Boy did I do that a lot for the third book in the trilogy, but I'm getting ahead of myself here.) (Unlike me, who was doing just that even with the visual aids! I love being able to call up on YouTube a song mentioned in the book and listen to it during the appropriate chapter.
I loved this format, I found it quite fascinating and a great way to set the scene and time period for kid readers who don't necessarily know this background already and who might not be willing to put the book down and Google something unfamiliar they come across. Second: the book contains lots of awesome black and white photos of actual events of the time, quotations from current events, and brief biographies of contemporary historical figures (Truman, JFK, Pete Seeger, Fannie Lou Hamer) along with snippets of song lyrics, visuals of "Duck and Cover" drill advertisements, nuclear attack propaganda, etc. First: it is a novel about an 11 year old girl living in tense times, during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and her family-Air Force officer father, homemaker mother, older sister who mysteriously disappears for strange meetings at her college, adorkable young brother who worships atomic science and wants to be an astronaut, and her troubled Uncle Otts, who is suffering from PTSD from his ages-ago war service and comically calls everyone "Private!" or "Sergeant!" but also does scary things like try to dig a bomb shelter in the front yard. I would tag this in both "Biography" and "Historical Fiction", because it is a "documentary novel," the term used by the author.
0 kommentar(er)
