From: Megan Schliesman <mjschlie>
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 1998 11:29:36 -0600

I'm so glad Eliza Dresang brought up Anthony Browne's Voices in the Park. I have been thinking about this book a lot during our discussion on point of view. While I can't share any responses of young reader's, I will say that when we discussed this book here at the CCBC during our monthly discussion of new books in November, a fifth grade teacher said she had shared it with other teachers in her school and all were excited about it. They plan on adding it to the list of books they will use to help teach children the concept of "voice." I, too, am eager to hear what young readers think of this book, as well as what others who use books with children think. I was struck by how effectively Browne was able to use point of view in such a short narrative to get a sense not only of each of the four characters perspectives on a single series of events, but also on how much he was able to reveal about the lives and personalities of each of those characters in the process--there is a lot to be inferred in those 32 pages.

Eliza also brought up Go and Come Back by Joan Abelove, and quoted from Perry Nodelman's review. However, I found I had a somewhat different reaction to the book than expressed by Nodelman, who wrote: "While Alicsia's alien values foreground the foolishness of some common North American assumptions, a Reader's knowledge of what Alicia gets wrong often makes her assumptions seem foolish also. It's Abelove's ability to preserve this precarious balance, to allow her representatives of two different cultures to equally reveal each other's blindnesses, that makes *Go and Come Back* such a highly moral book." I did not find myself responding to any of Alicia's assumptions as "foolish." One of the things that I so appreciated about the book was that I was so firmly rooted in Alicia's point of view that I did not find myself judging her ideas from my own industrialized perspective--her way of looking at things made sense to me after a short period of time and that was a remarkable accomplishment on the part of the author in terms of my own reading experience. In fact, going into the book I was very concerned that I would feel Alicia's way of living was being judged--by the reader or the author--and it was the absence of that judgment that made me feel more comfortable with the book than not. I still have to be aware that my understanding of this culture is being filtered through a person not of that culture (the author), but it was the very fact that I felt so rooted in looking at people from my own cultural background as outsiders that made me feel comfortable with the book.

In her post Jeanne Whitehouse Peterson wrote "I think it's interesting to ponder our own transaction with novels, like SEED FOLKS. Authors, like Paul Fleischman, spend much energy imagining the structure, the language, the forms of the piece. While his work in WHIRLIGIGS and SEED FOLKS doesn't 'transcend' for me, it certainly gives me much to ponder about the ways the world works." Applying that thinking to my own expereience with Go and Come Back, my feeling was that I had been given the astonishing oppotunity to surrender my own point of view and to see myself--the behavioral patterns that our part of my culture--from another's.

One of the questions that this discussion of point of view raises for me is the issue of believabilty. We often discuss the believabilty of a character's action or voice in a story, and the believability of a plot. But what about point of view? Point of view is one of the ways that an author can really make events in a story that might otherwise seem a stretch, or melodramatic, BE believable in the context of the fictional world that has been created; or events that might seem too much for young readers accessible because of firmly rooting the story in a child's viewpoint. Renee Hoxie earlier mentioned What Jamie Saw as an excellent example of a story that stays true to a child's point of view; as a result, even though it is a hard story to read on an emotional level, it is a story true to a child and child readers.

Linda Sue Park wrote about at first fighting the technique of multiple points of view in Bat 6 and then just giving in to it and having an
"amazing" experience as a result. So over and over again I am struck by the power of this literary element to create powerful reading experiences, whether it is stretching the boundaries of what we excpect, such as the use of multiple viewpoints or unexpected ones, or simply done extremely well in the context of a more traditional narrative. So I'm wondering not only what people think about the effectiveness of point of view in books we have already mentioned but also what are other books in which you find point of view is used to great effect.

Megan Schliesman Cooperative Children's Book Center School of Education UW-Madison schliesman at mail.soemadison.wisc.edu
Received on Mon 16 Nov 1998 11:29:36 AM CST