El Deafo, Cece Bell

Title:  El Deafo
Author:  Cece Bell
Publisher:  Harry N. Abrams
Year:  2014
Pages: 233
Genre:  Memoir, Graphic Novel
Theme:  Disability, Perseverance, Friendship, Self-Esteem
Age Range:  4th-7th Grade

Summary:  from Goodreads

Starting at a new school is scary, even more so with a giant hearing aid strapped to your chest! At her old school, everyone in Cece's class was deaf. Here she is different. She is sure the kids are staring at the Phonic Ear, the powerful aid that will help her hear her teacher. Too bad it also seems certain to repel potential friends. 

Then Cece makes a startling discovery. With the Phonic Ear she can hear her teacher not just in the classroom, but anywhere her teacher is in school--in the hallway...in the teacher's lounge...in the bathroom! This is power. Maybe even superpower! Cece is on her way to becoming El Deafo, Listener for All. But the funny thing about being a superhero is that it's just another way of feeling different... and lonely. Can Cece channel her powers into finding the thing she wants most, a true friend?

Review:
Charming is the first word that comes to mind when I try to describe this graphic novel about a girl (rabbit?!?) with a hearing impairment.  Cece Bell tells her own story in this engaging memoir, which details her bout with meningitis as a toddler, her struggle to learn to lip read, her ambivalence with her hearing aids, and her eventual acceptance of herself exactly the way she is.

Bell grew up in the 1970s, and there are quite a few pop culture references that today's student readers may not get right away.  But I grew up during the same period as Bell, and I found myself fondly remembering times and places from my own childhood.  The setting also highlights the difference in treatment options for children with hearing impairments today, when technology has allowed doctors to return normal or almost normal hearing to many people who would not have been able to hear as well in the past.

What hasn't changed, as far as I can tell, though, is the way that the deaf and hard of hearing are perceived and treated by some in society.  Cece's experiences demonstrate the things that people do, with good intentions or bad, that make people with hearing impairments (or physical or cognitive disabilities) feel like the "other".  Cece was afraid to stand out, didn't want to be noticed for her hearing aids or her awkward speech. She pretended to understand things that she didn't really hear in an effort to "fit in".  She desperately wanted a friend who just treated her like the normal person she really is inside, but the various other children she met during her elementary school years never seemed to be able to totally forget the hearing impairment.  She was the "deaf" friend, the friend who sometimes made unfortunate, laughable mistakes because of her difficulty understanding speech,  and some of the girls who befriended her seemed to be motivated by their own desire to be noticed for their kindness to the "deaf" girl.

There are a few things in this book that might be problematic in a school setting.  It was the 70s, and people smoked in the 70s (including her teacher, which is mentioned one time in one panel).  There is also some bathroom humor involving Cece's ability to hear her teacher while peeing.  I didn't find anything really objectionable, but if you are a teacher, you know your population and what would be acceptable or not.  There are definitely plenty of opportunities for discussion with the themes in this book, and the fact that this is a memoir makes the message even more powerful.

Teacher Resources:
Cece Bell Talking About El Deafo
Cece Bell's Website
Abrams Teaching Guides

Barbed Wire Baseball, Marissa Moss

Title:  Barbed Wire Baseball
Author: Marissa Moss
Publisher:  Harry N. Abrams
Year:  2013
Pages:  48
Genre:  Non-Fiction, Historical
Themes:  World War II, Japanese Internment, Sports, Perseverance
Age Range: 2nd-6th Grade

Summary:  from Goodreads

As a boy, Kenichi “Zeni” Zenimura dreams of playing professional baseball, but everyone tells him he is too small. Yet he grows up to be a successful player, playing with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig! When the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor in 1941, Zeni and his family are sent to one of ten internment camps where more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry are imprisoned without trials. Zeni brings the game of baseball to the camp, along with a sense of hope.

Review;
There are quite a few children's and young adult books out there that describe the experience of Japanese Americans sent to internment camps during World War II.  Books like The Bracelet and  Farewell to Manzanar have become staples of English classes in schools that strive to teach the complete truth about America in regards to its treatment of immigrants generally, and the Japanese Americans specifically.  There is even another book about baseball and the internment camps, called Baseball Saved Us.  Moss' contribution, Barbed Wire Baseball, tells the true story of a famous Japanese American baseball player named Zenichi Zenimura, sent to internment camps in the desert along with tens of thousands of other Japanese.  The story begins when Zeni was a small boy who became determined to become a great baseball player.  Unlike many young boys with the same dream, Zeni actually had the talent to make it a possibility, and the perseverance to make it happen.

Rather than focusing on the day to day life in the camp,  Barbed Wire Baseball details the extraordinary optimism, hard work, and ingenuity displayed by Zeni and the other prisoners at his camp.  Determined to play baseball, no matter the challenges, Zeni has a vision, a dream of a "real" baseball field in the middle of the stony desert.  He plants grass, chalks lines, steals wood to make bleachers for fans, and takes up a collection to buy equipment and uniforms for the players.  Zeni's quest proves the strength of the human spirit when faced with adversity, while highlighting the inherent injustices in this painful period of American history.

The illustrations pair beautifully with the story, done in a quasi-traditional Japanese style, but with American images included.  This picture book would make a good read aloud as a stand alone title, but would be a marvelous addition to a unit about World War II.

Teacher Resources:
Abrams Discussion Guide
Marissa Moss' Website

I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced

Title:  I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced\
Publisher:  Broadway
Year:  2010
Pages: 188
Genre:  Memoir
Themes:  Survival, Social Justice, Feminism
Age Range:  8th Grade and Up

Summary:  (from publisher)
Forced by her father to marry a man three times her age, young Nujood Ali was sent away from her parents and beloved sisters and made to live with her husband and his family in an isolated village in rural Yemen. There she suffered daily from physical and emotional abuse by her mother-in-law and nightly at the rough hands of her spouse. Flouting his oath to wait to have sexual relations with Nujood until she was no longer a child, he took her virginity on their wedding night. She was only ten years old.

Unable to endure the pain and distress any longer, Nujood fled—not for home, but to the courthouse of the capital, paying for a taxi ride with a few precious coins of bread money. When a renowned Yemeni lawyer heard about the young victim, she took on Nujood’s case and fought the archaic system in a country where almost half the girls are married while still under the legal age. Since their unprecedented victory in April 2008, Nujood’s courageous defiance of both Yemeni customs and her own family has attracted a storm of international attention. Her story even incited change in Yemen and other Middle Eastern countries, where underage marriage laws are being increasingly enforced and other child brides have been granted divorces.


Review:
Nujood's story is simply but powerfully written.  Detailing a loss of innocence that was made all the more brutal for coming from the betrayal of her parents, I Am Nujood is both an easy and a difficult read.  While the sexual assaults that she endured daily are only described in much detail once, the effect of it on her is both tragic and ultimately redemptive.  Despite all teachings to the contrary, Nujood refuses to accept that her fate as a woman is to be beaten and raped by her "husband", showing a bravery that not many adult women in repressive societies do.  Her determination to move forward and help other girls is an example to any survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault, whether from countries where the practice is societally supported or from more "enlightened" countries like America, where supposedly we value women more.


But this book is much more than one personal story of survival and redemption.  This book can be used to highlight the very real problem of forced child marriage that exists in parts of the developing world.  Unicef estimates that in Africa, there the practice is prevalent, 42% of girls will be married before the age of 18, many without their consent.  This means that a lack of formal schooling and a separation from the rest of society will only lead to a perpetuation of the cycle for their daughters.  Child marriage is most often the result of poverty combined with a  rigid sense of honor.  This sense of having to "honor" the family by putting up with abuse is pervasive and makes girls in this situation feel ashamed of their desire not to be married.  There is much work to be done to help women world-wide gain the education and rights necessary for them to have true self-determination, not to have to choose between the equally unacceptable alternatives of staying with their family and starving or being forced into a marriage with an older man and enduring whatever abuse he chooses to throw her way.  


While the reading level for this book is quite low, the content is mature, and should it should be read with guidance by younger teens.  I believe that it could be a very powerful book to use in the classroom, however, not necessarily for its literary merit as much as for the issues it raises about human rights.  While the description of Nujood's rape on the first night of her marriage is disturbing, it is not graphic in nature in terms of language.  I believe that it would make an excellent addition to any high school literature or social sciences curriculum, and that it could be used as a jumping-off point for a unit on the status of girl children throughout the world.


Teacher Resources:
Random House Reader's Guide
Human Rights Watch Article About Child Marriage in Yemen

Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters

Title:  Of Thee I Sing:  A Letter to My Daugters
Author:  Barack Obama
Publisher:  Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers
Date:  November 2010
Pages:  40
Genre:  Non-Fiction
Age Range:  Ages 4-8 (I would use it in 4th and 5th grade as well)


Summary:
Of Thee I Sing is a loving tribute to President Obama's daughters, Malia and Sasha.  Mr. Obama uses the personal stories of 13 famous Americans of all races and backgrounds to highlight the traits he believes each of his daughters possesses- creativity, intelligence, bravery, compassion, strength, humility, and kindness.  With beautiful illustrations by Loren Long, this book makes an inspiring story to read with your own children.

Review:
I will admit to some bias in my reasons for buying this book.  I happen to love this particular president, and have read his other books as well.  What makes this book special is two things for me-the multicultural figures Obama uses to highlight each character trait, and the gorgeous illustrations that accompany each person's story.  As a teacher I am routinely frustrated by the token multiculturalism we have in American schools.  Too many people seem to think that if we teach about Martin Luther King Jr. in January and Harriet Tubman and George Washington Carver in February we are somehow being progressive.  This dichotomous view of "diversity" in our schools, the myth that by teaching about a few African-American heroes we are somehow making up for the lack of representation in our history and literature series, leaves out the many children who belong to neither group, or to more than one.  Mr. Obama includes Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, women, men, rich, and poor in his description to his daughters about what makes America the amazing place that it is-and what it takes to make it the more amazing place it can be.  Despite the political rhetoric in Washington, I can feel his continued idealism, and that in itself is a source of hope for me.  For his daughters, this book holds all of the love and hope that their father has for them-and I dare say, for all of our children.

Teacher Resources:
I was unable to find any online teaching resources for this book yet, though I imagine that's at least in part because it only came out a couple of months ago.  I am planning on using it to frame a biography unit, where we will do research on each of the Americans highlighted in the book.   You can also use it to discuss begin a conversation about immigration, since a few of the people named were naturalized citizens.  

The Boy Who Dared, Susan Campbell Bartoletti

Title:  The Boy Who Dared: A Novel Based on a True Story of the Hitler Youth
Author:  Susan Campbell Bartoletti
Publisher:  Scholastic
Pages:  174 plus about 10 pages of photos and a timeline
Genre:  literary non-fiction
Age Range:  6th Grade and Up

Summary:
The year is 1933, and the world is in the grip of the Great Depression.  Germany is especially hard hit, after paying reparations to the rest of Europe after World War I.  Helmuth Hubener is a German schoolboy, playing with toy soldiers on the floor of his small Hamburg apartment, while outside brown shirted men in jackboots have parades in support of their new chancellor, Adolf Hitler.  At first Helmuth is taken in by the shiny uniforms and nationalist pride-until his Jeweish neighbors' shops are burned, and more and more freedoms are curtailed for everyone.  Forced to join the Hitler Youth, he grows more and more angry, until one fateful decision leads to his imprisonment and execution.

Review:   
Even though this is billed as a novel, I am going to call it literary non-fiction.  It reads more like a biography than a novel, and while I'm sure some of the events are completely made-up, there is enough non-fiction here that I am not comfortable calling it fiction.

This book is sparsely written, at times almost too sparsely.  Yet Bartoletti does a good job of setting the mood of Germany during the 1930s and early 1940s.  Without going into too much technical detail, Bartoletti lays out some of the reasons that the Germans turned to Hitler in the first place.  She also shows how the media can be used to incite fear and manipulate people into doing things that go against their nature. The characters are portrayed thoughtfully, with care given not to stereotype.  When Helmuth rejects the Nazis at first, it is just as much because of his dislike of his stepfather as it is about being uncomfortable with the Nazi's restrictive laws.  So often in Holocaust literature the German people are shown to be either indifferent to or in favor of the racism and hatred spread by the Nazi's.  This book shows that some people did try to stand up, and that not every German was in love with Hitler.  Helmuth's character is influenced strongly by his brother Gerhard, who is a voice of reason during Helmuth's teenage years.  Gerhard, however, counsels following Hitler's laws in order to be a patriot (and good Mormon).  In the end Helmuth cannot.

This book would make a good companion book to Number the Stars by Lois Lowry or The Devil's Arithmetic by Jane Yolen.  While most Holocaust fiction focuses on the events around the Jewish internment in concentration camps (and rightly so), there is a place in young adult literature for stories of the ordinary Germans who tried to stand up to the Nazi's.  

Teacher Resources:

Scholastic Discussion Guide 

E-Notes Study Guide 

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

 Thanks to Sheila at One Person's Journey Through Books for hosting this weekly meme, letting book bloggers share what they've been reading.  I tell you, my reading has become so much more diverse since doing this whole book blogging thing!  Thanks to my fellow book bloggers for the inspiration and book ideas!

Another week gone, another week closer to going back to school.  Ah, well, at least I had a good reading week!



Children's/YA Books Completed This Week:

Escape from Saigon, by Andrea Warren

Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, by Rick Riordan

(Review coming soon!)

Adult Fiction Completed This Week:

Another Thing to Fall, by Laura Lippman

Wild Seed, by Octavia Butler

(Review coming soon on Book Addict Reviews )

Books I'm Hoping to Get to This Week:

Stargirl, by Jerry Spinelli (YA)
10 Things I Hate About Me, by Randa Abdel-Fattah (YA)
Mind of my Mind, by Octavia E. Butler

...and whatever else I decide to pick up off the shelf.  After a month of reading for class, I want to keep my options open!

Have a great week, everyone!

Escape from Saigon, by Andrea Warren

Title:  Escape from Saigon: How a Vietnam War Orphan Became and American Boy
Author:  Andrea Warren
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pages:  128
Genre:  Non-Fiction
Age Level:  5th-9th Grade



Summary:
In the terrifying days at the end of the Vietnam war, a young boy named Long was airlifted out of Saigon and taken to the United States in what became known as Operation Babylift.  Hundreds of war orphans were brought to the United States and adopted by loving families.  Long became Matt Steiner, and went on to become a valedictorian, athlete, and doctor with a family of his own. While this tale has a happy ending, one might not have predicted it based on his harrowing early years.  Long barely remembers his American father, but he vividly remembers his mother's suicide.  His devoted grandmother tried as best she could to take care of him, but when she became unable to support him any longer he was sent to live in an orphanage operated by Holt International Children's Services.  This agency housed him, provided schooling, and later made it possible for him to be adopted in the United States.  Finally returning to Vietnam in 1995, Long was amde to understand the sacrifices that his grandmother had made for him.

Review:  
Warren has reason to be interested in this story of survival and triumph-her own daughter was also a child rescued in Operation Babylift.  And a very personal story it is.  Warren uses Long's memories, along with interviews and research regarding other adopted Vietnamese children, to craft a story that is powerful and engaging.  This is a story of a child at war, a child struggling to find his identity in his new land, a child who mourns the loss of his family while going on to become a success in his new home.  This story also details the challenges that Long had coming to terms with his mixed heritage, a theme that could speak to many biracial children in our school, who often don't see themselves represented in mainstream media.  The action is written in a gripping, engaging style that leaves the reader feeling as though they too have witnessed tragedy and incredible acts of heroism.  The passages detailing the airlift are especially gripping, and should grab the attention of even the most reluctant of readers.

Teaching Resources:
This book would make an excellent text to use in any study of immigration.  It is also a good book for teaching about the diversity of the American experience, as Long's journey is very different from most children in America.  Below I've listed some websites where you can find more ideas and specific lesson plans. 

Louisiana Reader's Choice Awards

Bookwizard-Scholastic

Immigration and Diversity Lesson Plans