Harbor Me by Jacqueline Woodson [in Shelf Awareness]
*STARRED REVIEW
“[T]he school wanted to try something new: Could they put [six] kids together in a room with one teacher and make something amazing?” For Ms. Laverne’s fifth/sixth grade Brooklyn, N.Y., class, the answer is a resounding yes. Deemed “special kids,” Haley, Holly, Ashton, Amari, Tiago, and Estaban “learned differently.” To enhance their regular schedule, the six are ushered every Friday afternoon into a former art room, cleverly renamed the “A-R-T-T room – A Room To Talk,” and encouraged “to talk about the things kids talk about when no grown-ups are around.”
The children are initially unsure how to interact, but compassionate concern quickly unites them when Estaban’s father goes missing: Ms. Laverne’s empathic lesson, “I want each of you to say to the other: I will harbor you,” is already well-ingrained. Safe in ARTT, the children share such things as U.S.-born Estaban’s worries for his parents, immigrants from the Dominican Republic; Amari’s restricted freedoms as an African American youth; Ashton’s discomfort with white privilege and his struggles with bullying; Tiago’s clashes with racism despite being Puerto Rican and therefore American; Holly’s challenges of everything she considers “unfair.” Haley, the book’s narrator, records the group’s stories until she’s finally ready to share her own difficult experiences.
In her first middle-grade novel since her 2014 National Book Award winner, Brown Girl Dreaming, National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Jacqueline Woodson deftly alchemizes a sixth-grade classroom into an affecting metaphor for racial, political, and socioeconomic challenges – enhanced by the transformative power of storytelling: “what matter[ed] most is that we were heard.” Bonded and buoyed by their shared “stories on top of stories,” Woodson’s sextet commit to meet again in 20 years; readers should start praying now to be privy to what promises to be an astonishing reunion.
Discover: Jacqueline Woodson’s Harbor Me is a powerful love letter to effective teachers, unexpected friendship, and the healing magic of hearing, recording, and sharing words.
Review: “Children & Young Adult,” Shelf Awareness, September 4, 2018
Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult
Published: 2018
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