Almost certain to make my best reads of the year list.

books:


	• Seedfolks (Joanna Colter Books) Paul Fleischman HarperTeen, 1999 - 70 pages average customer review:based on 89 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A Must Read for Young Adults!

SeedFolks By Paul Fleischman
Harper Collins Publisher 1997
Flesh Kincaid Index- 4.9
69 pages
Genre: contemporary fiction

Synopsis of plot: Seedfolks takes place in Cleveland, Ohio in a low-income neighborhood. The main setting is a small, abandoned and run down lot in the neighborhood. The book is narrated by a different character every chapter, although the presence and connection of all the narrators is intertwined throughout the chapters. The novel opens with Kim, a young Vietnamese girl struggling with the early loss of her father. To gain a connection to her otherwise estranged dad, she decides to plant some beans to honor his life as a farmer. She chooses the abandoned lot as her garden. The chapters that follow introduce other characters that end up planting in the lot as well, all for their own unique reasons. The reader sees the narrators from past chapters showing up in the new narrators' chapters. Each character has their own problem that essentially is solved by their participation in the growth of the garden. Strangers who normally do not acknowledge each other's existence begin to say hello, offer advice, and communicate across language barriers.

Address negative aspects of the book: One of the negative aspects of the book that I encountered was that the chapters are so short! Each character had their own personal story to share, but a few pages do not do them all justice! The author leaves you wanting more, but in a negative way. Another negative aspect is that I still had questions and concerns about each character when the book ended. The book concludes the same way it starts, with a narrator's story, and some strings are never tied up. This frustrated me as the reader.

Personal appraisal of the book: I thought this book was fantastic. It was quick to read and really hard to put down. I got attached to each character and really enjoyed seeing past narrators through the new narrator's eyes. The connection of all the characters was also really interesting. Seeing how Kim, the first character, is brought up in subsequent chapters and appears throughout the book was an appealing and unique quality of the writer. Living in a city like Cleveland, I can identify with how strangers ignore each other on the streets and feel they have nothing in common- even though they live within blocks and see each other every day! The diversity of the characters reminded me of my own neighborhood, and since reading the book, I've decided to say a simple hello to my fellow neighbors when passing them around the block. It's interesting to see how people react to kindness from strangers! You should definitely consider spending the couple of hours it takes to read this book to begin to think about how the book parallels aspects of your own life. I give this book 5 out of 5 stars!

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Almost certain to make my best reads of the year list.

Paul Fleischman, Seedfolks (Harper Collins, 1997)

I've read a lot of books in the past few weeks, as I often do right around the new year for some reason. The best of them this year was Seedfolks, a kids' book about a community garden in Cleveland and how it came to be. (For the record, yahoo's map doesn't locate a Gibb Street anywhere in Cleveland; if this is based on a true story, Fleischman has masked the location of the garden in question.)

The story begins with Kim, a Vietnamese girl living in a Cleveland slum. In order to connect with a father she never knew, she plants a few lima beans in a junk-filled lot across the street from her tenement building. From this small act grows a community garden, complete with activist residents getting the city to come clean up the vacant lot, social workers using a plot to teach their charges about life, and, of course, a teacher who takes it upon herself to educate the entire surrounding community.

Sometimes, however, what makes a book great is not its overarching message, but how much latitude the author gives his characters in subverting that message. While the subject of the book is a good one, and it is presented in a novel way, where this book passes from the good to the great is when one of the gardeners notices the way the plots in the garden are panning out, and how everyone self-segregates. When fences start to go up around plots, he notes sadly that what was once Paradise is turning into Cleveland again. It's a passage that stands in direct contrast to the message of the rest of the book; Fleischman, who's been feeding us a steady stream of "wow, this garden has changed my life" stories, pulls the rug out from under us by subverting his own utopia. He doesn't do it again at any time in the book, though from this point on, we do get tougher stories about the various gardeners; still, that one moment of disillusionment colors the entire book, and makes it far deeper and more thought-provoking than it otherwise would be.

A wonderful, wonderful book. **** ½

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Inspiring Seedfolks

Seedfolks is a book about a vacant city lot in Cleveland, Ohio that is abandoned until one day a Vietnamese girl decides to plant some beans as a way to become connected to her father who died before she was born. It tells the story of 13 different people who come together by this garden. They are all different ages and have different ethnic backgrounds and jobs. Somehow this garden brings them all together and means something different to each of them. The individual stories are interesting and touching.

My favorite part of the book is Gonzolo's Tio Juan story. He came to the U.S. with Gonzolo's mother and brother. Because he didn't speak English and couldn't work he would wonder around all day long with nothing to do and had to be baby sat by Gonzolo who who referred to him as a baby. One day he went off on his own in the neighborhood and came across the garden. The next day he went back and started working in the garden and planting seeds. Back in Guatemala he used to be a farmer and this gave him life again and he went from being a baby back to a man again.

I would recommend that you read Seedfolks. I think you will be touched by the 13 different people who are brought together through this community garden. In Reading Gonzolo's story it made me think about my Mom's parents who are immigrants from Portugal and how they too must of felt like Gonzolo's Tio Juan when they first arrived in the U.S., like they were babies and didn't know anything.

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Good Stories, but Too Disconnected

It all started with one little girl. Kim's father died before she was even born, and she is afraid that he might not know her as he looks down from heaven. So she decides to do something to make him recognize her and to make him proud. He was a farmer back in Vietnam, so she takes a handful of bean seeds to a trash-covered vacant lot near her inner-city apartment and plants them. When he looks down and sees them, he will know she is his daughter.

Someone looks down from a window and is intrigued by this girl who keeps visiting the vacant lot in secret. Upon investigation she sees what is going on and decides to clear a little patch of land for a tiny garden of her own. Others observe and like the idea, and soon the vacant lot is covered with a patchwork of gardens from all sorts of people living nearby. Someone is able to bully the city into moving the trash off of this land. People who usually avoid eye contact at all cost are suddenly meeting neighbors and relating to one another. Through this garden project, a neighborhood of strangers becomes a real community.

I liked the characters in this story. They were all very vivid and their stories were well thought out. I also liked being able to see the different perspectives on this garden, and the different reasons people decided to plant things here.

I didn't like that each person's story was just dropped after it was told. I wanted the author to go back and write what the people were thinking. What did Kim think when her garden idea caught on? Was Sam able to stop the segregation he saw developing in the garden? I wanted some followup to each story.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

A vacant lot, rat-infested and filled with garbage, looked like no place for a garden. Especially to a neighborhood of strangers where no one seems to care. Until one day, a young girl clears a small space and digs into the hard-packed soil to plant her precious bean seeds. Suddenly, the soil holds promise: To Curtis, who believes he can win back Lateesha's heart with a harvest of tomatoes; to Virgil's dad, who sees a fortune to be made from growing lettuce; and even to Maricela, sixteen and pregnant, wishing she were dead.

Thirteen very different voices -- old, young, Haitian, Hispanic, tough, haunted, and hopeful -- tell one amazing story about a garden that transforms a neighborhood.

Chosen as a state and citywide read in communities across the country:
Vermont
Racine, WI
Tampa, FL
Newburgh, NY
Boca Raton, FL

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