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    Seedfolks
    Seedfolks
    Seedfolks
    Ebook74 pages58 minutes

    Seedfolks

    By Paul Fleischman and Judy Pedersen

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    ALA Best Book for Young Adults ∙ School Library Journal Best Book ∙ Publishers Weekly Best Book ∙ IRA/CBC Children's Choice ∙ NCTE Notable Children's Book in the Language Arts

    A Vietnamese girl plants six lima beans in a Cleveland vacant lot. Looking down on the immigrant-filled neighborhood, a Romanian woman watches suspiciously. A school janitor gets involved, then a Guatemalan family. Then muscle-bound Curtis, trying to win back Lateesha. Pregnant Maricela. Amir from India. A sense of community sprouts and spreads. 

    Newbery-winning author Paul Fleischman uses thirteen speakers to bring to life a community garden's founding and first year. The book's short length, diverse cast, and suitability for adults as well as children have led it to be used in countless one-book reads in schools and in cities across the country.

    Seedfolks has been drawn upon to teach tolerance, read in ESL classes, promoted by urban gardeners, and performed in schools and on stages from South Africa to Broadway.

    The book's many tributaries—from the author's immigrant grandfather to his adoption of two brothers from Mexico—are detailed in his forthcoming memoir, No Map, Great Trip: A Young Writer's Road to Page One.

    "The size of this slim volume belies the profound message of hope it contains."  —Christian Science Monitor

    And don’t miss Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices, the Newbery Medal-winning poetry collection!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperTeen
    Release dateJul 30, 2013
    ISBN9780062283689
    Seedfolks
    Author

    Paul Fleischman

    Paul Fleischman's novels, poetry, picture books, and nonfiction are known for innovation and multiple viewpoints. He received the Newbery Medal for Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices and a Newbery Honor for Graven Images, and he was a National Book Award finalist for Breakout. His books bridging the page and stage include Bull Run, Seek, and Mind's Eye. For the body of his work, he's been the United States nominee for the international Hans Christian Andersen Award. He lives in California. www.paulfleischman.net.

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    Reviews for Seedfolks

    4/5

    486 ratings93 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Cute little story - a neighborhood of (mostly) immigrants coming together thanks to a guerrilla garden. Nice hopeful ending. That's about all there is to it, though.
    • 5/5
      Taking place in Cleveland, this book sheds the light that segregation, and prejudices are still revalant. It's amazing how a simple garden can bring the divided community together. Each chapter in Seedfolks is told through the narative of thirteen different people. The reader gets to hear the sturrgles that each character is going through. An activity that can be done is planting a garden at school. This can bring your classroom together just how the garden brought the neighbors together.
    • 5/5
      For such a great story, a lot of audience must read your book. You can publish your work on NovelStar Mobile App.
    • 5/5
      Pleasantly surprised by this novella. Little girl in a poverty stricken Cleveland neighborhood decides to plant Lima beans in a neglected, trash filled lot. Others folks from the neighborhood from different backgrounds and religions become a new sort of family. Cute and uplifting.
    • 5/5
      Fictional account of the development of a community garden in Cleveland in a down-trodden inner city neighborhood. 13 immigrants mini-stories showing how peoples of different walks of life can come together to create and grow plants. Heart-warming book.
    • 5/5
      And with this review it commenced my annual reread of 'Seedfolks' It's such a great book to pick up every spring, reminds me why I get out of my own garden and try to communicate nature so to speak. I'm very inspired by the draw of the neighborhood individuals into one communal space that's why I like participating in my local community garden as well you get to see people from around my own community.

      This year I was drawn to the stories from Ana, Gonzalo, and Leona.
    • 2/5
      The book was very boring. It just kept repeating people and how hard their life was. No adventure
    • 4/5
      A slim book, I believe written for children but I can't tell what age, it's also good reading for adults. Each story or chapter is part of the same city garden. The garden lot used to be a garbage dump, piled waist high with trash. A young Vietnamese girl plants a few beans in a spot behind a refrigerator in honor of her dead father, who died before she was born. Life lessons are plentiful in this small book and it's easy to hear the voices of the diverse community. What becomes the garden binds them together, even while they speak different languages. It's a wonderful study in conciseness.
    • 1/5
      Maybe the author had good intentions with this story of a multicultural community coming together to grow a garden. But the racial insensitivity it traffics in was painful - each chapter is written in a different characters voice, but only the Asian character is written with an obvious accent. The political and economic assumption is that all these people could build a better community if they just worked a little harder. One of the final chapters includes a line “ It had been such a wonderful change to see people making something for themselves instead of waiting for a welfare check.”There’s so much to unpack in these 70 pages, and I don’t think this novella deserves that much work.
    • 4/5
      greeeeaaaaat
    • 4/5
      I listened to this as an audio book. There were multiple narrators which made it very enjoyable. Really interesting story.
    • 4/5
      A short book that is great fun to read aloud, "Seedfolks" shows the reader that community can be found in the strangest places. Read several stories, each from a different perspective, that center around the building of a community garden. Feel along with the narrators as the vacant lot changes from garbage pile to paradise and witness the effect that one garden can have on so many lives.
    • 5/5
      This book was awesome. I love how Paul Fleischman wrote from different character's perspective. The character's love for the neighborhood garden really showed. They were able to come together to get to know each other as people and not just neighbors. One little girl brought many people together by planting six seeds in a vacant lot. This community of diverse cultures cared and loved the garden. They not only grew vegetables, fruits, and flowers, but grew in their differences to get to know one another. They broke stereotypes and rules that had never before been broken all from caring for a garden. The book was not about the garden itself, but how the garden brought people together who otherwise wouldn't have spoken to one another.
    • 4/5
      Told through different voice, this story grows with the garden - told from the first young girl who digs in the hard dirt to plant bean seeds to the last voice, an old black woman, speaking about spring and hope, even as the garden dies. It's a power story, giving hope and warmth to the reader, just like the garden gave to the neighborhood. Published in 1997, it has a timeless quality to it. It could be from 1950 or today. This would be an excellent book for elementary age kids (indeed, the young girl is about that age) or teenagers and college kids, to spark discussion and thought about people and community and what brings people together - and what separates. This story explores race, gender, and culture - the things that divide and the things that bind. The prose is simple, but not dumbed-down, complex enough for adults but easy enough for kids. Absolutely worth reading!
    • 4/5
      An easier read, excellent for middle school (and probably even 4th & 5th grade). This novel's structure is made up of short chapters from a different perspective each time (a different member of this community who sees the community garden happening & ultimately either participates in growing or just helping), but their stories entwine so that you can see how a character is doing/progressing even though you never hear their voice again through narration.

      If I had a "community building" and "tolerance" bookshelf, this would be on it.
    • 5/5
      This book is about different people who are all going through s rough time in their life. They each live near a vacant lot and this lot brings them together. When they all come together, they realize that everyone goes through a hard time. It may seem hard to get over it at the moment, but time heals everything. This goes with the garden that they build together. The vacant lot started out ugly and destroyed and when they all came together they grew a great garden. This is a great book for a classroom because it teaches children about hardship. Everyone goes through a hard time and only time can heal the pain.
    • 4/5
      Seedfolks is as story told through 13 different people and their perspectives and takes place in Cleveland Heights, a very poor part of town with people of many different cultures. The story begins with Kim, a young oriental girl, who decides to plant lima bean seeds for her father in a nearby lot. Others see her planting these seeds and decide to plant their own. The garden becomes so big that people from all around the neighborhood decided to join in. This garden really brings the community together and helps everyone get to know one another. The settings are different in every chapter, but the constant setting is the garden. This is a story about something as simple as a garden can lift up an entire neighborhood. People who would never speak to each other are now having parties together because of this garden. This story shows the reader that you should never judge someone by their culture and that you can get along with everyone if you try. As an activity, the class could make their own community garden and plant their own seeds.
    • 4/5
      I like this book a lot just because the stories are sort of an accurate interpretation on how most of our society function these days. In Seedfolks, many people share this apartment complex, yet no one really interact with each other. Everyone is doing their own thing and sort of to themselves most of the time. Until one day, a little girl name Kim started to plant a seed in the apartment lot. Slowly one by one came out of their shells and participates in the garden that brought them together.I think it is especially true about the communities in New Orleans. Many parts of the city have this kind of separation between them. They do come together when the city has a celebration or festivals such as Mardi Gras, French Quarter Festival, Jazz Festival, Essence Festival, etc...
    • 4/5
      A community is the product of the people who live within the vicinity of one another. This novella provides an example of how people can come together and share ideas and love of the outdoors. This book will inspire people to visit their neighbors. The added bonus is to listen to the audiobook which uses different actors to portray each chapter. Delightful.
    • 5/5
      This book by Paul Fleischman reveals that light can rise out of the most dim circumstances. He uses the stories of 13 different characters, all of from different racial and ethnic backgrounds to get this moral across. Seedfolks hits home because it embodies a problem still alive today. People often separate and define themselves by race and ethnicity when together something beautiful could exist, much like the garden that bloomed from filth in Seedfolks.
    • 2/5
      Seedfolks is an interesting novel. This book tells the story of a garden that brings people from all cultures together. While the message of this novel is great, it was not particularly my favorite. I was never totally enticed by this book, resulting in my lack of enthusiasm.Teaching Ideas: cultures, acceptance
    • 4/5
      Good short chapter book with great themes. Great structure. Moral of the story was inspiring.
    • 5/5
      This shares a community's story of an apartment complex of individuals with diverse backgrounds who come together to grow a community garden. Each individual has their own set of problems and cultural dialects, but the community garden allows the problems and cultures to subside and allow the neighbors to find common ground and become just like one another. I personally love the development of each character in this novel as well as the organization of the book. I also loved the dialect of each character, as the reader is able to truly gain an appreciation for the culture of each character.Reading this book has introduced me to a wonderful author, who I look forward to reading more literature by Paul Fleischman.
    • 4/5
      This was a nice little book. They were short vignettes that all interconnect. There is a lot of material to work with as far as digging deeper into the writer's craft and literary terms.
    • 5/5
      Seedfolks is a story about a community coming together over s shared garden. Each chapter is a short story told from the point of view of a different person in the community. At first, the way the book was structured confused me, but once I caught on that different people were narrating their own stories each chapter I started to enjoy the book. I enjoyed the structure because it was like reading a new story each chapter. Plus, this allowed the diversity of the community to be shown. I like how the books teaches that despite various backgrounds, people can still relate to each other and work together.
    • 5/5
      Seedfolks is an excellent story about the lives of several people who are connected by a vacant lot. The people who live in the neighborhood come from different backgrounds and each have a different story. Each chapter covers a character and how they're connected to the vacant lot. Gardening is the common interests among the group of people and they eventually come together towards the end of the book, looking past each other's background. The book emphasizes a sense of unity among neighbors where there was once segregation and illustrating the affects of diversity.
    • 5/5
      This short, quick read is very powerful and inspiring. Paul Fleischman tells an amazing story of a common garden and the value of building a community with those we might see as 'strangers'. I came away feeling hopeful and inspired to continue to find more ways to plant my own 'seeds' in my communities. This would be a great story to use with young adults studying diversity.
    • 4/5
      Seedfolks is an interesting book that teaches the reader about diversity. The people that live in this community know little to nothing about their neighbor, yet they are all similar. The people of the community have different backgrounds and they all face different obstacles. Instead of bonding, all of the neighbors ignore each other. The one thing that brings the community together is the garden that they grow. Although the people begin to work next to each other and now have gardening in common, they are still distant. By the end of the book, the characters interact more with each others, but not how I expected them to. The chapter book has a different narrator for each chapter, which made the book hard for me to get into. I found myself interested in a particular charatcer, only to move onto someone else suddenly. I would have found the book more enjoyable if it was only told in one or two perspectives. I would read this book with a group of students. It teaches about diveristy and communication. Those are important lessons to teach to children.
    • 2/5
      This book didn't particularly interest me; however, it was required reading. It did have some good moral value throughout, teaching that everything you did could have an affect on someone else.
    • 5/5
      Set in Cleveland, Ohio, a vacant, trashed lot is slowly transformed into a community garden. It starts with one young girl, Kim, planting lima beans to remember her dead father. Then an old Romanian lady, Ana, snooping from her apartment window with binoculars, discovers her little secret and decides to add to it. One by one, 13 people are drawn in to the garden and a sense of community is formed for the neighborhood.This is a great little gem of a book and not very long, which makes it great for folks to pick up and enjoy in an afternoon. I really liked that the story showed how people, one by one, were drawn into the garden and their various reasons for sticking with it. Some truly enjoy gardening. Some want to grow produce to sell. Others are trying to impress some folks. It was very interesting to see how so many people from different walks of life were drawn into this community garden.The book shows quite a bit of diversity and doesn’t shy away from having various characters comment on it. Sometimes the characters even have the ethnicity of another character wrong, and that shows how ignorance can keep a community divided up. Yet as the garden grows, these barriers start to break down and people get to know one another better.The garden doesn’t just affect those people gardening. Other folks join in by strolling by and chatting with the gardeners, or simply enjoying the view of the garden through a window. There’s a social services nurse that comes by a few times a week and takes her charge down to the garden for his enjoyment. Another lady gets the city to come by and remove the piled up trash that used to be part of the derelict lot. The garden brings the community together in many ways. Indeed, this is a little feel-good book.I won a copy of this book from Blackstone Audio with no obligation for a review.The Narration: The audio production for this book was great. There was a full cast of narrators to carry out this book. Of course, I loved Barbara Rosenblat’s performance of the grumpy, suspicious Romanian Ana. Hue Edwards did a great job as young Kim with the lima beans, who kicked off the entire community garden thing. Stephanie Diaz was great as a sassy, snotty pregnant teen. Earl Alexander made a great young stud trying to impress the love of his life by growing tomatoes. Michelle Blackman made a very practical Leona. I really liked Nicholas Luksic’s performance as young Gonzalo who learned so much from his grandfather about plants. Characters and their narrators (please note I couldn’t find a list anywhere and so I listened to the end of the second disc – I apologize for any name misspellings): Sae Young (performed by Sunni Hit), Kim (performed by Hue Edwards), Ana (performed by Barbara Rosenblat), Sam (performed by Michael Rafkin), Maricela (performed by Stephanie Diaz), Curtis (performed by Earl Alexander), Nora (performed by Sandra Squire), Gonzalo (performed by Nicholas Luksic), Amir (performed by Norian Ahrash), Wendell (performed by Robert Hit), Virgil (performed by Russ Lamore), Florence (performed by Michelle Blackman), and Leona (performed by Michelle Blackman).

    Book preview

    Seedfolks - Paul Fleischman

    cover-image

    Dedication

    For my mother and father

    Contents

    Dedication

    Kim

    Ana

    Wendell

    Gonzalo

    Leona

    Sam

    Virgil

    Sae Young

    Curtis

    Nora

    Maricela

    Amir

    Florence

    From Seed to Seedfolks

    Excerpt from The Half-a-Moon Inn

    About the Author

    Acclaim for Seedfolks

    Other Books by Paul Fleischman

    Credits

    Copyright

    About the Publisher

    KIM

    I stood before our family altar. It was dawn. No one else in the apartment was awake. I stared at my father’s photograph—his thin face stern, lips latched tight, his eyes peering permanently to the right. I was nine years old and still hoped that perhaps his eyes might move. Might notice me.

    The candles and the incense sticks, lit the day before to mark his death anniversary, had burned out. The rice and meat offered him were gone. After the evening feast, past midnight, I’d been wakened by my mother’s crying. My oldest sister had joined in. My own tears had then come as well, but for a different reason.

    I turned from the altar, tiptoed to the kitchen, and quietly drew a spoon from a drawer. I filled my lunch thermos with water and reached into our jar of dried lima beans. Then I walked outside to the street.

    The sidewalk was completely empty. It was Sunday, early in April. An icy wind teetered trash cans and turned my cheeks to marble. In Vietnam we had no weather like that. Here in Cleveland people call it spring. I walked half a block, then crossed the street and reached the vacant lot.

    I stood tall and scouted. No one was sleeping on the old couch in the middle. I’d never entered the lot before, or wanted to. I did so now, picking my way between tires and trash bags. I nearly stepped on two rats gnawing and froze. Then I told myself that I must show my bravery. I continued farther and chose a spot far from the sidewalk and hidden from view by a rusty refrigerator. I had to keep my project safe.

    I took out my spoon and began to dig. The snow had melted, but the ground was hard. After much work, I finished one hole, then a second, then a third. I thought about how my mother and sisters remembered my father, how they knew his face from every angle and held in their fingers the feel of his hands. I had no such memories to cry over. I’d been born eight months after he’d died. Worse, he had no memories of me. When his spirit hovered over our altar, did it even know who I was?

    I dug six holes. All his life in Vietnam my father had been a farmer. Here our apartment house had no yard. But in that vacant lot he would see me. He would watch my beans break ground and spread, and would notice with pleasure their pods growing plump. He would see my patience and my hard work. I would show him that I could raise plants, as he had. I would show him that I was his daughter.

    My class had sprouted lima beans in paper cups the year before. I now placed a bean in each of the holes. I covered them up, pressing the soil down firmly with my fingertips. I opened my thermos and watered them all. And I vowed to myself that those beans would thrive.

    ANA

    I do love to sit and look out the window. Why do I need TV when I have forty-eight apartment windows to watch across the vacant lot, and a sliver of Lake Erie? I’ve seen history out this window. So much. I was four when we moved here in 1919. The fruit-sellers’ carts and coal wagons were pulled down the street by horses back then. I used to stand just here and watch the coal brought up by the handsome lad from Groza, the village my parents were born in. Gibb Street was mainly Rumanians back then. It was Adio—Good-bye—in all the shops when you left. Then the Rumanians started leaving. They weren’t the first, or the last. This has always been a working-class neighborhood. It’s like a cheap hotel—you stay until you’ve got enough money to leave. A lot of Slovaks and Italians moved in next. Then Negro families

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