I read the book Homesick by Jean Fritz SUMMARY:This book is an autobiography about a girl who grows up in China, with American parents, and her amah. She dreams of going to America, which she write letters to her grandma who lived in Pennsylvania. This book describes her everyday struggles of how to define "home" and "family". She lives in pre-communist Hankow, China. She attends a British school and refuses to sing "god save the queen", but she does whisper quietly the part about America. Later she has to disappear to a remote cottage in China to get away from the revolution happening in her home city. Then she has a baby sister that dies suddenly which causes much sadness in her family at this already tough time. Eventually she leaves China and she realizes her homesickness isn't for America, but she is leaving her place of birth. SHe then reflects on how important living in China was in her life and how much she truly will miss it. CRITIQUE: I believe that young readers will not have an interest in the person in this particular book. I would not pick it off of a single shelf because i had never heard of Jean Fritz before now. But i believe once children start reading this book they will become interested in her way of life and how they should value American as their home. I think the readers can very much identify with the main character. She is the same age that many children will be when reading this book in my class so they will be able to relate to her problems and wonders about other places in the world and where her family is from. Her language she uses is humorous and somewhat sarcastic which makes the story believable. With the humorous and easy to read language it maintains the readers attention throughout the whole book. The author really grabs the attention of the readers also by using first person language and showing the story from the main characters perspective. I did some extra research on the character and the information in the book is very accurate and true. Since it is an autobiography the information is expected to be very true and a first hand experience. I also enjoyed reading the expert in the back of the book and seeing the two real photos of Jean Fritz to get a mental picture of what she looked like through this time in her life. RESPONSE: I enjoyed this book because it showed the differences in cultures and what it would be like to live in China. It also shows to appreciate your family and the place you come from. I would have this book in my classroom to give a different perspective to China that many children have no encountered. This is a first hand experience of someone that is the audiences age in my classroom and they will be able to really relate to Jean at this point in her Life.
Pretty decent read, I s'pose. I read the whole thing in about two hours on Saturday. I would say the book was just okay. I thought it over-simplified many of the issues going on in China. I couldn't help but feel that the author seemed like a rather spoiled girl. She's complaining about living in China and she wants to live in America (where her parents are from), but meanwhile she's surrounded by all these servants and she has a huge house while millions of Chinese are starving on the streets. I understand that it must have been difficult to be a foreigner during the beginnings of the revolution in China (the Chinese were NOT very fond of foreigners at that time). I understand that she felt like an outsider in the country where she'd spent her entire life. But still, I think the author did not put things into perspective enough. Looking back as an adult, I think she should be mature enough to see that the Chinese were kind of justified in their distrust of foreigners. For a long time, China was basically split up between several foreign nations. Most of the foreigners living in China were extremely rich, living in lavish households filled with dozens of servants (like the author, Jean Fritz). I can hardly blame the starving and emaciated Chinese citizens for calling the author and her family "foreign devils." Yet, Jean Fritz acts like she was such a victim. I realize that Jean Fritz herself was not to blame for what happened in China (and of course, I do NOT think that anything could justify the killing of foreigners by Chinese revolutionaries), but I still think that she should see now as an adult that the Chinese attitude toward foreigners was at least partly justified. Fritz portrays the events in China in a very one-dimensional way and I think her whole book suffers because of it.
Ms. Fritz is a great storyteller! She tells her story from her perspective as a child in China, at age 10, and it is so accurately presented, age-wise. (...from my perspective living with an 11 yr old and 9 yr old). Enjoyable and humorous, with real life mingled in. The reason I did not assign five stars can be explained by a comment made by my 11 yr old, who said "Um, nothing really *happened* in that story." As far as plot structure, there is not really a build-up, a central event, and a resolution. It is "just" her story of the last year or so in China before she came home to the United States - which was home only in her dreams as she had never actually lived there. Short and fun to read, but don't expect a life-changing, pivotal experience. Just lots of every day life lessons tempered by youth, with some roller skating thrown in at the end. :)
—Katie
Jean thinks she was born on the wrong side of the world, but her love of the Yangtze River infuses her entire life. "Why did I love the river so? It wasn't what you would call beautiful. It wasn't like anything. It just was and it had always been."Jean is so much like that river. She's not beautiful, she's not Marjorie, she just is who she is. How interesting that her last trip on the river was in a boat surrounded with armor...separating her from her childhood home and her childhood.The author makes us each feel like a ten-year-old girl, trying to understand grown-ups and the inequalities of life. Jean Fritz is a master at putting her readers in the middle of historic events. Although "homesick" is primarily the account of a girl in pre-Communist China, it is also a history book, bringing the political and cultural details of that country to life.
—Penny Johnson
Homesick is a book based on the life of Jean Fritz, some of the story is fiction and the others are true accounts of her life growing up in China. The main characters in the book are Jean, her parent’s, their servant Lin Nai-Nai, and Jean’s best friend Andrea. The plot of the book is centered around Jean’s childhood in China. I think that Jean is someone whose life would be of interest to young readers. Growing up in China as US citizen is definitely something that would interest students, and with our diverse culture it would be good to incorporate this piece of literature.The author has presented Jean in a way that all readers can identify with her. Telling her story as both a biography and fiction blended together keeps the reader interested, it also keeps the flow of the novel going. This book would be great for a multicultural unit and would be a good way to teach your students about different cultures.
—Amanda Delegram
