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    The Braid
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    The Braid
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    The Braid
    Ebook125 pages1 hour

    The Braid

    By Helen Frost

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Two sisters, Jeannie and Sarah, tell their separate yet tightly interwoven stories in alternating narrative poems. Each sister – Jeannie, who leaves Scotland during the Highland Clearances with her father, mother, and the younger children, and Sarah, who hides so she can stay behind with her grandmother – carries a length of the other's hair braided with her own. The braid binds them together when they are worlds apart and reminds them of who they used to be before they were evicted from the Western Isles, where their family had lived for many generations.

    The award-winning poet Helen Frost eloquently twists strand over strand of language, braiding the words at the edges of the poems to bring new poetic forms to life while intertwining the destinies of two young girls and the people who cross their paths in this unforgettable novel. An author's note describes the inventive poetic form in detail.

    The Braid is a 2007 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateSep 6, 2016
    ISBN9781466896338
    Unavailable
    The Braid
    Author

    Helen Frost

    Helen Frost is the author of several books for young people, including Hidden, Diamond Willow, Crossing Stones, The Braid, and Keesha’s House, selected an Honor Book for the Michael L. Printz Award. Helen Frost was born in 1949 in South Dakota, the fifth of ten children. She recalls the summer her family moved from South Dakota to Oregon, traveling in a big trailer and camping in places like the Badlands and Yellowstone. Her father told the family stories before they went to sleep, and Helen would dream about their travels, her family, and their old house. “That’s how I became a writer,” she says. “I didn’t know it at the time, but all those things were accumulating somewhere inside me.” As a child, she loved to travel, think, swim, sing, learn, canoe, write, argue, sew, play the piano, play softball, play with dolls, daydream, read, go fishing, and climb trees. Now, when she sits down to write, her own experiences become the details of her stories. Helen has lived in South Dakota, Oregon, Massachusetts, New York, Vermont, Scotland, Colorado, Alaska, California, and Indiana. She currently lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with her family.

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    Reviews for The Braid

    4/5

    42 ratings7 reviews

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    • 3/5
      The story is told mostly in free verse narratives alternating from one sister’s voice to the other’s. The author uses syllabic measurements in each line to indicate the age of each girl. Interspersed between the narratives are praise poems. The author creatively uses the concept of braiding, mingling of ideas, as the basis for her poetic rules she follows. Easy to read, despite the intricate detail of poetic rules, the story unfolds about two sisters who must decide by themselves the pathway to follow. Heartwarming and poignant at the same time, the story reveals the severities of survival and death in new terrain. Older teens would better appreciate the intensity and complexities, but a younger reader will still understand the family situation.
    • 4/5
      Helen Frost does a wonderful job at telling the story of two sisters Sarah and Jeannie. Their family was forced to leave their home in Scotland - each girl traveling to a different location. Their hardships and happinesses are told in an invented formal structure, comprised of narrative poems (told in alternating voices - from Jeannie, then Sarah) and in between, short praise poems. A short, yet satisfying read.
    • 3/5
      The story is told mostly in free verse narratives alternating from one sister’s voice to the other’s. The author uses syllabic measurements in each line to indicate the age of each girl. Interspersed between the narratives are praise poems. The author creatively uses the concept of braiding, mingling of ideas, as the basis for her poetic rules she follows. Easy to read, despite the intricate detail of poetic rules, the story unfolds about two sisters who must decide by themselves the pathway to follow. Heartwarming and poignant at the same time, the story reveals the severities of survival and death in new terrain. Older teens would better appreciate the intensity and complexities, but a younger reader will still understand the family situation.
    • 5/5
      Helen Frost's The Braid takes the reader on a simple family journey across the Atlantic Ocean to the strange land of Canada's Cape Breton in the Mid-1800s, while at the same time allowing us to follow the delicate yarn that stretches across the sea back to Scotland and Mingulay where the rest of the family remains. It was such an easy read, it only took me two short 15-minute Metro rides. I also didn't even notice the intricacy of the book, its narrative poems, and its praise poems. Frost's explanation of how the poems are interwoven together surprised me, perhaps because I was not looking for it or because it was so well done that I was not jarred out of the narrative by its style.***Spoiler Alert***Jeannie and Sarah are close sisters, who are separated by the Atlantic Ocean when Sarah makes a rash decision to hide away while the rest of the family boards a boat for Canada. Sarah stays behind in Scotland with her grandmother, while Jeannie boards the boat with her other sisters, brother, and parents.Jeannie must step up to the plate in the New World and help provide for her family by begging strangers for food and shelter. She finds strength within herself. Sarah meanwhile succumbs to her emotional weakness, but turns out to be a positive for her. Jeannie, on the other hand, then transitions from an "adult" back to her childlike self.***End Spoiler Alert***This is another Young Adult novel that I would never have read without the advice of some great book bloggers and my Word Nerd partner. Helen Frost is a very creative author and this book is a simple story told in a unique way. I would love to recommend this to anyone who likes Young Adult novels and to those who just want a breath of fresh air.
    • 4/5
      Interesting. Not only is the story about braids of hair, but the poetry is braided, also.
    • 3/5
      Two Scottish sisters, living on the western island of Barra in the 1850s, relate, in alternate voices and linked narrative poems, their experiences after their family is forcible evicted and separated with one sister accompanying their parents and younger siblings to Cape Breton, Canada, and the other staying behind with other family on the small island of Mingulay. Each sister - Jeannie, who leaves Scotland during the Highland Clearances with her father, mother, and the younger children, and Sarah, who hides so she can stay behind with her grandmother - carries a length of the other's hair braided with her own. The braid binds them together when they are worlds apart and reminds them of who they used to be before they were evicted from the Western Isles, where their family had lived for many generations.
    • 5/5
      There is some poetry that reads complete with rhyme and a galloping rhythm, and then there is poetry like this book where the word play and skill is so skillfully done that it is almost invisible to the reader. This is the story of the intertwined lives of two sisters who are caught in the exodus from Scotland in the 1850s and escape into two very different lives that, like the poems that make up the story, are separate but braided together. Jeannie leaves Scotland for Canada with her mother, father, younger sisters and baby brother. Sarah stays with her grandmother, moving to an island in the Outer Hebrides. The two girls slowly grow up apart from one another and often unable to communicate in any way, though they remain connected by a braid of both their hair that each girl carries. The stories of the girls are in turn tragic, amazing and typical of so many people forced to leave their homelands. The skillfulness of Frost's poetry makes their situation all the more moving. Once readers finish the book and reach the explanation of the poetic forms, they will find themselves turning back through the poems and marveling at what happened right in front of them but they were unaware of. It is amazing skill to write this well, but to do it with a limitation of form that doesn't ever seem to limit the writing is simply remarkable.