The girls in the sixth-grade at New York's Manhattan School for Children fell hard for Bobby. They fell so hard, in fact, that author Angela Johnson decided to pluck the doting teenage father and his daughter, Feather, from her 1998 book "Heaven" and cast them as the central characters in a later novel. She dedicated "The First Part Last," published in 2003, to that 1999-2000 sixth-grade class.
They weren't the only ones taken with "Heaven." A young girl walked into a book-signing in Columbus, Ohio, last fall, clutching a battered copy of the book. She threw her arms around Ms. Johnson, then ran off in tears, without ever uttering a word.
"More than likely it was her story," says Johnson. "She didn't stay to fill me in, but I sort of got through the bookstore owner that she had been through tough times."
It's only been in the last decade or so that African-American children and teenagers have been able to see their experiences carefully rendered in books by African-American authors. [...]
| Continue Teresa Mendez's Christian Science Monitor article "A stark race gap -- in kids' books"
posted in articles on August 17, 2004 5:28 PM | t (0)
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