The House You Pass Along the Way

The book The House You Pass Along the Way was interesting. It was definitely an easy read and I did enjoy reading it. I thought it was an interesting story that intertwined two very important and pertinent topics to many of today’s middle school students: sexuality and race. The idea of interracial marriage is an important one to discuss in my opinion too because I would like to hope that most people are ok with this idea, but I am not naive enough to believe that everyone loves it.

Another interesting thing about this book was the relationships between Staggerlee and her siblings. For the most part, I think that she felt compared to her siblings and felt it was not fair that they be expected to act the same way. This idea would definitely be important to middle school students. Even if they do not have siblings that they live with and deal with on a constant basis, students always have to go through some level of comparison. Staggerlee dealt with this well for the most part in my opinion and she made it apparent that regardless of what others thought of her, her family, her siblings, or their past, she was going to be her own person. This lesson is so vital for everyone to go through, and middle school students often are trying to understand themselves, their peers, and the relationships that go on between their peers.

Also, I loved how the house in the story was so vital to the characters. That Staggerlee’s father left for a while, but he eventually came back. It just reminded me a lot of how I feel about the house that I grew up in. It made me who I am. So much has happened in the house and I would love to come back to live in a house just like that when I grow up and have kids of my own. People get attached to places, and I love that this is so well represented in the book. Places are meaningful.

I loved the article, “Who Can Tell My Story,” because it discussed the nature of language as a mode to communicate and tell a story. Language has been a common theme in my life lately and the more I hear from people and classmates, the more it fascinates me. Language is so much more than talking. It is culture, it’s communication, it’s telling a story, and it’s about relating to others. I also loved that Woodson wrote this, and told more of her personal story in it. I was interested to learn more about her as an author and a person and I think that knowing that she had experienced so much hatred and judgment from others made her story behind Staggerlee and her family that much more real for me. Real life stories make an impact and when people can write from places of knowing feelings that characters feel, it is so meaningful. People everywhere can benefit from walking a mile in someone else’s shoes, and stories are one way to do just that. Jacqueline Woodson definitely accomplishes this feeling in her book The House You Pass Along the Way.

Woodson, Jacqueline. (1997). House You Pass on the Way. New York: Penguin

Group.

(2003). Who Can Tell My Story? In D. Fox & K. Short (Eds.), Stories Matter: The

Complexity of Cultural Authenticity in Children’s Literature (41-45). Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English