Banned Book: The Great Gilly Hopkins

I've had The Great Gilly Hopkins for years. Our homeschooling is centered around a fantastic literature-based curriculum, and this Newbery honor book by Katherine Paterson is included in the 20th-century world history program. Banned Books Week seemed a perfect time to read this book on the ALA's 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000.

I loved this sweet book. Gilly Hopkins is a foster kid, tossed from home to home, always hoping that her mother will come back for her. Her latest home seems intolerable to the great Gilly: she can't get a rise out of Trotter, her obese foster mother; her foster brother, William Ernest, is so terrified that he barely speaks; and the blind next-door-neighbor comes over for supper everynight—and he's black. Gilly has lots of prejudices to overcome and a very hard heart to soften. This book is about redemption, the need to be wanted, and the ability to change one's heart.

So what's the problem with it? Why is it on the List?

I suspected it was because of Gilly's occasional bad language, although her language is specifically used as a device to show how she changes. I did a little research and found this, excerpted from article "Why Johnny Can't Read: Censorship in American Libraries" by Suzanne Fisher Staples (bold words mine):

With few exceptions, literature's best, most important books are believable and compelling because they do contain material that readers may find troubling. Take Katherine Paterson's National Book Award winner, The Great Gilly Hopkins, which was banned in school libraries in Albemarle County, Virginia, because it contains curse words and "takes God's name in vain." The book is about a tough-talking, angry foster child who is redeemed by love. The parent who filed the complaint listed the profanities in the book without reading it. The school board convened a panel of educators, who reviewed the book and twice recommended it be kept on the shelves. The school superintendent ordered it removed anyway.

In an open letter to the Albemarle County School Board, Katherine Paterson wrote, "Though Gilly's mouth is a very mild one compared to that of many lost children, if she had said `fiddlesticks' when frustrated, readers could not have believed in her and love would give them no hope."

One fifth-grade reader (whose teacher described him as `the Gilly of my class') wrote in a book report of The Great Gilly Hopkins, "This book is a miracle." There is little doubt that if Mrs. Paterson's Gilly hadn't cussed like a trooper that lost boy would have been denied his miracle.

One librarian at a conference on children's literature in Virginia this summer speculated as to why parents react so forcefully to books they perceive as offensive. "They feel helpless sending their children into a world that seems increasingly plagued with hazards over which they have no control," she said. "They see the books available to their children as an area where they can have control."

That's what bugs me the most: that we parents forbid our kids from reading books that we've not read ourselves. I don't think I've ever been guilty of doing this, but this week is a good reminder, nonetheless.

And I will for sure be keeping The Great Gilly Hopkins on our shelves.

Booking Through Thursday: Best

Today's Booking Through Thursday asks:

What, in your opinion, is the best book that you haven’t liked? Mind you, I don’t mean your most-hated book–oh, no. I mean the most accomplished, skilled, well-written, impressive book that you just simply didn’t like.

The first book that came to mind--no, shouted "PICK ME! PICK ME!"— is Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth. I actually despised this book. We had to read it for an awesome class in graduate school called "The Mayflower at Ellis Island: The Immigrant Experience in the U.S." The professor chose Portnoy's Complaint to read an example of growing up Jewish in American in the 1940s and 50s. It's supposed to be outrageously funny, but I found it outrageously annoying. Even though I loved Roth's novella Goodbye, Columbus, which I read in college, I have never read another Philip Roth novel. That's how much I hated this "masterpiece."

Do you have a most-hated "masterpiece"? Check out other answers at Booking Through Thursday.

Book Review: Half of a Yellow Sun

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun led me first to Wikipedia to get a little background on Biafra:

The Republic of Biafra was a secessionist state in south-eastern Nigeria. Biafra was inhabited mostly by the Igbo people (or Ibo) and existed from 30 May 1967, to 15 January 1970. The secession was led by the Igbo due to economic, ethnic, cultural and religious tensions among the various peoples of Nigeria and the creation of the new country, named after the Bight of Biafra (the Atlantic bay to its south), was among the complex causes for the Nigerian Civil War, also known as the Nigerian-Biafran War.

That's Wikipedia's introduction to its section on Biafra. Half of a Yellow Sun, goes far beyond the dry facts. Adichie tells the story of the Igbo people, who were determined to establish a nation independent from Nigeria. The book starts before the civil war, when optimism is high and excitement fuels the people, and ends with the devastating defeat of Biafra.

The novel contains two intertwining stories: that of upper-class Olanna and her revolutionary husband, Odenigbo, and their houseboy, Ugwu; and that of Olanna's wealthy twin sister, Kainene, and her white lover, Richard. From lavish meals to roasted rats, Adichie follows the two families from the height of success to the daily struggle to survive.

Adichie is a phenomenal writer. Her language is lyrical, her descriptions rich, her dialog true. Her power to portray the images of Africa is astounding: the sights and smells of a country and its people are nearly palpable. The lushness of the first section of the book contrasts sharply and effectively with the starkness of latter two-thirds. We go from black party dresses to ripped rags, from a baby dressed in clean white linen to a little girl playing with shrapnel:

"Baby joined the thin children who ran around with their naked bellies wreathed in brown. Many of the children collected pieces of shrapnel, played with them, traded them. When Baby came back with two bits of jagged metal, Olanna shouted at her and pulled her ear and took them away. She hated to think that Baby was playing with the cold leftovers of things that killed."

This is an amazing book, haunting and memorable; a book that one cannot read without being staggered by the strength and will of humans to survive.

Other reviews of this book:
Caribous Mom
Jill at The Magic Lasso
Gautami at the Reading Room

(If you have reviewed this book and would like me to link to your review, please leave a link in the comments.)

Weekly Geeks #19: 2008 Favorites

This week's Weekly Geeks at The Hidden Side of a Leaf asks for our favorites thus far published in 2008. Here are the books published in 2008 I've read thus far:

Young Adult
A Beginning, a Muddle, and an End (Avi)
Jimmy's Stars (Mary Ann Rodman)

Fiction (Novels)
The Cellist of Sarajevo, (Steven Galloway)
The Fiction Class (Susan Breen)
The Miracle at Speedy Motors (A. McCall-Smith)
The Secret Between Us (Barbara Delinsky)
The Senator's Wife (Sue Miller)

Fiction (Short stories)
Unaccustomed Earth (Jhumpa Lahiri)

Memoir
The Sky Isn't Visible From Here (Felicia Sullivan)

My favorites our of all of these:
The Cellist of Sarajevo, (Steven Galloway)
Unaccustomed Earth (Jhumpa Lahiri)
The Sky Isn't Visible From Here (Felicia Sullivan)

(See more lists of 2008 favorites at Weekly Geeks !)

The Sunday Salon: War-Torn and Carnival

It doesn't seem right to put those two words in the same phrase: war-torn and carnival. First, the carnival: there is a new one that is perfect for book bloggers, aptly named the Book Review Blog Carnival. You can peruse the first carnival here at I'll Never Forget the Day I Read a Book. There are 38 reviews in all, incuding one of mine. The next carnival will be coming up on October, so if you'd like to submit a review, follow the directions here.

Moving on to the "war-torn" part of this post. For the past two weeks I've been immersed in communities and individuals ravaged by war. I've reviewed The Cellist of Sarajevo, a sparse but immensely powerful novel about the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s. I've just finished Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's phenomenal Half of a Yellow Sun, which is about the three-year civil war in the late 1960s when the Igbo people seceded from Nigeria to form the independent nation of Biafra. I'll be reviewing this astonishing novel soon and looking for Adichie's Purple Hibiscus, which I've been told is even better.

This week I'm back in the south with Janet Beard's Beneath the Pines. My friend Amy (my real friend Amy, not the My Friend Amy of Book Blogger Appreciation Week fame!) handed me this book a couple of days ago and said, "Read this! My son's first babysitter wrote it!" I was instantly skeptical because, well, I have no idea. I'm sure many fabulous authors were once just teenagers who babysat. But I was intrigued when I read the back cover and became immediately engrossed when I started reading it last night. Janet Beard is an excellent storyteller. I'm only a hundred pages into the book, but I'm enjoying it so much that I can't wait to head for bed so I can read for awhile.

Sunday Scribbling #130: Weddings

Today's Sunday Scribblings prompt is weddings. The Scribblings are supposed to be about my writing, I know, but today I'm sharing my writing heritage instead. My father wrote this poem for my mother on their 50th anniversary. I can't think of a more beautiful tribute to weddings.

Always Twenty-One

You are still in my heart's eye that golden girl in white,
You're walking down the aisle
into my heart,
Still that lovely girl in white
coming to me down the aisle.

In my mind I know we've had these years together,
I know the storms we've shared,
the joys we've shared,
these many years we've shared—
And yet,
And yet you're still that golden girl in white
who's coming down the aisle
into my heart.

My heart's eye cannot see the years behind us,
My heart's eye looks on you and sees again
the golden girl you were
and still are in my heart,
My golden girl who's always twenty-one.

~James N. Cummins, 1998

I still cry every time I read it. As a footnote, my parents just celebrated their 60th anniversary last month, 8/8/08.


(Read more Sunday Scribblings on weddings.)

Book Review: The Cellist of Sarajevo

"It doesn't matter what the world thinks of his city. All that matters is what he thinks. In the Sarajevo of his memory, it was completely unacceptable to have a dead man lying in the street. In the Sarajevo of today it's normal. He has been living in neither, has tried to live in a city that no longer exists, refusing to participate in the one that does."

The Cellist of Sarajevo is a small book about 22 days in what became the longest siege in the history of modern warfare, a four-year sniper and shelling campaign against the citizens of Sarajevo by Serb forces. But this story begins on May 22, 1992, when 22 people in a bread line were killed in a mortar attack. The cellist—who on that day decided not to buy bread— then begins a 22-day memorial service, playing Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor each afternoon "into the mortar-packed, sniper-infested streets of Sarajevo."

The book alternates among the stories of four main characters trapped in their own city: the cellist himself; Arrow, a sniper of snipers; Kenan, a young husband and father who must cross the dangerous city twice each week to get water; and Dragan, a baker who just wants to cross a street in safety. They were once four ordinary citizens of an ordinary city. Now they are survivors in a war-ravaged city, struggling each day to navigate in a city in which people are gunned down as if they were game pieces, picked off one by one.

It is a small book, quick to read, about a very big subject: how the human spirit insists on surviving and creating some semblance of meaning when the world has spun out of control. Steven Galloway's writing is clean and spare. The effect is powerful. Galloway's images stick. His characters are in a constant state of trying to reconcile the past and the present: this was my life then, this is my life now:

"The absence of shelling is almost like music, and she imagines if she closed her eyes she could convince herself that she was walking through the streets of Sarajevo as it used to be. Almost. She knows that in the city of her memory she wasn't hungry, and she wasn't bruised, and her shoulder didn't bear the weight of a gun. In the city of her memory there were always people out at this time of morning, preparing for the day to come. They wouldn't be shut inside like invalids, exhausted from another night of wondering if a shell was about to land on their house."

This book is based on real events that happened just 16 years ago, when I was a young married woman, buying our first car and soon to be expecting our first baby. Sarajevo, Serb, Bosnia: words on the evening news. While I shopped for a new car, people exactly like me were dashing across intersections, fervently praying that they weren't a sniper's target practice that day, trying to figure out how this happened to their lives, and when it would all end.

"There is no way to tell which version of a lie is the truth. Is the real Sarajevo the one where people were happy, treated each other well, lived without conflict? Or is the real Sarajevo the one he sees today, where people are trying to kill each other, where bullets and bombs fly down from the hills and the buildings crumble to the ground?"

Read this book. It is devastating, but the glimmer of hope is powerful, and Galloway is a language craftsman and a beautiful storyteller.

Other reviews:
Natasha at Maw Books here
Wendy at Caribousmom here
Jill at The Magic Lasso here
(If you have a review, please post your link in the comments!)