Tween Reads fest connects kids with authors
Keynote speaker Reynolds writes novels that reflect children of color
Jason Reynolds was 17 before he ever finished reading a novel. None of the books he’d encountered were about any kind of world he recognized, so he thought he hated reading.
But then he opened Richard Wright’s 1945 book “Black Boy,” which starts with a 4-year-old kid playing around with a broom in the fireplace. He starts a fire, panics and then hides so no one can find and punish him.
“On the first page, he burned his (grandparents’) house down. That’s all I needed,” Reynolds says. “He set the curtains on fire and burned the house down and ran from the whoopin’s. That, I could get with.”
Now Reynolds, 32, writes books for kids. His latest, “Ghost,” is a finalist for the National Book Award, and Reynolds will be in Houston on Saturday to give the
keynote address at the annual Tween Reads conference at South Houston High School.
The festival for young readers features 32 authors discussing and signing their work; it’s free to attend and is designed to give kids up-close access to their favorite writers, from Ally Carter to Trenton Lee Stewart. The target audience is kids in grades 5 through 8, but that’s not a strict rule, said Margaret Hale, one of the festival’s coordinators: “We just want to connect kids with authors.”
“Ghost,” narrated by a seventh-grader named Castle Cranshaw, is a good place to start.
Castle’s mother works at a hospital cafeteria and takes nursing classes online at night; she’s been raising him alone since the night Castle’s dad pulled a gun on them both. Castle has been running ever since, and he’s gotten good at it: He nicknames himself Ghost to show off his speed.
Ghost gets recruited to join an elite youth track team and discovers he’s passionate about track, but he struggles to stay out of trouble so he can stay on the team.
“Like, for me, the best way to describe it is, I got a lot of scream inside,” Ghost explains. But once he gets to know some of his teammates, he discovers that they all have some scream inside — for different reasons.
Funny and young, tattooed and dreadlocked, Reynolds seems more like a cool older brother than an author. And that’s partly why he’s had such success getting kids — especially boys — excited about reading, even when they think they hate books.
“It’s not that boys hate to read, it’s that boys hate boredom,” Reynolds said. “I hated books for the same reason they hate books. If you’re a kid of color and you’re growing up in a colorful neigborhood, and you don’t see any of those colors in the books that you’re reading, it’s really hard. It’s difficult to latch on and bite down.”
When Reynolds speaks Saturday at Tweens Read, he’ll do what he always does: He’ll walk up on stage in enviable shoes and a jacket, then remove the jacket to show off his tattoos. “It’s a silly thing, but it always works,” he said.
Reynolds doesn’t just want to give kids good books to read. He wants them to buy into the idea that an author can understand them.
“People invest in people,” Reynolds said. He grew up loving hiphop, especially Tupac Shakur, and through hiphop he fell in love with poetry. He may not have found the right novel until he was 17, but Reynolds wants to give today’s kids a “literary archive” of books that reflect and validate the way they talk, the way they think and what they experience.
“It’s my mission, my charge, to make sure they have those books — that they know their natural voices, who they are, is magical,” he said. “It’s already enough. I spent my whole life trying to being somebody else ... because no one ever told me I already was.”