Reading Without Walls

Midnight Without a Moon
by Linda Williams Jackson
HMH Books for Young Readers, 2017
review copy provided by the publisher

This was a Gene Yang "Reading Without Walls" book for me. It's a Civil Rights story, but not "just another Civil Rights story." What makes it different is the point of view in the story and the authenticity of the author.

The story is set in rural Mississippi, where a black family and community process the push for voting rights, integrated schools, and Emmett Till's death. What seems obvious and easy from the outside (who wouldn't want the opportunity to vote?) was complicated in ways a white or a northerner couldn't imagine. There is pushback about change from the older members of the community, and intra-racial racism based on the lightness or darkness of skin.

The author was born and still lives in the Mississippi Delta. She gets the characters, setting and language right in a way no one else could.

I've tagged this book YA for language and violence. I think pairing it with The Hate U Give would provide an amazing experience for readers to understand the historical context for the modern story, and would prompt rich conversations between teens of all races. Like The Hate U Give, this is a debut novel.

I was thrilled to see that Midnight Without a Moon is book one in a series! Book two comes out in January of 2018.

A Sky Full of Stars
by Linda Williams Jackson
HMH Books for Young Readers, January, 2018

Stray Dogs Who Save Lives

First there was Because of Winn Dixie by Kate DiCamillo. This scruffy dog who smiles shows up in India Opal's life and helps her to make friends and learn to navigate through a life without a mother.

Then last summer, there was Wish by Barbara O'Connor. Wishbone the stray and Howard the surprising neighbor help Charlie deal with her challenging family while she works on making her wish come true.

Last month, when I read Full of Beans by Jennifer Holm, I realized there was a text set coming together -- here's another book with a stray dog in it! Beans saves Termite's life.

The very next book I read after Full of Beans was Liberty, the third (and best, in my opinion) book in Kirby Larson's Dogs of War series. Here we have yet another stray dog who gives the main character purpose and direction. Set in the 1940's in New Orleans, Fish is a white boy with polio who lives with his older sister while his father is away fighting in Europe. His friendship with his neighbor Olympia crosses racial lines and they are unified by their plans to save Liberty. There's even a subplot with a German prisoner of war.


Besides having stray dogs in common, each of these books has a strong sense of place and time, and I just realized as I'm typing this that they are all set in the South!

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

Join the It's Monday! What Are You Reading party at Teach Mentor Texts and Unleashing Readers!

I read two great middle grade novels this week. Both were novels in verse.  These seem to get me out of whatever reading rut I am in and these two were definitely fabulous choices. I would highly recommend both of them for upper elementary and middle school students.

Garvey's Choice by Nikki Grimes

Unbound by Ann E. Burg

SaveSave

Summer Reading at its Best

Wolf Hollow

by Lauren Wolk

Dutton Children's Books, 2016

I almost couldn't read this book. The tension and conflict from the very beginning nearly did me in. But the language and the characters kept me going. I was not at all surprised to find that Lauren Wolk is a poet.

Maybe this could be a read aloud in 5th grade. It's a hard story, but the stories on the news aren't much better. Perhaps it would give us a safe way to talk about the wolves out there, about honesty, about the choices we make, about how we can't control what happens...but we can try.

Whew. Just thankful that it's summer and I could curl up on the couch for four hours straight and read this all in one gulp. I feel like going right back and rereading it for the beautiful language.

Poetry Friday: To Stay Alive

I mentioned in Wednesday's post (about my next-in-the-graphic-novel-series TBR pile) that I love Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales, and this one in particular. From my Goodreads review: "The Donner Party story is filled with idiots who make stupid decisions for all the reasons stupid decisions get made: pride, greed, stubbornness...Here's some history we FOR SURE don't want to repeat!!"

Donner Dinner Party 

by Nathan Hale

Harry N. Abrams, 2014

To Stay Alive

by Skila Brown

Candlewick, October 2016

Even though I knew the train-wreck of a story line, I was excited to read this novel in verse about the Donners, and excited for another book from Skila Brown, author of Caminar. The story is told from the point of view of 19 year-old survivor Mary Ann Graves. Each poem has its own unique structure, which gives the book a satisfying breadth and depth, and which contributes to the pacing of the story. Because of the first person point of view and the emotional quality of the poems, this is a most human telling of this story -- yes, they were stupid; yes, mistakes were made. But in the end, they were humans who did what they needed to do to survive.

Julie has this week's Poetry Friday roundup at The Drift Record.

Ranger in Time by Kate Messner

Ranger in Time #1: Rescue on the Oregon Trail
by Kate Messner
Scholastic, January 2015
ARC received from the publisher

This is going to be a great series for grades 2-5!

Ranger is a golden retriever who failed search and rescue school because he can't stop chasing squirrels. He also love to dig, and one day, he finds a old first aid kit while he's digging in his back yard. When he slips the strap over his head, he is transported in time to 1850. He uses his search and rescue skills several times along the Oregon Trail to help Sam Abbott and his family.

After the story, Messner has included a very readable 10-page author's note about the time period and her writing process.

Next up in the series, Ranger travels in time to Ancient Rome!

History in Graphic Novel Format

Now that I've started thinking about creative "right brain" ways to expand and enrich the ways I am (and my students will be) responding to informational texts (common craft videos, illustrated note-taking), new possibilities keep cropping up everywhere I look:

Why not take a page of text and do an erasure poem with it? Or, as Austin Kleon calls them, a newspaper blackout poem?

How about a ThingLink?

And maybe you could take a complicated historical event, like the Boxer Rebellion in China, and make it a two-part graphic novel that explores both sides of the story.

Boxers & Saints Boxed Set
by Gene Luen Yang, First Second, September, 2013
review copies from the public library

I think it's fair to say that I would never have picked up a history of the Boxer Rebellion to read in my spare time if it hadn't been in graphic novel format. And I think it's fair to say that a historical description of the rebellion/movement would never have given me such a deeply personal glimpse into both sides of the story.

An added bonus was finding this review on GoodReads by FirstSecond, and gaining an even deeper appreciation for the complexity of what Gene Yang created in these two books:

One of the things that makes both Boxers and Saints fascinating is how the author treats religion. 

Boxers features a magical realistic element; the Chinese gods (who the characters know mainly through the opera) possess the Boxer rebels and help power their rebellion; when the rebels go to war, they feel that they are taken over by the gods and protected and driven by them. In the book, Gene draws the gods as they are taking over the Boxers and propelling them into battle. The pictures aren't just people saying, 'a god is possessing me!' while nothing is happening -- a god is _there_. 

This is clearly meant (through our 21st-century lens) to be magical realism; these gods aren't something that we today are meant to be like, 'drat those gods possessing people and causing rebellions all the time; you'd think they would know better after all these years of being gods and all.' 

This is all thrown into question in a fascinating way in Saints, when Gene (a devout Catholic) draws the main character seeing an actual Catholic saint -- Joan of Arc -- and at one point, seeing Jesus. In the same way that the Chinese gods appear on the pages of Boxers, the Catholic saint and deity appear throughout the pages of Saints. Does their more-convincing reality (both in our culture today and in the author's life) throw into question the reality of the Chinese gods? Does this set-down-on-paper reflection of the beliefs of that time, both equally devout -- call into question the veracity of our own beliefs today, and the amount our contemporary culture is influencing what our beliefs are?

The format of the graphic novel has huge possibilities both as a launch-pad for introducing readers to new information (history, science, etc), and as a way for readers to process their learning of informational text.

I Survived #8: The Japanese Tsunami, 2011

I Survived #8: I Survived the Japanese Tsunami, 2011
by Lauren Tarshis
illustrated by Scott Dawson
Scholastic, 2013
review copy provided by the publisher

A couple of weeks ago, this "Shocking New Video" of the 2011 Japanese tsunami was shared on FaceBook. I clicked over and watched all 25+minutes of it. It was one thing to have seen the quick clip that became iconic in the days after the tsunami -- the one of the monster wave crashing into the coast -- but to watch, with the person behind the camera, 25 minutes of gradual, and then terrifyingly sudden rising waters that completely obliterated the landscape, was quite another.

It was with those images in my mind that I read Lauren Tarshis' newest installment in the I Survived series. (I'm embarrassed to admit that this is the first book in this series that I've read. Somehow, this series escaped my radar until last year. I got several for my classroom library, and then they were never back on the shelves!)

Tarshis gives a kid reader just enough of the terrifying experience of the tsunami to understand the suddenness, feel the separation from loved ones, and know the shock of whole towns being leveled. But her character is an American child, visiting in Japan, so he gets to leave the destruction behind, in much the same way the world has. (There are no "Shocking New Video"s of the rebuilding efforts that are still, I'm sure, going on.) I do not mean this as a criticism. Tarshis writes, in the information following the story, about how hard it was for her to try to understand the enormity of the disaster. And she does show readers a Japanese character who chooses not to leave, and teaches us, in the information after the story, about gaman, a word in Japanese which means "to be strong and patient even when something terrible is happening."

P.S. Be Eleven

P.S. Be Eleven
by Rita Williams-Garcia
Amistad (HarperCollins), on shelves May 21, 2013

In this sequel to One Crazy Summer, the focus is on Delphine, the oldest of the three sisters, who is beginning sixth grade. Delphine has to deal with not having the "right" clothes, not getting the teacher she wanted, and not being able to go to the Jackson Five concert. She's learning to understand her father and grandmother, and she gets to see a part of her sister Vonetta that she didn't know existed.

Periodically, Delphine gets letters from her mother in L.A. Each letter includes, "P.S. Be eleven" at the end, and through the letters, the reader gets to know a softer part of Celine, the girls' mother, than we saw in One Crazy Summer. It's pretty amazing how much of a presence Williams-Garcia creates for Celine with just those letters.

Readers who loved One Crazy Summer will definitely want to spend the school year after that summer with these likable characters.

Navigating Early

Navigating Early
by Clare Vanderpool
Delacorte Press, 2013
review copy ARC provided by Cover to Cover Books for Young Readers

It's been a long time since a book has grabbed me by the collar and sat me down in a chair and refused to let me up until I finished it.

Navigating Early wiggled its way into my school bag and forced me to read during SSR time, as I ate lunch, and while my students were at art.

I fell in love with Jack, from flat, wide open Kansas, who pukes the first time he looks at the ocean. And I fell in love with Early, who listens to Billie Holiday when it rains. I fell in love with the stories within the story -- the travels of Pi that match both the digits of Pi as well as the adventure Jack and Early have in the backwoods of Maine.

I couldn't help myself -- I dogeared the page corner at Chapter 21 -- the first time I can ever remember encountering fly fishing in a children's book (not to mention a spirited argument about why Jesus could possibly have been "a likely candidate for fly-fishing").

Navigating Early is mysterious and magical, brimful of surprising characters, and with an ending that's a sigh of satisfaction.

Move Navigating Early to the top of your must-read list. You won't regret it.



Also reviewed by
Kevin at Kevin's Meandering Mind
Katherine at Read, Write, Reflect
Colby at Sharpread

Format, Not Genre

We are working hard in fifth grade to be more specific in our identification of genre. Knowing that a book or story is fiction or nonfiction just isn't good enough anymore! We have identified the qualities of fantasy and science fiction, historical fiction and realistic fiction, and more. 

One of the first hurdles we had to cross was that "graphic novel" is NOT a genre. We have seen graphic novels that are fantasy, science fiction, biography, memoir, and mythology. So a graphic novel is a FORMAT for presenting a story, rather than a single GENRE.

The same is true for wordless books. It might be a fun informal assessment to give a group of students a stack of wordless books and ask them to sort the books by genre!

Here are two you could include in your stack -- one fantasy, and the other historical fiction.

The Night Riders
by Matt Furie
McSweeney's McMullens, 2012
review copy provided by the publisher

In this fantasy, Frog and Mouse go on a journey together. They meet a scary dragon who turns out to be friendly. Dragon and his underground video-game-playing friend join Frog and Mouse and their journey takes them all the way to the ocean.


One of the best things about this book is the dust jacket -- it unfolds into a big poster with the characters on one side, and parts of the setting on the other!

Unspoken: A Story From the Underground Railroad
by Henry Cole
Scholastic Press, 2012

The silence of a wordless book is perfect for UNSPOKEN. When the girl discovers a runaway slave hiding in the outbuilding, she keeps his secret.

Henry Cole uses well-chosen details to evoke the setting (both time and place), to build suspense, and to give the story a satisfying ending. For those with background knowledge about the Underground Railroad, such images as the lantern, the Big Dipper, and the quilts will resonate. This gorgeous wordless book belongs in classrooms at all levels. It will prompt great discussions, and perhaps some will want to try to write the story with words.