Author: Terry Pratchett
Publisher: HarperCollins
Copyright: 2008
ISBN: 9780061433016
Reading Level/Interest Age: Grades 7-12
Genre: Adventure/Thrilllers--Survival Stories
Reader’s Annotation: When a tsunami destroys his world, Mau sets out to rebuild it with the help of a "ghost girl," Daphne.
Plot Summary
While Mau is on his way home from time spent on an uninhabited island as part of his coming-of-age ritual, a great wave sweeps over his home (“the Nation”) and the surrounding islands. Mau returns to his home to find everyone dead. How could the gods have let this happen? Mau collects the bodies of his people, giving them proper burials at sea so they can become dolphins. But he is not alone on the island. An English girl, Daphne, whose ship was carried up onto the island survived the wreck. At first deeply suspicious of each other, Mau and Daphne (whom he thinks of as “the ghost girl”) gradually learn to communicate and come to rely on each other. Soon more people, survivors from other, smaller islands, begin arriving. Together they begin building a new society built on both the traditions of the Nation and Daphne’s rationalism. But soon this fledgling people faces its greatest challenge yet—cannibal raiders are on their way, led by the mutineers from Daphne’s ship.
Critical Evaluation
Nation starts out promisingly. The scenes of Mau’s return to his ruined home and his burial work are very powerful, and his early interactions with Daphne humorous. The writing is elegant and the setting detailed. Mau and Daphne are believable and touching as two teens who have lost everything but gather their hope and courage to try to build a good world. Unfortunately, Pratchett can’t resist hammering away on the “problem of evil.” While Mau’s questions about how the gods could allow his world to be destroyed (and his conclusion that they must not exist) are valid and thought-provoking, Pratchett allows these questions to dominate, rather than inform, the story. The priest character, who argues with Mau about continuing the religious practices of the Nation, is a cartoonish, dogmatic, lazy jerk. Toward the end of the book, Mau makes an unlikely discovery that further derails the plot. Deep in a cave he finds evidence that his people had astronomy and other sciences before Europeans did; they just forgot about them because they became too religious. This has the opposite effect Pratchett intends. Instead of showing that all of the world’s cultures deserve respect for their unique contributions, this discovery seems to say that only advanced science can put other cultures on an equal footing with the western world.
Curriculum Ties: N/A
Booktalking Ideas: What if your whole life were swept away? How would you rebuild it? Whom would you trust? How would it change you?
Challenge Issues: Anti-religious content, violence
In the defense file, I will include my library's selection policy, ALA's Library Bill of Rights, ALA's guidelines on free access to libraries for minors (http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/intfreedom/librarybill/interpretations/freeaccesslibraries.cfm), and ALA's strategies and tips for dealing with challenges to library materials (http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/challengeslibrarymaterials/copingwithchallenges/strategiestips/index.cfm). I will also include my library's reconsideration form, in case challenges to this book cannot be defused with "tea and sympathy." I'll include reviews from School Library Journal, Booklist, Bookmarks Magazine, Kirkus Reviews, Kliatt, The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, and VOYA.
About the Author
SIR TERRY PRATCHETT: born 28 April 1948, Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. Major source of education: Beaconsfield Public Library (though school must have been of some little help). After passing his 11-plus in 1959, he attended High Wycombe Technical High School rather than the local grammar because he felt ‘woodwork would be more fun than Latin’. At this time he had no real vision of what he wanted to do with his life, and remembers himself as a ‘nondescript student’.
When Terry was thirteen, his short story ‘The Hades Business’ was published in the school magazine Technical Cygnet, and two years later, commercially, in Science Fantasy. With the proceeds he bought his first typewriter. Other short stories – ‘Solution’, ‘The Picture’ and maybe others, yet undiscovered – also appeared in the Cygnet. Terry was in line for a bright future. Having earned five O-levels and started A-level courses in Art, History and English, he decided after the first year to try journalism, and when a job opportunity came up on the Bucks Free Press, he talked things over with his parents, and left school in 1965. While with the Press he still read avidly, took the two-year National Council for the Training of Journalists proficiency course (and came top in the country in its exams) and passed an A level in English, both while on day release.
Terry married Lyn Purves at the Congregational Church in Gerrards Cross in October 1968, by which time he had interviewed Peter Bander van Duren, my fellow director of our publishing company Colin Smythe Limited, for the Bucks Free Press about a book he had edited on education in the coming decade, Looking forward to the Seventies. At this time Terry mentioned to him that he had written a book called The Carpet People and asked whether we would consider it for publication? So Peter passed it to me. Yes. It was a delight, and it was obvious that here was an author we had to publish.
He was working at the CEGB when we published the first of the Discworld books, The Colour of Magic, in 1983.
While on tour in America in summer 2007, Terry told audiences at the National Book Festival in Washington DC (during which Terry breakfasted at the White House and dined at the Library of Congress with the other featured authors) and in New York, that he’d had a stroke, but the symptoms had been misdiagnosed, and were of a far worse illness, posterior cortical atrophy, a rare variant of Alzheimer’s disease, which was diagnosed in December.
Terry has now written fifty books (of which thirty-nine are Discworld novels) and co-authored a further fifty more. Between them they have sold over 65 million copies in thirty-seven languages, which I calculate would be a pile of books over 1,000 miles high, stretching further than Land’s End in Cornwall to the furthest tip of the Shetland Islands off the north coast of Scotland – or from New Orleans to Chicago, and then some.
The year [2008] climaxed with the announcement that Terry had been included in the 2009 New Year’s Honours List, being appointed a Knight Bachelor, ‘for services to literature’, with the press handout adding that it was ‘in recognition of the huge impact his work has had across all ages and strata of society and across the world’.
Terry is now an adjunct Professor at Trinity College, Dublin University, and in November 2010 went to Dublin to give his inaugural lecture and masterclasses, as he did so again in March 2011.
http://www.colinsmythe.co.uk/terrypages/tpindex.htm
Why is this title included?
Nation is on many best-of lists and has won several prestigious awards, including Best Kids Books of the Year, Washington Post, 2008; Booklist Best Books for Young Adults, 2009; Publishers Weekly Best Children's Books, 2008; School Library Journal Best Books, 2008; YALSA Top Ten Best Books for Young Adults, 2009; Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Excellence in Children's Literature, 2009 Winner Fiction and Poetry; Los Angeles Times Book Prize, 2008 Winner Young Adult Literature; and the Michael L. Printz Award, 2009 Honor Book. Obviously other reviewers found it less flawed than I did.