Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech

Walk Two Moons is a book about Salamanca Tree Hiddle, also known as Sal, who travels across the country with her grandparents to Idaho to find her mother. This travelogue describes Sal’s adventures, as well as memories of the time she spent with her mother before she abandoned Sal and her father while on vacation. At the end of the novel, we discover the truth about Sal’s mother, and follow Sal as she discovers who she is as a person within her own culture. Sal’s mother is Native American (although they prefer the term Indian) and Sal recalls different cultural traditions that her mother would uphold in her childhood. In Sal’s journey, she also discovers more about this culture and learns how to adopt it into her own life.

This book is written as a first person narrative travelogue. The travel narrative could make for interesting activities if students were to map out Sal’s journey. I also liked that in addition to Sal’s story, we also get to know Phoebe Winterbottom, Sal’s friend with an interesting life. The text is easy to read, so I would mark it at a sixth grade reading level.

While the book is excellently written and has won a Newberry award, Sharon Creech is not Native American. I expected this book to have more culturally rich detail, however, there is certainly a gap between the author’s experiences with Native Americans and the reality of Native American assimilated culture. While I would recommend this book for a good read, I do not think it is multicultural enough for students to understand something about Native American culture. 

Street Love by Walter Dean Myers

Street Love by Walter Dean Myers

Street Love published by Amistad, 2006

Street Love is a modern take on the Shakespearean classic Romeo and Juliet.  Narrated in flowing free verse poetry, Street Love follows the romance of Damien and Janice, two teens with seemingly nothing in common.  For Damien, the sky is the limit.  He is a star athlete who also shines in the classroom.  The prestigious Brown University and the American Dream seem to be foregone conclusions.  All of this is made possible by his parents’ support.  Janice’s life could not be more different.  Her mother is serving a twenty five year sentence for possessing drugs which leaves Janice to care for her younger sister and her aging grandmother.  Janice’s life seems to be just another chapter in a never ending cycle of poverty and general familial turmoil.  Her father, like her grandfather before him, is nowhere to be seen.  Janice catches    

Damien’s eye and their unlikely romance struggles to remain airborne.  Will they succeed against all odds? 

Myers’ Street Love is without a doubt a masterpiece.  Myers’ use of poetry as a narrative technique is uncannily accessible for any reader and seems to pull you into the story.  Street Love would be an excellent way to introduce students to poetry as a narrative model for middle school students.  Myers’, as usual, is unafraid to approach tough real life issues like drug abuse and poverty while still making the book appropriate for middle school readers.   I would definitely teach this book in my classroom.  The educational potential is simply astounding.  Tough cultural, social, and economic themes coupled with an engaging but also unique style make this book a no brainer for any middle school classroom.

Double Dutch, by Sharon Draper

Novels about sports are always a bit iffy--either you have the right ratio of sports descriptions to other significant plot advancements, or the sports details overtake the rest of the book, which doesn't seem too meaningful. This book tries to avoid having too much emphasis on the double dutch aspect so as to move the plot along, but in doing so, it doesn't necessarily have a quality narrative apart from the sporting component.

This novel tells the story of 8th grader Delia, an African American girl on a double dutch team. Double dutch is her passion, which I really liked, because I think it's good to demonstrate to students that you can have passions that are different from your peers. Double dutch is a skill/hobby that is not often presented in young adult sport novels--it's usually either basketball, running, etc. But double dutch is a more quirky sport, which made those parts of the novel compelling.

The other layer of Delia, though, pertains to her inability to read--a secret which she has kept from her teachers, parents, coach, and teammates. This renders her frustrated and embarrassed in school on a regular basis, yet she can't really do anything about it until she decides to tell her parents. My question about this, though, was how realistic is it to have a 14 year old girl whose parents haven't noticed that their daughter can't read? Really? In the scene where Delia reveals to her mother that she can't read, they go out to dinner at a Chinese restaurant, and Delia cannot read the menu, which frustrates her so much that she cries. Then she tells her mother the truth, at which point her mom obviously arranges to help Delia overcome this by working with her teachers, and getting her reading tutoring.

There is a subplot pertaining to Delia's friend Randy, who hasn't seen his dad in several weeks. This storyline is resolved by a tornado, which hits the town where Delia and Randy live, and brings everyone in the school, including two major school bullies, together. There is also a culminating double dutch competition. It ends how you would expect it to. Delia can read. Randy's dad also shows up at the tournament.

The book was okay; not great. The language is a bit juvenile, and the fact that Delia's parents didn't know she couldn't read was a little unrealistic and annoying. I'd say 6th graders through 8th graders could read it.

Things Not Seen

Things Not Seen, Andrew Clements, Scholastic, 2002.  

Things Not Seen tells the story of Bobby Phillips, a fifteen-year-old boy, who wakes up one morning to find himself invisible.  Bobby learns that adults do not always have all the answers when his professor and scientist parents are at a loss as for what to do.  Unable to go to school, Bobby’s boredom soon leads him to venture outside and test the limits of exploration as an invisible person.  He meets a blind girl named Alicia in the library, and they eventually form an unlikely friendship.  Alicia’s struggles with the incident that blinded her and changed her life forever make her understanding of what Bobby is going through.  Their families meet, and Alicia’s astronomer dad helps Bobby’s father as the characters race to find a cure for Bobby’s invisibility before his status as a missing child gets his parents into legal trouble.

This novel would work for a middle-school audience even though its protagonist is high-school age.  The writing style is straightforward and easy to understand.  Parental authority versus personal autonomy is a theme the protagonist struggles with, and this is a concept many young adolescents deal with on a daily basis.  Identity is also a main theme, because the time Bobby spends invisible helps him to decide who he is when everything he is normally judged by, and normally judges others by, disappears. 

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian

Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, 2007

In Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, Junior is a high school freshman who has chosen to leave his home school on the Spokane Indian Reservation and attend Reardan, an all-white school in a more prosperous area.  Junior suffers from a disease he dubs, “water on the brain,” and the physical effects of this disease have made fitting in hard for him at his old school.  Eventually, a conversation with a former teacher convinces Junior to seek other horizons.  Junior’s decision is viewed as betrayal by his fellow Spokane Indians, and even his best friend gets angry and shuns him.  Things aren’t much better at Junior’s new school, where the racist, white, farming population views him as a threat and an outsider.  Despite the challenges of feeling accepted by neither group, Junior perseveres and eventually gains the respect and friendship of some students at Reardan.  Where Junior really earns the chance to shine is on the basketball court.  Twice, Junior’s new team faces off against his old one, and Junior goes head-to-head with his former best friend.  Junior also experiences several tragedies in his family life, all of which center around alcohol use.  

This novel would work well in middle school classrooms, although some discussion of masturbation occurs and could be potentially problematic.  Alcohol and abuse also play a role in the plot, and for this reason, the book might be best suited to 8^th grade students or students who are mature enough to handle such heavy and controversial topics.  Themes of family, identity, friendship, and acceptance would appeal to most readers, and the basketball scenes would be of special interest to students in athletics.  The fact that this novel also uses cartoons and drawings frequently makes the book more exciting and accessible to readers of varying strengths and ages.