Booktalking Colorado - Full Booktalk Record

Booktalking Colorado Full Record:

	Title:	Kit's Wilderness
	Author:	Almond, David
	Date Published:	2000
	Genre:	Adventure
	Grade Level:	6 - 12
	Booktalker:	Bonnie Phinney

Booktalk:
Everyone in Stoneygate thought they had disappeared. They were wrong. They thought they were dead. But they were wrong. John and Allie and Kit stumbled out of the ancient darkness into the valley. They were scorched and blackened from the flames and there was dried blood on their lips, cuts and bruises on their skin. They watched their neighbors below digging for them in the snow and dragging the riverbed for their bodies– everyone feared the worst. Kit met John Askew a week after he moved to Stoneygate. John was known to be a troublemaker and everyone told Kit to stay away from him. But, the boys were drawn to one another, partly because they both came from the “old families” of the village, but also because they were both artists. John Askew drew hauntingly realistic pictures of the old life: dark, but beautiful, pictures – pictures that reflected pain, and poverty, and death. Kit was an artist of a different sort – an artist with words. He began to write about it, composing haunting stories to go with the pictures, stories that took a person deep into the darkness of history, stories that lived in Kit’s imagination and came to life on the paper. It was almost as if both boys had been there. Living in the pits. In Stoneygate there is a wilderness – an empty space between the houses and the river where the coalmine used to be. All that remains now is an abandoned shaft with its labyrinth-like tunnels below. It was there where it all started – John and Allie and Kit’s adventure – an adventure into another time long ago…. It had begun with a game. Askew’s game. In his game, he leads his friends down into the abandoned pits to look for the childhood ghosts of their long lost ancestors. Imagine sitting in a circle in the cavern, candles aglow, Eerie pictures on the walls. John Askew chooses someone to lie down alone in the darkness while they reenact the mining disaster of 1821. Some of the players consider the game to be make-believe, but to Kit, with his vivid imagination, it is all too real. When it’s his turn, he actually does see visions of the long-dead miners and senses something dark and dangerous. “You have come into this ancient place,” Askew challenges Kit, “to play the game of Death.” And so it began.