Chocolate Fever- Fantasy

          Chocolate Fever, by Robert Kimmel Smith, is a fantasy book involving children eating too much chocolate!  The book focuses on one child, Henry and how his obsession with chocolate becomes a problem when he breaks out in mysterious brown spots all over his body.  His teacher, the school nurse, and several others at the school are puzzled by these now bursting brown spots.  A doctor at the hospital diagnoses him with Chocolate Fever which causes him to run away.  The reader will enjoy this fantasy book following Henry’s adventure of running from this new disesase.

                There are a few pictures in the chapters throughout this book.  The pictures give minimal support to the text, but are interesting for the reader.  The book moves quickly and keeps the reader turning the pages.  Almost every chapter has a different setting, keeping the reader on his/her toes.  Henry is an interesting character, and his thoughts keep the reader wanting to know more about his predicament.

                While Henry’s predicament of Chocolate Fever may seem outlandish, his thoughts and feelings are ones that many children can relate to.  He struggles with bullying, both being the bully at the beginning and then being bullied towards the end.  Many students on either side of the bullying will be able to relate to Henry’s feelings of wanting to fit in.  He especially struggles with wanting to fit in after he is the first person, or so he thinks, to be diagnosed with Chocolate Fever.  He also wrestles with his feelings about his parents and wanting to please them, yet also living his own life.  These feelings and struggles while about a ficticious disease, are ones that children may relate to and may get them talking about their own situations and feelings.

                This book does tackle a few morals and lessons that can be taught light-heartedly through this fantasy book.  When Henry runs away and joins Mac, the truck driver, Mac tells Henry of his own childhood struggles of attempting to fit in, but instead of chocolate fever, his was racial.  The author does not go into great detail about these racial tensions Mac experienced, but it is left up to the background knowledge of the students as to how much they can understand the racial tension.  Henry also learns another important lesson that is part of his cure for Chocolate Fever, when Mr. Alfred Cane advises him, “Although life is grand, and please is everywhere, we can’t have everything we want every time we want it!” (84). Henry must learn this difficult lesson of how too much of a good thing can become a bad thing.  These lessons are at the surface level in this book, but they may get the reader thinking at deeper levels about the issues presented.

                Overall, students will enjoy this lighthearted book, but also may begin to think about larger issues by reading this book.

Bull Run- Historical Fiction

          Bull Run, by Paul Fleischman, is a historical fiction book based on the American Civil War.  The book is composed of the thoughts of sixteen different people.  Each person’s thoughts, which are similar to a diary entry, compose only about one to two pages and then the reader will read the next person’s section.  The book focuses on the start of the Civil War and Bull Run.  The characters, while fictional are based off of real people, as historical fiction is usually.  The thoughts of these characters include great detail about their ways of life which enable the reader to relate to each of the characters.

                This book would be an excellent book to read while studying the Civil War.  While the details surrounding the important events of the Civil War are based off of facts from the time period, the focus of the book is more on the people themselves.  While students are studying the Civil War in history, this would be a great way to connect it to people’s lives.  Because the sections are not in any order, and have both people supporting the South and the North following each other, it makes the reader reconsider the points of view of the war.  However, Paul Fleischman does not include many politics, instead leaving the focus on the individuals and how their lives were affected by the war.  This is a great book to have students work on understanding different perspectives and could be used as a launching point from which students could write editorials pretending they were in the time period.

                While the random order of the sections in regards to people supporting the North and South is good for students to constantly reconsider perspective, it can make the book hard to follow.  I got confused a few times as to which side different people were on as I was reading, but this reminded me once again that politics was not Fleischman’s focus, but the people’s individual lives.  It can also be difficult to remember the individual stories of each person’s life as there are sixteen different individual stories happening at the same time.  By the time the reader returns to the same individual, he/she has already read fifteen other individual stories and may have forgotten the storyline for that individual.

                This book does a great job of including many different individuals from different walks of life.  Fleischman includes women, blacks, servants, doctors, generals, young children, and men.  By reading so many stories from different points of view about the war, the reader can gain a better understanding of how the war affected people from all walks of life.  Fleischman also includes art through the thoughts of Nathaniel Epp as he was a photographer during the war.  In Social Studies, we have been discussing the importance of bringing in individuals, both famous and others including women, children, and minorities.  This book definitely does that for students allowing them to read so many individual stories but connect them all through the time period.

                Overall, this is a great book for older students who either are familiar with or learning about the Civil War.  Readers will be in for an adventure following sixteen characters, but they should be warned to pay close attention to each individual character’s life and personal storyline in order to understand the overall story.  With close attention to detail and the ability to jump around, older students will love this book as they learn about an important historical event from so many different perspectives.