Two Kid Schoolhouse
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May. 8, 2007
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A book I (sort-of) hated but am glad we listened to
The kids and I just finished listening to A Stranger at Green Knowe by Lucy M. Boston. This is the 4th in a series of books, and we have enjoyed the first 3 very much. They're set at an estate in England - appropriately old and rundown, with an equally rundown Great-grandma named Granny Partridge running the place. They are sweet stories with an element of magic realism to them.
This book starts off very differently from the others: in the jungles of Africa. At this point the main character is a young gorilla. We listened as he was hunted down, his parents and sister killed, and he is moved to the zoo. This was annoying me greatly and I almost stopped the story. Perhaps it was because I'd recently been horrified to read about efforts to have a chimp declared a person and I just wasn't in the mood for a gorilla with human characteristics and emotions.
But the kids were enjoying it, I had hopes it would turn around, and there were no more tapes or cds in the car, so...
Finally the story came around to England and the characters we were expecting. Everything was going well but soon I had a feeling I was going to get annoyed again, and I was right. The gorilla escapes from the zoo, and ends up in a thick wooded area at Green Knowe. It is befriended by visitor to the estate, a young boy who had previously "met" and become fascinated by the gorilla at the zoo.
The boy makes a lot of dumb decisions and tells a lot of lies in his effort to keep the gorilla in the wood rather than being captured and returned to the zoo. These decisions and lies ultimately lead to the gorilla's death. We heard this part in the Costco parking lot today. J was sobbing. E was holding it in. I was disgusted. The ending was "happy" in an odd sort of way - the boy determined that the gorilla had made the choice to be killed rather than go back to his bleak existence at the zoo. But beyond that, the boy's errors and lies were brought out. He did not appear to suffer any consequences of his actions, but at least they were not ignored. The zookeeper, who chastised the boy for causing the gorilla's death (by not telling him the gorilla was in the wood), came to understand something of the boy's motivation to help the gorilla, whatever mistakes he made trying to do it.
So in some ways I hated the book but I was glad we persevered and heard the whole thing. It sure brought up a lot of discussion, because it just wasn't an "easy" book. Who was the hero of this book? Were the police and the zookeeper wrong to trespass on the estate once they had evidence that the gorilla was in the woods, even though Granny Partridge didn't explicity give permission? Was Ping (the boy) wrong to have lied since he had good intentions to help the gorilla? Do you think he made bad decisions because he thought he knew and understood more about the situation than he really did? Was it OK for him to take food from Granny Partridge's kitchen and garden if he was doing it so the gorilla wouldn't eat poisonous yew trees? What could he have done differently? Do you think gorillas have the same sorts of feelings that humans do? Could the gorilla really have made the decision to let the hunter shoot him? Do you think death would be better than living in a concrete cage?
I'm glad the kids didn't read or listen to this book on their own. I don't want them to grow up to be people who think a chimp, or a gorilla, should be considered a "person," and this book could be seen as an encouragement to that point of view. Still, to them, it was an exciting and bittersweet book, set in a place and populated by characters they love. |
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Musings of a slacker homeschool Mom
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