Bingo Free Space
Yes, I know Bingo technically was supposed to end two days ago, but since this is the extra free space I never ended up using, I’m still going to finish that off. I’ve been struggling to find a novella that I wanted to assign to an intro to lit class this coming spring (for reference, I’m at a regional state school) because I didn’t want to re-use anything too recent and I wanted to avoid something easily findable on the internet (either summaries or general study guide type sites with basic analyses etc.). Figures I find the one I want to use three weeks after book orders were due, but at least now I’ve got something for next time. I had decent luck with a previous P. Dejli Clark novella, and I’d somehow missed the original notice for The Black God’s Drums. It’s a good, quick moving story, with enough basis in tropes and traditions that it would make for a decent class study [and yes, eventually a paper of some kind] not limited to but including the plucky street smart heroine, alternate post Civil War history, New Orleans location and lore, steampunk, and pirates (sort of). It’s also got Africa folklore, the wise and strange elders, a swamp child, and a sort of chosen one angle that I kind of enjoyed. The use of dialect would also make for a pretty good starting point for looking at regional speech, something I’m pretty sure would go over well with a bunch of mostly Southern college students.
This was the fun but also smart read I’ve been looking for, both for myself and hopefully for some future students. Especially with some of the political and war commentary and themes, I think this would make a good way to look at those things without getting myself into trouble with the powers that be (I’m in a state that has some rules against “divisive” topics). Besides this being what I’m hoping is a readable and teachable novella, I also just had fun reading it myself. I’m the sort of geek who likes catching the allusions, and there are plenty here, and I’m sure quite I few I may have missed. But again, that’s the fun of doing a book with a group, even if it’s basically enforced book club, as I now I may have to re-label that section of my syllabus because that sounds like more fun the “longer fiction”.
