'Brown Girl Dreaming' by Jacqueline Woodson (LS 5663)

Woodson, Jacqueline. 2014. Brown Girl Dreaming. New York: Nancy Paulson Books.

ISBN: 978-0-399-25251-8

Book cover courtesy of
www.penguin.com

Jacqueline Woodson's memoir of her childhood, Brown Girl Dreaming, was published to universal acclaim and immediately made the short list for major children's and young adult literature awards.  Woodson's lyrical and moving account of her childhood won the 2014 National Book Award for Young People's Literature and has been named by School Library Journal as one of the best nonfiction titles for children and teens in 2014.   It is, in my opinion,  a shoo-in to win a Newbery (or at the very least a Newbery Honor).

Woodson's memoir examines the many dualities of her early life.  South Carolina versus Brooklyn, New York.  Raised as a Jehovah's Witness by her grandmother, but privately skeptical.  Desperate to write down the stories swirling in her head and hampered by dyslexia.  Binding the series of poems together is a thread of familial love and devotion.  It ends with a few reflective poems where Woodson ruminates on her personal journey and how all the dichotomies that have formed her journey have helped shape who she is today.

Most of the poems are written in free verse, but Woodson peppers the novel with several haiku.  The haiku are often meditations or some other realization in response to the events surrounding the young Jacqueline.  By writing those small moments in haiku, it sets them apart from the longer free verse poems.  The structural brevity of the haiku gives Woodson's thoughts in those moments a measure of profundity and emotional depth out of all proportion to their size.  Several of the haiku are series titled "How To Listen".  The third in the series simply describes her grandfather's coughing fit in the middle of the night and Woodson's reaction to it, but the ominous air around the poem is palpable.  The final word of the poem -- "startled" -- is written as a sentence by itself, which helps create the sense of unease in the poem.

Overall, the poems have a sense of immediacy.  We experience Greenville of the 1960s and later Brooklyn of the 1970s through Woodson's eyes in a first-person narrative.  This is illustrated with brutal honesty in two separate poems: "How To Listen #2" and "The Fabric Store".  In both poems, Woodson paints a picture about her experiences shopping in Greenville.  She writes of store clerks following her or her grandmother around the store "in case they try to / steal something" because of their skin color (Woodson 2014, 90).  Woodson also deftly uses the poems to demonstrate the difficulty of straddling two cultures as a child -- the religious upbringing of her childhood and her own skepticism, returning to Greenville after living in Brooklyn for a while, learning to realize the difference between orally telling stories (and having them thought lies) and writing them down and having them recognized (and lauded) as fiction.  Woodson's poems perfectly capture the bemusement of a child at having someone mock their style of speech or the confusion at a teacher's disappointment that she isn't more like her older sister.

Woodson subtly scatters figurative speech throughout the poems in Brown Girl Dreaming.  In "Second Daughter's Second Day", she juxtaposes the image of her baby hands against the hands of several civil rights figures:

     I do not know if these hands will become
     Malcom's -- raised and fisted
     or Martin's -- open and asking
     or James's -- curled around a pen.
     I do not know if these hands will be
                            Rosa's
                        or Ruby's
                     gently gloved
                and fiercely folded
                   calmly in a lap,
                       on a desk,
                   around a book,
                          ready
                to change the world... (Woodson 2014, 5)

This juxtaposition serves to allow Woodson to look back and wonder what her hands will accomplish, born in the turmoil of the civil rights movement of the 1960s.  Woodson also effectively uses simile to give her poems a richness of sensory language.  She describes her grandparents' love as a blanket, enveloping Woodson and her brother and sister in its warmth.  In the poem "Hair Night", Woodson (2014) compares her sister's voice to "a hand on my shoulder" as Odella reads aloud to the young Jacqueline while their grandmother does Woodson's hair on Saturday night (84).  The figurative language seems to come organically in the poems.  The words aren't flowery or flamboyant, but they still effectively create a sense of what Woodson felt, saw, heard, or otherwise experienced as a child.  Probably the best and most visual use of figurative language in the novel occurs when stories first begin to swirl through Woodson's imagination, begging for her to write them down.  She uses personification to describe the stories that appear in her head saying, "The story / wakes up and walks all over the room.  Sits in a chair, / crosses one leg over the other, says / Let me introduce myself. Then just starts going on and on" (Woodson 2014, 217).  As a sometime writer, I can say that Woodson's description of the moment when something pops into your head, and insists that you write it down right now, thank you, is spot on.

Woodson also judiciously uses pauses in her poetry.  They're purposeful and built into the poems to allow the moment to percolate and roll around on the tongue and in the brain of the reader.  The pauses help set certain words and phrases apart from the rest of the poems.  Generally, these are nuggets of insight the adult Woodson can see in the events of her childhood.

The book should appeal to middle grades.  The free verse format of the poems can often make you forget you're reading poetry at all.  Woodson's language is accessible, but she doesn't condescend to her juvenile audience.  In fact, there are several moments where Woodson couches issues like learning disabilities or fatal illnesses in so much figurative language that an older or more observant younger reader will immediately understand what Woodson is saying.  Those moments are few and far between, so it won't make younger readers feel as if they can't follow the main plot lines of the novel.  The book will also appeal to adult readers and older students who enjoy reading memoirs.  To most students, Woodson's childhood is simultaneously unfamiliar with its historical setting in the 1960s and 1970s and yet the struggles to read, the delight in finding a book with characters who looked like her, the bullying at the hands of other children in Greenville are all familiar topics to many young readers.  The memoir can also offer readers insight into the civil rights era from the point-of-view of a child.  Younger readers might also appreciate learning about the civil rights era from a narrator that is their age and learning about Woodson's personal experiences with racism.

All of the poems are uniformly excellent.  There is not a single poem that feels out of place in this novel.  Even the last two poems, which are written from the perspective of the adult Woodson feel organic and natural in their place at the end of the novel.  The two poems before the last two serve as a bridge between Woodson's childhood and how it has informed the outlook she now has as an adult.

The novel contains a brief table of contents.  It doesn't list all the poems, which makes it difficult to track down a specific poem.  Woodson divided the memoir into five parts, and the table of contents lists those parts.  It also includes a family tree that includes four generations of Woodson's family.  Woodson also includes family photos of her parents, various aunts and uncles, her grandparents, and her two brothers and sister.  All readers will enjoy being able to put faces to the names in the book.

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Spotlight on...

"Hope Onstage"

Until the curtain comes up and he's standing there,
ten years old and alone in the center of the P.S. 106 stage,
no one knew
my big brother could sing.  He is dressed
     as a shepherd, his voice
soft and low, more sure than any sound I've ever heard
come out of him.  My quiet big brother
     who only speaks
when asked, has little to say to any of us, except
when he's talking about science or comic books, now
has a voice that is circling the air,
landing clear and sweet around us.

.................................................................................... 

Maybe, I am thinking, there is something hidden
like this, in all of us.  A small gift from the universe
waiting to be discovered. (Woodson 2014, 232-233)

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 Throughout Brown Girl Dreaming, Woodson struggles to live up to the scholastic examples of her older brother Hope and older sister Odella.  Both Hope and Odella were excellent students in school, and Woodson often describes how easy learning came to them and how much she struggled with school.  She also details the disappointment her teachers visibly felt once they realized that she was not going to be a model student, like Odella.  We all know how it feels to be compared to someone else -- to our siblings, our classmates -- but like Woodson says in "Hope Onstage" we can all do something well.

What is your gift?  Can you cook, draw, dance, sing, build things with Legos or Tinker Toys?  Do you work well with small children? (And believe me, that is a gift!)  Can you envision the way a building should look?  Fix cars?  Tell us about it.

Write a poem, a story, an essay, or even draw a picture that describes your gift.  You can even share a moment when you realized you had this particular gift.  Students who are willing to share can upload their work to the class blog or give an oral presentation to the class.

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Works Cited

Woodson, Jacqueline. 2014. Brown Girl Dreaming. New York: Nancy Paulson Books.

'The Brimstone Journals' by Ron Koertge (LS 5663)

Koertge, Ron. 2001. The Brimstone Journals. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press.

ISBN: 978-0-7636-1742-4

Photo of book cover
by L. Propes

The Brimstone Journals is a verse novel by Ron Koertge set in the fictional suburban Branston High School, although the students refer to it as Brimstone, a sly observation of their feelings about high school in general.   It's almost more of a novella than an outright novel due to its brevity.  The book features ninety journal entries over 110 pages in the form of poems written by fifteen different students at Branston.    The students at Branston could appear anywhere at any high school: Boyd, neglected by an absent and alcoholic father; Lester, the frequently bullied fat kid; Carter, the son of wealthy surgeon and the new kid at Branston; Tran, the son of Vietnamese immigrants, pushed into pursuing a course of study he hates; Damon, the football star and stereotypical jock; Kelli, Damon's girlfriend, chafing under his rules; Sheila, a girl in love with her best friend Meredith and questioning her sexuality; Joseph, the son of fervent environmentalists; Jennifer, the evangelical Christian struggling to reconcile her faith with what she sees at school; Kitty, an anorexic; Allison, who has to put up with her stepfather's sexual advances toward her; Rob, Branston's resident ladies' man; Neesha, who at first glance is the stereotypical angry African-American girl; Dave, who is a dedicated gamer, despite his parents'  worries that it will turn him to violence; and Meredith, the girl who dates older men and has a reputation.  There are a lot of characters in such a short book.

The journal entries offer brief glimpses of the students' lives in and out of school over the course of a single year.  One could argue, though, with an average of six poems per narrator, whether or not the paucity of the journal entries can do more than just skim the surface of the students and the culture within Branston.  For the most part, The Brimstone Journals features several storylines at Branston.  The primary storyline that weaves its way through most of the others involves Boyd and his deepening involvement with Mike, a white supremacist.  Another storyline is Carter's struggle to fit in with students at Branston.  Dave's arguments with his parents that while he does play violent video games, he has absolutely no urges to actually commit crimes and his dreams to become a video game designer and developer.  There is also Tran's lonely journey through high school, weighed down by the expectations of his family, but who forges a connection with Carter through shared love of music. Kelli wants to end her relationship with Damon as he grows increasingly possessive.  The novella itself is so brief, that I fear I've given away the entire plot, such as it were.

Photo of text
by L. Propes

That being said, the surface-skimming quality of the novella is both a strength and a weakness.  Koertge's strategy of spreading the wealth, as it were, among so many students offers a wealth of issues students can discuss.  They span everything from trying to live up to parental expectations to sexual abuse by parental figures to the double-standard by which boys and girls are judged based on their sexual activity.  There is nothing in these poems that treads unfamiliar territory to the average high school student.  On the other hand though, with so many characters it's difficult to get to know any of them in depth.  It also serves to lessen the emotional investment for the reader.  For example, when we first meet Boyd, his father has been verbally abusing him, and then the next time we see Boyd, he's met Mike and is utterly entranced by Mike's racist rantings.  It often feels as if there is a huge jump from A to D and the readers are left trying to construct B and C with few or no details.  There are several characters whose presence is so fleeting that I found myself saying, "Who?" more than once as I read the novella.  In all honesty, Rob, Kitty, Jennifer, Sheila, and Joseph could be removed from the pages and the book's quality would not suffer.  I would even go so far as to call Rob, Jennifer, Kitty and Sheila non-entities as far as the plot is concerned, especially Kitty.  She's barely a blip on the radar, which is how things do work in the social structure of high schools, but she adds so little to the overall tone of the novella, that she might as well not be in it.  Then again, it could be a rather tortured way to symbolize her vanishing body due to her anorexia.  If that was Koertge's intention, it might pass over the heads of many readers.  At most, they provide background color for the rest of the poems.

All of the poems were written by Koertge.  The novella is a quick read and most of the free-verse poems are a quarter to a half page long.  The fluid structure of the free-verse reflects the inner voices of the teenagers who appear on the page and comes off as a natural structure of the characters' thoughts.  Neesha's poems have a rhythmic quality about them, which is not surprising, considering she is a student of the history of rap and hip-hop.  Koertge makes her poems come alive on the page and you can feel the rhythm as you say them.  Koertge also uses pauses built into the poems to create emphasis on certain lines.  Kelli ends her relationship with Damon and describes what happens when she comes home from watching a movie without Damon: "When I got home Mom said Damon / called / three times" (Koertge 2001, 35).  He adds a space between the last two lines to set the number of times Damon called apart from the other lines.  It adds a slight sense of tension, and provides an opportunity for the reader to question just what Kelli feels in that moment.  Is it dread? Alarm?  Panic?  Apprehension?  Is she waiting for the other shoe to drop?  Often the pauses in the poems resemble that moment where the narrator takes a sharp intake of breath and the emotion builds, albeit briefly, because the novella quickly moves on to the next poem.  The poems are an unflinching look at the students' lives and rarely descend into sentimentality.  The book is purported to be an inside look at the lives of fifteen high school students and the poems reflect that.  I do have to give Koertge a lot of credit.  He manages to make the fifteen narrators distinct from one another with a unique perspective and point of view.

The poems will appeal to some older middle grades (probably Grade 8 and some Grade 7 students) and to high school readers who will likely find themselves or someone they know on the pages of The Brimstone Journals.   Reluctant readers might like The Brimstone Journals.  It's intellectually demanding due to the topics that are brought up in its pages, but the poems are easily accessible and the free-verse structure might make students forget they're even reading poetry at all.  The poems skip  randomly from character to character, but it's not as confusing as it might seem.  The top of each page has the signature of the student who wrote the journal entry, as seen on the introduction page.  The poems are printed in a regular typeface, but I wonder how the overall effect would have changed if they had printed the poems in the penmanship of the writer.  It might have helped personalized the poems.

There are a few examples of figurative language in the poems, but by and large, Koertge uses ordinary language, and as a result the poems don't necessarily "feel" like poetry.  Lester and Tran's poems have the best examples of figurative language.  Lester employs metaphors as he compares his body to a "big bag of fries and Coke and pepperoni" (Koertge 2001, 3).  Lester also describes the football players coming down the hallway "like a tidal wave of muscle" (Koertge 2001, 36).  That single phrase evokes the image of a hallway filled with larger-than-life football players, rolling over everything in their path.  It's an effective image.  Tran's language overall is so picturesque that his poems are the most emotional of the fifteen narrators.  His status as an outsider gives him the opportunity to observe his classmates.  He describes them as "attractive, but still insatiable" ghosts (Koertge 2001, 37).  Tran refers to himself as "an anthology of [his father's] ghosts", burdened by the responsibility of doing what his parents want, rather than following his own dreams.  Tran's poetic voice even renders gossip as something striking rather than lurid.  He says, "I listen to what is traveling through wires, / dripping from overhead lighting, radiating / from computer screens, oozing from outlets / in walls" (Koertge 2001, 28).

The poems are not titled and are only distinguishable from one another by the heading that contains the name of the narrator at the top.  It has no table of contents or index.  This tends to make it slightly difficult to track down a specific poem and the reader ends up having to leaf through the entire book to find the exact moment they want to read or use.  It's a bit annoying.

I do want to take a moment to mention the cover.  It's chilling in its design, given the context of the novella.  The main plotline deals with a planned school shooting. It looks like a page ripped from a high school yearbook.  One young man's face is washed with red ink or watercolor paint, while the faces of the surrounding students have been scratched out with the point of scissors or a black pen.  The cover sets a provocative tone to start the novella.

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Spotlight On...

Lester

I'm about half sick to my stomach all
the time because I'm scared.

Those jocks come down the hall like
a tidal wave of muscle.  On a good day
they only knock me into the wall once.

The time Damon smashed a Twinkie
in my face I went to the office and
ratted him out.

I could see Mr. Newman look at his
calendar and think, The game's tomorrow 
night.

But he said, "I'll talk to him, Lester.  We'll
make sure this doesn't happen again."

Next time it was a Ding Dong instead
of a Twinkie.  Damon said if I opened
my big mouth, I was a goner.

(Koertge 2001, 36)

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Lester's poem about the constant bullying he experiences at the hands of Damon and the other football players offers an opportunity to discuss bullying, especially in the context of Anti-Bullying Week/Bullying Awareness Week.  I would have copies available for the students to read and read it aloud a few times.  Ideally, I would want the students to write and present short skits about what they would do if they saw Damon bully Lester.  Would they approach Damon or Lester?  What would they say?  This would also be a great chance to use social media, as Bullying Awareness Week in Canada has a Twitter presence and a hashtag: #BAW2015.  Students could use a school or teacher created Twitter account to tweet responses to Lester's poem with the BAW hashtag.

This is absolutely the kind of poem where a responsive Web 2.0 platform would come in handy for a teacher.  The students could create a class wiki or a blog that discusses bullying and methods they have found that works to curb or alleviate bullying in their schools or classrooms.  They could share their blog or wiki with another school and engage in a meaningful discussion with each other.

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Works Cited

Koertge, Ron. 2001. The Brimstone Journals. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press.

'All the World's a Stage' edited by Lee Bennett Hopkins, illustrated by Guy Billout (LS 5663)

Hopkins, Lee Bennett, ed. 2013. All the World's a Stage. Illustrated by Guy Billout. Mankato, MN: Creative Editions.

ISBN: 987-1-56846-218-9

Photo of cover by L. Propes

All the World's a Stage is a compilation of twenty-one short poems by Lee Bennett Hopkins that relate in some way to one of the seven ages of man, as described in the famous "All the World's a Stage" speech from William Shakespeare's play As You Like It.  The book is divided into seven parts, each linked to one of the ages of man detailed in the speech: "the infant... the whining school-boy... the lover... a soldier..." middle age, the beginnings of old age, and finally one who is elderly and infirm.  Three poems, each by a different poet, illustrate or expand upon each age.  The poems are sparsely accompanied with whimsical drawings by Guy Billout, with about two drawings per age.  The poets represented on the pages range from well known nineteenth-century poets like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Walt Whitman to more modern poets like J. Patrick Lewis and Janet S. Wong.  Bennett includes other less-well known (at least to me) poets like Madeleine Comora and Joan Bransfield Graham.

Bennett and Billout introduce each age with a two-page illustration that depicts the age in question with a quote from the "All the World's a Stage" monologue.  The illustrations feature the "one man in his time" -- a baby crawling across the floor, investigating the space, a soldier sitting under a tree, with his head resting on his drawn-up knees, clearly exhausted, and an old man with a cane in the exact same room as the baby in the first drawing, representing the cyclical nature of life as laid out in Shakespeare's monologue.  Some of the drawings with the poems themselves are specific to the theme of one of the poems, and others do more to capture the mood of age.

Photo of Billout drawing by L. Propes

The majority of the poems won't necessarily appeal to a young audience, despite the picture book format of the book.  Some of the poems will appeal to younger audiences, but a librarian or teacher needs to choose carefully.  "You and Me" by Rebecca Kai Dotlich touches on a common experience with children when their parents bring home a new baby brother or sister.  "Now" by Prince Redcloud will appeal to all students, with its brief, but poignant, lamentation that summer is ending and school will begin soon, especially at the beginning of the school year.  Most of the poems will, with a thoughtful introduction, appeal to some middle grade students and many high school students.  Some of the themes, especially as the "man in his time" ages, might be too mature for some middle grades, and yet, some middle grade students might understand it perfectly.  Again, it is incumbent on the teacher and/or librarian to carefully consider their audience and choose the poems to share accordingly.

Photo of Billout drawing by L. Propes

The poems touch on a variety of subjects: the thrill of a first touch by a crush, a father's elation at finally leaving a combat zone to see his new baby daughter, the loneliness of an old woman during the holidays, and ageing in general.  The poems are all excellent expansions of the themes of the "All the World's a Stage" monologue and rarely wallow in sentiment, unless the mood behind poem calls for it.  Overall, the poems also present a wide range of moods -- somber, exasperated, loving, contemplative.  The poems are generally fairly short, but they offer students a chance to expand their figurative language skills.  The poem "Years" by Cynthia Cotten, in particular allows teachers to provide easily digestible examples of figurative language, such as comparing the memories of an elderly person to fluttering butterflies.  "Take a Lump of Clay" by Kuan Tao-Sheng compares a married couple to statues that have been broken to pieces, the shards mixed together, and combined into statues once more, this time made up of bits of each other.  Some of the poems have a more meditative quality than others, but other poems, like "Winter Rabbit" by Madeleine Comora which portrays a child's first experience with death, have an emotional impact that is quiet on the surface, but gives a reader the opportunity to explore the emotional depths underneath.  Some of the poems make good use of rhythm to emphasize certain lines or highlight a specific mood, which is seen best in "Eighty-Eight" by Lee Bennett Hopkins.  Hopkins skillfully uses pauses to illustrate the bleakness of the old woman's situation as she celebrates a lonely Christmas.  The pauses in "Now" coupled with short sentences and a staccato rhythm reflect the inevitable sadness of the end of summer and the beginning of school.

The book contains several access features for ease of use.  It has a table of contents and three indices where a reader can look up poets by author, title, or first line.

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Spotlight On...


"Memory Trees" by Kate Coombs

It started when she was a girl
and the neighbour boy died in France.
My great-aunt planted a tree
In memory of her friend, Lance.

Photo of Billout drawing by L. Propes

"Every time I turn around,"
she says, "there's another war.
Grace just lost her grandson,
and I know there'll be more."

My great-aunt has an orchard.
To me all the trees look the same.
But she touches every trunk we pass
and tells me each one's name.

(2013, 20)
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All three of the poems in the section titled "Act Four: War" are actually perfect for use with Veteran's Day/Remembrance Day, but "Memory Trees" is the best one out of the three.  I would introduce the poem by asking students how we remember soldiers who have died, and hopefully the students will make the connections to Veteran's Day/Remembrance Day ceremonies and tangible reminders of soldiers and others that have lost their lives in times of conflict (the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., the cenotaph in Victory Square in downtown Vancouver, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, for example).

I would next read the poem once and give the students a few minutes to think about it, then read it a few more times.  I would give the students a few minutes to reflect on the poem, perhaps jotting down a few thoughts in a journal.

As an activity, I would ask the students to think about how they remember people in their lives who have died or live far away.  It can be a family member or a close friend.  The students would then write a poem (format of their choice) that reflects it.  The poem needs to clearly reflect how and what the students do to remember someone special to them.  An example of this could include a poem about baking a grandmother's signature pie recipe or the event behind a photo with a best friend who lives far away.  If the class wanted, they could use a Web 2.0 tool like Storybird to compile their poems into a book.

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Coombs, Kate. 2013. "Memory Trees." All the World's a Stage. Edited by Lee Bennett Hopkins. Illustrated by Guy Billout, 20. Mankato, MN: Creative Editions.