by Nancy Pearl
Hatchet by Gary Paulsen is not only one of the most exciting novels for kids and young adults ever written, it’s also one of the best books to give to reluctant readers. It’s the story of a boy’s survival in the wilderness against seemingly insurmountable odds.
Other one-word wonders include Hush, Jacqueline Woodson’s moving story of a family forced to go into the witness protection program; Milkweed, Jerry Spinelli’s wrenching novel of a Jewish orphan trying to get by in Nazi-occupied Warsaw; David Almond’s fantasy novel Skellig, about a young boy who finds a mysterious creature—part angel, part bird—in the garage of his new house; and Andrew Clements’s Frindle, which answers the question of how words get added to our everyday vocabulary. It’s an excellent choice for third and fourth graders.
ORPHANS ABOUNDING
I’ve often wondered why there are so many orphans as main characters in children’s books—is it because it’s a common fear that kids can relate to? Or, contrariwise, is it because children sometimes feel that having parents is more of a burden than a blessing? Or maybe, reading about these kids who somehow manage to come out on the other side of a tragedy—always successfully (at least in books), through pluck or brains or simply good luck—can help children be aware of and appreciate their own inner resources.
Perhaps everyone’s favorite orphan is Anne Shirley, heroine of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s series beginning with Anne of Green Gables, when Anne goes to live with Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert on their farm on Prince Edward Island, Canada (although they had asked for a boy, to help with the chores), and ends, many books (and years) later, with Rilla of Ingleside, the story of Anne’s youngest daughter. (My favorite, though, has always been the ohso-romantic Anne of the Island, when she goes off to college, rejects her longtime suitor, and meets the man who she’s sure is the love of her life.)
Then there are the other now classic orphans: Mary Lennox (The Secret Garden) and Sara Crewe (A Little Princess), both by Frances Hodgson Burnett; J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and sequels); Heidi by Johanna Spyri; David Balfour (Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson); and the Baudelaire kids—Violet, Klaus, and Sunny—in Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events, which begins with The Bad Beginning and continues (with great glee) over many, many books.
But here’s a wildly diverse selection of other books—some fantasy, most realistic—in which orphans play a leading role; they’re probably less familiar, but, as kids will discover when they’re reading them, they’re no less fun to get to know:Franny Billingsley’s The Folk Keeper
Gary Blackwood’s The Shakespeare Stealer and Shakespeare’s Scribe
Eve Bunting’s Train to Somewhere
Georgia Byng’s Molly Moon’s Incredible Book of Hypnotism (give this to Lemony Snicket fans)
Christopher Paul Curtis’s Bud, Not Buddy
Karen Cushman’s Rodzina
Helen Fern Daringer’s Adopted Jane
Elizabeth Enright’s Thimble Summer
Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s Understood Betsy
Sid Fleischman’s The Midnight Horse
Rumer Godden’s The Story of Holly and Ivy
Elizabeth Goudge’s The Little White Horse
Erik Christian Haugaard’s The Samurai’s Tale
Eva Ibbotson’s Journey to the River Sea
Gail Carson Levine’s Dave at Night
D. Anne Love’s The Puppeteer’s Apprentice
Betty McDonald’s Nancy and Plum
Tor Seidler’s Brainboy and the Deathmaster
Jerry Spinelli’s Maniac Magee
Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes
Jean Thesman’s The Ornament Tree
Cynthia Voigt’s Homecoming
Barbara Brooks Wallace’s Sparrows in the Scullery and Peppermints in the Parlor (give the latter book to fans of The Little Princess)
OTHER TIMES, OTHER PLACES
One of the best reasons to read the books in this category is that they offer glimpses of other worlds, different ways of living, and take children into the lives of people they would never otherwise have the chance to get to know.
Twelfth-century Korea is the setting for Linda Sue Park’s Newbery Award-winning A Single Shard, the story of Tree-Ear, who longs to help one of the village’s potters make the famed celadon pitcher. Park also set When My Name Was Keoko in Korea, but this time it’s just before and during the Second World War, when the Japanese Emperor decreed that every Korean had to take a Japanese name.Told from the alternating points of view of a brother and sister, Park explores what it means to be forced to give up your culture and identity—and what bravery means in the shadow of war.
In Arthur Dorros’s Under the Sun, thirteen-year-old Ehmet leaves his war-ravaged city in Bosnia to try to find a place he’s only heard rumors of—a children’s village where young people of all ethnicities from the former Yugoslavia come together to live in peace.
London in 1677 comes alive in At the Sign of the Star by Katherine Sturtevant, the story of Meg Moore, who likes nothing better than working with her widowed father in his bookstore (and meeting the leading literary figures of the day). Meg’s life turns upside down, however, when her father marries a woman determined to turn Meg into a “lady.” Meg’s story is continued in A True and Faithful Narrative.
Karen Hesse’s Stowaway shows that in the hands of a gifted writer, even the most obscure of facts can be made interesting. Here she begins with a real person, eleven-year-old Nicholas Young, who stowed away on Captain Cook’s HMS Endeavour in 1768, and accompanied his crew as they searched for a continent at the bottom of the world. Drawing on Cook’s own diary of the trip, as well as the writings of the famed naturalist Joseph Banks, Hesse has written this spellbinding adventure as though it were Nick’s own journal.
Other too-good-to-miss titles in this category—books guaranteed to take kids away from their ordinary, everyday lives—are Catherine, Called Birdy by Karen Cushman (set during the Middle Ages, with a very modern and determined thirteen-year-old heroine); and Mildred D.Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and its sequel, Let the Circle Be Unbroken (about a black family living in heavily segregated and prejudice-filled Mississippi during the Depression years).
THE PLEASURES OF POETRY
I think that children would be natural poetry lovers if we only gave them the chance by introducing them to the books that I’ve included here.The rhymes and rhythms, the imagery, even the subject matter will engage a child’s imagination, stimulate his creativity, and broaden his or her language skills. And best of all, poetry is written to be read aloud, so you’ll have a wonderful experience sharing them, too.
Paul B. Janeczko (text) and Chris Raschka (illustrations) combined to produce two colorful, useful, and, most important, entertaining books of poetry. The first, A Kick in the Head: An Everyday Guide to Poetic Forms, is a guide, with examples, of different forms of poetry, including couplets, quatrains, pantoums, and sonnets. The second is A Poke in the I: A Collection of Concrete Poems. Concrete poems (we learned in A Kick in Head) look like their subject matter, and Janeczko offers some of the best here. Don’t miss these poems: “Giraffe” by Maureen W. Armour, “Tennis Anyone?” by Monica Kulling, and John Hegley’s “I Need Contact Lenses,” all brightly illustrated by Raschka. I thought, as I read through this book, that composing and illustrating a concrete poem would be a great school assignment for all grades.
Poetry Speaks to Children is an anthology of poetry for kids, including selections from William Shakespeare to James Stevenson, Rita Dove to Christina Rossetti, Carl Sandburg to Roald Dahl, Langston Hughes to J. R. R. Tolkien, and Eugene Field to Sylvia Plath, edited by Elise Paschen and illustrated in several different styles by Judy Love,Wendy Rasmussen, and Paula Zinngrabe Wendland. It’s accompanied by a CD of more than half the poems, many read by the authors themselves, others recorded especially for this project.
Sing a Song of Popcorn: Every Child’s Book of Poems, selected by Beatrice Schenk
de Regniers, is illustrated by nine Caldecott Medal winners, including Marcia Brown, Leo and Diane Dillon, Maurice Sendak, Arnold Lobel, and Margot Zemach.
A Family of Poems: My Favorite Poetry for Children is a wide-ranging anthology assembled by Caroline Kennedy, including poems by everyone from A. A. Milne to Robert Frost, and Edward Lear to William Wordsworth.
One of the most beautiful combinations of art and poetry I’ve ever seen is Heart to Heart: New Poems Inspired by Twentieth-Century American Art, edited by Jan Greenberg.The art includes works by Frank Stella, Grant Wood, Andy Warhol, and Georgia O’Keeffe; the poets included are Nancy Willard, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Marvin Bell, among others.
For those young readers who love Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends and A Light in the Attic, Jack Prelutsky’s The New Kid on the Block, and other books of light verse, it’s time to try Douglas Florian. His clever and amusing poems can be found in Bow Wow Meow Meow: It’s Rhyming Cats and Dogs; Mammalabilia (poems about Bactrian camels, mules, and aardvarks: “Aardvarks aare odd, / Aardvarks aare stark, / Aardvarks look better / By faar in the dark”); Laugh-eteria; Summersaults; Bing Bang Boing; In the Swim; On the Wing; Beast Feast; Lizards, Frogs, and Polliwogs; and Insectlopedia. And Florian himself—multitalented as one person can be—did the paintings that illustrate these books (as, of course, did Shel Silverstein in his books). Try Florian’s books on your second- and third-graders, as well.
For Laughing Out Loud: Poems to Tickle Your Funnybone is a collection of poems by writers like Ogden Nash, Karla Kuskin, Judith Viorst, and John Ciardi, all selected by Jack Prelutsky, with illustrations by Marjorie Priceman.
Canadian poet laureate Dennis Lee’s classic contribution to the silly-poetry genre, Alligator Pie, is still a crowd-pleaser, though it was originally published more than thirty-five years ago.
The accessible free verse written by Valerie Worth in Peacock and Other Poems will both entertain and help young readers discover the poetry within them. (Of course, few of us will be lucky enough to have our books illustrated by Natalie Babbitt.) This is a valuable choice for teachers who want to do creative writing with their classes, as well as for parents interested in sharing poetry with their children.
Poems in both Spanish and English express a little boy’s memories of his home in El Salvador and how his uprooted family moved far away to San Francisco’s Mission District, in Jorge Argueta’s A Movie in My Pillow.
Another bilingual collection of poetry is Angels Ride Bikes and Other Fall Poems, written by Francisco X. Alarcón with colorful illustrations by Maya Christina Gonzalez that are reminiscent of the great Mexican muralists.You can find more of their collaborative work in Laughing Tomatoes and Other Spring Poems, From the Bellybutton of the Moon and Other Summer Poems, and Iguanas in the Snow and Other Winter Poems.
Other books of poetry to be checked out and shared are Nancy Willard’s award-winning A Visit to William Blake’s Inn; The Llama Who Had No Pajama by Mary Ann Hoberman (“Balloons to blow / Balloons to burst / The blowing’s best / The bursting’s worst!”); Bobbi Katz’s Once Around the Sun (a month-bymonth’s worth of poetry), illustrated by LeUyen Phamany; Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses (if you can find the edition illustrated by Brian Wildsmith your child is in for a true treat); Jack Prelutsky’s Read-Aloud Rhymes for the Very Young (illustrated by Marc Brown, author of the “Arthur” books); If Not for the Cat (a collection of haiku); and Prelutsky’s very funny poems about dinosaurs, Tyrannosaurus Was a Beast. Prelutsky also edited two excellent collectionns: The Random House Book of Poetry for Children and The 20th Century Children’s Poetry Treasury.
REAL PEOPLE YOU OUGHT TO KNOW
The goal of the biographer, it seems to me, is both to bring his or her subject to life and to illuminate the time period in which the biographee lived. Through offering readers an entrée into the mind and experiences of another person, biographers give readers the opportunity to step outside their own lives. A good biography can lead readers down many different pathways and open a lifetime of reading opportunities. Here are some first-rate ones for the middle-grade reader:
Laurie Lawlor’s Helen Keller: Rebellious Spirit conveys not only the Keller that many children may be familiar with, but also gives a good sense of a fun-loving and lively child, who lost little of her vivaciousness as she grew up. A companion for Lawlor’s is the fine biography by Joan Dash, The World at Her Fingertips. Together they provide a well-rounded and informative portrait of Keller.
Dash also wrote The Longitude Prize, which tells the story of John Harrison, a British clockmaker who spent his life trying to find a way for sailors to figure out their longitude at sea.
She presents the life and work of a much better-known man in A Dangerous Engine: Benjamin Franklin from Scientist to Diplomat. It’s hard to write a dull biography of a man as interesting as Benjamin Franklin, and Dash’s is no exception, nor is Rosalyn Schanzer’s How Ben Franklin Stole the Lightning, which includes accounts of many of Franklin’s creative experiments and inventions.
Walter Dean Myers captures the mercurial nature of an amazing boxer in The Greatest: Muhammad Ali, covering his childhood, his career as a boxer, his decision not to fight in Vietnam, and his later career. (Teen readers won’t want to overlook King of the World, a biography of Ali by David Remnick.)
In Sigmund Freud: Pioneer of the Mind, Catherine Reef offers a comprehensive picture of the father of psychoanalysis, whom she describes as “an archaeologist of the mind”; she doesn’t shy away from discussing the controversial nature of some of his beliefs.
Fans of the Robinson Crusoe story will want to check out Robert Kraske’s Marooned, a biography of the “real” Crusoe, Alexander Selkirk.
In 1833, Prudence Crandall, a young, white, single schoolteacher living in Canterbury, Connecticut, decided to open a school for African American teens. Suzanne Jurmain highlights the difficulties Crandall and her students faced, especially in dealing with the townspeople’s anger, in The Forbidden Schoolhouse.
Until 2001, African American Matthew Henson’s contributions to the success of Robert Peary’s 1909 trek to the North Pole weren’t given full due, but Onward: A Photobiography of African-American Polar Explorer Matthew Henson by Dolores Johnson should remedy that. The inspirational text and outstanding photographs are just what you would expect from a National Geographic Society publication.
Russell Freedman is one of the best biographers around, whether you’re talking about books for adults or kids. I look forward to reading and recommending each of his books as it appears (not often enough, in my opinion!). Here are five of my favorites: The Voice That Challenged a Nation: Marian Anderson and the Struggle for Equal Rights; Confucius: The Golden Rule, which not only offers us a biography of the fifth-century Chinese philosopher, but also serves as a fine introduction to Eastern thought; his Newbery Award-winning Lincoln: A Photobiography, which is an excellent introduction to the life and career of the president known as the Great Emancipator; The Wright Brothers: How They Invented the Airplane, the story of the two eccentric men who changed history through their inventions; and The Life and Death of Crazy Horse, a good way to meet the chief of the Lakota Indians and understand the world he lived in.
The story of a man who worked tirelessly to improve the lot of America’s migrant workers is movingly recounted in Kathleen Krull’s Harvesting Hope: The Story of Cesar Chavez.
Josephine Poole and Angela Barrett have combined to write and illustrate two biographies for young readers: Joan of Arc and Anne Frank are both superb introductions to these indomitable girls who came to sad ends. (Although I suppose some smart kid could argue that Joan of Arc came to a glorious end.)
Charles Darwin was first and foremost one of the nineteenth century’s most respected naturalists; in a text mostly taken from Darwin’s own writings and accompanied by commentary and detailed illustrations, Peter Sís helps young readers (and the adults in their lives) understand Darwin and his ideas, in The T
ree of Life.
Maritcha: A Remarkable Nineteenth-Century American Girl by Tonya Bolden combines Maritcha’s own words, vintage photographs, reproductions of newspaper articles, and more to animate the life of a young woman who was the first African American to graduate from Providence High School, in Rhode Island.
Other recommendable biographies for this age group include Dickens: His Work and His World by Michael Rosen; Saladin: Noble Prince of Islam by Diane Stanley, the story of a great man who was known for his generosity of spirit toward his friends and enemies alike; Good Brother, Bad Brother: The Story of Edwin Booth and John Wilkes Booth by James Cross Giblin (one was a great classical actor and the other, the man who assassinated Abraham Lincoln); and Bill Pickett, Rodeo-Ridin’ Cowboy by Andrea Davis Pinkney (the story of the great African American bulldogger).
RELATIVITY
Sometimes I think that—at least in books, but probably also in real life—strangers can be, uh, strange, but family can be decidedly quirky.