MARA’S STORIES: GLIMMERS IN THE DARKNESS — Review

Thought for the Day:

“Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.”
~ Barbara Kingsolver ~

Gifts for My Writer Friends:

Kristen Lamb has one of my favorite writing blogs, although I get her posts rather irregularly. I don’t know if she has no regular schedule, or if the problem is on my end. Anyway, when I see her posts, I read them. She is funny and smart. HERE is a great post she wrote about prophets in fiction. It is well worth your time.

The Creative Penn has a terrific post HERE that is an interview with Erin Dionne. It is titled Bad Choices Make Good Stories, but there is a lot more than the discussion of that. They cover a lot of territory.

John Matthew Fox has written an amazing post on his Substack HERE called The Antagonist Your Novel is Missing. His examples are all so good. Don’t miss this one.

My, oh, my. What a baseball week it has been for me. If you have read my blog for a while, you probably already know I am an ABD baseball fan. Anybody But Dodgers. The Brew Crew from Milwaukee made my postseason dreams come true in the most amazing fashion, sweeping the dastardly Dodgers. I think there is little doubt the Brewers will win the World Series. They have such a great team, and the product they put on the field is so much fun to watch. I have no idea who will win the Tampa/Cleveland series, but whoever does will have a very heavy lift against the Brewers. Still, it should be great fun to watch. I will be moving on to hockey after the World Series. The San Jose Sharks have a very exciting and very young team. So that should be fun as well. I will not be here next weekend. I will be off to the Better Books Workshop. It has been a while since I’ve gone to a workshop, and I am looking forward to it. Of course, Gary D. Schmidt will be there, so that is also pretty exciting.

The journey continues. This week I read MARA’S STORIES: GLIMMERS IN THE DARKNESS. This is unlike anything else I have read by Gary D. Schmidt. Mara, a Jew and daughter of a rabbi, is in a German concentration camp. Every night, the women and children in her barracks gather around her and beg her to tell them stories. She will take a child into her lap and give her story to those with her. These are little stories drawn from Jewish folktales. Mara has imbued some of the stories with the cruelty and horrors of the Nazi regime under which everyone is living. Some tales have no mention of those horrors. They are simply folktales that have been passed down through generations. Some are very humorous. Some are sweet and sad. All are thought-provoking. This is a lovely little book, although some of the stories are hard to read. I can see this being used in a middle-grade classroom as a companion to The Diary of Anne Frank. Each of the stories would be a great discussion starter. This book will give young readers a window into the rich culture of the Jewish people as well as a window into the horrors of the Nazi regime. The extensive notes at the end of the book give context to the stories. This book is as important as ever, as we are living under a government that is moving rapidly toward autocracy.

Of course, I want to leave you with a sample of Schmidt’s wonderful writing. “Eisik, the youngest boy in his family, believed that his must be one of the poorest families in all of Poland. Poorer than poor. When their Rabbi spoke of poverty, Eisik knew, he was speaking of Eisik’s family. Even his hunger was hungry, and his jacket was more patch than jacket.” (page 46)

Please don’t forget to check for other Marvelous Middle-Grade Monday posts at Greg Pattridge’s blog HERE.