Thirsty?

Imagine you are an eleven-year-old girl living in a place where there is no running water and you have to fetch water twice a day for your family. Now imagine the water source is two hours walk away from home. Across desert. And the water source is a muddy pond. Imagine you are an eleven-year-old boy, sitting in your classroom, when gunfire rings out. Your teacher tells you to flee. Not toward your family, but away from them. If you go toward your family, you will be either killed or captured and made to fight. You may never see your family again.

Based on the real life story of Salva Dut, A Long Walk To Water, by Linda Sue Park, is a moving portrayal of life during two different times in the history of Sudan. In 1983, the Second Sudanese Civil War began. It drove families from their homes and separated many. Thousands people, primarily boys and young men, were forced to walk hundreds of miles through dangerous desert lands to achieve a small degree of safety in refugee camps set up in other countries. Salva Dut endured months of walking and years of refugee camps before being allowed to go to America.

 Fast forward to 2008 and the story of Nya. Every day, she has to get water for her family. During the dry season, they walk three days to camp by a dried-up lake bed for five months. The lake has no water pooling in it, but if they dig through the clay of the lake bed, they can find enough water to sustain them. They are unable to live by the lake year round because of the fighting between their tribe and another. Then, Nya’s little sister becomes very ill, and the doctors tell the family it is because of the dirty water.

How Salva’s and Nya’s stories intersect is a hope-filled journey.

Question for you

I was looking back at past posts and realized I had a (more or less) snappy title for each review. The reviews from this year have not had the benefit of the same, merely being labeled with the title and author of the book under consideration.

My question is this: Should I go back to the descriptive post titles or stick with the book titles?

A Review Revisited...

With all the furor over the upcoming movie, The Hunger Games, it seemed an appropriate time to direct my faithful readers (all two of you) to the review I wrote of the book by Suzanne Collins. Click here for my oh-so-insightful comments.

Roots and Blues: A Celebration, by Arnold Adoff

Roots and Blues is a book of poems and poetic prose which loosely chronicles the history of blues from its earliest origins on slave ships and plantations through more current years. Adoff's writing style is very visual, with words sometimes d r a w n out along the page,
    sometimes
         cas
              cad
                    ing
    sometimes
    falling
    sharply,    and sometimes jumping from one margin                                                            to the other.

It takes some getting used to, but is well worth the effort. I will not attempt to recreate any of Adoff's poems here, but will include part of his prose:

     "This many words machine-gunned through close air
      and sacred chanting across the caribbean waters.
      Brown fingers moving with the regularity of rhythm
      onto stretched skins onto smooth carved wood.

      This new world music moves with shackle sounds."

For kids and grown-ups who enjoy poetry or blues, this is a real feast. The paintings by R. Gregory Christie are a moving accompaniment with their dark, rich tones and bold strokes.

If you want additional information on Arnold Adoff, follow this link to a 1988 profile by the National Council of Teachers of English.

Ninth Ward, by Jewell Parker Rhodes

Hurricane Katrina remains a landmark event in the lives of everyone who lived through it or even observed it from afar. It affected all of us in the United States, to one degree or another. Of course, most of us who do not make our home in New Orleans or the other areas directly impacted by Katrina can have no idea what those residents went through. There are some who understand, having lived through their own disasters, but the majority of us are in blessed ignorance.

Lanesha, born to a teen mother who died in childbirth, has been raised for all of her twelve years in New Orleans' Ninth Ward by Mama Ya-Ya, the midwife who helped bring her into the world. Lanesha may have been disowned and ignored by the uptown family of her mother, but Mama Ya-Ya has always made sure she feels loved and cared for. The wise woman has encouraged her and taught her in the use of her special gifts and made sure that she had all she really needed.

Mama Ya-Ya has her own special gifts, and she dreams of the hurricane several days before it hits. Her dreams leave her confused, and she retreats into herself, leaving Lanesha to continue preparations for the coming storm. For her part, Lanesha's love for Mama Ya-Ya fills her with a courage she didn't know she could have and a resourcefulness she never dreamed she possessed. With the help of a new friend, she manages to survive the flooding of the Ninth Ward with her spirit intact and a new depth of confidence.

Jewell Parker Rhodes has given us a moving story of the power of love, the gift of friendship, and the ability to recover from that which we thought might break us.