Shooting the Moon

Frances O'Roark Dowell
Atheneum 2008

Jamie Dexter is an army brat, her dad a full bird Colonel running a base in Texas during the Vietnam war. When her brother skips college, and medical school, to enlist Jamie couldn't be happier. In her 12-going-on-13 year old mind, there can be no higher honor than to serve one's country. Isn't that what her dad is always saying? But then why does her dad, always referred to as the Colonel, keep trying to talk his son out of his enlistment? And why instead of letters does her brother keep sending Jamie rolls of film for her to develop?

It's apparently natural that history repeats itself as the echoes from Vietnam and our current situation in Iraq reverberate in literature. As seen through Jamie's eyes we watch her move away from her pro-war position as she comes to meet and know other soldiers on the base. She never waivers in her pride for her brother, never loses the respect of or for her father, but a shift takes place when she comes to realize that the price of service, the high price of honor, may not always be justified.

I walked into this book cold and I wasn't sure I was going to like it. That may be the point, to have a young girl so gung-ho for war that it might appear a bit uncomfortable or distasteful. Naturally she's going to grow and change by the end - she's in those awkward years as it is - so the only real questions are how will she change, and how much.

But the book has a serious flaw: it's missing it's final third. In the last couple of pages (no, I won't spoil the ending here) there is a new piece of information that would seriously effect Jamie's entire family. Worse, the two years following this information are essentially tidied up in two paragraphs that seriously cheat the reader from watching the effect on Jamie as she grows into being a young woman. If this was a conscious decision to withhold this information in lieu of a sequel, it was a serious mistake. As it stands, this ending is a sort of slap in the face. Imagine if the Harry Potter books jumped from number four to number seven with two pages to cover the two years in between. That's how much I feel the ending here leaves out.

Some might disagree. The book did receive the Boston Globe/Horn Book Honor for fiction this year.

As a final note, this book and Barbara Kerley's Greetings From Planet Earth both deal with Vietnam from a child's eye view and the moon features prominently as a symbol in both. It's curious, because Kerely's book deals with what happens after the soldier returns home and less about how the family felt when it happened. In that sense these books might be well suited for a classroom to discuss the full range of feelings concerning either the Vietnam War or the effect of war on families in general.

Poetry Friday: my sweet old etcetera

from America At War
poems selected by Lee Bennett Hopkins, illustrated by Stephen Alcorn
McElderry Books 2008

Yeah, I'm back in the Friday Poetry round-up, for the month at least. Can't let National Poetry Month drift without mentioning some sort of poetry. I'm taking the liberty this week of cross-posting two different poems from the same collection because, well, just because. Does poetry need a reason?

This collection, America At War, groups poems by the wars America has participated in one way or another. A while back I mentioned this collection and included a Carl Sandburg poem, one I'm pretty sure I had to memorize in seventh grade. This time around we have a little e.e. cummings, and despite the fact that it's about a letter from the front, I like the refrain and the subtle bawdiness at the end.

my sweet old etcetera
e.e. cummings

my sweet old etcetera
aunt lucy during the recent

war could and what
is more did tell you just
what everybody was fighting

for,
my sister

isabel created hundreds
(and
hundreds) of socks not to
mention shirts fleaproof earwarmers

etcetera wristers etcetera, my
mother hoped that

i would die etcetera
bravely of course my father used
to become hoarse talking about how it was
a privilege and if only he
could meanwhile my

self etcetera lay quietly
in the deep mud et

cetera
(dreaming,
et
cetera, of
Your smile
eyes knees and of your Etcetera)

Yes, quite. Dreaming of your Etcetera. People should sign love notes to one another that way. And why not?

Check out the Poetry Friday round-up this week over at Becky's Book Reviews.
My other post is lurking over at is lurking over at fomagrams.

Poetry Friday: Two About War

I caught a peep at a new book due out in the spring called America At War, poems selected by Lee Bennett Hopkins, illustrated by Stephen Alcorn. The selections are grouped by the major American wars starting with poems about the Revolutionary War and concluding with poems from the Persian Gulf War of 1991.

I had been looking lately for a poem about the Vietnam War that might resonate today. I found in this collection a Sandburg poem from World War I that I had forgotten.

Grass
Carl Sandburg

Pile the bodies high as Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work--
I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What is this place?
Where are we now?

I am the grass.
Let me work.

I remember being more than a little creeped out when my 7th grade teacher had us memorize that, the images of the grass growing over the fallen. Since then I've come to hear the weary voice of the grass begging to be allowed to cover over the scars of battle. Not to hide but to heal.

I had also been looking for a poem by Denise Levertov, separate from a war poem, and found this in the same collection.

What Were They Like?
Denise Levertov

1) Did the people of Vietnam
use lanterns of stone?
2) Did they hold ceremonies
to reverence the opening of buds?
3) Were they inclined to quiet laughter?
4) Did they use bone and ivory,
jade and silver, for ornament?
5) Had they and epic poem?
6) Did they distinguish between speech and singing?

1) Sir, their light hearts turned to stone.
It is not remembered whether in gardens
stone lanterns illuminated pleasant ways.
2) Perhaps they gathered once to delight in blossom,
but after their children were killed
there were no more buds.
3) Sir, laughter is bitter to the burned mouth.
4) A dream ago, perhaps. Ornament is for joy.
All the bones were charred.
5) It is not remembered. Remember,
most were peasants, their life
was in rice and bamboo.
When peaceful clouds were reflected in the paddies
and the water buffalo stepped surely along terraces,
maybe fathers told their sons old tales.
When bombs smashed those mirrors
there was time only to scream.
6) there is no echo yet
of their speech which was like a song.
It was reported their singing resembled
the flight of moths in moonlight.
Who can say? It is silent now.

Too much silence these days, too quiet for my taste.

Greetings From Planet Earth

by Barbara Kerley
Scholastic 2007

Warning: Contains spoilers.

It's 1977. Theo and his middle school classmates are working on a science project that mirrors that of the Voyager space probe. By asking a series of questions to generate ideas for their projects -- Who are we? What makes us human? -- Theo and his classmates are gently directed to examine what it is about humans that make us unique in the universe to include as an artifact for their own imaginary space probe.

While Theo is wrestling with this question he has even larger questions closer to home to confront. His father enlisted to fight in Vietnam when Theo was small and has not come home. His mother has told him his father is missing, not dead, but refuses to allow Theo and his sister to speak of him. On his birthday Theo once again receives a gift from his missing father, a model of a rocket, a family tradition meant to serve as a token of memory for his father. But Theo suspects that his grandmother may have some answers about his father that his mother won't address.

In secret meetings Theo's grandmother fills in the gaps about her son, his father. She hints and and intimates that the reasons for his disappearance may be more complicated than he can understand and she is clearly working against the wishes of Theo's mother in telling him so. His curiosity piqued, Theo's class project leads him to issues of Life magazine where he begins to get an education in the Vietnam War. He learns about the MIA's and POW's and feels this is the secret his mother has been keeping from him. He searches his mother's room and discovers more, letters his father sent that Theo was never shown, letter specifically about his return from the war and why he has not returned home yet.

Theo's sister becomes suspicious of their grandmother's activities on the weekend and enlists Theo to shadow her to a children's center where they witness a hippie working with kids. Confused and angry, Theo confronts his mother first with the possibility that his father's a POW and then with the frustration that she has known all along and hid the truth about his father from her. Theo learns that after returning from Vietnam that his father had so much anger and frustration inside of him that he didn't feel he could return home and be a good father. Theo's mom had kept the information from her children because she felt abandoned, and because it was easier to explain when they were young that he was missing.

Only later does Theo connect the dots and realize the hippie he saw at the children's center was his father, living within an hour's bus ride of his family. With everything finally out in the open Theo and his mother explain that their father had recently decided that the time had come to try and return. After many years and a lot of emotional confusion to break through Theo takes the initiative to meet his father in a pre-arranged location. Theo comes the realization that the thing that makes us human is that we ask questions, tough questions, not the least of which are all the questions he has for his father.

I would have been a few years older than Theo is in this book in 1997, probably a classmate of his older sister. It's interesting that Kerley sets the questioning in a Science class because we addressed these issues in Social Studies, but absolutely correct that it was easier to talk about NASA in the classroom than Vietnam. Much of what I learned about the Vietnam War during that time I learned just as Theo did, through Life magazine. These things just weren't talked about; I had an uncle in the military at the time and no one has ever really talked about that either. He came home was all that mattered.

It's an interesting way of addressing similar concerns teens may currently be facing now that The War Against Terrorism (aka The Iraq War) is entering its fifth year. We don't have the same issues where the war isn't being addressed, criticized or discussed in the media but the same confusion among children -- of soldiers or otherwise -- will always exist.

Recently I had a conversation with some parents over another book I enjoyed where, in breaking down the background for the different characters, I mentioned that one of the kids was a military brat (he was a brat) whose father was stationed in and died in Afghanistan. Oh, my god, that's dreadful! Why would anyone write about that in a children's book? That's just distasteful, there's really no call for that.

Honestly.

After all these years, people would still prefer to shelter children from the outside world and have them learn what they can through piecing things together from magazines, television and the Internet? That strikes me as both more dreadful and distasteful than anything a book could present to a child, to force all heads into the sand, but that's partially how we got ourselves into our current geopolitical situation so I shouldn't be surprised.

There's another plus in this for me that has less to do with the war aspect. The book's 1977 setting may provide a conversation starter for children of parents who remember the post-Watergate Carter era. It's a well-written period piece that doesn't feel stale or too deeply rooted to its time making it accessible to contemporary readers who might -- might -- pause to consider what middle school might have been like for their parents.