis and the Dusky Devastators of the Depression. The city of Flint plays an important role in many of Curtis's books.
Education and Work
Curtis is a product of the Flint Public Schools system. He attended Dewey Elementary, Clark Elementary, Pierce Elementary (in the Academically Gifted Program), Whittier Junior High School, McKinley Junior High School (where, in 1967, he became the first African-American student to be elected to student council in the school's 32-year history), and Flint Southwestern High School. Graduating from the University of Michigan-Flint in 1999, he received his bachelor's degree at the same ceremony where he was the commencement speaker.
Every year since 2008 Curtis has returned to the University of Michigan-Flint to host the Christopher Paul Curtis Writing Challenge, a program instituted by Dr. Rose Casement and Dr. Fred Svoboda. During the program every fourth-grade student in Flint comes to UM-Flint's auditorium to hear a presentation by Curtis. Afterwards they are provided with a story starter that Curtis has written and given the challenge of finishing the story. A winner from each of Flint's elementary schools is chosen by the teachers to return to UM-Flint with their families for an award ceremony where Curtis and Dr. Casement announce an overall winner. The stated goal of the challenge is to expose Flint's youth to the university environment and to encourage writing as a means of expression.
The summer after graduating from high school Curtis became a member of a Lansing, Michigan based theatrical/musical group called Suitcase Theatre. The group was directed by Powell Lindsay and performed musical numbers and the works of Langston Hughes. The group toured and performed in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, France, England, Canada, and the United States.
Curtis spent the first 13 years after high school on the assembly line of Flint’s historic Fisher Body Plant #1. His job entailed hanging car doors on Electra 225s and LeSabres, which, he later claimed, left him with an aversion to getting into large cars, particularly Buicks. After quitting Fisher Body he took a series of low-paying jobs. He worked as a groundskeeper at Stonegate Manor housing cooperative in Flint, Flint campaign co-manager for United States senator Donald Riegle, customer service representative for Mich Con in Detroit, temporary worker for Manpower in Detroit, and warehouse clerk for Automated Data Processing in Allen Park, Michigan. Curtis took a year off of work to write his first novel, The Watsons Go To Birmingham: 1963. He wrote the novel in longhand in the Windsor Public Library.
Curtis has been a full-time author and lecturer/speaker since 1998.
In 2009 he received a Doctor of Laws Honoris Causa from the University of Windsor in Windsor, Ontario, Canada.
Published Works
The Watsons Go to Birmingham: 1963—When Kenny's 13-year-old brother, Byron, gets to be too much trouble, the Watsons head from Flint, Michigan, to Birmingham, Alabama, to visit Grandma Sands, the one person who can shape Byron up. But the events that shake Birmingham in the summer of 1963 will change Kenny's life for ever.
Bud, Not Buddy—It is 1936, in Flint, Michigan. Times may be hard, and ten-year-old Bud may be a motherless boy on the run, but Bud's got a few things going for him. The book was released in September of 1999.
Bucking the Sarge—Luther T. Farrell has got to get out of Flint, Michigan. He just needs to escape the evil empire of the local slumlord, his mother.
Mr. Chickee's Messy Mission—When Russell's dog, Rodney Rodent, jumps into a mural to chase a demonic-looking gnome and disappears, the Flint Future Detectives are on the case.
Mr. Chickee's Funny Money—Mr. Chickee, the genial blind man in the neighborhood, gives 9-year-old Steven a mysterious bill with 15 zeros on it and the image of a familiar but startling face.
Elijah of Buxton (2007) A story based on the real settlement of former slaves who escaped to Canada on the Underground Railroad.
The Mighty Miss Malone—This book is set in depression-era Gary, Indiana, and Flint, Michigan. The work is a spin-off from Bud, Not Buddy and is narrated by 12-year-old Deza Malone.
Curtis's next book, Benji & Red, (Formerly titled The Madman of Piney Woods) returns readers to Buxton, Ontario, this time in the year 1901. It is a story told in alternating chapters by two twelve year old boys. One, Alvin "Red" Stockard is an Irish boy living in Chatham, Ontario, and the other, Benjamin "Benji" Alston is an African-Canadian boy living in the settlement of Buxton. Several characters from Elijah of Buxton make brief reappearances. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Curtis's magical touch in his debut novel, The Watsons Go to Birmingham1963 (1995), is once again evident in all its powerful, funny glory in his latest lovely novel. Ten-year-old Bud Caldwell, wise beyond his years, is hit particularly hard by the Depression in 1936. Bud has been bounced back and forth between a Flint, Michigan, orphanage and foster care since his mother died when he was six. Fed up with beatings from those who take him in, Bud grabs his few meager treasures and sets out in search of his father. With determination and a cautious but curious spirit, Bud heads for Grand Rapids, home of Herman E. Calloway, legendary bass player and leader of a renowned jazz band. Convinced that Calloway is his longlost father, Bud seeks a reunion. Bud's only guidebook is Bud Caldwell's Rules and Things for Having a Funner Life and Making a Better Liar out of Yourself, his own set of poignant, riotous tips for preserving sanity. In a scene of stunning hilarity, Bud is rescued by Lefty Lewis, who takes Bud to Grand Rapids, where the child learns yet again that life is not always what it seems. Curtis writes with a razorsharp intelligence that grabs the reader by the heart and never lets go. His utterly believable depiction of the selfreliant charm and courage of Bud, not Buddy, puts this highly recommended title at the top of the list of books to be read again and again
VOYA
As in his Newbery Honor-winning debut, The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963, Curtis draws on a remarkable and disarming mix of comedy and pathos, this time to describe the travails and adventures of a 10-year-old African-American orphan in Depression-era Michigan. Bud is fed up with the cruel treatment he has received at various foster homes, and after being locked up for the night in a shed with a swarm of angry hornets, he decides to run away. His goal: to reach the man he--on the flimsiest of evidence--believes to be his father, jazz musician Herman E. Calloway. Relying on his own ingenuity and good luck, Bud makes it to Grand Rapids, where his "father" owns a club. Calloway, who is much older and grouchier than Bud imagined, is none too thrilled to meet a boy claiming to be his long-lost son. It is the other members of his band--Steady Eddie, Mr. Jimmy, Doug the Thug, Doo-Doo Bug Cross, Dirty Deed Breed and motherly Miss Thomas--who make Bud feel like he has finally arrived home. While the grim conditions of the times and the harshness of Bud's circumstances are authentically depicted, Curtis shines on them an aura of hope and optimism. And even when he sets up a daunting scenario, he makes readers laugh--for example, mopping floors for the rejecting Calloway, Bud pretends the mop is "that underwater boat in the book Momma read to me, Twenty Thousand Leaks Under the Sea." Bud's journey, punctuated by Dickensian twists in plot and enlivened by a host of memorable personalities, will keep readers engrossed from first page to last.
Publishers Weekly
When 10-year-old Bud Caldwell runs away from his new foster home, he realizes he has nowhere to go but to search for the father he has never known: a legendary jazz musician advertised on some old posters his deceased mother had kept. A friendly stranger picks him up on the road in the middle of the night and deposits him in Grand Rapids, MI, with Herman E. Calloway and his jazz band, but the man Bud was convinced was his father turns out to be old, cold, and cantankerous. Luckily, the band members are more welcoming; they take him in, put him to work, and begin to teach him to play an instrument. In a Victorian ending, Bud uses the rocks he has treasured from his childhood to prove his surprising relationship with Mr. Calloway. The lively humor contrasts with the grim details of the Depression-era setting and the particular difficulties faced by African Americans at that time. Bud is a plucky, engaging protagonist. Other characters are exaggerations: the good ones (the librarian and Pullman car porter who help him on his journey and the band members who embrace him) are totally open and supportive, while the villainous foster family finds particularly imaginative ways to torture their charge. However, readers will be so caught up in the adventure that they won't mind. Curtis has given a fresh, new look to a traditional orphan-finds-a-home story that would be a crackerjack read-aloud. —Kathleen Isaacs, Edmund Burke School, Washington, DC
School Library Journal
Bud, 10, is on the run from the orphanage and from yet another mean foster family. His mother died when he was 6, and he wants to find his father. Set in Michigan during the Great Depression, this is an Oliver Twist kind of foundling story, but it's told with affectionate comedy, like the first part of Curtis' The Watsons Go to Birmingham (1995). On his journey, Bud finds danger and violence (most of it treated as farce), but more often, he finds kindness—in the food line, in the library, in the Hooverville squatter camp, on the road--until he discovers who he is and where he belongs. Told in the boy's naive, desperate voice, with lots of examples of his survival tactics (Rules and Things for Having a Funner Life and Making a Better Liar out of Yourself), this will make a great read-aloud. Curtis says in an afterword that some of the characters are based on real people, including his own grandfathers, so it's not surprising that the rich blend of tall tale, slapstick, sorrow, and sweetness has the wry, teasing warmth of family folklore.
Booklist
Discussion QuestionsFamily and Relationships
Parents
1. What are some of Bud's special memories of her? Why did his mother never tell him about his grandfather? Why do you think Bud's mother left home? Changed her last name? If Bud's mother was so unhappy, why did she keep the flyers about her dad's band?
2. Why is Bud so convinced that Herman Calloway is his father? Discuss whether Bud is disappointed to learn that Calloway is not his father but his grandfather. What type of relationship do you think Bud will have with his grandfather? How is Calloway's Band like a family? What is Miss Thomas's role in Bud's new family?
Survival
3. Bud has been without a family since age six. What type of survival skills does Bud learn at the Home? Make a list of "Bud Caldwell's Rules and Things for Having a Funner Life and Making a Better Liar Out of Yourself." How does Bud use these rules to survive difficult situations? Have the class discuss whether Bud will continue using these rules now that he has found a family.
Hope
4. Discuss how the flyers in Bud's suitcase give him hope. Bud's mother once told him, "When one door closes, don't worry, because another door opens." (p. 43) How does this statement give Bud the hope he needs to continue his search for his father? Discuss the moments in the story when a door closes for Bud. At what point does the door open? Cite evidence in the novel that Herman Calloway had hope that his daughter might return.
Racism
5. Engage the group in a discussion about the different types of racism. Bud encounters racism throughout his journey. Ask students to explain Mrs. Amos's statement: "I do not have time to put up with the foolishness of those members of our race who do not want to be uplifted." (p. 15) How does this statement indicate that Mrs. Amos feels superior to Bud and other members of her race? Why does she think that Bud does not want to be uplifted?
6. Bud meets many homeless people at Hooverville. What evidence is there that racism prevails among them? How does racism affect Herman E. Calloway's band? Eddie tells Bud, "Mr. C. has always got a white fella in the band, for practical reasons." (p. 205) Discuss what the "practical reasons" might be. How does this reflect the times? Would Mr. Calloway's reasons be valid today?
(Questions issued as part of a teaching guide from Random House Publishing Company.)
Dark Places
Gillian Flynn, 2009
Crown Publishing
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307341570
Summary
I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ.
Libby Day was seven when her mother and two sisters were murdered in “The Satan Sacrifice of Kinnakee, Kansas.” As her family lay dying, little Libby fled their tiny farmhouse into the freezing January snow. She lost some fingers and toes, but she survived—and famously testified that her fifteen-year-old brother, Ben, was the killer. Twenty-five years later, Ben sits in prison, and troubled Libby lives off the dregs of a trust created by well-wishers who’ve long forgotten her.
The Kill Club is a macabre secret society obsessed with notorious crimes. When they locate Libby and pump her for details—proof they hope may free Ben—Libby hatches a plan to profit off her tragic history. For a fee, she’ll reconnect with the players from that night and report her findings to the club...and maybe she’ll admit her testimony wasn’t so solid after all.
As Libby’s search takes her from shabby Missouri strip clubs to abandoned Oklahoma tourist towns, the narrative flashes back to January 2, 1985. The events of that day are relayed through the eyes of Libby’s doomed family members—including Ben, a loner whose rage over his shiftless father and their failing farm have driven him into a disturbing friendship with the new girl in town. Piece by piece, the unimaginable truth emerges, and Libby finds herself right back where she started—on the run from a killer. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 24, 1971
• Where—Kansas City, Missouri, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Kansas; M.A., Northwest University
• Awards—Ian Fleming Steel Daggers
• Currently—lives in Chicago, Illinois
Gillian Flynn is an American author, screenwriter, comic book writer, and former television critic for Entertainment Weekly. Her three published novels are the thrillers: Sharp Objects, Dark Places, and Gone Girl.
Early life
Flynn was born in Kansas City, Missouri. Both of her parents were professors at Metropolitan Community College–Penn Valley: her mother, Judith Ann (nee Schieber), a reading-comprehension professor; her father, Edwin Matthew Flynn, a film professor. "Painfully shy," Flynn found escape in reading and writing and watching horror movies.
Flynn attended the University of Kansas, where she received her undergraduate degrees in English and journalism. She spent two years in California writing for a trade magazine for human resources professionals before moving to Chicago where, in 1997, she earned a Master's in journalism at Northwestern University.
Career
Initially, Flynn wanted to work as a police reporter but soon discovered she had no aptitude for police reporting. She worked briefly at U.S. News & World Report before being hired as a feature writer in 1998 for Entertainment Weekly. She was promoted to television critic, writing about both tv and film.
Flynn attributes her craft to her 15-some years in journalism:
I could not have written a novel if I hadn't been a journalist first, because it taught me that there's no muse that's going to come down and bestow upon you the mood to write. You just have to do it. I'm definitely not precious.
Although Flynn considers herself a feminist, some critics accuse her of misogyny because of the unflattering depiction of female characters in her books. Yet feminism, she feels, allows for women to be bad characters in literature:
The one thing that really frustrates me is this idea that women are innately good, innately nurturing.
Flynn also said people will dismiss...
trampy, vampy, bitchy types—there's still a big pushback against the idea that women can be just pragmatically evil, bad, and selfish.
Books
Flynn began writing novels during her free time while working for Entertainment Weekly. Her three books are—
♦ Sharp Objects (2006) revolves around a serial killer in Missouri and the reporter who returns to her Missouri hometown from Chicago to cover the event. Partly inspired by Dennis Lehane's 2001 Mystic River, the book deals with dysfunctional families, violence, and self-harm. It was shortlisted for the Mystery Writers of America Edgar in 2007 for Best First Novel by an American Writer. It won the Crime Writers' Association "New Blood" and "Ian Fleming Steel Daggers" awards.
♦ Dark Places (2009) centers on a woman investigating her brother who was convicted in the 1980s, when she was only a child, of murdering their parents.The book explores the era's satanic rituals and was adapted into a 2015 film. Flynn makes a cameo appearance in the film.
♦ Gone Girl (2012) concerns a couple, the wife of which disappears on their fifth wedding anniversary, and her husband who comes under police scrutiny as the prime suspect.
The novel hit No. 1 on the New York Times Hardcover Fiction Bestseller list for eight weeks. Times culture writer Dave Itzkoff wrote that the novel was, except for the Fifty Shades of Grey series, the biggest literary phenomenon of 2012. By the end of that year, Gone Girl had sold over two million copies (print and digital).
After selling the film rights for $1.5 million, Flynn wrote the Gone Girl screenplay. The 2014 film, starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, was released to popular and critical acclaim.
Other writing
Flynn was an avid reader of comic and graphic novels when she was a child. She collaborated with illustrator Dave Gibbons and wrote a comic book story called "Masks," as part of the Dark Horse Presents series. It came out in 2015.
Flynn agreed to write the scripts for Utopia, an forthcoming HBO drama series adapted from the acclaimed British series Utopia. The HBO series is to be directed and executive produced by David Fincher, who also directed Gone Girl.
Personal life
She married lawyer Brett Nolan in 2007. They met through Flynn's grad school classmate at Northwestern but did not start dating until Flynn, then in her mid-30s, moved back to Chicago from New York City. The couple still resides in Chicago with their two children. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/13/2015.)
Book Reviews
Libby Day, the protagonist of Flynn’s disturbing second novel, was, as a seven-year-old, the only survivor of her family’s brutal murder by her older brother.... [Years later she] is forced to reëxamine the events of the night of the murder. Flynn’s well-paced story deftly shows the fallibility of memory and the lies a child tells herself to get through a trauma.
The New Yorker
In her first psychological thriller, Sharp Objects, Flynn created a world unsparingly grim and nasty (the heroine carves words into her own flesh) written with irresistibly mordant humor. The sleuth in her equally disturbing and original second novel is Libby Day....It's Flynn's gift that she can make a caustic, self-loathing, unpleasant protagonist someone you come to root for.
New York Magazine
Gillian Flynn coolly demolished the notion that little girls are made of sugar and spice in Sharp Objects, her sensuous and chilling first thriller. In Dark Places, her equally sensuous and chilling follow-up, Flynn…has conjured up a whole new crew of feral and troubled young females…. [A] propulsive and twisty mystery.
Entertainment Weekly
Flynn follows her deliciously creepy Sharp Objects with another dark tale.... The story, alternating between the 1985 murders and the present, has a tense momentum that works beautifully. And when the truth emerges, it’s so macabre not even twisted little Libby Day could see it coming.
People
Edgar-finalist Flynn's second crime thriller tops her impressive debut, Sharp Objects. When Libby Day's mother and two older sisters were slaughtered in the family's Kansas farmhouse, it was seven-year-old Libby's testimony that sent her 15-year-old brother, Ben, to prison for life. Desperate for cash 24 years later, Libby reluctantly agrees to meet members of the Kill Club, true crime enthusiasts who bicker over famous cases. She's shocked to learn most of them believe Ben is innocent and the real killer is still on the loose. Though initially interested only in making a quick buck hocking family memorabilia, Libby is soon drawn into the club's pseudo-investigation, and begins to question what exactly she saw-or didn't see-the night of the tragedy. Flynn fluidly moves between cynical present-day Libby and the hours leading up to the murders through the eyes of her family members. When the truth emerges, it's so twisted that even the most astute readers won't have predicted it.
Publishers Weekly
Once in a while a book comes along that puts a new spin on an old idea. More than 40 years ago, Truman Capote (with In Cold Blood) took readers inside the Clutter farmhouse in Holcomb, KS, to show them what it was like to walk in a killer's shoes. Flynn (Sharp Objects) takes modern readers back to Kansas to explore the fictional 1985 Day family massacre from the perspective of a survivor as well as the suspects. For all public libraries. —Nancy McNicol
Library Journal
The sole survivor of a family massacre is pushed into revisiting a past she'd much rather leave alone, in Flynn's scorching follow-up to Sharp Objects (2006).... Libby Day, seven, testified that her brother Ben, 15, had killed the family.... [Now 31, she] reluctantly agrees to earn some...cash by digging up the leading players.... Flynn intercuts Libby's venomous detective work with flashbacks to the fatal day 24 years ago so expertly that as they both hurtle toward unspeakable revelations, you won't know which one you're more impatient to finish. Only the climax, which is incredible in both good ways and bad, is a letdown. For most ofthe wild story's running time, however, every sentence crackles with...baleful energy.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Did you like Libby as a character? Do you think the author intended for her to be likeable?
2. As the book shifted between points of view, did you find one most appealing, most enlightening, or most reliable?
3. Why has Libby ignored Jim Jeffreys’s advice to earn an income for so many years? Do you believe she feels she’s earned the money she’s been gifted by strangers? What is her attitude toward money?
4. Throughout the book, many characters seem to feel as though life is something that happens to them; others take a more proactive role in steering its course, often with disastrous consequences. Discuss the book’s theme of action versus reaction, investigation versus acceptance. Where does Libby’s behavior fit in this contrast?
5. Like others Libby meets during her investigation, Barb Eichel seems pleased to have been contacted, having “wondered if you’d ever get in touch.” Why did Barb wait for Libby to come to her? Did Barb do enough to remedy the harm she thinks her book has done?
6. As Lyle first brings Libby through the Kill Club gathering, he distinguishes between different types of members—role players and solvers, for instance. Do you consider these to be meaningful differences? How do the various groups make use of the club?
7. In considering the case of the missing girl Lisette Stephens, Libby thinks to herself, “There was nothing to solve.... She just vanished for no reason anyone could think of, except she was pretty.” Do you think it’s strange that Libby considers this an uninteresting case? What does her attitude toward Lisette say about her view of her own family’s murder? Was there something to “solve” in the Days’ murder?
8. What do you make of Magda, the middle-class Kill Club member so fond of Ben, and so callous to her own son? What does her character tell us, if anything, about the Kill Club and its members?
9. One of the appealing aspects of the Day case (according to Lyle) is the role of children as instigators, victims, and unreliable witnesses. Do you see any similarities among Krissi’s accusation, Libby’s false eyewitness account, and Lyle’s role in the California fires? Were these children to blame for their mistakes? In what ways did they attempt to right the wrongs they caused?
10. “No one ever forgives me for anything,” one character says. What role does forgiveness play in Dark Places? Which characters should be more forgiving? Less?
11. What do you think of Diondra’s relationships? Why is she attracted to Ben? Why is Trey such a constant companion? Do you think she was romantically involved with Trey?
12. Patty Day frequently worries whether she is a good mother. What do you think? How does the book depict parents in general? Who do you consider the “good” and “bad” parents in the book?
13. Did you think Ben was guilty? Does the author intend for us to doubt him?
14. Why doesn’t Diane return Libby’s phone calls? What does she mean at the end of the book when she says, “I knew you could do it.... I knew you could...try just a little harder”? Do you like Diane?
15. Why do you think Libby, at the end of the book, thinks twice before shoplifting? Is this reflective of a new attitude toward the world? How?
16. Do you think Ben will find Crystal? What do you imagine their reunion would be like? 17. Why do you think the author chose to set the murders on a farm? What images and themes does the heartland and farming evoke?
18. Libby is a liar, a manipulator, a kleptomaniac, and an opportunist. Does she have any redeeming qualities? Are you able to empathize with her? If so, why?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Princess Academy
Shannon Hale, 2005
Bloomsbury USA Children's Books
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781599900735
Summary
Newbery Honor Book
High on the side of rocky Mount Eskel, far from the valleys where gardens are green and lush, where lowlanders make laws, Miri’s family has lived forever, pounding a living from the stone of the mountain itself. For as long as she can remember, Miri has dreamed of working alongside the other villagers in the quarries of her beloved mountainside. But Miri has never been allowed to work there, perhaps, she thinks, because she is so small.
Then word comes from the valley that the king's priests have divined Mount Eskel to be the home of the prince’s bride-to-be—the next princess. The prince himself will travel to the village to choose her, but first all eligible girls must attend a makeshift mountain academy to prepare themselves for royal lowlander life.
At the school, Miri soon finds herself confronted by bitter competition among the girls and her own conflicting desires to be chosen by the prince. Yet when danger comes to the academy and threatens all their lives, it is Miri, named for a tiny mountain flower, who must find a way to save her classmates—and the one chance to leave the mountain each of them is determined to secure as her own.
From acclaimed author Shannon Hale comes the Newbery Honor-winning novel about would-be princesses and one small but determined girl's destiny. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 26, 1974
• Where—Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Utah; M.F.A., University of
Montana
• Awards—Newbery Honor Award; CYBILS Award
• Currently—lives near Salt Lake City, Utah
Shannon's mother says she was a storyteller from birth, jabbering endlessly in nonsensical baby-talk. Once she could speak, she made up stories and bribed younger siblings to perform them in mini-plays until, thankfully, an elementary school teacher introduced her to the wonder of written fiction. At age 10, she began to write books, mostly fantasy stories where she was the heroine.
She continued to write secretly for years while pursuing acting in television, stage, and improv comedy. After detours studying in Mexico, the UK, and a year and a half as an unpaid missionary in Paraguay, Shannon earned a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Utah. She was finally forced out of the writers closet when she received her Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Montana.
The goose girl, her critically acclaimed first book, is an ALA Teens' Top Ten and Josette Frank Award winner. Enna Burning and River Secrets are companion books to Goose, continuing the "Bayern" books series. Princess Academy is a Newbery Honor Book and a New York Times best seller. Book of a Thousand Days, her newest fairy tale retelling, received a CYBILS award. Austenland, a romantic comedy, and The Actor and the Housewife are her first two adult books. She and her Dean husband are working on a series of graphic novels, the first of which, Rapunzel's Revenge was selected by Today's Al Roker for Al's Book Club for Kids.
Shannon makes her home near Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, with her super-human husband, their indomitable toddler, stunning baby girl, and their pet, a small plastic pig. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Readers enchanted by Hale's Goose Girl are in for an experience that's a bit more earthbound in this latest fantasy-cum-tribute to girl-power. Cheerful and witty 14-year-old Miri loves her life on Mount Eskel, home to the quarries filled with the most precious linder stone in the land, though she longs to be big and strong enough to do quarry work like her sister and father. But Miri experiences big changes when the king announces that the prince will choose a potential wife from among the village's eligible girls-and that said girls must attend a new Princess Academy in preparation. Princess training is not all it's cracked up to be for spunky Miri in the isolated school overseen by cruel Tutor Olana. But through education—and the realization that she has the common mountain power to communicate wordlessly via magical "quarry-speech"—Miri and the girls eventually gain confidence and knowledge that helps transform their village. Unfortunately, Hale's lighthearted premise and underlying romantic plot bog down in overlong passages about commerce and class, a surprise hostage situation and the specifics of "quarry-speech." The prince's final princess selection hastily and patly wraps things up. Ages 9-up.
Publishers Weekly
Shannon Hale's career began with a fascinating retelling of The Goose Girl. One of the invented characters from that book became the heroine of Enna Burning. Now she writes a completely new tale and once again shows us that she knows the language, structure, and images of the world of fairy tales. The story begins in the mountainous region of Mount Eskel, a place where miners remove linder, a sought-after stone. Sometimes they do this without speech, for they have learned to communicate in a whole different way. All but Miri, a child who is not strong and who grieves this separation, as much as she grieves that her mother died at her birth. Everything changes when all the young women in the village must train in a hastily constructed Princess Academy so that one can be chosen to marry the prince. The governess Olana is a harsh task mistress, even cruel, as she crams her unschooled students full of information about poise, reading, and history. For once in her life, Miri is part of a community and she fights for fairness for her fellow students, even as she herself fights to learn. She also faces inner battles, trying to forget her growing love for her childhood friend, Peder, should she have to marry the prince. Coming of age in a princess academy, and understanding her past and her future path, are made stronger by the fairy tale voice Hale creates. This voice allows readers to lose themselves in her stories.
Susie Wilde - Children's Literature
Princess Academy is a delightful read with everything you need in a good fantasy book: action, adventure, romance-and a good kidnapping. Although many people who read this book will not have any connection to Miri's way of life (people usually don't tend goats high on a mountainside their whole lives), Hale's writing places you in the book, so you feel you can relate. The plot seems predictable, like any other book of its genre, but it has a twist that sets it apart and makes it all the more enjoyable. (Better than most, marred only by occasional lapses; Broad general YA appeal.) —Rebecca Moreland (Teen Reviewer)
VOYA
(Gr 5-9.) The thought of being a princess never occurred to the girls living on Mount Eskel. Most plan to work in the quarry like the generations before them. When it is announced that the prince will choose a bride from their village, 14-year-old Miri, who thinks she is being kept from working in the quarry because of her small stature, believes that this is her opportunity to prove her worth to her father. All eligible females are sent off to attend a special academy where they face many challenges and hardships as they are forced to adapt to the cultured life of a lowlander. First, strict Tutor Olana denies a visit home. Then, they are cut off from their village by heavy winter snowstorms. As their isolation increases, competition builds among them. The story is much like the mountains, with plenty of suspenseful moments that peak and fall, building into the next intense event. Miri discovers much about herself, including a special talent called quarry speak, a silent way to communicate. She uses this ability in many ways, most importantly to save herself and the other girls from harm. Each girl's story is brought to a satisfying conclusion, but this is not a fluffy, predictable fairy tale, even though it has wonderful moments of humor. Instead, Hale weaves an intricate, multilayered story about families, relationships, education, and the place we call home. — Linda L. Plevak, Saint Mary's Hall, San Antonio, TX
School Library Review
There are many pleasures to this satisfying tale: a precise lyricism to the language ("The world was as dark as eyes closed" or "Miri's laugh is a tune you love to whistle") and a rhythm to the story that takes its tropes from many places, but its heart from ours. Miri is very small; her father has never let her work in the linder stone quarries where her village makes its living and she fears that it's because she lacks something. However, she's rounded up, with the other handful of girls ages 12 to 17, to be taught and trained when it's foreseen that the prince's bride will come from their own Mount Eskel. Olana, their teacher, is pinched and cruel, but Miri and the others take to their studies, for it opens the world beyond the linder quarries to them. Miri seeks other learning as well, including the mindspeech that ties her to her people, and seems to work through the linder stone itself. There's a lot about girls in groups, both kind and cutting; a sweet boy; the warmth of friends, fathers and sisters; and the possibility of being chosen by a prince one barely knows. The climax involving evil brigands is a bit forced, but everything else is an unalloyed joy. (9-14).
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Miri’s father tells her that her mother named her“after the flower that conquered rock and climbed to face the sun” (page 14). Do you know why your parents chose your name? Does your name have a special meaning to you and your family?
2. Does Princess Academy remind you of any other novels you have read? If so, which ones and why? If not, what makes it unique?
3. The people of Mount Eskel use a kind of telepathy to communicate with one another in the quarry. Miri learns that the “quarry-speech” works by sharing memories through the rock of the mountain itself an can be used to communicate many things besides warnings or instructions in the quarry. Have you ever imagined a secret way to communicate with your friends and family? How might it work?
4. Miri makes a dramatic difference in the life of her village by sharing what she has learned at the academy about commerce. Have you ever had an idea that you thought might make a difference? Describe one change you would like to make in your community that could have a positive influence on people’s lives.
5. At a critical moment in the mountain girls’ training at the academy, they must all pass an oral test in order to attend the ball with the prince. At one moment, Miri notices Gerti struggling to answer a question. Convinced it would be unfair for the girls to be banned from the dance if they can’t pass the test, Miri finds a way to help Gerti get the answer through quarry-speech. Do you think Miri did the right thing or not? Why?
6. Miri treasures the carved linder hawk that Peder gave her when they were small. In a fateful twist, it helps her escape from the bandit Dan, though she loses it as it falls down the mountain. What do you think the hawk means to Miri, and to Peder? What do you think is the symbolic significance of the hawk?
7. Many of the characters in Princess Academy learn to look past the masks that people wear. Which of the characters wear a mask that hides their true feelings, and what is their motivation for doing so?
8. Shannon Hale spends a great deal of time describing the natural world that surrounds Miri, and she vividly expresses how Miri feels about the mountains, flowers, snow, and rock that make up her world. Take a moment to think about your favorite place. How does it look and smell? How do you feel when you are in this place?
9. At the end of the novel we learn that Tutor Olana was intentionally cruel and even lied to the girls in order to motivate them to learn. Do you think this was a wise choice on her part? What might have been different in the story had she been friendly and encouraging?
10. Were you surprised when you learned about Britta’s secret? How did you feel about Prince Steffan’s final choice?
(Questions from author's website.)
Flush
Carl Hiaasen, 2005
Random House Children's Books
263 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375861253
Summary
You know it’s going to be a rough summer when you spend Father’s Day visiting your dad in the local lockup.
Noah’s dad is sure that the owner of the Coral Queen casino boat is flushing raw sewage into the harbor–which has made taking a dip at the local beach like swimming in a toilet.
He can’t prove it though, and so he decides that sinking the boat will make an effective statement. Right. The boat is pumped out and back in business within days and Noah’s dad is stuck in the clink.
Now Noah is determined to succeed where his dad failed. He will prove that the Coral Queen is dumping illegally... somehow. His allies may not add up to much–his sister Abbey, an unreformed childhood biter; Lice Peeking, a greedy sot with poor hygiene; Shelly, a bartender and a woman scorned; and a mysterious pirate—but Noah’s got a plan to flush this crook out into the open. A plan that should sink the crooked little casino, once and for all. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 12, 1953
• Where—Plantation, Florida, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Florida
• Awards—Newbery Honor Award
• Currently—lives in Tavernier, Florida
When one thinks of the classics of pulp fiction, certain things — gruff, amoral antiheroes, unflinching nihilism, and a certain melodramatic self-seriousness—inevitably come to mind. However, the novels of Carl Hiaasen completely challenge these pulpy conventions. While the pulp of yesteryear seems forever chiseled in an almost quaint black and white world, Hiaasen's books vibrate with vivid color. They are veritable playgrounds for wild characters that flout clichés: a roadkill-eating ex-governor, a bouncer/assassin who takes care of business with a Weed Wacker, a failed alligator wrestler named Sammy Tigertail. Furthermore, Hiaasen infuses his absurdist stories with a powerful dose of social and political awareness, focusing on his home turf of South Florida with an unflinching keenness.
Hiaasen was born and raised in South Florida. During the 1970s, he got his start as a writer working for Cocoa Today as a public interest columnist. However, it was his gig as an investigative reporter for the Miami Herald that provided him with the fundamentals necessary for a career in fiction. "I'd always wanted to write books ever since I was a kid," Hiaasen told Barnes & Noble.com. "To me, the newspaper business was a way to learn about life and how things worked in the real world and how people spoke. You learn all the skills—you learn to listen, you learn to take notes—everything you use later as a novelist was valuable training in the newspaper world. But I always wanted to write novels."
Hiaasen made the transition from journalism to fiction in 1981 with the help of fellow reporter Bill Montalbano. Hiaasen and Montalbano drew upon all they had learned while covering the Miami beat in their debut novel Powder Burn, a sharp thriller about the legendary Miami cocaine trade, which the New York Times declared an "expertly plotted novel." The team followed up their debut with two more collaborative works before Hiaasen ventured out on his own with Tourist Season, an offbeat murder mystery that showcased the author's idiosyncratic sense of humor.
From then on, Hiaasen's sensibility has grown only more comically absurd and more socially pointed, with a particular emphasis on the environmental exploitation of his beloved home state. In addition to his irreverent and howlingly funny thrillers (Double Whammy, Sick Puppy, Nature Girl, etc), he has released collections of his newspaper columns (Kick Ass, Paradise Screwed) and penned children's books (Hoot, Flush). With his unique blend of comedy and righteousness ("I can't be funny without being angry."), the writer continues to view hallowed Florida institutions—from tourism to real estate development—with a decidedly jaundiced eye. As Kirkus Reviews has wryly observed, Hiassen depicts "...the Sunshine State as the weirdest place this side of Oz.
Extras
•Perhaps in keeping with his South Floridian mindset, Hiaasen keeps snakes as housepets. He says on his web site, "They're clean and quiet. You give them rodents and they give you pure, unconditional indifference."
•Hiaasen is also a songwriter: He's co-written two songs, "Seminole Bingo" and "Rottweiler Blues", with Warren Zevon for the album Mutineer. In turn, Zevon recorded a song based on the lyrics Hiaasen had written for a dead rock star character in Basket Case.
•In Hiaasen's novel Nature Girl, he gets the opportunity to deal with a long-held fantasy. "I'd always fantasized about tracking down one of these telemarketing creeps and turning the tables—phoning his house every night at dinner, the way they hassle everybody else," he explains on his web site. "In the novel, my heroine takes it a whole step farther. She actually tricks the guy into signing up for a bogus ‘ecotour' in Florida, and then proceeds to teach him some manners. Or tries. (Bio fom Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Compulsively readable with a cleverly conceived resolution... Fans of spy stories, action, environmental intrigue, and, well, Hiaasen, will cheer for this one.
The Bulletin
How does Hiaasen follow up his page-turning novel about saving owls in Florida (Hoot)? With a second fast-paced story featuring an environmental theme-this time about ocean pollutants harming turtles' habitats (and the surroundings in general) in the Florida Keys. Welch (TV's Joan of Arcadia) has a compelling, snappy delivery suited to 11-year-old Noah's personality; he's a clever kid who wants to set things right, even when it pits him against shady characters and the local bully. Noah is exasperated over his father's arrest for sinking a casino boat that the man believes is flushing sewage into the ocean. The boy also knows that proving his dad's suspicions could go a long way toward healing his strained family and saving the ocean. Welch handily captures Noah's moods, though not even he can make eccentrics such as Lice Peeking and his burly bartending girlfriend Shelly likable at the outset (they grow on listeners, however). Those who couldn't get enough of Hiaasen's last outing will find plenty to hoot about in this solid recording. Ages 10-up.
Publishers Weekly
In Flush Carl Hiaasen's ecological concerns focus on illegal dumping of raw sewage from a floating casino. Noah Underwood's dad has sunk the gambling ship, the Coal Queen, in protest. Now the elder Underwood is launching a media campaign from his jail cell to raise public awareness since the sewage-spewing ship will soon be back in operation. Though Noah and his younger sister Abbey believe in their father's cause, they also fear their mother will file for divorce if he continues to react so outrageously to environmental issues. After a few false starts and run-ins with the casino owner's son and the ship's hired goon, the siblings come up with a plan to use food coloring to expose the hazardous dumping. Working with Shelly, the casino's bartender, and aided by a mysterious white-haired man, Noah and Abbey set their trap, but end up adrift off the Florida Keys. Rescue and an unexpected family reunion make their successful exposure of the corrupt casino owner even sweeter. It takes a few more plot twists before the Coral Queen is closed forever, and by then Noah's parents have learned better ways to manage their marital problems. Michael Welch's narration neatly balances the protagonist's earnest youthfulness with the story's humor. In the manner of Hoot (Knopf, 2002), Hiaasen's award—winning first foray into young adult novels, Flush deals with serious ecological and personal issues. With good insight into real world relationships plus a mix of solid citizens and offbeat good guys, this audiobook has broad appeal and will be valued in middle school, high school, and public libraries. —Barbara Wysocki, Cora J. Belden Library, Rocky Hill, CT
School Library Journal
Hiaasen's second novel exhibits some of the same elements found in his 2003 Newbery Honor Book: Florida local color, oddball adults (buxom and brawny), and a delightful quirkiness.But the sparkle that catapulted Hoot into the limelight isn't quite as brilliant here. Even so, there's plenty to like in this yarn, which, once again, drops an environmental issue into the lap of a kid.
Booklist
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Flush
1. Do you find this book funny? How does Hiaasen create his humor, particularly with character names? What parts made you laugh?
2. Talk about the differences between Noah and Abbey—what is about the two of them that makes them such a good team?
3. What about their family? What does each think about their parents? What does Donna want to fix in Paine?
4. Hiassen devotes time to father-son relationships. Discuss the relationship between Noah and his father. Does Paine expect too much of his young son...is he right to depend on Noah? What does Noah learn from this father? What about the book's other father-son relationships—Jasper, Jr. and Dustry Muleman?
5. The story also revolves around bullying. How does Noah's father define bullying? Do you agree? Who are the bullies in this book?
6. Is it fair or right of Paine to involve his family in his environmental causes? Can one be too committed to a cause? Is Donna justified in worrying about her husband's actions? Does she lack courage or is she simply tired of rescuing her husband?
7. Paine claims he's not a criminal despite the fact that he's broken the law. He says he knows "right from wrong." Does he? Is there a higher moral claim to his actions? What justification, if any, does he have for his actions? Does philosophical justice trump legal justice...when the legal system doesn't fulfill it's role?
(These Questions by LitLovers are adapted from Random House Teachers Guide. Please feel free to use them online or off, with attritubtion to both sources. Thanks.)
top of page (summary)
The Wednesday Wars
Gary D. Schmidt, 2007
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780547237602
Summary
Winner, 2008 Newbery Honor
Holling Hoodhood is really in for it.
He’s just started seventh grade with Mrs. Baker, a teacher he knows is out to get him. Why else would she make him read Shakespeare...outside of class?
The year is 1967, and everyone has bigger things than homework to worry about. There’s Vietnam for one thing, and then there’s the family business. As far as Holling’s father is concerned, nothing is more important than the family business. In fact, all of the Hoodhoods must be on their best behavior at all times.
The success of Hoodhood and Associates depends on it. But how can Holling stay out of trouble when he has Mrs. Baker to contend with? (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1957
• Education—N/A
• Awards—two Newbery Honors
• Currently—lives in Alto, Michigan
Gary D. Schmidt is an American children's writer of nonfiction books and young adult novels, including two Newbery Honor books.
He lives on a farm in Alto, Michigan, with his wife and six children. He is a Professor of English at Calvin College. The American Library Association awarded Mr. Schmidt a Newbery Honor in 2005 for Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy and again in 2008 for The Wednesday Wars. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
There are many strands in this story: the Vietnam War, air raid drills, missing soldiers, a classmate who is a Vietnamese refugee, a rescue, extreme humiliation, chalk-covered cream puffs, yellow tights with feathers in all the wrong places and a bully. In fact, so much happens I wondered whether all the seeds Schmidt planted could flower by the end. To his great credit, they do. Still, while The Wednesday Wars was one of my favorite books of the year, it wasn't written for me. Sometimes books that speak to adults miss the mark for their intended audience. To see if the novel would resonate as deeply with a child, I gave it to an avid but discriminating 10-year-old reader. His laughter, followed by repeated outbursts of "Listen to this!," answered my question.
Tanya Lee Stone - New York Times
Seventh grader, Holling Hoodhood is convinced that his teacher, Mrs. Baker, hates him. After all, her folded arms and eyes that roll with unspoken sarcasm offer ample proof, right? When Holling, the lone Presbyterian, is left in the empty classroom on Wednesday afternoons as the other Jews and Catholics are bussed to religious instruction, real vengeance begins. Mrs. Baker requires Holling to read Shakespeare, not only in class, but aloud with her, and at home for discussion the following week. This bittersweet novel set during the days of the Vietnam conflict, peace marches, racial protests, and flower children rivals the immortal Bard for tragedy and comedy. Holling narrates, as readers assimilate the 60s, developing a fresh appreciation for a country at war from the voice of a memorable hero who is battling to discover himself. Schmidt, an award-winning author in his own right, combines the student-teacher relationships reminiscent of Andrew Clements' Frindle with the angst of the middle school individualist depicted in Sue Stauffacher's Donuthead, with original flare, unfolding the past at the pace of the present. This story interweaves the issues of the period with grace and power, resulting in historical fiction both entertaining and endearing.
Children's Literature
Seventh grader Holling Hoodhood lives in the Long Island suburbs in the Perfect House with his less-than-perfect, architect father, his subservient mother, and his flower-child sister. On Wednesday afternoon, half of his class leaves for Hebrew School at Temple Beth-El while the other half goes to catechism. Holling is the lone Presbyterian so he stays behind with his teacher, Ms. Baker, whom Holling knows hates him. She introduces him to the plays of William Shakespeare, an assignment that Holling assumes is punishment but which actually enhances his life. There is a lot going on in this novel not all related to the politics of the turbulent 1960s. The assassinations of Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, and the unpopular Vietnam War play a part in Holling's seventh grade year but so do two rats, Sycorax and Calliban, with their clacking yellow teeth; a part as Ariel in yellow tights; a track team; bullying and racism; a camping trip; and disappointment in a first love. Ms. Baker gently guides him through everything even as she brokenheartedly deals with the news that her husband is MIA. This novel is funny, warm, sad, and touching all at the same time. Holling Hoodhood will live with the reader for a very long time after he finishes seventh grade and learns "to thine self be true."
VOYA
The year is 1967, and on Wednesday afternoons in Holling's Long Island, NY 7th-grade class, all the Catholic students go to Catechism, while all the Jewish students go to Hebrew school—leaving Holling, the only Presbyterian, alone with his teacher each week. He's convinced Mrs. Baker hates him: she has him reading Shakespeare, after all. Which leads to his role as Ariel in a community production of The Tempest and to possibly the most embarrassing newspaper photo of all time, of Holling in yellow tights with feathers on the rear, which of course is posted all over the school. Other amusing incidents involve rats gone AWOL, an encounter with Mickey Mantle, and joining the track team. But as wise Mrs. Baker notes, "Comedies are much more than funny," and this wonderful novel about the miseries and miracles of Holling's 12th year offers more than just belly laughs. The Vietnam War is a backdrop to life at Camillo Junior High: a Vietnamese orphan is in their class, while Mrs. Baker's soldier husband is missing in action. Holling's 16-year-old sister dreams of being a flower child and runs away, and Holling must come to her rescue. Acclaimed author Schmidt's warmth and understanding shine through on every page, along with his humor (one boy can "cuss the yellow off a school bus") and his gift for creating memorable characters: he may remind readers of Jerry Spinelli or Richard Peck. Not to be missed—this is a marvelous read, both achingly funny and deeply affecting.
KLIATT
It's 1967, and on Wednesdays, every Jewish kid in Holling Hoodhood's class goes to Hebrew School, and every Catholic kid goes to Catechism. Holling is Presbyterian, which means that he and Mrs. Baker are alone together every Wednesday—and she hates it just as much as he does. What unfolds is a year of Wednesday Shakespeare study, which, says Mrs. Baker, "is never boring to the true soul." Holling is dubious, but trapped. Schmidt plaits world events into the drama being played out at Camillo Junior High School, as well as plenty of comedy, as Holling and Mrs. Baker work their way from open hostility to a sweetly realized friendship. Holling navigates the multitudinous snares set for seventh-graders—parental expectations, sisters, bullies, girls—with wry wit and the knowledge that the world will always be a step or two ahead of him. Schmidt has a way of getting to the emotional heart of every scene without overstatement, allowing the reader and Holling to understand the great truths swirling around them on their own terms. It's another virtuoso turn by the author of Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy.
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Wednesday Wars:
1. Why is Holling convinced Ms. Baker hates him? How does their relationship change during their year of studying together?
2. Ms. Baker says that Shakespeare "is never boring to the true soul." What does she mean by that remark...what is a "true soul"?
3. What is it about Shakespeare that Holling comes to appreciate? But what about Romeo and Juliet?
4. How do the Shakespearean plays Holling reads reflect the events in his life?
5. Gary Schmidt sets his story in the Vietnam War era, along with the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. In what way do these historical events highlight the book's plot?
6. What do you think about Holling's parents? What kind of parents are they? What is uppermost in Mr. Hoodhood's life—business or family life?
7. Does the author do a good job of describing the problems faced by seventh graders—friendship, bullying, parents, siblings, teacher expectations?
8. What episodes did you find especially funny? The rats episode, the yellow tights, the cream puffs?
9. Talk about the line, "when the gods die, they die hard." What symbolic "gods" die for Holling?
10. In what way does Holling grow by the end of the book? What does he learn...how does he change?
11. Mrs. Baker advises Holling to "Learn everything you can—everything. And then use all that you have learned to be a wise and good man." Does, or will, Holling live up to that advice?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
top of page
Rules
Cynthia Lord, 2006
Scholastic, Inc.
208 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780439443838
Summary
Winner, 2007 Newbery Honor Book
Twelve-year-old Catherine just wants a normal life. Which is near impossible when you have a brother with autism and a family that revolves around his disability. She's spent years trying to teach David the rules from "a peach is not a funny-looking apple" to "keep your pants on in public"—in order to head off David's embarrassing behaviors.
But the summer Catherine meets Jason, a surprising, new sort-of friend, and Kristi, the next-door friend she's always wished for, it's her own shocking behavior that turns everything upside down and forces her to ask: What is normal? (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Cynthia Lord is the mother of two children, one of whom has autism. A former teacher, behavioural specialist, and bookseller, she lives with her husband and children in Maine. Visit her at www.cynthialord.com. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[Catherine] begins to realize "normal" means different things to different people. And maybe normal is not so important after all.
Washington Post
The appealing, credible narrator at the heart of Lord's debut novel will draw in readers, as she struggles to find order and balance in her life. Her parents place 12-year-old Catherine in charge of her younger autistic brother more often than she would like. Taking solace in art, the girl fills the back of her sketchbook with rules she has established for David, "so if my someday-he'll-wake-up-a-regular-brother wish doesn't ever come true, at least he'll know how the world works, and I won't have to keep explaining things." Sorely missing her best friend, who is away for the summer, and realizing that the girl who has just moved in next door is not a kindred spirit, Catherine devises some of her own self-protective rules ("When you want to get out of answering something, distract the questioner with another question"). In the able hands of the author, mother of an autistic child, Catherine's emotions come across as entirely convincing, especially her alternating devotion to and resentment of David, and her guilt at her impatience with him. Through her artwork, the heroine gradually opens up to Jason, a wheelchair-bound peer who can communicate only by pointing to words on cards. As she creates new cards that expand Jason's ability to express his feelings, their growing friendship enables Catherine to do the same. A rewarding story that may well inspire readers to think about others' points of view. (Ages 9-12.)
Publishers Weekly
(Gr 4-7) Twelve-year-old Catherine has conflicting feelings about her younger brother, David, who is autistic. While she loves him, she is also embarrassed by his behavior and feels neglected by their parents. In an effort to keep life on an even keel, Catherine creates rules for him ("It's okay to hug Mom but not the clerk at the video store"). Each chapter title is also a rule, and lots more are interspersed throughout the book. When Kristi moves in next door, Catherine hopes that the girl will become a friend, but is anxious about her reaction to David. Then Catherine meets and befriends Jason, a nonverbal paraplegic who uses a book of pictures to communicate, she begins to understand that normal is difficult, and perhaps unnecessary, to define. Rules of behavior are less important than acceptance of others. Catherine is an endearing narrator who tells her story with both humor and heartbreak. Her love for her brother is as real as are her frustrations with him. Lord has candidly captured the delicate dynamics in a family that revolves around a child's disability. Set in coastal Maine, this sensitive story is about being different, feeling different, and finding acceptance. A lovely, warm read, and a great discussion starter. —Connie Tyrrell Burns, Mahoney Middle School, South Portland, ME
School Library Journal
Growing up with an autistic younger brother is not easy and it seems far harder when the pre-teen years hit. Catherine feels as though David's needs far overshadow her own in the family but the embarrassment his behavior causes her is the worst of it. Nevertheless, Catherine understands what David's world is like and when she snaps at him, she is beset by guilt. It is this sensitivity that allows her to befriend a boy her age with severe communication problems who is wheelchair-bound. Gaining a stronger sense of herself and demanding what she needs as a member of the family allows her to move beyond embarrassment into acceptance. This is a story that depicts the impact of a needy child on an entire family very realistically. One of the treats in this book is that David echoes words rather than generating his own and he frequently speaks in lines he remembers from Arnold Lobel's Frog & Toad.
Joan Kindig, Ph.D. - Children's Literature
When 12-year-old Catherine is embarrassed by her autistic younger brother's behavior, her mother reassures her that "real friends understand." But Catherine is not convinced, and she is desperate to make a friend of the new girl next door. She doesn't like it when others laugh at David or ignore him; she writes down the rules so he will know what to do. Catherine is also uncomfortable about her growing friendship with 14-year-old Jason, a paraplegic. Jason uses a book of word cards to communicate, and Catherine enjoys making him new cards with more expressive words. Still, when he suggests that they go to a community-center dance, she refuses at first. Only when Jason sees through her excuse does she realize that her embarrassment is for herself. Catherine is an appealing and believable character, acutely self-conscious and torn between her love for her brother and her resentment of his special needs. Middle-grade readers will recognize her longing for acceptance and be intrigued by this exploration of dealing with differences. (Fiction. 9-12)
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Rules:
1. Cynthia Lord has said that when she writes, she instinctively takes on the personae of a 10-12-year-old girl. Do you find her voice convincing?
2. Talk about the book's humor. What did you find funny? And is Lord's use of humor helpful or appropriate in dealing with a serious disability like autism?
3. Has the book given you deeper insight into someone with autism? Lord's hope in writing Rules was that readers would gain a greater understanding of someone with the disability.
4. Catherine feels ignored by her parents, who must devote extra time and attention to her brother. As Lord says: "fair can't always be equal." What does Lord mean by that? What does Catherine eventually learn about her father, in particular —and what does he come to learn about Catherine?
5. All writers, poets especially, have talked about the inadequacy of words—imagine how Jason feels having to depend on someone else's words to express his feelings. Talk about Jason's role vis-a-vis Catherine. How does their friendship change her?
6. Overall, in what way is Catherine changed by the end of the book? What does she come to learn about herself and others?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
top of page
The Secret Garden
Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1910-11
~250-300 pp. (varies by publisher)
Summary
Mary Lennox has no one left in the world when she arrives at Misselthwaite Manor, her mysterious uncle's enormous, drafty mansion looming on the edge of the moors. A cholera epidemic has ravaged the Indian village in which she was born, killing both her parents and the "Ayah," or Indian servant, who cared for her.
Not that being alone is new to her. Her socialite mother had no time between parties for Mary, and her father was both too ill and too occupied by his work to raise his daughter. Not long after coming to live with her uncle, Mr. Craven, Mary discovers a walled garden, neglected and in ruins.
Soon she meets her servant Martha's brother Dickon, a robust country boy nourished both by his mother's love and by the natural surroundings of the countryside; and her tyrannical cousin Colin, whose mother died giving birth to him. So traumatized was Mr. Craven by the sudden death of his beloved wife that he effectively abandoned the infant Colin and buried the keys to the garden that she adored. His son has grown into a self-loathing hypochondriacal child whose tantrums strike fear into the hearts of servants.
The lush garden is now overgrown and all are forbidden to enter it. No one can even remember where the door is, until a robin leads Mary to its hidden key. It is in the "secret garden," and with the help of Dickon, that Mary and Colin find the path to physical and spiritual health. Along the way the three children discover that in their imaginations—called "magic" by Colin—is the power to transform lives. (From the Penguin edition—image, top-right.)
Author Bio
• Birth—November 24, 1849
• Where—Manchester, England, UK
• Death—October 29, 1924
• Where—Plandome, New York, USA
Frances Hodgson Burnett was an Anglo-American playwright and author. She is best known for her children's stories, in particular The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, and Little Lord Fauntleroy.
She was born in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, England. Her father died in 1854, leaving her mother to support five children. They had to endure poverty and squalor in the Victorian slums of Manchester.
In 1865, at age 16, Frances emigrated to Knoxville, Tennessee in the United States. The move, which the family made at the request of an uncle, did not alleviate their poverty, but they were now living in a better environment. She lived in a house in New Market, northeast of Knoxville (off of 11E; in front of the house there is a sign which contains details).
Following the death of her mother in 1867, the 18-year-old Frances became the head of a family of two younger siblings. She turned to writing to support them all, with a first story published in Godey's Lady's Book in 1868. Soon after she was being published regularly in Godey's, Scribner's Monthly, Peterson's Ladies' Magazine and Harper's Bazaar. Her main writing talent was combining realistic detail of working-class life with a romantic plot.
She married Dr. Swan Burnett of Washington, D.C. in 1873. Her first novel, That Lass o' Lowrie's, was published in 1877 and was a story of Lancashire life.
After moving with her husband to Washington, D.C., Burnett wrote the novels Haworth's (1879), Louisiana (1880), A Fair Barbarian (1881), and Through One Administration (1883), as well as a play, Esmeralda (1881), written with William Gillette.
In 1886 she published Little Lord Fauntleroy. Altough originally intended as a children's book, it had a great appeal to mothers. It created a fashion of long curls (based on her son Vivian's) and velvet suits with lace collars (based on Oscar Wilde's attire), which became a stereotypical image for children of the wealthy. The book sold more than half a million copies. In 1888 she won a lawsuit in England over the dramatic rights to Little Lord Fauntleroy, establishing a precedent that was incorporated into British copyright law in 1911.
In 1898 she divorced Dr. Burnett. Two years later married Stephen Townsend, her business manager. This second marriage would last less than two years, ending in 1902.
Her later works include Sara Crewe (1888), later rewritten as A Little Princess (1905); The Lady of Quality (1896), considered one of the best of her plays; and The Secret Garden (1911), the children's novel for which she is probably best known today. The Lost Prince was published in 1915, and The Head of the House of Coombe in 1922. The Making of a Marchioness was published in 1911 and was one of Nancy Mitford's favorite books, mentioned in Love in a Cold Climate.
In 1893 Hodgson published a memoir of her youth, The One I Knew Best of All. From the mid-1890s she lived mainly in England, and in particular at Great Maytham Hall (from 1897 to 1907) where she really did discover a secret garden, but in 1909 she moved back to the United States, after having become a U.S. citizen in 1905.
After her first son Lionel's death of consumption in 1890, Burnett delved into Spiritualism and apparently found this a great comfort in dealing with her grief (she had previously dabbled in Theosophy, and some of its concepts are worked into The Secret Garden, in which a boy who has been an invalid for a long time helps to heal himself through positive thinking and affirmations). During World War I, Burnett put her beliefs about what happens after death into writing with her novella The White People.
Frances Hodgson Burnett lived for the last 17 years of her life in Plandome, New York. She is buried in Roslyn Cemetery nearby, next to her son Vivian. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
(Older works have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)
Discussion Questions
1. Mary and Colin are often described as being unpleasant and rude. Martha, in fact, says Mary is "as tyrannical as a pig" and that Colin is the "worst young newt as ever was." Why are both of these children so ill-tempered? Whom does Burnett hold responsible for their behavior—themselves or their parents? How does this fit into one of the larger themes of the novel, that of the "fallen world of adults"?
2. Why does Mary respond so well to Martha? What characteristics of Martha's personality are responsible for awakening the gentleness hidden in Mary? Compare Martha's treatment of Mary to Mary's treatment of Colin. Does it have the same effect on Colin as it does on Mary?
3. Upon Mary's first encounter with Dickon, Burnett describes the boy in this way: "His speech was so quick and easy. It sounded as if he liked her and was not the least afraid she would not like him, though he was a common moor boy, in patched clothes and with a funny face and a rough, rusty-red head. As she came closer to him she noticed that there was a clean fresh scent of heather and grass and leaves about him, almost as if he were made of them." What is significant about this passage? Are there any particular motifs that seem to be connected specifically to Dickon?
4. Compare Dickon's upbringing with Mary's and Colin's. How is it different? Is it important, or just incidental, that Dickon is a "common moor boy" rather than a member of the "privileged class"?
5. Could Mary and Colin have found the path to spiritual and physical healing without Dickon?
6. Is Colin's deceased mother's spirit present in the book? Where and when do you sense it the most? Who does she employ as her "agents" of goodwill in the book?
7. Misselthwaite Manor is a house of masculine rule, whether it be Mr. Craven's or Colin's rule. The garden, however, is a place of fertility and regrowth. This type of symbolism structures the novel. Where else is this structure manifested in the novel?
8. In its theme of the mind's potential for regeneration, The Secret Garden has often been considered a tribute to the "New Thought" movement, which included ideas of Christian Science and Theosophy. How do you feel about this? Do you think that the "magic" employed by Colin was as crucial to his healing as was communion with nature and other living things?
9. Discuss the regionalist aspects of the novel, such as the Yorkshire dialects. How do they contribute to the overarching themes of The Secret Garden?
10. In your opinion, does Mr. Craven, after subjecting his son to years of neglect, deserve redemption?
11. Which narrative features were employed by the author to make The Secret Garden speak to children? Why do you think this novel appeals to an adult audience as well? What makes it a classic?
(Questions from the Penguin edition—image, top-right)
top of page (summary)
The Illumination
Kevin Brockmeier, 2011
Knopf Doubleday
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375425318
Summary
What if our pain was the most beautiful thing about us? At 8:17 on a Friday night, the Illumination commences. Every wound begins to shine, every bruise to glow and shimmer.
And in the aftermath of a fatal car accident, a private journal of love notes, written by a husband to his wife, passes into the keeping of a hospital patient and from there through the hands of five other suffering people, touching each of them uniquely. The six recipients a data analyst, a photojournalist, a schoolchild, a missionary, a writer, and a street vendor inhabit an acutely observed, familiar-yet-strange universe, as only Kevin Brockmeier could imagine it: a world in which human pain is expressed as illumination, so that one s wounds blaze with light.
As we follow the path of the journal from stranger to stranger, we come to understand how they are all connected in the human pain and experience. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—December 6, 1972
• Where—Little Rock, Arkansas, USA
• Education—B.A., Southwest Missouri State University; M.F.A,
Iowa Writers' Workshop
• Awards—3 O'Henry Awards, Nelson Algren Award, Italo
Calvino Short Fiction Award, James Michener-Paul Engle
Fellowship; National Endowment for the Arts grant
• Currently—lives in Little Rock, Arkansas
Kevin Brockmeier is the author of Things That Fall from the Sky (2002), The Truth About Celia (2003), The Brief History of the Dead (2006), and The Illumination (2011) He has also written two children's novels, City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery. His stories have appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker, McSweeney's, Georgia Review, The Best American Short Stories, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and multiple editions of the O. Henry Prize Stories anthology.
He is the recipient of a Nelson Algren Award, an Italo Calvino Short Fiction Award, a James Michener–Paul Engle Fellowship, three O. Henry Awards—one of which was a first prize—and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. He has taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and lives in Little Rock, Arkansas. (From the publisher and Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
[E]legantly written...Brockmeier devotes his considerable gifts of description to the illuminated wounds of his characters, using lush, quiet prose to detail their cancer, abuse, self-mutilation and just plain old age.... Brockmeier relies on his usual poise to make the Illumination real. The reader never doubts that, on a certain day at a certain time, light begins to pour from our wounds. The strange transformation is wonderfully human, down to the social awkwardness it engenders.
Scott Hutchins - New York Times Book Review
Brockmeier is a dazzling stylist with a flair for creating alternate versions of familiar existence...[an] elegiac tone pervades the book, and indeed, it is the mood of much of Brockmeier's work. He is a poet of grief and longing whose precision is reminiscent of Steven Millhauser's fiction. Brockmeier resists the easy resolution of allegory, and that makes the premise of this novel successful. The Illumination is a sad and beautiful novel, well worth the heartache evoked in its pages.
Keith Donohue - Washington Post
In Brockmeier's spectacular latest, pain manifests itself as visible light after a mysterious event called "the Illumination," revealing humanity to be mortally wounded, and yet Brockmeier finds in these overlapping, storylike narratives, beauty amid the suffering. Jason Williford, a photojournalist, loses his wife in a traffic accident and fixates on a troubled teenage girl who teaches him to cultivate pain "in a dreamlike vesper." Chuck Carter, a battered and bullied neighbor boy, steals a journal of love notes from Jason's house, and later gives the journal to door-knocking evangelist Ryan Shifrin, who found his faith after watching his younger sister die from cancer. Telescoping into his decades of service to the church, Ryan wonders at the civil strife and disasters that "produce a holocaust of light." Through accounts of quotidian suffering depict humanity's quiet desperation—the agony of a severed thumb, the torture of chronic mouth ulcers—Brockmeier's careful reading of his characters' hearts and minds gives readers an inspiring take on suffering and the often fleeting nature of connection.
Publishers Weekly
In a familiar but parallel universe, the wounds, diseases, sores, and tumors of the inhabitants begin emitting light, evidently in varying colors and shades. It seems they still hurt but are now visible to others. This work covers the stories of several individuals, from a woman who stabs herself accidently to a photographer who has a car accident; a writer suffering from sores in her mouth to a young boy who is a victim of brutal abuse. Linking the tales is a book, originally compiled by the photographer, of love notes to his now deceased wife, which is passed from one character to the next and conveys a message to each according to their painful circumstances. The novel ends with a homeless man getting thoroughly beaten up by local hoods. Verdict: A capable writer, Brockmeier (The Brief History of the Dead) succeeds in describing the depressing circumstances of the characters, along with passing observations of a fragmentary and disorienting nature. Some readers may find this uplifting and inspiring, but others will feel pained by the suffering the novel seeks to illuminate. —Jim Coan, SUNY Coll. at Oneonta
Library Journal
A soft-hearted spiritual parable that aims for beguiling but succumbs to cloying. The author's first novel since The Brief History of the Dead (2006) is another vaguely futuristic fable with meditations on mortality, which explore the beauty and redemption in suffering.... More illumination than revelation.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Does your understanding of the Illumination change throughout the novel? Why or why not? What do you think it is, and what causes it?
2. Discuss the structure of The Illumination. What is the effect of dividing the book into sections? With which characters did you most identify? Why?
3. How do the epigraphs that begin each section of The Illumination evolve throughout the book? Does the change in tone of the epigraphs reflect how the characters reactions to the Illumination change? And, your own? Why or why not?
4. The Carol Ann Page section begins with an epigraph that says, in part, The light is worth the pain. How does this relate to Carol Ann Page, and to the rest of the characters in The Illumination? Do you think that the Illumination makes the pain that each person experiences more endurable? Please explain.
5. According to the narrator, The world had changed in the wake of the Illumination. No one could disguise his pain anymore [p. 33]. How does this influence Carol Ann Page s interactions with others, particularly Dr. Alstadt? What other characters interactions are affected by the presence of the Illumination?
6. How does the journal help shape your understanding of Patricia and Jason Williford as a couple? Compare and contrast their relationship with the relationship that Carol Ann Page has with her ex-husband. Why do you think that Carol Ann decides to take the journal home from the hospital with her?
7. Jason comes to regret the last note that he left for Patricia before her death, which said, I love the spaghetti patterns you leave on the wall [p. 50]. Why is he regretful? How does the meaning of this note change following her death?
8. In the aftermath of Jason s accident, his agony was nearly indistinguishable from bliss, and while he originally does not court pain, he did not shrink away from it, either [p. 48]. How and why does he begin to court pain? Does it help him deal with his grief over Patricia s death? How or how not?
9. Who are the cutters? How does Jason meet them? Why do you think that Jason feels a certain kinship with them? What does he gain from his relationship with them, particularly Melissa? Why does he let her live with him? What do you think about his decision to do so?
10. Chuck believes that his duty is to be the Superman of lifeless objects They were simple, childlike, and they could not protect themselves [p. 93]. What in particular about the journal makes Chuck think that it needs rescuing? Why does he ultimately give the journal away?
11. Why does Chuck call his father his Pretend Dad ? Discuss their relationship. How does Chuck s relationship with his father affect other aspects of his life?
12. The narrator says that Judy Shifrin was a Christian by constitution, whereas Ryan was merely a Christian by inertia [p. 133]. What does this statement mean? Does this affect Ryan s missionary work? Or, do you think, as Ryan does that evangelism was a job like so many others, where it did not matter what you believed, only what you did [p. 144]? Please elaborate.
13. After Judy dies, the narrator says And so the first part was over, and [Ryan] could begin teaching himself not to remember [p. 133]. How does Ryan deal with his grief over Judy s death? Compare and contrast Ryan s reaction to grief to that of Jason Williford. Does the Illumination help both men to cope with their losses? How?
14. Although Ryan encounters much suffering and sickness through his missionary work, he remains healthy throughout. How does this affect his faith? When Ryan fears God s love is merely decorative [p. 164], what does he mean? How does the Illumination help illustrate this fear?
15. Nina Poggione finds her pain shameful appalling. She hated to exhibit it, hated the attention it brought her [p. 183]. Yet, when John Catau asks to see her ulcer, she obliges him. Why do you think she chooses to do so? What affect does the action have on their relationship? Do you, as the reader, learn anything more about her because of this action? What?
16. Describe Nina s story A Fable for the Living. What is the effect of interspersing the story throughout the section about Nina? How does the emotional pain depicted in A Fable for the Living contrast with Nina s physical pain?
17. At a reading, Nina tells an audience member that with her first book she had seen the world as a narrative, seen human lives as narratives. Now, instead, she saw them as stories. She wasn t sure what had happened [p. 205]. What does she mean by this statement? Based on the structure of The Illumination, how do you think that Kevin Brockmeier sees the world? How do you? Why?
18. One of Nina s readers tells her you write these stories about characters who have great sectors of what one would ordinarily regard as the common human experience entirely unavailable to them they don t seem to realize it, but they do [p. 212]. Do you think the same could be said of Kevin Brockmeier s characters? Who in particular and why?
19. Who is Lee Hartz? Why do you think that the author waits until midway through Morse s section to reveal his name? Why does Lee continue to visit Morse? How does his relationship with Morse evolve? Does your impression of him change as a result? In what ways? 20. In a description of Morse, the narrator says, It was people they were the problem [p 225]. In what way are people problematic for Morse? Is his relationship with Lee Hartz different? If so, how?
21. Why is Morse unable to part with the journal? What does he learn about himself in the process?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
top of page (summary)
The New Valley
Josh Weil, 2010
Grove/Atlantic
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780802144867
Summary
The three linked novellas that comprise Josh Weil’s masterful debut bring us into America’s remote and often unforgiving backcountry, and delicately open up the private worlds of three very different men as they confront love, loss, and their own personal demons.
Set in the hardscrabble hill country between the Virginias, The New Valley is populated by characters striving to forge new lives in the absence of those they have loved. Told in three varied and distinct voices— from a soft-spoken middle-aged beef farmer struggling to hold himself together after his dad’s death; to a health-obsessed single father desperate to control his reckless, overweight daughter; to a mildly retarded man who falls in love with a married woman intent on using him in a scheme that will wound them both—each novella is a vivid, stand-alone examination of Weil’s uniquely romanticized relationships. As the men battle against grief and solitude, their heartache leads them all to commit acts that will bring both ruin and salvation.
Written with a deeply American tone, focused attention to story, and veneration for character, The New Valley is a tender exploration of survival, isolation, and the deep, consuming ache for human connection. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Virginia, USA
• Education—M.F.A., Columbia University
• Awards—Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction
from the American Academy of Arts and
Letters; New Writers Award from Great Lakes
College Assn.
• Currently—lives in Oxford, Mississippi
Josh Weil was born in the Appalachian Mountains of rural Virginia to which he returned to write the novellas in his first book, The New Valley.
A New York Times Editors Choice, The New Valley won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from The American Academy of Arts and Letters; the New Writers Award from the GLCA; a “5 Under 35” Award from the National Book Foundation; and was shortlisted for the Library of Virginia’s literary award in fiction.
Weil’s other fiction has appeared in such publications as Granta, One Story and Agni, and he has written non-fiction for The New York Times, Oxford American, and Poets & Writers. The recipient of fellowships and awards from the Fulbright Foundation, the Dana Foundation, the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, the James Merrill House, and the MacDowell Colony, he has taught at Bowling Green State University as the Distinguished Visiting Writer and been the Tickner Writer-in-Residence at Gilman School.
Currently living and teaching in Oxford, MS, as the University of Mississippi’s John & Rene Grisham Emerging Southern Writer, he is at work on a novel. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Read back to back to back, these novellas form a triptych—detailed works in their own right, they offer more than the sum of their parts when taken together. Weil meticulously imagines people and their histories, and presents them as a product of their places. This is perhaps the hardest thing for a fiction writer of any age, working in any form, to accomplish.
Anthony Doerr - New York Times
Critics claiming that American short fiction is on life-support should sample the healing elixir of Josh Weil’s breakout collection. In this mesmerizing debut, Weil offers up three razor-sharp novellas...that ring sincere and rarely hit a false note.... These are quiet stories of struggle, survival, heartbreak and grace.... Readers will find glimpses of Bobbie Ann Mason’s depictions of the small-town poor mixed with Annie Proulx’s evocative landscape language.... [Weil’s] writing is understated [and] as strong as steel.
Charleston Gazette-Mail
[Weil’s] language is exquisite, his sentences glorious. In fact, [he] writes the kinds of sentences you want to go sniff and then slosh around in your mouth for a while before heading into the next paragraph. The kind that make you set the book down and think, the kind that can break your heart with their truthful simplicity.... Refreshing and engaging.
Ploughshares
Weil's debut is a stark and haunting triptych of novellas set in the rusted-out hills straddling the border between the Virginias. In "Ridge Weather," Osby, a hardscrabble cattle rancher, finds himself lonely and isolated after his father's suicide. In the aftermath he struggles to make some sort of a personal connection in increasingly desperate attempts to be needed by someone. In "Stillman Wing," the elderly Charlie Stillman, afraid of his own mortality, tries to reinvigorate his life by stealing and reconditioning a tractor, all the while maintaining a relationship with his obese, promiscuous daughter and coming to terms with the death of his barnstormer parents. "Sarverville Remains," takes the form of a letter from Geoffrey Sarver, a mildly retarded orphan, to an incarcerated man whose wife he has fallen in love with, and takes on the elements of a well-told crime story. All three pieces, despite their somber tones, offer renewal for their protagonists. Taken individually, each novella offers its own tragic pleasures, but together, the works create a deeply human landscape that delivers great beauty.
Publishers Weekly
Set in a rural West Virginia valley, this debut novel by Fulbright winner Weil uses linked novellas to show how three loners, with the resilience to make one final connection, bring meaning to their lives. In "Ridge Weather," when Osby Caudill's father dies, Osby realizes they never were much company to each other. A local woman fails to seduce him, and having a renter doesn't work out. Only when he cures a sick steer does he connect with another creature. The title character in "Stillman Wing" is a cantankerous man whose daughter brings home lowlifes to sleep with her. Stillman derides her reckless behavior, but, afraid of losing her, acts recklessly himself by taking a moonlight swim in a toxic pond. "Sarverville Remains" is narrated by Geoff Sarver, a mentally slow man, who hangs out with younger troublemakers who go to Linda Podawalski for sex behind the local bar. Linda uses Geoff to get rid of her husband, but she also gives him the courage to strike out for land where Sarvers fled in search of a new life decades ago. Intense and satisfying; highly recommended for all public libraries. —Donna Bettencourt
Library Journal
A restive nobility binds the sorrowful protagonists of Weil’s stellar debut collection of novellas, each a tender anthem to a starkly unforgiving Virginia countryside and the misguided determination of its most forsaken residents.... Throughout, Weil limns a rugged emotional landscape every bit as raw and desolate as the land that inspired it, delivering an eloquent portrait of people who defiantly cling to a fierce independence. —Carol Haggas
Booklist
Intimacy eludes the misfits in Weil's debut, three novellas set in the backwoods of Virginia. In the slight first entry, Ridge Weather, father and son used to tend their five small herds of cattle together. Now it's all on the son, 38-year-old Osby, for his father has committed suicide. At least he still has the cows for company; his greatest fear is of a solitary entombment. Yet when a middle-aged divorcee offers herself to him, Osby bolts. It's a superficial story, leaving us wondering about the causes of the father's suicide and the son's ingrained isolation. Cause and effect are clear in the second entry, Stillman Wing. The eponymous Wing is a "fear-driven man" because while a child he witnessed the death of his parents, daredevil pilots, in a crash. Fearful of risk, Wing worked for 50 years as a mechanic for a moving-equipment company and failed to tie the knot with the carefree Ginny. His daughter Caroline (Ginny is long gone) has become the new risk-taker. She drives in demolition derbies. She binges, sending her weight to 300 pounds, and craves one-night stands. Wing loves her dearly, but his censoriousness drives her away. Now retired, Wing spends his time restoring a vintage 1928 tractor, his last love. The story is contrived and overly schematic. The third entry, Sarverville Remains, though too long and cluttered, has an undeniable power. Geoffrey Sarver is a mildly retarded gas-station attendant. After his kin, all hill people, disappeared, he was raised in foster homes (Weil captures their smothering condescension). Now 30-ish, Geoff hangs out with some high-school kids. They know a restaurant worker, Linda, who fellates them for free. In his artfully garbled voice, Geoff describes how he and Linda, trapped in a bad marriage, become friends. Their one date ends disastrously when the husband shows up. Geoff loses an eye, yet the showdown is also his long-delayed rite of passage into adulthood. Weil's empathy for his damaged people has not yet found a compatible narrative.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
“Ridge Weather”
1. The trilogy of novellas creates a saga of the land and its people. How would you describe the world that Weil creates? Are there plot links or echoes of similar themes in the three stories?
2. What are the results of a hard life in near isolation in this unyielding country? Might a closer community have created easier warmth and better dinner-table conversation? Are there any people with these gifts in the stories?
3. Formal education has certainly not been available to the characters, yet some have remarkable competency in practical matters. Examples?
4. Are there moral imperatives in the trilogy? What behavior is criticized by a narrator or other character? What do we learn about tolerance? As we read about the stubborn aged, the morbidly obese, the mentally impaired, would we do a better job of living with these people than their families do?
5. Does the author provide different versions of the truth? Is reality something to be personally reconstructed by characters as well as by the reader? Did you find that your interpretations shifted as you proceeded in a novella? Can you give examples? In “Sarverville Remains,” Geoffrey says to Brian/Waker, “You just know your half of the story. And I know the same is true for me” (p. 304).
6. What differentiates Osby from his father as recalled in these pages? For instance, “His father would have just put a bullet in it” (p. 48). Are the two men alike in any ways?
7. “Osby wasn’t considered the smartest man in Eads County” (p. 7). The kids on the school bus “looked at him the way they look at adults. That still felt odd to him” (p. 20). What has kept Osby somehow frozen in time? Have there been any women in his life? Has he ever left home? Do you think his father’s dying will liberate him? Might he begin to live in the present?
8. How does the outside world penetrate the story? Consider the “Save the Children” pamphlet. And the arrival of Jim and his dreams for the Asian crop kenaf. What is the effect of Whistler’s Meadow, the hippy commune?
9. In a story largely about loss and loneliness, why does Osby reject Jim’s friendship and nurturing? Could Jim evolve into a son figure for Osby?
10. How is Deb from the gas station brilliantly portrayed? What are some of the details that create this absolutely original woman with her sadness, generosity, and fantasies? In contrast, what are Osby’s fantasies? What could he do to earn the declaration, “I don’t know what I’d do without you” (p. 67)? Do we also think of Osby’s imagined disasters for his cows, predicaments only he could help? In difficult calving, “the irrefutable fact that a living thing would not exist if it weren’t for him” (p. 29).
11. When Osby retreats to the Old House in the snowstorm, what kind of sanctuary is he seeking? Is he given any revelation?
12. How does Osby resolve the problem of the dying steer? How are the fates of Osby, the steer, and his father intertwined? Are we looking at a shared miracle?
13. Do you see in “Ridge Weather” a hymn of praise for the land? Not only has it been home for multiple generations of Caudills, but how does it have an inestimable value of its own? Waste of land is sinful, as in the pasture land taken over by the government. The old hay bales once “had been large and round, but they’d sat there for almost three years now and had sunk in on themselves, decomposing, just mounds of rotten grass. . . . Now, what had been a smooth field of good grass was mostly scrub: junipers, cedars, broom sedge, briars that were getting worse all the time” (p. 30). Is there a note of hope at the end? What do you think Osby has learned?
“Stillman Wing”
1. How are Stillman and the Deutz linked? What propels this “mountain-raised, long-working, hard-minded, fear-driven man” (p. 87) to steal and restore the tractor? A forced retirement and shaking his fist at fate? An offering—and proving something—to Caroline? “There are days when the world outside his shop seems spinning too quickly for him to get his hands on it, and he comes in, and the Deutz is there like a bolt right through the axis of it all” (p. 117).
2. Caroline accuses her father of iron control. How does his health obsession reveal his character? His diet and exercise fetishes? Are his love and concern for his daughter heartfelt? To the point of sprinkling seaweed on her cereal and delivering it to her in the bath? Do you think it is old age and diminishing blood flow that accentuate his need to control?
3. In this land of elemental struggle, some events recall biblical catastrophes. One thinks of the mysterious slaughter of all the Demastus cattle (pp. 94-95). Recall the grackles smothering the trees “like some biblical plague” (p. 105). Does Caroline, bent on self-destruction, create her own Sodom and Gomorrah? Might she herself call it survival? And self-medication? Does her total lack of discipline reflect a perversion of Stillman’s “carefulness”?
4. “Risks?...What would you know about risks, Dad? You’ve never took a risk in your life” (p. 115). (Can this still be said at the end of the story?) What might have made Stillman such a careful man? What does he recall of his parents? (Who besides them has abandoned him?) When told the story of her grandparents’ death, Caroline, age six, said, “You don’t look sad…you look angry” (p. 130). Even in old age, Stillman is haunted. The plane circling his workshop, real or hallucination? “Something in him iced over. He could feel it spread like frost dusting his bones” (p. 122). As he then tries to remember…and to feel…he goes to the cemetery. Are we reminded of several characters in King Lear? Of “unaccommodated man”? “Turning the basin upside down, he held it over his head and got out. The rain beat above him. It was cold on his fingers. He splashed around the car, crouched beside the fence, scrunched his eyes at the chiseled stones. He tried to summon some kind of sadness” (p. 131). Later, thinking of his “one-time nearly wife…the anger, and fear, and regret boil to the surface like pot scum…Outside the snow covers everything in quiet. He will sleep. He will rejuvenate and heal and sleep” (p. 139). It is a stunning picture of old age and despair. In King Lear, how does Cordelia’s standing up to her tyrannical father (and later reconciling) compare to Caroline’s role? What other characters in novels or myth does Stillman make you think of, characters at the very verge of chasm or apocalypse?
5. How does the past become present in “Stillman Wing”? Think of the pond at the commune. And the “rusted hulk of a B-26” (p. 164). The ringing of Old Les Pfersick’s bell. Other instances? Ginny’s pregnancy?
6. What are some of the surprising acts of generosity in the story? Do you recall the surprise posthumous gifts of old Pfersick? And that of the Booe child?
7. How do you understand the end of the novella? “... he felt ready, unafraid, even eager to see at last what a new valley might look like..." (p. 187). After a heroic journey, has Stillman achieved his quest?
8. What do the time warps mean in the story? At one moment Stillman is waiting for Caroline to pick up the phone at the commune. The next ring he hears is from a California orphanage, an event of forty-one years ago (p. 154). And there is the phantom plane. Other examples? Are these signs of deterioration and mental disorder? Or are they times when Stillman is trying to integrate disparate, jarring events in his life?
9. “These were a strange people who lived down there, a people not of this land, not of this valley. This valley was a place of homes scattered far from homes, and meant to be that way, of lives built around cattle more than conversation, timed to rhythms of the crops, not the need to keep pace with other people’s heartbeats. This was a place where people knew how to keep apart” (p. 162). In vivid contrast, how does the commune serve as both refuge for the living and the dying? What are the ironic links between pollution and healing, or at least comforting?
"Sarverville Remains”
1. What is Geoffrey’s motive for writing? Is he seeking some unity with Linda’s husband? Is it expiation he’s after? Does the second-person narrative pull in the reader effectively? Is Waker the only (captive) audience Geoffrey could hope for?
2. Talk about Linda and Geoffrey’s relationship. “You aren’t like anybody else, she said” (p. 276). Does the man-boy give her some self-respect? And on Geoffrey’s side, he says, “She’s the first who ever made me feel full growed” (p. 219).
3. In the coon episode, what propels Geoffrey to commit this neighborhood chaos and carnage? At the point of Roy’s gun and rage, how does Geoffrey perform a Herculean labor, like cleaning out the Augean stables?
4. What do we learn about Roy at the dump? His nostalgic dreams of childhood? His capacity for “magical” moments (p. 260)? Comment on his question to Geoffrey: “You ever hear the one about the guy that brings his retarded buddy on a hunting trip?” (p. 262).
5. “Most like you think there ain’t no Sarverville at all” (p. 263). Talk about the range of views of the Sarvers, before and after their fifty years out in the wilderness on their own. An Eden? Is it a deliberate rejection of conventional behavior that actually seems to work? Ma B says “all of them diminished…but they was diminished only in the narrow sight of them who was so alike they could be swapped from wife to husband or job to job and wouldn’t nobody know the difference” (p. 292). What were the special gifts of the Sarvers?
6. “It was Ma B teached me how to give good hugs” (p. 281).What else has she given Geoffrey? Is it possible that living with her and her brood was the last time he felt normal? “They was all diminished” (p. 288). How does her insisting on “yes Ma’am” relate to her advice about how he should treat Linda?
7. If we read “Sarverville Remains” as a fable, does it make you think about other stories about “diminished people”? I.B. Singer’s Gimpel the Fool? The film King of Hearts? Others? What truths of the heart are the writers trying to alert us to?
8. Is the story set up, with all its time shifts and misperceptions, to make the reader share Geoffrey’s confusion about Brian and Waker? Do we begin to question individual perspectives and their limitations?
9. What is Jackie’s idea of a good life for Geoffrey? “You remember how it was. Things was good. You got a good job. People like you. Like to watch you wave and wave back . . . It’s the way it’s meant to be” (p. 310). But Roy says “. . . just let him be . . . alive” (p. 310). What do these attitudes reveal about Jackie and Roy? And expectations for people who are different?
10. “I wanted to do it right,” I said. “I wanted to have it out like growed men.” But Linda says, “Grown men don’t do it like that, Geoffrey” (p. 335). What is it to be a grown man in this story? Do we see any? “Why did He let her break them rules and kiss me like I was a full adult?” (p. 336)
11. Are the land and his heritage to be Geoffrey’s salvation? Has he made the right decision? Do you think he will continue to write?
(Questions developed by Barbara Putnam and are found on the author's website.)
top of page (summary)
Skellig
David Almond, 1998
Random House Children's
192 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780440416029
Summary
Young readers will by enchanted by this magical tale of friendship and family: Michael was looking forward to his new house and neighborhood, until his infant sister became very ill. Now his parents are constantly frantic, the scary doctor is always coming around, and Michael feels helpless.
When he goes out into the old rickety garage, he comes across a mysterious being living beneath spider webs and eating flies for dinner. This creature calls himself Skellig, and over the weeks Michael and his new friend Mina bring Skellig out in to the light, and their worlds change forever. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 15, 1951
• Where—Felling and Newcastle, England, UK
• Education—University of East Anglia, England
• Awards—2 Whitbread Awards; Carnegie Medal, 2 Michael L.
Printz Awards
• Currently—lives in Northumberland, England
In his own words:
I grew up in a big extended Catholic family [in the north of England]. I listened to the stories and songs at family parties. I listened to the gossip that filled Dragone’s coffee shop.
I ran with my friends through the open spaces and the narrow lanes. We scared each other with ghost stories told in fragile tents on dark nights. We promised never-ending friendship and whispered of the amazing journeys we’d take together.
I sat with my grandfather in his allotment, held tiny Easter chicks in my hands while he smoked his pipe and the factory sirens wailed and larks yelled high above. I trembled at the images presented to us in church, at the awful threats and glorious promises made by black-clad priests with Irish voices. I scribbled stories and stitched them into little books. I disliked school and loved the library, a little square building in which I dreamed that books with my name on them would stand one day on the shelves.
Skellig, my first children’s novel, came out of the blue, as if it had been waiting a long time to be told. It seemed to write itself. It took six months, was rapidly taken by Hodder Children’s Books and has changed my life. By the time Skellig came out, I’d written my next children’s novel, Kit’s Wilderness. These books are suffused with the landscape and spirit of my own childhood. By looking back into the past, by re-imagining it and blending it with what I see around me now, I found a way to move forward and to become something that I am intensely happy to be: a writer for children.”
David Almond is the winner of the 2001 Michael L. Printz Award for Kit’s Wilderness, which has also been named best book of the year by School Library Journal, Booklist, and Publishers Weekly. He has been called "the foremost practitioner in children's literature of magical realism." (Booklist) His first book for young readers, Skellig, is a Printz Honor winner. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Skellig is the first mainstream Gothic novel for kids to deal unblinkingly with the genre's big time themes, including the fragility of life and redemptive power of love.
USA Today
British novelist Almond makes a triumphant debut in the field of children's literature with prose that is at once eerie, magical and poignant. Broken down into 46 succinct, eloquent chapters, the story begins in medias res with narrator Michael recounting his discovery of a mysterious stranger living in an old shed on the rundown property the boy's family has just purchased: "He was lying there in the darkness behind the tea chests, in the dust and dirt. It was as if he'd been there forever.... I'd soon begin to see the truth about him, that there'd never been another creature like him in the world." With that first description of Skellig, the author creates a tantalizing tension between the dank and dusty here-and-now and an aura of other-worldliness that permeates the rest of the novel. The magnetism of Skellig's ethereal world grows markedly stronger when Michael, brushing his hand across Skellig's back, detects what appears to be a pair of wings. Soon after Michael's discovery in the shed, he meets his new neighbor, Mina, a home-schooled girl with a passion for William Blake's poetry and an imagination as large as her vast knowledge of birds. Unable to take his mind off Skellig, Michael is temporarily distracted from other pressing concerns about his new surroundings, his gravely ill baby sister and his parents. Determined to nurse Skellig back to health, Michael enlists Mina's help. Besides providing Skellig with more comfortable accommodations and nourishing food, the two children offer him companionship. In response, Skellig undergoes a remarkable metamorphosis that profoundly affects the narrator's (and audience members') first impression of the curious creature, and opens the way to an examination of the subtle line between life and death. The author adroitly interconnects the threads of the story—Michael's difficult adjustment to a new neighborhood, his growing friendship with Mina, the baby's decline—to Skellig, whose history and reason for being are open to readers' interpretations. Although some foreshadowing suggests that Skellig has been sent to Earth on a grim mission, the dark, almost gothic tone of the story brightens dramatically as Michael's loving, life-affirming spirit begins to work miracles.
Publishers Weekly
Exploring a tbumbling-down shed on the property his family has just bought, Michael finds Skellig, an ailing, mysterious being who is suffering from arthritis, but who still relishes Chinese food and brown ale. Michael also meets his neighbor Mina, a homeschooled girl. When she's not trying to open his eyes and ears to the world around him, she is spouting William Blake. As Michael begins nursing Skellig back to health, he realizes that there is something odd about his shoulders. Together, he and Mina move Skellig to a safe place, release the wings they find on his back from his jacket, and look after him until he eventually moves on. Throughout the story, readers share Michael's overriding concern for his infant sister, who is gravely ill. In the end, little Joy comes home from the hospital safe and happy and Michael's life has been greatly enriched by his experiences with her, Skellig, and Mina. The plot is beautifully paced and the characters are drawn with a graceful, careful hand. Mina, for all her smugness, is charmingly wide-eyed over Skellig. Michael is a bruising soccer player but displays a tenderness that is quite touching and very refreshing. Even minor characters are well defined. The plot pivots on the question of what Skellig is. It is a question that will keep readers moving through the book, trying to make sense of the cleverly doled out clues. The beauty here is that there is no answer and readers will be left to wonder and debate, and make up their own minds. A lovingly done, thought-provoking novel. —Patricia A. Dollisch, DeKalb County Public Library, Decatur, GA
School Library Journal
(Junior high.) Mina and Michael have seen Skellig together, a strange creature who lives in Michael's old garage, eating Chinese take-out and owl pellets. One magical time the three joined hands and danced in a circle, and the children grew wings from their shoulder blades and learned what it means to fly. In the midst of these wondrous things, Michael is trying to understand why his tiny baby sister is so fragile, and he worries that she will die. He and his father are trying to take care of each other while the mother is staying at the hospital with the baby. Michael's concerns for his little sister have taken him to some edge of awareness where he is able to see Skellig.... Skellig is a strange book, certainly a memorable one. It isn't the usual fantasy, rather there is something about it that makes the reader feel if he or she just looked a bit harder and listened more carefully, many wondrous creatures would be there to find... Almond, who is British, has written for adults, but this is his first world for children. (Editor's note: Skellig is the winner of England's Carnegie Medal; it is a Horn Book Fanfare Book and an ALA Notable Children's Book.)
KLIATT
Almond pens a powerful, atmospheric story: A pall of anxiety hangs over Michael (and his parents) as his prematurely born baby sister fights for her life. The routines of school provide some relief, when Michael can bear to go. His discovery, in a ramshackle outbuilding, of Skellig, a decrepit creature somewhere between an angel and an owl, provides both distraction and rejuvenation; he and strong-minded, homeschooled neighbor Mina nurse Skellig back to health with cod liver pills and selections from a Chinese take-out menu. While delineating characters with brilliant economy-Skellig's habit of laughing without smiling captures his dour personality perfectly-Almond adds resonance to the plot with small parallel subplots and enhances his sometimes transcendent prose ("'Your sister's got a heart of fire,'" comments a nurse after the baby survives a risky operation) with the poetry of and anecdotes about William Blake. The author creates a mysterious link between Skellig and the infant, then ends with proper symmetry, sending the former, restored, winging away as the latter comes home from the hospital. As in Berlie Doherty's Snake-Stone (1996) or many of Janet Taylor Lisle's novels, the marvelous and the everyday mix in haunting, memorable ways.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Michael is very unhappy at the beginning of the novel. Discuss how Michael's life changes after he discovers Skellig and meets Mina. Think about ways that you deal with fear and loneliness. How can you help a friend who appears unhappy?
2. Almond never gives the reader a specific description of Skellig. Based on the glimpses of Skellig found throughout the novel, what is your impression of Skellig? How might Michael describe Skellig at the end of the novel?
3. Michael brushes his hands against Skellig's back and detects what appear to be wings. When he asks his mother about shoulder blades, she answers, "They say that shoulder blades are where your wings were when you were an angel...where your wings will grow again one day." What does this statement reveal about Skellig?
4. When Michael questions why Skellig eats living things and makes pellets like an owl, Mina answers, "We can't know. Sometimes we just have to accept that there are things we can't know." Why is this an important moment in the novel?
5. When Michael's soccer teammates discover his friendship with Mina, they begin teasing him. How does this affect Michael's relationship with them? Why do you think they make fun of Mina? How does she handle the teasing? How would you handle the situation if your classmates made fun of a special friend?
6. Discuss Michael's relationship with his mother and father. How does the baby's illness put a strain on these relationships? How is Michael's relationship with his parents different from Mina's relationship with her mother?
7. At the same time that his sister is undergoing heart surgery, Michael discovers that Skellig is gone. Mina calms Michael by quoting William Blake: "[Blake] said the soul was able to leap out of the body for a while and then leap back again. He said it could be caused by great fear or enormous pain. Sometimes it was because of too much joy. It was possible to be overwhelmed by the presence of so much beauty in the world." Why do you think Mina quoted this passage to Michael? How are fear and pain related? How are joy and beauty related? How does Skellig represent all these qualities?
8. What does the nurse mean when she describes Michael's baby sister as having a "heart of fire"? Why does Michael want to name the baby Persephone? Why is Joy an appropriate name for her? What other names might symbolize her journey and her place in the world?
9. Skellig returns for one last visit with Michael and Mina. What do you think is Skellig's purpose for entering Michael's life? How does he touch other lives? Do you think he'll ever return?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
top of page
Swindle
Gordon Korman, 2008
Scholastic, Inc.
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780439903455
Summary
After a mean collector named Swindle cons him out of his most valuable baseball card, Griffin Bing must put together a band of misfits to break into Swindle's compound and recapture the card. There are many things standing in their way—a menacing guard dog, a high-tech security system, a very secret hiding place, and their inability to drive—but Griffin and his team are going to get back what's rightfully his...even if hijinks ensue.
This is Gordon Korman at his crowd-pleasing best, perfect for readers who like to hoot, howl, and heist. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—November 23, 1963
• Where—Montreal, Canada
• Education— New York University
• Currently—lives in Great Neck (Long Island), New York, USA
Gordon Korman was born in Montreal, Canada, and grew up in the Toronto area. Since he had no brothers, sisters, or pets, he started writing to keep himself entertained. Then his 7th-grade English teacher gave the class an exciting assignment: "He gave us four months—45 minutes a day!—to work on the story of our choice. My project was This Can't Be Happening at Macdonald Hall, which became my first published book. I happened to be the class monitor for the Scholastic TAB Book Club, so I figured I was practically a Scholastic employee already! I sent my novel to the address on the TAB flyer, and a few days after my 14th birthday, I had a book contract with Scholastic."
By the time Korman graduated from high school, he had published five other novels and several articles for Canadian newspapers. He then moved to New York City, where he studied film and dramatic writing at New York University.
Known for his funny, realistic novels for children and young adults, Korman has also collaborated with his mother on two books of poetry written by the fictional character Jeremy Bloom. Never short for ideas, Korman is grateful to the real kids he meets for inspiration: "The best place to get ideas is at the schools I visit. No matter how inventive we writers try to be, the real characters are always the best ones."
Gordon Korman lives in Great Neck, New York, with his wife and son. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
This novel by the very popular author contains all of the perfect elements of a story for middle school readers, including suspense, fully-developed characters, relevant plot, humor, and a surprise ending that is difficult to predict. The main character, Griffin Bing is the boy who always has a plan. He is also a 6th grade student who is known for his sometimes outrageous actions. One of his recent ideas is to have a sleepover in a condemned local "haunted house." While scoping out the house, Griffin discovers a very rare George Herman Ruth baseball card. This card is the key to his Griffin's new plan to save his family from their financial problems. He sells his card to a dealer for $120. Later, he discovers that he has been swindled. The dealer sold the rare card for $200,000. Griffin knows he needs a new plan. He enlists the help of his friend in his mission to get his card back. His plan is not perfect, and he and his team soon realize they must outwit a guard dog, a security system, and a secret hiding place. One more problem stands in his way: No one can drive. Readers will enjoy the page-turning adventure, the quirky characters and the revenge factor. This book is destined to become a favorite read-aloud for librarians and classroom teachers. It is a must-have for middle school libraries. —Sue Reichard
Children's Literature
(Gr 3-7) When Griffin Bing and his pal Ben discover an old Babe Ruth baseball card in a home about to be demolished, Griffin—aware that his dad's lack of success as an inventor is causing increasing stress at home—dreams of selling it for thousands and using his share to keep the family financially afloat. The boys are somewhat deflated when they present the card to collectibles dealer S. Wendell Palomino and he suggests that it is a reproduction and buys it for just $120. They soon discover that the sleazy dealer plans to auction off the card, which is actually an extremely rare misprint, and that it is expected to sell for well over a million dollars. Outraged at having been taken advantage of, Griffin plans to steal the valuable card back from Palomino—or "Swindle," as he now calls him—but doing so is no mean feat. Among the obstacles the boys face are a large fence, a high-tech security system, and a ferocious guard dog. Clearly, special skills are needed, so they recruit a ragtag crew of oddball accomplices including an expert climber, an electronics whiz, an aspiring actor, and an animal lover who claims to be able to put even the most hardened, snarling canines in touch with their cuddly inner puppies. This kids-versus-adults-themed story is pure plot-driven fun from top to bottom. If you read it aloud, don't be surprised when your listeners beg you for "just one more chapter." —Jeffrey Hastings, Highlander Way Middle School, Howell, MI
School Library Journal
Eleven-year-old Griffin Bing enlists sixth grade friends who have computer, climbing, acting, animal handling, and swindling skills to retrieve a possible million-dollar Babe Ruth baseball card from a shop owner who scammed it from Griffin for only $125. Griffin hopes that selling the card will solve his parents' financial problems brought on by his father quitting his engineering job to focus on his invention, the SmartPick, which picks fruit without bruising it. The crew sends the shop owner tickets to a hockey game and break into his house while he is gone. With the help of the SmartPick, they overcome hostile guard dogs, security systems, neighbor surveillance, and betrayal to secure the card, but Griffin must return it to its rightful owner. Eventually the card funds the building of a town museum that includes a skate park, which is dedicated to Griffin and his team, and the caper brings attention and investors to the SmartPick so that Griffin's family is financially secure. Korman's fast moving, feel-good suspense novel will have middle schoolers, especially boys, turning the pages. Griffin, "The Man With a Plan," is resourceful but believable and likeable. He needs his friends, learns from them, and makes some poor choices for good causes. He out thinks the bad guys, supports his father (the good guy), and commits a crime with which even the police sympathize. The dog cover, large print, and ample white space make it reluctant reader material. —Lucy Schall
VOYA
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Swindle:
1. How would you describe Griffin Bin, "The Man With the Plan"? Do admire him? Is he the kind of person you would like as a friend?
2. What about Ben? What kind of friend is he? Why does he worry about trying to get the baseball card back.
3. What do you think about Griffin's advice for getting around adult rules—suggestions like how to sneak out of the house or "always maintain eye contact" when lying to your parents? Good advice...or not so good?
4. Why does Griffin organize the sleep over in the Old Rockford House?
5. Because Griffin was the one to find the baseball card, does that mean he owns it? What does Ben think?
6. Griffin intends to retrieve the card from Palomino and use the money to help his parents. Do the ends justify his means? Is he right to steal the card—in fact, is it stealing? Is there another way for Griffin to get the card back?
7. How does Griffin plan to get the baseball card back from Swindle? What are the problems he faces...and how does he attempt to solve them? Talk about Griffin's "team" and their special skills.
8. Did you enjoy this book—did you find it an exciting story? Are you happy with the way the book ended? What would you like to have seen happen to Swindle?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
top of page
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
Kate Douglas Wiggin, 1903
~240 pp. (Varies by publisher.)
Summary
In this 1903 children's classic, 10-year-old Rebecca, energetic, high-spirited, and full of mischief, goes to live with her spinster aunts, one harsh and demanding, the other soft and sentimental, and spends seven difficult but rewarding years growing up in their company.
The two aunts who are raising her on a Maine farm try to turn her into a proper young lady—which eventually happens. Adults enjoy the book as well, especially the vivid glimpses of turn-of-the-century New England and its virtues. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—September 28, 1856
• Where—Philadelphia, Pennnsylvania, USA
• Death—August 24, 1923
• Where—Harrow, Middlesex, England, UK
• Education—Gorham Female Seminary; Morrison Academy
(Baltimore, Maryland)
Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin, born in 1856 in Philadelphia, was of Welsh descent. A 1873 graduate of Abbot Academy (New England's first girls' school founded in 1929), she started the first free kindergarten in San Francisco in 1878 (the Silver Street Free Kindergarten). With her sister in the 1880s she also established a training school for kindergarten teachers.
Kate Wiggin devoted her entire adult life to the welfare of children in an era when children were commonly thought of as cheap labour. Kate herself experienced a happy childhood, even though it was colored by the American Civil War and her father's death. Kate and her sister Nora were still quite young when their widowed moved her little family from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Portland, Maine. Then three years later, upon her mother's remarriage, to the little village of Hollis. There Kate grew up in rural surroundings, with her sister and her new baby brother, Philip.
Her education was spotty, consisting of a short stint at a "dame's school," some home schooling under the "capable, slightly impatient, somewhat sporadic" instruction of Albion Brabury (her step father), a brief spell at the district school, a year as a boarder at the Gorham Female Seminary, a winter term at Morison Academy in Baltimore, Maryland, and a few months' stay at Abbott Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Although rather by-the-way, this was more education than most women received at the time.
In 1873, hoping to ease Albion Bradbury's lung disease, Kate's family moved to Santa Barbara, California, where Kate's stepfather died three years later. The circumstance of this move put Kate at the forefront of the kindergarten movement in America. A kindergarten training class was opening in Los Angeles, and Kate enrolled. After graduation, in 1878, she headed the first free kindergarten in California, on Silver Street, in the slums of San Francisco. The children were "street Arabs of the wildest type," but they were no match for Kate's warm personality and dramatic flair.
By 1880 she was forming a teacher-training school in conjunction with the Silver Street kindergarten. However, according to the customs of the time, when Kate married Bradley Wiggin in 1881, she was required to give up her teaching job.
Still devoted to her school, she began to raise money for it through writing, first The Story of Patsy (1883), then The Birds's Christmas Carol (1887). Both privately printed books were issued commercially by Houghtom Mifflin in 1889, with enormous success.
Ironically, considering her intense love of children, Kate Wiggin had none. Her husband died suddenly in 1889, and Kate took her grief home to Maine. For the rest of her life she struggled with depression, and in order to combat it she travelled as frequently as she could, dividing her time between writing, trips to Europe, and giving public reading for the benefit of various children's charities. Her literary output included popular books for adults, scholarly work on the educational principles of Friedrich Froebel, and of course the classic children's novel Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903).
In 1895 Kate Wiggin married a New York City business-man, George Christopher Riggs, who became her staunch supporter as her success grew. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm became an immediate bestseller; both it and Mother Carey's Chickens (1911) were adapted to the stage. Houghton Mifflin collected her writings in ten volumes in 1917.
For a time, she lived at Quillcote, her summer home in Hollis, Maine. Quillcote is now the town's library. Wiggin founded the Dorcas Society of Hollis & Buxton, Maine in 1897. The Tory Hill Meeting House in the adjacent town of Buxton inspired her book (and later play), The Old Peabody Pew (1907).
In 1921, Wiggin and her sister Nora Archibald Smith edited an edition of Jane Porter's 1809 novel of William Wallace, The Scottish Chiefs, for the Scribner's Illustrated Classics series, which was illustrated by N. C. Wyeth (father of Andrew)..
In the spring of 1923 Kate Wiggin travelled to England as a New York delegate to the Dickens Fellowship. There she became ill and died, at age 66, of bronchial pneumonia. At her request, her ashes were brought home to Maine and scattered over to the Saco River. Her autobiography, My Garden of Memory, was published after her death.
Kate was also a composer of music, including "Nine Love Songs and a Carol" (1896) for voice and piano. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Beautiful, warm and satisfying.
Mark Twain
May I thank you for Rebecca?... I would have quested the wide world over to make her mine, only I was born too long ago and she was born but yesterday.... Why could she not have been my daughter? Why couldn't it have been I who bought the three hundred cakes of soap? Why, O, why?
Jack London (letter to Wiggin, 1904)
Another title celebrating a century marker, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin...reveals a lively, generous spirit in the heroine who leaves her home to live with her two elderly aunts.
Publishers Weekly
Rebecca is an unforgettable character. Rebecca is someone you want to get to know, and hate to leave at the end of the book. Young girls will enjoy reading about her adventures as well as her humorous and extroverted personality. This story is 100 years old, but readers can still connect to it today. Her story is set in the late 1800's. Rebecca leaves her home at Sunnybrook farm to live with her two older aunts. Although it is difficult at times, Rebecca tries desperately to fit in at the brick house. This story tells of her efforts.
Louise Parsons - Children's Literature
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm:
1. Why is it necessary for Rebecca to leave her family and live with her aunts in Riverboro? Why had the aunts hoped that Hannah, Rebecca's older sister, would be sent instead of her—but why wasn't Hannah sent?
2. Difficult as it would have been, splitting up families was not uncommon, at any time or place in history. What would it feel like as a child to be torn from your roots and the closeness of family love? How did Rebecca accept her lot?
3. Talk about the aunts, Jane and Miranda Sawyer. They are sisters, but as seemingly different as night and day. How does each treat Rebecca? What are their expectations and hopes for her? Are Miranda's expectations fair? Miranda considers Rebecca "All Randall and no Sawyer"—what she mean? What is Rebecca's relationship to each aunt and does her relationship change?
4. Much of Rebecca's charm as a heroine comes from the fact that she isn't perfect. What are some of the mistakes she makes? How does Rebecca respond to Aunt Miranda's scoldings? Does she give reasons or excuses? Does any of it sound familiar to you—if you are a young person who has been scolded by your parents...or a parent holding your children responsible for their actions.
4. What does the soap-selling episode say about Rebecca and Emma Jane Perkins and the kind of girls they are? Are the two girls different from young people today? Consider, too, Rebecca's anger when Minnie Smellie taunts the Simpson children?
5. What are the character traits that enable Rebecca to win the respect of her teachers and schoolmates. In what way does Rebecca become a leader?
6. How does Rebecca change over the course of the novel? Living with her aunts was to be "the making of her." What does this mean, and does she achieve the goal?
7. How important is education in this book and why? Compare it to the emphasis on learning today? Do we take school as seriously—we all say we do, but do we ? What things detract from—or enhance—today's education?
8. Are you satisfied with how Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm ends? What do you like—or dislike—about the ending?
(Questions by LitLovers, Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
top of page