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Nine poignant and empowering short stories from the author of The Breadwinner.
The seated child. With a single powerful image, Deborah Ellis draws our attention to nine children and the situations they find themselves in, often through no fault of their own. In each story, a child makes a decision and takes action, be that a tiny gesture or a life-altering choice.
Jafar is a child laborer in a chair factory and longs to go to school. Sue sits on a swing as she and her brother wait to have a supervised visit with their father at the children’s aid society. Gretchen considers the lives of concentration camp victims during a school tour of Auschwitz. Mike survives seventy-two days of solitary as a young offender. Barry squirms on a food court chair as his parents tell him that they are separating. Macie sits on a too-small time-out chair while her mother receives visitors for tea. Noosala crouches in a fetid, crowded apartment in Uzbekistan, waiting for an unscrupulous refugee smuggler to decide her fate.
These children find the courage to face their situations in ways large and small, in this eloquent collection from a master storyteller.
Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.3
Describe how a particular story's or drama's plot unfolds in a series of episodes as well as how the characters respond or change as the plot moves toward a resolution.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.6
Explain how an author develops the point of view of the narrator or speaker in a text.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.9
Compare and contrast texts in different forms or genres (e.g., stories and poems; historical novels and fantasy stories) in terms of their approaches to similar themes and topics.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The image of a seated child a factory laborer, a boy imprisoned for reasons unknown, among others opens each of these 11 taut stories, which span countries and cultures but are gracefully linked by themes of hope, identity, and resilience. Ellis (The Cat at the Wall) nimbly slips into the minds of her memorable characters, who weigh their options in the face of significant challenges. Humiliated by her mother and banished to the "time-out chair," seven-year-old Macie takes refuge in the "forest house" of her imagination. A deeper psychological quandary emerges in "The Question Chair," about Gretchen, a contemporary German girl who, after a field trip to Auschwitz, agonizes over what stance she and her parents would have taken during the Nazi regime. Several especially hard-hitting stories introduce children (an evacuee in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, an Afghan refugee escaping the Taliban) whose brave actions place them in life-threatening situations. Ellis's protagonists share the common goal of survival be it emotional, physical, or both and her thought-provoking collection should spark wide-ranging discussions about choice and injustice. Ages 10 13.
