From: linnea hendrickson <lhendr>
Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 21:07:35 -0700

I'm one of the readers who loved "Bud, Not Buddy," who brought it home to review for the library, started reading after dinner (when I should have been doing other things) and just kept reading until I'd finished the whole thing in practically one sitting. I find the book very much in the tradition of the picaresque novel -- the innocent protagonist heading into the world where he experiences a series of adventures -- the tradition of Tristram Shandy, Tom Jones, and Moll Flanders, and I suppose of David Copperfield, too.



I heard someone comment that there were too many separate adventures and incidents -- did we really need them all -- but I think they are part of that tradition. It is not so much the getting there but the journey that's important I found Bud's combination of street smarts and naivete fascinating, and I loved his rules. I've been reading mostly the opening chapter, or part of it, to my students this week. They've ranged from 3rd to 5th graders. Just in that opening, there are wonderful opportunities for dramatic reading aloud and the mood switches from humor to sadness, to those oddly touching ruminations on life, such as when he talks about really becoming grown up at the age of six, when adults no longer think you're a cute little kid and your body parts (teeth) start falling off. All of this held the children's interest, and they laughed and groaned in the right places. We were all pushing our tongues around feeling our teeth, and remembering what it felt like to not be able to keep your tongue out of the hole left by a missing tooth, so vividly does Curtis capture the details, just as he did in the opening scene of "The Watsons" with the mouth stuck to the car mirror! Or, do you have to have grown up in the frozen north to appreciate that?

I, too, know that road from Owosso to Flint, at least the way it used to be back in the 1960s. My mother taught school on the outskirts of Flint near that road in the 1940s. And yes, the racism is very believable.

As for "Joseph Had a Little Overcoat," I have very mixed feelings. I've been reading it, too, to my classes this week, both older and younger children. Oddly, the kindergartners and first graders have seemed to gravitate to "There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly," which I brought in for comparison, more than to "Joseph." Perhaps because they are familiar with that song or perhaps because the images are so much wilder and more grotesque.

The reaction to "Joseph" is much more subdued than the reaction I got two weeks ago to "Sector 7" and "Weslandia," which the students are still coming back asking to see and read again this week (even the younger ones for whom I thought these stories might be too difficult). The best part of "Joseph" was when the music teacher came in with her guitar and sang the song at the end. We talked about the idea of recycling, and how the form of the book follows the subject of the story, and the way every inch of space is used in the book just the way every bit of the coat is used. But that all seems a bit too pat and prosaic. Everything fits almost too well. One student (a fifth grader or maybe the teacher?) suggeested that the book might be more powerful without any words at all, leaving more of a gap for the reader to fill in, because the story really is told in the pictures. I'd like someone to elaborate on the significance of some of the references to "Fiddler on the Roof," and Chelm (I am familiar with Chelm), and some of the other bits and snatches of quotations and portraits found in the story. Is there a pattern to them that relates to the story?

Linnea

Linnea Hendrickson Lhendr at unm.edu http://www.unm.edu/~lhendr
Received on Wed 26 Jan 2000 10:07:35 PM CST