Celebrities and Literature

The article written by Linda Park brings up a very strong point against the success of celebrity authors. I completely agree that just because someone is a celebrity does no mean that their book should be published and force fed to children. One of the most famous cliches says that you should never judge a book by its cover so then I too believe a book should not be judged by its author. Each book is an individual work of art and should be analyzed and looked at by what that individual book brings to the proverbial table of children's literature.

As Park says it is exceedingly hard to write for children and write well by not underestimating the audience. Children should be tested and urged to expand their literature skills with more challenging and fulfilling literature. I don't believe that there is any value in children reading a book solely because it has been written by some celebrity that they or their parents happen to know the name of.

I do believe, however, that this is not just the fault of the publisher. Personally I would lay most of the blame upon the children's parents who have gone out and chosen to by this celebrity literature. The publishers are simply out to make money and no less can be expected in a consumer economy like ours. When parents go to buy literature for their children they should look at book reviews and see what the critics and educated readers have to say about certain books. From the reviews parents would more knowledge on the type of books that their children should be reading.

This is also the case with teachers and schools. Education should be built around challenging the students to excel and read books that offer the most benefit not the most entertainment. The more skilled and knowledgeable students become with literature the more entertainment they will have reading challenging and deep literature. It is crucial to the development of young readers that children do not waste time reading poorly written books. I believe that only in the school system would it be effective to get rid of celebrity novels by requiring the reading of well written novels by exceedingly talented authors. In this way it is possible that celebrity novels will lose their value and slowly fade from the shelves they currently dominate.

Adolescents and Multicultural Literature

We have discussed the importance of multicultural literature in many class periods already, and this was my focus point in the books that I reviewed. Multicultural literature is at its best when the novels not only reveal what life is like in different cultures, but also when the books are well written, contain historical elements, and also cultural symbols. All of these characteristics work together to educate students about not only different societies and cultures, but about the writing styles of multicultural authors.

The author of Esperanza Rising used a technique where she added spanish words with their interpretations in English. This is a characteristic found in many books written by spanish authors. I believe that it captures the essence of how hispanic immigrants hold onto their roots, but envelope themselves in the American culture at the same time. Through words the author is able to represent the characters struggle between two very different worlds and how they work to bring those worlds together.

Adolescents can greatly benefit from reading multicultural literature not only from the knowledge that they gain of other cultures, but also the appreciation and respect that they are able to attain for completely different lifestyles. The book Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe has the potential to open adolescents eyes to how hard life was for the Africans when Christianity was forced upon their culture. Most Americans would believe that bringing Christianity to the Africans was a great accomplishment as well as bringing civilization to them. Multicultural literature, however, teaches us that we should not look at the events in the novel from our perspective, but instead we must analyze them through the eyes of the African characters. In doing so the reader will understand the main points that the author is attempting to get across and the reader will understand how the natives believe such events affected their culture.