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At its heart, Feathers is about hope, and what it means to face tremendous opposition, and still smile.
Frannie is a middle school-age girl living in the black section of a never-named urban city center in the winter of 1970. She has an older brother, Sean, who is deaf, and a mother who has suffered several miscarriages. One day, a new boy — a white boy — comes to her school as a transfer student. He’s quiet, has long hair and is named Jesus. No one is quite sure what to make of him, or the fact that he as a black father, or that he stands up to the class bully.
The title comes from an Emily Dickinson poem that Frannie and her class read and try to explain one day:
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune — without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
A host of awards
The author, Jacqueline Woodson, has won a host of awards for her many young adult and children’s books: the Caldecott Medal, the Coretta Scott King Award, the Newbery Honor Medal, the Margaret A. Edwards Award for Lifetime Achievement and the National Book Award, to name just a few.
Feathers, which won the Newberry Honor, does not disappoint. Even though it’s written for young adults, it deals with issues most adults struggle with: dealing with death, fitting in, realizing your own limitations and exceeding them when you can.
An excerpt
In this excerpt, Frannie talks about the difficulty she feels in talking with her friend, Samantha, about going to church and feeling holy:
“And staring at the picture of Lila, hanging on the wall with her eyes all dark and wide, it dawned on me — I wasn’t afraid of dying because dying had always been somewhere in our house, somewhere so close, we could feel the wind of it on our cheeks. Lila had died. The other babies had died. And now Mama was pregnant again and maybe this one would make it and maybe it wouldn’t. But if it didn’t, it would hurt for a while and then we’d figure out how to move on. Samantha was afraid of that — afraid of the feeling of having to move on. She had never had to before, she’d never even known anybody close to her who died. And because of that, the idea of it scared her more than anything. It made me feel a little bit sorry for the people who didn’t know much about death.”
For an 11- or 12-year-old, that’s some pretty deep stuff.
And, throughout, there are themes dealing with Sean’s deafness and his efforts to interact with the hearing world, and the growing unhappiness of the American black community in the 1970s.
Feathers is a slim volume, but it packs a world of feeling into such a small space.
– Chuck Bowen
The visit Jacqueline’s Web site, CLICK HERE.
Reading level: Ages 9-12
Hardcover: 208 pages
Publisher: Putnam Juvenile
ISBN-10: 0399239898
ISBN-13: 978-0399239892
