SuitabookI'll Be Watching
Pamela Porter
- Reading
- Consider reading together or checking in after sections that deal with family loss or abuse; the free-verse form and changing narrators also offer natural pauses to discuss perspective.
- Themes
- Resilience and kindness: The children face severe hardship and find ways to get by through their own resourcefulness and small acts of help. The book presents this favourably.
- Community judgement and adult hypocrisy: Small-town gossip and cruel attitudes appear alongside adults’ indifference, self-interest and wrongdoing. The book takes a critical view of this.
- Worth knowing
- The story includes a parent’s death, children left with little food, heat or money, sexual abuse of a minister’s daughter, wartime danger and a storyline involving a doctor’s daughter and polio.