Stolen Children, Part I 2 comments

By Bradford Winters

Of all the solicitations that come my way on any given day—be it fundraising letters from Doctors Without Borders, UNICEF, and the like, or take-out menus from neighborhood restaurants strewn like confetti in the vestibule of our brownstone—there has been one that grabbed me in a way that even the most urgent mass appeals couldn’t: a pen pal program pairing members like me of the Writers Guild of America with local schoolchildren in Queens.

And despite the fact that any other form of writing is about the last thing I need in my life at this moment, my response was an instant, “Sign me up.”

An offshoot of BookPALS (Performing Artist for Literacy in the Schools), a volunteer program that brings members of the Screen Actors Guild into classrooms across the country to help generate a passion for reading, PencilPALS aims to do the same with schoolchildren and their culturally stunted regard for writing: not writing as a career per se, but as a highly endangered if not altogether lost form of communication.

In short: in an age of txting, show them the value of the old-fashioned letter.

Before I even got started, the program struck me as something that the entire country should be doing, adults and children alike. Perhaps in some ways that’s not such a great idea—certainly not one welcome in all corners due to random pairing—but at least the Postal Service wouldn’t have to keep raising its rates.

Cut To: my first letter from D., a fourth-grade girl at a public school in Queens. Actually, the first letter came from a classmate of hers to inform me of the following:

Greetings! My name is J.K. however your pen-pal is a fellow classmate of mine. However, she is in Ecuador at the moment for personal issues. Her name is D.P. I apologize for the inconvenience.... She’s a fun, bubbly person to be with. She likes Disney Channel and its stars like Selena Gomez and Miley Cyrus. She will be very enthusiastic to have you as a penpal.

Enthusiastic she was indeed, when I opened her first letter a week later upon her return from Ecuador. But I was a bit taken aback when, barely four lines into it, after thanking me for the letter I wrote back to her classmate yet before she has told me anything else, she writes:

One more thing I wanted to tell you. There is this book called “Stolen Children” by Peg Kehret. I have the book so I will read the blurb.... (I think that’s how you spell blurb...I’m not a good speller) Anywho here it is.... “Amy learned a lot in her babysitting course, but not what to do if two thugs show up, intent on kidnapping. Armed with misinformation and a weapon, the men take Amy and little Kenra to a remote cabin in the woods. There they make videos of the girls and mail them to Kendra’s wealthy parents in an effort to get ransom money. After servel of her escape attempts fail, Amy is forced to make one last, desperate move.” This book is suspenseful because I am reading it and it’s very interesting. Try and get the book if you can and if you want to.

“Jesus Christ!” I muttered, as much as I try to refrain from that profanity more than certain others. “What is this girl reading?”

This I endeavored to find out, which brought about a bonus albeit unintended feature of this program: my first New York City Public Library Card! Not only was I back to writing letters, but checking out books—okay, only one so far, and reluctantly at that—from my local branch as well. Next thing you know, D. and I would have our letters delivered by horse.

Given its target audience, you know going into a book like Stolen Children that all will end well despite the bad intentions of both its front cover—an abandoned teddy bear at the foot of an empty rocking chair in the moonlight—and its back-jacket blurb that concludes: “When it was time to collect the money and go, they would leave Amy behind—but she would not be able to talk to the cops. She would not talk, period, ever again.”

Right. I’m sure Amy will end up in a ditch with that teddy bear stuffed inside her mouth, and Kehret will get another PEN Center Award for Children’s Literature for it.

It isn’t fair, of course, to judge an author by the marketing shenanigans of her publisher, and you can’t quite ascribe anything perverse to an author like Kehret, whose brief bio in the back of the book includes: “When she isn’t writing, Peg Kehret likes to read, invite her grandchildren to visit, and help animal rescue groups.”

Tomorrow: Vampires, Kidnappers, and Other Figures from Children’s Books