Ms. Grady Reads

Friday, May 20, 2011

List of Books in Chronological Order

Thursday, May 19, 2011

The Arrival by Shaun Tan

The Arrival by Shaun Tan, Scholastic Press, 2007, ISBN 0-439-89529-4

Plot Summary
In this wordless graphic novel, a man leaves his homeland, bidding farewell to his small daughter and wife. The reader wonders why he must leave his family behind--visual cues hint at economic desperation and other “monsters” that the man must escape. He travels by boat across the sea to a new land where he encounters foreignness all around him. When he first arrives, he is poked and prodded by officials. He tries to communicate in a tongue that he does not speak, relies on gestures, but ultimately cedes defeat. Nothing feels familiar to him in this new place. Tan brings this sense of foreignness to the viewer by showing otherworldly creatures and text on walls and in books in a non-western print. Other aspects of life in the new land also feel strange and unfamiliar to the man--transportation systems, the behaviors of the inhabitants--even the features of the inhabitants. Over time, he forms friendships with other travelers and immigrants to this land--he even befriends some of the fantastic creatures.

Critical Evaluation
This wordless graphic novel is a profound study in how symbols and visual cues can sometimes take viewers/ readers to deeper places than words can. Many aspects of the story are left to the viewer’s imagination which stimulates provocative thinking--what are those monsters that are swirling around the man’s homeland? What might they represent? The viewer thinks longer and more carefully because the answers haven’t been handed to her. The sepia tones that color most of the novel lend a haunted, sorrowful tone to the text while the other-worldliness of the creatures that inhabit this place lend comic relief to the isolation and confusion that permeates much of the man’s experiences. This would be a powerful work to use with immigrant students who could use the graphic novel as a springboard to write (or draw or make a movie) of their “arrival” stories to a new country.

Reader’s Annotation
Sean Tan’s The Arrival is a beautiful, wordless graphic novel that invites its readers into the wonder, sorrow, and confusion of the immigrant experience.

Information about the Author
We learn more about Sean Tan through the illustrator/ author’s website, “Shaun Tan grew up in the northern suburbs of Perth, Western Australia. In school he became known as the 'good drawer' which partly compensated for always being the shortest kid in every class. He graduated from the University of WA in 1995 with joint honours in Fine Arts and English Literature, and currently works full time as a freelance artist and author in Melbourne.

Shaun began drawing and painting images for science fiction and horror stories in small-press magazines as a teenager, and has since become best known for illustrated books that deal with social, political and historical subjects through surreal, dream-like imagery. Books such as The Rabbits, The Red Tree, Tales from Outer Suburbia and the acclaimed wordless novel The Arrival have been widely translated and enjoyed by readers of all ages. Shaun has also worked as a theatre designer, and worked as a concept artist for the films Horton Hears a Who and Pixar's WALL-E, and directed the Academy Award winning short film The Lost Thing with Passion Pictures Australia. In 2011 he received the presitgious Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, honouring his contribution to international children's literature.”

Genre
Graphic Novel

Curriculum Ties
This would be a good choice to include as part of a unit on Immigration and Emigration.

Booktalking Ideas
Have you ever felt like a stranger in a strange land? Do you know of any stories (your own/ parent/grandparents) of coming to a new country for the very first time? This book tells one such story.
Reading Level
Grades 6+
Challenge Issues
N/A
Why Included?
I included this graphic novel because I find it arrestingly beautiful and thought that it would be helpful for teachers of English Language Learners.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins, ISBN-13: 978-0-439-02349-8, Scholastic Press, 2009

Plot Summary
The first novel in the Hunger Games trilogy left readers hanging with tantalizing questions: Whom does Katniss really love, Gale or Peeta? Will her actions stir rebellion among the 12 districts? The second novel in the series, Catching Fire, begins to answer some of those questions. As the novel opens, Katniss has returned home safely to district 12 --she has her mother, sister and best friend, Gale near her, but she doesn’t feel the much-awaited relief. Though she and her partner Peeta Mellark both miraculously made it out of the Hunger Games alive, she realizes that she is still not safe. She learns that powerful forces are upset with her when the Capitol’s President Snow pays her a visit and warns her that she will pay dearly if any uprisings occur in any of the districts. As she and Peeta make their Victory Tour throughout the twelve disricts, she must convince everyone that she is madly in love with Peeta so that no-one suspects a ruse against the Capitol. As if that isn’t enough, Katniss learns that the Capitol has staged an even greater challenge for her than the one she faced in the first novel.

Critical Evaluation
Collins juxtaposes descriptions of life in the decadent Capitol against the grinding poverty in the 12 districts. The jewels, opulent meals (pounds and pounds of which are thrown away when there is excess) and elaborate wardrobes that are mainstays of life in the Capitol stand in stark opposition to the daily life of people in the districts. The denizens of the districts regularly face a terrible choice: go hungry or pay tribute, endangering the lives of their children whose names will be entered that many more times to become contestants in the hunger games. A citizen of district 12, Katniss receives lavish attention, food and wardrobe choices only when she is being prepared for potential death in the games. Collins’ descriptions of these extremes help the reader stay invested in the central tension of these novels.

Reader’s Annotation
Now that she has returned from the Hunger Games, will Katniss finally get some rest at home with her family and loved ones? Or will she stir rebellion among the twelve districts?

Information about the Author
(see The Hunger Games entry)

Genre
Science Fiction, Dystopian Literature

Curriculum Ties
Revolution/ Rebellion, Utopian vs. Dystopian Societies

Booktalking Ideas
Take the perspective of President Snow and explain what he wants of Katniss Everdeen when he pays her a visit at the beginning of the novel.

Reading Level/ Interest Age
Grades 8+

Challenge Issues
Depictions of violence may be graphic for younger readers. If the book were challenged, I would turn to ALA's Strategies and Tips for Dealing with Challenges to Library Materials.

Why Included?
This is a highly regarded series that serious readers of YA fiction are talking about--I wanted to be able to join in the conversation.

"Twilight" directed by Catherine Hardwicke

“Twilight”, 2008, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, screenplay by Melissa Rosenberg. Based on the novel by Stephanie Meyer

Summary
Fans of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series got to watch the film version when director Catherine Hardwicke’s movie hit the big screen in 2008. The film mostly stays faithful to the novel, chronicling the trials of Bella Swan who has recently moved to small town Forks, Washington where she falls in love with a vampire, Edward Cullen. Much of the first half of the film shows the repressed desire the two have for each other. The first notable moment of the seething passion show Edward storming out of Biology class when Bella is assigned a seat next to him in lab. Little does Bella know that the reason Edward gives her the cold shoulder is that he is overcome with desire for her but doesn’t want to harm her with his desire for human blood. Still, Edward can’t help but show his concern for Bella, rescuing her from harm on more than one occasion using his superhuman powers (notably strength and speed). The two finally declare their love for each other, and Bella takes the gamble of dating a repressed vampire. The tension in the novel centers on Edward’s need to keep his mouth from sinking into Bella’s delicate neck and a tribe of non-"vegetarian" (as Edward refers to his adoptive family) vampires who are wreaking havoc in Forks and circling impatiently for Bella’s flesh. Will Edward be able to protect her?

Critical Evaluation
The most enjoyable part of the film for this viewer came in watching the setting of the film. Shot on location in the Pacific Northwest (mostly Oregon), the director does an excellent job of capturing the green lusciousness of that saturated landscape. The opening scene hints at danger ahead with a depiction of a deer running through the dense forest trying to escape a predator, and the reader is welcomed into the tension of the story and the habitat of the light-fleeing vampires. One of the most beautiful scenes depicts Bella and Edward climbing and flying through enormous pine trees giving a great sense of the scale of the forests there. One off-note, however, was in the director’s choice to make the student population at Bella’s Forks High School a multi-cultural dream mix. Rural Washington may have gorgeous forests, but an abundance of African-American and Asian-American students it lacks, and so that aspect of the setting rang false to this viewer.

Annotation
Fan of the Twilight series? See how the film compares!

Challenge Issues
Portrayal of vampires. If the movie were challenged, I would turn to ALA's Strategies and Tips for Dealing with Challenges to Library Materials.

Why Included?
The Twilight series is a pop-culture sensation, one that many teens adore. I was curious to see how the film version compared to the novel and wanted to be able to talk about it with patrons.

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, ISBN 0-7679-0289-0, Houghton Mifflin, 1990.

Plot Summary
The Things They Carried is a series of inter-connected short stories about the human experiences of fear, camaraderie, courage, and brutality experienced by combatants of the Vietnam War. O’Brien explores the aftereffects of the war on its veterans, those who are haunted by the ghosts of their fallen fellow combatants and the memories of the Vietnamese people they killed. In these stories, O’Brien, blurs the line between fact and faction as he fictionalizes elements of his own experience of combat in Vietnam, narrating many of the stories from the first person voice and, in other stories, making reference to a character named “Timmy.” In “The Man I Killed”, he imagines the life of the young Vietnamese soldier that he killed and in “How to Tell a True War Story” he tells the story of a member of his unit who is overcome with grief at the loss of a friend and takes it out by brutalizing a water buffalo. This is a work of fiction that speaks to a wide range of readers, from those who can’t get enough of war-stories to those who don’t think they can bring themselves to read about Vietnam but get swept up in the human element of this work, the reflections on friendship, love and loss.

Critical Evaluation
One of the most compelling (and sometimes confounding) elements of this work is its grey areas, the line that hovers here between truth and fiction. Readers oftentimes tumble headlong into the narrative thinking that they are reading O’Brien’s actual account of his memories as a Vietnam vet. He writes movingly about the members of his Alpha unit, even going so far as to dedicate the book to “the men of Alpha Company, in in particular to Jimmy Cross, Norman Bowker, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Henry Dobbins, and Kiowa” all of whom are key “characters” in the short stories. The confusion that arises gets to the heart of one of the main themes of this work: What is truth? Why do we tell stories, and what is the purpose of those stories? In The Things They Carried, O’Brien writes, “Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth” (83) Discussions of these questions make for hours (heck, a lifetime!) of stimulating and important conversations.

Reader’s Annotation
This is a rare work of fiction that blends genre, voices, fact and fiction to bring the experience of combat in Vietnam to life.

Information about the Author
In Gale’s Contemporary Author’s Online, we learn about novelist Tim O’Brien.
“Award-winning author Tim O'Brien is perhaps best known for his fictional, yet gripping, portrayals of the Vietnam conflict, especially of its people. Based on his own combat exposure, O'Brien delves into the American psyche and the human experience as he writes not only of what actually happened, but also the emotional and psychological impact of the war. In highly praised novels such as The Things They Carried, Going after Cacciato, and In the Lake of the Woods, he explores the war and its aftershocks from many vantage points, some intimate and some more distant. "But to label O'Brien a Vietnam author seems limiting, even simplistic," Library Journal contributor Mirela Roncevic maintained, "for his work has incessantly challenged his storytelling skills, demonstrating his ability to write both lucidly and succinctly while exploring the arcane relationship between fact and fiction, reality and imagination."

...

“Drafted immediately following his graduation from Macalester College in 1968, O'Brien served two years with the U.S. infantry. In a Publishers Weekly interview with Michael Coffey, O'Brien explained his motivation in writing about the war as his need to write with "passion," and commented that to write "good" stories "requires a sense of passion, and my passion as a human being and as a writer intersect in Vietnam, not in the physical stuff but in the issues of Vietnam--of courage, rectitude, enlightenment, holiness, trying to do the right thing in the world."

Genre
Short stories, War Fiction, Meta-Fiction

Curriculum Ties
A perfect companion for any study of the Vietnam War. This is also a helpful companion text when students are writing personal narratives and telling stories from their own lives.

Reading Level/ Interest Age
16+

Challenge Issues
There are references to violence in this work of fiction. If the book were challenged, I would turn to ALA's Strategies and Tips for Dealing with Challenges to Library Materials.

Why Included?
I’ve taught The Things They Carried, and it has stimulated some of the richest class discussions I’ve ever had with groups of students. It is one of the most compelling looks at memory, kinship, love and loss, particularly among men, that I have ever read. The Things They Carried has entered the contemporary canon and is an important work to talk about with all kinds of readers, young and old.

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan

The Worst Hard Time: the Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan, ISBN-13: 978-0-618-77347-3, Houghton Mifflin, 2006

Summary
The Worst Hard Time is Timothy Egan's National Book Award winning account of the Dust Bowl as told from the perspectives of those who lived through it. Egan traces the origins of the "nation's worst prolonged environmental disaster" -- from the theft of the land from the Comanche, to government efforts to populate the land after the expulsion of Indians and bison, to the destruction of the grasslands as they were plowed over to be planted with wheat. In the early 2000s, Egan conducted interviews with people then in their eighties and nineties who had lived through the Dust Bowl that ravaged many parts of the High Plains in the states of Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. He tells the stories of these people who, unlike the Joad family in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, chose to stay. The accounts are dramatic and a testament to the power of the human spirit -- and hubris.

Critical Evaluation
Egan masterfully weaves together dates, newspaper clippings, speeches, crop records, telegrams, photographs from as far back as the 1860s, maps and descriptions of place past and present, along with the human stories of the dust that ravaged many a family farm, took lives, and led to countless acts of desperation. He brings the physical experience of the dust to life with vivid descriptions: “On the skin, the dust was like a nail file, a grit strong enough to hurt. People rubbed Vaseline in their nostrils as a filter” (7). His interviews and research cover a wide range of perspectives on those years, from those like John McCarty who were boosters of the area and refused to give up on their prairie towns to those who wanted to give up their children for fear that they would starve. He tells of an old woman whose misery was so deep that she burned her husband’s journal accounts of those years. Who would ever want to relive the “horror” of those years? (3). His use of primary sources, particularly the human stories, bring this history of grinding poverty, environmental calamity, and determination to life and make it hard to put this book down.

Reader’s Annotation
Read The Grapes of Wrath and want to learn more about the Dust Bowl? If you are a lover of history (and geography) who looks for the human angle within the data, this is a perfect read for you.

Information about the Author
“According to Gale’s Contemporary Authors Online, “Timothy Egan is an American journalist. Born in Seattle, Washington, on November 8, 1954, he graduated from the University of Washington in 1980. Egan began working as the Pacific Northwest correspondent for the New York Times in 1987, eventually becoming the Seattle bureau chief.”

...

“Egan returned to nonfiction with The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. To write the book, Egan began collecting oral histories from survivors in 2002, traveling the back roads and visiting family farms. He profiles many of the survivors and their families and recounts those difficult times also written about by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath. However, unlike Steinbeck, who wrote about those who fled to California and other places, Egan focuses on the farmers and families who hunkered down and weathered the drought.”

Genre
Non-fiction/ History

Curriculum Ties
History--Dust Bowl

Booktalking Ideas
Show Dorothea Lange photographs, and explain that this was a time in which the sky sometimes went black in the afternoon and dust would come through the windows of peoples’ homes. This is a history that tells some of the personal stories from this time and place.

Reading Level/ Interest Level
Age 14+

Challenge Issues
N/A

Why Included?
I wanted to include a book in the collection for some of the history buffs out there. This is one of the most gripping historical accounts I’ve read in years and wanted young people to know about this particular book and Timothy Egan as an author.

Monday, May 16, 2011

Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America by Nathan McCall

Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America by Nathan McCall, ISBN 0-679-74070-8, 1994, Vintage Books

Summary
Journalist Nathan McCall’s autobiography chronicles his childhood in an all-black working class neighborhood of Portsmouth, Virginia, his descent into violence and crime as a teenager, his prison education, conversion to Christianity and later Islam, and journey to become an award-winning journalist for the Wall Street Jounal. McCall leads his memoir with a snapshot of himself as a teenager in which he and a group of friends brutally beat a white boy who mistakenly rode his bicycle into “their” territory. He uses this incident to set the stage for a memoir which is a gritty, oftentimes harrowing narrative of what it means to be a black man in America, always perceived as the “other” and faced with the social pressures to be cruel. Race is never far from the reader’s consciousness as McCall narrates his childhood recollections of whiteness being held up as a model of all that is good, the isolation of attending an all-white school, the destruction of his neighborhood by the crack epidemic, and the easy descent into aggression against a society that had rejected him. This memoir, with its graphic depictions of crime, poverty and injustice, may be difficult to read, but it adds an important voice to discussions on race in America.

Critical Evaluation
Part of the power of this text is that McCall is writing about what it means to be a black man coming of age in America from the first person perspective. On the first page, he names a common fear in the American consciousness of the menacing black man--he implicitly addresses this fear and then identifies himself in that image as a perpetrator of violence. He does not make excuses. The author then steps back to contextualize and discuss the forces that have brought him to that moment--and many others--in which he commits harmful acts. Readers may wonder how someone with a criminal past could go on to become a successful journalist, one who does not deny or "clean up" his past. It is this honesty and unflinching look at a painful past that provides such power to McCall's narrative voice.

Reader’s Annotations
Can one grow to become a just man in an unjust society?

Information about the Author
According to the author’s official website, “Nathan McCall was born in Norfolk, Va. One of five children, he graduated from Manor High School in Portsmouth and attended Norfolk State University, where he received a bachelor of arts degree in journalism in 1981. Nathan has worked as a reporter for The Virginian Pilot-Ledger Star in Norfolk, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and The Washington Post, where he worked until taking a leave of absence to write his best selling autobiography, Makes Me Wanna Holler, A Young Black Man in America.

Makes Me Wanna Holler was a New York Times bestseller and won the Blackboard Book of the Year Award for 1995. In praise of Makes Me Wanna Holler, noted scholar Henry Louis Gates wrote, “Sooner of later every generation must find its voice. It may be that ours belongs to Nathan McCall, whose memoir is…a stirring tale of transformation. He is a mesmerizing storyteller.”...McCall serves as a senior lecturer in the African American Studies Department at Emory University in Atlanta, GA.”

Genre
Memoir/Non-fiction

Curriculum Ties
History-Civil rights era, desegregation in the US

Booktalking Ideas
Read aloud a paragraph from the first two pages, the description of the white boy getting jumped by McCall and his friends. Ask, "If anyone wonders, '“Why?” and “What else happened in this man’s life?”', they might consider reading this book.

Reading Level/ Interest Age
16+

Challenge Issues
This work could be challenged due to its graphic depictions of violence. If the book were challenged, I would turn to ALA's Strategies and Tips for Dealing with Challenges to Library Materials.

Why Included?
This is an important narrative about race in America. It was a transformative read for me many years ago, and I believe would be a compelling read for teenagers who want to grapple with questions of societal injustice.

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