Whose Justice?

Sabaa Tahir

Neither all brains nor all brawn is enough to conquer the society depicted in An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir. It's the classic story told throughout human history. But Tahir takes a fresh look through the eyes of two teens--one a Scholar, the other a Martial--at the center of the conflict.

The Scholars may be the group that's oppressed now, but they were the oppressors until 500 years ago, when the Martials took control by force. Laia, a Scholar, must live with the fact that her parents chose the Resistance over their children. The only family member she has left is her brother, held prisoner by the Martials. In her quest to enlist the Resistance members' help to free her brother, she learns that someone within the movement betrayed her parents. She also learns how the Scholars played a role in their own demise.

As her life becomes entangled with that of Elias, an elite member of the Martials called a Mask and a favorite to become the next Emperor, Laia must decide for herself who is on the side of justice--so must Elias. Sahir portrays a fictional society with realistic conflicts. Must justice for one group come about at the expense of another? What do you, as an individual, do to stay true to your ideals when others around you are corrupting them for selfish ends? How do you know when you yourself have crossed a line? If you gain power and prestige, is it because of your leadership qualities, or through force and fear? How can you be sure?

History is littered with examples of those who used an ideology or force (often both) to achieve goals they felt were good, but whose means resulted in imprisonment and death for many. Tahir demonstrates that it's harder to recognize an ideal gone wrong when it's unfolding in the present. Laia and Elias observe the corruption going on around them, but can they stop it, or at least stand up to it? And the implicit question to readers is: What would you do?

Standing at the Crossroads

Mitali Perkins

Mitali Perkins gives readers a journey to an exotic land in flux in her novel Tiger Boy. The village itself mirrors young Neel's predicament. A developer, Mr. Gupta, has arrived in the Sunderbans of West Bengal, who wishes to exploit its resources, using its sundari trees for his buildings, and pressing the villagers to take the wood from reserves where the trees should be protected.

Then a Bengali tiger cub escapes. Mr. Gupta wants to sell it on the black market, and Neel becomes determined to find it first and return the cub to the rangers. It's a crisis of conscience for Neel because his father has begun working for Mr. Gupta to pay for Neel's mother's medical bills and a tutor so that Neel can win a scholarship to go to Kolkata and study--a path Neel does not wish for himself.

Change is in the air, and Neel is resisting it. His country is at a new stage, just as he is. Perkins exposes the differences accorded to the genders in West Bengal without judgment--it's a way of life that requires a girl to drop out of school to tend to the cooking and washing if her mother becomes ill. Yet the focus remains on Neel's choice to remain in the village he loves or go out into the world and try to bring back his knowledge and experience. The author also exposes the moral crossroads of the villagers--namely Neel's father.

As with her Bamboo People, Perkins smoothly conveys the all-too-brief childhood of young people forced to grow up quickly because of the changing nature of their way of life. She transports readers to faraway places yet endows her characters with problems that feel immediate and universal: the importance of safety, food, clean water, family and community--and standing up for the ideals you hold dear.

Filling in the Gaps

Marilyn Nelson

Poetry, as a form, invites readers to make meaning between the lines. Marilyn Nelson takes this a step further with her memoir How I Discovered Poetry. The poems begin when "the Speaker" (as Nelson refers to the child narrator in an author's note) is just four years old. As she matures, through the course of the book, to age 14, she comprehends more.

But in the 1950s, an era when injustice prevails, even adults are at a loss to understand the inequalities in evidence in American society. These gaps in understanding serve a dual purpose, as a child tries to grasp how the world works, and also the deeper challenge of coming to terms with the aspects that defy understanding.

In a conversation we had for an interview in School Library Journal's Curriculum Connections, Nelson said she was inspired by her friend Inge Pedersen, who’s a poet and novelist in Denmark. "She published a memoir of her girlhood in the 1930s, when Denmark was occupied by the Nazis," explained Nelson. "She told me that each of her short stories shows a gap in a child’s understanding of the world around her. I address the same sort of ‘gaps’ in these poems."

In the poem "Bomb Drill," a hydrogen bomb becomes "the hide drajen bomb." Ducking under their desks to hide from "drajen bombs" in school causes a six-year-old Marilyn to imagine that "maybe drajens would turn into butter/ if they ran really fast around a tree," just like the tigers in Little Black Sambo.

Nelson also bridges gaps of a different nature. She spoke of having a more inclusive world view than her mother did. She remembers wanting everyone to be in her family, as they drove through Kansas, through "miles and miles of nothing" on Route 66, captured in "Pick a Name." "I wanted to write postcards to people, telling them God loves them: 'I love you. [Signed] God.' That’s all I could think about. In a way it’s that plea in the book’s final poem, 'Thirteen-Year-Old American Negro Girl': 'Give me a message I can give the world.' "

By the final poem, Nelson has filled in many of the gaps, the greatest being her own identity--a calling as a poet.

A Time of Transition

When you look back on your childhood, doesn’t it seem as if summer was always a time of momentous changes? Your first time away from home? Winning a tennis tournament? A first romance?

Drew Robin Sole is 13 years old during the pivotal summer when she begins to think of herself and her world differently. The Summer I Learned to Fly by Dana Reinhardt unfolds like a poem, from Drew’s no-nonsense point of view. Except that she begins to indulge in a bit of nonsense—like riding a bike without a helmet and sneaking out of the house when she’s grounded. She also finds herself arguing with her mother, and she can’t figure out quite how it happens. She loves her mother. Yet Drew also needs to test out her own ideas about how things work.

And then there's Emmett Crane, who eats the cheese she leaves on the dumpster behind her mother's Cheese Shop, and shows her things and people in her community she never knew existed. This is not a romance, though maybe there are feelings stirring there. Mostly it’s the story of a boy and girl building a tenuous trust that blossoms into friendship—with a few missteps along the way.

Almost everyone in the book is in transition in some way—Drew’s mother; Nick, a handsome employee in her mother’s cheese shop; Emmett and the friends to whom he introduces Drew. And each touches Drew in ways large and small that ripple through her. By summer’s end, she emerges as a bigger person with richer life experiences for having tested her wings.

Lifting the Veil

As an Upper West Sider in Manhattan, I live among Orthodox Jewish families. Parents drop off their children at the school on my block. I see the men in hats and women with their heads covered and wearing long skirts as they walk to services on Friday nights and stroll along the Hudson River with their children during the High Holy Days. Hush, by Eishes Chayil, took me inside this insular world and offered me a deeper understanding of its culture and customs. The novel’s narrator, Gittel Klein, lives just two blocks outside of the heart of the Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn’s Borough Park, but that’s enough to give her a rare arm’s-length perspective of her community.

The goyishe (non-Jewish) family that rents an apartment from Gittel’s father may be off-limits, but Gittel and her best friend, Devory, form a friendship with Kathy, Gittel’s upstairs neighbor, and realize that she is not the devil she’s painted to be. This raises other questions for Gittel. That exposure to outside values factors into her contemplation of whether or not to confide what she comes to realize about Devory’s suicide at age 10. While Gittel spends the night at Devory’s house, she witnesses something she doesn’t quite understand but that fills Gittel with fear. Devory’s 15-year-old brother, who is home from yeshiva, comes to Devory’s room in the dark and goes under his sister’s blanket: “I saw the blanket, how it moved back and forth and back and forth so fast I thought they were playing tug-of-war.” Those are the only details the author gives, but they are the only details she needs to give. Gittel never discusses this with Devory, but she knows something is terribly wrong. Only as she prepares for her marriage does Gittel realize what happened to Devory, and she must either betray her community by telling the truth, or betray herself.

There has been some debate about whether Hush would have been better served if it had been published as an adult book rather than as a book for teens. But I believe it is solidly young adult. The author clearly traces Gittel’s coming of age, and the way that the gradual realization of what happened to Devory shapes the person Gittel becomes. The chapters in which the 12-year-old Gittel narrates perfectly capture that young, trusting mind attempting to make sense of her world and testing her theories. It’s a book filled with warmth, humor and respect for family and tradition. So when Gittel begins to question the dark side of tradition and absolute loyalty, we feel the devastating consequences as acutely as Gittel does.

A Rendezvous with History

Rita Williams-Garcia has many gifts. One of them, which may be hardest to achieve for any writer, is her ability to fill in only the details the narrator (and thus, the reader) needs in order to make sense of her experience. That’s what the author accomplishes through Delphine's narrative in One Crazy Summer.

Big Ma, Delphine’s paternal grandmother, does not embrace change. The Brooklyn household she runs with her son, Delphine’s father, is a traditional home, and those are the values she instills in Delphine and her sisters. So when Delphine and her sisters arrive in Oakland, Calif., and they find themselves immersed in the Black Panthers Summer Camp, they must sift through Big Ma’s beliefs and the values that their mother, Cecile, lives by to figure out what makes sense to them—as readers, we get to go on that journey with them.

The girls’ mother puts on a lot of armor. To survive as an African-American woman on her own, she has to. But Delphine doesn’t understand why that armor shields Cecile from her daughters, too. That’s another journey to understanding that we take with Delphine. There are no easy fixes for Delphine. There were no easy fixes in 1968. What the author does is create an opening to understanding. Cecile gives Delphine as much knowledge and exposure as she can handle and leaves a door open for future revelations. And Rita Williams-Garcia does the same for young readers. Brava!