The Night Diary and book discussions

Veera Hiranandani's The Night Diary was next up on my list of book camp books. It's a lovely book, but I don't really want to talk about it so much as around it (I think).

Whenever I read these books for our teacher book club and our summer book camp (one of my biggest losses as I leave for new adventures is the community of kindred spirits that I found through these groups, and I feel that loss keenly as I read - they have made my reading life a slightly less lonely one), I inevitably think ahead to our discussions. Much as I enjoy the discussions as they play out, they always head in a different direction than where my mind takes me. We talk about the books as we would use them in the classroom, the ages of kids they would appeal to, the windows they offered to us into other lives. And those are valuable things!

But when I read Exit, Pursued by a Bear, I wanted to talk about sexism and harassment! And Shakespeare! And Shakespeare adaptations and Women of Will, which I had recently read. (It didn't help that very few in the group had chosen to read it, of course.) And when I read The Wild Robot, I filled a page with notes about artificial intelligence and R.U.R. and Dollhouse (because they shared that R.U.R. reference) and POI and retro-futurism. We talked about what a good read-aloud it would be (it would! I just really wanted to talk about Dollhouse and POI).

So as I read and make notes of the pathways in my brain that link to these books, I wonder how useful those notes will actually be. I hope, with The Night Diary, that we talk about the Partition. I don't know enough about that. (I know that little Prince Louis was named for Lord Mountbatten. That is not particularly useful.) And I would love to talk about this interview from NPR with Veera Hiranandani, because I'm fascinated by the heading for the last quote. NPR describes it as "what [Hiranandani] wants other young girls to take from Nisha's story," while Hiranandani speaks solely of "readers" and "other 12-year olds." This is par for the course when we talk about books that have female main characters, but it never ceases to be frustrating. This book is good, and it could be enjoyed by boys and girls.