Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Project Mulberry
Overall, I enjoyed this book yet had some grievances with it as well. First, I'm not sure how I feel about the interjections between chapters. I do enjoy hearing about "behind the scene" info from the author, yet sometimes I felt that these chapters put akward haults into the text and disrupted the flow. Another concern I had with the text is that we as readers never really hear of Julie becoming accepting of her heritage at the end of the book. I can see how she feels more comfortable with her Korean heritage as her interest in embroidery grows, for example, yet I feel that I was looking for some closure with the topic and was waiting for her to say how she feels now about being Korean and how her project helped her embrace her culture. We also never really heard about Patrick's culture in the text. If heritage is such an important issue in this story, why isn't his heritage mentioned? The topic of Julie's mom's racism was also seemingly unresolved in this book. There are many loose ends that I feel weren't tied up as satisfyingly as I would have liked, but nevertheless it was a book I enjoyed and I was interested in the silk worm project especially.
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6 comments:
I wonder if these "loose ends" were intentional. Although it isn't as satisfying for the reader, these really aren't questions that get resolved in a tidy manner in real life.
I felt the same way as you on a lot of these topics. Those interjections between chapters really bothered me and I felt as though they were a distraction from the text itself. I felt that the mom's racism was a very randomly placed event in this book. I was not really sure how it fit, and I felt that it was one of those things that could have been touched on a little more and possibly resolved. I also feel that there was a lot of loose ends in this story, but I agree with Valerie that these are tough situations that don't usually have a resolution in real life. There is not that big of a time span that goes by in the book so it would be very unlikely that she would be change her feelings completely in that matter of time.
I agree with many of the points you make about the book. I also feel that the interjections did not really contribute to understanding the story overall, and could be distracting. I also felt that, though it is an imporant issue to discuss, the idea of racisim is just barely touched upon and is a minor part of the book. However, I also feel that the book was helpful in generating discussion about what it is to be American, and the difficulty that people of differing ethnicities sometimes feel when trying to idenitfy themselves as "American" because of the traditional views people hold. For this reason, I think the book would be helpful when talking about accepting diversity. In Julia's questioning how to be both Korean and American, it causes the reader to think about what an American really is, can one be Korean American or only one or the other. I think this book helps people to recognize that American doesn't always have to be the traditional European American image the word tends to identify with. In this realization, people will be more willing to identify American's as a more diverse group of people.
I too agree with many of the grievances you had with Project Mulberry, Tara. I didn't like the interjections and, as the class now knows, I completely stopped reading them. I was more interested in the dynamics of the story anyway, not in the conversation between the fictional character and the author. Also, I can see how others felt that the additional racism coming from Julia's mother was randomly inserted, but I feel like it opened by eyes to a situation I hadn't really considered. With so much racism going around in a country known as a "melting pot" I wouldn't think that there would be racism amongst other minority groups. I would have liked some extra thoughts on why Julia thought her mother could dislike Mr. Dixon based solely on his race. Not all things in life are resolved neatly, but with Julia haven't constant nagging thoughts about her mother's apparent racism, I would have liked to see more come from that. I understand the difficulty of confronting a mother with a touchy subject, because I have fears of doing the same with my mother, but for the author to bring the issue to the forefront for the main character, something (ANYTHING) should have come from it. The racism was an interesting dynamic, as I have already mentioned, because it was a Korean American feeling distaste towards an African American. The author could have really raised questions among her young audience if she had included more of this plot... to allow her young readers to see that racism doesn't just occur between white people and minorities. However, perhaps that was her intention: insert a questionable interaction between two minorities in order to open the door for further discussion, without providing a nice and tidy solution in the end. I don't know... just some of my thoughts following our class session yesterday.
I agree with you about the dialog between chapters in the book. I thought that they were very distracting, and they didn't even give us much inside information or "secrets" as the author foreshadowed, into the writing of the book. I did read them, but I guess I was looking for a little bit more out of them. As someone mentioned in class, I do think that a middle school student reading this book might actually enjoy this aspect, but I just had a hard time getting into it.
I also agree with you that there are so many unresolved parts to this book. It almost felt like there should be a sequel or something! I was especially bothered by the unresolved issue of Julia's mother's racism. In my head I kept telling her to confront her about it, but she never did. I do think that she began to accept her Korean culture a little more by the end of the book, but you are right-we never did hear exactly how she felt about it or if she had finally accepted it.
I think that this book could be inspiring and enjoyable to young readers who weren't necessarily critiquing it, but from my perspective is was almost frustrating.
I really, really, really disliked those interjections that were in between chapters. One thing that really bothered me about it was that the author even said herself that you could skip over them. Why would she put something in the book if she wanted readers just to skip over it? It didn't make sense to me.
I agree with everyone when they say that these interjections just take away from the story. In class one person said that they just skipped them completely, well, towards the end of the book I did too. I just felt like the story wasn't flowing well enough to keep my attention. The interjections were just taking my attention away.
One question for the author that I have is, why didn't she put more insightful things in these interjections? Maybe if these interjections had a little more substance to them, I would have read them.
I think the book without those interjections in between chapters was an okay book.
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