'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.

'Winger' by Andrew Smith

Smith, Andrew. Winger. New York: Simon and  Schuster, 2013. Print.

Photo by: Simon and Schuster

If you read the blurb on the back of the book that summarizes Winger, a few thoughts might run through your head.  It describes Ryan Dean West, a fourteen year-old junior at Pine Mountain, an exclusive boarding school in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon.  A few of the thoughts that went through my head were: #poorlittlerichboy and #firstworldproblems.

Ryan Dean (yes, that's his first name) doesn't mind attending Pine Mountain.  He doesn't have the best relationship with his parents to begin with, and his father is a politician in Boston.  Ryan Dean is a bit precocious and, as Pine Mountain is in a remote location, it effectively removes any chance of scandal back home.  Before you get the idea that Pine Mountain is a refuge for poor little rich kids, here are a few of their rules: no cell phones, no iPods, uniforms -- at all times, and all the students are required to participate in at least one sport.  Oh, and there's existence of Opportunity Hall, the dorm for "troublemakers".  Opportunity Hall, or O-Hall, is no picnic.  There are no locks on the doors, the shower curtains in the boys' bathroom are on the grungy side, and scary Mrs. Singer oversees the vacant girls' floor of O-Hall.

Ryan Dean has been assigned to live in O-Hall because of an incident the previous school year, and his roommate is none other than Chas Becker, a large, menacing senior, who Ryan Dean is convinced wants to kill him.  The book follows Ryan Dean and his exploits over the first few months of the school year at Pine Mountain.  Ryan Dean tries to not rouse the ire of Chas, fit in with the much older boys in O-Hall, keep his position on the varsity rugby team, and get his best friend Annie to admit she's mad about him.

Smith writes the book from the point-of-view of Ryan Dean, so we're privy to all his inner thoughts about girls, his classes, rugby, girls, the inhabitants of O-Hall, girls...  Smith captures Ryan Dean in all his adolescent glory.  His inner voice can be quite profane, but Ryan Dean is a sweet kid at heart, who can recognize his mistakes.  Ryan Dean is a wonderfully complex character, who struggles to find his niche at Pine Mountain.  He's too mature for the other fourteen year-olds, but still a kid in many ways to his classmates in the eleventh grade.  Ryan Dean has a wry, amusing take on life, perhaps especially when life decides to make situations as humiliating to Ryan Dean as possible.

Other characters are less well-drawn, especially the girls.  At first glance, it's possible that Smith ventured into Mary Sue territory, because all the girls are, in Ryan Dean's word, "hot".  Two girls in particular, Annie and Megan, are almost too perfect so that it hurts to look at them.  On further reflection, perhaps it's because we're looking at them through Ryan Dean's eyes, so of course they are presented in the burnished glow of Ryan Dean's admiration.  Chas is a grunting, seething, looming presence in the book.  Nick and Casey, two of the other boys in O-Hall, are painted as stereotypical aggressive jocks.  One of the characters that has the potential to be as complex and interesting as Ryan Dean is Joey Cosentino, who is a stereotype-defying gay teen, often serving as the voice of Ryan Dean's conscience.  Joey gently guides Ryan Dean into being a better man, while Ryan Dean wholeheartedly accepts Joey as one of his best friends.

Ryan Dean is an artist, so the book is littered with his illustrations that depict his rich imagination or his current state of mind as presented in various graphs.  The overall tone is endearing, engaging, and often hilarious.  There is a dark turn toward the end of the book, and Smith cuts things short with that event.  There is a sequel, Stand-Off, that should be published next fall.  Hopefully, Smith will let us see how Ryan Dean has coped with the events that marked the end of Winger.  

To borrow a phrase from Ryan Dean, I give Winger a four-out-of-five-chicken-potpies-on-the-Lisa-scale-of-you-should-read-this.  It makes a welcome departure from the glut of vampire and dystopian novels cluttering the YA shelves.

'Persepolis' by Marjane Satrapi

Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. New York: Pantheon, 2003. Print

Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis: The Story of a Return. New York: Pantheon, 2004. Print.

I remember seeing the hostages from the US Embassy in Tehran released from captivity on television.  I was five years old.  For years my perspective of Iran, and Iranians in general, was colored by the version of Iran I saw on the nightly news: the image of a monolithic block of hundreds of Iranians chanting, "Death to Satan!" while burning American flags.  I imagine this is true for many other people.  It was an image that motivated Marjane Satrapi to write -- and draw -- a memoir of the Iran in which she grew up, left, returned, and ultimately left once again.

Cover image of Story of a
Childhood

Persepolis begins with the first volume, The Story of a Childhood.  In it, we meet a 10 year old Satrapi as she's handed a hijab as she walks through the gates of her school, with a command to wear it.  Satrapi wryly observes of herself and her classmates, "We didn't really like to wear the veil, especially since we didn't understand why we had to" (Childhood 3).  The image accompanying her statement shows a playground full of little girls doing everything with their veils, except actually wearing them.  From there, Satrapi takes the reader on a journey through a brief, but informative, history of Iran, ending up in the late 1970s when the Iranian people began to protest against the Shah, who eventually left his role as the ruler of Iran.  Satrapi then shows how little by little Islamic extremists appropriated the revolution itself.  The rest of the book covers how Satrapi and her family struggled against the restrictions placed on them in the Islamic Republic, the restrictions that governed how and what Satrapi was taught in school, what she wore in public, and even the type of music she was allowed to openly purchase.  After witnessing their daughter chafe under the restrictive society, Satrapi's parents make the decision to send her to school in Austria.

Cover image of Story of a
Return

The memoir picks up in the second volume, The Story of a Return, when Satrapi lands in Vienna.  There, she wrestles with the initial language barrier, and then the cultural barrier that drives Satrapi back to Iran once she graduates from the school in Vienna.  The solace she sought in Iran was short-lived.  The restrictions are even tighter than they were when Satrapi went to Austria.  In order to be admitted to a university, she must submit to a religious exam.  She meets a young man, but the restrictions of society mean they are unable to really spend a great deal of unchaperoned time with one another, and their eventual marriage is a disaster from the word go.  Her parents, once more, seeing Satrapi's options in Iran are severely limited, encourage her to leave Iran, but this time for good.

The dual nature of Satrapi and many
other Iranians after the revolution.

One of the overarching themes of the memoir is the ultimate futility of pinning labels on people.  Satrapi and her family are proud of their Persian heritage, and only nominally Muslim.  Yet as Iranians, people outside of Iran often won't look past the hijab on Satrapi, her mother, or gradmother's head, labelling them as devout Muslims, even when they are not.  A beloved family member is viewed as an enemy of the state by the government.  The mullah who administers Satrapi's religious ideology exam for university admittance turns out to be a fair and thoughtful individual, quite at odds with the image of a dour, suppressive religious leader seen on Western television screens.  Satrapi even goes so far as to call him a "true religious man" (Return 130).  Neighbors who hadn't been devout Muslims before the revolution were now publicly even more devout than the Ayatollah Khomeini.  It serves to demonstrate that perception is everything, and our perceptions are often at odds with reality.

Satrapi as a child,
on the right, on the
way to a protest.

The people Satrapi encounters in Vienna are supposedly more enlightened, free from the repressiveness of a religious regime, and yet while Satrapi lives in Vienna, neo-Nazi groups are on the rise.  Markus, Satrapi's boyfriend at the time attempts to placate her by claiming, "culture and education are the lethal weapons against all kinds of fundamentalism" (Return 75).  This statement is particularly distasteful to Satrapi, who came from an educated family and culturally-rich background, and still watched helplessly as fundamentalists took over her country.  Incidents such as this one during Satrapi's time in Vienna only widen the gap between Satrapi and her peers in Vienna.

When she's set adrift in Vienna, Satrapi comments that she's essentially stateless: in Iran she's too Western, but in the West she's too Iranian (Return 118).  Satrapi's identity crisis is a frequent issue of personal contention.  She can't relate to her peers in Vienna, because they have lived an extremely sheltered existence in comparison to Satrapi, who has seen neighbors killed in the Iran-Iraq War and lives in Vienna completely alone, with no support system.  When Satrapi returns to Tehran, her experiences in Vienna have made her foreign to her friends there.  The repressive regime has made her girlfriends' tiny acts of rebellion -- wearing makeup and emulating Western fashions -- into a veritable lifeline.  To Satrapi, coming home after more than four years of isolation, bad relationships, and still worse choices,  even those small acts of rebellion are too exhausting.  Nor can she speak of the worst of her time in Vienna, which pales in comparison to what her friends and family have had to endure in Tehran.

Satrapi's friends... veiled...

... and unveiled.

Satrapi's art class at university
attempting to draw the human
form while hidden in a chador.

Given that the memoir is written by a woman, the veil becomes a source of contention between Satrapi's progressive upbringing and the regime that dictates she wear one upon leaving the house.  Satrapi doesn't delve into the history of the veil in Iran, but there is a long history of Persian women covering their heads (Jelodar, Yusof, and Mahmoodi 66).  The veil itself also became the object of a tug-of-war between the push to modernize Iran when Reza Shah had the Unveiling Act passed in 1936 and more traditional Iranians.  Jelodar, Yusof, and Mahmoodi 67).  The Veiling Act made the veil mandatory in 1983 (Jelodar, Yusof, and Mahmoodi 70).  The veil creates "a feeling of alienation from [Satrapi's] friends and opposite sex at schools... the veil, as a national symbol, separates her in copious ways, including body and mind" (Jelodar, Yusof, and Mahmoodi 71).  Satrapi uses depictions of veiled women to demonstrate the way "the veil became a benchmark with which women are measured.  Those who wear the veil are devoted believers and those who do not are traitors and westoxified" (Jelodar, Yusof, and Mahmoodi 72).  First, she uses a contrasting drawing of a "devout" woman versus a more modern woman.  The devout woman is dressed in full-length garment that covers everything but her face.  The modern woman wears a long-sleeved jacket and a scarf over her head that allows a few illicit strands of hair to peek out.  When Satrapi returns to Tehran from Vienna, she encounters girls who push the boundaries set by the Revolutionary Guards for their scarves and allow the hijab to slip a bit further back, exposing more of their hair.  The veil also acts as a means to keep women so busy questioning if their appearance meets the Revolutionary Guard standards that they are unable to question the loss of their freedoms (Satrapi, Return 148).

The panic experienced when the
Revolutionary Guard discovers
a party.

Satrapi herself has an admittedly mixed view of the hijab.  While she doesn't wish to wear one, she doesn't want to take the choice to wear one away from someone else.  In a op-ed piece in response to the 2004 French law banning hijabs in The Guardian, Satrapi writes, "Forcing women to put a piece of material on their head is an act of violence, and even if you get used to it after a while, the violence of insisting that women must cover their heads in public with a small piece of cloth does not diminish ("Veiled Threat").  She continues, "But I also think that to forbid girls from wearing the veil... is every bit as repressive... young women... should have the freedom to choose... a basic human right that someone can choose what she wears without interference from the state ("Veiled Threat").  To Satrapi it's an ironic situation because as much as she dislikes the veil, she finds herself defending the right to choose to wear one to Western audiences (Constantino 434).

Satrapi's beloved uncle
Anoosh, as he realizes
everything is not all right.

The artwork in Persepolis is expressive without being ornate.  Bold slashes and swirls of black bisect the panels, creating the upsweep of an eyebrow, the folds of a chador, or the silhouetted bodies of young men and boys killed on the front of the Iran-Iraq War.  In an interview with Mother Jones, Satrapi says, "Writing is not for me. I completely lose my sense of humor when I write... Images give me possibilities that I don't have with words" (Walt "Never Mind the Mullahs").  The images allow Satrapi to convey her younger self in a way that both adult and teenage audience can recognize. It's not difficult to see how precocious Satrapi was as a child when you see the expression on her ten year old face -- full of confidence and the absolute certainty she is right.  It allows her to show her uncle Anoosh's growing disillusionment with the revolution as he repeatedly says, "Everything will be all right." while his head droops and shoulders hunch in disappointment and defeat (Satrapi, Childhood 65-66).  A panel with no text is enough to demonstrate the urgency of seeking shelter from a bomb attack from Iraq.  You don't need it.  The sight of so many people frantically rushing down flights of stairs says everything (Satrapi, Childhood 103).  A series of panels showing how Satrapi's university art class struggled to draw the human body while swathed in a volumuous chador is at the same time wryly comical, but the waves of frustration emanate from the page (Satrapi, Return).  Two group images of women first show the women in hijabs, then unveiled, and their individuality can be truly appreciated (Satrapi, Return 151).  The former image shows only the faces of the women in Satrapi's circle of female friends, but without much to differentiate them.  The latter image shows them in all their individual glory, different hair colors and styles, sleeveless tops, trousers, skirts, and even -- gasp! -- cleavage.  A three page series of drawings depict the night a private (and furtive) party was discovered by the Revolutionary Guard and a friend died trying to flee pursuit (Satrapi, Return153-155).  There are no words, but again, there is no need.  Satrapi's drawings efficiently and emotionally offer the panic, fear, and misery of the situation.

An instance where Satrapi
breaks the fourth wall.

As a memoir, the graphic novels do their job.  Satrapi takes you on an emotional ride, punctuated by moments of horror, terror, and unbelievable sadness.  As a narrator, she often breaks the "fourth wall" of the graphic novel, sharing a knowing look, a comment, or other aside with the reader.  It's a wink and a nod to the fact that Satrapi is "speaking" to an audience, and includes them on her own feelings and opinions of certain events, even if she isn't directly involved.  The love her family feels for one another is palpable and seeing her grandmother makes me miss my late grandmother more than ever. (They had similar attitudes about patriarchy and personal lives.)  While the novel itself is accessible to a general audience, there are a few concepts, such as dialectic materialism (the foundation of Marxism-Leninism), totalitarianism, communism, socialism, etc. that might be a bit beyond some readers.  That being said, even I had to look up a few things.  For the most part, Satrapi tries very hard not to leave her audience behind.  As someone whose childhood was peppered with images of the Ayatollah Khomeini, which were the stuff of nightmares to a small child, I greatly appreciated the opportunity to learn more about Iran and Iranians beyond the frenzied protests against the Great Satan.

Running to the
basement shelter
during a bomb
attack

Persepolis has recently come under fire in Chicago Public Schools for a handful of scenes, specifically the single scene showing how the government tortured a friend of Satrapi's parents ("ALA Questions" 8).  The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom pointed out the irony of censoring a book that "reflects the totalitarian society [the] book is all about" ("ALA Questions" 8).  In response, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF) started a feature column "designed to allay confusion around the content of banned books and to help parents and teachers raise readers" (Jaffe "Using Graphic Novels").  Their column on Persepolis offers different discussion points of the novel; history and civics connections; applications in literature classes; visual literacy; and pairings with other novels and memoirs.  There are links to recommended teacher resources and, for those who need them, relevant Common Core State Standards.

Satrapi's version of people fleeing
Tehran during the Iran-Iraq War.

An updated version called Persepolis 2.0 was published online by two anonymous Iranian artists, that took the disputed 2009 elections into account.  Using Satrapi's artwork, they added new text and a few original drawings to supplement Satrapi's artwork.  They did this with Satrapi's full permission.

Persepolis was also made into an animated film in 2007, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

All images were photographed from Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and Persepolis: The Story of a Return.

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Works Cited

"ALA Questions Removal of Graphic Novel in Chicago." American Libraries 44.5 (2013): 8-. Education Source. Web. 25 July 2014.

Costantino, Manuela. "Marji: Popular Commix Heroine Breathing Life into the Writing of History." Canadian Review of American Studies 38.3 (2008): 429-47. Academic Search Complete. Web. 25 July 2015.

Jaffe, Meryl. "Using Graphic Novels in Education: Persepolis." CBDLF. 27 June 2013.Web. <http://cbldf.org/2013/06/using-graphic-novels-in-education-persepolis/>.

Jelodar, Esmaeil Zeiny, Noraini MD Yusof, and Khalil Mahmoodi. "Bearers of Culture: Images of Veiling in Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis." Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies 19.2 (2013): 65-74. Education Source. Web. 25 July 2014.

Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis: The Story of a Return. New York: Pantheon, 2004. Print.

---. Persepolis: They Story of a Childhood. New York: Pantheon, 2003. Print.

---. "Veiled Threat." The Guardian. 12 December 2003.Web. <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/dec/12/gender.uk>.

Walt, Vivienne. "Never Mind the Mullahs." Mother Jones 33.1 (2008): 74-5. Academic Search Complete. Web. 25 July 2014.

Steampunk Display

'The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope' by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer

Kamkwamba, William and Bryan Mealer. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of  Electricity and Hope. New York: William Morrow, 2009.  Print.

Cover Image:
HarperCollins.com

Go have a look in your trash or recycling bin.  Or maybe you drive by a junkyard or have a neighbor with a junky car they haven’t fixed in the last ten years. I’ll wait.  What did you see there?  Do you think you could make anything out those things?  Do you see trash or do you see potential?  While growing up in a remote Malawi village, William Kamkwamba saw the potential.  As a young teenager, he designed and built a windmill using materials he found in the trash and junkyard.  William’s windmill not only brought electricity to his family’s home, it also helped them access a supply of clean drinking water and water to irrigate their crops.  What was even more remarkable about this situation is that William was entirely self-taught.

Before we can understand what drove William to design and build a windmill for his family, we have to understand the environment in which he and his family lived.  The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind begins with a brief history of Malawi, and the area in which William lives in particular.  This also serves to explain how the people of Malawi ended up in a situation where their lives are dependent on the capriciousness of weather and the moods of their government.  Many people are undereducated, including William’s parents, neither of whom finished primary school and were barely literate (Kamkwamba and Mealer 105).  Attending secondary school, much less a university is a pipe dream to many in Malawi, as William and many of his friends are to discover.  Placement in secondary schools is determined by the scores a student earns in exams given at the end of primary school.  Students must be able to pay the tuition and fees for secondary school and obtain the proper uniform to attend secondary school.  For many students, these requirements place advanced schooling out of reach.  Just before William was to begin secondary school, drought hit Malawi hard and without corn and tobacco crops to sell, Williams’s father was unable to scrape together the twelve hundred kwacha (about eighty US dollars) to pay for William’s school fees. 

William’s father wasn’t always a farmer.  He worked as a trader in the village market, but a brother talked him into joining his tobacco farm when William was a year old.  From that moment onward, the family fortunes rested on the rainy season arriving at the right time and lasting for the proper amount of time.  And all was well for a while.  Things began to unravel when William was nine years old, and his uncle died, leaving the tobacco farm to his oldest son, who promptly mismanaged the farm into unproductivity.  Soon after that, drought and famine arrived in Malawi, which not only destroyed the tobacco crop the family sold for money, but also their maize crop they used as their primary food source.  Even though the next year brought the right weather needed to grow maize and tobacco once more, the damage was done.  William’s family was deeply in debt, and William was forced to repeatedly drop out of school when his family was unable to afford the fees.  William is unwilling to become just another undereducated young man with limited or no prospects, so he haunts the small library in his village in an attempt to keep up with his studies.  He felt “reading could help keep my brain from getting soft while being a dropout” (Kamkwamba and Mealer 161).  One day, he finds an American science textbook that explains windmills and a dream is born.

The region of Malawi where William’s family lives has one abundant natural resource: wind.  When William discovers that wind can create electricity, he begins to plan to build one in order to benefit his family.  It’s soon after the recent drought, and William is driven by a desire to make sure his family doesn’t lose their tobacco crop or go hungry.  With a windmill, his family can pump water from their well to irrigate their tobacco and maize crops and enable his mother to plant a garden to grow other vegetables for his family to eat, like potatoes, cabbages, and beans.

Seeing the windmill wasn’t William’s first exposure to the concept of moving creating energy.  He had seen bicycle lights that were powered by the rider’s pedaling, which sparked his interest in figuring out how to create that kind of power without needing a human or animal to be the source of the motion.  William, along with his cousin Geoffrey, was always a tinkerer.  Together, they learned how radios worked through much trial and error.  In the process “a great many radios were sacrificed for [their] knowledge” (Kamkwamba and Mealer 69).  Eventually they had a small business repairing radios for other people in their village.  This dedication to learning from failure would help William when it came to building his windmill.

William’s windmill was made from a collection of materials salvaged from around the village and an “abandoned garage and scrapyard” (Kamkwamba and Mealer 176).  He describes his first trip to the scrapyard with a windmill design in mind this way: “Now that I had an actual purpose and a plan, I realized how much bounty lay before me.  There were so many things: old water pumps, tractor rims half the size of my body, filters, hoses, piles, and plows” (Kamkwamba and Mealer 176).  What follows is a description of the junk he found in the scrapyard and how he repurposed it to construct his windmill. 

Much to William’s relief, the windmill works according to plan.  He’s able to wire the house for electricity and build a water pump for his family’s well.  The windmill gives his family a much more reliable source of electricity than people in the village, who rely on the government service, which is subject to frequent blackouts.  People can bring their mobile phones to his home and charge them using the windmill’s power.  His sisters can study for school after sundown, and his parents are able to work on tasks that need light after dark, making his family much more productive.  A couple of years later, when William and his windmill came to global attention, he was able to finally install a pump and spigot on his family’s well, and opened it for other women in the village to use.  His mother reports she “saved two hours each day” by not having to carry water from the public drinking water well back to their home (Kamkwamba and Mealer 275).  One can only surmise how much time other women were able to save by having a nearby source of clean drinking water. 

Government education officials later discovered William’s windmill, who in turn, brought journalists to see it.  They were so impressed that they managed to help William continue his interrupted education, reasoning the way to help Malawi was to help innovative young men and women like William continue with higher education.  He was then invited to a TED conference in 2007 in Tanzania where he presented the story of his windmill.  This led to additional publicity and funding, which helped William continue his education at a better school, help pay for his sisters’ school fees, and help make improvements to his village.  William also started a fund, the Moving Windmills Project, to help make improvements in rural Malawi.  After the terrible experience of the drought and famine, William wanted to make sure people never had to depend on the whims of government assistance, if they could avoid it.   

William fits the definition of an innovator.  He didn’t need to reinvent the wheel, or in this case, the windmill.  He saw a situation that could be better and found a way to make it so.  Even as an adolescent, he saw that his village needed someone to quickly repair radios, their entertainment and news source.  William brings to his community what what J.P. Kretzmann and John L. McKnight would term a “unique combination of assets” (4).  Even more importantly, he “represents an image of Africa and Africans that rejects the pity and guilt commonly invoked by most news stories out of the continent.  In fact he represents the opposite -- and may simultaneously be offering solutions to poverty, degradations, starvation, aid dependency, and corruption” (Gallis “Sustainable Entrepreneurship”).  Instead of aid groups swooping into Malawi and other countries and imposing their “help”, William represents what happens when local talents are identified and cultivated for the betterment of their community.

As a writer, William has an engaging voice.  It’s the memoir’s greatest strength.  He’s funny, friendly, and has a conversational style.  When describing the importance of a doughy bread made from maize -- nsima -- that’s a staple in Malawian diets he confides, “Everyone from the fat politicians to the dogs and cats depend on nsima to live.  Each night after our supper, Khamba (his dog) would be waiting by his food bowl to get his delicious helping.  Most of the time he didn’t even chew his portion, just inhaled it whole.  ‘How can you even enjoy it?’ I’d ask” (Kamkwamba and Mealer 72).  Anecdotes such as this present a moment of commonality to readers in the Western world.  We’ve all fed our dog or cat a yummy treat only to see them swallow it without even a cursory chew and ask the exact same thing.  In Robin Vidimos’ review of the book, she describes his voice as “without guile, laying out the realities of a farming life” (E-12).  He doesn’t make farming romantic, nor does he make his poverty noble.  It’s backbreaking work, and William often mentions the capriciousness of nature that makes their situation as subsistence farmers so precarious.  He often treats the reader as a confidante, confessing things he hadn’t revealed until he wrote the memoir, like leaving his beloved dog Khamba to die out in a grove of blue gum trees at the height of the famine when everyone was starving.  William says, with evident sadness, “We filled the hole with soil and left no marker, even concealed the patch with grass and branches.  When Charity and I got home, we told no one about what we’d done.  Even after all these years, it’s remained a secret, until now” (Kamkwamba and Mealer 148).  William even has a self-deprecating sense of humor, especially when he describes his first brushes with modern technology.  At the TED conference in Tanzania, William sees the Internet for the first time.  He remarks how “funny to me now -- at this conference in East Africa, with some of the world’s greatest minds in science and technology just outside the door, there I was in this room seeing the Internet for the first time.  They could have put a blinking sign over my head and charged admission” (Kamkwamba and Mealer 266).  It’s a testament to his sense of humor that he can gently poke fun at himself in such a situation. He also evokes such strong emotion in the reader, that you become invested in his story. The memoir is also an inspiring tale of a young man who overcame adversity and misfortune by his sheer will and determination.  Who doesn’t like a story like that?

The book moves a nicely meandering pace, much as a storyteller would use to draw in their audience.  There is a section, especially when William starts describing how he made his windmill that honestly made my eyes glaze over.  It’s a bit tedious and technical and is a place where a little editing to tighten up the prose or make it less technical could have helped.  On the other hand, my boredom could also rested on my ignorance of more than basic physics and lack of interest in the subject overall.  It’s understandably meant to convey William’s persistence, but it moves the focus of the narrative from perseverance to technical details that perhaps aren’t completely necessary in the overall arc of the narrative.  William has also provided line drawings of his windmill and a few of the other things that are meant to offer a visual aid to the narrative.  The drawings are almost too simplistic to accomplish the task.  They lack a level of detail to make them comprehensible to a non-science person and are often more puzzling than enlightening.  They’re a bit distracting. 

One of the lessons that I’m afraid will get lost under the clarion call of perseverance is that failure is indeed a great teacher.  I spent many years teaching underprivileged children and this is exactly the kind of book that an administrator would suggest we read in order to inspire us for the coming school year.  Like I said, who can resist such an inspiring story?  It is important to remember that this is one person’s experience.  Before we turn to underprivileged schools with this book and say, “See?  If this kid could succeed, so should yours!”, we need to ask ourselves the following questions: 1) What about William’s family structure made it possible for him to succeed?; 2) How much of his success was motivated by an internal desire to succeed?; and 3) What about William’s personal story is specific to his circumstances and upbringing?  What can we take from this memoir and make it scalable?  For me, it’s the much smaller message about failure.  William mentions the times he tried to do something, failed the first time, then analyzed what went wrong, and then tried it again, applying what he’d learned.  That is the message I’d want my students to take away from this memoir.  Sometimes in order to learn something, we have to learn from the mistakes we make along the way.  The other thing that I think gets lost in the rest of the memoir is that William didn’t operate alone.  He had help from other members of his family -- his father who left him alone to build the windmill and his cousin Geoffrey who helped him acquire tools and hardware William was unable to salvage or make.  No man is an island and no innovator works in a vacuum. 

William has a blog where you can find photos and videos of William and his windmill.  There are also links to his TED presentations in 2007 and 2009.  The blog also has a link where you can donate to his NGO Moving Windmills. 

For younger readers, there is a picture book version of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. 

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Works Cited

Gallis, Helene. "Sustainable Entrepeneuship in Africa." World Watch 23.4 (2010): 12-7. Academic Search Complete. Web. 18 July 2014.

Kamkwamba, William, and Bryan Mealer. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope. New York: William Morrow, 2009. Print.

Kretzmann, John P., and John L. McKnight. "Introduction." Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community's Assets. Evanston: Institute for Policy Research, 1993. 1-6. Web. <http://www.abcdinstitute.org/docs/abcd/GreenBookIntro.pdf>

Vidimos, Robin. "African Boy's Triumph, Stunningly Told." The Denver Post, sec. E: 12. 15 November 2009. Business Insights: Essentials. Web. 18 July 2014.