#688 Suffer the Little Children- Stephen King

#688 Suffer the Little Children- Stephen King

“Kids these days just have no respect, they were so much nicer so many years ago.” This common refrain is often heard by educators who have been teaching a long time. Ms. Sidley is such a teacher. She teaches third grade and has a reputation for being very strict. One of her tricks is to use her glasses to reflect her students actions while her back is turned. She often catches them in unruly behavior this way. Her eyes-in-the-back-of-her-head routine usually shocks them into compliance. But recently she sees more students defying her authority. Robert is such a student. When her back was turned she swore she saw his face morph into something ugly:

“What was it I saw when he changed? Something bulbous. Something that shimmered. Something that stared at me, yes, stared and grinned and wasn’t a child at all. It was old and it was evil…”

She is taken aback but tries to remain calm. But the next day when Robert confronts her and admits his power to change into the monster, and tells her there are many more students that can change, she loses it. Eventually the changlings are everywhere and she decides to take matters into her own hands. 

Is she crazy, or are the students really shape-shifters? The metaphor of students morphing into monsters and leaving their old, more innocent selves buried deep inside, is one most teachers will understand. There gets a point where seeing students as evil monsters may be a sign you should probably retire, before you do something drastic.

Rating: 7-8-8-8 Total= 31

#474 How We Avenged the Blums- Nathan Englander

#474 How We Avenged the Blums- Nathan Englander

Three Blum brothers have been under steady harassment from who they only call The Ant-Semite. The smallest, Zvi has just been knocked unconscious and left hanging by his underwear from his friends to find him. The police are called, something not all the Jewish families are willing to do, but nothing of consequence happens.

“Our parents were born and raised in Brooklyn. In Greenheath, they built us a Jewish Shangri-la, providing us with everything but the one crucial thing Brooklyn had offered…a toughness. As a group of boys thirteen and fourteen, we grew healthy, we grew polite, but our parents thought us soft.”

With the grudging support of their rabbi and parents, the Jewish children begin a self-defense training program. They not only want to protect themselves but they want vengeance from past transgressions. When the Blum’s mother is attacked, the kids finally spring to action, but really what good did it do?

I’m not sure what message we are supposed to glean from this story. Not only do the children not really learn self-defense, or proper teamwork, but in the end their “revenge” was wrought by a ringer they brought in to help. Zvi did stand up for himself, but that was it, all the other children acted as mere onlookers. I wasn’t expecting a big good-guy-wins type of ending, but I still missed some sort of conclusion.

Rating: 7-7-6-7 Total= 27

#471 Our Lady of Peace- ZZ Packer

#471 Our Lady of Peace- ZZ Packer

Lynnea finally got out of her backwoods Kentucky town…only to end up in Baltimore. Her freelance writing job wasn’t paying enough so she took a teaching program and ended up at a public High School.

Teaching public High School in a poorly funded, weakly supported bad part of a city like Baltimore isn’t as bad as you might think; It’s a thousand tomes worse. It is definitely not the place to go to find yourself, or figure out your own life. Children are self-centered creatures, they are supposed to be that way, that’s their job. If you can’t find a way to keep your own insecurities out of the classroom, things will spiral out of control.

I think that’s what happens to Lynnea in this story. Of course the children should behave, of course they should show respect, and want to learn. But if they don’t, is really isn’t their fault?

Rating: 8-7-7-8 Total= 30

#450 Brownies- ZZ Packer

#450 Brownies- ZZ Packer

This is the first story in Packer’s collection, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere.  A troupe of Brownies (younger girl scouts if there is someone who doesn’t know what that is) attend a camping weekend. They are from a predominantly black south Atlantic Suburb and they fixate on an all white Troupe 909.  The “leader” of the girls says she heard a racial slur being thrown in their direction, and she rouses the others into action.

What follows is a pretty great description of child group/peer/tribal behavior. Social archetypes play their rolls: the leader, the peacemaker, the troublemaker, the follower, the goody-two-shoes, quiet moral one, etc. Although race is at the heart of the conflict, it does not seem to be the heart of the meaning of this story (although the race dynamics shouldn’t be overlooked). Group activity and peer pressure are a huge part of growing up, especially at a Girl Scout camp.

Notable Passages: “The word ‘secret’ had a built-in importance, the modifier form of the word carried more clout than the noun. A secret meant nothing; it was like gossip: just a bit of unpleasant knowledge about someone who happened to be someone other than yourself. A secret meeting, or a secret club was entirely different.”

“Even though I didn’t want to fight, was afraid of fighting, I felt like I was a part of the rest of the troop; like I was defending something.”

 “When you’ve been made to feel bad for so long, you jump at the chance to do it to others.”

Rating: 9-9-10-9 Total= 37

#400 St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolfs- Karen Russell

#400 St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolfs- Karen Russell

The title says it all here doesn’t it? A group of feral girls, birthed by werewolf parents, are in St. Lucy’s, a halfway house turning wild creatures into productive humans.

Symbolism and metaphors abound in this one. It could be children being dropped off at boarding schools when they are young, it could be culture to culture adjusting, it could mean prisoners of war. Depending on what you tale from this, the tone changes. If it’s a harsh reality of a rite-of-passage thing, then that’s one thing. However if it is taken as one culture forcing assimilation of another, then the following lines are tragic:

“We couldn’t make our scent stick here; it made us feel invisible. Eventually we gave up.”

“The pack hated Jeanette. She was the most successful of us, the one furthest removed from her origins.”

Either case, this is a strong allegory, nice work.

Rating: 9-10-9-9 Total= 37

#398 Children of the Sun

#398 Children of the Sun

Even tough kids gets sad at the dying of a dog. Jubal, Nathan, Hoodoo, and Lance take Nathan’s dog into the woods to bury him. They are silent and reflective. At times they almost fall into their normal jovial, juvenile behavior, but are struck at the seriousness of the situation.

“As…we stood there trying to pretend we were grownups having a very proper funeral, something…caught us and halted us, drained us of all the horseplay and laughing and made us look at what we were really doing. How could  a group of kids know about the terror and pain of dying…and yet we did know, we did sense something.”

Rating: 8-7-8-8 Total= 31

#394 Dimension- Alice Munro

#394 Dimension- Alice Munro

This was a hard story to read. An emotionally oppressive marriage ends it the murder of three children. Lloyd was insane, getting there slowly, while Doree seemed happy at first, but as it is in this situation, she couldn’t reason with herself a way to get out.

“No matter how worn out she got with him, he was still the closest person in the world to her, and she felt that everything would collapse if she were to bring herself to tell someone exactly how he was, if she were to be entirely disloyal.”

Her fears seemed to be dead-on. When they had an argument and Doree spent the night with a friend to give it some space, he took that as betrayal, and killed their children: “I wanted to save them the misery…the misery of knowing that their mother walked out on them.”

In her emotional recovery—if a person can really recover from something like this—she decided to go visit him in prison. “It was almost like seeing a ghost.”

He was more worried about his own soul--“Peace. I arrived at peace and I’m still sane”—then the souls of his children. He wasn’t contrite or apologetic, just interested that he, himself was getting better. I guess that’s the true definition of psychosis…you murder three people, and make it all about yourself.

Rating: 8-7-7-8 Total= 30