Chat From the Stacks Episode 7: Who is your best reading friend? The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise, by Dan Gemeinhart
You know the job of the person who has to write the summary for the inside book flap must be incredibly difficult. That short single paragraph passage can have a significant impact on a reader's decision to keep reading. Certainly, by now, you know that I can be easily dissuaded from a book if the first lines, first chapters, or inside flyleaf aren't in order. The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise fell into that category. Or maybe I just wasn't ready for a book that had so much emotion packed into a brief description. It was one that I set aside for a time.
The other important message here is that friend recommendations can be the key to making sure you don't miss memorable books. Fellow readers, I know you have one, a reading friend; someone with whom you easily fall into discussions about books and who knows you well enough to know what you would like in a story. Someone who's taste in books you trust because over time you've had the experience of reading books they recommend and are not disappointed. Recommending books is a tricky business. Reading is a personal interaction with the characters, the story, and the author. So each person's reading experience with the same story can vary widely. Yet, reading friends know exactly which books will resonate with you even though their experience was also unique and personal.
Well as you also may have guessed one of my most reliable and best reading friends is Ms. Brooke Strachan our Lower School Librarian. Certainly, many of you have benefited from Ms. Strachan's talent for great book recommendations. As librarians do, we are often talking about books in the course of many other conversations. Our discussion about Coyote Sunrise actually started as we were talking about reading great books that we have found to be powerful and important but wonder if they have the same appeal for our reading patrons; Lower and Middle School students. We agree on the emotional impact of many books we've both read like The Truth as Told by Mason Buttle by Leslie Connor and Echo's Sister by Paul Mosier but our musings have been about their appeal to adolescents and teen readers. In that same conversation, we talked of books and series that we just knew were going to be unstoppable. Sometimes a story is just a good story creating the Harry Potter/Hunger Games phenomenon of being widely read by young readers, their parents, and teachers. What is the magic formula? As a librarian, I'm not sure I know the answer to that question. I do know which books will be impossible to keep on the shelves for long though.
During that conversation, I was admitting to needing a box of tissue nearby for Echo's Sister and Ms.Strachan said she felt the same way when reading The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise so as you can imagine, I went directly to my Sora app and borrowed the book. Sometimes I feel as though the moment I finish a book I should write down my thoughts. First to be able to recall the details of the story when I want to share with fellow readers and second because the emotions I feel at the end of a book seem to slip away with time. The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise was one of those books for me. Dan Gemeinhart created that connection with the character of Coyote, someone whose vulnerability and strength make her hard to forget. She and her father travel from town to town, and state to state in a refurbished school bus that is home. They've lived this nomadic life for five years and while the relationship between Coyote and her dad Rodeo is a strong one with deep emotion, it isn't until we learn of the great loss they have both suffered that we realize Coyote's life is one of protecting her father from the pain of these emotions. Coyote's own emotional life and healing hang in the balance when she learns that a memory box that she buried in a park as a time capsule years ago with her mother and sisters is about to be destroyed and with it her last links to the past and to the hope of facing her loss and moving forward in her life.
Coyote fills the bus with people who cross her path and ride along with her on this journey of self-discovery and recovery. They work together to at first trick and then convince Rodeo to return to the hometown that is the source of painful memories. As she shares her destination with each new bus-traveler they are determined to get Coyote home before it's too late. Along the way, she makes life long friends whose stories make this a pilgrimage for more than one person on the bus. Read it with a box of tissue nearby. And, keep your reading friends close. Summer is coming and you know you're going to want a good book to read. Turn to a friend who reads and knows you as a reader or you just might miss something memorable.