When a novel is on its third middle school reader within 9 days of being introduced to the class, I know it’s got something going for it. Today I want to share three fantastic middle school books I’ve discovered recently that do a great job of increasing the reader’s knowledge of the world and empathy for global neighbors with very different experiences. In our current, interconnected world, we need to understand ourselves; we need to understand each other. My international students come mostly from Japan, with a sprinkling from such diverse places as South Korea and Thailand, Australia and New Zealand, Austria and Finland, and the US. We need to see—with the eyes of the heart—the neighbors we are to love. And novels are a powerful tool for helping us do just that.
Finding Junie Kim by Ellen Oh. When a Korean-American middle schooler experiences bullying on the bus and witnesses racism at school, talking with her grandparents about their experiences in the Korean War helps her find strength and agency for her own life. I love the connection of past and present, and as a grandparent myself…well…there were a few tears shed.
Everything Sad Is Untrue (A True Story) by Daniel Nayeri. I love this book so much that is hasn’t even made it to my classroom library yet (though I did successfully lobby for the purchase of the audio book for our online library). I read it, and now I’m reading it to a friend in the US in a series of weekend Skype sessions. We’re about halfway through.
The book purports to be a series of presentations by an Iranian refugee to his middle school classroom in Oklahoma. There are typical middle school escapades and sly humor woven in with cultural analyses of Oklahoma vs. Persian culture, and the narrator’s family history in layers from the mythical to the historical to his mother’s conversion to Christianity on a visit to England that led to half of the family fleeing persecution in Iran. And then there are the difficulties of refugee life. All this stitched together with references to Scheherazade and the significance of stories, sprinkled with some philosophizing about families and love.
I was hooked from the title (an allusion to J.R.R. Tolkien) and the epigram at the beginning which includes this quote from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov that I copied into a journal years ago: “I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.”
This story, by the way, is the author’s. The narrator introduces himself like this: “All Persians are liars and lying is a sin. That’s what the kids in Mrs. Miller’s class think, but I’m the only Persian they’ve ever met, so I don’t know where they got that idea.
“My mom said it’s true, but only because everyone has sinned and needs God to save them. My dad says it isn’t. Persians aren’t liars. They’re poets, which is worse.
“Poets don’t even know when they’re lying. They’re just trying to remember their dreams. They’re trying to remember six thousand years of history and all the versions of all the stories ever told.
“In one version, maybe I’m not the refugee kid in the back of Mrs. Miller’s class. I’m a prince in disguise.
“If you catch me, I will say what they say in the 1,001 Nights. ‘Let me go, and I will tell you a tale passing strange.’
“That’s how they all begin.
“With a promise. If you listen, I’ll tell you a story. We can know and be known to each other, and then we’re not enemies any more.
“I’m not making this up. This is a rule that even genies follow” (Nayeri 1).
Stories to make us know and be known to each other so we aren’t enemies any more. And that's what I get to teach students! Here are three great stories I've shared with them recently.
How about you? What stories have you read recently that help us know and be known to each other so we aren’t enemies any more?
This story, by the way, is the author’s. The narrator introduces himself like this: “All Persians are liars and lying is a sin. That’s what the kids in Mrs. Miller’s class think, but I’m the only Persian they’ve ever met, so I don’t know where they got that idea.
“My mom said it’s true, but only because everyone has sinned and needs God to save them. My dad says it isn’t. Persians aren’t liars. They’re poets, which is worse.
“Poets don’t even know when they’re lying. They’re just trying to remember their dreams. They’re trying to remember six thousand years of history and all the versions of all the stories ever told.
“In one version, maybe I’m not the refugee kid in the back of Mrs. Miller’s class. I’m a prince in disguise.
“If you catch me, I will say what they say in the 1,001 Nights. ‘Let me go, and I will tell you a tale passing strange.’
“That’s how they all begin.
“With a promise. If you listen, I’ll tell you a story. We can know and be known to each other, and then we’re not enemies any more.
“I’m not making this up. This is a rule that even genies follow” (Nayeri 1).
Stories to make us know and be known to each other so we aren’t enemies any more. And that's what I get to teach students! Here are three great stories I've shared with them recently.
How about you? What stories have you read recently that help us know and be known to each other so we aren’t enemies any more?
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