Reviews for Iggie's house

The average rating for Iggie's house based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-11-19 00:00:00 Gary J. Samoil The second book in my project to read or re-read all the Judy Blume. I never read this one as a kid. It's a little dated, and the capital-M Message definitely overrides the story, but I feel like this would be a really good way into talking with your kid about racism. Because it's narrated by a little while girl, the focus is obviously on her as she tries to befriend a black family (the first and only in her neighborhood). It walks us through the process by which she learns to untangle her own racism, and it even tackles the White Savior Complex, when Winnie is more concerned with helping the Garners be accepted by the neighborhood than just being their friends and treating them like people. It doesn't do all of this perfectly, but even the stuff that doesn't quite work out would be interesting to talk about with a young kid. The saddest part about reading this was that it was published forty-five years ago, and it's still almost as relevant now as it was then.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-01-11 00:00:00 Carl Monkman I had to stop reading this book when the White girl slapped the Black boy for taking her to task for her White Savior Complex ("the first time she hit anyone ever!"--and it had to be a Black boy, how nice!) AND his brother didn't put a whoopin' on her for hitting his brother with no justification AND/OR tell his mom or dad that this White girl just hit his brother, at which point mom or dad would have told that White girl to get out of their house! I really was a 1970s Black kid from Michigan, as the siblings in this book are supposed to be, and I can tell you that if some White kid would have hit any of us among my siblings, whether they were trying to be friends with us or not, that kid would have had another thing coming! We had distrust and fear of White people anyway, and a White kid who tried to befriend us while saying the expected stupid stuff White kids say to Black kids ("Are you from Africa? Did you or your parents loot in the riots?") and then turned around and hit one of us would have confirmed our beliefs that White people are mean to Black people and not to be trusted. I was starting to like this book, too. It does honestly portray White liberal "benign" racist thinking and how it manifests in the minds of White kids especially, like the White girl in the story. This girl really expects these Black kids to go ga-ga because she's "one of the good ones," and when one of them lets her know that it's really not all about her and as a kid she doesn't have all the White privilege and power she thinks she has, the White girl slaps him like Scarlett slapped her slave! Ugh.