CCBC-Net Archives
Teenaged first-person angst
- Contemporary messages sorted: [ by date ] [ by subject ] [ by author ]
From: Elsa Marston <elsa.marston_at_gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 06 Apr 2010 11:09:50 -0400
I've just finished reading Howard Fast's historical novel APRIL MORNING, and I'm ready to call it one of the world's best YA war novels, if not one of the world's best YA novels. The first-person voice--a 15-year-old boy living in Lexington at the start of the American Revolution and his participation in the events of April 19, 1775--strikes me as purely wonderful. The wry humor sounds adolescent-flip in an authentic 18th-century mode . . . but rather than dealing with the anomie and angst of Holden and his innumerable successors, this boy is facing the need to become a Man in a matter of hours, leaving childhood behind him forever.
My copy of the book (1961) is ancient and dog-eared, and has "Binford 6th grade" written on the inside cover (Binford being a middle school in my town). What I'm wondering is whether a book as rich in content and meaning, as serious, as *historical *, as thought-provoking, as revealing of human nature and the past events that helped make us what we are today (both as a country, a democracy, and as individuals), would ever be used in a 6th-grade class today. Would teachers want to assign something like this--which kids would really have to work to get through, but would be richly rewarded all along the way?
I'm curious. Any comments on this question--along with comparisons between teenaged narrators in historical novels and those of today?
Elsa www.elsamarston.com
PS I picked up this ancient copy because I am currently, at long last, reviving my own historical novel in progress, also about a teenaged boy on the brink of the Revolution. Fast's book is enormously inspiring, and helpful.
Received on Tue 06 Apr 2010 11:09:50 AM CDT
Date: Tue, 06 Apr 2010 11:09:50 -0400
I've just finished reading Howard Fast's historical novel APRIL MORNING, and I'm ready to call it one of the world's best YA war novels, if not one of the world's best YA novels. The first-person voice--a 15-year-old boy living in Lexington at the start of the American Revolution and his participation in the events of April 19, 1775--strikes me as purely wonderful. The wry humor sounds adolescent-flip in an authentic 18th-century mode . . . but rather than dealing with the anomie and angst of Holden and his innumerable successors, this boy is facing the need to become a Man in a matter of hours, leaving childhood behind him forever.
My copy of the book (1961) is ancient and dog-eared, and has "Binford 6th grade" written on the inside cover (Binford being a middle school in my town). What I'm wondering is whether a book as rich in content and meaning, as serious, as *historical *, as thought-provoking, as revealing of human nature and the past events that helped make us what we are today (both as a country, a democracy, and as individuals), would ever be used in a 6th-grade class today. Would teachers want to assign something like this--which kids would really have to work to get through, but would be richly rewarded all along the way?
I'm curious. Any comments on this question--along with comparisons between teenaged narrators in historical novels and those of today?
Elsa www.elsamarston.com
PS I picked up this ancient copy because I am currently, at long last, reviving my own historical novel in progress, also about a teenaged boy on the brink of the Revolution. Fast's book is enormously inspiring, and helpful.
Received on Tue 06 Apr 2010 11:09:50 AM CDT
