What I’ve Been Reading
Amal Unbound by Aisha Saeed
Definitely as good as it is rumored to be! Quick-paced but still managing to pay loving attention to the details of everyday life in a Pakistani village–the sugarcane fields, the ironing of the salwar kameez, the hot homemade rotis, trips to the market, the close connections of the village families. There’s more than enough suspense to pull a reader through, and I particularly admired how the characters are multifaceted without being overly complicated–the thug of a landlord is human enough to mourn over a lost love, the mistress of the house is kind yet spoiled, helpful as long as her own convenience isn’t marred. Amal’s father, who lets her be taken as as servant to pay off his debts, isn’t a villain–he’s desperate, helpless, and trying to take care of a family of five daughters, sacrificing one to keep the others safe. Don’t miss this one!
Read MoreMore About Reading Logs
It occurs to me that I never did tell you why Natalie Babbit agrees with me about reading logs. (You do know who Natalie Babbit is, don’t you? She wrote Tuck Everlasting. Go read it. Now.)
She wrote, not specifically about reading logs, but about the panic all around her (in 1986) that literacy skills were devolving. This is from her speech “Easy Does It.”
We are blaming our children’s poor reading and writing skills on television, an easy and pleasant machine, and also on the seductive and mysterious computer, which, I understand, is easy and pleasant too….There can be no question about the fact that these two inventions are changing our world. They are only the latest things to change our world, which has been in a constant process of change since its creation…. Still, I think it’s highly debatable that they are single-handedly responsible for our difficulties….It seems to me that it’s not so much the difficulties that are new as it is our expectations.
When I was a child in the good old days, my friends weren’t all word lovers, not all book lovers, not all good readers and writers….And all were growing up without television and computers. It seems to me as if we simply can’t expect a universally high level of enthusiasm about reading. That expectation seems new to me. And, unfulfilled, it carries with it for our teachers [and, I’d add, our kids] a heavy and inevitable load of blame. But there always was and always will be a percentage of children that finds reading stale, flat, and unprofitable….
And if we–you and I–go on believing that we can, should, and must graduate all children from high school and college into a lifetime of appreciative reading of literature, and a capacity for clear and graceful writing, we will, quite simply, break our hearts….
The only thing we can do, I guess, is fight fire with fire….Somehow [teachers] are going to have to find a way to make reading as seductive as its rivals–to make it, in other words, easy and pleasant. Because that, it seems to me, is the only thing that was better about the good old days. Books–for me, anyway–were easy and pleasant.
One of the things that makes books easy and pleasant was the practice of reading aloud. Almost any writing is easy and pleasant when it’s read aloud. My fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Wilson, read aloud to us every day for the last half hour, and she read aloud for pleasure, hers as well as ours. We weren’t tested on the books she read to us. We didn’t do projects or write to authors. We just relaxed and enjoyed it….
Some of the things I hear about that are being done with books in classrooms now make my blood run cold….Books have collected countless barnacles of peripheral stuff these days, and how can that do anything but turn reading into hard work?…
Use a little low cunning. Ease up on the projects, schedule time for reading aloud. Read aloud things that you really like, yourself. Everyone responds to a good story, and that is what good literature really is: a good story, well told.
I think we can go a long way if we take that route. Honey, you know, is actually good for us nutritionally. So is peanut butter. But they taste so good that we forget about the nutrition. Reading is like that. Or at least it should be. And could be. Maybe. All we can do is try.
This marvelous essay and many more are found in Barking With the Big Dogs: On Writing and Reading Books for Children.
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New England Vampires
JB exhumed skeleton beings studied at the National Museum of Health and Medicine.
Forensic science and folklore can piece together some truths about life (and the afterlife) in New England in the 1700s and 1800s. Like Mercy Brown in Mercy: The Last New England Vampire, JB was a real person, a Connecticut farmer who died of tuberculosis….and whose community dug up his grave after his death, convinced he was a vampire. The Washington Post details new discoveries about him here…one of the few so-called vampire burials to be exhumed and studied.
You don’t have to travel to Transylvania to encounter homegrown vampire folklore. The same legends that led to JB’s exhumation were the basis for my YA novel Mercy. Family, loss, terror, and love–the elements of a good horror story or a supernatural legend.
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Chicken Rescue
I am a DINOSAUR!
Normally I post about writing or books…but it’s summer and things are slow so I thought I’d treat you all to a chicken story.
Yesterday I was driving my daughter home from her grandmother’s house when she called out from the back seat.
“Chickens!”
“What?”
“Chickens! Over there! The chickens are out!”
About three blocks away from her grandparents’ house, five chickens live in a backyard coop. When she was four or five, it was an adventurous walk to go down and visit them and poke bits of grass through the wire for them to peck at. When she learned to ride a bike, she could zip down to check on the chickens and see how they were faring.
And now they were loose! Emergency!
I pulled over and we hurried back half a block to check. Sure enough, the two white chickens with red crowns were pecking happily outside the pen. The single brown one and two black-and-white speckled ones, apparently more peaceful, were still inside the coop.
My daughter went up to knock on the back door to let the owners know their chickens were out. No answer.
Okay. Chicken rescue was underway!
I thought I could just pick them up and toss them gently back into the pen. I edged toward one. It eyed me and edged away.
Now, I have just been listening to a podcast all about dinosaurs. And it was heavy on the “birds are really dinosaurs” thing. And this chicken was really giving me a very nasty glare. The closer I got, the more vicious its claws looked. Velociraptor vicious. Seriously. I inched a tiny bit near and it sprinted away on bright yellow legs that looked very muscular indeed.
No way was I going to be able to pick this tiny little T. rex up.
It led me on a chicken-chase around the coop twice before I had the bright idea of telling my girl to stand by the coop entrance. I shuffled behind the two chickens and waved my arms. She blocked them when they tried to dart to one side, and between us we whooshed them into the coop and shut the door smartly. The three in-coop chickens did not make a break for it. Success!
It’s not often that my work days are interrupted by chicken rescue. Very exhilarating, really.
We drove away quickly just in case they found whatever hole in the fence let them escape in the first place. It would just be too stressful to go through the whole thing again.
Read MoreAmazing News for Amazing Tigers!
There is actually a tiger in this picture–they are way more camouflaged than you would think. This is one of India’s tigers, a (nearly grown) cub my daughter and I saw in Ranthambore National Park!
It can be hard to find good news out there when it comes to environmental issues. So I’m delighted to share that India has managed to double its tiger population from 1,411 in 2006 to to 2,967 today.
When I read Amazing Tigers in elementary schools and share with kids the horrifying decline in tiger populations in the last century, they are always shocked and eager to set to work to make the world safe for tigers. Glad I’ll have some good news to share the next time I visit a school.
Read MoreTwo Summery Haiku
At last it’s summer in Maine (we’ve been waiting so long!)! So here are two poetic expressions of the season.
On the Dock #1
Weight of sunlight
on my skin–golden sawdust
sifting down.
On the Dock #2
Shock of deep green cold
slaps through me swallows me
diving in.
Highlights Stands Up for ALL Kids
Proud to have three of my books published by these fine folks! The CEO of Highlights Magazine says, “Our company’s core belief…is that ‘Children are the world’s most important people.’ This includes ALL children.”
Sarah L. Thomson
A children’s book author publishing award-winning nonfiction, poetry, picture books and novels including…
“Thomson focuses on newfound connection, magic, and suspense to conjure a fast-paced, heartwarming mystery. Thomson’s world is populated by resourceful protagonists, fanciful creatures, and quirky supporting characters.”
—Publishers Weekly