Others opt for practicality: a phone, a parent’s wallet. Speakers return, continue their thoughts, amend their answers.Īs for the answers themselves, some students pick objects with sentimental value: an old sweater, a baseball game program. Park embraces the chaos, which adds movement to the dialogue. The children are funny and poetic on their own, a multiplicity of voices in discussion and prattling among themselves. The abrupt enjambment at the ends of these lines combined with the push-pull between the forward momentum of the speech and the rules of the sijo, which include subtle volta-like turns of thought from one line to the next, is more distracting than illuminating.
Though Park borrows from the form, she doesn’t adhere to it most of the students’ responses comprise multiple two- to three-line stanzas, giving them a jerky quality. “Oh man, I hate this, I’m never gonna be able to decide,” one declares, but they do, in short exchanges with one another and in longer monologues that follow the structure of the sijo, a Korean three-line syllabic poetic form similar to the haiku or the tanka. You’re allowed to save one thing.” Her characters respond in the casual everyday speech of middle school students.
Park, the Newbery Medal-winning author of “A Single Shard,” begins with the assignment: “Imagine that your home is on fire. We see their faces in our mind’s eye, as though they’re glancing out the window, considering with humor and grace what they value most in their young lives. That’s the image I kept with me throughout “The One Thing You’d Save,” which doesn’t fully succeed in its poetic structure but does convey a crowded classroom where kids share answers of remarkable depth to an ordinary assignment question. THE ONE THING YOU’D SAVE By Linda Sue Park Illustrated by Robert Sae-Hengīefore I started Linda Sue Park’s “The One Thing You’d Save,” I had been reading Heather Christle’s “The Crying Book.” In one section, Christle describes children’s theories about the composition of the moon that were published in The American Journal of Psychology in 1902 as “a house made entirely of windows, in every one a child’s round face.”
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