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Cuckoo's Child
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From: Claudia Backus <cbackus>
Date: Tue, 3 Sep 1996 11:24:28 -0500
Thanks to the CCBC staff for their warm, welcomming response to recent comments on the nature of CCBC-NET. Here is my not-laboriously-in?pth but hopefully well-thought-out response to Ginny's question, "What did you appreciate about "The Cuckoo's Child" ? I LOVED the 1962 setting. The images of life in Beirut which occur throughout the book are so evocative, they replaced the war-torn, city in ruins pictures that automatically come to my mind when I see the word "Beirut". For example, on page 3, "In Beirut, where we had been living, I shinnied to the top of the date palm trees on the playground almost every day and swayed there, hidden in the leaves...". That image, of a little girl, perched at the top of a tree, looking out over the sea is so poignant. What would she see if the book was set in the present? The sea (a constant in her life in Beirut, but missing in Tennessee) would be there, but what about the "tall white buildings and the tramcars" (pg 4), the university library where Nell spent her afternoons reading medical textbooks
(pg 19), Mia's school with "the peculiar, foreign odor of the gloomy front hallway..spicy and dank at the same time, and it always made me think of cooked eggplant." ? Such powerful images, rooted in Freeman's Beirut childhood, make me even more aware of the destruction war has brought to the Middle East.
Claudia Backus Children's Services Coordinator Waukesha County Federated Library System 321 Wisconsin Avenue Waukesha, WI 53186 414?6?87 cbackus at omnifest.uwm.edu
Received on Tue 03 Sep 1996 11:24:28 AM CDT
Date: Tue, 3 Sep 1996 11:24:28 -0500
Thanks to the CCBC staff for their warm, welcomming response to recent comments on the nature of CCBC-NET. Here is my not-laboriously-in?pth but hopefully well-thought-out response to Ginny's question, "What did you appreciate about "The Cuckoo's Child" ? I LOVED the 1962 setting. The images of life in Beirut which occur throughout the book are so evocative, they replaced the war-torn, city in ruins pictures that automatically come to my mind when I see the word "Beirut". For example, on page 3, "In Beirut, where we had been living, I shinnied to the top of the date palm trees on the playground almost every day and swayed there, hidden in the leaves...". That image, of a little girl, perched at the top of a tree, looking out over the sea is so poignant. What would she see if the book was set in the present? The sea (a constant in her life in Beirut, but missing in Tennessee) would be there, but what about the "tall white buildings and the tramcars" (pg 4), the university library where Nell spent her afternoons reading medical textbooks
(pg 19), Mia's school with "the peculiar, foreign odor of the gloomy front hallway..spicy and dank at the same time, and it always made me think of cooked eggplant." ? Such powerful images, rooted in Freeman's Beirut childhood, make me even more aware of the destruction war has brought to the Middle East.
Claudia Backus Children's Services Coordinator Waukesha County Federated Library System 321 Wisconsin Avenue Waukesha, WI 53186 414?6?87 cbackus at omnifest.uwm.edu
Received on Tue 03 Sep 1996 11:24:28 AM CDT
