Sing a Song of Tuna Fish: A Memoir of My Fifth-Grade Year. This item is unavailable.Sing a Song of Tuna Fish: A Memoir of My Fifth-Grade Year

Like every fifth grader, Esmé Raji Codell spent her days at her school, in her neighborhood, and with her family. But this small world provides rich material for these hilarious, moving, and engrossing stories. Esmé tells us about the night she and her mother became "egg vigilantes" against an illegally parked car; her freewheeling first school, where kids sat on sofas instead of desks and could choose disco dancing instead of math, and her dangerous neighborhood, which her father made seem friendly and wondrous. In this childhood memoir, Esmé demonstrates her gift for making the ordinary extraordinary, and the unusual familiar.

*Starred Review* Gr. 4-7. Memoirs are a hot genre in adult literature, less so in children's literature. But Codell's small, intimate work is the very model of what this kind of book should be. It brings young readers close while opening up a wider world. Ten-year-old Esme is growing up in one of Chicago's lower-middle-class neighborhoods in the late 1970s. Her family is unconventional, but then isn't everyone's? Her parents love television and are indifferent to school attendance, and her mother once takes her along to egg the car of a rich guy. Esme relishes the structure of a public school after enduring one so free-form that students could spend their time doing anything they wanted, from cranking ice cream to playing with rats. What is so appealing here is not so much what happens to Esme as the marvelous deadpan way Codell tells her stories (at least 95 percent true, as claimed by the flap copy). She begins each chapter the same way ("Let me tell you about . . ."), and then she does what she says, telling children in a simple yet profound way how parents can argue but still continue on: "Love is loud." She brings death home with a report on a prank that kills a classmate, and she explains what it's like to sink in Chicago snow as if caught in quicksand. Esme's is a story that sings its own special song. Ilene Cooper
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