Borrowed Names: Poems About Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madam C.J. Walker, Marie Curie, and Their Daughters [Hardcover]

Jeannine Atkins (Author)

Book Description

Release date: March 16, 2010

As a child, Laura Ingalls Wilder traveled across the prairie in a covered wagon. Her daughter, Rose, thought those stories might make a good book, and the two created the beloved Little House series.

Sara Breedlove, the daughter of former slaves, wanted everything to be different for her own daughter, A’Lelia. Together they built a million-dollar beauty empire for women of color. Marie Curie became the first person in history to win two Nobel prizes in science. Inspired by her mother, Irène too became a scientist and Nobel prize winner.

Borrowed Names is the story of these extraordinary mothers and daughters.

Borrowed Names is a 2011 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

*Starred Review* In 1867, three women who achieved great success were born: writer Laura Ingalls Wilder, entrepreneur Madam C. J. Walker, and scientist Marie Curie. All three had complicated relationships with their daughters, relationships that Atkins explores in this unusual volume of poetry. Each section follows one daughter from young childhood to adulthood, sketching out the facts of her life, but creating impressions of the emotional lives beyond the facts. Rose Wilder Lane grows up in rural poverty. Constricted by her mother’s expectations, she leaves the Wilder farm to work, marry, and travel, but returns and helps to shape her mother’s books. As a child, A’Lelia Walker watches her mother wash clothes for a meager living, but after her mother’s hair products make them wealthy, A’Lelia grows up to become a patron of the Harlem Renaissance. Curie’s elder daughter, Irène, knows early on that her mother’s focus is on her work with radium. As an adult, Irène continues that work, earning her own Nobel Prize. In vivid scenes written with keen insight and subtle imagery, the poems offer a strong sense of each daughter’s personality as well as the tensions and ties they shared with their notable mothers. Writing with understated drama and quiet power, Atkins enables readers to understand these six women and their mother-daughter relationships in a nuanced and memorable way. Grades 6-9. --Carolyn Phelan

Review

Praise for Borrowed Names:

 

* “This book, powerful when read independently, would also make for a great readers’ theater project for teens. The images created bring powerful emotions to the surface, felt by the women profiled here and by those who read this gem that belongs in any literary cedar chest, as well as in every collection.” —School Library Journal, starred review

 

*  “In vivid scenes written with keen insight and subtle imagery, the poems offer a strong sense of each daughter’s personality as well as the tensions and ties they shared with their notable mothers. Writing with understated drama and quiet power, Atkins enables readers to understand these six women and their mother-daughter relationships in a nuanced and memorable way.” —Booklist, starred review

 

* “The thirty vignettes concerning each mother-daughter pair offer just a few telling facts, beautifully phrased and skillfully arranged to evoke the most significant events and emotional trajectories of entire lives.” —The Horn Book, starred review

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Age Range: 12 and up
  
• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. (BYR); 1 edition (March 16, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805089349
• ISBN-13: 978-0805089349
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #914,746 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jeannine Atkins writes books for children and teens. Her most recent book is Borrowed Names: Poems about Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madam C. J. Walker, Marie Curie and their Daughters. She teaches Children's Literature in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. You can learn more on her website at www.Jeannineatkins.com or read her blog, View from a Window Seat, at http://jeannineatkins.livejournal.com

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful book about mothers, daughters, & the creative spirit March 24, 2010

By L. K. Messner

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I think this is one of my favorite books ever. Really.

Full disclosure - I know Jeannine and heard her read a poem from this book at a writers retreat last summer. It was lovely and poignant, but when she described the book as a collection of poems about mothers and daughters, in the voices of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madam C.J. Walker, and Marie Curie, I wondered a bit how that could all fit together.

Then I was lucky enough to pick up an advance copy of BORROWED NAMES at ALA Midwinter, and I understood.

It does fit. As beautifully as anything I've ever read.

The poetry in this book is magnificent by itself, but it's the characterization of the women -- mothers and daughters both -- that makes it stand out even more. The verse shines with the creative spirit of all of these amazing women, and I really can't imagine capturing the whole give-and-take, come-together-and-go-away moments of mothers and daughters any better.

I'm sitting here at my computer frowning because I can't really make my words do justice to this special book. But trust me. Just go get it.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Beautiful Read May 9, 2010

By Becky Levine

Format:Hardcover

I've had this book on my nightstand for several weeks, because I knew I would want to read it slowly. So of course, I opened it last night and just kept reading. And now it's back on my nightstand, because I want to let the poems and the people in them sit for a bit, then go back to them again and see what else they stir in me.

Yesterday and today, they stirred interest and curiosity and love and sadness. Interest and curiosity, because I thought I "knew" about Laura and Rose, but found out how much there is that I could still find out about them, and because I knew almost nothing about the other women--the mothers or daughters. Love because of the pull between these mothers and daughters, the need for warmth and caring, the need to GIVE warmth and caring. And sadness, because somehow there is a layer to these poems that shows the conflict in the relationships, as well as the connections.

Is it that the three mothers were such strong and, each in their own way, very powerful women? Did this set up a goal that the daughters felt they had to reach and then, perhaps, felt they didn't or couldn't reach? Or is it that all daughters have to break away from who their mother's are, to find out who they themselves might be? And some of the sadness was for the one daughter, at least, who may have learned that piece too late, too late to come back and share it with their mothers.

I'm not sure yet what all the feelings ARE that Atkins has woven into these poems, or what all the feelings ARE that echo in me as a response. I am sure that she has mined deeply into these individual and universal relationships, that she has shared the gold she found with us in lines of beautiful language--both joyous and painful. And I am sure that I will pick up the book again, soon, to see what else I can find for myself.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Rare Treat April 20, 2010

By Sarah Lamstein

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Jeannine Atkins' Borrowed Names is like fine chocolate - velvety texture, rich content. Her three subjects are presented not in their iconic splendor, rather as women in full, with sometimes bumpy childhoods, sometimes sour marriages, passionate in their work though sometimes drawn to it late, and all experiencing the joy and pain of mothering. It is the mothering and the daughtering that is the center of this book. Most interestingly, Atkins gives us the daughters' views of their famous mothers - the strains of the relationships, the stresses of the times - as the younger women make their own lives. The reader comes away with eyes wide open and heart moved by Atkins' surprising, ennobling work.