By AUDREY FISCHER
If the six winning essays in the 2006-2007 Letters About Literature competition are any indication, today’s youth have weighty issues on their minds.
Selected from 56,000 entries nationwide, the winning letters to their favorite authors written by students in grades 5 through 12 deal with moving away from home, adoption, reading disabilities, Nazi Germany and the Middle East.
For Katja Martin, an elementary school student originally from Delaware, moving to Georgia meant “no chance of snow.”
“No white blanket is dropped over the landscape to cover the leaves of fall,” she wrote to Robert Frost, author of the poem “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening.”
“Your poem is all I have left to bring back that feeling of tranquility and simplicity,” she continued. “Your poem is my winter. It’s my snow in a small collection of words.”
Elena Suglia, a middle school student from Rhode Island, also found solace in a poem. Her letter to the unknown author of “Legacy of an Adopted Child” explained the impact of the verse on her self-esteem.
“Reading your poem that day made something inside me feel different. Before … I was insecure and uncomfortable with my position of being adopted. I used to believe my birth mother was someone who didn’t care about me and cast me away. Now,
I know that I was wrong. In reality, she displayed a great deal of love
and courage when she made that decision.”
As “the worst reader in the school,” Jordan Slisher, a middle school student from South Carolina, also had suffered from poor self-esteem—until he mastered one of the Harry Potter books. When he was 5 years old, he sustained an eye injury that required four surgeries, making it difficult for him to read. Being teased by friends was bad enough, but the final straw was not being able to discuss the Harry Potter series with his peers.
“I grabbed your book ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’ off the shelf,” Slisher wrote to author J.K. Rowling. “Word by word, paragraph by paragraph, it took me about a month to read … it was better than any dessert I could possibly eat. When I did finally finish it, I felt I could climb any mountain, swim across the Atlantic Ocean, and most importantly, read any book I wanted to.”
Today, Slisher happily reported, he is in an advanced English and Language Arts class with his friends.
The message in Mark Zusak’s “The Book Thief”—that you can save people with words—was not lost on Alexis Haaland, an elementary school student from North Dakota. Set in Nazi Germany and narrated by Death, the book’s dark themes helped her “realize we can change the effects of bad things that happen … with Hitlers and Husseins prowling, we have to be careful.”
“Liesel seemed to calm everyone down in the bomb shelter with her reading; she’s literally saving lives with book,” said Haaland, who considers sending her copy of “The Book Thief” to Iraq.
“I’m lucky enough to be living in a country where I can read any book I want,” wrote Haaland to the book’s author. “I even have enough money to buy (not steal) another copy of your life-changing book.”
The atrocities endured by Elie Wiesel in Nazi Germany, as outlined in his memoir “Night,” prompted Amber Jin, a high school student from Florida, to write to the author. Doubting that she could ever display Wiesel’s courage, she realized that her mother, who had emigrated from China to the United States, was equally courageous.
“Alone, without the comfort of family or familiarity, she labored for three years before finally being able to bring me here to join her,” wrote Jin.
Addressing Wiesel, she said, “In your memoir, your spoke of sons abandoning fathers and fathers abandoning sons and the courage that seems to abandon most, if not all, in the camps. … Then I thought about my mother and what she would do … my mother would have the courage to face whatever odds for me; my mother’s love would triumph over all.”
Before moving from Washington, D.C., to the Midwest, Audrey Keranen was bombarded by stereotypes about Iowa. Perhaps that is why she has been troubled by America’s perception of the Middle East since Sept. 11.
“When young people today hear the word ‘Afghanistan,’ certain images may come to mind: the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, veiled women, Muslim extremists,” she wrote to Khalid Hosseini, author of “The Kite Runner.”
After viewing pre-Taliban Afghanistan through the eyes of the protagonist, Amir, Keranen became enamored with Afghan culture.
“I was heartbroken to see the Afghanistan of the 1970s lose its flavor as the Taliban drove in with their tanks and pickup trucks,” she wrote. “I no longer view it along stereotypical lines and have begun to associate this country with its population and culture, not the actions of a select few.”
Not only did Keranen continue to read all she could about the Middle East, but she participated in a summer institute on Middle Eastern culture.
“I have become motivated to learn about countries whose fates are inextricably tied to ours,” wrote Keranen. “Someday I would like to be the one who can encourage nations to set aside their differences and, in the words of Rahim Khan, find ‘a way to be good again.’”
Letters About Literature
Sponsored by Target, in association with the Center for the Book in the Library, the Letters About Literature essay contest gives young people the opportunity to express how books changed their lives.
The 2007 national winners each received a $500 Target gift card and a trip to Washington to visit the White House and the Library of Congress and participate in the National Book Festival. Next year’s national winners will receive a Reading Promotion Grant of $10,000 for their school or community library and will be instrumental in deciding how the library funds will be spent.