From: Peggy Rader <rader004>
Date: Fri, 9 Jul 1999 12:00:32 -0500

I've followed the discussion of the effectiveness of MAKING UP MEGABOY with interest. After reading about this book and others during the POV discussion earlier this year, my 12-year-old seventh-grade son and I read both MEGABOY and WHIRLIGIG aloud to each other. While Alex was intrigued by the visual elements in MEGABOY, he was truly disturbed when we finished it and very negative about it. He disliked it because it didn't offer any answers or even possible answers. It made him uncomfortable, not because of the subject matter, but because of the subject matter's lack of meaningful context. The various points of view were sometimes interesting, but not really enlightening--you didn't really learn much about those who were speaking or much about who MEGABOY was or the whys of the crime.

It did lead to a brief discussion between my son and me about possible whys, but I agree with Nancy Werlin's post which says that the book gives you no more insight than a "two-minute sound bite on the news." It's all well and good to say that we shouldn't slap our expectations about the novel form on this book, but I believe that my son's and my responses were based very much on that expectation -- that the best sort of book (novel) asks the great questions and leads you, at least, to a point where you can draw conclusions of your own, if not offering one or two of the author's.

MEGABOY offers hints--his father's bullying, homophobic comments; his parent's racial prejudices--but those seem somewhat predictable and stereotypical. There simply is not enough information to draw any definitive conclusions. It's certainly true to life in that sense (in that it reflects our helpless and wondering responses to the evening news bites) and I definitely have no argument against children's literature reflecting real life, but after finishing MEGABOY Alex and I didn't really have enough ideas or information or inspiration for a really thoughtful discussion. We both felt rather flat and even a bit depressed. Sort of as if we'd just watched the evening news.

WHIRLIGIG was a very different experience, more conventional to be sure than MEGABOY, but leading to much more extensive conversations between us about crime and punishment, redemption, the nature of evil, and what makes a girl intriguing to a boy (!). After Littleton, my son reminded me of when we had read and discussed WHIRLIGIG. He never mentioned MEGABOY. His comment was that maybe the boys in Littleton were like "that boy in the Whirligig book who was all confused and unhappy and lonely and so he ended up making a really stupid decision that ended up killing someone." WHIRLIGIG gave Alex something to hang his hat on -- a reference point that helped him to make some little bit of sense out of something horrendous. I don't think MEGABOY provided that kind of depth (or any depth really). That may make it more of a "rashomon" than a novel as Patty Campbell suggested in an earlier post, but whatever you call it, it is not something I would return to or suggest to others except perhaps as an academic exercise. I don't think my son would either.

-- Peggy Rader


"Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another."
-- G.K. Chesterton

Peggy J. Rader Communications/Media Relations College of Education and Human Development 117 Burton Hall, 178 Pillsbury Dr. SE University of Minnesota Minneapolis MN 55455 612b6?82 rader004 at tc.umn.edu
 Message----From: Nancy Werlin To: Subscribers of ccbc-net Date: Friday, July 09, 1999 5:57 AM Subject: Re: ccbc-net digest 9 Jul 1999


or any kind grieves on the the
Received on Fri 09 Jul 1999 12:00:32 PM CDT