Quiet 3

QUIET 3

THE QUIET PLACE is a beautiful, tender tale of  Isabella and her family who move to the US from Mexico.  Isabella misses all that she has left behind, especially her Aunt Lupita and the sound of her own language.   In America she experiences her first snowstorm and she turns a large box into her QUIET PLACE, where she keeps her books and toys and writes letters to Aunt Lupita.  In her box, she feels safe and at home, and learns to adapt to her new life.  Set in the 1950’s and told through Isabel’s letters to her aunt, this is a story of immigration and assimilation.

I read this story (at the school where I read stories and majority of children are Hispanic)  in May at the close of the school year.  I had planned on reading it only to the 1^st through 4^th grades, but….I recognized after the 2^nd or 3^rd reading, that this was not only a timeless tale, but an ageless one.  The 8^th graders sat as spell bound as the 1^st graders.

I loved this story, not just because it is exquisitely illustrated and touchingly told, but because it opens up so many issues near and dear to my own heart.

Even although I was an adult when I moved to States, I still experienced (sometimes still do) a deep longing for my native land….homesickness.  I too missed my “language” (Scots English is different from American English).  I too missed my family back in Scotland and Ireland.  And I too missed my history, my roots, my identity.

This book also addresses what Doris Lessing (British novelist, who grew up in Zimbabwe and won Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007) calls – SPACE.  When reporters asked Lessing about her writing process, she told them that the essential question to ask any writer was not how they wrote, with quill or pen or word processor, but rather, “Have you found a space?"

because, Lessing claimed, " into that space, which is a form of listening, the ideas will come.”

 Dictionary definition of QUIET

1.       An absence or near absence of noise

2.       Peaceful, calm, tranquil

3.       Untroubled

4.       Not busy

5.       Not public

6.       Secret

7.       Modest

From the Latin – past participle – quietus, from quierscere TO REST.

QUIET books, like quiet people, teach us how to LISTEN.  It is not only writers who need SPACE, all of us do….and most especially, our little people need SPACE – QUIET PLACES

Be it a big cardboard box,

A spot underneath the table,

A den at the bottom of the yard,

A grassy patch beneath an oak tree

In their SPACE, children can pause and ponder and wonder and...

REST awhile, 

They need REST in order to GROW.

“There is nothing so strong as gentleness, and there is nothing so gentle as real strength.” Francis de Sales (patron saint of writers)

QUIET LEADERSHIP is not an oxymoron.”  Susan Cain.

Shh….Shhh….Shhh……