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Round 1 Match 6: Peace, Locomotion vs A Season of Gifts
Peace, Locomotion by Jacqueline Woodson Putnam |
A Season of Gifts by Richard Peck Dial Books |
Judged by Cynthia Kadohata |
If you could count the subject matter of every novel ever written, I’d wager that the subject of family would come in first place. Maybe not, but that’s where I’d put my money. Family dynamics are endlessly fascinating. Peace, Locomotion and A Season of Gifts come at the subject of family from different directions.
Peace, Locomotion involves a 12-year-old boy who has been living with one foster family while his 9-year-old sister lives with another. Their biological parents have died in a fire. The story is told through letters he writes to his sister but doesn’t send. He plans to give her the letters when they are older. The boy, Lonnie, lives with a foster mother who has two sons, one of whom was shipped off to a war. (I may have missed it, but I don’t believe we’re ever told which war.) Jenkins, the son fighting in the war, eventually comes home missing part of a leg. Jenkins says, “This wasn’t the dream I had, Mama.” His mother replies, “This wasn’t the dream none of us had. But it’s our lives now and we need to be living it, sweetie.” Beautiful! Rather than finding its power through plot and storyline, Peace, Locomotion finds its power through accretion, the buildup of poignant details and beautiful lines.
A Season of Gifts concerns a family who has just moved to a new town. The father is a reverend trying to build up his parish. The protagonist is a young boy with one older sister and one younger one. Peck is a master at what he does. He is one of those blessed and rare people who can write a quirky, perfectly happy book and not seem hokey or banal. I will confess that before I received both books, I had already bought A Season of Gifts, as I am a fan of Peck’s. As I read, I could really picture his happy characters — his sisters, his parents, everyone in the whole quirky town. If A Season of Gifts were a song, it might be Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World.
Everybody brings something different to the table when he or she reads a book. What I brought to the table was that I once stayed in a foster home, albeit briefly, with my sister and I living in a different home than my little brother did. It was an intense and emotional experience, and I admired the emotions and intensity that Peace, Locomotion offered up. Still, I found myself wanting more because the subject matter demanded more. Instead, Woodson tells how Lonnie feels without ever really convincing me: “I felt like something was breaking inside of me. I felt like I could hear our own true Mama looking down at us and biting her lip to keep tears from coming.” That’s the age-old problem of telling instead of showing, and it happens too often in what is overall a fine book. It’s easy to spot the problem because I do it so often myself.
It could be that Woodson took more risks than Peck, that he simply knows what he does best, and he did it in A Season of Gifts. But why not do what you do best? It’s a lovely, lovely book and a joy to read. A Season of Gifts it is.
The Winner of Round 1 Match 6 Is…
Happy characters?!? Wonderful world?!? Is this the same author who wrote that book, KIRA-KIRA, which made us cry our eyes out? I thought THE LAST OLYMPIAN would suffer most from sequelitis, but PEACE, LOCOMOTION has now earned that honor because the first book, LOCOMOTION, probably offers more of the raw emotion that Cynthia was looking for. Of course, A SEASON OF GIFTS is a sequel, too, and maybe that helped this book because, like Cynthia, I just cannot get enough of that crotchety, old woman and will come back for second, third, and *hint, hint* fourth helpings. This decision sets up an interesting match in the next round—MARCHING FOR FREEDOM vs. A SEASON OF GIFTS—a match that Chris seems uniquely qualified to judge having written (a) in the humorous tradition of Mark Twain (and Richard Peck) and (b) having also written about the historical injustices of African Americans during the civil rights era. Honestly, we couldn’t script this any better if we tried! I can’t wait!
— Commentator Jonathan Hunt
Filed under: Round 1
About Battle Commander
The Battle Commander is the nom de guerre for children’s literature enthusiasts Monica Edinger and Roxanne Hsu Feldman, fourth grade teacher and middle school librarian at the Dalton School in New York City and Jonathan Hunt, the County Schools Librarian at the San Diego County Office of Education. All three have served on the Newbery Committee as well as other book selection and award committees. They are also published authors of books, articles, and reviews in publications such as the New York Times, School Library Journal, and the Horn Book Magazine. You can find Monica at educating alice and on twitter as @medinger. Roxanne is at Fairrosa Cyber Library and on twitter as @fairrosa. Jonathan can be reached at hunt_yellow@yahoo.com.
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