The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Alexie, S. (2007). The absolutely true diary of a part-time Indian. New York: Little, Brown and Company. ISBN-10: 0-316-01368-4

Why read this book

Read what an American Indian thinks it’s like to be an American Indian. No, they didn’t all die a hundred years ago, and no, they aren’t all rich from casino profits. They still suffer tremendously from the loss of their land and their culture. It ain’t pretty, but you owe it to them to know more about it.

Plot summary

Arnold Spirit Junior is a 14-year-old Spokane Indian. He’s grown up on a reservation – the rez – in eastern Washington state. High school starts badly. In a scene reminiscent of Little Man’s first day in first grade in Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, when Junior’s geometry teacher passes out the textbooks, Junior finds his mother’s name on the inside cover from when she used the book 30 years earlier. Junior loses it and throws the book fiercely at … his teacher. Junior’s not a bad kid, and he didn’t really mean to hit the teacher. He was just pissed. And he got suspended for a week, during which the very same geometry teacher visits him at home and lays it all out: Junior, you’re smart, the reservation is going to kill you, and you have to get out as soon as you can. Junior is smart. The next day he gets his dad to take him to the white town 22 miles away and he enrolls in the white high school.

It’s a big move. None of the white kids pay any attention to him for months, and everybody on the rez thinks he’s a traitor, including Rowdy, his best friend, the toughest guy in his class, the guy who protects Junior when everybody else is picking on him. Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention. Junior had “water on the brain” when he was born. He had major brain surgery when he was just a baby. He had seizures for years. He still looks a little weird. So he gets beat up a lot. But Rowdy has always protected him, and now Rowdy hates Junior’s guts for leaving the rez.

Except Junior hasn’t really left the rez. He still lives there with his parents, hitchhiking back and forth to school. It’s a tough life, but there’s some good things, too. The white kids at his new school gradually figure out that Junior is a pretty cool guy. A beautiful white freshmen girls gets kind of interested in him, and one of the brainy white kids realizes that Junior is more interesting than most of the other kids in school, and they all realize that Junior is a pretty good basketball player. So this story is about how Junior deals with his people on the rez hating him for leaving and the white folks kind of liking him and how a young Indian boy honors the history and the reality of being an Indian while moving onward into a world bigger than the rez, which, after all, has always just been a big Indian prison.

Critical evaluation

The Absolutely True Diary is a bold book. Junior is a bold narrator, letting us know that he masturbates and he enjoys it and he doesn’t feel guilty because everyone does it and everyone enjoys it, for example. It’s a bold book because Sherman Alexie doesn’t pull any punches about the way alcohol has destroyed so many Indian lives. It’s bold because it isn’t a story about an Indian kid getting treated badly by his white classmates. There aren’t many villains in this book, just a lot of alcohol and history. It’s a bold book because it directly expresses some harsh realities but puts them in the mouth of a narrator who is so engaging that we can accept those realities as realities rather than sloganeering. Take these brilliant true statements:

I’m fourteen years old and I’ve been to forty-two funerals.

That’s really the biggest difference between Indians and white people (p. 199).

My dad was trying to comfort me. But it’s not too comforting to learn that your sister was TOO FREAKING DRUNK to feel any pain when she BURNED TO DEATH! (p. 205)

Reservations were meant to be prisons, you know? Indians were supposed to move onto reservations and die. We were supposed to disappear.

But somehow or another, Indians have forgotten that reservations were meant to be death camps (p. 216-217).

Roxburgh (2005) says that effective use of causality is a key to good literature, young adult or otherwise. In The Absolutely True Diary, Sherman Alexis makes causality a theme. As tragedy mounts on tragedy during the story, Arnold can’t help but think that his abandonment of his reservation is the cause of it all. Look at his sister Mary, who had lived in the basement for years until, inspired by Arnold leaving the reservation, she met a Montana Indian at a casino, moved back to Montana with him, married him, and died with him in a horrible fire. How can Arnold not think that he caused this misery? Alexie makes a bold statement when Arnold realizes that it’s okay to have dreamed of a bigger world despite being an Indian:

I realized that, sure, I was a Spokane Indian. I belong to that tribe. But I also belonged to the tribe of American immigrants. And to the tribe of basketball players. And to the tribe of bookworms. … of cartoonists … of chronic masturbators … of teenage boys … of small-town kids … of Pacific Northwesterners … of tortilla chips-and-salsa lovers … of poverty … of funeral-goers … of beloved sons … of boys who really missed their best friends (p. 217)

Alexie has given teens a marvelous model of someone who can honor the person history has made of him and also transcend that history to be who he needs to be for himself.

About the author

According to a recent New York Times article, Sherman Alexie has called The Absolutely True Diary “an extremely faithful recounting of his experience growing up poor on the Spokane tribal reservation in eastern Washington State” (Konigsberg, 2009). Like Arnold, Alexie is a Spokane Indian who was born with hydrocephalus, grew up on the rez, left it to attend high school in the nearest white town, and was a pretty good basketball player (Alexie, 2009). The Absolutely True Diary, which won the National Book Award for young adult literature in 2007, was Alexie’s first young-adult novel, but he was already well known as the author of 18 volumes of poetry and fiction.

In an interview with young-adult author Rita Williams-Garcia, Alexie responded to a question about “the story decision that you are most proud of” in The Absolutely True Diary:

I suppose I’m most proud of telling the story in first person. I worried that my highly autobiographical novel would be just thinly disguised memoir if I wrote in the first person. And I was equally worried about writing yet another first-person YA novel, featuring yet another highly sensitive protagonist. So, yes, I did write an early draft in the third person, but that narrative distance created an emotional distance as well. And I realized that I was afraid of the first person because I was afraid of my own history. I’m not a fearful person, onstage or in my books or anywhere else, so I was nearly debilitated by my fear. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to finish the book (Williams-Garcia, n.d.).

Genre: Life is hard, American Indian

Curriculum ties

United States History – This novel would bring both an updating and a reality check to the topic of American Indians in United States history. Indians drop out of the traditional narrative in the late 1800s, and this novel could help make the connection between then and now. History teachers could use this novel to explore the legacy of the genocide of American Indians.

Book-talking ideas

• Read from the first chapter, where Arnold introduces himself. His first-person narration should capture the interest of potential readers. Show examples of the cartoons that are embedded in the novel.

• Read excerpts from the section about the first basketball encounter between Reardon (white) High and Wellpinit (Indian) High (p. 142-146). This section will catch the interest of the sports fans without revealing the resolution that occurred during the second encounter between the two schools.

Reading level/interest age

The reading level, the directness of the narrative, and the cartoons in the book make it accessible to middle school students, and the emotional intensity makes it compelling to older teens.

Challenge issues

The only sex in the story is the enthusiastic endorsement of masturbation (p. 25-26). The themes are very political, and the criticisms of both whites and Indians could be a problem for some people.

Responses

• Remind the challenger of the policy (in the case of the San Francisco Public Library) to present “all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”

• Inform the challenger that the book won the National Book Award for young adult fiction in 2007, one of the highest literary honors in the United States.

• Remind the reader that the book is largely autobiographical. It is an authentic and important expression of Indianness in the United States today.

Why I chose to read this book

Every librarian and English teacher whom I asked for recommendations on young adult literature mentioned this book. I am especially interested in multicultural literature, and I think that recognition of the genocide of Indians in the United States is one of the most important unacknowledged political/cultural issues in our society today.

References

Alexie, S. (2009, March). Official Sherman Alexie biography. Retrieved October 30, 2009, from http://www.fallsapart.com/biography.html

Konigsberg, E. (2009, October 20). In his own literary world, a native son without borders. The New York Times. Retrieved October 30, 2009, from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/books/21alexie.html?_r=1

Roxburgh, S. (2005, Winter). The art of the young adult novel. The ALAN Review, 4-10. Retrieved August 23, 2009, from http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ALAN/v32n2/

Williams-Garcia, R. (n.d.). 2007 National Book Award young people’s literature winner interview with Sherman Alexie. National Book Foundation. Retrieved October 30, 2009, from http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2007_ypl_alexie_interv.html

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry

Taylor, M. D. (1991). Roll of thunder, hear my cry. New York: Puffin Books. ISBN 0-14-034893-X. Originally published in 1976.

Why read this book

Learn what bittersweet means from this story of life in rural Mississippi during the Great Depression. Bitter is the racism that black people experienced daily. Sweet is the land, the family, the people who share your struggles and your happiness.

Plot summary

Cassie Logan is an eight-year-old who lives with her older brother Stacey, her younger brothers Christopher-John and Little Man, Mama, Papa, their grandmother Big Ma, and Mr. Morrison on 400 acres of their own land in Mississippi cotton country during the early 1930s. Papa is a hard-working, loving father who has to spend much of the year working on the railroad in Louisiana to get the cash to pay the mortgage and the taxes on their land. Mama teaches seventh grade in the local black school, and she and Big Ma keep the household running while Papa is away. Mr. Morrison is a giant of a man, older than Papa, who comes to live with the family when tensions build between black families in the area, most of whom are sharecroppers, and the local white community.

Trouble starts when drunken white owners of the local store burn three black men whom they have accused of flirting with a white woman. Mama and Papa Logan quietly organize their neighbors to boycott the local store by traveling to Vicksburg, the nearest large town, to buy their household items. The major local landowner decides to make a grab for the Logan land, which his family has coveted since Papa’s grandfather purchased it from them during Reconstruction. First the white school board fires Mama from her teaching job, seriously jeopardizing the Logan financial situation. Then the white storeowners attack Papa, Stacey, and Mr. Morrison late at night when they are returning from a trip to Vicksburg. How far will this struggle escalate, as the Logan family navigates the difficult ground between preserving their dignity and provoking an onslaught against the black community?

Critical evaluation

Roll of Thunder is a well-crafted story. It provides a good example of what Stephen Roxburgh (2005) describes as the importance of causality in fiction. Minor events laid out at the beginning of the story reveal their relevance as the narrative builds to a climax, such as the interest that T.J., a friend of the Logan children, shows in a small revolver for sale in a neighboring town. The complex relationships between characters shape the narrative, as when Stacey must decide to help T.J. despite T.J.’s earlier betrayal of the Logan family that helped cost Mama her teaching job. Cassie’s first-person narration is skillfully employed to imbue the story with a lively spirit, but Taylor doesn’t hesitate to make an eavesdropper out of Cassie to gain some of the advantages of an omniscient third-person narration.

Still it is hard not to think that Taylor has pulled some of her punches because she was writing for young adults. There is no questioning the authenticity of her story, as she has often explained how it derives from her own family’s experience living in Mississippi since the days of slavery (Taylor, 2004). Her story doesn’t sugarcoat the oppressive nature of the white power structure, but it lacks the bite of Anne Moody’s autobiography Coming of Age in Mississippi (2004), which takes place at nearly the same time in nearly the same place as Roll of Thunder. Having read Coming of Age before Roll of Thunder, I read the latter in dread of the assault that I assumed was coming on the Logan family. In the end, Papa’s cleverness averts disaster in a dénouement that seem more akin to a made-for-television movie than the lived experiences of many black families in Mississippi before the Civil Rights Movement.

About the author

Mildred D. Taylor was born in Mississippi in 1943 and moved with her family to Toledo, Ohio, when she was an infant. She describes continual comings and goings among her extended family between Toledo and the family farm in Mississippi, including many summers spent on the farm. She also describes her father’s storytelling talents and credits him and other family members with passing on the family history that she writes about (Taylor, 2004). In addition to Roll of Thunder, Taylor has written six other books that feature Cassie Logan and her ancestors. Some are written for children and others for young adults (Penguin Books, 2000).

Genre: Historical fiction, African American

Curriculum ties

U.S. history — Roll of Thunder is an excellent book for teaching and learning about racism, other social conditions, and economic conditions in the Jim Crow South between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement.

Book-talking ideas

• Read a fun part of the story, such as the rainy day that the Logan children skip lunch and dig a trench across the road so that the white school bus, which has been harassing them on their walk to school, ends up getting stuck.

• Read a more harrowing part of the story, such as when Papa, Stacey, and Mr. Morrison are attacked on their way home from Vicksburg.

Reading level/interest age

I agree with the publisher’s listing of “10 and up” as the appropriate age for readers of Roll of Thunder (Penguin Books, 2000). The central role of the children in the narrative and the straight-forward plot and language mean that the book is accessible to younger readers, but the historical significance of the story and the quality of the storytelling are such that many older teens will also find it worthwhile. I would encourage older teens to read Coming of Age In Mississippi (see above) in addition to Roll of Thunder.

Challenge issues

Taylor has noted that her books have been challenged for use of the n-word (Taylor, 2004, p. 8), although the word does not figure prominently in Roll of Thunder.

Responses

• Remind the challenger of the policy (in the case of the San Francisco Public Library) to present “all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”

• Remind the reader that Taylor is African American and is writing about her own family, which means she is entitled to choose whatever vocabulary she wants.

• Remind the reader that the book is a part of the canon of young adult literature and therefore has both historical and literary significance.

Why I chose to read this book

Since reading a Horn Book essay on multicultural literature for another course, I have wanted to read Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.

References

Moody, A. (2004). Coming of age in Mississippi. New York: Delta Trade Paperbacks.

Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers (2000). Mildred D. Taylor. Penguin.com USA. Retrieved October 27, 2009, from http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Author/AuthorPage/0,,1000031974,00.html

Roxburgh, S. (2005, Winter). The art of the young adult novel. The ALAN Review, 4-10. Retrieved August 23, 2009, from http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ALAN/v32n2/

Taylor, M. D. (2004, May-August). My life as a writer. World Literature Today 78(2), 7-10. Retrieved October 27, 2009, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40158384

Speak

Anderson, L. H. (1999). Speak. New York: Penguin Group. ISBN 0-14-240732-1

Why read this book
Meet Melinda, who is beginning her high school career with a bundle of problems, not the least of which is that she called the police in on a back-to-school party where all the coolest kids at school were having a great time.

Plot summary
Like most students entering ninth grade, Melinda is a bit nervous, but she has more reason to be than most. Word is out that she’s the one who called the police to bust up a big party held right before school started. None of her middle school friends will talk to her, and none of the older students pay any attention to her, either, except for senior Andy Evans, whose attentions are wholly unwanted. But it’s kind of okay with Melinda that almost no one is talking to her, because she doesn’t want to talk to anyone anyway. Not her parents, not her teachers, not her classmates. She is greatly relieved when she finds a janitor’s closet at school where she can hide out during the day. Art class is the only place where she will even consider expressing herself. The adults all think she’s just being a difficult teenager, but there’s more to the story than that. Doesn’t anyone care why she had to call the police?

Critical evaluation
Speak is a powerfully told story, primarily for two reasons. First, Melinda’s voice as first-person narrator is captivating. She’s clever:

The climax of mating season is nearly upon us – the Senior Prom. They should cancel school this week. … The gossip energy alone could power the building’s electricity for the rest of the marking period (p. 176).

She’s perceptive:

I’ve been going to most of my classes. Good girl, Mellie. Roll over, Mellie. Sit, Mellie. No one has patted me on the head, though. I passed an algebra test, I passed an English test, I passed a biology test. Well, hallelujah. It is all so profoundly stupid. Maybe this is why kids join clubs – to give them something to think about during class (p. 143).

She is a classic unreliable narrator (Roxburgh, 2005, p. 7-8). She can’t speak. She can’t tell us what happened at the back-to-school party. She can’t verbalize the most important event that is shaping her narrative. And that’s the second reason the narrative is so powerful. Like Melinda, we readers are in unknown territory. We feel her inability to verbalize her pain as our own suspense and bewilderment. Our resolution will not come until she finds hers, which is a very effective narrative strategy.

About the author
Laurie Halse Anderson was born in upstate New York in 1961. She graduated from Georgetown University in 1984 with a degree in languages and linguistics. Speak was her first young adult novel to be published, although she had previously published children’s books and she began the young adult historical novel Fever, 1793 (2000) before Speak. Speak was a commercial and critical success, winning numerous awards. Anderson has followed it up with both young adult fiction (Catalyst, 2002; Prom, 2005; Twisted, 2008; Wintergirls, 2009) and young adult historical fiction (Chains, 2008) (Anderson, S. H., 2008).

Genre: Life is hard

Curriculum ties
Speak would be a great read in a high school literature class. It is an engaging narration of a story with important social implications, and it stands up to literary analysis. The symbolism around trees is a little obvious, but that’s not a bad thing in a high school literature class. Curriculum guides for teachers are available on Anderson’s Web site.

Book-talking ideas
• Reading any of Melinda’s first-person narration is likely to engage potential readers. For better or worse, the social topic that the book explores can’t be the focus of a book talk without spoiling the story.
• Show a clip from the film that was based on the novel.

Reading level/interest age
Although the central topic of the book is difficult, it remains off-stage through most of the book, which means that even younger teens are likely to handle the book okay. Readers understand the powerful impact of the dark event not through explicit description but through its ongoing consequences for the narrator. Most middle school and high school libraries in the San Francisco Unified School District include multiple copies of Speak.

Challenge issues
Although there is no explicit sex in the novel, some adults might object that the topic of sexual assault is inappropriate for younger teens.

Responses
• Remind the challenger of the policy (in the case of the San Francisco Public Library) to present “all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”
• Direct the challenger to the long list of positive reviews and awards on the author’s Web site.

Why I chose to read this book
A friend who is a librarian told me that any novel by Laurie Halse Anderson is worth reading. She was right about this one.

References
Anderson, S. H. (2008). Officially long official biography of Laurie Halse Anderson. Laurie Halse Anderson. Retrieved October 25, 2009, from www.writerlady.com

Roxburgh, S. (2005, Winter). The art of the young adult novel. The ALAN Review, 4-10. Retrieved August 23, 2009, from http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ALAN/v32n2/

Santa Claus in Baghdad

Marston, E. (2008). Santa Claus in Baghdad and other stories about teens in the Arab world. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-22004-2

Why read this book

Do you worry about terrorists and religious fundamentalists taking over the Middle East? Read these stories to meet young people from the region who are more like you than you might have imagined.

Plot summary

This collection features eight short stories set in eight places in the Arab world. In Baghdad, a high school student learns the beauty of generosity even as her family’s material well-being diminishes during the international sanctions imposed in the 1990s. In Damascus, a 12-year-old boy says good-bye to his mother as his father reclaims him for life in his father’s new household with a new wife. In Lebanon, a Syrian teenager working as a maid faces a choice between returning to her village to marry a well-off older man or trying to make a life of her own. In Palestine, a boy who has lost his brother and his best friend to the Israeli occupation learns that there are more ways to resist than throwing stones at the Israeli soldiers. In Egypt, a daughter of a middle-class public servant learns the pain of class divisions when she befriends a classmate from a farmer’s family. In Tunisia, a boy who sells souvenirs at a Roman ruin re-imagines his future after befriending an artist. In Jordan, in the most harrowing of these stories, two classmates from different sides of the fundamentalist divide find common ground when the cousin of one is threatened with an “honor” killing because she has spoken in public with a man. In a lighter-hearted final story, a high school student in a Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon schemes to introduce his older brother to his beautiful new art teacher.

Critical evaluation

These are quiet, mostly small stories of everyday life that provide an important alternative to the stereotypes of life in the Middle East that emerge from most western media. As short stories, the character development is limited, yet we quickly come to see that the protagonists are thoughtful young people who draw on the cultural traditions in which they have been raised to confront difficult circumstances. The conflicts in these stories arise from divisions within society that the protagonists must negotiate. Most dramatic is the division based on religion in the story about “honor” killings in Jordan, but more common are divisions based on politics (Baghdad, Palestine, and the Palestine refugee camp) and class (Lebanon, Egypt, and Tunisia). Most intimate is the story from Damascus in which the boy confronts the division of his family following his parents’ divorce. The strength of the stories is that they provide the “heightened sense of awareness” that Stephen Roxburgh describes when explaining why it is important that we read stories set outside the United States (2004, p. 50). As in, “So, in Syria the father usually takes custody of the children after a divorce, and the children must bond with a new mother. That’s interesting. I wonder how that works.”

About the author

Elsa Marston was born in Massachusetts in 1933 and spent her youth in the Boston area, where her father was a professor of English at Northeastern University. She earned a B.A. in American civilization at the University of Iowa, an M.A. in international affairs at Harvard University, and an M.S. in art education at Indiana University. She studied Middle Eastern history at the American University of Beirut and lived in the Middle East for many years. She writes mostly for younger teens, and her works include fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. Her non-fiction includes both history (ancient civilizations in the eastern Mediterranean) and contemporary topics (Women in the Middle East: Tradition and Change, which she wrote with her son Ramsay M. Harik). She currently lives in Bloomington, Indiana (biography.jrank.org, n.d.; Elsa Marston children’s author, n.d.).

Genre: Contemporary life, International

Curriculum ties

Modern world history, international relations — Santa Claus in Baghdad would be a good introduction to a unit on the contemporary Middle East. The stories put human faces on the political, social, and economic issues of the region, and the notes at the end of the book provide an introduction to particular issues that are referenced in the stories.

Book-talking ideas

• Show a clip from the film version of the short story Santa Claus in Baghdad and invite students to read the original.

• Read short excerpts of the various conflicts that the protagonists confront, such as Aneesi’s desire to make a life for herself in Beruit rather than marry a man in her home village (“The Hand of Fatima”) and Yasmine’s dilemma about whether to tell her journalist mother about the danger that her classmate’s cousin faces (“Honor”). Point out both similarities and differences in the lives of these teenagers and the lives of the potential readers.

Reading level/interest age

Although most of Elsa Marston’s work is for younger readers, Santa Claus in Baghdad is listed as teen fiction in the San Francisco Public Library catalog. The reading level is suitable for many middle school students, but the contemporary issues embedded in the stories would be of interest to high school students.

Challenge issues

Given the political climate concerning Middle Eastern issues, any stories set in the region might be controversial for some library patrons. Some supporters of Israel might object that the Israeli view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not presented. Some Moslems might feel that centering one of the stories on “honor” killings contributes to stereotypes of Arab culture.

Responses

• Remind the challenger of the policy (in the case of the San Francisco Public Library) to present “all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”

• Point out that the stories present multiple perspectives on the issues that they raise, such as the Israeli soldier who sympathizes with the teen who is resisting the destruction of the village’s olive trees.

• Remind the challenger of the importance of people in the United States understanding all sides of issues in the Middle East, where United States foreign policy is a significant factor in many economic, political, and social developments.

Why I chose to read this book

As a world history teacher and an internationalist, I am interested in stories that explore life outside the United States. I prefer stories written by people who live where the stories are set, but there aren’t a lot of choices.

References

biography.jrank.org (n.d.). Elsa Marston (1933 – ) biography – personal, career, member, honors awards, writing, sidelights. Retrieved October 25, 2009, from http://biography.jrank.org/pages/1090/Marston-Elsa-1933.html

Elsa Marston children’s author (n.d.). Retrieved October 25, 2009, from http://www.elsamarston.com/index.htm

Roxburgh, S. (2004, January). The myopic American. School Library Journal 50(1), 48-50. Retrieved on September 6, 2009, from http://vnweb.hwwilsonweb.com/hww/jumpstart.jhtml?recid=0bc05f7a67b1790e4741fae46b91d0b76b0b548d3b3b9feacaae1a7be962700181f025e7d59f1416&fmt=

Shipwrecks

Yoshimura, A. (1996). Shipwrecks (Mark Ealey, Trans.). New York: Harcourt Brace & Company. ISBN: 0-15-100211-8

Why read this book

If you’ve wondered what life was like before the Internet, computers, television, and electricity, you might want to visit the world of Isaku, who lived in a village on the Japanese coast before the Industrial Revolution created the world we know today. Was life better when people lived closer to nature?

Plot summary

Isaku is a nine-year-old boy who lives in an isolated coastal village in pre-industrial Japan. The 17 families in the village support themselves by harvesting food from the sea and from the forests that cover the steep mountains that surround them. They farm a little, but the land doesn’t yield much, and they live in constant fear of starvation.

Isaku’s father has sold himself into three years of indentured labor outside the village to secure cash to buy grain from more prosperous villages several days walk away. “Don’t let the children starve” are his father’s parting words to his mother, who knows no joy as she struggles to keep Isaku, his younger brother, and his two younger sisters alive in his father’s absence.

At nine years old, Isaku is expected to labor like a man, going out to sea in his father’s small boat when there are fish, squid, or octopus to catch, foraging in the woods for bark from linden trees that his mother can work into thread and weave into cloth, and manning the fires all night under the caldrons where sea water is boiled away to produce salt for trade with outside villages.

Isaku soon learns the village’s dark secret about the salt caldrons. They boil at night because the night fires have the potential to confuse sailors on the boats that carry rice and other products along the coast. Especially when the weather is bad and the sailors are looking for a safe harbor, sailing toward the fires can land them on the reef just outside the breakers, and the villagers can pillage the ship for food they could never produce in their isolated coastal valley. They call a wrecked boat o-fune-sama, a blessing that can stay their hunger for two or three years and keep them from selling themselves into bondage outside the village. Is it a sin to lure sailors to their death to save their own lives?

Critical evaluation

Akira Yoshimura’s stark narrative reveals the beauties and the perils of living close to nature. His vivid descriptions of the changing seasons and the rhythm of the village economy as it shifts from one resource to another in search of sustenance cannot transcend the grimness of the villagers’ struggle to live. Isaku’s mother’s sorrow at the absence of her husband, Isaku’s struggle to provide as well as his father, and the villagers’ fear that their pillaging of a ship will be discovered by authorities from the outside create a mood of quiet desperation. And that’s before the real tragedy strikes. It’s hard not to imagine that Yoshimura’s goal in recreating life in a Japanese coastal village was a reaction against the romanticizing of pre-industrial life by authors like Yukio Mishima. And that’s why I would encourage young adults to read Shipwrecks. This short, simple novel transports readers to a world we will never know, a world of beauty and brutality that could be a useful measure by which we reflect on our own lives.

About the author

Akira Yoshimura was born in Japan in 1927 and died of pancreatic cancer at his home in Tokyo in July 2006. He wrote more than 20 novels that were best-sellers in Japan, as well as short fiction, non-fiction, essays, literary criticism, and lectures. His works that have been translated into English include:

· Build the Musashi: The Birth and Death of the World's Greatest Battleship, translated by Vincent Murphy (1991).

· Zero Fighter, translated by Retsu Kaiho and Michael Gregson (1996).

· Shipwrecks, translated by Mark Ealey (1996).

· On Parole, translated by Stephen Snyder (1999).

· One Man's Justice, translated by Mark Ealey (2001).

(Akira Yoshimura, 2001)

Genre: Life is hard, International, Crossover, Historical fiction

Curriculum ties

• World history — Shipwrecks paints a valuable picture of what life was like before the Industrial Revolution for a large percentage of the world’s population. Although many villages around the world were not as remote or desperate for food as the village described in Shipwrecks, selected excerpts from the novel could illustrate very well the directness of human dependence on nature for food and the way that most tools and household items were made by hand from local resources.

• Literature — The moral dilemma posed in Shipwrecks should provide rich material for analysis in literature classes. Is it wrong for desperately hungry people to lure ships onto their rocky shoals and kill the crews so they can eat the food the ships are transporting?

Book-talking ideas

• Read a passage that describes Isaku’s workday to make the point that the novel is a window into a past when most people relied directly on nature for all their food and material needs.

• Read from the description of the unloading of the first o-fune-sama that captures the villagers’ joy at receiving the food, explain briefly how the ship came to be wrecked, and pose the moral dilemma that is at the heart of the story.

Reading level/interest age

Given the length of the novel (180 pages), the simplicity of the plot and the vocabulary, and the centrality of the young protagonist, I think that students as young as 9th grade could handle it. Certainly 10th grade Modern World History students could read excerpts that describe pre-industrial life.

Challenge issues

Some Japanese Americans might feel that the desperation described in Shipwrecks is a misrepresentation of Japanese history.

Responses

• Remind the challenger of the policy (in the case of the San Francisco Public Library) to present “all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”

• Inform the challenger that the book was a best-seller in Japan.

• Direct the challenger to the favorable review in The New York Times, which indicates the importance of the book as a representative of Japanese culture on the world stage.

Why I chose to read this book

I read this book when it first appeared in English and thought it would be great to use in high school world history and literature courses. Re-reading it in the context of my expanding knowledge of young adult literature, I’m not so sure. It paints a desperate picture with only the slightest ray of hope at the end, and even that ray is an ambivalent one.

References

Yomiuri (2006, August 26). Novelist Yoshimura ‘sought death with dignity.’ The Daily Yomiuri, p. 3. Retrieved October 13, 2009, from http://www.lexisnexis.com.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/us/lnacademic/results/docview/docview.do?docLinkInd=true&risb=21_T7585749614&format=GNBFI&sort=RELEVANCE&startDocNo=1&resultsUrlKey=29_T7585749621&cisb=22_T7585749620&treeMax=true&treeWidth=0&csi=145202&docNo=25

Akira Yoshimura. (2001) Contemporary Authors Online. Retrieved October 14, 2009, from http://go.galegroup.com.ezproxy.sfpl.org/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=sfpl_main