Truth in Fiction - The Mighty Miss Malone by Christopher Paul Curtis

Part One

"I laughed and ran upstairs to get ready. 

I hadn't read anything in four days and felt like I was starving!"

Part Two

"... I was still at the mercy of someone else's words. And Mother had told us so many times that that's something neither me nor Jimmie can afford to let happen, that we should take everything someone says, good or bad, with a grain of salt."

"One day you're living in your own home, and then it seems like with no warning, the next day you're carrying everything you own in a blanket or a sack or a ratty suitcase while being shooed from one place to another like a fly."

"Hoping is such hard work. It tires you out and you never seem to get any kind of reward. Hoping feels like you're a balloon that has a pinhole that slowly leaks air."

"You can tell you're reading a really good book when you forget all about everything else and know you'll die if you don't get to at least the end of the chapter."

"I know you can't read what someone's like by the way they look. The person who seems to be kind and understanding may be using that look to hide something horrible, while the person who at first sight scares you might turn out to be the gentlest soul you'll ever meet. And things like houses hide their secrets even better than people do. Things don't even have to try."

Afterword

 "A tragedy, a true tragedy" Deza Malone

What I want The Mighty Miss Malone to do is, first, to provide an enjoyable read. Second, as with all of my books, I want this to be a springboard for young people to ask questions and do more research on some of the themes the book explores, in this case the Great Depression and poverty in general. And third, I hope that Deza can serve as a voice for the estimated *fifteen million American children who are poor, who go to bed hungry and whose parents struggle to make a dignified living to feed and care for them.

The Mighty Miss Malone by Christopher Paul Curtis 
(late 2011)

*As I write this blog entry in early 2013 there are now an estimated  16 million American children living in poverty.