Deconstructing Penguins: Parents, Kids, and the Bond of Reading Book

The authors are book collectors who have been conducting a popular parent-child book club series in a public library in Connecticut. This book describes their experience with the book clubs and shares their program. Each chapter incorporates brief summaries of the books they shared at their meetings and a description of how they focused their discussion to help readers think critically about the books. They lean very heavily on classic titles for young people, and they take issue with the premise - popular in some circles - that it doesn't matter what young people read so long as they do read. They choose books with strong messages or important questions; they layer in ambiguities and complexities for older children.

Deconstructing Penguins, the book's main title, references Mr. Popper's Penguins, a book they use in their group. It is an effective attention-getter, but what prompted me to pick up the book and read was the subtitle: Parents, Kids, and the Bond of Reading. As a teacher of middle school students who are developing their reading skills, I am always looking for any new ideas about how to encourage parents to bring reading into their relationships with their children in a positive way. Unfortunately, while this book addresses the bond some parents and their children do share, it had nothing to say on the topic of encouraging the development of bonds where they do not already exist. Parents and children who choose to read the same book together, planning thereafter to attend a voluntary Saturday afternoon book club in a public library, are already pretty thoroughly bonded in a relationship where the parent cultivates the intellectual growth of the child. It is great that these parents and children share these books and the book club; unfortunately, this book says nothing about how to plant a seed where the parent does not relate to reading with a child in such a great way.

That said, the descriptions of the authors' discussions with children and parents were instructive. I have already borrowed some of the phrasing from their description of the elements of plot; that lesson seemed to be helpful to my students, who are now discussing and writing about protagonists, antagonists, and the contested action between them, with greater fluency. The book could also be useful to someone unfamiliar with the classic books for grades two through five, as the summaries they provide are well written.