This month, one subscriber to my Bartography Express newsletter will win a copy of Burning Nation (Scholastic), the second book in Trent Reedy’s Divided We Fall YA trilogy
If you’re not already receiving Bartography Express, click the image below for a look. If you like what you see, click “Join” in the bottom right corner, and you’ll be in the running for the giveaway at the end of this week.
This month’s edition of Bartography Express features a Q&A with Trent Reedy, author of the second book in the Divided We Fall trilogy, Burning Nation (Scholastic). It also includes a giveaway of a copy of Burning Nation — please see the newsletter for details.
The formatting of my newsletter made it unwieldy to include Trent’s complete answers to my questions, so I made a few edits for space. As I promised my subscribers, though, I’m including the full text here.
CB: What drew you toward the story you’re telling in the Divided We Fall trilogy?
TR: I wrote the Divided We Fall trilogy because I love stories about nightmare futures where everything we rely on to maintain our safe, comfortable lives fails us: government, law enforcement, food distribution, the electrical grid… Stripped of these systems we’ve come to depend on, would our society descend into total violent chaos, or is there enough kindness in humanity to offer hope? These sorts of narratives are great venues for action and adventure, but they also raise fascinating issues about the human condition and the nature of our contemporary society.
Some of my favorite post-apocalyptic/dystopian stories are The Walking Dead, The Hunger Games, Divergent, and The Giver — just to name a few. But the thing about these books and TV shows is that we usually don’t see much of the story about how the world arrived in such a dire situation. I wanted to do something different, where the focus was on what led to the collapse and on the collapse itself. So I decided to write the story of the fall of the United States.
I was also inspired to write the trilogy by watching the news, so much of it bad. I think many Americans are frustrated with a political system that seems to celebrate arrogant, divisive partisan politics more than it seeks to work toward compromise and solving our collective problems. I think many believe that if they can only help their party to defeat the other, then America might be saved, but I’ve come to believe that this rivalry, the divide itself, is America’s biggest problem. I’ve written Divided We Fall and Burning Nation to show what happens when the bitterness over that divide is carried out to its most disastrous potential.
CB: Tell me about the kind of kid you think Burning Nation will appeal to the most.
TR: When I began writing the trilogy, I thought that most of my readers would be high school students. However, I have received letters from readers as young as ten years old and e-mails from readers in their forties or fifties. I’ve heard from girls as well as boys. Veterans. Children of veterans. Teachers and librarians.
Burning Nation maintains an exploration of a lot of the socio-political issues in Divided We Fall, but it cranks up the action even more and runs the protagonist PFC Daniel Wright and his friends through even harder circumstances.
When I was a combat engineer in the Army National Guard, I learned a lot about weapons and explosives. I brought that knowledge to my work during my year in the war in Afghanistan, and now, I’ve used it to bring authenticity and visceral details to this trilogy. So I’d say that readers who are interested in action or military stories would enjoy Burning Nation.
But Burning Nation isn’t merely an action story. As a veteran who is writing war stories marketed toward younger readers, I am acutely aware of my responsibility to avoid glorifying war or violence. I try to be as honest as I can about war and its effects on the soldiers and civilians trapped in the middle of it. We Americans are used to thinking of war as something we’re rather distanced from, even though we’ve been at war now for over a decade. Divided We Fall and Burning Nation bring a recognizable near-future war to our back yards.
It’s an action story, a war story, but it’s a thinking-reader’s war story, a cautionary tale for us all, and a reminder of the need to get better at working together to overcome our shared problems and to bring unity to our country.
By Nina Schuyler, The Children’s Book Review
Published: August 9, 2012
What is it about boys and wheels? Yes, I’m making a gross generalization and relying far too heavily on anecdotal evidence, but I don’t see our neighbors with daughters outside at 6:30 am on Garbage Day, watching the parade of garbage trucks go by. All to the delight and squeals of my 14 month old son, a son who bolts up in bed when he hears the first rumble of the trucks. A son whose bedroom rug is decorated with things that go– airplanes, fire trucks, cars, trains, and helicopters—and it is the wheel, that black round object, to which he points and drools.
In honor of boys and things that go, here are a handful of new books that celebrate the wheel.
Picture Books
By Steve Light
Steve Light, the author and illustrator of Trains Go knows the allure of trains. It’s not just the rattle and clang or the choo choo or whoosh, it’s the length. How the train just keeps going by, car after car, as if it will never end. Light uses watercolor and black ink and beautifully illustrates trains –freight and diesel and speed and more. When you open the page, the train stretches to two feet. That’s a lot of train!
Ages 1-5 | Publisher: Chronicle Books | January 25, 2012
By Andrea Zimmerman and David Clemesha
In Train Man, by Andrea Zimmerman and David Clemesha, we enter the realm of a boy’s imagination as he considers what he’ll be when he grows up. A train man, without a doubt, with a train man hat and overalls. As the story progresses, his toy train turns into a big engine and he is at the helm, traveling up the mountain and back down again, then finally into his room with his track and miniature trains.
Ages 2-5 | Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.| March 13, 2012
By William Low
Since I received this book a couple weeks ago, my son has picked it up probably fifty times. (You’ll see why in a second). William Low’s Machines Go to Work in the City opens with a garbage truck. “Vroooom! Here comes the garbage truck, making its run! When the truck makes its last pickup, are the garbage collectors done for the day?” The page on the left folds out or up or down to give you the answer: “No, they must go to the landfill to empty the trash.” (And then I launch into a discussion of how we want to try to recycle because look at that yucky landfill. Never too early to start, I suppose). That’s the pattern of the book as it moves through commuter trains, vacuum trucks, tower cranes and airplanes. After the umpteenth reading, my son now says very clearly and distinctly the word, “No.”
Ages 2-6 | Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.| June 5, 2012
By Brian Biggs
Everything Goes On Land by Brian Biggs illustrates the entire page, using lots of color and capturing the sense of a city with its busyness and packed streets. We move through the city with a little boy and his father, who is driving. They see cars, trucks, RVs, bikes, buses, motorcycles, subway and trains. The book is interspersed with detailed explanations about particular vehicles. We even get to learn about how an electric car works. Biggs has a wonderful sense of the silly, letting the dogs and birds talk. He’s also built in a sort of I Spy game with birds wearing hats and random things that just don’t belong.
Ages 4-8 | Publisher: HarperCollins | September 13, 2011
A Chapter Book
By Trent Reedy
Trent Reedy in Stealing Air has a keen sense of what might appeal to a young boy– not only things that go, but boys who build rocket bikes and real airplanes in secret sheds.( Yes, a bike that with a flip of a switch zooms down the road.) Brian, a newcomer to Iowa, makes friends with Max, who shares with him his secret—in a hidden shed, he’s building a real airplane that looks like a flying motorcycle. But Max is afraid of heights so he solicits help from Brian and Alex, the popular kid from school, to serve as pilot and co-pilot. If the plane is ever to get off the ground, the boys have to overcome fights at home, at school, and a bully named Frankie.
Ages 8-12 | Publisher: Scholastic, Inc. | October 1, 2012
Nina Schuyler’s first novel, “The Painting,” was nominated for the Northern California Book Award and was named a ‘Best Book’ by the San Francisco Chronicle. Her next novel, “The Translator,” will be published by Pegasus Books in New York, Spring, 2013. She is the fiction editor for www.ablemuse.com and teaches creative writing at the University of San Francisco.
Original article: Kids Car Books & Things That Go: Airplanes, Fire Trucks, & Trains. Oh, My!
©2012 The Childrens Book Review. All Rights Reserved.
Rgz SALON member Lyn Miller-Lachmann has been the Editor-in-Chief of MultiCultural Review; the author of the award-winning multicultural bibliography Our Family, Our Friends, Our World; the editor of Once Upon a Cuento, a collection of short stories by Latino authors; and most recently, the author of Gringolandia, a young adult novel about a refugee family living with the aftermath of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. The book is in its second print run and is available for order. (Don't forget to read the fascinating Cover Story for Gringolandia.)
We're honored to have Lyn here as part of the rgz SALON, a feature where four of the top kidlit experts clue us in to the best YA novels they've read recently. Today, she reviews Words in the Dust by Trent Reedy (Scholastic, 2011).
"Thirteen-year-old Zulaikha hardly remembers her mother, a victim of Taliban violence in Afghanistan, or how to write the letters and words her mother taught her. Disfigured by a cleft lip and protruding teeth, called Donkeyface by both the neighborhood bullies and her own brother, and ordered around by her father’s demanding second wife, Zulaikha faces a bleak future. Then she meets Meena, an elderly former professor who was a friend of her mother’s. Meena inspires Zulaikha to learn to read and write, and the American soldiers occupying her village offer work for her father and an operation to cure her cleft lip.
However, promises made aren’t always kept, and when Zulaikha’s beloved older sister is promised to an older businessman who lives far away, the young woman endures terrible loss and finds unexpected allies.
"Reedy, who spent a year in western Afghanistan with the U.S. Army, engages all five senses in describing a setting he knows well. The story begins slowly as the author builds Zulaikha’s world, but Reedy rewards patient readers with fully realized characters rooted in their land and way of life. The immediate and extended family present a large number of characters who could easily blend together, but Reedy succeeds in distinguishing them through a combination of precise physical description, well-drawn personality characteristics, and location within the family and community dynamics. The principal characters�
By:
Betsy Bird,
on 1/20/2011
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Words in the Dust
By Trend Reedy
Arthur A. Levine Books (an imprint of Scholastic)
$17.99
ISBN: 978-0-545-26125-8
Ages 11 and up.
On shelves now.
A children’s book, written by a soldier about an Afghani girl, set in the recent past. That’s a toughie. There are a lot of easier books out there to review too. Why aren’t I writing one about the adorable little girl who wants to be Little Miss Apple Pie or the one about the cute dog that wants to find its home? Well, sometimes you have to step out of your comfort zone, which I suspect is what author Trent Reedy wanted to do here. With an Introduction by Katherine Paterson and enough backmatter to sink a small dinghy, Reedy takes a chance on confronting the state of the people of Afghanistan without coming off as imperialist, judgmental, or a know-it-all. For the most part he succeeds, and the result is a book that carries a lot more complexity in its 272 pages than the first 120 or so would initially suggest. Bear with it then. There’s a lot to chew on here.
Zulaikha would stand out in any crowd. It’s not her fault, but born with jutting teeth and a cleft upper lip she finds herself on the receiving end of the taunts of the local boys, and sometimes even her own little brother. Then everything in her life seems to happen at once. She’s spotted by an American soldier, who with his fellows manages to convince their captain to have Zulaikha flown to a hospital for free surgery. At the same time she makes the acquaintance of a friend of her dead mother, a former professor who begins to teach her girl how to read. Top it all off with the upcoming surprise marriage of Zeynab, Zulaikha’s older sister, and things seem to be going well. Unfortunately, hopes have a way of becoming dashed, and in the midst of all this is a girl who must determine what it is she wants and what it is the people she cares about need.
I approach most realistic children’s fiction with a great deal of trepidation, particularly when it discusses topical information. The sad truth of children’s books is that they are perfect containers for didacticism, even if you did not mean for that to be the case when you begin. With that in mind I read the first 120 pages of the story warily. I wasn’t certain that I liked what I saw either. Seemed to me that this book was indeed showing an in-depth portrait of Afghanistan, beauty, warts, and all, while the Americans were these near saviors, picking a poor girl out of the crowd upon whom to bestow free surgery out of the goodness of their golden glorious hearts. Fortunately, by the time we got to page 120 we saw the flip side of the equation. Yes, the Americans are perky and western and what have you. They’re also doofuses. Sometimes. They sort of blunder about Afghanistan without any recognition of the cultural courtesies they’re supposed to engage in. They merrily serve their Muslim guests food made out of pigs, unaware of what they’re doing. At one point Zulaikha’s father grows increasingly angry with them for their distrust of common Afghan workers (watching builders at gunpoint so that none of them steal tools) as well as their conversational blunders. Don’t get me wrong. The Americans are generally seen as good blokes. But I was worried that this book was going to be one sweet love song to the American invasion, and it’s not that. It’s nuanced and folks are allowed to be both good and bad. Even the ones writing the book.
I still got nervous, though. I desperately did not want this
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I am actually booktalking this one to our sixth through eighth grade book group today. I was also really impressed with his nuanced portrayal of the situation in Afghanistan and the fact that the information that he gave was such a natural part of the story. I think you’re right, too, that kids will gloss over some of the stuff that they don’t understand. I know I did when I read THE GODFATHER when I was twelve!
When I first heard about this book I thought, wow sounds exactly like Wanting Mor. BUT I found wanting Mor a bit…wanting. It briefly touches on important issues but never fully dives into them and it seems that Words in the Dust does. Wanting Mor mentions that the Afghans are tired of being treated like charity cases but it doesn’t go further than that. i like that Words in the Dust not only brings that issue up but shows the complicated situation in Afghanistan with the soldiers.
And yes people need to realize that not every single person in Afghanistan supports the Taliban. Good grief. That’s why I’m grateful to books like this one
Excellent review, you made me even more eager to run out and get this book!
PS What you mentioned about the blood and sex is so true. When I was about 9 or 10 I read the first Alanna book and I had no idea what she was talking about when she mentioned blood. lol. I re-read it so many times though that I eventually got it