The Red Pencil, by Andrea Davis Pinkney

We begin with Amira's 12 birthday.  She is finally old enough to wear a toob yet young enough to enjoy her Dando lifting her to the sky.  Amira lives on a farm in South Darfur surrounded by friends and family, but changes are afoot.  Amira's best friend Halima and her family are packing their things and moving to the city.  They say the city has more opportunities.  Amira wishes she could go with them to Nyala and attend the Gad Primary School with Halima.  Amira is not so sure about her Muma's old fashioned ways.

                  "She does not like the idea of Gad,
                    or any place where girls learn
                    to read
                    or write,
                    in Arabic or English
                    or think beyond a life
                    of farm chores and marriage." (p. 13 arc)

Soon, the extra chores of 12, missing Halima, and trying to solve the ongoing bickering between her father and villager Old Anwar seem anything but troubling.  The relative peace of her village is shattered when the Janjaweed  attack, changing Amira's very existence.

Amira and the other survivors must pick up the pieces and leave the ruins of the village to find safety.  Their trek takes them to the refugee camp Kalma - the Displaced People's Camp.  Amira doesn't like this space surrounded by fences and barbed wire.

                    "Everywhere I look,
                      I see
                      people, people, and more people.

                      I'm glad to stop walking.
                      I'm glad we have finally reached who-knows-where.
                      But already I do not like this place." (arc p. 139)

It would be easy enough to give up in such a desperate place with no real end in sight.  Amira and her family have lost so much.  But when Amira meets Miss Sabine and is given a gift of a red pencil she discovers some things about herself, her family and those on the journey with her.

Written in free verse, The Red Pencil is a story of family and loss and hope.  It was eye opening for me on a number of levels.  One is that it is so easy for me not to see what is happening in the world from my perch here in NYC.  The horrors of Darfur in the early 2000s seemed so far away in time and place that I wonder how many people in North America are aware of what was happening.  I find myself very impressed with the deftness of Andrea Davis Pinkney's hand when it came to writing the passages dealing with the violence.  She truly tells the story from a 12 year old's point of view, and the free verse format allows for silences that speak volumes.  The illustrations by Shane W. Evans are playful within this serious book and somehow bring a feeling of safety to the pages.

A must read for librarians, teachers and students.

Surviving the Applewhites, by Stephanie S. Tolan

Jake is the textbook juvenile delinquent. He has been kicked out of every public school in Rhode Island, and was shipped down to Traybridge North Carolina and his grandfather. Jake managed about 3 weeks at Traybridge Middle School before he was asked to leave as well. Lucille Applewhite had been conducting a poetry workshop at the school when Jake got kicked out and she suggested that Jake attend the Creative Academy: a home school that the Applewhites ran out of their home.

E.D. can’t imagine why Aunt Lucille thinks that their home school can help Jake when so many others had failed before. Then again, Aunt Lucille tends to see the good in everyone. Jake doesn’t exactly want to move into the Applewhite’s place either, but his social worker told him in no uncertain terms that it was this or Juvenile Hall.

When Jake arrives with his scarlet liberty spikes, piercings, foul mouth and cigarette habit, he doesn’t get much of the reaction that he is hoping for. Aside from the smoking, nobody seems to care. In fact, the family parrot swears more than he does.

The Applewhites are a family of artists with a capital “A”. The kind where the grown ups are too busy creating to go grocery shopping, forget to check in on the kids home school lessons, and can even forget what day it is. So Jake is left up to E.D. who is the lone organized, structure-loving member of the family. Neither of them are pleased and they manage to pretty much ignore each other.

It’s not until E.D.’s director dad gets asked to direct a community theatre production of the Sound of Music that everyone’s talents (even E.D.’s) get put to good use. Jake comes to see that he can separate himself from what his parents have made him.

With a cast of kooky characters, an angry goat, a scene stealing 4 year old, and a common goal, Stephanie S. Tolan has written a charming and thought-provoking story about family and self. How we define ourselves doesn’t have to mirror our parents and siblings, but each of us does have some definition of place within the idea of family. A Newbery Honor book for 2002.