A. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Woodson, Jacqueline. 2003. LOCOMOTION. New York, NY: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. ISBN 399231153.
B. PLOT SUMMARY
African American eleven year old Lonnie writes poetry to grieve after the death of his parents and family upheaval. His school teacher encourages his writing as a therapy to deal with living in a foster family and not being near his sister.
C. CRITICAL ANALYSIS (INCLUDLING CULTURAL MARKERS)
Woodson’s writing style will have both young adults and adults enjoying this book. Lonnie is a complex character with heart and soul. Woodson’s sparse free verse style is simple and clean. The reader can envision a young boy writing this way and feeling so much emotion in all these words. Lonnie lost his parents in a house fire and lost his younger sister as a result of not having relatives able to take care of them both. It is a refreshing change to read a book about loss from a boy’s point of view. Many authors would write emotional topics like this only from a girl’s point of view. Readers will also appreciate that these poems do not rhyme and are not catchy and upbeat.
Woodson’s writing will be appreciated by the African American community because it portrays strong characters with high character and depth. Lonnie struggles with being a black young adult by saying, “Ms. Marcus don't understand some things even though she's my favorite teacher in the world. Things like my brown, brown arm.” At first, Lonnie sees many differences between him and a new student, Clyde, who is from the country. The reader does not know Clyde’s race but can sense that he is viewed as an outsider. Fortunately, Lonnie gets to know him better and they realize they both lived in Georgia and have more in common. It was a nice touch by Woodson to allow the characters to get to know each other and not continue to judge one another. Other cultural markers include an importance of church and family bonds. Lonnie goes to church with his foster mother and goes with his sister’s new family. He realizes the importance of impressing his sister’s new mother by showing piety at church. Woodson also uses African American names as characters. For example, LaTenya and Lamont. The predominantly African American genetic disease, sickle cell anemia, is also discussed when a classmate gets it. The dialect and Lonnie’s writing style are not overly African American and not stereotypical. Slang shortcuts like, ‘cause and fo’ are used sparingly. Most readers will see this as being modern and present day and not trying too hard to be from a certain culture.
D. REVIEW EXCERPTS“…Woodson, through Lonnie, creates (much as Sharon Creech did with the boy narrator in Love That Dog) a contagious appreciation for poetry while using the genre as a cathartic means for expressing the young poet's own grief.” PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“…Despite the spare text, Lonnie's foster mother and the other minor characters are three-dimensional, making the boy's world a convincingly real one. His reflections touch on poverty and on being African American when whites seem to have the material advantages, and return repeatedly to the pain of living apart from his younger sister. Readers, though, will recognize Lonnie as a survivor. As she did in Miracle Boys (Putnam, 2000), the author places the characters in nearly unbearable circumstances, then lets incredible human resiliency shine through. "I sneak a pen from my back pocket,/bend down low like I dropped something./The chorus marches up behind the preacher/clapping and humming and getting ready to sing./I write the word HOPE on my hand." SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL
E. CONNECTIONS
Discuss the poetry of Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, two poets Lonnie mentions studying in the book. Which poems of Hughes and Wright would Lonnie have enjoyed?
Discuss sickle cell anemia after reading about Lonnie’s classmate having the disease. Discuss the impact of this disease on the African American community.
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