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Whirligig, Holes & Others
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From: ANNE BREEN <AEBREEN>
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 1998 12:58:14 -0600
I will also share my experience with young readers, grades 5 through 8, who are members of a youth book review group in my public library. A great deal of my acceptance of and thinking about nonlinear narrative stems from these real readers' responses. These young readers can all define traditional story structure... they describe a one hill roller coaster with their words and hands. But they love the new nonlinear, multiple perspectives they find in recent venturesome novels. They are unphased by the twenty-one narrators in Bat 6, and they appreciate Go and Come Back tremendously. One of my sixth graders was so enthused about Whirligig and Holes that he chose to write his summer essay for school on these two books. Though you may wonder if he really did write the following himself, I can testify that he did. Kate McClelland, Perrot Library, Old Greenwich, CT Here is his essay with his permission:
"When I was younger, a lot of the books I read had a predictable beginning, middle and end, like a straight road on which you knew where you were going. At that time, I liked those books because their predictability comforted me. But now that I am older, I find them a lot less interesting to read. Recently, I have read two books with different formats, Paul Fleischman's Whirligig and Louis Sachar's Holes. Whirligig is about a boy named Brent Bishop, who tries to take his own life and ends up accidentally killing a young girl. On a mission of repentance for her parents, he travels to the four corners of the country to build whirligigs with their daughter's face on them. Instead of following the story line straight through, Fleischman takes us from place to place to tell separate and unrelated stories about the people who eventually find happiness as a result of the whirligigs. And he doesn't even put these stories in the same order as Brent is building his whirligigs. In the book Holes, a boy named Stanley Yelnats is sent to a juvenile correctional facility in Texas for a minor crime which he didn't commit. There he has to dig a hole five feet deep every day for a warden who thinks she will find an old outlaw's buried treasure. Intertwined here are separate stories about people from the distant past, but they all have some connection to each other and to Stanley and to the treasure he is digging for. Both Fleischman and Sachar have used non-linear structures in previous books, but not quite like the structure in Whirligig and Holes. Fleischman's Seedfolks and Sachar's Wayside School Is Falling Down tell stories about a place from different people's points of view. What I really like about Whirligig and Holes is it's like taking a trip with those unpredictable cutoffs, but finally coming back to the main road at the end."
Received on Tue 27 Oct 1998 12:58:14 PM CST
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 1998 12:58:14 -0600
I will also share my experience with young readers, grades 5 through 8, who are members of a youth book review group in my public library. A great deal of my acceptance of and thinking about nonlinear narrative stems from these real readers' responses. These young readers can all define traditional story structure... they describe a one hill roller coaster with their words and hands. But they love the new nonlinear, multiple perspectives they find in recent venturesome novels. They are unphased by the twenty-one narrators in Bat 6, and they appreciate Go and Come Back tremendously. One of my sixth graders was so enthused about Whirligig and Holes that he chose to write his summer essay for school on these two books. Though you may wonder if he really did write the following himself, I can testify that he did. Kate McClelland, Perrot Library, Old Greenwich, CT Here is his essay with his permission:
"When I was younger, a lot of the books I read had a predictable beginning, middle and end, like a straight road on which you knew where you were going. At that time, I liked those books because their predictability comforted me. But now that I am older, I find them a lot less interesting to read. Recently, I have read two books with different formats, Paul Fleischman's Whirligig and Louis Sachar's Holes. Whirligig is about a boy named Brent Bishop, who tries to take his own life and ends up accidentally killing a young girl. On a mission of repentance for her parents, he travels to the four corners of the country to build whirligigs with their daughter's face on them. Instead of following the story line straight through, Fleischman takes us from place to place to tell separate and unrelated stories about the people who eventually find happiness as a result of the whirligigs. And he doesn't even put these stories in the same order as Brent is building his whirligigs. In the book Holes, a boy named Stanley Yelnats is sent to a juvenile correctional facility in Texas for a minor crime which he didn't commit. There he has to dig a hole five feet deep every day for a warden who thinks she will find an old outlaw's buried treasure. Intertwined here are separate stories about people from the distant past, but they all have some connection to each other and to Stanley and to the treasure he is digging for. Both Fleischman and Sachar have used non-linear structures in previous books, but not quite like the structure in Whirligig and Holes. Fleischman's Seedfolks and Sachar's Wayside School Is Falling Down tell stories about a place from different people's points of view. What I really like about Whirligig and Holes is it's like taking a trip with those unpredictable cutoffs, but finally coming back to the main road at the end."
Received on Tue 27 Oct 1998 12:58:14 PM CST
