From: Dean Schneider <schneiderd>
Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2007 11:56:15 -0500

 I like it when participants in our discussion offer why they like certain titles, rather than just offering up titles.
  Since Paul Fleischman's Breakout has been mentioned already, I'll speak to that (and risk being too personal). For most of the novel, it's the story of a young woman looking back at the time when she was a teenager stuck in an LA traffic jam. But as she herself says, "Roads and revelation go together," [14] and the LA freeway becomes more metaphorically "the whole freeway of life." [14]
  For me, personally, Breakout is a book that became important and meaningful when my wife was diagnosed with cancer last year and ended up having two major surgeries and 28 days of radiation treatments. Things turned out well, but it was a scary time. One of the revelations that Del has in the novel is: "It's not just other people we have to accept.It's Otherness. Things we have no control over. Didn't ask for, don't deserve. History. Earthquakes. Cancer. Family. Traffic jams. 'It is what it is.'" [122] Later, she says, "...open-hearted acceptance. The jam was just a beginner's exercise in giving up control, in receiving with good grace everything given us at birth and everything that comes after. In eating everything on our plates." [123]
  Of all the books that I could think of -- and, as a reader, books are where I went looking for a philosophy to make sense of things -- this was the book. I had read it a couple times before and had marked these lines, before knowing the value they would have in my own life. A simple, eloquent, matter-of-fact revelation a character learned from the road.
  So, for me, Breakout is a fine road book about roads of all sorts, roads we all travel at one time or another.
  Dean Schneider Ensworth School Nashville, TN 37205 schneiderd at ensworth.com
Received on Thu 05 Jul 2007 11:56:15 AM CDT