From: Kathy Isaacs <kisaacs>
Date: Sat, 06 Jan 2001 09:42:24 -0500

Without straying too far from the focus on the books, I hope, I'd like to add my increasing discomfiture with the premise that fiction has to be factually accurate. Fiction is a work of the imagination, and stretches a child's ability to see beyond his or her own experience. Rather than deplore the idea that the author of Homeless Bird only READ about India, basing her work on the experiences of a number of others, rather than just her own, I would like to applaud the leap of her imagination.

Those of us who work with children know that the most effective education begins where the child IS. Presenting an unknown geographical or historical setting to a child through familiar lenses is one way of decreasing the strangeness and helping the child become familiar with events and ideas beyond his or her own experience. Like it or not, India, Africa, the California Gold Rush, and Narnia are equally unfamiliar to children in this country, until they've experienced them vicariously. They are unlikely to grow into adults who care about other parts of the world and other ways of thinking and doing without that kind of exposure. The lens of a writer who shares common experiences with her readers is one way to help children along that path.

I am one of the reviewers of Homeless Bird who admired it greatly. I interviewed Gloria Whelan recently; the conversation should appear in School Library Journal this spring and she has interesting comments on this subject.

-Kathy Isaacs Edmund Burke School kisaacs at mindspring.com
Received on Sat 06 Jan 2001 08:42:24 AM CST