© 2000 by Oxford University Press
Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Vol. 92, No. 15, 1267,
August 2, 2000
© 2000 Oxford University Press
BOOK REVIEW |
Zink
Cherie Bennett. New York (NY): Delacorte Press, 1999. 240 pp., $15.95. ISBN 0-385-32669-6
Correspondence to: Merle O’Rourke Thompson, Ph.D., 6012 Morgan Ct., Alexandria, VA 22312 (e-mail: merlethompson{at}compuserve.com).
Zebra herds on the Serengeti Plain in Tanzania fascinate the observer. On a Serengeti photo safari last year, I was mesmerized and couldn’t help wondering what secret code the hundreds of zebras were obeying. They would be standing around in groups and sometimes in pairs. Seemingly searching for a succulent grass blade, or snorting side by side, and suddenly, as if on a silent command, they would take off en masse, bobbing and weaving as one, across the grass, heading for cover in a wooded copse or by a rocky kopje. Had I read Bennett’s Zink, I might have understood. An enchanting creation of 10-year-old Becky’s imagination, the zebras in this book seemed as real to me as they did to her. They gossip, argue, play favorites, enjoy family security and rivalry, possess a legend about Zink, a polka-dotted zebra, are guided by a wise patriarch, and use social cohesion against adversity. It is the latter quality that Becky needs because she is facing her own predator, leukemia, just as the zebras face their predator, lions.
The story of Becky Zaslow’s journey through cancer treatments with the help of singing zebras arose because an 11-year-old girl, Kelly Weil, dying of cancer, wrote a one-page story about a polka-dotted zebra named Zink. After Kelly’s death, her father created the Zink the Zebra Foundation in her memory, which is devoted to celebrating and promoting diversity. The Foundation underwrote Bennett’s award-winning play Zink: The Myth, The Legend, The Zebra, which premiered in 1997. We now have the novelization of that play.
It is a simple story. Becky, a sixth grader, is participating in a multicultural school festival dressed in African costume when she faints and is taken by ambulance to the hospital. There she undergoes painful tests, including a bone marrow sampling, worried at first that she has acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, because no one, least of all her parents, is telling her anything. Then, pleased that it’s only leukemia, she stays hospitalized during chemotherapy, cuddling her stuffed zebra, mostly worried about the sixth-grade talent show that popular Ashley will probably win during her absence. Switching off and on back to the Serengeti, the story also follows the daily tribulations of a zebra herd headed by Papa Zeke. He tells them about Becky and sends three young zebras to comfort her. Magically, during her most painful time, Becky is visited by Zap, Zip, and Ice Z, zebras who sit by her bed, singing her favorite song, which is the one she will use in the talent show, "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." After more painful treatments and several zebra visits, Becky goes into remission and returns to normal life for many months. When the disease returns, she has a bone marrow transplant that does not succeed, and she then dies.
Becky has the normal preadolescent trials: an annoying sibling, middle-school rivalries, gossipy girlfriends, and parents who she feels treat her like a baby when she feels all grown-up. These concerns are mirrored in the zebra herd by witty depictions of several zebra personalities. Although I usually dislike children’s stories that anthropomorphize animals, I thought these zebras were interesting, perhaps because I recently stood in awe at the mysterious beauty of the Serengeti. It seemed natural that Papa Zeke should be standing in the birthplace of human life lecturing young zebras about the universality of certain truths among men and animals.
But Becky also has abnormal trials: recurrent pain, nauseating illness, parents who she feels treat her as too grown up when she feels sick enough to be a baby in their arms, and, most of all, the fear of death. She learns many of life’s important lessons from the zebras: to stop apologizing for being herself, to fly away to the Serengeti when she is overwhelmed by emotion and fear, to make real friends among the sick children, to confront her anxieties about Ashley and middle-school popularity, to talk honestly to her parents, and to ask them to reciprocate.
As a prime example of hyperrealism in children’s books, Zink offers guides to life’s realities. Bennett writes a nationally syndicated teen advice column, so her solutions for minor adolescent problems are on target. The value of a vivid imaginative life becomes a major lesson. Her instruction about cancer treatment details is honest. The reader notes that, despite adult conspiracies to keep the hospitalized children innocent, the patients talk among themselves and know a great deal, including the meaning of the medical shorthand used by doctors and nurses.
And yet, I wonder just who should read this book. After she dies, Becky becomes Zink, the legendary polka-dotted zebra living on the Serengeti, which might offend some religious readers. I cannot imagine that a child in the first stages of leukemia would want to face death so realistically, although older teenagers might be offered the book at the end stages of their disease. Perhaps parts of it could be read to hospitalized young teens with suggestions for their own imaginative escape from pain (not discomfort, as Becky so perfectly says). Parents and pediatric medical personnel should definitely read it to discover the conflicting feelings of their young patients and the knowledge a perceptive 12-year-old child can gain just lying in her hospital bed.
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