The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin

The Westing Game is a mystery involving a group of possible heirs to Sam Westing's fortune. Through a strange game set up by Westing before he was murdered, the characters must determine the murderer in order to inherit his money. As the reader, you are privy to the clues each heir receives. There are other inconsistencies, details, and clues in the text so that you can solve the mystery.

As a reader, I enjoyed the story and getting to know the characters but I didn't feel the need to try and solve the case before it was revealed to me in the story. I noticed some of the details that would have helped me figure it all out, but I was content to keep reading and let the characters do the work.

The plot is full of twists and turns and pulls you in successfully. At the end of the first, 4 page chapter, the text reads: "Who were these people, these specially selected tenants? They were mothers and fathers and children. A dressmaker, a secretary, an inventor, a doctor, a judge. And, oh yes, one was a bookie, one was a burglar, one was a bomber, and one was a mistake. Barney Northrup had rented one of the apartments to the wrong person." (p.5) At this point, I was eager to figure out who the bookie, burglar, bomber, and mistake were.

For a light-hearted read that engages, this book does the trick. I remember reading it in school and really enjoying it. In fact, it is one of only a handful of things I even remember reading as a school assignment prior to AP English. I think it has the potential to engage even reluctant readers with the plot twists and clues.

Locomotion by Jacqueline Woodson

I think this was the perfect time for me to have read this book. As someone who can write a paper but has never felt the urge to write for pleasure, I’ve been thinking a lot about why writers write this week. Between reading Rylant’s autobiographical But I’ll Be Back Again and Waiting to Waltz to thinking about Beth’s post about VA Tech, to our discussion in class, I’ve been thinking. Locomotion by Jacqueline Woodson is written from the perspective of a boy, nicknamed Locomotion, who learns to deal with the loss of his parents and sister through poetry. In fact, the book is written as poetry. So, many of the poems discuss how poetry is giving him a voice for his pain.

As an avid reader, it never occurred to me to actually try writing myself. But, after this I think the seed has been planted. Maybe I can use writing to help me in times of great emotion. I think Locomotion would be a perfect way to introduce kids to the idea that writing can be just for you and doesn’t have to be for school.

In some ways, Locomotion reminded me of another book I read this semester—Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse. Both are written about loss in a poetic form. However, Locomotion is a contemporary kid living in a city. While the girl in Out of the Dust lives during the dustbowl in the rural Midwest.

At first a lot of the poems explain poetry. One named “Line Break Poem” tells how Lonnie’s teacher explained the purpose of line breaks. The early poems revolve around the memories of his family. But, as the book progresses, I was able to see how he was healing. Many poems still involve memories of his family, but his friends at school and new memories with his sister take on a more important role. I enjoyed witnessing his progression in the subtle form of poetry. There was more for me to figure out than with prose.

I do wonder, though, why is this one classified as poetry and Out of the Dust as fiction?

In But I’ll Be Back Again, Cynthia Rylant tells us of the experiences that shaped her as a writer—her childhood including her family, first loves, and The Beatles. I see now that in some ways she is Summer from Missing May, the boy wanting a doctor’s kit in Silver Packages, and the teenager whose father “went away on business” in I Had Seen Castles. While she did not profess that all of these details from her stories resulted from her own life, I think perhaps they did, at least in part.

Most interesting of all, was the difference between how she got many of her stories and how Richard Peck professes to have gotten his. I guess I was thinking about this since we just watched Peck’s webcast from last year’s Bookfest in DC. In the webcast, Peck says he is a listener, a collector of other people’s stories. He says he gets his ideas from the lives of other people. From Rylant’s But I’ll Be Back Again, it seems that she pulls a lot from her own childhood for inspiration.

As we’ve studied Rylant, we’ve talked over and over about how she writes about family and home. She explains that the loss of her father was “all the loss I needed to become a writer.” (p.7) I guess that she writes about family and home because she felt as though something of family and home were missing for her as a child. In reading, Waiting to Waltz and now But, I’ll Be Back Again, I feel as though I can understand her motivations and subject matter more. I think I will look for more autobiographical information about authors I enjoy. It’s a bit like seeing the “picture” in one of those trick drawings—an extra bit of information or help makes all the difference in whether you can figure out what the picture is. Much like understanding a good book.

As I finished this book, I was overwhelmed by the thought that “Wow, this lady totally identifies herself as ‘writer.’” In thinking of my own self-identity, I can’t imagine summing up myself with one thing, like ‘teacher’ or ‘reader’ or ‘learner’ or ‘wife.’ But, then it occurred to me that maybe her focus on herself as ‘writer’ made it easier to tell the story of her childhood or limited the scope of her topic. Maybe she can’t really sum herself up as ‘writer,’ she chose to do so for this book. Now I’m curious to know what another book like this one would be like if she wrote it as ‘mother’ or ‘daughter’ or ‘librarian.’

Waiting to Waltz by Cynthia Rylant

In Waiting to Waltz, I followed a girl's journey growing from a child to a young lady with a backdrop of people and places entwined with her youth. Through the sparse words of peotry recounting memorable events, I was able to picture the town of Beaver and the girl. As one who generally avoids poetry, I was pleasantly surprised.

In the first part of the collection, the girl enjoys childhood joys like wax lips and remembers events like misspelling woke at the spelling bee or when her mother ran over a dog. But, in the second part of the collection, the girl begins to reflect on her fatherlessness, her freedom during the summers, and boys. At times she still feels like a child but realizes she is no longer. During the thunderstorm she acts brave "but inside, [she is] a little girl crying." (p. 19).

The girl's experiences with religion were unexpected to me. The people of Beaver seem religious but the girl's family does not seem to be. In Holiness, she was frightened at the Pentecostal service. When she took her mother to church in Saved, her mother was embarrassed by the girl's behavior. She even wishes she were Catholic because of the "slick-haired boys" (p. 37).

Without reading all of the poems in the collection, I would have an incomplete understanding of the story. They all work together to tell of this girl's journey toward adulthood.

Joyful Noise by Paul Fleischman

By about the third poem, it hit me. Paul Fleischman crafts his stories so that we hear multiple points of view. While this may not hold true for each of his books, it is true of the three most recent ones we have read-- Seedfolks, Bull Run, and Joyful Noise. In the first poem, Grasshoppers, the readers are speaking the poem from a third person point of view. But, in the next one, Water Striders, two water striders are talking to us in the first person. I started each new poem eager to figure out what the voice would be. Would each reader be a different character? Would they work together for one point of view? Would it be third person like the first poem?

I have a love-hate relationship with insects. As a former Biology major, I find their anatomy fascinating and enjoyed learning about the complexity of all living things, but on a personal level I hate bugs! I can't even kill one, but I certainly won't have one near me. So, I enjoyed the illustrations in Joyful Noise because of the detail drawn for each of the beautiful insects. And, I gained a different perspective on the insects I usually just find bothersome and gross.

Fleischman did an excellent job of varying the poems to keep me engaged in the story. Some of the poems like Water Striders, Grasshoppers, and Mayflies, provided factual information but in a fanciful way. The reader learns about water striders distributing their weight on "the thin film of the surface" (p. 7) and that mayflies only live for a day. In other poems, the insects are personified. The digger wasp is an industrious mother and the moth struggles to resist what he knows he should avoid-- the porch light.

I never would have thought I would enjoy a collection of poems about bugs!

Fables by Arnold Lobel

Arnold Lobel uses animal characters to tell his Fables. Each fable is about a page in length and ends with an italicized “lesson” sentence at the bottom. Each one is an unusual story that goes with the “lesson,” but it is not obvious what the message will be. In The Elephant and His Son, the father elephant tells his son that he must be quiet so that he can read the newspaper. He says he can only focus on one thing at a time. Then his slipper catches on fire and the son has to bring it to his attention. The lesson is: “Knowledge will not always take the place of simple observation.” While I see the lesson, it was not the obvious ending to the story.

Fables is the winner of the Caldecott Medal. Each fable has an accompanying picture showing the characters from that fable. The illustrations are triple framed giving the reader distance from the story’s action. I think the animal characters, formal language, coupled with the framed illustrations allows the reader to more objectively read each fable for its intended message.

While many people would expect the book to be geared toward young children as a read aloud because of the short stories, illustrations, and animals, I think the collection would be lost on young children. As I mentioned above, the lesson is not clear from each story and each lesson is a complex idea. For instance, one lesson sentence states: “Advice from friends is like the weather. Some of it is good; some of it is bad.” I don’t think young children could fathom that idea. The formal language makes the book inaccessible to young children as well. In The Lobster and the Crab, Crab states: “Lobster…it is foolhardy to venture out on a day like this.” To which Lobster replies, “Perhaps so… but I love a squall at sea.” I found the exchange amusing because it is formally written, but I don’t think young children could understand it. I think Fables would be more suited for upper elementary school children.

My favorite story is The Lobster and the Crab. Its lesson states: “Even the taking of small risks will add excitement to life.” How true! How true! I also had a good chuckle in The Bad Kangaroo. A young kangaroo throws spit balls and puts tacks on the teacher’s chair. When the principal visits home, the parents do the same thing. The lesson reads: “A child’s conduct will reflect the ways of his parents.” Hehe :)

Anansi the Spider by Gerald McDermott

Anansi the Spider tells how the moon came to be in the sky. When Anansi’s sons save him from a fish and falcon, Anansi has a hard time deciding who to reward with a “glowing orb.” He gives it to Nyame, The God of All Things, to keep it until he can decide. Nyame puts it in the sky, and thus it is the moon.

This version of the story is obviously written for children unfamiliar with Ashanti folklore. I think McDermott did a good job of including information necessary for the unfamiliar reader while telling the story simply and concisely. For instance, at the beginning he writes, “Anansi. He is “spider” to the Ashanti people.” And later after introducing Nyame, he writes: “For Ashanti people, Nyame is The God of All Things.”

Geometric shapes abound in the illustrations. Each of the six sons has a different attribute and it is represented by a unique shape. River drinker has waves on his body, while Game Skinner has two pointy triangles like the ends of knives. I imagine that Ashanti people may have used the same shapes when telling the story.

This book was a Caldecott Honor book and I can see why. Without the illustrations, the story would be incomplete. For instance, the text says: “He [Anansi] fell into trouble” while the illustration shows him falling off the land and in the next illustration you see Anansi in the river being eaten by a fish. Nowhere in the text, though, does it tell you that he was eaten by the fish.