Point of View: Milkweed

Milkweed by Jerry Spinelli, is a book about rough times back in the Holocaust. This is told by a very young boy named Misha, who has no knowledge of his parents, or much of his previous life before the story, or of anything. As you can probably guess, the time period of the Holocaust was not a good time to be confused. If you unknowingly did something wrong, you were killed, and that was the end of it. Luckily, Misha has his friends, and adopted family, to guide him along.

One of Misha's best friends is Uri. Uri is almost everything Misha isn't. He's smart, patient, and is a lot less confused as to what's going on around them. The one thing that they have in common, is being a thief, which is how the two met. They both tried to steal a loaf of bread, but Misha got there first. Thinking that a small, quick kid could be useful, Uri builds up a type of "partnership" with Misha, and helps him survive. In my opinion, the story could be very different if told from the perspective of Uri.

Throughout the book, you almost want to yell to Misha, "No! Don't do that! You'll get caught!" or, "What were you thinking?!" but then you remember that he's just a little kid and he doesn't know any better, which also provides an interesting aspect to the story. It is fun to listen to Misha's point of view, because he is often a bit off on his philosophy, with simple facts such as things like milkweed. He thinks that milkweed is where angels come from, and doesn't think otherwise. When someone tells him something, he doesn't really have any reason to think that it is wrong, and he therefore believes it. On the other hand, Uri knows better, and his perspective would probably be more appealing to an adult audience, an audience who wants to hear the mature side of things. Instead of hearing "I saw people walking down the road, and I couldn't help marching along to the parade. I saw a nice man with really shiny boots and an eagle hat, so I started to talk to him," they'd rather hear a more mature point of view, like that of Uri's which would be something like, "I can't believe that Misha participates in these childish games, he has to think before he does things, because marching along to imaginary parades and walking up to Nazis will get you killed in an heartbeat."

This is one of the many reasons why I think that the story could be altered greatly if the main character's point of view were changed from Misha to Uri.