Skip to main content

Star Jumper

I have tried J to get interested in the imaginary, whimsical and the fantastical in reading and otherwise. Sometimes we make up stories as a game, adding to each other's plots until the results are quite crazy. My efforts to send the protagonist through a door that leads to a magic kingdom or have Aladdin come upon his cave is always countered by J's unyielding realism.

The characters are yanked right out, set straight and put on their way on a more mundane and believable course. I give up in the end not quite able to fathom my practical little Virgo who does not have one shred of my love for the imaginary and improbable. She has no yen for the girly stuff either when it comes to reading. She'll tires of the goody two-shoes and the divas equally and very quickly.

Now a story like Star Jumper - Journal of a Cardboard Genius by Frank Asch is something she can enjoy. After she finished reading it recently, I asked her to tell me about it - what the story is about, what she like and disliked. This is a "review" of sorts in J's words.

The story is about Alex and his little brother Jonathan. Jonathan really annoys Alex and Alex wants to get away from him. Wherever that Alex goes, Jonathan always follows him. Peter Pan sewed it back for her when Wendy lost her shadow but Jonathan does the opposite - he tries to cover Alex's shadow with his own body. Alex finds a way that he could get away from him - by building a spaceship.

He first made a plan and it took him about twenty minutes but he could have done it faster if Jonathan wasn't bugging him. The only time that Alex has peace is at school. At school he stares at the girl in front of him named Zoe Breen. He works on the calculations for his space ship in class. Zoe asks him what it is and he tells her it is a little math for extra credit. He finds the materials for the spaceship in the attic.

After dinner he builds it and at night he tries it out. When he goes into space he goes on a spacewalk but on his way back he hits another planet. He thought about it and he told himself he was missing a part. He wondered if there was anything strange on the planet. He then came back home.

What I like : When Zoe called from the phonebook, she asked if Alex he wanted to watch the Mummies’ Curse. He wondered if anyone else from their class would be there and if they would think he was on a date and tease him. He brought Jonathan along. How he made the spaceship. Everything the space ship needed was already in his own house. He recycled and did not have to buy anything.

What I did not like : The way Jonathan bugged Alex. The pictures of Jonathan in the book do not express his behavior and how he really acts.

Even with all that information, I am no closer to understanding why J likes what she does. This sounds like science fiction and does not jive with her need for "real" and yet somehow it works. She also liked Caitlin's Holiday when she read it a while ago - a story about a girl and her talking doll. Maybe it is all about what J finds believable or possible and what she does not. At any rate, I will keep trying get her excited about genies in bottles and magic faraway trees.

Comments

Priyamvada_K said…
HC,
I think sometimes its the romantics that suffer a lot. Realists are very grounded and know what they want. They have realistic expectations about themselves and others, and will probably have a better emotional life.

Glad to know J is a realist. That can be a good thing....even though right now the fairy tales are falling flat :-)

Priya.
ggop said…
HC,
Can't blame you for not being closer to figuring out what J likes.

This may explain why Amazon/Netflix "suggestions" based on my past ratings fall flat for me. :-)

Didn't Netflix in particular announce a million dollar prize for people who could improve the algorithms by 10%?
Heartcrossings said…
Priya - You are right abour romantics suffering more emotionally and I have do but I would not trade it for anything :) As for J I have to try and get her hooked to something Sci-fi with a bit of fairy tale thrown in. That would be like slipping the veggies under the french fries.

ggop - I don't have Netflix but the Amazon suggestions are quite pointless. Had no idea it was that much money to tweak the algorithm. Gotta be really hard to do !

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...