I think I Created a Monster

Precious is a very precocious (no pun intended) 15 year old girl who is in her second class in junior high school. She is one of the top performing students so the teachers pick her for just about anything that needs school representation outside the school. And the best part? She LOVES books. Precious doesn't originally come from Damanko, but her family came from somewhere around Kumasi. She said when she was younger her grandmother used to make her spend the hours after school in the library there, and she developed a love for books. In Damanko, however, there is not much to read. The headmaster at the junior high school quickly found that Precious could not only read at a higher level than most of his students but was equally impressed by the level with which she could recite (not word for word of course) the stories she read. But he soon ran out of novels to give her. (I think the school has scavenged maybe a total of five books one of them being Huck Finn.) So he started sending her to my house. At first I gave her easy-to-read abridged classics I found for sale in Hohoe. She got through those in a couple of hours. Then I started giving her books from our informal Peace-Corps-pass-around library and at first I didn't have much that was suitable for a teenaged African girl, so I gave her Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. She was excited that it looked like a grown-up book. Surprisingly, she had few problems reading or understanding it. Because of the rote memorization technique the schools employ here, students can usually read the words, but their comprehension is very low. After a couple easier children's novels, I gave her the big volume of the Chronicles of Narnia. I knew I had a winner there, because she devoured that book rapidly and her eyes lit up when she talked to me about it. She even kept it for a long time and read it through a second time. During all that time, I was collecting the Harry Potter books for her because various copies are in various Peace Corps offices and I even had to get the first book sent from home.

After about a month and a half, she is starting on the sixth book. One indicator of JK Rowling's genius is the ability of the books to evoke the same emotion in all its readers. Precious had never heard of Harry Potter before I gave her the books, never met anyone who had read them, and is totally isolated and ignorant about the Potter-mania that has sprung up and the cultural icon that is Harry Potter. Yet she acts like every other 15-year-old I ever saw that absolutely loves the books. Her mother tells her not to come and collect anymore, she is totally addicted. (I'm sure this makes me a bad influence.) I have all except the very last movie on my computer, so I've started letting her watch the movies and we only finished watching the first one today. Because many of the lines follow very closely with the book, she was predicting the actors' lines before they said them. And, no, of course she had never seen the movie before. She remembers nearly every little detail from any of the books she read; details such as that Filch is a squib, and she knows what that means. I had to convince her not to skip ahead in the movie because she was so curious to see what Quidditch looked like. She loves all the good characters and hates the bad ones with a vengeance. She is vehemently convinced of Snape's duplicity. Anytime the movie showed a panoramic view of the castle or flying on brooms, Precious would lament: “I wish I were a wizard!” She is certain all other books will be boring compared to the bright shiny world of Harry Potter. She would fit right in any of the Harry Potter fandom and there isn't much of that in Africa. Is the mark of a truly good story that it provokes similar behavior and emotions in all different people?

When she finishes the series, I'll tell her to take a break from books for a while (she may also need to catch up on her math practices), then I'll throw The Lord of the Rings at her and see what happens.