It’s inauguration day! Regardless of how you feel about the outcome of the election, I’m willing to bet your feelings are strong. Mine are and I’m so glad Leaving Kent State by Sabrina Fedel entered my heart and my home when it did because it made me less scared to stand up for my beliefs and turned me into a better human overall.
The World I Thought I Lived in
I’ve had a lot of conversations in the past few months with my husband about vaguely remembered concepts from elementary and high school—things like tyranny of the majority and informed electorates. As much as I found myself defending the electoral college, I couldn’t quite reconcile myself with a world in which the answer to liberal fact-checkers is conservative smoke and mirrors. See, I grew up with a liberal little heart in a conservative family in a conservative state (almost libertarianly so), but I was always taught that it’s my job as a citizen to have an opinion and to voice that opinion. So I will admit to feeling more than a little deflated when a man I don’t believe won through honest conviction or means was named president elect.
The World I Wanted to Live in
“I think Vietnam has a lot to do with changing things,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Evan studied me as he asked.
“I don’t know, I guess it’s made us ask why.”
I grew up such an idealist that I fully felt I should have been a member of the flower children and that if I had been alive during that time, I too could have brought an end to the Vietnam War.
That’s why Leaving Kent State was perfect for me. This young adult novel follows 17-year-old Rachel, a native of Kent and daughter of a professor, as she negotiates her relationship with the love of her life (who may or may not love her back) as he negotiates his new life as a disabled Vietnam vet. It’s 1969 and the social revolution hasn’t quite hit Kent, Ohio, though some of the students are trying to change that. Rachel’s also struggling with her destiny, which she feels is as an artist, but her parents just aren’t on board.
If Kent, Ohio or Kent State sound familiar to you, it’s likely because of the shootings there in 1970 of unarmed protestors by the National Guard. Some people credit those events with turning the national consciousness against the Vietnam War. The book gets there, though deliciously slowly as we explore what it’s like for a young girl to love a young man who experienced something she abhors. Thankfully Evan, the object of Rachel’s love, is a very round character and we get to experience through him both the camaraderie of the soldiers in Vietnam and the regrets of someone who saw and experienced the worst of war.
Who I Can be
I purposely started reading this book on the day of the January 15 rally to save the Affordable Care Act. I needed to believe that a group of people can in fact make a difference for the better. I trekked downtown with my young son in tow and, yes, I chanted all the chants. He could only take an hour of the rally so we missed the main event, but we sang our nightly round of “We Shall Overcome” and “Where have all the Flowers Gone,” and I’m energized to try again at the Women’s March tomorrow.
See, Leaving Kent State gave me hope. I should tell you that it’s very well written and that the period details are spot on and the characters believable. I should tell you that Fedel takes the subtle (and better) path of introducing the reader to people who know people who know people who are famous rather than hitting us over the head with unlikely encounters. Or how she drops in all the right information to ground our reading and hint at where the story is going without inundating us. Or how she paints one of the most tender and accurate portraits of PTSD I’ve ever seen on paper. All of those things are true. But as much as I love good writing, I am most grateful to Fedel for that gift of hope.
As part of my new rosy outlook, I also hope that it won’t take a tragedy like the Kent State shootings to heal the rifts that have been growing in DC and in our society since 9/11. But Leaving Kent State also gave me the courage to stand up for myself and for what I believe in even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard. Rachel could not have known what she was getting herself into that day in Kent, Ohio, but even as events unfolded she and Evan were the best people they could be. This book helped me find out who I want to be—for myself, and for my son.
What is Young Adult Anyway?
Quick side note here about the young adult (YA) genre. When the author and I were discussing her book, she warned me that it’s YA. I personally don’t believe in those labels too much, but I can see what she meant. In this book we are deeply immersed in the moony and not very actiony heart of a teenaged girl for most of the story. I kind of loved that because I remember what that was like, but if you’re a “get on with it already” kind of person, this probably isn’t the book for you.
Whether you choose to read this book or not, please, for my sake and yours, keep asking why and pushing for the best world you can dream of.
To catch your own glimpse at what life was like during a “simpler time” and maybe recapture some hope, pick up a copy of Leaving Kent State from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.
The rhythms of this book are fantastic. It’s a lot of fun to read aloud and I think my poetry has gotten better as a result. Making animal sounds is supposed to be a good way to help kids learn language and Remy seems to love when I dig in next to his ear and announce, “BOOM BOOM BOOM Mr. Brown is a wonder. BOOM BOOM BOOM Mr. Brown makes thunder.”
This is one of the books the library very wisely allows parents to take out on loan permanently. We all know what kids can do to books. No one wants them back after they’ve been out on loan. But the book is terrible. Little Blue leaves the house when his mama tells him not to (after she’s left him home alone). He and his friend Little Yellow cry so hard that they meld identities and their parents no longer recognize them. The illustrations appear to be made of torn paper. I don’t know why I keep reading it to my son.
Torn paper done right. I still vaguely remember doing kindergarten projects with tissue paper in imitation of Carle’s iconic style and was delighted when my husband wanted to buy a copy that came with a little stuffed caterpillar for our little baby. Though the sentences are a little long and meandering, I love the focus on days of the week and counting and the story’s good. Even if it makes me want ice cream cones. We used to read the book with the caterpillar weaving in and out of the holes in the pages. But now Remy’s all business and I have to hurry if I want to get to the end. Bonus Eric Carle book is the aforementioned Brown Bear—talk about rhythm and I think the repetition is really good for language learning. I was dreading the day someone would tell me I look like the teacher in the book. It happened. I lived.
Arty parents trying to expose their kids to arty books can’t really go wrong with this book. The author does a good job of incorporating a blues rhythm into the text and I enjoyed getting to know more of Lawrence’s work. There’s also a book in this series that uses Magritte’s work that is more imaginative but the text and images in the Lawrence book work better together overall.
Speaking of arty books, I adore Tullet’s books. I sometimes fantasize about my husband becoming a childrens’ book illustrator and these books feed that fantasy. This one doesn’t have any words, but it’s filled with abstract illustrations cut at odd angles and I like seeing what picture Remy will make with it next. You may have heard of Press Here which is a super fun book to read and I think will get better as Remy gets older. My least favorite Tullet so far is The Game of Red, Yellow and Blue. The color combinations are okay and I like the shape cutouts, but the “Fab-racadabra” rainbow carnival at the end does not translate well into English.
One of the things I’ve been trying to make sure Remy gets is exposure to other languages. I started reading him Garcia Lorca really early on and when I saw this adorable little book, I thought it would be a good chance to learn to count and for me to get my tongue around Spanish in ways that we could both practice. The illustrations are so attractive and I liked the book so much that we now have all of the books in the series. Probably the second best is Lucha Libre Anatomy/Anatomia and not just because I like shouting “ombligo!” on the belly button page.
This is another book I liked so much that I bought everything else by Cliff Wright I could find. It’s a very simple book with just a couple of words on each page that match the illustration. Still, Wright achieves a kind of story with the pictures and I love the summary at the end where you can see all the pages at once. The rhyming is nice, too.
I knew this book was a classic and I loved the sentiment of not being able to quantify the amount of love a parent has for a child. What I wasn’t prepared for is how competitive it is. Geez Big Nutbrown Hare, just let your kiddo have the upper hand one time fer Chrissakes.
One of the wonderful things about having a community of people around you when you have a baby is that they expose you to new things. I’ve always resisted Native American art because I didn’t understand it. But a Native friend gave this book to us at a baby shower and I love learning about the iconography of Native Northwest coast tribes and also some of the lore that accompanies it. Like the books says, “Raven teaches us to be clever and creative” and I’m really glad my son will have some exposure to a culture that’s very important in the area he calls home.
Some books are written for parents. This is one of them. I’m a socialist. I’d love for my son to be politically involved and try to make the world he lives in a better place. I don’t often read him this book, though, because there are a few things I need to teach him before he absorbs messages like “No! No! No! Yes to what we want. No to what must go.”
There are a lot of reasons I haven’t blogged lately. Only one of them is that I’ve been having trouble finding the right book. I don’t have enough to say about my troubled relationship with Winnie the Pooh or a deep enough understanding of Taoism to make my thoughts on The Te of Piglet worth sharing. The random thoughts that catch my attention in Nobody’s Home aren’t concrete enough to justify me blogging about Ugrešić 
When a dear friend sent me a copy of Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, he said it was because I had a son. I don’t think I would have read the book if I’d understood it was about race in American society. But that skirting of uncomfortable topics is exactly why I needed to read this book. It’s why I think everyone should read this book.
Initially, I was reluctant to read Emma Donoghue’s Room, because I’d recently read Above by Isla Morley and I was pretty sure there were only so many “kidnapped woman imprisoned for years bears the child of her kidnapper/rapist” stories this new mom could take. But I found Room in one of our neighborhood Little Free Libraries and couldn’t resist. As similar as the stories sound at first blush, the books could not be more different. Except that I loved them both.