Cross-X by Joe Miller

May1

My initial, knee jerk reaction to this book? Despair.

Cross-X is subtitled “The Amazing True Story`of How the Most Unlikely Team from the Most Unlikely of Places Overcame Staggering Obstacles at Home and at School to Challenge the Debate Community on Race, Power, and Education.” It’s about the debate program at Kansas City’s Central High School and about how the author himself, a journalist, became a part of the story he was chronicling. Mr. Miller starts out observing and following the debating adventures of these black, inner city high school debaters, and by the end of the book he’s an assistant coach and an advocate for ending what he sees as institutional racism within the debate community and inside the education system as a whole.

The problem that I see is that these kids are being trained to see racism in everything that happens to them, and their teachers are so biased and despairing that the kids come (are lead) to the conclusion that the overthrow of the government and the education system is just about the only thing that will get them their “rights” as human beings. Their argument against any and all comers is that the system is racist and oppressive and until that fact is acknowledged and changed (how?) they won’t discuss anything else. Period. This argument is their response to problems in mental health care, foreign policy questions, and nuclear war, to name just a few of the debate questions that Central High debaters answer with their all-purpose “end racism first” response.

My near-despair comes from reading that we have students in inner city high schools who are being taught that making up a rhymed rap about how racist everything and everybody is will get them into the upper echelons of power and change the world for the better. In other words, if black young people can be trained to see themselves as victims and to articulate that vision, then eventually the white oppressors will see the light and —what? Reading this book reminds me of the OJ Simpson trial and what a gulf that trial revealed between the perspectives of white people and black people in this country. Are we really so far apart? And are we moving farther apart? I pray not, but I am discouraged by the stories in this book.

May Day

Apr30

Dawn reminded me. With my older children, we spent several successive May Days delivering a basket of flowers and a poem to friends and neighbors. Unfortunately, these traditions tend to fall into the black hole of Tired, Old Mom-hood if I’m not careful. I haven’t been careful, and I’m not sure my younger four urchins remember delivering flowers for May Day.

So, tomorrow we’ll make a simple door hanger out of construction paper or a paper cup as Dawn suggests, and we’ll gather some wildflowers, tuck in a poem, and give a gift of May Day ~~allergens~~ floral offerings to some of our favorite people.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Kids’ Fiction About Foster Care and Homelessness

Apr30

Here are a few more recommended titles about these topics:

The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson. I read this book a l-o-n-g time ago. As I remember it, it’s about a wise-cracking foster kid and the foster mom who loves her anyway.

Homecoming and Dicey’s Song by Cynthia Voigt. These two books are about homelessness and being abandoned by a parent who can’t cope, and about four resilient children who bring as much to their new home with their grandmther as she gives them.

Heat by Mike Lupica. I just read this baseball-themed book for the Cybil Awards, and I really liked it. It’s bout two boys, brothers, who’ve lost both parents, and are trying NOT to get caught up into the foster care system. Semicolon review here.

Alabama Moon by Watt Key. A boy raised in the wilderness by a survivalist father runs away from a foster care facility. Semicolon review here.

Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis. I’ve got to read this Newbery Award book soon. It’s about “Bud–“not Buddy”–Caldwell, an orphan on the run from abusive foster homes and Hoovervilles in 1930s Michigan,” according to Amazon.

The Pinballs by Betsy Byars. Three children in a foster home grow and learn to care about each other.

The Orphan Train series by Joan Lowery Nixon.
In The Face of Danger (Orphan Train Adventures)
A Place to Belong (Orphan Train Adventures)
A Dangerous Promise (Orphan Train Adventures)
A Family Apart (Orphan Train Adventures)
Keeping Secrets (Orphan Train Adventures)

Where the River Begins by Patricia St. John.

Pictures of Hollis Woods by Patricia Reilly Giff.

Gossamer by Lois Lowry. Semicolon review here.

The Road to Paris by Nikki Grimes.

The Family Under the Bridge by Natalie Carlson Savage. This title is written for younger children, and it’s not as contemporary as the other books on this list, but definitely worthwhile. It’s the story of three children and their mother who must live under a bridge in Paris after they’re evicted from their apartment. It’s also about the old tramp who becomes their adoptive grandfather in spite of his determination not to get involved with any “little birds.” (children who steal your heart)

More book suggestions on this same topic at Fuse 8.

The Higher Power of Lucky and Another Place at the Table

Apr30

Another Place at the Table by Kathy Harrison. Not a children’s fiction title, this book reminded me of the dozens of women I know who are just like author Kathy Harrison, foster moms and adoptive moms who are called and able to parent damaged and abused children who come to their homes via CPS with love, courage, patience, and realism. In fact, I know of a little girl right now who’s adopted and in need of a heart transplant. She’s four years old, and her adoptive mom is pouring out her life at the hospital, taking care of and praying for C. Would you say a prayer for them, too?

The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron. I read these two books back to back, by chance, and they meshed well. Another Place is nonfiction about one couple’s experience as foster parents in Massachusetts. The Higher Power of Lucky is Newbery Award winning fiction about Lucky, a young resident of hard Pan, CA (pop. 43, whose guardian is Brigitte, her father’s first wife from France. Lucky’s mom died in an accident, and Lucky is just as insecure about her place in the world and her future as are many of Mrs. Harrison’s foster children. The Higher Power of Lucky should be comforting and familiar for children like Lucky who live in fosterhomes and other insecure situations, and it mught just help the rest of us understand those children a little better. On top of that, it’s a good story and one which will add new words to some vocabularies (scrotum, crevice, commodity, cremation).

I recommend Another Place at the Table for anyone considering foster parenting or foster-to-adopt. ALso, people like me who are interested in children and in mental health issues should be able to learn something from Mrs. Harrison’s account of her experiences, both good and bad, in the foster care system. I recommend The Higher Power of Lucky for its quirky characters and setting and its true-to-life description of the thoughts and feelings of a kid trying to survive in a family and in a community that are both a little shaky and unstable at times.

Quirky Quotations:

“Lucky had a little place in her heart where there was a meanness gland. The meanness gland got active sometimes when Miles was around. She knew he knew he had to do what Lucky wanted, because if he didn’t , she’d never be nice to him. Sometimes, with that meanness gland working, Lucky liked being mean to Miles.”
(Don’t we all have one of those glands? I believe Christians call it a sin nature.)

” . . . the valve that kept secrets locked up in Lucky’s heart was clamped shut.”

“It made her feel discouraged, like if you took the word apart into sections of dis and couraged. It was getting harder and harder to stay couraged.”

“The sky arched up forever, nothing but a sheet of blue, hiding zillions of stars and planets and galaxies that were up there all the time, even when you couldn’t see them. It was kind of peaceful and so gigantic it made your brain feel rested. It made you feel like you could become anything you wanted, like you were filled up with nothing but hope.”

So, in spite of death (her mother) and desertion (by her father), Lucky’s got “a sense of hope.” And I, for one, am a lot more concerned about that aspect of a children’s book than about any scrotal references.

Henderson’s Spear by Ronald Wright

Apr29

Olivia, a British Canadian filmmaker, is writing to the daughter she gave up for adoption at birth. She’s writing from the jail in Tahiti because the French authorities suspect her of spying on nuclear testing in the Pacific, perhaps even murder.

Olivia, in turn, shares her own story and the story of the ancestor of a friend of the family, Henderson, who as a young man accompanied the Prince of Wales on a trip through Polynesia and the Pacific islands. When he was a bit older Henderson had a nearly deadly encounter with some Arabs in North Africa, and he came to believe that his treatment in North Africa was somehow connected to the secrets he learned while travelling with Prince Eddy through Polynesia.

I didn’t feel as if the plot strands in this book came together well. I didn’t much care for the oh-so-liberated Olivia who was mourning, twenty or so years later, both the loss of her father and of her daughter. Henderson, the other main character in the book, was a bit of a Victorian prig, stereotypical, yet he accepted certain events that I think would have appalled any man of his time and background.

I give it about a C+.

Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey

Apr29

I think I’ve read this book before; I sort of had a deja vu idea of what was going to happen almost from the beginning of the story. Nevertheless, it was an enjoyable, if familiar, trip.

Tey’s detective stories are often concerned with elaborate lies, and impersonations, and unravelling the truth. Brat Farrar is just such a story, in which the truth about a thirteen year old boy’s disappearance nine years before the story actually begins, is a truth that needs a lot of investigation and patient scrutiny to come clear. And Brat Farrar, an orphan who’s impersonating the missing boy, is the only one who can discover what really, really happened to Patrick Ashby, the boy who’s come back from the dead in the person of Brat Farrar.

Tey’s writing reminds me of Daphne du Maurier (atmospheric), Agatha Christie (great plot development), and Ruth Rendell (psychological suspense).

Denny of The Book Den on Josephine Tey.

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born April 29th

Apr29

Today is the birthday of Jill Paton Walsh, author of several good children’s and young adult novels. However, of even more interest, she is also the author of Thrones, Dominations a continuation of the Lord Peter Wimsey saga by Dorothy Sayers and based on notes Sayers kept for another Lord Peter novel. I have a copy of Thrones, Dominations, and I have read it and thought it was well done. Now I find in a visit to Walsh’s website that she has published another Lord Peter novel–A Presumption of Death. I also found this speech given by Walsh at The Dorothy L. Sayers Memorial Lecture in May 2002.

Paton Walsh’s YA fiction title A Parcel of Patterns, set during a plague epidemic in the 1600’s in England, is also worth a look. It fits into my plague/fever books post which is pending.

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born April 28th

Apr28

Harper Lee, b. 1926. Enough has been said and written about To Kill a Mockingbird. If you haven’t read it, put down whatever you’re reading now, especially if it was published after 1940, and go borrow or purchase a copy of Miss Lee’s book and read it.

Lois Duncan, b. 1934. Author of many YA suspense novels, including Killing Mr. Griffin and I Know What You Did Last Summer.
Lois Duncan’s website.
From the website: “Lois Duncan is known for award-winning suspense novels. Few people know she’s led a secret second life as a poet.” In her new poetry book, Seasons of the Heart:

“You can read about Belinda, who chewed her nails so fiercely that she ended up eating her fingertips:

They just went “Crunch” and disappeared.
Belinda thought, Now this is weird!
I wonder why that knucklebone
Is sticking up there all alone?

And there’s a poem about Jerome, who refused to take a bath:

There were deposits in his ears
That had been rotting there for years.
His neck and chest were quickly crusting.
His belly button was disgusting.”

Healing

Apr27

At a homeschool gathering today, I was talking with a couple of friends. One lady, “Denice”, who attends a very charismatic church, said that she had been to the doctor yesterday and that he was amazed that she had been healed of her thyroid condition. She said that the Lord told her three years ago to quit taking her thyroid medication, and she was obedient, and then she just trusted that she was healed. Somewhere in the midst of Denice’s story, the other lady mentioned that she, too, had thyroid problems.

I just stood and listened and became more and more uncomfortable as Denice told us that God had delivered her from thyroid imbalance and that Satan wants us to be in bondage to health problems but we should know that we are already healed from all diseases. I was thinking, and I’m sure the other lady who still has a thyroid condition was thinking, too: “So, why isn’t she healed?”

I didn’t want to belittle Denice or show disbelief in her story, but I was quite discomfited by the implications of the conversation. I do believe that God can heal us and sometimes does, but I don’t believe that it’s right or wise to quit taking medication that was prescribed by a doctor without getting the advice of that doctor. And I don’t believe that “we are already healed of all diseases.”

So, what should I have said, if anything?

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born April 27th

Apr27

Buy at AllPosters.com

Morse, Samuel Finley Breese, b. 1791. With funding from the U.S. government, he constructed the first telegraph line in the US between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore Maryland. The first message sent on this telegraph line on May 24, 1844 by Morse himself was, “What hath God wrought?”

Bemelmans, Ludwig, b. 1898. We like Madeline. “She was not afraid of mice; she loved winter, snow, and ice. To the tiger in the zoo, Madeline just said, ‘Pooh-pooh.'” She’s definitely a positive role model—brave, bold, and adventurous. Mr. Bemelmans was born in Austria.

Lanz, Walter, b. 1900. Animator and creator of Woody the Woodpecker.