As I mentioned in my last post, I chose to read beautiful boy in my effort to pair fiction and nonfiction and to find nonfiction books that discuss real world issues in an engaging, interesting way, a way that students will hopefully not find dry and boring. Crank and beautiful boy definitely compliment one another in their exploration of why kids turn to drugs and how that choice damages them in heartbreaking ways.
In terms of my goal, I also read A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah, a memoir of how the author became a child soldier in Sierra Leone. I'd pair that one with Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers. I love Myers' work because his writing is rough and raw, and his story of the young men who fought in Vietnam demonstrates how young those soldiers were, how full of hope, and how the war took that youth and hope away from them. A Long Way Gone accomplishes the same tragic effect of war with truly disturbing details about the life of a twelve-year-old fed drugs, handed a rifle, and turned into a killer. I'm pleased with how my goal is going since I've found two pairs of books that present some heavyweight issues in a way that holds interest and builds a reader's concern.
I almost thought I would not finish beautiful boy. I didn't know how much more I could take of the author's son hurting himself and his family. Pages would go by showing Nic in the process of recovery, but it seemed a relapse was always hovering at the fringes, and time and time again, he would, in fact, turn back to drugs. Sheff shares all the emotions he feels - the hopelessness, the anger, the guilt, but he also assures us that those feelings always give way to love, love for his son that makes him keep looking for answers. Admitting that he's not a religious believer, Sheff explains how he eventually turned to prayer when every other effort failed, and the sentence he writes about the way people use prayers caught my eye, and my ear, and even my heart, immediately. I'm just going to throw the whole thing out there because it's too powerful to hack up with embedding:
There is devastating hurricane and flooding and suicide bombers and crashes and tsunamis and terrorism and cancer and war - endless and brutal war - disease and famine and earthquakes and everywhere there is addiction, and today the heavens must be overwhelmed with the noise of all the prayers.- pg. 256
I love the effect of his list. I love the way it builds and pounds, like a heavy drumbeat, and this list literally makes my heartbeat with the thought of all the many, many people throughout the world desperately needing answers. I love when a writer captures something beyond the scope of his story to show us a reality we all confront, the reality that our prayers, our sufferings are not unique or special or even noteworthy when considered in the context of the world's suffering, but they are real. No matter what we suffer, we know the reality of the pain.
P.S. I know my first two posts have been gloomy - unavoidable when reading a seriously gloomy book. I'm reading something fun now, one of my e. lockhart books from the grab bag I won on Twitter. Next post will be more light-hearted.
No comments:
Post a Comment