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emilyhays 's review for:
Fish in a Tree
by Lynda Mullaly Hunt
2.5/5 stars. The halfway mark.
I both listened to this on audio and read it and while normally I prefer listening to middle grade, I prefered reading this one. But before I get into that you need to know more about the book.
This follows Ally, who loves to draw and is good at math, but never quite figure out reading and writing. Then a substitute teacher swoops in while Ally's regular teacher goes on maternity leave and helps her. Eventually learning that she has dyslexia.
The book's side characters also feature a wide array of students, a POC girl (who's ethnicity is never actually stated. It's just implied she's black because her name is Keisha), a super smart boy who is getting beat up after school, a Japenese girl who has just immigrated to the states, and a couple of rich white means girls who's parents are secretly really hard on them.
So you can see where I'm going here. It's not really the troupes that bother me, because it's a middle grade and some stuff needs to be simplified, it's the stereotypes. Which are especially prevailent in the audiobook where the narrator feels it necessary to REALLY change up the voices as different characters talk. For example, when Suki, our Japenese student, talks, the audiobook narrator feels it necessary to pull a racially charged accent while mimicking the broken english on the page, circa the star wars prequels and the enemy aliens that suddenly mimick what western people think asain people sound like.
Back to the troupes, which are pretty simple, but I also think everything was a little too over simplified. I don't think we give middle grade (9-12 year-olds) enough credit about how smart they are, how much they're going to pick up on. And this novel follows kids with varrying hardships who's main theme is that the right people will help you get through any hardship, while true, is a vast oversimplification of what the world outside of this book for 10 year-olds looks like.
That being said, I still thought it had good things to say, it was still a good read, which is why it gets this middle of the road rating.
I both listened to this on audio and read it and while normally I prefer listening to middle grade, I prefered reading this one. But before I get into that you need to know more about the book.
This follows Ally, who loves to draw and is good at math, but never quite figure out reading and writing. Then a substitute teacher swoops in while Ally's regular teacher goes on maternity leave and helps her. Eventually learning that she has dyslexia.
The book's side characters also feature a wide array of students, a POC girl (who's ethnicity is never actually stated. It's just implied she's black because her name is Keisha), a super smart boy who is getting beat up after school, a Japenese girl who has just immigrated to the states, and a couple of rich white means girls who's parents are secretly really hard on them.
So you can see where I'm going here. It's not really the troupes that bother me, because it's a middle grade and some stuff needs to be simplified, it's the stereotypes. Which are especially prevailent in the audiobook where the narrator feels it necessary to REALLY change up the voices as different characters talk. For example, when Suki, our Japenese student, talks, the audiobook narrator feels it necessary to pull a racially charged accent while mimicking the broken english on the page, circa the star wars prequels and the enemy aliens that suddenly mimick what western people think asain people sound like.
Back to the troupes, which are pretty simple, but I also think everything was a little too over simplified. I don't think we give middle grade (9-12 year-olds) enough credit about how smart they are, how much they're going to pick up on. And this novel follows kids with varrying hardships who's main theme is that the right people will help you get through any hardship, while true, is a vast oversimplification of what the world outside of this book for 10 year-olds looks like.
That being said, I still thought it had good things to say, it was still a good read, which is why it gets this middle of the road rating.