For example, while there are men and boys in the book, the bulk of the focus, as well as the characters themselves, is on girls. Along the way he makes some very specific choices. Ghost kicks it off, and Patina makes it clear that Reynolds isn’t afraid to dive into his first female heroine right from the start. Sold! So right from the start it was clear that there were four kids in these books that would go on personal journeys. A different publisher offered him a series deal where he could pick the sport himself. When Jason was initially approached by a publisher to write a sports book, he was offered "street ball". Reynolds wrote Patina in the first place. So the question I hand to you today is this: Did it work? Curtis, Jason decided to write a book from a girl’s perspective. Reynolds is an award-winning African-American author who had done us the great good of providing us with a plethora of memorable, wonderful black boy characters. So it was with great trepidation that I picked up Patina. Instead she’s a fairly passive character who watches as her troublemaking younger brother single-handedly rescues the family from despair. Deza, the heroine, is never allowed to save the day. The hope was to fully flesh out a minor character from Bud Not Buddy. So in 2012 he produced the book The Mighty Miss Malone. Curtis felt compared to push himself into new territory. Also, do you know how many middle grade novels for 9-12 year olds star African-American boys in a given year? You can usually count the number on your own two hands. Bud Not Buddy? The Watsons Go to Birmingham? Elijah of Buxton? The dude was on fire! Of course, there was one thing that ALL his books had in common. Chickee series wasn’t quite up to his usual standards) but when it came to historical fiction nobody could match him. Sure he’d had the occasional misfire here and there (his YA never really hit the heights and his Mr. Author Christopher Paul Curtis was at the top of his game. Not easily, but when it happens then maybe a lot of other things in her life will start to change as well.īefore we go any further today I would like us to consider the case of The Mighty Miss Malone. Someone who doesn’t need help (are you sure?). Patina, however, can’t afford to synchronize with anyone in her life. Now the trick to any team is to synchronize yourself with the people around you. At least there’s track, though, right? Only now Patina has lost a race and, stranger still, she and her fellow runners are going to be forming relay teams. She lives with her aunt and uncle, helps take care of her younger sister, and attends this hoity toity school that may be good for her future but is death on her friendships. Her dad died when she was pretty young, and her mom nearly died of diabetes after that. The thing is, Patina’s already lost a lot of things in her life. If you knew Patina, this would probably be the first thing you knew about her. Even when they’ve given you absolutely no reason to do so. A companion novel to Ghost, Reynolds’s latest takes a long hard look at what it sometimes takes to trust the people around you. But having finished the latest Jason Reynolds title in the Track series called Patina, if I could go back in time and hand my younger self one book that fell squarely outside her comfort zone, I’d probably hand her this. When I was a 9-12 year old I went out of my way to avoid works of realistic fiction that could potentially depress me. I often wonder what would have happened if I’d encountered this challenge as a child. You can read about a character that doesn’t look like your, a topic you don’t know much about, and/or a format you don’t usually pick up. Our current National Ambassador of Young People’s Literature, Gene Luen Yang, put this far more eloquently when he urged people to partake in the Reading Without Walls Challenge. You cannot be a children’s librarian or an adult children’s book reviewer if you do not constantly remind yourself that you have to read outside your comfort zone on a regular basis.
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