It's the Book Club for Kids.
The Book Club for Kids.
It's the Book Club for Kids.
It's the Book Club for Kids podcast.
Hi, I'm Kitty Felde.
Coming up, the Book Club for Kids goes on the road to Nebraska to talk about the book the entire city of Omaha is reading this month, The Unlikely Romance of Eleanor and Park.
That must be Eleanor's mom, Park thought.
She looked just like her, but sharper and with more shadows.
Like Eleanor, but taller.
Like Eleanor, but tired.
Like Eleanor, after the fall.
That's our celebrity readers.
The congressman who represents Omaha on Capitol Hill, Brad Ashford.
So who are Eleanor and Park?
Well, writer Rainbow Rowell describes the two main characters.
Park, a boy who's realized that the best way to get through high school is to be invisible.
And Eleanor, a girl who couldn't be invisible if she tried.
We'll also hear from the mighty members of the Bookworm Girls Book Club.
There were bullies in 1986, and there are bullies now, and they may bully people in different ways, but they're still bullying.
This is the Book Club for Kids, the podcast where middle grade readers talk about books.
We'll tell you how you can be on the show a little later on, but first, our panel of readers.
Victoria, Malia, Reese, and Bella.
And you guys all go to what school?
Westside Middle School.
Tell me what the book is about.
It's a love story sort of about a boy named Park and a girl named Eleanor.
And it starts when they meet on the bus and it sort of just gives their story.
They, at first, don't get along, really.
They try to stay away from each other, but slowly grow together because they have differences from the rest of the school.
And what are their challenges?
Well, Eleanor's family is really messed up.
Her stepdad is abusive and has a...
Small house and that she has to share with her siblings
And park does not always fill in with the rest of his family because his dad is super macho and manly and he is not always well
Park's mom is korean and and how many koreans are there in omaha
Not very many
So how does that make park feel
Well, he feels kind of excluded.
Let's hear a bit from the book that describes a supermarket outing for Park and his mom the first time his mom sees Eleanor.
Our celebrity reader is Omaha Congressman Brad Ashford.
Hark whipped around and saw Eleanor standing by the meat case with all four of their redheaded brothers and sisters.
A woman walked up to the cart and set down a turkey.
That must be Eleanor's mom, Park thought.
She looked just like her, but sharper and with more shadows.
Like Eleanor, but taller.
Like Eleanor, but tired.
Like Eleanor, after the fall.
Park's mom was staring at them too.
Mom, come on, Park whispered.
Aren't you going to say hi, she asked.
Park shook his head, but didn't turn away.
He didn't think Eleanor would want him to, and even if she did, he didn't want to get her in trouble.
What if her stepdad was here too?
Eleanor looked different, drabber than usual.
There was nothing hanging from her hair or a magpie tied to her wrists.
She still looked beautiful.
His eyes missed her as much as the rest of him.
He wanted to run to her and tell her how sorry he was and how much he needed her.
She didn't see him.
Mom, he whispered again, come on.
Park thought his mom might say something more about it in the car, but she was quiet.
When they got home, she said she was tired.
She asked Park to bring in the groceries.
Then she spent the rest of the afternoon in her room with the door closed.
His dad went in to check on her at dinner time, and an hour later, when they both came out, his dad said they were going to Pizza Hut for dinner.
On Christmas Eve, Josh said, they always had waffles and watched movies on Christmas Eve.
They'd already rented Billy Jack.
Get in the car, his dad said.
Park's mom's eyes were red, and she didn't bother reapplying her eye makeup before they left.
When they got home, Park went straight to his room.
He just wanted to be alone to think about seeing Eleanor.
But his mom came in a few minutes later.
She sat on his bed without making a single wave.
She held out a Christmas present.
This is for your Eleanor, she said, from me.
Park looked at the gift.
He took it but shook his head.
I don't know if I'll have a chance to give it to her.
Your Eleanor, she said.
She came from big family.
Park shook the present gently.
I came from big family, his mom said.
Three little sisters, three little brothers.
She held out her hand as if she were patting six heads.
She had a wine cooler with dinner, and you could tell she almost never talked about Korea.
What were their names, Park added.
His mom's hand settled softly in her lap.
In big family, she said.
Everything everybody spread so thin thin like paper you know she made a tearing gesture
You know maybe two wine coolers nobody gets what they need when you always hungry you get hungry in your head
She tapped her forehead you know
Park wasn't sure what to say you don't know she said shaking her head i don't want you to know
What was the best part of the book?
What was your favorite part of the book?
I kind of like at the end when Park is driving Eleanor to her uncle's house in Minnesota because she is getting free of her stepfather's abuse and Park's dad kind of gets more accepting and he realizes this is something important that he needs to do.
I really think this is an important part of the book, too.
I like the part toward the end where Park and Eleanor go out, and they go down to the old market, and they just really have a good night.
What were they doing that they were having such a good night?
Well, they get pizza and ice cream, and they just walk around and have fun.
There's a whole lot of kissing in this book.
It's not exceptionally inappropriate.
Yeah.
It wasn't embarrassing to read.
No.
Well, they do kiss and stuff, but the way it's described, it's not, like, that inappropriate.
Do you find it realistic?
I mean, did it ring true for you?
Could you really understand who these people were?
I'm seeing a lot of nodding heads around here.
Talk to me about the way that Rainbow Rollins wrote this book, the style that she chose to write this book in.
She really tries to capture the essence of teenagers, and so it is told like a teenager would tell it.
Well, it's written in third person, but it switches back between focusing on Eleanor and her feelings and Park and his feelings, so it's interesting both.
Because you get to see the feelings that both of them are having at the same time separately.
It helps you get a grasp of not just one character, but it helps you understand both characters better.
Was the style, did it make it easier to read as well?
I mean, did it move quite well?
Well, maybe it gets off to a little bit of a slow start because they're just like on the bus and it's not super interesting.
But then it speeds up and it gets a lot more interesting if you just...
Read the first few pages.
They don't communicate, as you say, in the first part of that book for a long time.
But what is communicated in the silence?
How can we tell that there's any kind of communication going on between the two of them?
Well, at the beginning of the story, they kind of look away from each other, and it's kind of an uncomfortable silence.
But slowly as they begin to, you know, they read the comic books together, and it becomes more of a comfortable silence, a companionable silence.
Talk to me a little bit about Eleanor's father.
It's not father, but stepfather.
Her father's a piece of work, but talk to me a little bit about her stepfather.
Well, her stepfather is abusive and Eleanor really does not like him.
He doesn't let them have friends over or anything and they have to try to stay quiet.
He gets
Drunk a lot, and he's just creepy.
He is creepy.
I mean, how does she describe that?
He writes on her notebook.
He writes some despicable things on her notebook.
But we didn't find that out until the very end.
Did you figure it out?
That it was him writing the crummy stuff on her books?
I had some, like, a little bit of an idea, but I wasn't quite sure.
You know, we always talk about tone of the book, you know, that sense of how did that writer give us a sense of how dangerous that man was.
Can you think of, you know, how the writer dealt with that?
I mean, would you say there was, how did she do that to kind of relate to us readers?
I don't know, that sense of danger, I guess.
Well, it did mention that the mother had got a bruise on her arm one night, and they had arguments a lot, the stepfather and the mother.
They're of Eleanor.
They always refer back to the fact that Eleanor got kicked out of the house by her stepfather.
And so before she tries to do something that is kind of out of order, she always thinks of that and she stops.
And she hears a gunshot one night and she thinks that it could be him shooting her mother.
And just the thought that she thinks that shows that he is dangerous.
It mentions that sometimes Eleanor and her siblings are huddled on the floor all together, like before Eleanor got kicked out and after when she comes back.
You know, and her siblings are scared.
So this book isn't even set in the present day.
It's set in 1986, I think.
What was it like reading about, you know, what were the things that struck you as being so weird because they're not around anymore?
Walkman, they listen to.
Yeah, cassette tapes.
No cassette tapes anymore.
Technology.
I mean, Park doesn't
He has a phone in his room, but it's not his cell phone.
Did that seem weird to you?
Yeah, it was a little different.
I also found it interesting, going back to what Reese said, the music that was in style then was totally different than now, and I'd never heard of any of those people.
Well, given that it was set in a time period before you guys were born, did the people seem real to you?
I mean, could they, given if we had updated the technology, could it have taken place today?
Yes, I think so.
So why do you think the author made the decision to set it in what was obviously probably her high school days?
Why do you think she did it there instead of today?
I think she might have been telling her story.
Writer Rainbow Rowell talked about just how close these characters were to her own life in a speech that she gave after receiving the 2013 Boston Globe Hornbook Award.
This is how I pitched Eleanor and Park to my agent.
It's two kids in a truck, driving away from everything that hurts them, maybe to Minnesota.
Later, when I showed him the manuscript, he said, I thought this was going to be a road story.
Oh no, I said, I only told you the end.
That's all I had when I started.
The end.
And a knot of tar-like feelings that clumped up in my stomach every time I thought about the two main characters.
Park, a boy who's realized that the best way to get through high school is to be invisible.
And Eleanor, a girl who couldn't be invisible if she tried.
They'd be like Romeo and Juliet, I thought, if Romeo and Juliet had really been in love.
And if they'd seen their end coming.
I had plotted and planned attachments for years before I started writing it, but I only had one year to write Eleanor and Park.
There wasn't time to run a plan past my conscious mind, and there wasn't time to be careful.
I sat down to write, and without asking myself why or asking myself for permission, I started writing a story set in 1986, in my 1986, in my old neighborhood, on my old school bus, with a villain cut from the same cloth as my own villainous stepfather,
Eleanor and Park were new, their struggles their own, but I had placed them in the middle of my very worst memories.
It made the act of sitting down to write unusually and acutely painful.
This book is making me sick.
I confessed to someone in my family.
I was sick.
I was actually sick.
For the entire three months I worked on my first draft.
Maybe you should stop, she said.
If this book is making you sick, you should stop writing it.
Or maybe, I said, I need to keep going.
Maybe I need to get this out of me.
I think sometimes we think of bravery as being the opposite of fear.
But really, you have to be afraid of something before bravery even enters the picture.
If you're not afraid of demons, it doesn't take much bravery to face them.
I was so afraid and so insecure and so clueless about what I was supposed to be doing that my fear almost became irrelevant.
I was so far outside my comfort zone, there wasn't a safe, known path for me, forward or backward.
I remember writing the telephone call between Eleanor and Park, their first private conversation, and feeling like the scene was out of control.
Too drawn out, too dramatic, just way too much.
And then I thought, if this book is a big sloppy mistake, I may as well make it as sloppy as my heart desires.
I may as well take every risk, write everything that scares or embarrasses me.
Eleanor and Park is the most difficult thing I've ever written, and the most frightening, and it's the thing I'm most proud of.
We are meant to take risks in life.
Fear is as much a beacon as a warning.
The most profound progress can be made when you step directly into the chasm.
How different is that high school experience versus what you guys face in middle school here in Omaha, Nebraska?
I found that it was pretty similar.
Like, you know, they swear all the time and, you know, hear it all the time every day.
And, um,
Just people being mean and people being nice and people trying to get along and people trying to not get along.
It seems like there is quite a bit of teasing and some other things that are mean that I don't see very much today.
You don't have a lot of bullies at your middle school.
Well, we have bullies.
I just don't think they do.
They bully like the same way.
Well, do you think it was harder to be somebody your age then than it is now?
Or is it the other way around?
I think it's about the same.
I mean, like.
There were bullies in 1986, and there are bullies now, and they may bully people in different ways, but they're still bullying.
Like maybe less gym, but more online.
Yeah.
Are the adults any better today than they were back then?
Well, I think they live in a rougher part of town, and their families aren't as put together as maybe ours are, but I think it still represents the same.
Well, would you recommend this book to other people?
Yes.
It's just overall a good book, and you can really feel what the characters are feeling.
It does have a sad ending, though, which I didn't really like because I like books that have happy endings.
I feel like it was a really good book to read because it is pretty realistic.
It shows you what actually happens, and it kind of gives you the backstory on those people where you're like, wow, they are weird.
You know, and so sometimes it makes you think, like, you know, I shouldn't think that at first sight.
I would recommend it to someone too, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, like, younger than me.
So what age level do you think it's appropriate for?
Probably, like, middle school.
Middle school to high school, maybe.
I would recommend this book because...
You really get to understand the characters.
You really can understand them and feel how realistic it is.
An important part of the Book Club for Kids is finding out what you like to read.
Got a favorite book?
Want to be on the Book Club for Kids podcast?
Well, send us an email or record yourself online.
On the voice memo app on your mom's smartphone.
Just give us your first name, the city where you live, the name of the book you love, and why you like it.
And email the voice memo to bookclub4kidspodcast at gmail.com.
So, bookworms from Omaha, what are your book suggestions?
It's hard.
There's a lot of good books, but...
I'm just going to go with some of the series that I liked.
I liked the Percy Jackson series.
The author made a second series based off of that.
But I've read those and I really like those because they have, I don't know, I just get a good understanding of the characters and it's sort of a fantasy.
I like fantasy.
That's your favorite genre?
Well, it's one of my favorite genres.
I really like the book Out of My Mind by Sharon M. Draper.
It's about this girl named Melody, and she has cerebral palsy.
So she's in a wheelchair, and she can't control her muscles and stuff.
But she's really smart, and she has a photographic memory of...
Means she remembers everything?
My favorite book of all time, if I had to choose one, would probably be The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak.
It's set in World War II, and it's about a girl who goes to live with a foster family because her dad left and her mom was a communist.
And so it's just about her journey through World War II and how she discovers the power of words.
Congressman Ashford said he liked the book View from the Summit, the remarkable memoir by the first person to conquer Everest.
It's written, of course, by Sir Edmund Hillary.
Well, it was an adventure story, and I liked adventure stories, and it was in a way kind of a mystery in a way, too, as to the goal of getting to the top of Mount Everest, which had never happened before.
Was so elusive that it was very mysterious.
I remember that book the most.
You never climbed Mount Everest.
No, but I have climbed some mountains.
And then as far as achieving goals that seemed out of sight, well, certainly Mount Everest in a cloudy day is out of sight, but
Achieving a goal that is elusive and difficult is something that's motivated me.
And reading was important to me, and I read a lot.
Detective stories, the Hardy Boys books I liked a lot.
The Hardy Boys I liked because they were always getting in trouble, sort of pushing the rules.
I think maybe as I look back on growing up and becoming an older person, I do sort of like pushing the rules a little bit.
We'll have all of this week's book suggestions on our website, bookclubforkids.org.
And if you need some more, you won't want to miss the next Book Club for Kids, a very special show that we taped at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.
It is chock full of book suggestions.
My name is Leigh Longy.
My favorite book is The Hobbit and I like it because it's an adventure book.
Don't miss an episode.
Subscribe now to Book Club for Kids on iTunes.
Or if you have an Android phone, you can hear us on Stitcher or SoundCloud.
Or you can just listen online.
And help us spread the word about the show.
Like us on Facebook.
Subscribe, rate, and rewatch.
View the show on iTunes, follow us on Twitter and on Instagram.
And thanks this week to Jonathan Jensen, who composed and performed our music, Congressman Brad Ashford from Omaha, our celebrity reader, and of course, our bookworm girls, Victoria, Malia, Reese, and Bella.
I'm Kitty Felde.
Thanks again for listening.
Thanks for watching!
