Book Summary
Matt Pin was adopted into an American family after being air lifted out of Vietnam during the Vietnam War. His birth father was an American soldier and his birth mother was Vietnamese. His birth mother was forced to give him up for a better life. Matt plays the piano and becomes the pitcher of his baseball team. Through his coaches, parents, and piano teacher, Matt is guided towards facing his past, the people who treat him badly because of where he is from, the political climate of the time, and his own mistakes he has made.
APA Reference of the Book
Burg, Anne. (2009). All the broken pieces. New York, NY: Scholastic Press.
Impression
This is an emotional, powerful book that explores the tensions and misunderstandings that faced our nation after the Vietnam War. I think choosing to write this novel in verse made it more powerful and was the best format for this novel. This is a heavy novel, but one that I feel is needed. The emotions are much better expressed through verse than if it were just a standard novel. Like a strong fiction book, the changes the main character experiences are profound. There are not many books that confront this time in our nation's history and I think it is an important one that needs to be addressed. I also felt that weaving sports and music into this book not only make it more realistic, but show how these forums can help us deal with our emotions and experiences. It's a tear jerker, but a much needed one.
Professional Review
Seventh-grader Matt is haunted by his past, when his frantic Vietnamese mother, intent on keeping her elder son safe, sent him to America in the Saigon airlift when he was nine. On the surface, he seems to have settled in with his American family—he has joined the baseball team and become its star pitcher, and he's taking to the piano like a duck to water—but he's still tormented by grief and guilt over what he experienced, especially his younger brother's terrible injuries from encountering a land mine when he was under Matt's care. The free-verse text lacks tonal control, veering from sentimentality to flat prosiness to oversophisticated metaphor, and there's some cliché in plot elements such as Matt's misunderstanding of a parental conversation he overhears and his relationship with a racist bully on the team. The book tackles some subjects worthy of exploration, though, ranging from the parallels between the civilian and soldier experiences in the Vietnam War to the difficulty of reconciling a traumatic past with a peaceful present, especially when a child has left family behind; as a picture of older-child adoption, it's refreshing in its acknowledgment of the importance of the child's earlier life. With its accessible writing, this will help it bridge the historical gap for young readers, who may gain new understanding of some of the struggles of the previous generation.
Stevenson, D. (2009). [Review of the book: All the broken pieces, by D. Stevenson]. Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books: 62(9), 35.
Library Uses
This book could be used in a variety of scenarios: novels in verse, sports books, adoption stories, etc. I think this book would best be served as a study or display on books that have to do with the Vietnam War era. While this piece of history is more current than other wars and historical events, I think it gets some of the least recognition or study. To me, that's unfortunate, as I think a lot of our current political climate can be compared to this time.
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