Every Thursday afternoon, about six girls in the Kalamazoo County Juvenile Home meet for book club. Kids are only at the home for about two weeks at a time, but founder Marge Kars says reading has a profound effect on their lives.
Children really do have hard lives and people don't really see it
Kars took me to a club meet a few weeks ago, just as the girls were starting a new read—Panic by Sharon Draper. It's a fictional story about a girl who gets kidnapped after getting in a car with a handsome stranger.
Kars says the books they read are all very different, but usually there is an underlying theme.
"What they read about are, very often, young people that have the same circumstances they have. And so they may begin to share their personal stories," she said.
"But they also understand that somebody else has gone through this. Somebody else made it through, came out better at the end—and that I think has a big impact on them."
Kars says the book club only has a few rules: 1. You don't have to read, but you if you read that's great. 2. You can read as much as you want. 3. You cannot interrupt or poke fun—you have to focus on book club.
Everyone follows these rules, says Kars.
Peter Holt is the director at the juvenile home. He says a lot of these kids come from homes and schools where they may not have many books.
A lot of our kids will come in at a 3rd grade reading level or lower. So to get those kids that are not comfortable reading in front of the group to actually- by the end of the book club—being willing and feel comfortable enough with everybody there, including Marge [Kars] and Leslie [Schultz], is huge. And we don't see that in any of our other programs. They don't do that in school because they're embarrassed about how they read, but they'll do it in book club.
Unlike what teens and pre-teens often read for school assignments, almost all of the books in book club are young adult novels—plenty of which you can't even find at your local library.
Leslie Schultz is a retired teacher who volunteers for the book club. Schultz says she's seen girls who hate reading end up liking it by the end of book club.
"Many girls have never owned a book of their own and for the first time in their lives get to have a book, and that's a really powerful thing," she said.
Kars says some girls don't get to read the book all the way through in the club, so she lets many of the girls keep the books they purchase. One teen describes the book she read for the time she was in book club:
I really can't remember the title, but it was about a girl in witness protection program, her whole family was. And at first she didn't know why, she thought it was her dad's fault and stuff. And to the end of the book she figured out like she was in witness protection program cause herself—like she saw something that went on. Like she was having dreams and she didn't know what the dreams were. She just thought they were nightmares, but really they were reality. I didn't never finish the book so I don't know if they ever found out their real names or anything.
She said she would likely finish the book because she has it.
The book club has a partnership with the Kalamazoo Public Library that helps them bring in the authors of the books the girls are reading. Kars says about 30 authors have come to the juvenile home to meet members of the book club, including Jacqueline Woodson, James McBride, and the late Walter Dean Myers.
"The amazing thing with the authors is to a person, to an author, they will say afterwards, 'I got questions from those kids that I don't even get from college students," Kars said.
Kars says Walter Dean Myers considered re-writing a novel after visiting the Kalamazoo juvenile home.
One of the girls said she wants to meet the authors of The Three Doctors series - Sampson Davis, George Jenkins, and Rameck Hunt. All three men came to Kalamazoo to speak last July. The teen said she would ask them:
What made them talk about their lifetime story about how their life went from bad to good in like a couple of years? And what got them to where they are now? Cause it could relate to some of us that are in here now, cause they doing most of the stuff that we're doing now and they went to medical school and got their diplomas and all that. And they're making it successfully.
Another teen says she was only in book club for a short time, but her favorite book would have to be A Child Called "It." The book is author Dave Pelzer's story of how he was abused by his alcoholic mother for most of his childhood. I asked her why she liked such an intense read. Here's her reply:
It's like what kids go through from a young age, like he was really young going through all that and his parents was treating him wrong and stuff. And some people don't know what's going on. Us being juveniles and stuff, like people really don't know what we go through on the outside. And like even though we do little things that's mess-ups and then we get put here - all of us really not bad. I wouldn't label us as bad. We just have mess-ups and stuff. But people really do...children really do have hard lives and people don't really see it, they don't recognize it.
Kars says the Juvenile Home would like to start a book club for the boys. Men who are interested in helping out can find out more by contacting the Kalamazoo County Juvenile Home.
