
By JAMES PONIEWOZIK from NYT Arts https://ift.tt/2sghj4X
For the May/June 2018 Horn Book Magazine: Special Issue: Making a Difference (gorgeous cover at right by Yuyi Morales), we asked fifteen-plus children’s book creators to write about the book that changed their lives. The answers were heartfelt, touching, sometimes humorous, always thoughtful — and a welcome reminder about the enduring power of books and reading.
All month long, we featured “The Book That Changed My Life” articles on Hbook.com and on social media: Facebook.com/TheHornBook | @HornBook | instagram.com/thehornbook. Here is the complete series:
What book changed your life?
For more on social justice and activism from The Horn Book, visit our Making a Difference landing page.
In “Thank Heavens for Hugo, or When Size Matters,” children’s literature scholar Madelyn Travis wrote about her efforts to encourage her then-seven-year-old son to “love reading” and her worry that “if he doesn’t, he will miss out on one of life’s great joys.”
Lordy, do I get it. Though my kids were toddlers when I first read Madelyn’s piece, which appeared in the September/October 2011 Horn Book Magazine‘s Books in the Home column, I remember thinking how helpful it was to have a window into the relationship between a book-loving mom and her somewhat book-indifferent child. Seven years ago, we were in a different phase of my kids’ reading lives, but I could still identify with those parental worries and concerns.
What I find helpful now, in addition to those reflected anxieties, is how familiar Madelyn’s description of her son and his friends sounds: “Samuel (and many of his friends) happily sit in front of the TV or computer for hours, or stand around swapping football cards—not much running around happening there.” Here we’re knee-deep in Pokémon cards, but…yeah.
Madelyn’s love note to Hugo is worth spending time with — a reassuring reminder that raising readers is an endurance endeavor worth the effort.
It started in seventh grade, the day my best friend brought a beat-up paperback to school and asked me to hold it for her. Garla’s mom was very religious, so at times I found myself keeping stuff for her at my house, things her mother wouldn’t approve of, like her DeBarge and Prince records. That day it was her copy of The Outsiders.
It was the 1982 Dell paperback edition with C. Thomas Howell on the cover. Since I was its temporary keeper, I read it, too. It launched our obsession with S. E. Hinton’s books. We read them all: Tex; Rumble Fish; That Was Then, This Is Now. They were stories about kids outside the mainstream, balancing between the desire to belong and the desire to be accepted for who they truly were. Kids who were tough on the outside but tenderhearted, with heads full of dreams no one else in their lives dreamed for them. Kids who were contradictions.
I loved them all, but it was The Outsiders that left a lasting impression. I read Gone with the Wind because Ponyboy and Johnny did. To this day, I have Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay” burned in my memory — go ahead, ask me to recite it. The Outsiders was the book that captured the feeling of escape you get from reading, especially when you feel like you don’t quite belong in your own world. And it was the first book in which I remember being able to catch a glimpse of myself.
Growing up in the eighties, I never saw people who looked like me, my family, or my friends in books. The authors I knew weren’t writing about what it was like to be a child of immigrants, a Hispanic (before the terms Latina or Latinx). They weren’t writing about what it was like to have your roots split between countries, often holding on to a life and memories that weren’t yours. Floating between worlds, speaking Spanish with your parents at home and English with everyone else.
Like Ponyboy, who lived in a world where looking and acting tough were crucial to his survival but who really just wanted to read and write and watch movies, I felt like a contradiction, too. I was a brown girl with nerdy interests. I liked to watch professional wrestling. I wrote role-play letters with my best friends based on John Jakes’s Civil War drama North and South. I spent PE class alone, as far away as I could get from the threat of a ball to the face, reading. But in all the books I read, not one was about a brown girl who felt like she never quite fit in. We were so absent from the pages of my books that I never even imagined our stories could live there.
The Outsiders ends with Ponyboy thinking about a paper he has to write for his English class. His teacher tells him he can write about something that is important to him. He thinks about his friends and their experiences, everything wrong and everything good in their lives. “Someone should tell their side of the story, and maybe people would understand then…It was important to me.” So he decides to write about his own world, not as the Socs see it and not as the newspapers portray it. He writes about his world so that others know it as he experiences it.
I didn’t know what it was like to be a poor white boy from Oklahoma, but I knew what it was like to feel Outside, Other, to not see myself or my world in media or, when I did see it, to see it distorted through someone else’s eyes. The Outsiders was an early mirror, as well as an inspiration to — as Ponyboy did — write what was missing.
From the May/June 2018 Horn Book Magazine: Special Issue: Making a Difference. For more in this series click the tag Book That Changed My Life.
Champion: The Comeback of the
American Chestnut Tree
by Sally M. Walker
Intermediate, Middle School Holt 136 pp.
3/18 978-1-250-12523-1 $17.99
e-book ed. 978-1-250-12524-8 $9.99
The American chestnut tree once dotted the landscape in the eastern United States, but a mysterious blight began to wipe the trees out in the early twentieth century due to a fungus accidentally imported with Japanese and Chinese chestnut trees. The first line of defense was to inoculate the trees with a vaccine developed from the resistant trees, but more recently, scientists have turned their attention to “backcross breeding” the various chestnut tree strains. With both historical and contemporary black-and-white photographs (which are somewhat muddy; an eight-page color insert is more eye-pleasing), occasional maps, and sidebar digressions into scientific concepts, this book seamlessly incorporates both history and science — as many of Walker’s books do (Frozen Secrets, rev. 11/10; Blizzard of Glass, rev. 11/11; Their Skeletons Speak, rev. 11/12; among many others). Walker reveals her personal connection to this subject in an appended author’s note: for a high school project she was required to use leaves from any number of trees — except for the American chestnut, her father’s favorite, which the teacher mistakenly described as extinct. Other back matter includes source notes, glossary, index, and four appendices.
From the May/June 2018 issue of The Horn Book Magazine: Special Issue: Making a Difference.
Baby June’s Newsboys, courtesy of the Hillbarn Players, www.hillbarntheatre.org
Don’t forget to tune in to the Horn Book’s Facebook page tomorrow at noon, when the Globe’s Emily Procknal and I will be on Facebook Live announcing the winners of the 2018 Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards. In hopes that the broadcast will not be unintentionally hilarious, Em and I are having breakfast tomorrow to make sure we can pronounce everybody’s name.
Frank Doubleday, who played a henchman in “Escape From New York,” died on March 3, his wife and companion Christina Hart posted confirmed in a Facebook post.
from Yahoo Movies https://ift.tt/2ITEo7I
Ralph Macchio, William Zabka, and Martin Kove talk about the surprising twists of their "Karate Kid" reboot, "Cobra Kai."
from Yahoo Movies https://ift.tt/2xpYKQA
With the new sequel's release just weeks away, there'a a brick-asaurus invasion closer to home.
from Yahoo Movies https://ift.tt/2kzx9mX
Alden Ehrenreich and the cast of "Solo: A Star Wars Story" answer a series of burning questions.
from Yahoo Movies https://ift.tt/2L9GNYF
In revealing interview with Jamie Foxx, "dangerous man" Vince Vaughn recounts his biggest roles and new challenges.
from Yahoo Movies https://ift.tt/2JgxwAD
19-year-old Bechet Dumaine Allen is shutting down accusations against her father.
from Yahoo Movies https://ift.tt/2H1X6nS
Catch up on your pop culture news with our roundup of today's top stories.
from Yahoo Movies https://ift.tt/2xsyDZy
The film marks the directorial debut of Todd McFarlane from his scripted adaptation of his comic book creation.
from Yahoo Movies https://ift.tt/2H0Jbyp
The content is strictly copyrighted to the Admin and may not be reproduced without permission.
© 2014 Designed by Imran