Nine poignant and empowering short stories from the author of The
Breadwinner.
The seated child. With a single powerful image, Deborah Ellis draws our
attention to nine children and the situations they find themselves in,
often through no fault of their own. In each story, a child makes a
decision and takes action, be that a tiny gesture or a life-altering
choice.
Jafar is a child laborer in a chair factory and longs to go to school.
Sue sits on a swing as she and her brother wait to have a supervised
visit with their father at the children's aid society. Gretchen
considers the lives of concentration camp victims during a school tour
of Auschwitz. Mike survives seventy-two days of solitary as a young
offender. Barry squirms on a food court chair as his parents tell him
that they are separating. Macie sits on a too-small time-out chair while
her mother receives visitors for tea. Noosala crouches in a fetid,
crowded apartment in Uzbekistan, waiting for an unscrupulous refugee
smuggler to decide her fate.
These children find the courage to face their situations in ways large
and small, in this eloquent collection from a master storyteller.
Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language
Arts:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.3
Describe how a particular story's or drama's plot unfolds in a series of
episodes as well as how the characters respond or change as the plot
moves toward a resolution.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.6
Explain how an author develops the point of view of the narrator or
speaker in a text.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.9
Compare and contrast texts in different forms or genres (e.g., stories
and poems; historical novels and fantasy stories) in terms of their
approaches to similar themes and topics.
