Richie's Picks:CROSSING STONES by Helen Frost, FSG/Frances Foster Books,
October 2009, 184p., ISBN: 978-0-374-31653-2
"I am on a lonely road and I am traveling
Looking for the key to set me free"
-- Joni Mitchell, "All I Want"
From what I've gotten to know of Muriel Jorgensen, I somehow get the
feeling that she would really be into Joni Mitchell.
Muriel's a contemplative young woman who clearly has taken her studies
seriously. She has been connecting dots, experiencing some a-ha moments, and
paying attention to her radical Aunt Vera, who is a working woman over in
Chicago.
Muriel is perceiving some serious inconsistencies between the good line
that the President who has taken us into war talks, in regard to the
undemocratic behavior of those countries that we consider enemies, and what is
actually going on here at home, in so-called democratic America.
Is it really unpatriotic to speak out in dissent during wartime, to accuse
the President of being no better than our enemies? Is it a slap in the
face to Americans in uniform?
CROSSING STONES is the story of four teenagers and two interconnected
families -- the Jorgensens and the Normans -- living on adjoining farms that
are separated by a creek and joined by crossing stones. But the borders of
Muriel's idyllic Midwest farm life are breached when the news that young men
are getting sent to war hits home for both families. Before you know it,
Muriel's underage brother, Ollie, and next door neighbor Frank Norman have
both gone overseas. Meanwhile, there are protests and arrests in the
nation's capital and, to top it all off, there are signs of an impending flu
pandemic.
But there is no Joni Mitchell for Muriel, because CROSSING STONES is set
ninety years ago during the Great War when "W" stood for Wilson, and the
protests outside the White House gates, in which Muriel's Aunt Vera is
participating and for which she is getting arrested, focus on women demanding the
right of self-determination -- the right to vote.
(Thank goodness things are so much better now in 2009, as we wait to see
whether there will actually be a second woman seated on the U.S. Supreme
Court before the only one there now is forced to retire for health reasons.)
CROSSING STONES is a great piece of historical fiction and a great coming
of age story with some big surprises, some hints of budding romance, some
tragedy, a hunger strike, and The Flu.
But this is Helen Frost writing, so that is all just the beginning of the
story.
One of my oldest, dearest friends in the world is a craftsperson who knits
sweaters that are works of art and, now and again, works in various other
artistic media. I have witnessed the time and focus and planning and more
time that goes into the execution of her finished projects. It is a
process of which I am in awe.
It is that process that I think of when I look at how Helen Frost crafts
one of her verse novels to be both a great story and a perfectly-worded
poetic work of art.
CROSSING STONES is a verse novel featuring three narrators: Muriel, her
brother Ollie, and her best friend, Frank's sister Emma. As explained in her
author's note:
"I've created a formal structure to give the sense of stepping from stone
to stone across a flowing creek...The relatively free style of Muriel's
poems represents the creek flowing over the stones as it pushes against its
banks. Ollie's and Emma's poems represent the stones...They are 'cupped-hand
sonnets,' fourteen line poems in which the first line rhymes with the last
line, the second line rhymes with the second-to-last, and so on...In
Ollie's poems the rhymes are the beginning words of each line, and in Emma's
poems they are the end words...To give the sense of stepping from one stone to
the next, I have used the middle rhyme of one sonnet as the outside rhyme
of the next..."
I love when a thoughtful and well-educated young person becomes a river of
change. Muriel's search for what life may offer beyond the cycle of
seasons and farm chores illuminates a long-ago step in the historical quest that
continues for American women today in the Twenty-first century.
Throughout her travels, Muriel is so authentic and likeable in how she sometimes
second-guesses herself, how she comfortably embraces her nurturing instincts
while quietly and firmly rejecting her mother's antiquated thinking about
women's roles, and how, in the face of chauvinistic drivel, she is a girl
who is not afraid to take a punch.
Richie Partington, MLIS
Richie's Picks _http://richiespicks.com_ (http://richiespicks.com/)
Moderator, _http://groups.yahoo.com/group/middle_school_lit/_
(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/middle_school_lit/)
BudNotBuddy@aol.com
_http://www.myspace.com/richiespicks_ (http://www.myspace.com/richiespicks)
**************Remember Mom this Mother's Day! Find a florist near you now.
(http://yellowpages.aol.com/search?query=florist&ncid=emlcntusyelp00000006)
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