I recently read Harbor Me by Jacqueline Woodson. It is a middle grade book that I received through Penguin’s First to Read program. So far, I’ve had pretty good luck with this program, getting chosen for two books already. Anyway, Harbor Me is a middle grade book where a bunch of kids talk about contemporary issues that kids face today. While I thought that it was good, it came across as a little preachy.
The kids in Harbor Me are six kids of different races that go to a mostly-minority school in the Bronx. The narrator is an eleven-year-old mixed race girl whose father is in prison (during the story you discover why). These six kids are placed in a “special” classroom, and have a caring teacher that they like. At the beginning of the story, their teacher starts putting them in the ARTT room every Friday for them to talk. ARTT stands for “A Room to Talk”.
I did enjoy reading about their stories. Esteban’s father was taken by immigration; Tiago is Puerto Rican and is upset when people tell him to not speak Spanish with his mother. Another kid was told that he couldn’t play with toy guns any more because his parents were afraid that he’d be shot. All of the kids have things they have to deal with.
This book addresses a lot of situations that kids might be going through these days. A middle-grade reader might find this useful if they are going through difficult times as well. This book is good in that it addresses these topics and might make kids feel a little less alone; it also may help kids feel compassion for other children that they may know that could be going through these things. A little compassion is always a good thing.
The kids behaved like you would expect 11 year olds to behave. Since there are six characters in this story and it’s fairly short, it really didn’t get the time to allow the reader to get to know them incredibly well.
That, I think, may be where this story falls a little short. The book mainly focuses on the issues that these kids are having with the hot-button political issues of our day. 11 year olds might be also having trouble with peer pressure, girls, school work, etc., but these kids are all dealing with race issues and the like; in reality, kids are dealing with everything all at once. This book feels a little preachy in that almost the entire story is politics-driven
Perhaps it is the setting that these kids are in, but I think that it paints these issues too stereotypically. My kids are mixed-race. When the boy came to school one day and talked about how his parents no longer allow him to play with Nerf or water guns because they’re afraid of their child getting accidentally shot by the police, I think of my own boy, who likes to go to the neighbor’s house down the street and have water-gun fights. Never once in my life have I ever thought to tell him to not play those games because of his brown skin. Maybe it’s different for us because we live in a nice neighborhood where people aren’t afraid to leave their garage doors open all day, and not the Bronx. I felt that perhaps people might come away with the wrong impression though, thinking that all parents of brown children are afraid of their kids getting shot by the police if they play with guns. That is simply not the case.
Overall, while I think that this is a book that definitely points out problematic issues of our day, I think that it focuses a little bit too much on that. This book would have been better if it would have been a little longer and made these characters more real than just kids with stereotypical problems.
Harbor Me is scheduled to be released on August 28th, but you can pre-order it now.