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Homeless Bird and the NBA Shortlisted Finalists
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From: Ginny Moore Kruse <gmkruse>
Date: Fri, 05 Jan 2001 17:06:53 -0600
Thanks, Dean, for your evenhanded personal appraisal of the five NBA nominees. We're amazed that you've been able to maintain such a current reading list. Your middle school students are so fortunate to have a teacher who seeks new books to read and evaluates them so thoughtfully. We appreciate your thoughtful comments.
We also appreciate hearing from Uma, Rukhsana, and Phyllis as to issues and details regarding reliability in The Homeless Bird.
Most certainly writers who have not traveled somewhere or lived there have the right to write about a place or people, and in this nation, their works can be published if they can find publishers.
Most certainly it's always "iffy" to write about a place or time one knows only second hand or people of whom one is not a part. Doing this adds one or more barriers to creating a successful literary work.
It's the work of the fiction writer to imagine - and to do so successfully. This has been said many times in many ways within the CCBC-Net community. Making a place or some of the people who live there seem to be exotic is never a good idea, no matter how skilled the writer might be.
It seems to me - and I've heard similar, substantial cricitisms of The Homeless Bird from others before this - that the National Book Award panel of judges must have been looking only at literary aspects of this novel. I can see how this could happen during the discussion between five people who have a wide variety of perspectives, even though most of us would not find unreliable cultural information easy to excuse. The author of The Homeless Bird took a great risk, and apparently even though this novel has won a major award - according to some informed readers - she didn't succeed.
We all know that people from the same place and heritage can and do differ with each other in many ways, including their opinions on the same subject. There is no "official" single opinion about this book, or any other. So very few books published in this nation set in the Indian subcontinent that reviewers - whether or not they have special backgrounds or contacts - have little to go on as they evaluate a book such as The Homeless Bird.
What I invite you all to do is to focus on this novel and on the four other NBA nominess, so that we don't go off into a discussion of who may, or can, or should be writing certain novels or other books for young readers. Can we look at these five books and make references with examples when we are critical of any of them? Most certainly, critical remarks are welcome. And so are remarks from former NBA judges from earlier years who know more about the process of the NBA which - as I understand it - is really different from that of the other national award juries. That's why I took the time and space to write about it in general terms earlier in the week.
And let's hear from more readers of The Homeless Bird and the other four books nominated for the 2000 National Book Award for Young People's Literature.
Cordially, Ginny Moore Kruse gmkruse at facstaff.wisc.edu A Library of the School of Education, University of Wisconsin Madison
Received on Fri 05 Jan 2001 05:06:53 PM CST
Date: Fri, 05 Jan 2001 17:06:53 -0600
Thanks, Dean, for your evenhanded personal appraisal of the five NBA nominees. We're amazed that you've been able to maintain such a current reading list. Your middle school students are so fortunate to have a teacher who seeks new books to read and evaluates them so thoughtfully. We appreciate your thoughtful comments.
We also appreciate hearing from Uma, Rukhsana, and Phyllis as to issues and details regarding reliability in The Homeless Bird.
Most certainly writers who have not traveled somewhere or lived there have the right to write about a place or people, and in this nation, their works can be published if they can find publishers.
Most certainly it's always "iffy" to write about a place or time one knows only second hand or people of whom one is not a part. Doing this adds one or more barriers to creating a successful literary work.
It's the work of the fiction writer to imagine - and to do so successfully. This has been said many times in many ways within the CCBC-Net community. Making a place or some of the people who live there seem to be exotic is never a good idea, no matter how skilled the writer might be.
It seems to me - and I've heard similar, substantial cricitisms of The Homeless Bird from others before this - that the National Book Award panel of judges must have been looking only at literary aspects of this novel. I can see how this could happen during the discussion between five people who have a wide variety of perspectives, even though most of us would not find unreliable cultural information easy to excuse. The author of The Homeless Bird took a great risk, and apparently even though this novel has won a major award - according to some informed readers - she didn't succeed.
We all know that people from the same place and heritage can and do differ with each other in many ways, including their opinions on the same subject. There is no "official" single opinion about this book, or any other. So very few books published in this nation set in the Indian subcontinent that reviewers - whether or not they have special backgrounds or contacts - have little to go on as they evaluate a book such as The Homeless Bird.
What I invite you all to do is to focus on this novel and on the four other NBA nominess, so that we don't go off into a discussion of who may, or can, or should be writing certain novels or other books for young readers. Can we look at these five books and make references with examples when we are critical of any of them? Most certainly, critical remarks are welcome. And so are remarks from former NBA judges from earlier years who know more about the process of the NBA which - as I understand it - is really different from that of the other national award juries. That's why I took the time and space to write about it in general terms earlier in the week.
And let's hear from more readers of The Homeless Bird and the other four books nominated for the 2000 National Book Award for Young People's Literature.
Cordially, Ginny Moore Kruse gmkruse at facstaff.wisc.edu A Library of the School of Education, University of Wisconsin Madison
Received on Fri 05 Jan 2001 05:06:53 PM CST
