Sunshine by Jarrett J. Krosoczka

At the time Jarrett begins to volunteer at Camp Sunshine, he is sixteen-years-old and in high school,  living with his grandparents, his own parents mostly out of his life in any meaningful way. His grandmother has lots of questions and wonders how such a camp could be a positive experience. She can't comprehend how it would not be depressing being around kids diagnosed with cancer. But Jarrett is undeterred and so his grandfather drives him to Holy Rosary School to meet the van taking the high school students to camp.

His high school has a tradition of seniors volunteering for a week at Camp Sunshine. Jarrett was one of the lucky ones whose name was chosen at random along with five other students. Those students are Chad O'Halleran, Andrea Kim, Erin Price, Christine Lowery, Jonathan Garnier and two chaperones, the no-nonsense Sister Frances, and chain-smoking Mrs. (MaryBeth) Gormley. They arrive at Camp Sunshine after a three hour drive in the school van. As they drive to their trailer on Brown Road, Sister Frances hands out everyone's assignments.

Jarrett is assigned to a camper named Diego with special needs. Diego has advanced brain cancer, uses a wheelchair and has tubes under his arm and in his chest.

Mrs. Gormley reminds Jarrett and the other students how important this week will be to the campers and their families - it might be the happiest week they have had in a long time. She hints that their perspective will change throughout the week.

Jarrett is overwhelmed as he reads through the camp manual about the medical needs of the campers - something he's not responsible for. The other guys in Jarrett's trailer are nervous since none of them have met someone with cancer.

At orientation that evening, they meet Papa Frank, a kindly retiree who runs the camp program,  and their team leaders, Joy and Gary. 

While waiting in the dining room for Diego and his family, Jarrett meets Shelly Orfaos and her children, Jason, Mary and Eric, who has cancer.

On the first day of camp, Jarrett meets Diego and his parents, Carlos and Carmen who tell Jarrett that Deigo has suffered some cognitive decline and that he doesn't want to be at the camp. But as the week goes on, Diego begins to open up and enjoy himself, and Jarrett finds himself forming a deep bond with little Eric and the other campers who will impact his life in ways he can't imagine.

Discussion

Sunshine is the follow-up to Krosoczka's poignant memoir about growing up in his grandparents home, while dealing with an absent father and a mother with an addiction. 

Sunshine opens with Jarrett on his way to Sunshine Camp to volunteer for a week at the camp for children with terminal cancer. The graphic novel chronicles his journey through the week beginning with the start of camp, to life after camp and into college. In his Author's Note at the back, Jarrett indicates that "While the story in this book centers on that first week that I entered into this important work, some of the incidents and stories that I included are taken from subsequent years of working at Camp Sunshine and The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp." 

Initially Jarrett wonders what he can offer his camper, thirteen-year-old Diego, who has such intense needs and is only a few years younger. Jarrett is also disappointed with his assignment because he wanted to work with younger children. However, as the week goes on, Jarrett's perspective begins to change as he comes to understand how the camp helps the children. Life for them is very different: a world filled with doctors and nurses, while their healthy brothers and sisters are "...lost in the shadows of their siblings' illness." At camp, Jarrett comes to realize that the kids with cancer are "the mainstream kids" for once. Jarrett begins to see the campers in a different way too: he begins "...to look past the wheelchairs, bald heads, and oxygen tanks to see these kids as just...well, kids."  He also realizes these families experience pain, fear, and loneliness and that camp gives them a respite from this. 

As the end of camp approaches, both the campers and the teen volunteers struggle with the intense emotions they are experiencing. The volunteers have grown attached to their campers emotionally, and there is the realization that some of the campers will not survive their illness. For the campers, it means a return to the reality of their lives, hospitals, procedures, doctors and nurses. On the last day, Diego tells Jarrett that going home will mean people looking at him with pity, seeing him as "Diego with cancer." For Jarrett, coming home means a significant change in his perspective on life. Despite Jarrett having some significant issues in his own life regarding his parents, he finds these don't define him anymore and that his pervious worries seem unimportant.

Perhaps the most moving part of Krosoczka's graphic novel is what came a few years after his initial experience at Camp Sunshine. By this time Jarrett was in college and had continued to keep in touch with Eric's family. They had spent summers and even Christmas together. But Jarrett began having a dream that would turn out to be a haunting premonition of what was to come. 

In reflecting on his time at Camp Sunshine, in his Author's Note, Jarrett writes about what he learned from his experience and writes, "Perhaps I connected so quickly with them because I understood what it was like to yearn for childhood during childhood. Trauma has a way of forcing you to grow up while you are still in a small body."  Jarrett was uniquely placed to help campers like Eric and his family, and the young teen, Diego, because he too had experienced fear, loneliness and isolation as a child. When Jarrett and the other teen volunteers were on their way to the camp, the were cautioned by Mrs. Gormley that "this experience is bigger than any of you.", that they would quickly learn from the experience what was important in life,  and that no matter how much work they put into helping the children, they would get back much more than they gave. For Jarrett and his fellow volunteers, that was definitely what happened.

Sunshine is about so much more than volunteering at a camp for kids with cancer. Sharing ourselves with those whose life circumstances are hard, offers the chance to put our own lives in perspective, to bring just a little bit of joy to others while easing their fears, pain, and isolation. For Jarrett Krosoczka, Camp Sunshine gave back more than he anticipated, just as Mrs. Gormley predicted it would! The lovely, joyful picture of Jarrett at the end of the book is proof this is so.

Book Details:

Sunshine by Jarrett J. Kroscoczka
New York: Graphix,      2023
240 pp.

Signs Of Survival: A Memoir of the Holocaust by Renee Hartman with Joshua M Greene

In Signs of Survival, Renee and Herta relate their harrowing experience of living through the Holocaust and their lives afterwards. Their story is told in alternating first person narration.

Renee was born in 1933, her sister Herta in 1935. Herta writes that there were several generations of deaf people in their family including their parents, Julius and Henrietta. To communicate, they used sign language. Their parents attended the Vienna School for the Deaf: their father was a master jeweller and their mother a dressmaker.

Renee and Herta grew up in Bratislava, a city in the Nazi-occupied Slovak Republic. Fifteen thousand Jews lived in Bratislava at this time. Jews living in Bratislava's wealthier areas were forced to move into the poorer, Old Town area. Renee and Herta's family lived in a fourth floor apartment. Because the Nazis would not allow Jewish children to attend school, Renee did not begin her formal education until after the war. 

The family soon moved to Brno where there was a large Jewish community. They eventually returned to Bratislava but soon the situation in the city began to worsen with Nazi soldiers beating Jewish citizens. Then they were forced to wear the yellow Star of David on their outer clothing.

By 1941, Renee and her family had six extra people living with them in their apartment as the Nazis the Jewish population into the Old Town. She remembers seeing the "transports" where Jews were forced from their homes into transport trucks and taken to "resettlement camps' which they later learned were actually concentration camps to murder them. Because Renee was able to hear, she would listen for the Nazi soldiers and sign to her family that they needed to hide.

In 1943, Renee and Herta were sent by their parents to live on a farm of friends who were also deaf. Their farm was located in the foothills of the Tatra Mountains and they agreed to take the girls only if they were paid a large sum every month. The girls would receive one surprise visit from their father, after that they never saw him again.

When the farm couple did not receive money for over five months they told their girls they could no longer stay and they drove them back to Bratislava and left them on the street. They realized there were almost no Jews left in the city. Alone and unable to locate their parents, the girls lived on the streets for weeks before they finally turned themselves into the police. So would begin their haunting journey into the depths of the Holocaust. 

Fortunately, Renee and Herta survived the Holocaust and came to live a long productive life in America.

Discussion

Signs of Survival is a Holocaust memoir geared towards younger readers and is perfect for introducing them to this difficult topic. It is a witness account of the experiences of two sisters, Renee and Herta Hartmann who lived in Slovakia during the Nazi occupation, their time in the infamous concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen and their life afterwards in America. In this way it offers readers  through eye-witness testimony, the real life experience of the Holocaust as well as their life in the decades afterwards. At this time, while Renee is still living in the United States, Herta passed away in 2021 at the age of eighty-seven.

Renee and Herta do not go into explicit detail about some of the evils of the Holocaust (for example the Slovakian citizens beating their Jewish neighbours, the transports, and life in the concentration camp) but provide enough details that younger readers will understand what happened. This is done in an easy reading style with both Renee and Herta offering their accounts, and done in short chapters. Their account shows two very young children caught up in a situation that forced them to fend for themselves with Renee being the ears for Herta, ensuring that the two sisters remained together even through the worst of situations, from starving on the streets of Bratislava, to suffering through typhus in Bergen-Belsen.

At the back, the author has included an Epilogue about the Holocaust and a section of photographs of the sisters and their families. A map showing the countries of Nazi Europe during World War II would be helpful for readers.  Signs of Survival, the title a play on the use of sign language used by Renee and Herta to communicate and to keep Herta especially safe, is highly recommended for middle grade readers.

Book Details:

Signs of Survival: A Memoir of the Holocaust by Renee Hartman with Joshua M. Greene
New York: Scholastic Press    2021
123 pp.

This Star Won't Go Out by Esther Earl with Lori and Wayne Earl

Esther Grace Earl was a vibrant teenager, with her entire life before her; a life a many possibilities. One of those possibilities Esther thought, might involve becoming a writer someday and to that end she kept a diary. From these diaries and from those who knew her comes this beautiful and deeply touching book that is part memoir/part biography about a young girl whose life inspired young adult author, John Green to finally complete a book he had been working on prior to meeting Esther. That novel was the immensely popular, The Fault In Our Stars.

Green met Esther at a Harry Potter convention, LeakyCon in Boston in 2009. They were both Potter fans obviously, but Esther was also a fan of Green's novels. Post-LeakyCon, they continued to talk via Skype and while Green knew Esther was ill with cancer, the internet allowed Esther to have a friendship with Green and others that was not defined by her cancer and her illness. To her internet friends, she was simply Esther. Compassionate, funny and intelligent. Esther became one of Green's many vlog followers (named nerdfighters). As Esther's illness progressed, her "Internet" friends, including Green, soon discovered that this young woman was indeed very ill and was dying. This came about through a Skype chat group which collectively called itself Catitude. As Esther's health began to decline she was able to meet some members of Catitude as well as John Green in a sort of "reverse Wish". In his foreword to this book, Green writes that we often place the terminally ill on a pedestal, claiming for them a uniqueness that has its basis in their illness. But Green felt that Esther was special simply because she was Esther and not because she had terminal cancer.

 Esther was born in 1994 in Beverly, MA. She was the middle child in a family of five children, a spunky girl with wild hair. In 2006, at the age of twelve, Esther, who was living in France with her family,  had been feeling unwell for some time. A persistent cough, shortness of breath and pain in her chest forced her to seek medical help and she and her family were stunned to learn that she had thyroid cancer. Although this cancer usually has a very good survival rate, Esther's cancer was different; she had metastatic papillary thyroid cancer. This meant that the cancer had spread to the lymph nodes in her neck and lungs. Esther had her thyroid and some lymph nodes removed and underwent radiation therapy. The prognosis was not promising. In 2008, Esther took a turn for the worse, and she and her family decided to try two new experimental therapies. The experimental drugs stymied the cancer for a period of time allowing Esther and her family a short reprieve. Esther's condition slowly began to deteriorate and during the summer of 2010 she developed kidney failure. She passed away with her family at her bedside on August 25, 2010.

Discussion

This Star Won't Go Out is a compilation of Esther's diary entries, miscellaneous writings, poetry and drawings. The book also includes a foreward by John Green, entries written by her online group who called themselves Catitude and Lori, Wayne and Esther's entries from Caringbridge a website that helps families with seriously ill children.

Besides being a book about one person's journey through a difficult circumstance in life, This Star Won't Go Out is also a magnificent example of faith in God; Esther by her own admission stated she "was not close to God. I didn't want to deal with Him. I liked enjoying the material things that don't matter...But one day I realized, without God, nothing matters. So, I asked Him into my heart. Look, I don't understand anything, basically, about God except He loves me, He made me, without Him I'm lost." But yet after becoming sick, she really did come to know God: she probably wasn't even aware of just how much she really knew Him.

This deeply moving tribute to Esther Earl is well organized, drawing from many sources, chronicling Esther's life and giving those of us who did not have the privilege of knowing Esther, a very good sense of who she really was. The pink pages are Esther's Caringbridge pages which can be found online, the cream pages are her blog and diary entries, while the light green pages are friends and family writing about her.  Be prepared to cry and laugh through Esther's difficult journey. It is a deeply moving account, because Esther's life proves that one doesn't have to be exceptionally beautiful (although she was very pretty) or smart or talented to make a difference in this world. One simply has to be true to oneself. Esther Earl did all of that as This Star Won't Go Out demonstrates.

The only criticism is that the entries by numerous Catitude members overwhelms the last part of the book, detracting from the message that Esther lives on in the work her foundation, This Star Won't Go Out, does to help families struggling with cancer. Unless readers are a part of Catitude, they will probably find themselves skimming these entries.

The videos Esther Earl made are available on her youtube channel cookie4monster4.  Esther's Caringbridge page : http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/estherearl is still live and you can read about her story, the journal her parents posted online and sign the guest book on her page. Esther Earl is a star whose light will never go out. After Esther's death, her parents, Wayne and Lori founded a nonprofit organization, This Star Won't Go Out (https://www.tswgo.org/) which aids families in crisis with a seriously ill child suffering from cancer. Please take the time to check out their website and if you are a young person looking for a good cause, this might just be one to consider helping out. Both this organization and the book by the same name, This Star Won't Go Out are one of many ways Esther will live on in the hearts of those who loved and knew her, and those of us who wished we had.

DFTBA today in memory of Esther Earl. :)

Book Detail:
This Star Won't Go Out by Esther Earl with Lori and Wayne Earl
New York: Dutton Books      2014
431 pp.

Letters To My Daughters. A Memoir by Fawzia Koofi

Letters To My Daughters is a searing memoir that is an intimate look into the recent troubled history of Afghanistan from the perspective of a young Afghani who is both a woman and the country's only elected female politician. It is intense, thought provoking and and at times heart-rending. Fawzia Koofi's memoir is written in two formats; each chapter is prefaced by a letter to her young daughters Shuhra and Shaharzad, followed by an account of her life and the cultural and political landscape of Afghanistan at that time.

Fawzia was the nineteenth of her father's twenty-three children. Her mother was her father's second wife - he had seven wives but had divorced two so that he could marry two other women. Although her father had many wives, Fawzia claims that it was her mother Bibi jan whom he loved the most and it was her mother who ran the household, who kept the keys to the storeroom and the safe and whom coordinated the cooking for the huge political dinners he hosted.

Her father had recently married his seventh wife, a fourteen-year-old girl who gave birth to a son just three months prior to Fawzia's birth.Her mother, who had already had borne seven children when Fawzia came along, was distraught at yet another younger wife in the home. Upset at having lost his favour, she prayed for a son but it was not to be. Instead Fawzia was born in a remote mountain shack and left outside to bake in the fierce mountain sun. Finally after a day, her family took her back in and Fawzia's mother vowed that no harm would ever come to her again.

Fawzia's father, Abdul Rahman was a member of the Afghan parliament in 1975, the year she was born. He represented the people of Badakhshan province in the northern Afghanistan. It is one of the poorest areas of the country. Her family lived in the Koofi Valley, for which they are named.

Fawzi describes the rise to power of the Taliban from the ashes of an Afghanistan left in chaos after the defeat of the Soviets by the Mujahideen. While the West rejoiced in the Soviet withdrawal, a brutal civil war raged in Afghanistan between the factions of the Mujahideen. The country slipped into chaos and terror around the capital, Kabul as different Mujahideen struggled for control. This period was a dangerous time for Fawzi's family - her father was murdered and they had to flee their home in Badakhshan and travel to Kabul.

Meanwhile in the south, young men who had studied at the madrassas in the border regions between Afghanistan and Pakistan began to arrive in the southern villages of Afghanistan bringing with them radical Islam, common to Arab countries. The southerners, tired of civil war and poverty, accepted these "angels of rescue"as the young men called themselves.

When a peace treaty was brokered between the Rabbani government and the Mujahideen in 1995, the Taliban influence was growing. Koofi relates the heart-breaking and catastrophic changes that occurred within Afghanistan in 1996 when the Rabbani government fled north and Taliban rule commenced. Instead of rescuing the Afghan people as they initially claimed, the Taliban began to systematically implement laws that drove the country back into the dark ages within months. Women were required to wear burkas and were confined to home, no longer being allowed to attend school. All women in any type of public life were forced out. Men had to wear beards and turbans and many cultural practices such as the traditional Afghan weddings and music were banned.

Koofi accurately refers to this and other actions as cultural vandalism - a very perceptive description of radical Islam's effect on any culture it has ever overrun. Almost overnight, public beatings, stoning and executions became the norm for the slightest violations of radical Islamic code. Televison was banned and radio broadcast nonstop Taliban propaganda. Libraries were destroyed as were the beautiful Buddha statues of Bamiyan.

At this time of her life, Fawzi was in medical school and had to give up her studies. It was not only impossible to attend school, but impossible to go to even to the market unless dressed in "the new uniform of Afghanistan", the blue shuttlecock burka. Women were not allowed to speak to men who were not blood relatives. To do so was to risk arrest, beatings and possibly worse.

Fawzi tells us what this meant to her people:"And now that the war was officially over, the world also began to move on. The Cold War had ended, and the mighty Soviet Empire was collapsing. The Afghan fight against the Russians was no longer of relevance to the West. It was no longer broadcast internationally on the nightly news. Our civil war was over, and as far as the world understood it the Taliban were now our government. We were yesterday's story.....But our tragedy was not over. In many way, it was just beginning. And for the next few years, the world forgot us. They were our bleakest years of need."

Discussion

In Letters to My Daughters, Fawzia chronicles in detail the cultural annihilation Afghan underwent during Taliban rule and how it affected the people. During Taliban rule she felt Afghanistan was slipping back into the darkness of time. Her family suffered greatly. Newly married to a kindly man Hamid, he was soon taken from her and beaten and tortured, eventually contracting tuberculosis. Eventually Fawzia and Hamid decided to flee northward to Badakhshan where Ahmad Shah Massoud and President Rabbani's forces were fighting the Taliban. 

Only when Fawzia escaped the Taliban-ruled south did she realize how much she had changed. "Life under the Taliban had changed me in ways I hadn't really understood until now....The Taliban had taken that confident girl and determined teenager and turned her into a diminutive, cold, scared and exhausted woman living beneath the cloak of invisibility that was her burka."

She realized that her attitude towards men had changed. Although interestingly, Fawzia writes that while her father did beat her mother, she felt he respected her. This is definitely a difficult thing for Western women to understand. In one letter to her daughters, she insists that "true Islam accords you political and social rights. It offers you dignity, the freedom to be educated, to pursue your dreams and to live your life." However, in every country where Islam is the state religion, women are not treated as full citizens, do not have the same access to education, health care and employment as do men.

There's no doubt radical Islam took it's toll on her too. "There was a huge silence inside me. Until now, I hadn't even noticed it. Little by little, it had grown with each prison visit, each woman I saw getting beaten on the streets and each public execution of a young woman who was just like me."

When the Taliban were overthrown by the American military and Afghanistan began to be rebuilt, Fawzia ran for election in 2005 and became the first woman elected to the new parliament despite the opposition of many of her fellow male politicians. She is the first female deputy speaker of the Afghan Parliament - no small feat for a country that had few basic rights for women only several years ago.

Despite cultural and religious differences, Fawzia Koofi is to be admired. She is a brave woman who has incurred great personal risk in order to represent her northern province. Fawzia Koofi has a deep love of her country and she has a strong desire to help remake Afghanistan into a place that is safe for her two young daughters, where they can live with dignity. 

Fawzia's memoir, Letters To My Daughters, is highly recommended for those who wish to learn about the remarkable people of Afghanistan and to understand what has befallen in this turbulent country over the past thirty years. There is no doubt Fawzia is a remarkable young leader in a country desperate for good leaders. She is proof that Afghanistan and other Islamic states need the participation of women in society. She is proof of what these young women have to offer to their countries!

Book Details:
Letters To My Daughters by Fawzia Koofi
Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre 2011
275 pp.