The Blackbird Girls




















The Blackbird Girls by Anne Blackman is a historical fiction book targeted at 9-12 year olds from third to 6th grade as given in the product details at Penguin Random House (n.d.).

The story follows two dual narratives one set in 1986 Russia during the catestrophic events of the Chernobyle nuclear power plant disaster and the other follows a woman in 1941 who must flee her home before the Germans arrive due to her Jewish heritage. The story ends with the two character understanding their horrible situations and what to do to survive in this new world.

This book was selected due in part to its intriguing subject matter and the way it captures these to important historical events through the eyes of children, written for children. I justify using this book despite it not being found on any particular reputable list I could come across, but the subject falls in line with multicultural literature and tells an important story on the backdrop of two catastrophic events that children can learn from and might be learning about in class at the time.

For evaluating this book I will be examining style, character and setting.

The Black Bird is a great example of dual storytelling and its use of style is uniform in helping us understand the story while switching back and forth between two narratives. The language of the story is very visual heavy. Ttake this short excerpt for example, "The sky in the south was red. Smoke churned up toward the scarlet-colored clouds, The smoke wasn't black or gray, but a strange, unearthly blue." By using colors Blackman paints a very interesting and clean picture of what we should be visualizing. It informs us the story will be discriptive and provide some finer details.

Character is also very important in The Blackbird Girls. Following the dual narratives we have to explore the lives of two girls from very different time periods and relate them to each other. Our characters can't be flat or we'll never relate to them and they must appear in a way that makes us root for them. Thankfully, the book doesn't copy and paste these two and they both feel like their own characters with similar but different struggles. Our lead in the 1986 timeline, Valentina has a focus on surviving in a place that has become contaminated by the reactor and her struggle of adapting to that situation carries her narrative. Similarly, Oksana must deal with her own identity as she struggles to survive, being hunted and hated by the Nazis. Her struggle helps us care about her.

Lastly, we have setting. This book has the great luxury of being set within historical period set nearly fourty years apart and as such it must come to the terms of exploring two very different ways of living, people, location and situation. One is set in World War II, the othe set around the Chernbyl disaster and with this each explores their setting with uniqueness and not feeling like the same location. The choice of these two settings is to show similarities and differences between the two by showing the two different ways the characters and the real life people that experienced these events functioned.

References

Blackman, A. (2020). The blackbird girls. Puffin Books.

Penguin Random House (n.d.). The blackbird girls. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/607764/the-blackbird-girls-by-anne-blankman/

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