Linda Sue Park’s A Single Shard was published in 2001 and thereupon proceeded to be awarded the prestigious Newberry Medal for excellence the following year. Anyone familiar with that particular literary award will instantly realize that this makes a book written for a young audience. Most study guides to be used in teaching the book are furthermore narrowed to students in the high elementary to lower middle school grades, suggesting that the targeted readership for the book is somewhere in the tweens and very low teens. Much of the vocabulary used in the text, however, seems to strong hint that if his level is appropriate then it is book more likely to be used in advanced level English classes. Words like felicitous, concubines, connoisseur, lugubrious, and ministration don’t seem exactly suitable for the average eleven-year-old.
And then there is the actual storyline. Unlike many works of fiction that win awards specifically for writing for kids, A Single Shard does not take place in a completely imagined world nor does it feature characters the same approximate age as its readers experiencing events in the modern world to which they can relate. It is, in fact, set in a time and place that is about as far from the experiences of modern kids as know history allows: a small Korean village during the 12th century. Interestingly, however, one of the first things that the protagonist learns is that he is actually older than he has been led to believe:
“I kept count of your years, for I thought the time would come when you would like to know how old you are.”
Tree-ear looked again, this time with keen interest. There was a mark for each finger of both hands—ten marks in all.
Crane-man answered before Tree-ear asked. “No, you have more than ten years,” he said. “When you first came and I began making those marks, you were in perhaps your second year—already on two legs and able to talk.”
And so, less than five pages into the story, Tree-ear learns that he is actually more advanced than he thought. It is the first instance of his learning that he has reason to believe he possesses capacities within himself he did not know or imagine. The “plot” of the novel—the storyline that it tracks—is one in which this ten-year-old who really possessed the potential of a twelve-year-old is constantly tested against the expectations place upon him and the expectations he has placed upon himself. And with each confrontation, he learns to break through the limitations of expectations and exceed and excel beyond not just what others expect, but what he expects from himself.
Perhaps the link between the real age of the author’s hero and the age he believes himself to be and the expectations placed upon a ten-year-old by most people and the belief that most ten-year-old kids could probably meet the expectations placed upon those just a few years older is purely coincidental. And perhaps it is mere accident that the suggested grade level and age for students to read A Single Shard as part of a classroom assignment does not quite jibe with a vocabulary which seems more suitable for kids a couple of years old and a grade or two down the road. If so, it is a particularly felicitous ministration of fate, thematically speaking.
