I hope you're enjoying reading Ricochet River. It's a fun book, I think, and deals with many of the themes you deal with in your lives.
FINAL EXAM--Ricochet River will be your final. That means we need to read 10-15 pages per class period.
Today we will read to page 40 and then answer the following questions:
Here's a study guide for the novel that Robin Cody wrote himself:
Ricochet River
And here are the study guide questions that we will be answering in class and turning in periodically:
CHAPTER 1
The opening section, little more than one page,
sets up a lot of what follows in this book. Dumb
Indian, Wade tells us. Jesse wasn’t very smart.
Consider the possibility that the author, as opposed
to the narrator, thinks Jesse is the smartest guy
in the boat.What we have here is an unreliable
narrator. Wade—like Huckleberry Finn, who
told us he was gong down the Mississippi with a
simple runaway slave—doesn’t get it.Maybe he’ll
figure it out. Maybe the reader will figure some
things out before Wade does.Mirror images (upside-down fir trees) and
reversals (vuja de) run to the core of this story.
Watch for them as the story unfolds.
The story opens in the summer of 1960. Some
of the racial references toward an Indian here
might not be tolerated today.Or would they just
be more subtle?
CHAPTER 2
This chapter opens with Jesse’s Coyote-dancing
story.Why?Wade doesn’t get it.Do you?
Jesse has come to Calamus from Celilo Falls,
the ancient fishing grounds on the Columbia
River. The site deserves more explanation than
Wade gives us. Celilo was where native people
had gathered for some 10,000 years, not just to
fish but also to worship and to socialize and to
trade goods with other tribes, from the coast to
the inland plains.Celilo was a hub of Northwest
civilization, the Seattle or Portland of its time.
Celilo Falls disappeared when The Dalles Dam
flooded it in 1957, just three years before our
story takes place.
CHAPTER 3
Wade and Jesse check each other out. How are
they different from one another? Find examples
of how Jesse’s Indian background (and the place
he is from) contrasts with Wade’s world.
Dams and fish are coming into play.The dam at
Calamus, like the dam that drowned Celilo Falls,
had a big effect on ocean-going salmon.
Note Jesse’s blind spot about consequences. He’s
surprised, after hitting golf balls across the river,
that the golf balls are gone.
CHAPTER 4
Ricochet River has been described by some as a
book about place, about how a place—its rivers,
its woods, its natural setting—shapes its people.
How, in Wade’s view, is his mother out of place?
The New York publisher of this book surprised
the author by saying what he liked best about
Ricochet River was “the Oregonness” of it.What
could a New Yorker have meant by that?
Contrast Lorna’s view of Calamus to Wade’s.
Jesse has big money coming. The government
compensates native people for lost lands and
fishing sites. Ricochet River is fiction, but that
part is true. Do readers see any problem with
money for place?
Note for later Lorna’s favorite story, about the
raft.
CHAPTER 5
