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.
What's it like to be adopted?
Would your adopted family's history become your history?
Or would you feel the need to find your own biological story?
Our book this week is The Length of a String by Alyssa Brent Wiseman.
It's a Holocaust story about a Jewish family separated by the war.
All day I was worried that something horrid had happened, and I think I'm right, because I came home to find that all of the letters I've sent in the past month came back unopened.
That's our celebrity reader, actor and director Barry Hochwald.
The book gets a huge thumbs up from our readers from Hazelwood Elementary Middle School in Baltimore.
This book is like no book I ever read before.
Our writer, Alyssa Brent Weissman, answers a lot of questions about the book from the girls and even offers some writing tips.
If you start something and then you find yourself not wanting to continue and you just want to go on to the next idea.
It could be that the next idea is a better one, but it could also be that maybe you're bogged down in what happened next versus what happened next.
That's really important.
This is the Book Club for Kids, the podcast where kids talk about books.
We'll tell you how you can be on the show a little later on.
Oh, and a spoiler alert.
You might want to read the book before you listen to the episode, so you've been warned.
Now, let's meet our readers.
Hello, my name is Amaya.
My name is Quanera.
My name is Vincenzo.
My name is Samaya.
My name is Mariah, and we are sixth and seventh graders at Hazelwood Elementary Middle School in Baltimore.
The book is called The Length of a String and it's about a girl named Imani who finds her great-grandmother's diary and starts to read it and gets to know more about her great-grandmother's life and what she had to go through while she was in the Holocaust.
She found out that all her family died at a concentration camp and Imani was trying to find out her birth parents.
After she finds out her great-grandma's siblings are still alive, she goes to London to meet them.
And she's adopted, and so her adopted family is half Jewish.
And Imani is not.
How would we describe Imani?
At the end of the book, Imani found out that she's 50-something percent Native American.
In addition to being African descendant.
Yep.
And a few other things.
Yep.
How would we describe her character?
Imani is like she's a bit like scared to ask about things, so she's like a bit insecure in some types of ways.
And she, like, has a friend who she can depend on to help her figure out what she wants to do.
And she shares the diary with her friend, Madeline.
Imani was kind of scared because when Anna died, her mother was upset.
She was sad.
So she didn't want to ask her mother who and where she came from.
The timing was bad, in other words.
Yeah, the timing was.
So where are we in history?
I mean, what part of the world are we in and what's going on?
So we're in this tiny place in between France and another country.
I forgot the name, but it's called Luxembourg.
And right now the Nazis are coming to get everybody out of Luxembourg.
And it's currently 1941.
So at first.
Anna and Kurt were supposed to be going to stay with Max and Hannah, their so-called cousins.
In America.
They were leaving Luxembourg for America.
Yes.
The train tickets had got changed to a different cost, so only one could go, and they chose Anna.
And then when she got there, life wasn't very good for her at first.
Let's hear a scene from the book where Imani is reading from Anna's journal.
Anna is writing about her experiences in America for her sister, Belle.
Our celebrity reader is actress and producer Barry Hochwald.
Barry says she uses theater to awaken people to the miraculousness of being human on this planet, while confronting the difficult issues of our own making that keep us from living those miracles every day.
Friday, October 17th, 1941.
Oh, Belle, I had again a terrible dream last night.
I must have been screaming because my throat hurts today.
All day I was worried that something horrid had happened, and I think I'm right, because I came home to find that all of the letters I've sent in the Hannah tried to warn about it before I saw and I could tell she was worried too, but nothing could have stopped the buckle of my knees or the weight that seemed to push me down to the floor.
Not at this address, the letters say.
Perhaps they moved, Hannah said stupidly.
Not even she sounded convinced.
I don't know why she bothered.
They could be on their way here, she said.
Are you on your way here, Belle?
But if you were, Papa would have found a way to telegram or Mama would have written.
I haven't received any letters in weeks and weeks.
The war, Hannah said.
Surely all the mail is held up by the war.
The war.
It is starting to sound like at home with the war to blame for everything all the time.
Remember our joke?
Only not really a joke. that Minna's first words would be, Kreich, war.
Max said he will try to telegram tomorrow, but to what address if you're not at home?
And Hannah spent all evening telephoning women from the synagogue to see if anyone is away to get information.
We are all afraid, me most of all, thinking of you always.
Anna.
Towards the middle of the book they find out that her whole family just got moved to a new place, which means that they probably won't be responding to her letters.
And she thinks that they're still coming to America, but they're not going to because they got killed in the Holocaust.
And then she finds out that on the way to the place her brother got thrown off of a train and she ended the diary completely.
So Imani is going through this whole life crisis that's going on trying to figure out what her heritage is by birth.
And she discovers this diary, but she really bonds with Anna in the diary.
Why do you think that is?
I think it's because they were both adopted.
I think it's because when Anna went to America with Max and Hannah, she wasn't really accepting of how her family wasn't coming, and so is Imani about how her mom's not letting her find out about her birth parents.
Why did you think Imani really got hooked on that story of Anna?
Both of them have so many questions about their life and how they got there.
But I really do feel bad for Anna because she thought all this time Belle was going to be there with her.
I think Imani got hooked on to the diary because Madeline had to remind her a lot of times that it wasn't some book like a regular book or a regular movie.
Because she kept getting mad when there wasn't an entry for so long, because she thought that she can't just end it right there.
Is this book like anything else you've ever read before?
Is there another book that you can compare this to?
You guys are all shaking your heads, no?
No, it's nothing like this.
How come?
Because, like most of the time, it's always like about superheroes or about, like their daily life, what's going on around them.
But, like, that's just, like, going deeper into their past and their family past.
I say no because the books that I read they usually have like superheroes in them or like some kind of drama in it.
This book is, like, no book I ever read before.
I don't really read books like this.
I read more of Diary of a Wimpy Kid type books.
And this book is more suspenseful and has a lot of things that make you want to say like.
It reminds me not completely, but one part of the book when Imani felt left out in her family.
It reminded me of this book we read in third grade about how a guy had to pretend he was a superhero in order to fit in in his class.
Public school superhero?
So it's public school superhero you're talking about by James Patterson and Chris Tebbets, and it is a Book Club for Kids episode and we'll put a link there at our website, bookclubforkidsorg.
So would you recommend this book to other people?
And if so, who to?
I would recommend it to people who are adopted so they could feel like they're not left out and they're not the only ones.
Did you like the book?
It was so good.
Yes, I loved it.
It was like twists and turns.
It will leave the reader wondering.
Because you wonder after she found out she died.
She just completely ended the diary.
So you wonder like was she depressed afterwards?
And, like, you also wonder, like, what happened while they were in London?
Did they enjoy staying there with Oliver and his family, or did they want to leave immediately?
Was it awkward?
It leaves a lot of questions for you.
I know you guys have a lot of questions for our author, Alyssa Brent Weissman.
Who wants to go first?
Is the book about you?
The book is not about me.
It is fiction.
I completely made it up, made up most of the story.
But, that said, there is a lot in the book that is based on me or, more specifically, my own family history and people in my family.
So all of my grandparents grew up in New York in the 1940s and one of my grandfathers grew up in Bensonhurst, where Anna goes to live, and the other one of my grandfathers was a furrier, just like Max, who really worked for his uncles, who really were just as cheap as Uncle Egg and Uncle Onion.
So a lot of the story is based on or inspired by me and my family, but none of it is exactly me.
Will you make a second book?
I don't have any plans to make a second book.
I'd be curious to hear from you what you would want to see in a second book if I were to write a sequel.
I would like to see Imani's life, and I want to see if she adopts some of her own kids.
Hmm.
Yeah.
Why did you make this book?
I made this book because I was thinking a lot about one of my best friends when I was growing up and she was adopted.
She was adopted from Mexico and her sister was adopted from.
I grew up in New York, adopted from upstate New York.
And her sister was kind of like Imani in that she knew her mother was African American and that's all she knew.
And so I was thinking a lot about my friend Lauren both of them were and her sister.
They were both Jewish.
They went to Hebrew school with me and wondering what it would be like to be someone who doesn't look like anybody else at your Hebrew school, someone who doesn't really look like anyone else in your town to be adopted, to be always kind of wondering where your biological parents are, where you come from.
And so that's what really inspired Imani's story.
And then it was memories from my grandparents that kind of inspired Anna's story and I was able to put them all together.
And once I started putting them together, I realized that they were meant to go together all along.
Would you consider making a book about us?
Maybe if you keep reading my books, I bet there will be little details from today that you might be able to pick out later.
How long did it take you to make the book?
It usually takes me about a year to get a good draft of a book.
And then, after I spend that year, I spend another whole year revising that book with the help of my editor at the publishing company.
And the length of a string is pretty long.
It's the longest of my books and pretty complicated, because it's got two stories in one and it has all of the historical elements.
And so it took me longer than that.
I would say from the beginning to the end.
It probably took at least three, maybe four years to write.
Would you be considered as Madeline?
I'll take that as a compliment.
No.
I have certain things in common with all of my characters.
I'm probably more like Imani than I am like Madeline.
So...
I actually write little small stories, but I never finish them for some reason, because I always get writer's block.
So how do you deal with that?
Yeah, the beginning of a story, I think, is the most exciting part, because you've got this idea that you want to write down and you're creating something.
You're creating a world, even if it's really just a realistic world.
You're still building out these characters and figuring out how they fit together.
And then the middle of the story is where it starts to be not so fun anymore sometimes, because you can get bogged down in what happened next.
I don't make an outline when I write.
I just kind of write the story to see what happens.
Actually, the book I'm writing right now, I had no idea what was going to happen.
But then today I had a really big breakthrough and I think I figured out what's going to happen.
So that's very exciting.
A good thing to keep in mind.
If you start something and then you find yourself not wanting to continue and you just want to go on to the next idea, it could be that the next idea is a better one.
But it could also be that maybe you're bogged down in what happened next versus what happened next.
That's really important.
So remember, you're not a security camera.
You're a writer.
You can always say chapter two or chapter four or skip a line and then go to the next problem.
What's the next problem that this character has to face?
What's the next important thing?
When you make your books, how do you know if somebody did make it before?
That's a really good question.
You don't always know.
Luckily the internet.
Nowadays you can kind of use Google to search around and see if there are books that are similar to yours.
But the truth is that all stories kind of boil down to the similar things, right?
Like there are only so many stories.
And you're the only person who can tell that same story the way you can tell it.
So I think it's pretty rare that you're going to write, without knowing it write the same exact story that somebody else told.
And even if you did, you're going to do it in a way that only you can do.
So you've got to trust that you've got this idea and you've got this character and that you've got this way of writing that's going to be unique.
I think this story is really creative.
So where did you learn about this type of writing?
Well, thank you.
I went to college and studied creative writing, so I do have a background in learning to write books.
But really the best way to learn about any type of writing is by reading, is to read as much as you can and read things that you find creative.
Read things that you enjoy, read things that you don't enjoy and then ask yourself well, why don't I enjoy this?
How could I do it better?
And just pay attention as you read, and the more and more you read, the better you're going to become at writing.
What was the purpose of making this book?
I think the purpose of making this book, and of any book that I write, is just to tell a good story, a story that I sort of had an idea about and wondering.
I told you, I was wondering about my friend and how she felt, and thinking about my grandparents' stories and what they went through.
And just trying to write the story for myself and then wanting to know what, what would happen, and hopefully that being something that other people would want to know what happens too.
So I don't necessarily start out with a purpose, like a lesson I want to teach or something that I hope people will take away, but more just something that I hope it.
I hope it keeps you turning the pages, maybe keeps you up at night, maybe once makes you want to give it to a friend, say you have to read this because we have to talk about it, and maybe even makes you think about bigger things or, with this book, makes you want to research some of your own family history.
Those would all be a bonus.
Did this book process stress you out?
At times I was very stressed out.
A big part of this book because you know there's the two stories and they go back and forth.
That could be really stressful, because so here's the thing I really don't like revising.
But with this one I had to change a lot.
And anytime I had to change something in Anna's story, then it would affect Imani's story, because then maybe you know, if this happened in Anna's story where I moved it, then Imani hadn't read that part yet, so I had to change what happened to Imani until she read that part.
It involved a real lot of moving things around and a lot of changing things, and that part of it was really stressful for me.
Does your friend like that you wrote this book based off something that's going on in her life?
I hope so.
I talked to her a lot when I was writing the book and she helped me out a lot.
A lot of Imani and the things that happened to Imani and the way Imani thinks about being adopted are informed by my friend and also by other adoptees who I spoke with as I was writing the book or after I wrote the book.
If you were able, like, if you wanted to add some more to the book, what would you add?
I left it where I left it on purpose, so that different readers could come away with thinking different things might happen, or kind of leave it to you to wonder what would happen to Imani.
So I'm not really sure.
I'm not really sure what I would add.
And I like the fact that I hear from different people who've read it that each of them has a different response to what happens, and especially what happens at the end.
It's all the same words.
Everybody reads the same words.
But based on your experience and your worldview and your perspective, you might have a different opinion or want something different to happen at the end.
And I like that about the book.
So in the book, there's like the uncles, Uncle Egg and Uncle Onion.
To me, they were a bunch of jerks.
But how did you feel about writing about them?
I agree with you.
I think that they're to some degree kind of comic relief.
They're sort of funny and they're sort of sad to some degree if you think about how they probably have money hidden all over their apartment and tucked under the mattress and tucked in shoes and they're not spending that money or using it for something good, like bringing Anna's family over.
They're just kind of squirreling it away, and But it's a fact of life that there are people who aren't always good people in the world.
And certainly in literature.
If everybody was a good person and everybody did the right thing, there was nobody who was a jerk in any book, then the book would be pretty boring because there would be no conflict to drive it forward.
Sometimes it's kind of fun to write characters who are not so nice too, because you get to tap into that side of your personality where you're not really allowed to act on that in real life.
All right.
So we are at the portion of the show where we ask the hard question, which is what is your favorite book?
There's this book that I got for Christmas from my grandmother, and it's called All the Ways I Love You.
I think
And it's about a mom who reads to her son.
They're also bears.
It's really funny.
It's about a mom who reads to her son and tells her son that all the things, all his imperfections and stuff, she still loves him for that anyway.
I have a favorite book.
I just forgot what it's called, but it's about.
It's a whole family and they get into a car accident and the dad dies and then the rest of them live and then they move to a different house.
Wait a minute, wait a minute.
I think I know this book.
Is this Amulet?
Yes.
Yes.
And why do you love that book?
Because it's interesting and I just like when they go to save their mother because you care as much to save your mother.
I would have been too scared.
My favorite book is The Hate U Give.
It's about a girl named Star and she's basically like torn between two worlds black people and non-blacks.
My favorite book would be The President of Sixth Grade.
It's about a girl named Jessica, and she's going through all of this to be a president of her middle school in sixth grade, studying how to do what she wants to do and how to do it.
Why did you like this book?
I think that's how I used to be in elementary school and my old school.
Favorite book?
The book is called I Hate School and it's in all caps.
It's about how these kids are in fifth grade and they hate school so much that they decided that they was going to stay home.
And then the principal came to their houses and tried to break down their doors and drag them to school.
It was the best book ever.
And it was a movie too.
Why do you love this book?
Because I wish I could do that.
Stay home and get dragged back to school?
Stay home and stay home.
I like this other book.
It's Captain Underpants.
I like it because they use this ring that they got from a cereal box to turn their principal into a really nice man.
What about you, Barry Hochwald?
What is your favorite book?
I actually don't have a favorite book.
I just have a favorite activity, which is reading.
I love to read because reading takes me into other worlds that are created by minds other than myself, than my own.
Into worlds and into ways of thinking, ways of looking at the world that we live in, of reevaluating it.
It's the experience of reading that is so potent for me.
You become bigger.
You become greater somehow by sharing the talent and intellect and passions of other people and creativity.
And this is why I love to read.
We'll have a list of everybody's favorite book at our website, bookclubforkids.org.
And if you have a favorite book, you can be on the Book Club for Kids podcast, too.
Just give us a call at 323-639-3560 and leave us a message telling us your first name, the city where you live, the name of your favorite book and why you love it.
That number again is 323-639-3560.
This episode is funded in part by the Nora Roberts Foundation.
Thanks this week to producer Ilse Setziel.
Jonathan Jensen composed our theme with additional music from Charles Nilman.
Emma Steinkalner designed our logo.
Thanks to writer Alyssa Brent Weissman and our celebrity reader, Barry Hochwald.
And thanks as well to our readers this week Anaya Kinera Vincenza, Sanaya and Mariah, who are all members of the Girlfriends Book Club Baltimore.
And thanks to the book club founder, Tanya Wright.
We have a free newsletter for teachers, parents and librarians full of free tips about how to turn kids into lifelong readers and how to get the reluctant ones to pick up a book and put down the phone.
You can sign up at our website, bookclubforkids.org.
And, by the way, the website is also where you can find some great summer reading tips and ideas for terrific books.
I'm Kitty Felde.
Thanks again for listening.
