The Teacher's Funeral

The Teacher’s Funeral

By Richard Peck

Recommended for grades 5-8

“If your teacher has to die, August isn’t a bad time of year for it,” says fifteen-year-old Russell Culver. School seems like a “jailhouse” to him anyway. Russell and his ten-year-old brother, Lloyd, hope that it is too late for the school board to hire someone else since school starts in a few days and teachers for their one-room school in rural Indiana are hard to come by. With the school closed, Russell would be free to follow his dream of joining a team of harvesters in the Dakotas working the new 1904 all-steel Case Agitator threshing machine.

Russell’s dreams are upended with an especially cruel twist of fate for a young boy. Not only does the school board hire a new teacher, they hire Tansy Culver, Russell’s seventeen-year-old, take-no-nonsense sister. She is determined that he will turn over a new leaf this school year by finally passing eighth grade and becoming a better role model for Lloyd. Russell suspects the worst--that Tansy just might be able to accomplish this despite all of his efforts to stop her.

The Teacher’s Funeral, by Richard Peck, humorously explores education in the one-room-schoolhouse days of rural Indiana through the eyes of a boy who must endure his bossy older sister as a teacher. Though the first third of the book moves a little slowly setting up the circumstances surrounding Tansy’s hiring, the author then switches to high gear with the antics of the school’s eight students and the efforts of their inexperienced teacher to force learning into them. Boys, especially, may enjoy reading about Russell’s life in 1904 and the pranks students used to play on their teachers.

Two copies of The Teacher’s Funeral are available in the KPL Youth Department in the Junior High Fiction section.

Reviewed by Laura Abbott

KPL Youth Department Clerk

Title of book: Yellow Star

Author: Jennifer Roy

Intended Audience: Young Adult (and up)

Yellow Star is based on the true story of Sylvia Perlmutter, who was only four and a half years old when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Sylvia’s family was forced to move to the Lodz ghetto, along with over 270,000 other people. At the end of the war only 800 were still alive, including twelve children. Sylvia was one of the twelve.

Her family eventually moved to the United States, and for many years Sylvia did not speak about her experiences in Lodz. She finally decided to tell her niece, Jennifer Roy. Roy felt that Sylvia’s story deserved a wider audience, and wrote Yellow Star.

The book is written as a series of free verse poems, with an occasional brief prose section giving helpful historical background. The poems express Sylvia’s feelings and describe her experiences in simple, direct language, as if the young Sylvia herself were talking to you. Her convincing voice tells of unbelievable hardship and extraordinary courage. Roy concludes the book by describing what happened to the real-life Sylvia and her family after the war ended. She also provides a timeline of some important World War II dates.

Yellow Star gives us a view of our own humanity that is both horrifying and inspiring. It’s an unforgettable story, beautifully told.

Kewanee Public Library has one copy of Yellow Star in the New Books section of the Young Adult Room.

Gail Hintze

Kewanee Public Library Young Adult Coordinator