Evaluation

Evaluation of Minn of the Mississippi

When it was first published in 1951, Minn of the Mississippi was received by the public and critics with a great deal of success and praise.  For many readers the book’s artistic style and narrative format were instantly recognizable in keeping with exactly what they had come to expect from Holling’s other children’s books.  The book provided its readers with an encyclopedic coverage of an entire geographic region of the country through its main character’s travel narrative and accompanying black and white illustrations and full page scenes.  The book remains relatively popular to the present day and has continued to resonate with today’s young readers.  The timelessness of the narrative and beauty of the book’s illustrations have helped continue its relevancy with today’s audiences.

For the most part, Minn has continued to be viewed in a similar fashion throughout the history of its publication.  The book has been praised mainly for the amount of factual information it is capable of conveying to readers while remaining entertaining at the same time.  The story places its main character and the river in a fairly ahistorical setting in which many different eras of the river’s history are weaved into the larger narrative.  This mixing of historical periods allowed the narrative to convey a broader set of facts about the Mississippi’s long history and kept the story from becoming stale for future readers by not limiting the setting to contemporary 1950’s America.  The book’s ability to take its readers on a journey through history as well as down the river allows the reader to constantly satisfy their own curiosity by never quite being allowed to fully settle into any one of the book’s settings that Minn passes through.

Growing up, I fell in love with this book and many of Holling’s other works for that very reason.  For me, Minn was a sort of informational escapism that allowed me to explore an area of the country I had never traveled through.  The book took me on a very bizarre road trip in my head and included a lot of the highlights that I would have seen in parks and tourist stops along the way.  In many ways I’ve seen the book as a sort of intellectual precursor to other information dense children’s books such as Joanna Cole’s The Magic School Bus series of the 1990’s.  In both Cole and Holling’s works the theme of a journey or exploration provide the means for exposing its young readers to a large body of educational material while keeping them entertained.

How readers have viewed Minn’s educational value over the years has certainly changed.  At the time of its publication it was praised for being rich in information and facts, but it was equally praised for its colorful full-page illustrations as well.  Today, the book is experiencing somewhat of a renaissance amongst many homeschooling networks that value the book as an educational text that can be easily incorporated into a lesson plan.    Ready made lesson plans on geography and biology focused on Holling’s books may now be purchased from homeschooling resource websites.  One such lesson plan called Geography Through Literature advertises itself as being the best method of “getting the most out of Holling’s books.”  Using Holling’s works as the main texts of a child’s education, however, has many implications that go beyond anything the author most likely intended in the creation of his stories.  Holling never intended for his books to be the centerpiece of a child’s education, but instead sought to pique his readers’ curiosity to seek out more knowledge on the topics he covered.  While the books certainly contain a great deal of educational value, I believe Hollings never intended them to serve in the function of text book.

A Home School Primer Using Holling's Books

Holling, Holling Clancy, Minn of the Mississippi. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1951.

“Geography Through Literature.”  Heppner’s Legacy: Homeschool Resources. http://legacyhomeschool.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=3050&zenid=c17e6898f355b77a9abb43dc95ff32a0: accessed 11-11-2012.