For my booktalk I chose to read 2007 Newbery award winner "The Higher Power of Lucky" by Susan Patron. This story is about Lucky a ten year old girl who is trying to find her "higher power." She lives in the desert in a poor town called Hard Pan with her father's ex-wife Bridgette. One of the main reasons why I chose this book was because I know that it has been very controversial and many school libraries have banned or censored the book. I wanted to see why this book caused so much controversy when it won the Newbery Medal.
As a reader whenever I am picking out a book I always look at the front cover of the book. This is what I first see and what ultimately attracts me to the book. Next, I look at the back cover to read a brief synopsis of the story. On the back cover of this book there is no synopsis only snippets of passages from the book. Finally I looked on the inside of the cover and found a short summary of the book.
For me I felt that the book started off really slow and the first page of the book was shocking to me because the word scrotum is used in the second paragraph. When I read the first page I found myself thinking about would a child know what this word is and if they did what would they think? This is an aspect that would be very difficult for a young reader to comprehend. From the first page I was taken off guard by the book and I began to question my book choice selection. After I read the first three chapters I found myself being confused while I was reading, therefore, I read the first three chapters again. This is something I might normally do when I am reading a book.
These first chapters gave me a background on who Lucky is, what she does and why she is trying to find her "higher power." These first three chapters also introduce terms such as alcoholics anonymous and smokers anonymous. These would be concepts that I believe a young reader would question. This is also where I would expect the reader to ask a teacher or ask a parent what those terms mean. So far this book has caught my attention and I am captivated to see what is going to happen next in the story.
I also read The Higher Power of Lucky! And I completely agree about the beginning of the book - infact I blogged about some of the very same things! I was shocked at the vocabulary and topics chosen to be introduced in the very beginning of the book! However, as I continued reading I started to reconsider what children these days hear about and learn about outside of school. I feel though we may be shocked what students recognize or even know about some of the terms in this book, as teachers we can correct and improve their outside knowledge. I really enjoyed this book and found myself not being able to put it down!
ReplyDelete