Jazz Owls: A novel of the zoot suit riots was a novel written in prose from the perspective of mainly Spanish American young adults and their family but also from the perspective of a few police officers and news reporters. While I did not particularly care for the book, I do think it is an important story to tell and one that needs to be heard from the perspective of the Spanish Americans that were targets of racism in the 1940’s. I felt that the characters were not well developed and therefore a lot of the emotion in their narratives was lost therefore failing to draw the reader in emotionally.
Engle’s novel, Jazz Owls, won multiple awards: ALA Notable Children's Books, CCBC Choices (Cooperative Children's Book Council), Bank Street Children's Book Award, Americas Award Commended Title, and NCTE Notable Verse Novel List (Jazz Owls, 2020). The term Jazz Owls refers to young women that would go to Jazz clubs after work and dance with American soldiers. This book could be used in a poetry class, a point of discussion could be about books written in prose and how to properly execute prose as a novel. Other important themes in the book could also be discussed. The book looks into the zoot suit riots from the angle of those targeted in the riots and calls them the “Soldier Riots” because the newspapers refer to them as “Zoot Suit Riots” which infers that the Spanish American young adults were the cause of the riots, which is not the case. Another interesting parallel is that the young adult narrator’s brother is off fighting in the war for America as a solider but he is segregated even in war, but back in America, the riots are being caused by soldiers that have not deployed yet and the police are protecting their actions so that they do not look bad for handcuffing a young man in uniform. The young women in the story are fighting for women’s rights in the workplace as well, organizing unions and fair labor standards for them.
Additional Citations:
Jazz Owls. (2020). Retrieved July 03, 2020, from https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Jazz-Owls/Margarita-Engle/9781534409446