I can smell summer...
We hit the eighties this week in Nevada County and we're all starting to walk around in summer clothes.  Of course, while everyone is dreaming of swimming or BBQs or stargazing, I'm dreaming of summer reading lists.  I know, I know...I'm getting professional help, I promise. 

The book I'd like to recommend for your summer reading  (it makes an especially good read-aloud to discuss with your kids) is Remarkable by Lizzie K. Foley.

REMARKABLE by Lizzie K. Foley ( Puffin Books, ages 8+)
Jane is just a regular kid.  This should be fine, except she lives in the town of Remarkable.  Where everyone is, well, remarkable.  Except Jane.  She's ordinary.  In fact, she's so ordinary, she's the only one who goes to the regular public school.  Everyone else goes to Remarkable's School for the Remarkably Gifted.  Her brother's a remarkable painter.  Her sister's a math-whiz.  And, Jane - she's not sure she's remarkable at anything.  Of course, though, she is.  It's just not so obvious and doesn't need the label. Or the attention.

Foley's book is sweet and whimsical (there are pirates and a sea monster named Lucky!), but simmering beneath its playful surface is a strong commentary on a society that seems to need all of our kids to be....well, remarkable.  Exceptional.  What about the plain Jane's of the world?  In a school system obsessed with rankings, test scores, competitions, and levels, what about a kid who doesn't quite know yet what she wants from her life, what she wants to put into the world, or even doubts that she really wants much attention at all?  In her meanderings about town where no one notices her, Jane meets Captain Rojo Herring and when he asks her about her talent, she replies, "I'm not good at anything and I probably never will be."  He tells her, however, what a gift it is to be ordinary.  He had a chance to be ordinary once, but laments, "no, I had to run off to do something special."

Jane has an opportunity, too, to find out that being ordinary can be its own brand of specialness.  Anabella and I laughed out loud while reading this book, but we also talked about what it means to be "remarkable" and why people seem to not only need it, but also to figure it out so young.  It's tuned my ear to how often we pre-professionalize our kids.  "Oh, maybe he'll be a scientist" or "Maybe she'll be a party planner!" as if childhood is just one big try-out for future economic security.

While Anabella and I read Remarkable, I was also reading The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer, which is a grown-up novel that asks the same sorts of questions as Foley's book (in fact, I'm paraphrasing one of Wolitzer's observations about how we often treat the joys of childhood as a sort of pre-professional program).  Both books have stuck with me and made me ponder this need with my own child and with my students.  Heck, it's made me ponder it for myself.

Perhaps, they both seem to be arguing that joy is simply enough without the need to parlay it into something.  That seems to me the essence of summer.