Anchor Text

Content Area Connections- Social Studies:

7.H.1: Use historical thinking to analyze various modern societies.

• 7.H.1.3: Use primary and secondary sources to interpret various historical perspectives.

7.C.1: Understand how cultural values influence relationships between individuals, groups and political entities in modern societies and regions.

• 7.C.1.1: Explain how culture unites and divides modern societies and regions (e.g. enslavement of various peoples, caste system, religious conflict, and Social Darwinism).

Awards:

A Midwest Connections Pick for January 2017.

Winter 2016-17 Kids’ Indie Next Pick.

Finalist, Midwest Booksellers Choice Awards, 2017.

Finalist, Minnesota Book Awards, 2018.

VOYA (Voice of Youth Advocates) Top Shelf Fiction for Middle School Readers, 2017.

Sunshine State Young Readers Award (FL), 2018-19 finalist.

Maine Student Book Award, 2018-19 finalist.

Anchoring the Text Set and Cultural Diversity:

With a plethora of characters forced from their homeland, A Crack in the Sea anchors this unit of refugees and forced migration. It highlights different types of displacement that have occurred throughout our world including slavery and boat refugees during the Vietnam War. Readers are immersed into the lives of these characters and experience a part of what they are feeling in their journeys.

While writing the book, Heather (H.M.) Bouwman collaborated with six individuals to gather accurate and authentic details about Vietnam, including expert cultural advise on the country and its people as well. Doing so helps to maintain the portrayal of these characters in an accurate and appropriate representation. During her time teaching college courses, Bouwman came across the Zong slave ship while reading and developed this text around this real ship. She studied and explored the history of the vessel and the voyage that is mirrored in the text to provide details that are unknown to many, young and old, about the atrocity that actually took place in 1781.

Both of these examples of forced migration and refugees are taken from historical events and woven into the fantasy realm of the text, not to diminish what happened, but to have the reader consider alternatives. Alternatives of worlds where people didn’t drown while trying to escape from war, or where people didn’t die in chains. Where humans weren’t compared to property and seen as an insurance write-off. Through her words, Bouwman maintains each character’s individual humanity, regardless of their accomplishments and/or downfalls. The cultural diversity of the characters in their words and thoughts encapsulates their individuality, holding true to their home even as they cross into a second world full of magic and unknown.

The idea of “home” and where it is found is a strong ideology that Bouwman enforces throughout the text. Not that there is one solid home for anyone, but that it goes with you and you turn your surroundings into your home. She also brings up how sometimes you arrive at a new home and find that you are unwelcome. Feeling unwelcome in a new (or familiar) place also arises in A Crack in the Sea. This ideology is brought forth through the overarching topic of refugees and forced migration, and is especially timely in our current reactions to those who are simply seeking a new home for whatever reason. In her Afterward, Bouwman details in part why she chose to reimagine the historical acts in a fantasy world, and the power that books can have on readers when they offer alternatives to past events. This Afterward demonstrates just some of the research that she dove into to further her understanding of the Zong, which strengthens the accuracy of the text, and supports her details of the characters, their behaviors, and their actions in her writing.

Anchoring our unit, this text provides a basis for our text set that branches from the topic of refugees and forced migration. The children’s books are rooted in this theme and cover topics from various viewpoints across each: refugees traveling, refugees in camps, enslaved persons, a father of a child stolen away into slavery, refugee in a new country, undocumented immigration, and all from various ages, times, countries, religions, races, and genders. The connecting texts gather more information around this topic and culminate a richer and deeper insight into the history of the events of the book and some glimpses into the current events about refugees and forced migration.