Coyote Mercury Posts

Theories of Relativity by Barbara Haworth-Attard is another of the young adult books I took home from my classroom for the summer.

I have a lot of students pick up books, read a few pages, sometimes a few chapters, get bored and try another book. None of them get bored with this one. It’s about a kid named Dylan who lives on the street in a big northern city. The author is Canadian so I suspect it’s a Canadian city, although I kept imagining Cleveland. Never been there, so I don’t know why, but there it is.

Wherever it is, life is tough. Dylan is a smart kid – he likes to read about Einstein – and he doesn’t want to be on the street. Everyone from pimps to pushers wants to recruit him, and they offer him some deals, but Dylan wants to maintain his independence and his freedom, things tantamount to suicide in his world. Some adults want to help him, but his pride interferes. He’s a kid with no hope and no chance.

The characters are lively and believable and the situations that Dylan finds himself in are downright disconcerting. Theories of Relativity falls into a category of books that I call “problem books” in that they attempt to educate young readers about very real problems for which there are no easy solutions. Perhaps reading this might give some kids hope and others compassion. Or, perhaps, a few hours of being entertained by a solid modern story. I guess it’s win-win.

I have a whole set of Lois Lowry’s young adult novel Number the Stars in my classroom, which is why it’s one of the books I brought home for my summer reading.

The story takes place in Denmark in 1943. Word gets out that the Nazis will be relocating all of Denmark’s Jews, and ten-year-old Annemarie Johnsen and her family take in Annemarie’s best friend and neighbor, Ellen, who is a Jew.

During the Nazi occupation of Denmark the Danes helped nearly all of Denmark’s Jews escape to Sweden and Number the Stars is a fictional version of that larger story centered around one child on whom many people’s lives come to depend.

The best thing about the book is the way Lowry evokes place. I have never been to Denmark, but Lowry’s descriptions of the small fishing village across the water from Sweden became as vivid as my own memories.

I also get hung up on weird details such as the apparently true ruse the fishermen used to fool the Nazi dogs so they wouldn’t smell the human cargo. A powder made of dried blood and cocaine would be sprinkled on something the dogs would smell. The blood would attract the dogs, and the cocaine would temporarily destroy their sense of smell. I’m not sure what it says about me that that detail is what sticks out from a moving and well-written book about human courage, but there it is.

Since I already have a class set, I’ll probably use this one next year with my younger students. My high schoolers will stick with Elie Wiesel’s Night.

I’ve never read The Outsiders (but it is in the Summer Bucket) so Rumble Fish is my first SE Hinton novel. It’s one of the many in my classroom and it’s relatively popular among the kids, but it was recommended to me by one of the staff who read it as a kid growing up in the Bay Area. Turns out everyone at my school who grew up there in the seventies had to read it.

It’s about a junior high kid named Rusty-James, the toughest kid on a tough street, who loves to fight and wants to be in a gang like his older brother, The Motorcycle Boy, once was.

Rusty-James narrates, and he tells of a few days in which he gets in a knife fight and the Motorcycle Boy comes back to town. Rusty-James idolizes the Motorcycle Boy, an idealized older kid who has it all from street smarts to book smarts with good looks and a rep for being a seriously dangerous dude. The Motorcyle Boy can do anything with his life, but he doesn’t want to do anything. Naturally, Rusty-James only sees the Motorcycle Boy’s rep and wants to be just like him.

SE Hinton does a nice job evoking a rundown urban wasteland full of kids going nowhere fast whose only hope seems to be in maintaining a tough enough rep to stay alive. It’s a pretty bleak look at the all-too-real problem of kids growing up without dreams or any kind of vision of what life could be like, and in Rusty-James’s idealized view of the Motorcycle Boy we see the peril of choosing the wrong heroes.

This is one I’ll probably consider having my kids read next year. It has a very nice (perhaps I should say “nicely written” since it’s not really very ‘nice’) ending, which I won’t spoil, and besides it’s a really good character piece.

I think my students will be able to relate to this as well since so many of them are on the same dark road to nowhere as Rusty-James. Who knows maybe one or two will see in Rusty-James’s story a life they might themselves avoid.