It's
Marvelous Middle Grade Monday
at
at
and #IMWAYR day
at
February 25, 2025 by Aladdin
E ARC provided by Edelweiss Plus
Freya lives in Wellstone, a small, closeknit community where her family has lived for six generations. Her mother is an artist, her father a scientist, and her beloved Nan a local realtor. She often has concerns about issues going on in the world around her, and even tries to run for student council president on the platform of requiring students to do community service, but loses badly. Her friends, Hazel and Liliana, tell her that classmates don't appreciate her approach to addressing problems, but Freya is more concerned with doing what she feels is right. When Mc. Clayton assigns a class project to research a local person of important, Freya chooses the town founder, Benjamin Wellstone, since her cousin Aubrey had challenged her over the summer about "what was so great" about the man. While researching with the help of librarian Mia, Freya finds out that while Wellstone was an abolitionist, he also had multiple writings about why women should not be allowed to vote. Angry and unable to turn in her project, she talks to her teacher and gets an extension, and starts again, focusing on suffragists from the town. She locates one, Olivia Padgett, and has the good idea that the town should take down Wellstone's statue and replace it with one of Padgett. She and Callie, a new student she meets at the library, write an article about it to post on the school website. This gets a lot of comments, both positive and negative, but also results in some pushback from the mayor, who thinks it might adversely affect tourism. To make their displeasure over being taken lightly known, Freya and her friends post signs on the Wellstone statue in the middle of the night before a local festival that say "Tear me down", and are quickly found out. Wanting to be heard, they decide to make a quilt with pictures of the "invisible women" for the Wellstone arts festival. With the help of her mother, their protest peace is finished and received with much more support. The local rotary buys the quilt and donates it for display in the library, and Freya takes the $500 they pay to start a fund to have a statue to Padgett erected opposite Wellstone.
Strengths: There are certainly many historical figures all over the US who have problematic pasts which are often undiscovered. I love the idea of a school project on local history uncovering some of these secrets, and Mr. Clayton suggesting that the students access the resources at the public library instead of relying only on the internet doesn't hurt my feelings, either! Not everything has been digitized, especially some of the more problematic pieces of the past. It was good to see that Freya was passionate about her interests, and that she had several of them, including reading to a woman at a senior facility. Nan is a grandmother who is still working and active, and one who supports her grandmother. Freya's mother has a mother and daughter crafting group, which is a great idea. There's some interesting conversation about whether the group should include Freya's friend Jax, who is a boy, or whether it's okay for there to be safe spaces that are for girls only. Even though they are concerned for her, Freya's friends support her as well. Readers who enjoyed Dee's Haven Jacobs Saves the Planet will be especially interested in this new title.
Weaknesses: I wish that Freya's parents had addressed the reasons that she needed to cause conflict about everything; activism in children is great, but Freya had trouble connecting to her classmates and always seemed angry in a way that didn't seem to make her happy.
What I really think: This is a great choice for readers who enjoy books where the characters have concerns about the world and work to address them will be glad to add this title to a list of social activism books that includes Dimopoulos' Turn the Tide, King's Attack of the Black Rectangles, Shang's The Secret Battle of Evan Pao, or Farr's Margie Kelley Breaks the Dress Code.
January 14, 2025 by Bloomsbury USA
Copy provided by the Publisher
It was also the Age of Ballyhoo, so I was not overly surprised to learn that the trial came about due to local authorities wanting to bring more attention and tourism dollars to the small town of Dayton, Tennessee. Seeing the new Butler Act, which the governor signed thinking that it would have no effect on the citizenry, ban the teaching of evolution, and noticing that the state approved textbook, A Civic Biology, included a few pages of the topic gave Doc Robinson, the school board president and local drugstore owner an idea. The ACLU wanted a test subject to oppose the ban. Enter John Scopes, a young physics and math teacher who also coached, who was substituting for the biology teacher. Had he taught evolution? Well, probably. Would he be okay with being arrested and going to trial? Why not. And just like that, Dayton got lots of attention.
Levy does a great job of laying the groundwork and describing many different cultural facets that young readers won't know. Public schools were fairly new. There was a lot of religious fervor at the time. And William Jennings Bryant and Clarence Darrow were celebrity lawyers on opposite sides of the political spectrum with a long standing feud. There's also a discussion about Charles Darwin and his research, as well as an exploration of why some people believed in his work and others did not.
The most surprising part of this book is that while Scopes (who didn't speak in his own defense!) was found guilty and required to pay $100 fine, the case didn't get any further than the state supreme court, where the verdict was upheld, although the fine was eliminated. Evolution was kept out of many textbooks for years, and it wasn't until 1968 that Susan Epperson in Arkansas took her case to the supreme court, where it was declared that states couldn't ban teaching certain things because it was a violation of free speech. Even though Scopes had gone into geology, he and Epperson met up at one point to have lunch. This didn't surprise me. Teachers are particularly good at talking to each other, and that's one conversation I would have loved to have heard!
This is a well paced book, and quite an interesting read. There are several classes currently working on a nonfiction book project, and I have to admit that it took me a little bit of time to pick up this book, but once I did, I was hooked. My students with an interest in history, law, or science will find this to be an engaging narrative nonfiction choice. I just wish I still had a copy of Kidd's Monkey Town (2006) to go along with it.
No comments:
Post a Comment