Fleischman, P. (1999). Seedfolks. HarperTrophy.
This book is centered on the creation of a garden in a diverse, urban Cleveland neighborhood vacant lot. The format of the story unfolds within the thirteen chapters, each one focusing on the first person voice of a character that lives in the neighborhood and begins to interact with the creation of the garden. I found this setup of the book to be interesting, because it gave me the opportunity to hear each character’s diverse perspective as the way that each chapter was written as if the person was telling their story. Each character’s voice was clearly distinctive, as their dialect and use of grammar, whether proper or not, was written in their particular way. I could clearly hear the characters, and I felt that with the characters’ tellings, I could better picture them and even bring to life a tone of voice, whether high or deep, soft or hard.
In this book, the story begins with Kim, a young Vietnamese girl who desperately wants to connect to her deceased father that died when she was eight. She finds the courage to plant six beans in the harden Earth that was trying to break free into spring, hoping that her father looking down would see that she knew what persistence she had to care for plants as he had as a farmer. The book moves on to Ana’s story, who describes the diversity of nationalities in the neighborhood throughout the years. She then proceeds to tell how she saw Kim from her apartment, and suspicious that she is up to no good. Ana goes out and digs out of burning curiosity, and begins to dig up whatever the girl buried, only to discover she was digging up seeds. I thought the line she spoke was powerful: “I felt like I’d read through her secret diary and had ripped out a page without meaning to. I laid those beans right back in the ground, as gently as sleeping babies.”
The next character is Wendell, who lost his son to a shooting and his wife to a car wreck, and keeps an eye out for Ana. Ana employs him to go water the beans that she sees are dying from her binoculars. As a farm boy, he maneuvers an old refrigerator to reflect heat down, and mounds soil to support and catch water around the seedlings. Kim witnesses this, and fearful, says nothing. Wendell reflects on the Bible phrase: "And a little child shall lead them.” This reverberates that the initial chapter on the little girl Kim, young and able to be a visionary, unencumbered by the weight of adulthood, changes the lives of those who begin to interact with the garden, and out of the rest of the remaining nine stories, the domino effect of Kim’s bean planting unfolds into the mutual bonding between neighbors into a community.
This book flowed rather easily, considering that there was a shift in tone and voice with each new chapter since there was a new character introduced to the mutuality of the garden’s growth. I liked how they were distinct, but yet interconnected, and that the interconnectivity grew from the innocence and goodness of nurturing living things. In the end, it was not only plants that were nurtured, it was also people.
In this book, the story begins with Kim, a young Vietnamese girl who desperately wants to connect to her deceased father that died when she was eight. She finds the courage to plant six beans in the harden Earth that was trying to break free into spring, hoping that her father looking down would see that she knew what persistence she had to care for plants as he had as a farmer. The book moves on to Ana’s story, who describes the diversity of nationalities in the neighborhood throughout the years. She then proceeds to tell how she saw Kim from her apartment, and suspicious that she is up to no good. Ana goes out and digs out of burning curiosity, and begins to dig up whatever the girl buried, only to discover she was digging up seeds. I thought the line she spoke was powerful: “I felt like I’d read through her secret diary and had ripped out a page without meaning to. I laid those beans right back in the ground, as gently as sleeping babies.”
The next character is Wendell, who lost his son to a shooting and his wife to a car wreck, and keeps an eye out for Ana. Ana employs him to go water the beans that she sees are dying from her binoculars. As a farm boy, he maneuvers an old refrigerator to reflect heat down, and mounds soil to support and catch water around the seedlings. Kim witnesses this, and fearful, says nothing. Wendell reflects on the Bible phrase: "And a little child shall lead them.” This reverberates that the initial chapter on the little girl Kim, young and able to be a visionary, unencumbered by the weight of adulthood, changes the lives of those who begin to interact with the garden, and out of the rest of the remaining nine stories, the domino effect of Kim’s bean planting unfolds into the mutual bonding between neighbors into a community.
This book flowed rather easily, considering that there was a shift in tone and voice with each new chapter since there was a new character introduced to the mutuality of the garden’s growth. I liked how they were distinct, but yet interconnected, and that the interconnectivity grew from the innocence and goodness of nurturing living things. In the end, it was not only plants that were nurtured, it was also people.
1 comment:
I, too, liked the use of different dialects. I remember reading books written in dialects when I was younger and how I would always complain about how difficult they were for me to read. The chapters of this book written in dialoge were really easy for me to read and added a lot to the story, so I don't think young readers would have too much trouble with it. Although not all sections of this book were written in dialect, they all allowed the reader to hear the character's own personal voice.
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