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Nancy Keane's | Booktalks -- Quick and Simple | |
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Cline-Ransome, Lesa. FINDING LANGSTON New York : Holiday House, 2020. IL 3-6 ISBN 9780823445820 2 booktalks |
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Booktalk #1 This is a book about a boy named Langston. He recently moved to Chicago, Illinois, from his home in Alabama to start a new life with his father after the recent death of his mother. Langston’s new home in Chicago is a lot different. Life moves faster. People move faster. Everyone isn’t as friendly as the people in Alabama. Langston is constantly bullied at his school, and he just misses his mama and home. One day Langston walks into the Chicago Public Library and discovers that he can check out library books for free! Walking down an aisle in the library stacks, Langston comes upon a book with his name on it. It’s a book of poems written by Langston Hughes about his life, and young Langston soon discovers that Mr. Hughes’s poetry speaks to him with passion. Langston stays up late reading Mr. Hughes’s words, breathing them in, clinging to their truth. Soon Langston starts to get the hang of his new life in Chicago living with his father. At the end of this novel, there is a nice surprise on how Langston got his namesake that allows Langston to feel closer than ever to his mother. (Prepared by: Ashley Griffith, Pepperhill Elementary School, ashley_griffith@charleston.k12.sc.us) (South Carolina Book Awards, 2020-2021) Booktalk #2 The 11-year-old’s mother was barely dead and buried before his father moved them to Chicago, where, in 1946, “a man can provide for his family without always scraping and bowing.” But to Langston, Chicago is lonely and lacking—no friends, family, or good food - just his dad’s bad cooking. Three bullies make life even harder. Then he discovers something that amazes him: a public library, and it’s not just for white people like the one back home! This branch library not only welcomes African Americans, it celebrates successful black men and women, especially writers. The library becomes Langston’s everything—his space away from his tiny apartment, his refuge from the bullies, the expansion of his world through books. It is also the place where he finds his namesake, Langston Hughes, and begins to find himself. (Pennsylvania Young Reader’s Choice Award 2020-2021) |
| SUBJECTS: Hughes, Langston, -- 1902-1967. African Americans. Illinois -- Chicago. |
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