What I Finished This Week

 

108. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

 

I’ve heard about this book for years, so I was happy to run across a copy of it in a recent bookbox. In honor of Black History Month, I decided to try it.

 

I would say I liked it. I didn’t love it, but parts of it kept me reading along at a nice clip. It’s the story of a girl who considers herself ugly and is regarded as ugly by others. She is set aside by her mother and father and later her grandmother and uncle. She suffers from abuse by a step-parent when she was a very young girl. She is a member of the black population during the time that her people are tormented by her white peers. Yet she grows up strong and confident.

 

Parts of the book are poetic and beautifully written.

 

109. Joyful Noise by Paul Fleischman

 

I listened to this on audiotape, then I read the poems, and then I listened to the audiotape again. It’s amazing to hear the poems read aloud, in two voices, converging, diverging, making a strong statement by reading a line in unison.

 

The poems are all about insects. The illustrations are lovely pen-and-ink drawings. I want to get the audiobook for my library and find a way to use it with the students.

 

110. Lincoln: A Photobiography by Russell Freedman

 

Lincoln is presented here as I have never seen him, in both text and photographs. The details about him surprised me; I knew, of course, that he was extremely tall and had had a limited formal education, but I had no idea his voice was high pitched and that he had so much trouble finding a good general during the Civil War and that he was shy. I also loved the fact that though he had a total of a year of schooling he was able to read and study himself for two years and pass his bar exam. The Civil War years were a revelation. Poor Lincoln went through general after general who was afraid to act. And Lincoln’s assassination was so unexpected, coming so close to the end of the war. I could really feel Lincoln’s anguish in trying to figure out how to lure back the rebel states without cruelty yet also closing the door forever on slavery.

 

111. Rifles for Watie by Harold Keith

 

I’ve never read a book about a soldier in the middle of a war. Jeff Bussey is just a boy, but he decides to enlist in the Union Army during the Civil War. He longs for fighting. Time after time, he gets whisked away to other duties while the other soldiers fight. Finally, he is set up against the Southern Army and he finds it is not the glorious adventure he thought it would be. He makes an enemy of his commander and has to fight not only the Southern soldiers, but his own commander. Jeff is selected to infiltrate the Southern Army and to bring back information to the Union soldiers. He ends up spending many months with the Southerners and finds they are not so different from his Union friends.

 

My son has raved about this book for years. It was a very powerful book that I am happy to have finally read.

 

 112. Kira-Kira by Cynthia Kadohata

 

Katie is Japanese-American and she adores her older sister, Lynn. Their parents close their Oriental food market in Iowa and must move to Georgia to find work in the chicken-processing plants there. It is a hard life. The family is poor, but “…in the way Japanese people are poor, meaning (they) never borrowed money from anyone, period.” Lynn is Katie’s idol and the two girls are wonderful friends. Lynn teaches Katie all she has learned in life. Then Lynn becomes weak and ill and the family is shaken to the core.

   

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