Reaching for Sun [Hardcover]

Tracie Vaughn Zimmer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 6, 2007 | Age Level: 8 and up | Grade Level: 3 and up

Josie Wyatt knows what it means to be different. Her family's small farmhouse seems to shrink each time another mansion grows up behind it. She lives with her career-obsessed mom and opinionated Gran, but has never known her father. Then there's her cerebral palsy: even if Josie wants to forget that she was born with a disability, her mom can't seem to let it go. Yet when a strange new boy--Jordan--moves into one of the houses nearby, he seems oblivious to all the things that make Josie different. Before long, Josie finds herself reaching out for something she's never really known: a friend… and possibly more. Interlinked free verse poems tell the beautiful, heartfelt story of a girl, a family farm reduced to a garden, and a year of unforgettable growth.

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

Grade 7 Up—Josie, a girl with cerebral palsy, lives on the shrinking farmland owned by her family for generations and now being sold to developers. Her mother works and attends college and her grandmother tends her diminished patch of land. The story is told in the seventh-grader's voice in a series of free-verse poems. She is a bright and wry narrator, acutely aware of her limitations and her strengths. When Jordan, wealthy but neglected by his widowed father, moves into a mansion behind her farmhouse, they discover a common love of nature and science, and Josie finally has a real friend. She and her grandmother are both passionate about plants and gardening, and Zimmer does a nice job integrating botanical images throughout the novel. Josie feels like a "dandelion in a purple petunia patch" and thinks, "I must be a real disappointment—/stunted foliage,/no yield." Through growing maturity and Granny's wisdom, she gains confidence in herself. Reaching for Sun will have wide appeal for readers of diverse ability. Reluctant readers will be attracted to the seeming simplicity of the text, with short chapters and lots of white space on the page. They may not even realize that they are reading poetry. More sophisticated readers will find added enjoyment as they begin to appreciate the poetic structure and imagery. Readers of all levels will enjoy spending time with Josie and may gain an increased awareness of what it's like to live with a disability.—Nancy Brown, Fox Lane High School, Bedford, NY
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

As if seventh grade weren't enough of a challenge for anyone, Josie also struggles with cerebral palsy, social isolation, a mom she needs more time and support from, and monster bulldozers that are carving up the countryside to build huge homes around her family's old farmhouse. Enter new neighbor Jordan, a sensitive kid whose geeky, science-loving ways bring a fun spirit of discovery into Josie's days. He melds with her and her family, especially the warm and wise Gram, and the friends create a kind of magic as they conduct all kinds of plant and pond experiments. Further challenges face Josie when Gram becomes ill and Jordan goes off to camp. Then, risking her mom's wrath, Josie secretly ditches her hated therapy sessions; when mother and daughter eventually reconcile, Josie emerges from her rough patch in a believable and transforming way. Written in verse, this quick-reading, appealing story will capture readers' hearts with its winsome heroine and affecting situations. Anne O'Malley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 8 and up
  
• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA Childrens; 1st edition (March 6, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1599900378
• ISBN-13: 978-1599900377
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #493,390 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Tracie Vaughn Zimmer is an award-winning children's author who graduated from The Ohio State University and attained her master's degree at Miami. Currently, she teaches at her alma mater in the Lakota Local School District near Cincinnati, Ohio. Writing in a variety of genres from historical fiction and poetry to novels-in-verse, Tracie's six books have received critical acclaim including starred reviews as well as the Schneider Family Book Award. In addition, Tracie has created hundreds of guides for children's and young adult literature that are available for free on her blog. She has presented at NCTE, IRA and ALA as well as schools and conferences across the country inspiring teachers, librarians and students with her infectious passion for literacy.


Oddball facts/favorite things:

Someday I'll move to Brooklyn, NY or a remote Caribbean island.
Individually wrapped Ghiradelli milk chocolate caramels.
Revision over the blank page.
My first journal entry: December 24, 1978.
Buckeye football Saturdays
Movies with puffy dresses and men on moors
Louie, the world's largest collie and Mickey, the six-fingered cat
Poet: Mary Oliver
I wish I could sing, draw, or play the cello
Snow days

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poetic Growth, March 6, 2007

By 

Little Willow (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Reaching for Sun (Hardcover)

Reaching for Sun celebrates the growth of a young girl who flourishes over the course of a year, just like the flowers in her family's garden. As things change with the seasons, so does she, thanks in part to an unexpected new friend, her motivated mother, and her inspirational grandmother.

Josie was born with cerebral palsy, a condition which has affected one side of her body more than the other. She is a little shy and a little embarrassed to be in the special education class. She is very close to her mother and her grandmother, but hasn't any close friends at school.

Reaching for Sun is a verse novel told from Josie's point of view. Though Josie sometimes has difficulties expressing herself and speaking her thoughts, her voice on the page is full of strength. The book is split into four portions, marking each season and accentuating it with a famous quote. The floral motif is punctuated with illustrations of a flower slowly sprouting, budding, and opening on the bottom of the right-hand pages, creating a sort of flipbook, akin to that in What My Mother Doesn't Know by Sonya Sones.

A beautiful book simply told, I recommend Reaching for Sun alongside Rules by Cynthia Lord, Hugging the Rock by Susan Taylor Brown, and So B. It by Sarah Weeks, all well-written stories in which young characters and/or their family members overcome physical limitations and discover their inner strengths.

Take note of this book. Reaching for Sun has already been placed on my Best Books of 2007 list. I highly recommend it.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect for BOTH avid and reluctant readers, March 6, 2007

By 

J. Durango (Illinois) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Reaching for Sun (Hardcover)

This novel in verse tells the story of Josie, a girl with cerebral palsy who'll win your heart on every page as she navigates the various relationships in her life, including her first real friendship.

This is a quick read with lots of white space, which should make it appealing and accessible for reluctant readers. At the same time, Josie's wry observations will provide plenty of food for thought for more sophisticated readers who will savor the garden imagery and Vaughn Zimmer's gorgeous writing.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Cause I'm not like everybody else / I'm not like everybody else, June 10, 2007

By 

E. R. Bird "Ramseelbird" (Manhattan, NY) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Reaching for Sun (Hardcover)

Try this sometime. Read a book, put it down, and then wait a couple months. Let the distinct memories of the title ebb away. Your first impressions are tamed. Your fervor (of either the positive or negative variety) softens a bit. This method of reviewing is a way of separating the wheat from the chaff. If a book sticks with you for a certain period of time, it must be worth remembering. "Reaching for Sun" is worth remembering. A very gentle, warm, and welcoming book it feels like nothing so much as a gently scented bath. First time novelist Tracie Vaughn Zimmer tries her hand on a preliminary verse novel technique and, for the most part, pulls it off with aplomb. A title of the sweeter variety.

Josie loves so much. The woods behind her home. Her Gran and her mother. Nature itself. What she doesn't love is having to attend special education classes for her cerebral palsy. She's also not too fond of the fact that she doesn't have a real friend to hang out with. That is, before she meets Jordan. The only son of a busy businessman, Jordan sees the extraordinary that resides within Josie. Yet before too long Josie's life gets extremely difficult. Her mother's making her attend classes at the clinic that she simply does not want to attend. She fights with Jordan and she starts skipping clinic only to have her Gran collapse ill at home. Life can be cruel and life can be beautiful and Josie sees equal parts of either side.

The verse novel still has to justify its own existence with every book that uses its style. When you pick up a work of fiction written in verse you have to ask yourself, "Would this title be stronger or weaker if it were just straight prose?" Zimmer's advantage is that Josie lives a life that's best suited for poetry. The very world around her sings. To hear her say, "I'm the wisteria vine growing up the arbor of this odd family, reaching for sun," would sound trite or forced if the book weren't verse. Instead, it's just lovely. This isn't a case where the author wrote some sentences and then randomly chopped them up into lines. It's a book that flows to its own internal rhythm.

This isn't Zimmer's first book either, you know. She wrote a poetry title called, Sketches From a Spy Tree so her poetry credentials are well and truly in order. As for those amongst you curious as to whether or not Josie's cerebral palsy is treated with the proper amount of attention, Ms. Zimmer also happened to teach high school students with autism and middle school children with developmental and learning disabilities (as this title's bookflap explains). I, personally, have never had any contact with anyone with cerebral palsy, so maybe I'm not the best person to judge. Still, if you wanted to find books on a disability that was treated with the utmost respect, I cannot see that Zimmer does anything but impress.

It doesn't hurt things any that the language in "Reaching for Sun" is distinctly pleasurable too. The "poem" called "holiday buffet", for example, shows off the author's low key style. "On Christmas Eve / we buy up the gala apples / with thumbprint bruises, / oranges, scaly and puckered, / even bananas spotted like / Granny's hands." And when Josie meets Jordan for the first time the books says that her voice is like "new chalk". Later, Gran defends the raucous brightly colored energy of her home and says that though she sold most of her land she didn't sell the family's imagination. Be that as it may, Josie wonders of that imagination, "if we could bleach it - just a bit." And when Jordan comes out wearing his swim trunks, "his shoulders look like the nub / of new growth on a tree. / In my swimsuit I feel exposed - / a seedling in a late frost." Good stuff.

It has a first book feel to it, of course. That's not necessarily a criticism. It's just that sometimes you read a book and it offers you hints of greater things to come. "Reaching for Sun" does that. It's not a flashy book. It won't parade itself about demanding attention and respect. But the emotions in this title are raw, the characters real, and the situations interesting. A fine example of the verse novel and bound to be a book report favorite.