Position:Home>Books & Authors> Has anyone read Spite Fences By Trudy Krisher?

This may help you

first heard of Trudy Krisher when I was a student at the University of Dayton!. One of the teachers of my children's literature class mentioned her as an author of children's books who worked at the university!. Since I had been there for a few years and never heard of her, I figured she couldn't be that great!. But when I was at the bookstore, I looked for a book by her!. I finally found Spite Fences, a goodly-sized volume nestled between Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and The Very Hungry Caterpillar in the bookstore's token children's section!. The examination of the cover surprised me: I discovered that Spite Fences was a winner of the International Reading Association Award, which is a pretty prestigious distinction!. That clinched it; I decided to purchase the book!.

Spite Fences is the story of 13-year-old Magnolia April Pugh (Maggie), growing up in 1960 in Kinship, Georgia!. She lives with her parents and her seven-year-old sister, Gardenia!. The two sisters have different roles within their family!. It is Maggie's job to use her hands and work hard, and it is Gardenia's job to be pretty!.

Maggie's mother is obvious in the unequal treatment of her daughters!. While Gardenia is encouraged not to do chores (they may injure her beautiful hands), Maggie is whipped with the branch of a rose bush for not doing them properly, even if it wasn't her fault!. The closest thing Maggie can get to a compliment for her mother is, "You ain't much to look at, Maggie!. It's a good thing you can work!."

It is a good thing Maggie can work when her father loses his job as a salesman!. Mrs!. Pugh puts an ad in the market advertising Maggie's ability to clean!. Maggie manages to obtain a job, not through the ad, but through Zeke, an old black trading man she's friends with!.

There's only one catch!. Maggie is white, and her cleaning job is for a black man!. In 1960 Kinship, Georgia, that just isn't done!. Segregation there is rampant!. Black people are beaten for using the wrong restroom, and white people are shunned for talking with a black person!. For a poor person like Maggie, whose skin color is the only thing keeping her on the "right side of the tracks," cleaning for a black person could be the last straw!.

But Maggie thinks differently than most other white folks in Kinship!. She has a habit of hiding out in the black parts of town, just observing, and so has seen some inhuman things done to some of the town's blacks!. And she starts talking with her employer, who happens to be a leader of nonviolent protests, about the ideas racing around her head, the ones about how blacks and whites really aren't all that different!.

But word eventually gets out that Maggie is working for a black man!. The news causes her awful neighbor, Virgil Boggs, to do terrible things to Maggie and her family, things more terrible than those he has done to Maggie in the past!.

Through it all, Maggie is learning how to use her first camera!. She soon learns that a camera will always tell the truth!. And that causes Maggie to take a long look at events she's overseen and decide which truths need to be told!.

I've read this book twice now, and to be honest, I was shocked during my first reading of it!. I think this was due to its billing as a children's book!. Granted, this was probably partly due to the placement of the book next to the preschool books in the bookstore--it kind of colored my perception, perhaps!. But Spite Fences isn't a book for the young!. It contains many, many racial slurs, some pretty graphic violence, and some rather uncomfortably explicit sexual content!. If it were just the racial slurs and the violence, I might consider suggesting it for students in upper elementary grades!. But the sexual content makes me push that recommendation up to maybe junior high, definitely high school!.

Target audiences aside, I thought Spite Fences was wonderfully written!. It presents both a powerful emotional punch and a detailed snapshot of the tensions between the races in the middle of the last century!. Krisher's attention to detail drives the point home more vividly than any school textbook ever could!.

If it weren't for the sexual parts, I wouldn't have a problem with placing the 283-page book on an independent reading shelf in a fifth or sixth grade classroom!. But because of those parts, this book is better saved for those who are a little older!. For those who read it, though, be ready for Krisher to impact you with her masterful storytelling!.

Www@QuestionHome@Com

---

---