Seedfolks

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.

Using the multiple voices that made Bull Run (1995) so absorbing, Fleischman takes readers to a modern inner-city neighborhood and a different sort of battle, as bit by bit the handful of lima beans an immigrant child plants in an empty lot blossoms into a community garden, tended by a notably diverse group of local residents. It's not an easy victory: Toughened by the experience of putting her children through public school, Leona spends several days relentlessly bulling her way into government offices to get the lot's trash hauled away; others address the lack of readily available water, as well as problems with vandals and midnight dumpers; and though decades of waging peace on a small scale have made Sam an expert diplomat, he's show more unable to prevent racial and ethnic borders from forming. Still, the garden becomes a place where wounds heal, friendships form, and seeds of change are sown. Readers won't gain any great appreciation for the art and science of gardening from this, but they may come away understanding that people can work side by side despite vastly different motives, attitudes, skills, and cultural backgrounds. It's a worthy idea, accompanied by Pedersen's chapter-heading black-and-white portraits, providing advance information about the participants' races and, here and there, ages. (Fiction. 9-11)

-Kirkus Review show less

I got this book based on a colleague's recommendation and ended up liking it more than I thought I might. It tells the story of a vacant lot that is transformed by the members of neighboring apartments into a community garden. I guess I was put off by the expectation of a feel-good, we’re-all-in-this-together story but it didn’t read that way and I especially liked how individuals were given some development rather than being just stereotyped characters from any urban neighborhood. I was told but had to see for myself.

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.

This is a lovely tale of what makes humans, humans. It tells us that we have so much in common and we all have a story to tell. The story connects us to each other and to the Earth. It tells us that the most simple and basic act of growing a garden can bring people of all backgrounds together for a common goal. It is a quick, but satisfying read. The individual stories are rich and layered without being preachy and one-dimensional. A great read for any age.

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.

Very good book that incorporates several different narrators from different races and cultures and surprisingly brings them all together with the goal of a flourishing garden. I enjoyed reading the different perspectives from each narrator.