Richie's Picks: OPERATION REDWOOD by S. Terrell French, Amulet, Earth Day
2009, 368p., ISBN: 978-0-8109-8354-0
"We need wilderness preserved -- as much of it as is still left, and as many
kinds -- because it was the challenge against which our character as a
people was formed. The remainder and the reassurance that it is still there is
good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in
it. It is good for us when we are young, because of the incomparable sanity it
can bring briefly, as vacation and rest, into our insane lives. It is
important to us when we are old simply because it is there -- important, that is,
simply as idea."
-- Wallace Stegner, 1961
"How I love this happy place,
This healing place...I love it
How I love this peaceful place
This place with wings."
-- Joanne Rand
"The computer beeped. Julian glanced at the screen, and saw a message so
astonishing that he sprayed ginger ale out his nose and all across his uncle's
computer screen.
"The subject of the newest e-mail read: 'SIBLEY CARTER IS A MORON AND A
WORLD CLASS JERK!!!'"
Susannah T. French, environmental lawyer-turned-first-time children's book
author and Left Coast member of the "Class of 2K9," cites Elaine Konigsburg
and Jean Craighead George amongst her own childhood reading influences. In
OPERATION REDWOOD -- which takes place in my neck of the woods -- French employs
the cleverness of Konigsburg and the reverence of George in a hijinx-laden
activist tale of two boys and a girl who plot to protect a privately-owned
grove of old growth redwoods from being clear cut by a corporation.
"'Today, experts estimate that about 4 percent of the original redwood
forest remains.'
"Julian frowned. He pictured ninety-six giant trunks lying on the forest
floor and only four trees left standing. That couldn't be right."
Julian Carter-Li has been having a truly miserable time of things since his
mother departed San Francisco on her grant-underwritten photography trip to
China. Julian has been stuck in the nightmarish care of his wealthy paternal
aunt and uncle -- a very Dursley-ish duo. (His aunt employs a point system
to supposedly motivate his behavior with incentives. He is now at NEGATIVE
twenty-something and sinking fast.) And so it is that on a long afternoon and
evening when he is under the weather and left alone, to wait for hours and
hours in Uncle Sibley's corporate office, that Julian stumbles upon the
insulting, aforementioned, UNOPENED e-mail on his uncle's computer. Opening (and
then deleting) the email, Julian learns that his uncle is planning to
clear-cut some place called Big Tree Grove.
When Julian and his best bud Danny Lopez decide to reply to the insulting
email, they learn that the author is Robin Elder, a girl living a couple of
hours north of San Francisco, who will be personally impacted -- devastated by
the loss of her family's Eden -- if Uncle Sibley's plan is successful. As the
e-mails begin flying back and forth, Julian and Danny decide to secretly join
forces with Robin to attempt the impossible.
"He tried to imagine how the land might have looked five hundred years
earlier, when the Miwok Indians lived there."
I can remember how, as a teenager, I would sometimes play the game that
Julian plays -- imagining what a place looked like before developments and strip
malls and the asphalt roads that connect one strip mall to the next. Of
course, at my age I don't have to imagine. I am quite aware of the changes --
for the worse -- that have, in my own lifetime, taken place.
Shouldn't we be asking ourselves -- assuming that it is not already too late
-- whether or not it matters that such species as the Black rhinoceros, the
Bactrian camel, the Giant panda, or the Blue whale still roam the Earth when
humanity reaches the future inhabited by our children's children's children.
Does it matter whether or not our descendents have the opportunities I have
had to stroll through groves of trees that seem to reach to the sky and that
date back to Columbus and the Magna Carta and Kublai Khan? Whether one is
young or old, such questions can so easily fall between the cracks amongst the
day-to-day demands of living our lives.
OPERATION REDWOOD will surely get some kids wondering how much of Earth's
fragile beauty and diversity future generations will be required to experience
as no more than a figment of the imagination. Hopefully Julian, Danny, and
Robin's take-charge, good-hearted activism will rub off on readers and have
them thinking about speaking their own minds when they are faced with the
destruction of their natural inheritance.
Richie Partington, MLIS
Richie's Picks http://richiespicks.com
Moderator, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/middle_school_lit
http://www.myspace.com/richiespicks
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