JENNIFER FALVEY
COLUMBIA, S.C.
Dear Jennifer,
At school my older children learned the five-finger rule for finding a “just-right book”: If it has more than five unfamiliar words on one page, the book is deemed too challenging for a student to read. I sympathize with the practicality of the guideline, and understand that it is aimed mostly at developing readers, but in practice I find the rubric a little deflating for young bookworms. Part of the joy of unbridled childhood reading lies in the haze of misunderstanding; the mystifying behavior of adult characters and even scads of obscure vocabulary can spur curiosity and spark richly imaginative embellishments to fill in the gaps. Your more expansive approach — to look for books that will challenge your students — allows for who they are and who they will become.
Old Standbys
Your library is probably stocked with classics that your tightrope-walking middle schoolers will enjoy. Fluent, attentive readers of that age will fall for the warm, slyly playful first-person narration and meaty characters in Charles Dickens’s “Great Expectations.” And they might relate to the story of childhood friendship in Willa Cather’s more leisurely paced prairie novel “My Ántonia.”
Everything Old Is New Again
I’m sure your shelves also hold some of my recent favorites: “The Thing About Jellyfish,” by Ali Benjamin (for more science-minded kids); “When You Reach Me,” by Rebecca Stead (a great companion to “A Wrinkle in Time,” by Madeleine L’Engle); and “Brown Girl Dreaming,” by Jacqueline Woodson (a memoir in verse for your budding poets). But I also want to make a pitch for some mid-to-late-20th-century (mostly) realistic books for younger readers that may have fallen off your radar. Robert Cormier’s deeply unsettling, desperately suspenseful and structurally complicated novel from 1977, “I Am the Cheese,” tracks the thoughts of Adam Farmer, a troubled boy on a bicycle who is caught up in sinister events beyond his understanding.
More ordinary tragedies mark the heroines’ lives in both Irene Hunt’s “Up a Road Slowly” and “The High House,” the first installment of Honor Arundel’s Emma series. Each book centers on a motherless girl sent to live with her aunt, setting them on rough, rutted paths toward self-discovery.
The road to adulthood appears similarly dark and uncertain in Katherine Paterson’s novels. Readers who loved “Bridge to Terabithia” in elementary school might also like her moody, openhearted novel for older readers “Jacob Have I Loved,” the story of Louise, a misfit living in the shadow of her twin sister on an island in the Chesapeake Bay in the 1940s.
The Places You’ll Go
Then there are the coming-of-age stories not intended expressly for children. Books for adults told from the points of view of young protagonists keep your readers’ perspectives in mind while still giving them a taste of more advanced literary forms. Esperanza Cordero, a Mexican-American girl living in Chicago, narrates “The House on Mango Street,” Sandra Cisneros’s lyrical, at turns both childlike and mature novel in vignettes. While growing up in Antigua, the sharp-voiced, eponymous heroine of Jamaica Kincaid’s “Annie John” shares a sweet ease with her mother that turns bitter in adolescence.
Steer your most precocious 12- and 13-year-olds toward “Purple Hibiscus,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s debut novel — an intense family drama narrated by 15-year-old Kambili and set against a backdrop of political unrest in 1990s Nigeria — and “Black Swan Green,” David Mitchell’s minutely conjured, mystically mundane story of a year in the life of a 13-year-old English boy with a stutter. The first-person perspectives in all these novels for grown-ups get at what is essential and true about childhood, and also provide young readers with startling glimpses of the adult world just as it is coming into view.
Yours truly,
Match Book
