3 Cups for Young Readers - or Not

Three Cups of Tea
for Young Readers (c) 2009 209 pages

We’re all busy, it’s true. In case you’ve been so busy that you haven’t heard Greg Mortenson’s story – the riveting nonfiction Three Cups of Tea – well, OK, I’ll tell you. But I’ll wager you haven’t been quite as busy as Mortenson.

Mortenson served as a US Army medic before surviving years of what most would consider successful mountain climbing. Then, when he failed to reach the summit of K2 (he was about 600 meters short) and got himself badly lost, by the grace of God, or Allah, or Mohammed, or all three, he found himself in very good company, in the village of Korphe, in the Baltisan region of Pakistan.

There ended his climbing adventures and began a much more heroic journey.

Sincerely wishing to repay the kindness of those who nursed him back to health in Korphe – and probably, with a climber’s bravado – Mortenson promised to return to the village and build a school for its children.

How he fulfilled that promise is a great story, and after years on bestseller lists, it is now available in a young reader’s version (Puffin pb 2009). There's also a lovely picture book for the lapsit set. (More on that later.)

Weighing in at 209 pages, the young readers edition about two-thirds as long as the original – so adults who want to read Three Cups but just haven’t made time will have to come up with a new excuse. The Young Reader’s edition is better than a Readers’ Digest Condensed version, but the fact that it is so true to the original story is why, IMHO, it will not resonate with teens the way Three Cups did with adults.

For one reason, by teen standards, it’s a very slow-moving story.

There's little action, aside from some wild drives through Baltistan's Hushe Valley, which is quite dramatic. The rest of the book's drama is social, interpersonal, conversational. It's in the strange and protracted negotiations about concrete and nails. Trust me, it's a lot more exciting than it sounds, but it'll never grip kids like Twilight or (pulling out the obvious here) Harry Potter.

What could be done about it? That's a good question. Three Cups will probably never be a graphic novel. But the writing needs to be a little sharper, a little more pointed to get to kids, I think. It needs to move a little bit faster.

And the conundrum is, well, the book is about slowing down. That's the lesson of the three cups of tea. So a graphic novel or book with more action-packed dialog probably isn't the answer.

I hope I'm wrong in my assessment, and that tweens and teens will pick up and finish Three Cups, because it's an amazing story with an important message that kids - heck, all of us - would do well to grasp.

Click here to read my review in The Cleveland Plain Dealer, which also highlights the picture book, Listen to the Wind.