Reading Journal April 27, 2011

It’s really hard to keep up with all my reading—I’ve been reading a lot, mostly picture books and poetry for kids. I had 26 books checked out, but then I had to return them, having renewed them all twice, without really reading them as thoroughly as I had hoped. I have the printouts from the checkout machine, so I can track them down again. Meanwhile, this is what I’ve read most recently:

Sahara Special

By Esme Raji Codell

Hyperion Books For Children, New York, 2003

Middle grade novel, 175 pages, no illustrations

Sahara Special is the story of a girl who has to repeat 5^th grade. She writes in her journal that she wants to be a writer and her teacher, new to the school, writes, “I believe you.”

I love this book. I have read it 3 times. I study it to see how Esme has developed the characters—there is no “information dump”, as Arthur Levine called it at the recent SCBWI-IL Spring Thaw. We jump right into the story and into the problem of the story (Sahara misses her father, who abandoned her and her mother) and we are drawn to Sahara immediately by her unique and compelling voice.

Sahara is called “Sahara Special” because she was required to sit in the hall with the special needs teacher the year she failed fifth grade. The way the story is told, we, the readers, know something that the other characters do not. We share the secret with Sahara, that she is really smart and articulate, which we know through her first-person narration of the story. Her descriptions and ability to draw characters, and ultimately her essay about her name reveal her to be a gifted writer. But she hides this from all her teachers and classmates. It is only Miss Pointy, the new fifth grade teacher, who does not know Sahara’s history, who makes up her mind for herself, who suspects that there are sides to Sahara which have not been revealed.

This is a warm and unsentimental school story. I loved the setting—an urban school--, Sahara’s classmates, her teachers, and her mother. And I was rooting for Sahara all the way through. Even though I have never flunked a grade and my father never left us, I felt Sahara’s emotions and I identified strongly with her at every turn. It did not hurt that I, too, wanted to become a writer. This book is worthy of a Newbery.

Reading Journal March 30, 2011

Grandma’s Gift

Written and illustrated by Eric Velasquez

Walker & Company, New York, 2010

ALA recommendation/award

A very personal narrative about the author’s boyhood memory of spending Christmas vacation at his grandmother’s apartment in El Barrio. This particular Christmas vacation was spent shopping at La Marqueta for the ingredients for Grandmother’s special holiday pasteles and visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see the newly purchased painting by Diego Valazquez of Juan de Pareja.

There is a very subtle story line in which the grandmother is totally comfortable in El Barrio, where she knows almost everyone by name. When she takes the author to visit the museum she feels like a fish out of water. She is uncomfortable with the language and there are no familiar faces—until she sees the portrait of Juan de Pareja. She recognizes him from her own school days and speaks to the painting by name.

The story concludes with Grandmother presenting the author with his first set of colored pencils and a sketchbook of his very own for Christmas.

In an afterward the author asserts that seeing the painting of Juan de Pareja, who was a freed slave of African descent, and who became a famous painter in his own right, inspired him to become as artist. It was the first time he had seen a picture of an artist who looked like he could have come from El Barrio.

Boogie Knights

Words by Lisa Wheeler

Pictures by Mark Siegel

A Richard Jackson Book

Atheneum Books for Young Readers

2008

397 words

Great language, lots of fun word-play, strong steady meter, and fun, playful illustrations make this a great read-aloud, esp. at Halloween.

No traditional story-line or problem—7 sleeping knights wake up one by one and join in the monster’s ball. When night is done they go back to sleep and dream of next year’s ball.

I’m guessing that she was inspired by the title Boogie Knights—(from the movie Boogie Nights) and started to wonder who these knights would be.