At the start of the 20th century, young adult literature sought to soften the edges of the hard reality its readers saw and knew. Today’s writers take a different approach. Not only is their writing of the highest literary quality, but their stories are of a real world. Confusion, heartbreak, and disillusionment; abandonment, literal and figurative; lost heritage, through cultural or parental death; class difference, poverty, and inequality; these are the issues our children know, in their own lives or in the world around them.

Yet we know these issues too, and, like our children, we yearn for what will counter the world’s evil and pain. We still search for meaning, for understanding of ourselves.

This program is designed to help us remember our own youth, join our children’s experience, and consider our future. As we look into contemporary life, we will remember being lonely and uncertain, while trying to be confident and sure. We will also meet the challenge of standing beside, or in the shoes of, people whose ways of thinking and communicating, of daily habit and cultural ritual, of family relationship and friendship are different from our own. We will learn how our children define themselves, and perhaps gain insight into who we have become.

The lost culture of the Native American is explored in Velma Wallis’s tale of an Alaskan legend, Two Old Women, and Gary Paulsen’s story of an Eskimo boy, Dogsong. Here, we discover America’s original people and heritage through the eyes of Two Old Women whose tribe abandons them when starvation threatens the tribe’s survival, and by standing in the boots of a boy who leaves home to journey into his tribe’s old ways. These writers remind us of the strength of one’s heritage, whether immediate or ancient. Wallis writes that this legend provided “... something about me that I could grasp and call mine.” Given the rich climate of cultural diversity in America at the turn of the century, heritage is a vital mirror to self-knowledge as well as to understanding of neighbors and peers. We cannot help but look in the mirror as we read these courageous ventures.

In Holes, Louis Sachar takes us into a microcosm of young adult culture: the frightening world of a juvenile detention center in Texas, a place where authority figures assure life or death, and where peer relationships lead to inclusion or deadly isolation. Though an exaggerated version of life for America’s youth, we may find this setting uncomfortably familiar; we may then find relief and hope, as compassion and a sense of what is right lead Sachar’s protagonist to fight injustice and cruelty, and to win. Sharon Creech invites us into the world of loss in her novel, Walk Two Moons. We will come face to face with grief as the protagonist makes two journeys: the literal, as she follows her mother’s footsteps through the northern central plains of America; the figurative, as she makes peace with what she can no longer have, her family as it used to be. As divorce rates rise, as deaths affect many, we cannot help but find ourselves on every page, whether in our own lives, or through the lives of friends and family members. In Maniac Magee a modern day orphan turns to running to find his life. Jerry Spinelli takes us on a search that is familiar to most young adults who, though they may not be orphaned, know the pain of exclusion, the hurt of being different, the sadness of others’ intolerance, and the yearning for a sense of belonging.

The final work in this series, Catherine, Called Birdy, by Karen Cushman, takes us back in time to an English manor in 1290, to the troubling, but all too real dilemma faced by a young girl waiting to be sold in marriage to the highest bidder. The setting is unfamiliar, and the daily habits of life are strange to a 21st century reader, but the universal question of “becoming” a person is as recognizable as the sight of one’s face in a mirror.

What are Our Kids Reading These Days?

Books in the Series

Two Old Women by Velma Wallis (HarperPerennial, 1993)
Dogsong by Gary Paulsen (first published by Bradbury Press, 1985)

Velma Wallis says that “Stories are gifts given by an elder to a younger person,” a sentiment that forms the heart of young adult literature. Wallis was given this story by her mother; she recorded it in the hope that “tomorrow’s generation also will yearn for stories such as this so that they may better understand their past, their people, and, hopefully, themselves.”

It is late one autumn when an Athabascan chief announces that Two Old Women, known as complainers and burdens to the tribe, will be “left alone to fend for themselves in a land that understood only strength.” Shock and numbness fill the women as members of the tribe look away; the women watch the others pack their supplies and make ready to go. What lies in their future is the cold winter, a lack of food, and the dark unknown of “a certain death.”

Will the women quietly succumb to this death, or will they “die trying” in an effort to exercise their right to live? Such is the tension that carries the women, and Wallis’ reader, into winter’s cold hands. Would they rely on survival skills “not used in many seasons?” Would they prove The People wrong? Or would they imitate nature and be the old wolf who is shunned by the “younger, more able wolves?”

Wallis’ language is stark and pure, reflecting the stark, pure, wintry world in which Two Old Women decide their fate. Hers is a story that asks a reader to look hard into the eyes of injustice, to wonder at what is called “civilization,” and to seek compassion in dealing with one’s fellow beings.

In Dogsong, when Russel Susskit tells his father that something is bothering him, “But I don’t know what it is,” his father directs him to the old man, Oogruk, who will give the boy songs and words. “Sometimes words lie-but the song is always true,” says Russel’s father. Thus begins the search for Russel’s native cultural heritage-his song-as a salve to the heartache he carries but does not understand.

Oogruk sends Russel into the untamed wintry world with a sled and a dog team so the boy can journey to his cultural and spiritual past, a time before the white missionaries and hunters invaded the land and his people’s hearts. In search of his song, Russel learns to be one with his dogs and his sled, the landscape, and the animals he must kill to survive.

Russel learns to listen to his dreams as his ancestors did, to find his future in his dreams, and then, to make his own song. His is the story of both the fragility of any way of life, and of the enduring nature of one’s cultural history. Finally, it is the story of the continuity of the search for self amid these contradictory pulls.

Above and beyond this eloquent story is the novel’s voice which carries a reader into the heart of the Eskimo. Poetic, evocative, filled with unfamiliar clipped phrases and unusual images, Dogsong startles its audience into a lost way of life which could be its own.

Holes by Louis Sachar (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1998)

Sachar has relied on humor and heart to tell a story about human nature-its cruelty and good heartedness-in his novel, Holes. Green Lake Camp is a juvenile detention center for boys, located deep in a Texas desert; each day the boys must dig a hole five feet deep and five feet across. “This isn’t a Girl Scout camp,” says Mr. Sir, the guard, by way of welcome to a wrongly accused Stanley Yelnats on his arrival.

Stanley is an over-weight, picked-on kid, whose history of bad luck follows him to “camp.” X-Ray, Zigzag, Armpit, and Zero are the assumed names of Stanley’s tent mates, boys who revel in getting one another in trouble. Stanley, dubbed Caveman, becomes an ideal target.

A family history of bad luck also follows Stanley to the Texas desert, though he cannot imagine how that history will entwine itself and eventually free him from his current predicament. Free Stanley, it will, but only after the boy chooses right over wrong, and compassion over hatred and intolerance, and even then, Stanley’s survival is uncertain.

A story of surprising complexity, raw cynicism and tender-heartedness, Holes does not release its reader until the last pages, and even then, the drama lives on.

Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech (HarperCollins Publishers, 1994)

How does the mind of a thirteen-year-old work? How does that mind explain loneliness and loss? How understand the reasons that people change? What answers does that mind invent to explain the complexities of the human soul and heart, and the hard facts of life?

Salamanca Tree Hiddle’s mind is as creative, sensible, and outlandish as can be. When left alone with her father, Sal yearns for understanding of the events that took her mother away. Her father is too bereft to speak, and though he tries to invent a new sense of family, Sal’s heartache prevents him. When her best friend Phoebe’s mother goes away, Sal helps Phoebe to understand those events too. The invented scenarios are as lively and dramatic as Sal’s imagination can make them, but are they true?

When her grandparents, who call Sal “Chickabiddy,” take her on a journey that follows her mother’s footsteps, Sal’s mind goes into high gear as she relives her younger years and tells her grandparents the stories she has made. “She’s such a gooseberry,” is Gramps’ response. In the end, Sal learns the truth which is different from her imaginings, but no less real or heartbreaking.

In a moving, tremendously poignant story, Creech weaves her plot with the use of Native American maxims such as, “Being a mother is like trying to hold a wolf by the ears,” and “Don’t judge a man until you’ve walked two moons in his shoes.” There is little judging to be made of Sal and her family members in this story; the reader is tied firmly in Sal’s shoes and walks her story to the end.

Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli (Little, Brown and Company, 1990)

Orphaned at three, Jeffrey Lionel Magee was given to an aunt and uncle who despised one another. Jeffrey learned more than he wanted about hatred and intolerance, as he was split between his new parents from day to day. At a school musicale eight years later, young Jeffrey broke loose. He released “the birth scream of a legend” as he ran from the room. Thus began “Maniac” Magee’s search: for a family, for people who did not hate, for people who could appreciate differences in one another.

Maniac’s search takes him to the poor side of town where he finds a home with a black family, but his own blindness prevents him from seeing that “some kids don’t like a kid who is different.” In this case, Maniac is the different kid in the neighborhood because he’s “another color.” For a time he “couldn’t see it, this color business.”

When Maniac is taunted as a “Whitey,” he must face the truth. Then, off he goes, running again, still in search of a family. Where does he sleep? With the buffalo in the zoo, “among monuments and cannon and rolling hills” in Valley Forge, and even in a doghouse where he waits, “grimly, patiently,” for death to rescue him.

Spinelli gives his hero another chance, of course, but disappointment comes again to Maniac Magee. How he runs his way to security and an unlikely home, and how he bridges the gap between white and black, is Maniac’s story.

Catherine, Called Birdy by Karen Cushman (Clarion Books, 1994)

Karen Cushman, whose interest in medieval history has led to the writing of several young adult novels set in this period, recognizes that it is difficult, if not impossible to “understand medieval people well enough to write or read books about them.” But Cushman encourages her readers to “identify with those qualities we share,” and she illustrates these qualities with artful eloquence. Her audience cannot help but find itself in this story.

Catherine, Called Birdy, written in diary form, explores the heart and mind of a young girl who would “rather be a pig boy” than a wife performing “lady-tasks,” such as “mindless sewing, hemming, brewing, doctoring, and counting linen!” Yet it is “lady-tasks” that are her training, and the dreams she sets for herself-being a Crusader, a monk, or a painter-.are merely tantalizing

Catherine is a stubborn, intelligent, witty, and talented girl who only wants the chance to choose her own path, as have the maids on the manor who marry for love and are allowed to romp barefoot in the fields. Instead, Catherine says she “is a prisoner to my needle again.” When her father entertains a man that Catherine calls “Shaggy Beard” as her potential betrothed, her prison walls tighten.

What Catherine comes to know is that, “Like the bear and the popinjay, I cannot survive by myself. But I also cannot survive if I am not myself.” Hers is a battle of the hardest kind; one that brings desperation, terror, and rage, for she knows “No one will help me.” Will Catherine give in to her father’s wishes? Will she escape, only to wander like a beggar through the land? Through it all, will she learn who she is?

Readers of the 21st century will not face an arranged marriage to an old man like Shaggy Beard, nor eat swan’s neck pudding, but Catherine’s creator encourages her readers “to imagine and pretend and make room in our hearts for all sorts of different people.” Furthermore, all young readers will surely struggle, as Catherine does, to find meaning in existence, purpose in the days of life, and relationships that are built on mutual liking and respect.