Finding Fighting Words Made The Ground Feel Very Hard When We Landed (Slow Clap)

 

Ok, so here is how the last two rounds have gone for us over at SBS. We all read Fighting Words pretty much at the same time and we were having fist fights in the hallways about who would actually get to adopt these girls if they were standing here in front of us. So, yeah, that book got in our blood a little bit, and there was kind of a sense of that round being effectively over. And then one or two of us dipped our toe into When The Ground is Hard and the texting and whispers began: “Holy crap, this is really good. Is it actually better!!??!!” and, damn, if we didn’t end up thinking it was, so even when it didn’t make it through that round it was our no brainer for a Zombie pick. And then came the finale. The only book we had left to read was Clap When You Land. While we were mindful of the pedigree - I think we all loved Poet X and have been putting it in the hands of a number of kids these past few years - I don’t think any of us really thought that it was going to knock off these two books that we loved so much, but then it did. Kind of.

 Here’s where I think we ended up:

 Fighting Words is quite simply the book we thought we could and should get into the most hands. The prose was both eloquent and accessible and while the content matter is gut-wrenching, it opens up a topic that needs to come out of the shadows and I think it would flip the empathy switch on even the most hardened heart. As one of our team said “It’s been months since I’ve read it, but I still think about those two girls.” 

 I don’t think you are going to find a more perfectly crafted novel than When the Ground is Hard and it strikes some of the same chords as Fighting Words in terms of helping kids dig a bit deeper into their reserves of kindness and empathy. This would be a rich and powerful text to teach, but may be a bit daunting for some of our younger and/or struggling readers. That did not stop us, however, from saying this was the best book that we read in The Smackdown.

 And then, finally, came Clap When You Land and I think our sense was that it’s power maybe came in finding that greatness sweet spot between the other two books. It wasn’t quite as stomach-churning and ugly-cry inducing as Fighting Words, and while beautiful, poignant and lyrical, I’m not sure it was quite as carefully crafted as When The Ground is Hard, but it also, for all its complexity and poetry, would be accessible and even a relatively quick read for a wide range of kids. Like the narrator in Poet X, I felt like both knew these girls and wanted to meet them.

 One thing I know back from my days writing Exemplar and Reliability Review Rationales on the Diploma Exam marking floor (Shout out to you, Smilanich!) is that you sometimes don’t know what something is until you actually start writing about it. I think I’d have a long way to go until I really felt certain that any one of these three excellent books was demonstrably better than the others, but they should all unquestionably be in your school and classroom libraries. 

 My final vote is going to Elizabeth Acevedo’s Clap When You Land, but I think we’re all going to take a pause before we click send on our final vote and it wouldn’t surprise me if we have three different books coming forward from the four of us.