From time to time Audible has original titles for children that are free to download for members. This book by Scott McCormick from the title alone sounded like the perfect book for my children. It's the grand adventures of a boy and his "frenemy" who get sent to military school for bad behavior. The story is well-read and entails a lot of humor from the author, but it had an unexpected message worked in that I was pleasantly surprised to read in a story written for pre-teen children.
My children are eight and nine, but this story of acceptance is one I would like them to hear. They might be younger than the heroes (for they do become the heroes of the story), Nigel and Lance, but they enjoy many other books in this age range such as the Harry Potter and Percy Jackson series and I expected they would listen with as much enthusiasm as they had to the other stories in the same class.
Nigel has been stuck doing latrine digging duty with Lance, whom he despised at first because Lance had it all: adoring girls, good looks, wit, and charm. Lance had appeared Nigel's village with no history and had turned himself in so he would be sent to military school with Nigel and it didn't make sense—until Lance told Nigel the secret he had never told anyone before: he liked boys. Nigel, in a moment of spectacular denseness, didn't understand, but when Lance explained he liked boys, "romantically" Nigel finally got it.
Then Nigel got mad. He was so mad because how could Lance have all those girls hanging off his arm when he wasn't interested in any one of them? It just wasn't fair. When Lance asked and Nigel said that no, he wasn't upset or bothered at all that he preferred boys (even though girls didn't look twice at him when Lance was around) something connected between them and they became best friends.
Military unacceptance of homosexuality was also brought up as in this land, the case was the same and Nigel realized how much trust Lance had put in him. It was written beautifully, covering just enough so that children would grasp the importance of the topics. It was done in a very touching way too both at that point and several other times too. The reason Lance had appeared in Nigel's village was there was a bounty on his head. When Nigel asked who would do such a thing, he couldn't believe when Lance told him it was his parents and he'd been on the run for some time, turning himself in the day they were carted off to military school for an innocent prank gone horribly wrong, because he saw the bounty hunter arriving town.
I like the book. It's quite good. My children haven't finished it yet and I'm fairly confident the topics of acceptance won't even be brought up by them because they already feel this way. It's nice to have it in an age-appropriate story for them though.
The Big Boy Update: My son is creating the most interesting things in Minecraft. He showed me a cactus farm tonight. It looked very orderly but it had another function. It was a cactus factory in fact. As the cactus grew, they would fall over and land in the water surrounding each plant, flow to a drain, go underground and run into a chest to be collected. He can come back tomorrow to find a large collection of cactus that he can use in recipes to create other things in the game.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter is decorating some rocks for teachers this week. She wanted to gold leaf one for a favorite teacher. This sounds easy but gold leaf is a nightmare to get to stick. Blake and I are both on the job because we need to get it to the staff member at my son's school (who always was kind to her when she used to go there and to this day loves to say hello to her when she comes to school to drop-off my son). I hope we can get the gold leaf to stick by tomorrow,
No comments:
Post a Comment