Jim Brozina and our father have a lot in common: they're roughly men of the same age; both educators; love reading and sharing books with children; like bikes; and...and...and...are fathers. There, that's the best I can do to draw comparisons between our Dad and Jim, the father and co-creator of the father-daughter reading streak that led to the book, "The Reading Promise".
As a sixth grade teacher, Dad not only had firm knowledge of classic titles to share with us, but also kept pretty current with new authors and releases. We often went to the library as a family, and Dad was just as likely as Mom to suggest a title or offer a recommendation. Dad's reading corner in his classroom contained, I believed, the world's largest collection of thrillers for kids: books like "I Survived A Grizzly Attack! (and other tales of survival)". Looking back, there may have been only two or three of these books(and I'm paraphrasing the titles), most probably freebies from Scholastic Books, but I was riveted. A chance to peruse these books was one of the main reasons I so readily agreed to help with the summer cleaning and classroom prep (also: games; reading notes from kids; discovering graffiti; and lunch at McDonalds).
I give you these details because working together on a reading streak is precisely the kind of thing we would have done with our father, had it ever occurred to us. We're a competitive family, we like challenges, we like games...why not? As I made my way through the opening pages of Alice Ozma's literary account of her reading challenge with her own father, I couldn't help but wonder how our family would have made this our own. Popcorn and ice cream would have been involved somehow. We probably would have read a lot more in the morning (picture a parent reading while children are listening and dusting or weeding...we are also a family who multitasks). There would have been endless reminders not to dog ear the pages. (I'm of the mind that paper was meant to be folded. I've been somewhat rehabilitated, but we're all flawed. Right?) We probably would have taken turns being the reader, or at least switched sometimes. We might have also interrupted the reader to comment on the plot...a lot.
But, this is the story of a newly single dad who, whether by design or happenstance, helps his 9 year old daughter through this transition by reading aloud to her every night. Not that this was a new schedule for the pair, but they challenged each other to read for 100 consecutive nights, then 1,000, leading to a grand total of 3,000+ nights until she left for college. Told from the perspective of the daughter, Alice Ozma, their nine years of reading together are chronicled through tales of favorite titles, memorable moments, and slightly embarrassing times. Yet, this isn't a story of a happy father and happier daughter who become even happier by reading together. Ozma writes quite bluntly of her father's emotional distance; her mother's suicide attempt and later abandonment of the family; her much older (9 years) sister who fends for herself by making a life elsewhere; major financial hardship; and feeling like an outsider throughout most of her teenage years (more so than the rest of us). The book doesn't close on a happy note: the father is forced out of his job as school librarian and is in the process of figuring out the next chapter; the daughter is now a college graduate (and published author!) looking for a job through her personal website (as a former career counselor, this made me cringe).
While I loved the idea of this book, I wanted it to be so, so different. 9 years of reading together is certainly worthy of its own book. It could have been instructional, as so many parents need to be taught how to read to their children. It could have been more collaborative (the father does contribute a foreword), because I strongly wanted to hear the perspective of the adult in this reading duo. It could have been a young adult tale of survival, the kind of sensationalism I craved as a pre-teen ("My mother emailed her boyfriends, drank, and tried to kill herself...while my emotionally distant father read his books. I survived and you can, too!"). Instead, the publisher went with a 20 something writing autobiographically, using books as the anchor. This is very much a (well-written) personal diary that found its way to the printer's press. It's an interesting read as it stands, but could have been so much more so if Ozma had another 10 or 15 years of perspective on these very recent years of her life.
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