Left for Dead

Nelson, P. (2002). Left for dead: A young man’s search for justice for the USS Indianapolis. New York: Delacorte Press. With a preface by Hunter Scott. ISBN 0-385-72959-6

Why read this book

The USS Indianapolis participated in 10 major campaigns in the Pacific theater during World War II, delivered one of the world’s first atomic bombs from San Francisco to the Pacific island airfield where it was loaded on an airplane for the trip to Japan, and then a few days later was sunk by a Japanese submarine with the loss of nearly 900 men, the largest loss of life in a single sinking in U.S. naval history. But very few of your parents or grandparents have ever heard this story. Why did it drop out of the history books until a middle school student made it the subject of his History Day research project in the late 1990s?

Summary

Left for Dead is a skillful compilation of three stories connected to the USS Indianapolis. First is the story of its sinking, just days after it delivered one of the two atomic bombs that the United States dropped on Japan to end World War II. Hit by two torpedoes fired by a Japanese submarine, the ship went down in 12 minutes just after midnight on July 30, 1945. Nearly 300 the 1,200-man crew died outright. The survivors were dumped into the Pacific Ocean about 250 miles north of Palau Islands, the closest land, with very few lifeboats or provisions. Within hours sharks began attacking the men as they floated in the water, and it wasn’t until their fifth day in the water that U.S. ships and airplanes arrived on the scene to rescue the survivors. By that time there were only 317 men still alive.

The second story Nelson tells is the court-martial of the captain of the Indianapolis, Captain Charles B. McVay III. Nelson notes that the Navy lost 436 other combat ships during World War II, but McVay was the only captain to be court-martialed. Nelson attributes that to public pressure arising from all the mistakes that led to the sinking of the ship and the delay in rescuing the crew afterward. With the war over and security no longer an issue, newspapers aired the tragedy thoroughly, and the public wanted someone held responsible for the loss of life. To the top Navy brass, that meant court-martialing McVay on two charges, his failure to travel in a zigzag course to diminish vulnerability to enemy attack and his failure to order the crew to abandon the ship quickly enough after the attack. Since McVay had issued an order to abandon the ship within two minutes after the attack, the Navy court exonerated him on the second charge but still convicted him of the first. Acknowledging his service during the war, the Navy remitted his conviction and he served in obscure jobs until his retirement in 1949.

The third story that Nelson tells is that of Hunter Scott, a student in Florida who researched the story of the USS Indianapolis for his History Day project and sparked a movement to have the U.S. government address the injustices connected to Captain McVay’s court-martial. In 1996, when Hunter was 11 years old, he watched the movie Jaws with his father. In the movie one of the characters tells about the sinking of the Indianapolis and his days afterward in the shark-invested waters. Fascinated, Hunter decided to make this story his History Day project. He immediately ran into problems when he found that the Indianapolis was hardly mentioned in the histories of World War II that he consulted. Hunter decided to find survivors of the sinking to conduct oral histories. The first survivor Hunter interviewed gave him a list of the 154 other survivors who were still alive, and Hunter tracked most of them down. Many of them gave him documents and mementoes, and Hunter created an impressive History Day project. His work attracted the attention of his congressman, the local press, and eventually the national press. Hunter continued to work on his project through high school, building it into a campaign to get the U.S. Congress to pass a resolution urging the Navy to re-open McVay’s court-martial. Hunter met with members of Congress and testifyied before a Senate committee. In October 2000 Congress passed the resolution he and the surviving crew members of the Indianapolis had sought, and in April 2001 the Navy awarded the crew of the Indianapolis a long-overdue Naval Unit Citation.

Critical analysis

The reasonable length (186 pages, not counting the end material), the journalistic style, and the inclusion of Hunter Scott’s connections to the story make Left for Dead an excellent choice for teens interested in the history of World War II.

About the author

According to the book jacket, Pete Nelson has written 18 books, including both fiction and nonfiction. Left for Dead won a 2003 Christopher Award in the Books for Young People category (Christopher awards presented, 2003).

Genre: Historical non-fiction

Curriculum ties

U.S. history — Although the story is much too detailed to work into most high school survey courses of 20th century U.S. history, the chapters about Hunter Scott’s History Day project and the campaign that grew from it would be useful as an introduction to History Day projects.

Book-talking ideas

Show the excerpt from Jaws where the Indianapolis story is recounted and tell students they can read the whole story in Left for Dead. (That caught Hunter Scott’s attention, so it might catch the attention of other teens.)

Reading level/interest age

The Horn Book review lists Left for Dead as a middle school and high school book (Sieruta, 2003), but I think the level of writing is likely to be a challenge for younger teens.

Challenge issues

I can’t imagine any challenge issues for Left for Dead. It has an array of respectable heroes, from the men who lost their lives in the sinking of the ship and the survivors to the teenage boy who investigated their story 50 years later.

Why I chose to read this book

I saw a reference to the History Day connection in this book and, being a history teacher, I knew I had to read it.

References

Christopher awards presented. (2003, March 10). Publishers Weekly, p. 18. Retrieved November 6, 2009, from http://go.galegroup.com.ezproxy.sfpl.org/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=sfpl_main

Sieruta, P. D. (2002, July-August). Pete Nelson left for dead: A young man’s search for justice for the USS Indianapolis. The Horn Book Magazine 78(4), 487. Retrieved November 6, 2009, from http://go.galegroup.com.ezproxy.sfpl.org/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=sfpl_main

Sexy

Oates, J. C. (2005). Sexy. New York: HarperTempest. ISBN 0-06-0544149-0.

Why read this book

What do you do when some of your jock buddies accuse your English teacher of giving them bad grades because they wouldn’t respond to his sexual passes and he just gave you a B you didn’t earn? You want it all to just go away, but maybe it won’t.

Plot summary

Darren is a junior in high school in a small town in New Hampshire. He’s just beginning to realize that the girls think he’s cute, and he’s doing pretty well on the swimming team, but the academic work is tough. One snowy night after swimming practice the friend who usually gives him a ride home ditches him, and Darren ends up getting a ride from his English teacher, Mr. Tracy. Mr. Tracy is a little friendlier than Darren wants him to be, but Darren tries to forget about it. It gets harder to ignore when Mr. Tracy flunks one of his teammates and some of the other swimmers hatch a plan to get back at him. They start spreading rumors that Mr. Tracy has been threatening them with low grades unless they respond to his passes, and they try to implicate Mr. Tracy with some gay pornography. Before they know what’s happening there’s a police investigation. Darren thinks his teammates are idiots, but he really doesn’t want to have anything to do with Mr. Tracy, either. What are people going to think if they find out that Mr. Tracy gave Darren a B he didn’t deserve for the first semester?

Critical evaluation

There’s not really a lot of plot in this novel – even the one major tragic event is underplayed a bit – but what does happen creates a very complicated situation for Darren. Running under the surface of the story is a question that Oates’ never explicitly answers: Is Darren gay? It seems his parents think he might be. He’s a little more sensitive, a little less macho than his older brother Eddy. Darren has been best friends with a girl named Molly for a long time, but he doesn’t seem very interested in her sexually. They talk regularly, they email a lot, they exchange nice Christmas presents, but Molly doesn’t figure very largely in Darren’s interior monologues about his life and its difficulties. And Darren feels bad when he masturbates. “He hated losing himself, somehow” (p. 7, emphasis in original). Given the absence of any religious sensibility, what’s up with that? Whatever it is, Darren doesn’t want to think about it. He just wishes it would all go away.

By keeping the question of Darren’s sexuality unresolved, Oates builds a fair amount of suspense. As Darren’s swimming buddies start picking on Mr. Tracy and the homophobia increases in school and around town, the reader wonders how vulnerable Darren is becoming. Are the facts on the ground going to create a situation where he can’t maintain his role as just one of the guys? Is he going to end up outing himself to maintain his integrity?

Oates maintains this suspense with a clever narrative structure. The third person narration is almost exclusively focused on describing what Darren is doing and thinking. His thinking is confused. He’s angry with almost everyone – his friends, Mr. Tracy, his parents, his brother. He doesn’t trust or confide in anyone. Yet when he speaks and we hear his own voice, which isn’t often, he displays very little of his emotional turmoil. He manages to maintain a good-boy public presentation, usually saying what he knows he needs to say, what he is expected to say, being the nice boy that he is. His parents and Molly suspect that there’s more going on than he’s admitting, but he brushes them off. His self-imposed isolation is consistent with that of a high school boy who knows he’s gay and doesn’t want anyone else to find out, among other scenarios.

But Oates has to play tricks with her narration to keep the reader in the dark about Darren’s sexuality. Early in the book she portrays him as preoccupied with sex in a high-school-boy kind of way, but she never lets us in on what sexual fantasies he’s having. She tries to justify this by telling us that he just doesn’t want to think about all the turmoil inside himself, but I find this a bit disingenuous. I think Oates wants us to conclude ultimately that Darren is gay, despite the sex scene at the end where we are told he has had sex with a girl but we aren’t told anything about the actual act and we aren’t told very much of Darren thinks about it. I appreciate Oates’ desire to make the story more interesting by leaving Darren’s sexuality ambiguous, but this comes at the cost of the reader being too conscious that the narrator is manipulating the narrative. And we also end up concluding that the lesson Darren has learned is that he can cover his gayness. To be able to cover can be empowering, and I appreciate Oates’ implicit acknowledgment that it’s an option a gay person is entitled to exercise. But I wish there were a sequel to Sexy in which Darren learns that that are other, better options, too.

About the author

Joyce Carol Oates was born in 1938 to working class parents in Millersport, New York. She graduated first in her class from Syracuse University in 1960 and published her first collection of short stories in 1963 at the age of 25. She has since published a staggering collection of novels, short stories, plays, essays, and other non-fiction and is considered “among the most distinguished writers in the United States” (Joyce Carol Oates, 1994). Since 1978 she has been a professor of English at Princeton University. In addition to Sexy, her young adult fiction includes Big Mouth & Ugly Girl (2002), Small Avalanches and Other Stories (2003), Freaky Green Eyes (2003), and After the Wreck, I picked Myself Up, Spread my Wings, and Flew Away (2006) (For Children and Young Adults, 2008).

Genre: Coming of age, LGBTQ

Curriculum ties

Sexy is a great novel for exploring ambiguity in literature. I think the question of whether Darren is gay would inspire considerable discussion in a classroom of high school students. It’s a great opportunity to teach students to read a text closely and find evidence to support their interpretation of the author’s meaning.

Book-talking ideas

• Read the section where Mr. Tracy oversteps the boundaries while he is giving Darren a ride home and ask students whether Mr. Tracy is wrong (p. 49-52).

• Read the section of the police report where Darren finds outs that someone saw him in Mr. Tracy’s car and ask the students if Darren should have come clean with the police about the incident (p. 164-167).

Reading level/interest age

The text is accessible to younger teens, but they might not find the lack of action in the story very engaging. Older teens are more likely to appreciate the complexity and subtlety of the narrative.

Challenge issues

The title is a little sensational. The f-word appears periodically. A sexual encounter occurs off-page near the end but is not described.

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 challenger that Joyce Carol Oates is “among the most distinguished writers in the United States” and that we should hope our teens would read such fine literature.

Why I chose to read this book

I wanted to see what a great writer like Joyce Carol Oates would do with YA fiction, and when I looked in the library I found Sexy on the shelf.

References

For Children and Young Adults (2008, January 7). Celestial Timepiece: A Joyce Carol Oates Homepage. Retrieved November 4, 2009, from http://jco.usfca.edu/works/children/

Joyce Carol Oates. (1994). Current Biography. Retrieved November 4, 2009, from Biography Reference Bank database: http://vnweb.hwwilsonweb.com/.

Dr. Dre

Marcovitz, H. (2007). Dr. Dre. Broomall, PA: Mason Crest Publishers. ISBN 1-4222-0116-3.

Why read this book

Dr. Dre has been a major force in hip-hop music since the 1980s. Find out where he comes from and what he’s done.

Summary

In six short chapters Marcovitz surveys Dr. Dre’s life from his youth in Compton, an economically depressed suburb of Los Angeles where he was born Andre Young on February 18, 1965, to his role as a major rap producer on his own Aftermath Entertainment label. Dre started his career as a rapper with the group N.W.A., whose 1989 album Straight Outta Compton was a seminal work in the gangsta rap genre. The target of censorship fights because of the anti-police lyrics in some of the songs, Straight Outta Compton got little radio play but sold 3 million copies. Dre was involved in the production of three N.W.A. albums on the Ruthless Records label, experience he built on in 1991 when he and Marion “Suge” Knight founded their own label, Death Row Records. Dre’s first album for the new label, The Chronic (1992), was another landmark album in West Coast hip-hop. Consistent with hip-hop tradition, the content glorified drugs and violence, but Dre broke new ground musically by bringing studio musicians playing horns into the hip-hop sound. The album also featured rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg in his breakout performance. It earned $50 million in sales for Death Row Records.

The next few years saw a rivalry between Knight and East Coast hip-hop artists, especially Sean “Puffy” Combs. The rivalry became violent at times, including the shooting deaths of Death Row rapper Tupac Shakur and East Coast rapper Notorious B.I.G. In 1995, in part to distance himself from the feud, Dre left Death Row and founded a new label without Knight called Aftermath Entertainment. The first few albums on the new label were not well received critically, but Dre re-established his reputation with Dr. Dre 2001 in 1999. About the same time Dre discovered white rapper Eminem and signed him with Aftermath Entertainment. A few years later Dre hit gold again by signing 50 Cent, whose 2003 album Get Rich or Die Tryin’ sold nearly 1 million copies in its first week. Dre continues to develop new talent as a rap producer today.

Critical evaluation

The text of Dr. Dre reads more like an encyclopedia entry than a thoughtful analysis of a major musical talent. The author and publisher are to be commended for avoiding the cheap shots that mainstream media often lob at rap music, but they shortchange their readers by not going into more depth on the controversies that have made hip-hop the important force that it is in popular culture. The book is very engaging visually, with many color photos, background color frames on the pages, and blocks of type in various colors. It includes a nicely done timeline of hip-hop events from 1970 to 2006, a timeline of Dr. Dre’s life, a discography and awards list, suggestions for further readings (both print articles and Web sites), a glossary of terms that appear in bold face in the text of the book, and an index.

About the author

Amazon.com’s bibliography page for Hal Marcovitz lists more than 100 titles, all of which appear to be non-fiction for 9-to-12 and young adult readers. The topics range from the historical (Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, Benjamin Franklin) to the contemporary (marijuana, teens and sex) and from sports (the Manning brothers, Venus and Serena Williams) to popular culture (Justin Timberlake, Lindsay Lohan) and psychology (A Guy’s Guide to Jealousy/A Girl’s Guide to Jealousy; A Guy’s Guide to Loneliness/A Girl’s Guide to Loneliness).

Genre: Music, Contemporary non-fiction

Curriculum ties

For younger teens, the book would be a good option on a non-fiction independent reading list and a good topic for a book report.

Book-talking ideas

• Play some of Dr. Dre’s music.

• Explain Dr. Dre’s close connections to many of the major figures in hip-hop music since the 1980s, including Eminem, Tupac, Snoop Dogg, and 50 Cent.

Reading level/interest age

The San Francisco Public Library shelves this book with teen non-fiction and Amazon.com lists it as a young adult book, but I wouldn’t buy it for a high school library. The simplicity of the content makes it more appropriate for middle school readers than high school readers.

Challenge issues

Rap music has been hugely controversial for decades, but the objective tone of this book would probably make it less a target for challenges than more analytical books or the music itself.

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.”

Why I chose to read this book

Because I am researching music as a young-adult genre, I wanted to see what kinds of print sources are available for readers who like rap music.

References

Hal Marcovitz Bibliography (n.d.). Amazon.com. Retrieved November 1, 2009, from http://www.amazon.com/Hal-Marcovitz/e/B001JP4ANS/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1

Keith

Kessler, T. (Producer/Writer/Director). (2008). Keith [Motion picture]. United States: No Hands Productions.

Why watch this film

Sometimes it pays to get beneath the surface of someone who seems like a jerk. Sometimes even someone trying to be a jerk ends up doing something powerful and good instead. This film shows how complex and inexplicable romance can be.

Plot summary

Natalie (played by Elisabeth Harnois) is a second-semester senior in a suburban high school who has just been accepted to Duke. No surprise there. She breezes through her AP courses, runs half the school’s student organizations, and is a major tennis player. But her perfect world is shaken when she gets a new lab partner in chemistry. Keith (played by singer-musician Jesse McCartney, formerly a member of the boy band Dream Street) is smart, but he doesn’t seem to take anything seriously. Even when he makes a major effort to break through Natalie’s apparent disinterest in him, he’s not very predictable. Natalie finally agrees to go bowling (“Bowling?”), but they never get near a bowling lane. Instead they spend the evening driving around town in Keith’s old pick-up truck delivering bowling balls to the front porches of their teachers’ houses. Natalie is surprised that it’s kind of fun, and when they spontaneously slip into playing the roles of veteran bowlers during coffee afterward we can see that these two might have a future together.

Unlike everything else in her life, nothing about Keith is easy for Natalie. The more she cares for him, the more difficult he becomes, to the point where he skips school for two weeks without letting her know why. Natalie’s persistence in figuring him out takes them places neither of them anticipate.

Critical evaluation

This well-crafted film rings with authenticity. As the script develops the characters and the characters reveal themselves to each other, we find it easy to see how two young people so different on the surface could develop a relationship that transforms them both. Rather than presenting a problem at the beginning and spending the film resolving it, Keith reveals the problem only at the end, conveying to viewers the same suspense that the characters feel as they try to figure out where their deepening interest in each other is headed. The strong script provides the opportunity for strong acting, and Harnois and McCartney are up to the task. Both Natalie and Keith are good at playing the roles they have figured out for themselves as young adults, but they also let the unresolved aspects of those roles to slip into the open when the going gets a little tough. Although the film is a romance, Natalie’s transformation is the thematic heart of the story, and it’s a transformation that leaves the viewer feeling good not merely because our emotions have been manipulated but because we see how Natalie has changed from someone who does what she thinks she is supposed to do to someone who has figured out what is important to her as she creates the life she wants to live.

About the writer/producer/director

Todd Kassler is best known for his work on the pre-school children’s television show Blue’s Clues, which he co-created and remained involved with throughout its 10-year run. The International Movie Data Base reports that Kassler created the film Keith “on the advice of his teenage children who complained that there were no good films for them” (Biography for Todd Kessler, n.d.). The article also reports that Keith “has won first prize in every teenage festival in which is has competed,” including the festivals in Giffoni, Italy, and Schlingel, Germany; BUFF in Sweden, and the Youth section of the Toronto International Film Festival. Malcolm Gladwell featured Kassler in his book The Tipping Point, which explores change in the contemporary world.

Genre: Coming of age, Film

Curriculum ties

One of the themes this film develops is the difference between intentions and consequences. As Keith reveals near the end of the film, he was up to no good when he started to court Natalie, but the chain of events he set off transformed both of them in very positive ways. This is a theme worth exploring in both literature and history classes.

Film-talking ideas

• Like many films, Keith starts with a good hook: a disconcerting scene of a young woman lying in the bed of a pick-up track that is slowly rolling toward a precipice. Showing the first few minutes would motivate some students to see the rest on their own, although they might be disappointed when they find out it’s not a horror film or a slasher film.

• Some students might know Jesse McCartney from his singing career, so making that connection might engage their interest.

Viewing level/interest age

I think that both younger and older teens would find the film accessible and engaging. Although younger teens might not understand the dynamics of Natalie’s transformation, the values of the film are such that it wouldn’t hurt them to see it. All teens are likely to appreciate the authenticity of the film, which taps into the good girl/bad guy scenario without sensationalizing it.

Challenge issues

Keith does not have a rating from the Motion Picture Association of America, but my guess is that it would qualify for PG-13 pretty easily. Aside from some passionate kissing, there is only one brief scene with sexual content, and nothing more than bare shoulders are revealed. The f-word comes out at least once. The film does not explicitly address political or religious issues. Natalie’s parents are presented as overbearing and a bit clueless (especially her mother), but they have small roles in the film.

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 film is a hopeful coming-of-age story that uplifts the spirit while eschewing sensationalism and exploitation.

Why I chose to view this film

I think because I had added Speak and Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist to my Netflix queue, Netflix recommended Keith. I didn’t realize until I began to watch it that it is a powerful, authentic young-adult film.

References

Keith (2008). (2009). The New York Times Movies. Retrieved November 1, 2009, from http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/427998/Keith/details

Biography for Todd Kessler (n.d.). The Internet Movie Database. Retrieved November 1, 2009, from http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1383079/bio

Chains

Anderson, L. H. (2008). Chains. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN-10: 1-4169-0585-5

Why read this book

We think of the American Revolution as a glorious founding of a free nation, of patriots fighting to free themselves from British tyranny. But what did that fight look like to a young African-American girl who was held in slavery? Which side should she choose when neither side cared about her freedom?

Plot summary

In 1776 Isabel is a 13-year-old African American girl who has lived with her 5-year-old sister Ruth on a small farm in Rhode Island until the elderly woman who owners them dies and the woman’s nephew sells them to a wealthy New York merchant. Life in a mansion in New York city is much more restricted than what Isabel and Ruth had known on the farm, especially because the merchant’s wife has a mean streak. The tumult of the beginning of the American War of Independence complicates matters as the merchant, who is loyal to the British, conspires with other loyalists to oppose Washington’s military occupation of New York. Isabel’s only friend is Curzon, a young African American boy enslaved by a patriot leader. Curzon convinces Isabel to spy on the merchant, promising in return that the patriots will help her and Ruth return to Rhode Island. Isabel doesn’t want to get involved, but her despair and her resistance to enslavement grow when Madam sells Ruth to an unknown party. When Isabel confronts Madam, Madam attacks her, and Isabel ends up in jail, tried in court, and branded on her check with an “I” for “insolence.” Life gets increasingly difficult as the British re-take New York from the patriot army and Curzon ends up as a prisoner of war.

Critical evaluation

Chains begs to be compared with Octavio Nothing, the young adult novel by Matthew Tobin Anderson (2006). Aside from the coincidence of having the same last names, both authors are European Americans writing in the voice of young African Americans during the Revolutionary War. A major theme in each novel is the way in which the struggle for freedom means something very different for the narrator than it does for most white patriots. Both stories are multi-volume novels, and the first volume in each case ends with a dramatic escape across a river and unresolved plot threads to be continued in the next volume. Chains even parallels Octavio’s use/abuse as a curiosity by his owners when Madam briefly treats Ruth as her toy, dressing Ruth in fine clothes and showing her off to women visitors.

I find Octavio Nothing to be a richer narrative than Chains. Octavio’s odd upbringing as a scientific experiment and his relationship with his mother offer opportunities to develop themes and characters that are missing in Chains, which is a comparatively simple story. Octavio’s classical education justifies his astute observations about the people and events around him, while some of Isabel’s cleverness is hard to believe, as when she decides to take crucial information she has found in the merchant’s house to the patriot army headquarters rather than pass it on to Curzon, as she has done before, or when she checks a tide chart before making her escape across the Hudson River. Anderson’s story device of Octavio’s classical education also skirts the difficult issues of language in the first-person narrations. Octavio can speak the language of educated Europeans and colonials, something easier for a contemporary white author to pull off than the 18th century African-American language that Laurie Halse Anderson’s plot calls for in Chains.

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 (1999) 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 she began Speak. Speak was a commercial and critical success, winning numerous awards, and Anderson followed it up with contemporary young adult fiction (Catalyst, 2002; Prom, 2005; Twisted, 2008; Wintergirls, 2009) as well as the historical fiction of Chains and its forthcoming sequel, Forge (Anderson, S. H., 2008).

Genre: African American, Historical fiction

Curriculum ties

Chains is a great book for 8th grade English/language arts classes to read while the students are studying the Revolutionary War in history class. Chains encourages students to think more deeply about the concept of freedom than many conventional textbook narratives and it brings to life a time and place where the Revolution was fought. Anderson’s web site provides questions to guide students’ reading and discussion of Chains, and it also includes a list of links to primary sources that Anderson used when researching her project. That provides a great opportunity for history teachers to develop lessons that explain how we use primary sources to understand the past.

Book-talking ideas

• Read excerpts from Chapter V’s description of Isabel and Ruth’s arrival at the docks in New York. The descriptions of the setting, the intrigue over the trunk that Madam doesn’t want the inspectors to open, and Madam’s brutal treatment of Isabel give potential readers a good idea of the story they’ll find in Chains.

Reading level/interest age

A strength of Chains over Octavian Nothing is that the former is more accessible for younger teen readers. That is especially important in states like California, where the Revolutionary War is taught primarily in the 8th grade. For older teens interested in this topic, I would recommend the Octavian Nothing series.

Challenge issues

Chains doesn’t include any sexual situations, but, like Octavian Nothing, Chains challenges the generally held notion that the nation’s founding fathers were ardent champions of liberty whose heroism on our behalf should be honored above all else. Thus some might object that Chains is too subversive to be promoted among impressionable teenagers.

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 is regarded as generally historically accurate.

• Direct the challenger to the list on the publisher’s Web site of awards the book has received (http://writerlady.com/Chains/), including being a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award for young adult literature, the 2009 Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction, and the 2009 Top 10 Black History Books for Youth.

Why I chose to read this book

After reading Anderson’s Speak, I wanted to see what she would do with historical fiction.

References

Anderson, M. T. (2006). The astonishing life of Octavian Nothing: Traitor to the nation; Vol. 1: The pox party. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press.

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