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Three eras, spanning a hundred years
See how three teenagers overcome difficulties
Run like light in the rough earth
Look at ancient China like a teenager chasing dreams
Walking with one head held high, we will walk toward the road of national independence and prosperity
Author of "China's Good Books"
Yang Juan
2021 novel
"The Boy Who Chased the Stars"
This book tells the story of three young boys and girls of different eras who have devoted themselves to long-distance running.
A 14-year-old blind girl, Hoshizuki, learns the story of the famous runnerSmith Amu and Ryoko and develops a desire to run. Accompanied and encouraged by family and friends, Hoshigetsu practiced long-distance running unremittingly to continue the sportsmanship of Amu and Ryoko.
The work successfully shapes the image of teenagers with distinct characteristics of the times, such as Amu, Liangzi, and Xingyue, who are indomitable, more and more courageous, firmly set goals and be down-to-earth. The novel skillfully connects the stories of three teenagers running in different eras, showing ordinary children surpassing themselves step by step and finally realizing their dreams; looking back at the great struggle course experienced by the people in the past one hundred years since the founding of the Communist Party of China. At the same time, it also praises the Chinese sportsmanship of winning glory for the country and fighting tenaciously, full of positive energy for growth.
This book was selected
"China's Good Books" Monthly List
2021 Children's Theme Publishing Recommendation Book List
"Phoenix Good Books" monthly list
Recommended reading books for teachers and students of primary and secondary schools in Suqian City during the winter vacation of the 2021-2022 school year
China Press, Publication, Radio, Telegraph and Telegraph's November Excellent Bestseller List
This book skillfully connects the stories of three teenagers running in different eras, shows how children surpass themselves step by step in ordinary life, realize their dreams, and use small and big brushstrokes to highlight the chinese sportsmanship of winning glory for the country and fighting tenaciously.
"China's Good Books" Monthly List Recommendation
As Mr. Wang Xiurong, a member of the editorial board of Phoenix Media and the former editor-in-chief of Jiangsu Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing House, commented, this is a special gift for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.
Where is the "special" work?
Let's follow the professional publishers and find out -
Wonderful reviews
A century of China on the runway
Wang Xiurong
As a young writer, Yang Juan has made great achievements in the field of children's literature in recent years, and her representative work "Youth Just Comes From" not only won the Second Cao Wenxuan Children's Literature Award for Long Story Masterpiece Award, but also was selected into the "China Good Books" Monthly List. Yang Juan did not stop there, but continued to explore, and this newly published novel "The Boy Who Chased the Stars" is the latest result of this exploration, and in a sense, it can be said that she is a special gift to the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.
Novel narrative methods and unique story structures are the most distinctive features of this novel. "The Boy Who Chased the Stars" is a long children's novel, but it looks different from the general children's novel. It uses running as a clear line, selects three different historical stages, three characters of different historical periods, and carries out clever design and combination, threading and beading seemingly three unrelated stories, so that there is a certain relationship between them. The author visits the exhibition "Running Like Light" through the blind teenager Xingyue, and uses the audio equipment of the exhibition hall to unfold the storyline by listening to the story. The novel adopts the method of retrospection from far and near, through the different perspectives of three different characters of Amu, Liangzi and Xingyue, unfolding the story and shaping the characters, thus showing the broad social life, showing a broader vision, deeper history and multiple perspectives than ordinary children's novels, and also bringing readers a fresher reading experience. The works include Amu's melancholy and desolate historical narrative, As well as Ryoko's first-person intimate and simple self-description, as well as the omniscient perspective of the third person of Xingyue, and even make full use of Xingyue's unique hearing, "perspective" and imagination as a blind teenager. The superposition of multiple techniques shows the reader a colorful world.
The use of typification and symbolism gives the novel a special connotation. The novel selects three different historical stages with typical and symbolic significance, and three representative sports teenagers as the protagonists of the story, which is equivalent to intercepting three cross-sections from the long history and selecting a perspective in history, so that the novel has a special meaning and connotation. Amu is the epitome of the dark, backward and slaughtered youth of the old China, Liangzi represents the sunshine teenager of the newly liberated and newly reborn China, and xingyue represents the youth of the new era, they represent the old China, the new China and the contemporary China respectively. In a sense, these three periods of history in which they live are also the three representative stages of China's social development in modern times, condensing a hundred years of Chinese history.
Although Ah Mu was influenced by the democratic and progressive ideas of his mother, uncle, Song Jinchen and Liang Qichao from childhood, he knew that if the youth was strong, China was strong, although he wanted to "snow the shame of my motherland and relieve my people's livelihood" through personal efforts, although after countless runs on the Xiang River, countless sweats, and unremitting hard training, she became the first in Hunan in the athletics field, the first in China, became the famous "female runner king", and had the honor of participating in the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games with the Chinese team, but the result was the same as more than a hundred Chinese athletes. Even the preliminary round was not passed, and no one made it to the final. The harsh facts show that in the dark, backward, poor and weak old China, any personal effort was futile, and he was left with only eternal regrets. Amu's tragedy is not hers personal, but historical, epochal. Amu's fate is also a true portrayal of the fate of countless old Chinese teenagers.
Liangzi is an ordinary Anhui teenager, fortunately he is a teenager who has just liberated New China. In the prosperous world, the sky of New China is a sunny day, and the once dark sky has become brighter, so he changed his name to "Guoliang", nickname "Liangzi". Liangzi's father was a builder and water conservancy expert in New China. Liangzi grew up under the red flag and felt the booming construction of New China everywhere and the peace and beauty of New China. He didn't have the worries and difficulties of Amu, he felt a fire in his heart, and he had endless strength, and New China gave him a motivation to run. He loves to run, and although he runs very slowly, it doesn't affect his love of running in the slightest. As a primary school student, the first time he participated in the sports meeting, he only ran to the bottom of the first place, but he insisted on running to the finish line. He knew that it didn't matter if he could reach the finish line first, what mattered was to keep running. With this belief, later in the Foziling Reservoir, with the help of Shanghai university students, he mastered the correct running essentials, and finally added wings to the tiger, setting the first marathon record in New China, and was lucky enough to become the Olympic torchbearer.
If Amu and Ryoko represent the past tense, the star moon is the time of progress. Although born as a blind child, with the help of her parents and society, Xingyue has developed an optimistic and self-reliant personality. With the help of modern technology, she went to blind school, mastered some knowledge, and taught herself economics and literature classes online. Although blindness has closed a window on her, the Internet has opened up a new world for her. Through the network system designed for the blind, she can not only communicate with the outside world conveniently, but also live and study independently in the case of her mother going abroad for further study and her father going to a meeting in a foreign country, and even find a professional volunteer who is willing to take her for a run through the online social platform - Liangzi (Grandpa). Running made her insert a pair of wings, let her "see" a more different world, so she simply launched the organization of the "Starlight Running Group" on the Internet, calling on more people to participate in sports, run together, and run to the future.
Three different historical stages, three teenagers' running stories, and three teenagers with different destinies constitute a long picture from old China to a new era, reflecting a hundred years of history, making the work have a deep historical dimension and a broad vision, reflecting the historical progress of Chinese society and the theme of the times when the youth is strong and China is strong.
(Originally published in China Reading News)
Three typical historical phases
The running fate of three teenagers
The stars are lit up, and the dreams are brave
A hundred years of relay, a legend of Geng continued
The more you read, the happier you are
2021
Pay attention to Su Shao
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