READING WITH PATRICK

A book about the redemptive power of reading and literature

In 2009 Michelle Kuo was in law school, after having spent two years in a very poor part of Arkansas with Teach for America, when to her shock she learned that one of her most promising former students, Patrick Roddy, had killed someone. After visiting Patrick, she made the impulsive decision to stay. At first, she didn't have any idea what she would do there, but visiting Patrick again, realizing that he had lapsed back into illiteracy, she made another impulsive decision and gave him homework. In this way, they recreated their roles as teacher and student, and started reading together, beginning with The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.

READING WITH PATRICK is the story of the seven months Michelle spent teaching Patrick in jail. It's about Michelle's experience as an Asian-American whose parents are dismayed by their daughter's unconventional choices. It's about her loneliness in the Mississippi Delta, and the urban pleasures that pull her guiltily away. It's a meditation on the obligations of the privileged, and how so many in our country are abandoned. Throughout the story Michelle wonders about what she's doing, whether it's crazy and whether it will make any difference for Patrick. But in the end, even though she resists too-easy redemptive stories of teacherly heroism, it really does feel as if her astonishing rescue mission will succeed. We start to think that Patrick's life will really be changed.

Like Reading Lolita in Teheran, it's a book about the redemptive power of reading and literature. Like The Blind Side, it's a book about what can be done for a single talented young person, even after they've been utterly abandoned, if there's enough commitment. Like Pat Conroy's The Water is Wide, it's a book about the dedication of a teacher who travels to one of the poorest parts of the country, and through sheer teacherly energy, finds a way to connect.

MICHELLE KUO is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. She has worked in a poverty law clinic in Oakland California, taught writing at San Quentin prison, and clerked for two federal judges in San Francisco. She has published in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She currently lives in France, where her husband teaches history at the American University of Paris.