The Newbery Project

2012 Newbery Goes To...

2012-01-24T13:53:00.000-05:00

Dead End in Norvelt by Jack Gantos.
The Honor Books are Inside Out & Back Again by Thanhha Lai, and Breaking Stalin's Nose by Eugene Yelchin.

Dicey's Song

2011-08-21T12:48:00.002-04:00

Dicey's Song is a beautiful coming of age story of a 13 year old girl from a poverty-stricken background, who (along with her three younger siblings) has just come to live with her irascible grandmother in a dilapidated farmhouse on the edge of a small town on the Chesapeake Bay.

There isn't much action in the story, and there is a lot of self-reflection - so some teenagers (especially some boys) may not be very interested in it. The cover doesn't help much in this respect. I kept picking the book up and then moving on to a different book, because it just looked.....gloomy. Like a stereotypical "Newbery winner", I guess (though there really isn't any such thing), and I thought it would be full of angst, depressing events, and beautiful language

It wasn't until I had just a handful of Newbery winners left to read that I reluctantly picked Dicey's book up again.

Well, there is angst, and there is undeniably some tragedy (and beautiful language, too) in Dicey's Song, but it was really stupid of me to put off reading it, because it is also wonderful, and I loved it. The characters seem so real - so complex and interesting - that I can't wait to read more about all of them, starting with Homecoming, the book that precedes Dicey's Song in the "Tillerman cyle". The sibling relationships are fascinating, and Gram (aka Ab Tillerman) is one of my favorite characters in a kid's book since Richard Peck's Grandma Dowdel (in A Year Down Yonder). Ab isn't just eccentric and fierce, though - she has secrets, and we learn about some of the choices she made that have influenced the whole family in Dicey's Song.

Quite a few thought-provoking issues are explored in Dicey's story, which does put it squarely in "stereotypical Newbery"-winning territory. The meaning of family, sibling relationships, school and dealing with teachers, learning disabilities and differences (particularly in the ways different kids learn and different kinds of talent and intelligence), being an outsider, and finally, dealing with loss - all are important parts of Dicey's Song. Unlike some of the other Newbery winners, though (like Summer of the Swans, which covers some of the same terrain), Dicey's Song is rather timeless, and isn't really linked to any specific happenings in the late1970's- early 80's. You can figure out when the story's set by thinking about the technology (pre-Internet but post-Vietnam, and plane travel isn't extraordinarily rare), but it could almost as easily have taken place in the 1930's or the 50's. The emotional stresses of worrying about a brother who gets into fights, wanting some time away from the rest of the family, dealing with financial problems and prickly characters and aging - into adulthood and "the golden years" - are all pretty interesting as Voigt describes them, anyway - and still relevant in 2011.

Moon Over Manifest

2011-08-13T15:32:00.001-04:00

This book was most deserving of the 2011 Newbery Medal. With dual narrative lines set in 1917-1918 and 1936, it's the story of a small town in Kansas called Manifest (modeled after the real town of Frontenac, where author Clare Vanderpool's grandparents grew up).

In her Newbery acceptance speech, Vanderpool stated, "I knew I wanted to write a story about place and about home from the perspective of a young girl who didn’t have a home." (*42) She later added,

"I came across a quote from Moby Dick. 'It is not down in any map; true places never are.' That’s when the wheels began turning. What is a true place? What would a true place be for someone who had never lived anywhere for more than a few weeks or months at a time? What if it was a young girl during the Depression? A young girl named Abilene Tucker." (*44)

Twelve-year-old Abilene is sent in late May, 1936, to the town of Manifest by her drifter father Gideon, the closest place to a home in her father's stories. She's supposed to stay with a preacher named Shady. She arrives just in time for the last day of school, where she meets Ruthanne and Lettie, her playmates for the summer. She also meets Miss Sadie, a Hungarian woman who runs a "divining parlor."

Throughout the book, Miss Sadie tells Abilene a story about Manifest in 1917-1918, that mysteriously ties in items from a cigar box Abilene found hidden in Shady's home. The cigar box also contains letters from 1918 from Ned Gillen, a boy adopted by the local hardware store owner from the orphan train. Ned wrote the letters back to a boy named Jinx, after he helped Ned join the army (underage) to fight in World War I. Both Jinx and Ned (and Shady and a few other local people still alive in 1936, such as Hattie Mae and Sister Redempta) are in Miss Sadie's stories.

On the audiobook, actress Justine Eyre voices both Abilene in the first person in 1936, and the third-person 1917-1918 stories of Miss Sadie. Besides these alternating narratives, there are also excerpts from Ned's letters (voiced by Kirby Heyborne) and from "Hattie Mae's News Auxiliary," a column in the local newspaper in both 1917-1918 and in 1936 (read by Cassandra Campbell).

It all works together to create a novel with an intriguing plot, compelling characters, and a lot of heart and soul. And Vanderpool does an excellent job in creating her setting, not only in time and place, but also in the details of historical events and community life. I could feel the heat of the hot, dry summer, but I also felt the excitement of the bootlegging shenanigans, the immigrants' fear of the Klan and the mine owner, and the dread and sadness brought by Spanish influenza.

According to Vanderpool,

"Moon Over Manifest is about home and community, but in many ways it became a story about storytelling and the transformative power of story in our lives....Abilene would call this a universal—this need for story....And of all the places for her to end up in her drifting: Manifest, Kansas, the stopping point for immigrants and refugees from around the world. Displaced people just like her. People with stories of their own but whose stories become hers.... Through the people of Manifest, Abilene experiences the power in a story." (*44-45)

So does the reader.

This book has an 800 Lexile score and measures at grade 5.3 reading level on Accelerated Reader, with an interest level of grades 4-8. The main characters are 12 (Abilene and her girlfriends) and 13 (Jinx), at the upper end of that grade range. With the mystery subplot and Jinx's cons, I think the story would appeal to both boys and girls. An author's note at the end addresses what's real and what's not in the book, and suggests further reading. There are plenty of opportunities to tie this book in with lessons on social studies, English language arts, and even science.

(*Vanderpool, Clare. "Newbery Acceptance Speech," The Horn Book Magazine, Volume 87, Issue 4, July-August 2011, pages 39-45.)

© Amanda Pape - 2011 - this review also appears on my blog, Bookin' It.

[This audiobook and a hardbound copy of the book were borrowed from and returned to the Dick Smith Library at Tarleton State University, Stephenville, Texas, where I also accessed Vanderpool's speech through the EBSCO Academic Search Complete database.]

Up A Road Slowly

2011-08-02T11:25:00.006-04:00

Up A Road Slowly by Irene Hunt was one of my favorite Newbery books. And I know why! This coming of age story was of a girl who grew up right before I did. It was a world I was familiar with and made my memories of these times just flow back!

The novel takes place in the 60s (I am guessing) perhaps and begins with Julie's mother dying when she was seven years old. Julie is the narrator and finds herself and older brother Christopher shipped off to spinster school teacher Aunt Cordelia's house. Their father just cannot take care of them. Initially horrified, Julie comes to love the life in the country where her Aunt lives. The story follow her growth and development from elementary school in a one room class to graduation from high school and heading to college. While I didn't go to a one room school house - I knew that they existed when I was growing up.

The story is also filled with wonderfully outlandish characters such as her alcoholic Uncle Haskell, the bad boyfriend, the good boyfriend, and a wide variety of girls who can be very nice or filled with pride and envy. Julie navigates her life with these people, learning lessons along the way - happy and sad lessons. In the end, Julie learns that her Aunt usually knows what is best for her and knows that it is through her guidance she is an adult.

Allison's Book Bag has a great review of the book as well - with some comparisons to Anne Of Green Gables. In some ways, it also reminded me of Little Women. Still I wonder if this book would still have appeal with young girls who might find it too simple.

TITLE: Up a Road Slowly
AUTHOR: Irene Hunt
COPYRIGHT: 1966
PAGES: 197
TYPE: fiction
RECOMMEND: I loved this little book.

Moon Over Manifest by Clare Vanderpool

2011-04-11T11:16:00.001-04:00

Moon Over Manifest by Clare Vanderpool

Pages: 351
Ages: 10+
First Published: Oct. 12, 2010
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Genre: children, historical fiction
Rating: 5/5

First sentence:

The movement of the train rocked me like a lullaby.

Acquired: Borrowed a copy from my local library.

Simple perfection. When I see that Newbery sticker on a book, this is what I expect. A book that truly is a wonderful story that will appeal to kids. A story that catches your attention from the first chapter. One with characters who are interesting, unique and you either love from the start or they eventually win you over at some part. I truly enjoyed every minute of this book and was sad when it came time to close the book on Abilene, Jinx, Miss Sadie and all the rest of the characters in Manifest, Kansas.

Set in 1936, Abilene Tucker, who has grown up as a vagrant train rider with her father, is upset when he sends her to Manifest, a town he spent a spell in his youth to stay with a friend for the summer while he supposedly works a job, not appropriate for a young lady to be around, now that Abilene has turned twelve. Here Abilene makes two friends and finds a hidden cigar box with mementos and letters from 1918 under the floor boards. One is a map of Manifest, there is mention of a spy and the girls set about to find out who the spy was in their town back during WWI and if they are still here. They also come upon the legend of "The Rattler" who wanders the dark forest at night. Is the Rattler the spy, or someone/thing else?

As the girls read the letters we are transported back to 1918 on the war front in France as the letters are from a local boy to a friend named 'Jinx'. We also are taken back to 1918 on the home-front through Miss Sadie, a diviner, as she tells Abilene stories when she comes over to work her garden to repay a large pot she broke snooping about one night.

The story switches perspective between the present, 1936, through the first person narrative of Abilene and the past, 1918, through Miss Sadie's stories, a newspaper column and the letters. A rich engaging story that while not directly linked to any historical events does place one smack dab in the past and creates a good vision of living in a small town during the depression and during World War I, along with an impression of what it was like for a young soldier in the trench warfare of France. Topped off with a large cast of eccentric characters this is a gem of a story. This will be one of the rare modern Newbery's that I think will still be read decades down the road like perennial favourites "Caddie Woodlawn" and "Sounder".

Hitty: Her First Hundred Years by Rachel Field

2011-04-11T08:38:00.003-04:00

Choosing chapter books to read aloud to my girls is not something I've ever really given much thought or planning. Instead, I just pick up whatever I see that looks interesting or that I've recently read a review of, etc. Lately, though, I've been thinking about how I should probably be a little more intentional about what I read, at least occasionally. (How's that for noncommittal? ;-) ) What I mean is this: I don't think think our read-alouds have to always be educational or challenging, but because we are home educators and because I consider reading aloud a very important part of our school day (although the girls don't even realize that we're "doing school" while we're reading), I should get in as much good literature as I possibly can. If you scroll down a bit and look over in the sidebar, you'll see a list of our read-alouds for this year. You'll note that Nim's Island was our third chapter book of 2011, but you'll also note that there's no review of it linked. I meant to review it, but I ran out of time. However, I think I can sum it up in one sentence: a fun read, but nothing that challenged us in any way. It's one of those books that I think Lulu could've read on her own, even at the tender age of six. In thinking about our read-alouds, I'm moving toward consistently choosing books that are harder than my best reader could tackle on her own. I'm sure I won't always do this, but I prefer it this way.

Okay, now that all that preliminary business is out of the way, let's get on to the real matter at hand: Hitty: Her First Hundred Years by Rachel Field. Published in 1929 and awarded a Newbery Award the following year, Hitty is definitely a book that fulfills the requirement I explained above. It's not one of those books I could've continued reading after I'd come a hairsbreadth from reading myself to sleep, somehow managing to keep one eye open enough to read the text, brain on autopilot. (Please tell me you do that, too, at least sometimes!) No, Hitty requires diligence and concentration on the part of the reader. The plot is detailed and the sentence syntax is unlike that of our day. However, I never once grew tired of this story; on the contrary, I was eager each time I picked it up to find out what Hitty was going to experience next. My girls seemed to love it as much as I did. The story is rather simple, actually. It is simply the story of Hitty's hundred years of existence. Hitty is a wooden doll made of lucky mountain-ash wood, and at the story's beginning she belongs to a loving little girl named Phoebe Preble. When Phoebe's family goes aboard a whaling vessel, Hitty goes along, too. It's after this that almost all of the adventures begin. She is shipwrecked; she is taken as an idol on some uncivilized island somewhere in the middle of some ocean; she becomes the possession of a missionary child, a Quaker child, and a slave; she meets the poet John Greenleaf Whittier and sees Charles Dickens; in short, she has no end of adventures. Hitty's adventures are interesting, but what makes the story so absorbing is Hitty's voice. I just came to love her. This little wooden doll speaks with such intelligence and warmth. Although I wouldn't say that this is a funny story, there are moments when Hitty's wit shines through. I think that reading stories like this to my girls, young though they are, has immeasurable benefits. I've noted before how reading the Little House on the Prairie books has expanded my girls' vocabularies; I can't help but think that reading sentences that are more complex that we're accustomed to speaking will have a similar effect. I think it's funny that a couple of my blog readers and fellow bloggers commented about our reading Hitty when I mentioned it last week, and they had opposite opinions. Carrie said that she had to read it when she was twelve or thirteen and that she hated it. Catherine, on the other hand, said that she has already read it to her very young daughter twice, she loved it herself so much as a child. I wonder if this is one of those books that adults think children should love. (This is an opinion that is often bandied about when award-winning books are discussed.) I don't know. I do know that when I closed the book this little doll had come to mean so much to me that I had tears in my eyes. I also know that Lulu immediately grabbed the book and declared that she wanted to read it for herself. I know this is one story we'll be revisiting. Highly, highly recommended. (Please note that since this book was written in 1929, there are many elements in it that are non-PC today. See some of the reviews here for more about this.) Rachel Field also wrote a Caldecott Award winning book, Prayer for a Child, which is a Five in a Row book we own but that I don't think I ever read with my girls. She also wrote another juvenile chapter book that I have a copy of on our schoolroom shelf: Calico Bush. I think I need to pull both of these out and share them.

This review was also published at my blog, Hope Is the Word.

Moon over Manifest by Clare Vanderpool

2011-04-06T17:26:00.002-04:00

Moon Over Manifest by Clare Vanderpool is the 2011 Newbery Medalist and it does not disappoint. While I'm not sure it's a book that would hold the attention of most children in its target age range, it's a book I greatly enjoyed. Here's the CIP summary from inside the book:

Twelve-year-old Abilene Tucker is the daughter of a drifter who, in the summer of 1936, sends her to stay with an old friend in Manifest, Kansas, where he grew up, and where she hopes to find out some things about his past.

That one sentence summary covers the plot, more or less, but it by necessity leaves out what makes this book engrossing: mysteries in spades, compelling characterization, and lots of heart. In Manifest, Abilene Tucker stays with a preacher/bartender (yeah, you read that right) named Shady, and under a floorboard in her room she finds a box. Inside it is a small collection of treasures: various trinkets, a map, and some letters. She thinks that this must surely be a link, somehow, to her father, Gideon, and what unfolds is an at times convoluted, but very compelling series of flashbacks (told by a would-be fortune-teller, Miss Sadie, who is much better at telling the past than the future) and "flashforwards" to the present. These episodes are punctuated by related editorials from the town newspaper, a device that I found somewhat annoying at times because it interrupted the flow of the story. Both the past story and the present story are set in Manifest, and they're connected, somehow. The past story is about a young man, Ned Gillen, who befriends a boy named Jinx who shows up in town, obviously running from something or somone. Ned and Jinx get into all kinds of mischief (some of it righteous mischief) and manage to become heroes. Abilene hears Miss Sadie's stories as she works off a debt she owes the "diviner" (in a sort of Jem/Miss Dubose relationship like in To Kill a Mockingbird), and as she does, she gets closer and closer to her father and his story. I'll admit I had some reservations while reading this book about some of the characters. Take Miss Sadie, for example. She's a fortune teller? A diviner? I'm not sure that's something I want my upper elementary aged student (if I had one) reading about. Then there's Shady, the bartender/preacher. Sure, he's a remarkable fellow, both kind and principled, but I can't quite figure out how to even get a handle on a bar that doubles as a church. (Yes, I know it's being done nowadays, but I don't quite know what I think about it.) Too, there's a bit more about bootlegging in the story than I feel comfortable with. By the end of the novel, though, I was mostly satisifed by Vanderpool's resolution of these various issues, to the point that I would have virtually no hesitation in giving this novel to a sixth grader. I think it would take a strong reader who really enjoys historical fiction to persevere through its 350 pages, though. I really like this book, but I'm not sure I think it's better than Turtle in Paradise (linked to my review), which won a Newbery honor for 2010. I think Moon Over Manifest is a much more complicated story, with all kinds of plot twists and many, many seemingly disparate threads to be tied up in the end, but Turtle in Paradise is much more polished. Interestingly, both are set during the Great Depression. An expanded version of this review was previously published at my blog, Hope Is the Word.

Waterless Mountain

2011-03-10T18:28:00.004-05:00

I finally decided to read Waterless Mountain, by Laura Adams Armer, on a cold March morning. Somehow reading this timeless, rather mystical coming-of-age story about young boy in the desert Southwest - with bumblebees collecting pollen and eagles soaring and the sky like a giant turquoise bowl - seemed rather appealing when it was drizzling on piles of dirty snow outside, with that pathetic grey late-winter Michigan light coming in my window.

There are some quite beautiful descriptions of the natural environment of northern Arizona in Waterless Mountain, and of the traditional Navajo way of life, complete with lambs, weaving, corn, pinon nuts, pack rats, snug hogans, ancient skeletons buried with pottery eroding out of the ground, and sacred tobacco. There's also quite a bit of the poetry of Navajo ceremonies and their unique cultural perspective.

Songs like the following are scattered throughout Younger Brother's story:

From the house made of dawn,
On the trail of the dawn,
He is coming to us;
     He is coming.

Now the Bearer of the Day,
     Sends a beam from the blue.
It is shining on us,
   It is shining.

To the house made of night,
     On a trail made of night,
He is going from us,
   He is going.

Now the Bearer of the Day
     Sends the stars to the sky.
They are watching above,
     They are watching (p. 84).

"House made of dawn" is such a beautiful phrase. Native American author N. Scott Momaday used it for the title of his 1969 Pulitzer prize-winning book, and it is part of a traditional Navajo ceremony that has been widely reproduced because of the beauty of the its language. I think Laura Adams Armer did a pretty good job of portraying a Navajo boy in the 1920's or 30's (for an outsider, anyway), and the details of Navajo life and culture seem authentic, but it would be interesting to see what Navajo people today think about Waterless Mountain. Armer also mentions some important Navajo history, like the genocidal Long Walk, and the destruction of the Navajo peach orchards in Canyon de Chelly (p. 195-6, popularly blamed on Kit Carson).

Unfortunately, Younger Brother's narrative isn't exactly action-packed. It's mostly reflective, with calm acceptance of a few exciting events, drowsy moments thinking about legends, and then there's feelings of quiet happiness and content, followed by some zen-like attention to the moment. I found it refreshing, and liked reading about people whose religious philosophy includes the directive to "live in beauty", but I know that my son (who likes fiction like James Patterson's Maximum Ride series, for instance), would agree with the Amazon reader who said that it was "the most boring book I have ever read."

A few parts were awkward, if not "painfully condescending", as Amanda quoted in her post (from a 1993 Horn Book review), like when the Big Man (a white neighbor whom Wendy accurately sums up as the "all-knowing, kind, wise, Great White Trader" in her review) took Younger Brother up in an airplane, and when Younger Brother's family went to a movie during their trip to California. Interestingly, the "water-developer" is seen as another positive character, responsible for bringing more water to the family's livestock, and not someone stealing a precious resource for far-away golf courses or cities, as many communities in the Southwest would perceive him today.

A couple of random notes: Navaho is the old-fashioned spelling for this Native nation. Navajo is usually used today, and the people call themselves the Diné (or the Dineh).

This was one of my favorite sentences in the book, which I couldn't help reading aloud to my kids. Think no more about it, my children!

He knew that Mother was always right about everything so thought no more about it (p. 42).

I was truly surprised by how much I enjoyed Waterless Mountain, since I expected to plod through another "a boy's life in another traditional culture" story like Dobry or ...And Now Miguel. Instead, Armer's book left me longing to return to the Four Corners (ne Arizona, nw New Mexico, sw Colorado and se Utah), where I'd like to eat some fry bread, smell the sagebrush after a summer rain, and listen to the silent songs that Younger Brother describes. As the Big Man notes on page 137, "It's great stuff, this tying up fiction with facts."

Bridge to Terabithia - 1978

2011-02-07T14:14:00.000-05:00

by Katherine Paterson,
read by Robert Sean Leonard

This classic, dealing with themes of death, friendship, and imagination, won the (well-deserved) Newbery Medal in 1978. Ten-year-old Jesse Aarons befriends the new girl at school, his next-door neighbor Leslie Burke. They deal with a school bully and their families (Jesse's family is rural, poor and rather uneducated; Leslie's parents are wealthy writers escaping the big nearby city of Washington, DC, and trying to live the simple life. Both of them desire parental and adult love and approval). Jesse and Leslie create an imaginary world they call Terabithia* near the creek in the woods behind their homes. Then there is a tragic accident.

At the end of the audiobook, Michael Conroy with HarperAudio interviews Katherine Paterson and her son David, sometime in 2006. Katherine explains that "when [David] was seven and eight years old, his best friend was a girl named Lisa Hill, and the summer they were both eight, Lisa was struck and killed by lightning." Katherine said she wrote the book "to try to make sense out of a tragedy that didn’t make sense."

"I figured that David had a right to say whether or not he wanted the book published, because although he was not actually Jesse Aarons, all of his buddies at school would think he was... So I read it to him before I sent it even to my editor, and the only thing he said when I finished was...'I wanted it to be dedicated to me and Lisa,' so that’s why the book is dedicated to both of them." In a 2007 interview, David says there are "a lot of similarities" between him and Jesse, including being "in love with his music teacher" (the guitar-playing Miss Edmunds in the book).

The songs Miss Edmunds sings with the kids, and Leslie's no-TV, call-me-by-my-first-name parents are among the few clues that the book is set in the 1970s; otherwise the setting feels rather timeless. Katherine continues in the HarperAudio interview, "There’s some quality in this particular book … that opens itself up for people to bring their own lives to it in a very powerful way so that the story becomes their story, and I have people write to me, long long long letters, explaining how this book is their book and how it is their life that I am telling about. But that’s the reader’s response, it’s not something the writer can consciously do. It’s a magical thing when it happens, but it doesn’t always happen."

I think this is because nearly everyone grew up with a Terabithia, an imaginary world to play in. David said, "One thing that I found so amazing is everyone remembered Terabithia, but they all remembered it differently. The gift that her book gives the reader is she allows them to imagine, she guides them to their own imagination. But the funny thing is, people remember this so vividly, and ... Terabithia takes place in just a very small amount of the book – I believe it’s 12 to 14 pages – and yet, that’s what people remember. They remember these wonderful, wonderful experiences that Jess and Leslie went through, whereas most of it they made up in their own minds.” Katherine said, “Terabithia is the creation of the reader, not the writer."

The book is also a classic because it's about a child dealing with the death of another child, his friend. In the same HarperAudio interview, Katherine states, “Everyone will have to go through death, their own and the death of those they love, ... and a book in which a child dies is sort of a rehearsal for that. We hope the child will not have to go through it as early as David did, but it gives them a chance to go through those emotions vicariously." On her website, she adds that "though I was not fully aware of it, [I wrote it] to help me face my own death," which I think adds to the book's appeal to adults.

David pointed out, “I think that one reason the book has been so resoundingly successful throughout the years is that it was, when it first came out, one of the first books to really address... the death of a child, and the death of a friendship, and it still resonates today because it introduces the concept at a young age for young readers, which is also why it’s banned a lot of places, because adults don’t feel that children can handle issues such as this." Katherine added, “I even had a letter from someone who said death is not age appropriate for a ten-year-old. No, it’s not, but it happens.”

Indeed, in a 2002 interview, Paterson notes that the book has been challenged for more than being "not age appropriate" in discussing death. "Initially, it was challenged because it deals with a boy who lives in rural Virginia, and he uses the word 'Lord' a lot, and it's not in prayer." (Katherine taught for a year in a rural Virginia school, and on her website, she notes that "Jess and his father talk like the people I knew who lived in that area. I believe it is my responsibility to create characters who are real, not models of good behavior. If Jess and his dad are to be real, they must speak and act like real people. I have a lot of respect for my readers. I do not expect them to imitate my characters, simply to care about them and understand them.")

"Then there are more complicated reasons. The children build an imaginary kingdom, and there was the feeling that I was promoting the religion of secular humanism, and then New Age religion." Additionally, Jesse's family only goes to church at Easter, although the Bible "s'bout the only book we got around our place" (page 109). Leslie's never been to church before, and there's an amusing yet thought-provoking scene after she accompanies Jesse's family at Easter. I imagine this scene is likely to offend some fundamentalist/conservative Christians.

Actor Robert Sean Leonard (best known for playing Dr. Wilson on the TV show House) does a fine job narrating the audiobook. All in all, this is a wonderful book for about age 10 and up, and I highly recommend it.

*On her website, Katherine explains, "I thought I'd made up "Terabithia." I realized when the book was nearly done, that there is an island in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C. S. Lewis called Terebinthia. I'm sure I borrowed that unconsciously, but, then, so would Leslie who loved the Chronicles of Narnia. And, by the way, Lewis got Terebinthia from the Biblical terebinth tree, so it wasn't original with him either."

© Amanda Pape - 2011

[This audiobook and a print copy for reference were borrowed from and returned to my university library.]

Newbery Covers

2011-01-24T14:21:00.002-05:00

I've mentioned the covers of the Newbery winners more than a few times in my reviews here. Usually when the new covers are worse than the originals, or the covers are misleading (they made me think the book was going to be awful, and it was great, or vice versa).

Here's a blogger who is designing new covers for all the winners, starting with The Story of Mankind in 1922. He's up to 1928 now (Gay Neck), and it's pretty interesting looking at the book with a modern YA-ish style.

I can't wait until he gets to some of the more recent and/or classic ones! There are a few that I think cannot be improved upon. What do you think?

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

2011-01-17T11:07:00.000-05:00

Title: When You Reach Me

Author: Rebecca Stead
Publisher: Wendy Lamb Books
Language: English
ISBN - 10: 0385737424
ISBN - 13: 978-0385737425
Rating: 5/5

It was my love of puzzles that made me pick this one up, and the blurb itself was intriguing:

"By sixth grade, Miranda and her best friend, Sal, know how to navigate their New York City neighborhood. They know where it’s safe to go, like the local grocery store, and they know whom to avoid, like the crazy guy on the corner.

But things start to unravel. Sal gets punched by a new kid for what seems like no reason, and he shuts Miranda out of his life. The apartment key that Miranda’s mom keeps hidden for emergencies is stolen. And then Miranda finds a mysterious note scrawled on a tiny slip of paper:

I am coming to save your friend’s life, and my own.
I must ask two favors. First, you must write me a letter.

The notes keep coming, and Miranda slowly realizes that whoever is leaving them knows all about her, including things that haven’t even happened yet. Each message brings her closer to believing that only she can prevent a tragic death. Until the final note makes her think she’s too late."

I loved everything about this book! From the amazing cover design that I talked about here, which already piqued my interest on its own, to the title, and of course, to the story it held. It was fresh, snappy and fast paced, something an impatient reader like me loves.

I finished reading this three hours since I started. The author definitely knows how to capture the reader's attention. The story is not too predictable, and if you're like me who loves mysteries, you'll have an idea for an answer to the mystery, yet when the answer is revealed, it bowls you over that you were right, but not in the way you thought you would be. The book is filled with fun twists that everyone can understand, from tweens to the older readers. It just never gets boring.

The story is not very heavy on drama, but the few ones are fraught with emotion, but never becoming too mushy. Even then, it never drags and the reader is treated to lots of welcome surprises. Most times, reading felt like riding in a speedy motorcycle, with all the thrill and exhilarating speed, but without the uncomfortable and bumpy path, without the threat of crashing looming constantly overhead. The description of each scene and the dialogue are economic, to the point, with no digression, hesitation, or affectation. The author definitely knows what she's writing about.

The characters' personalities are well-established, no contradictions but not too dull or stereotypical, with the young characters' outlook innocent, yet clever. The relationships are realistic, there are no impregnable best-friends-forever vows, no I-totally-hate-you stuff, but the loyalty and respect for each person are present. The children act their age, as do the grown-ups. Very realistic, but never unimaginative. There are no minor characters - everyone is an essential part of the book, just as there are no minor details - everything is significant. As the story advances, the characters show growth and maturity in their roles, and every change is welcome, though some are a bit sad, they are nonetheless authentic and practical.

In the story, A Wrinkle in Time by Madelaine L’Engle was Miranda's favorite book. As for me, this book, Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me is now my very own new personal favorite. I tell you, this book will never disappoint. No wonder, it's the winner of the 2010 John Newbery Medal.

The Door in the Wall by Marguerite DeAngeli

2011-01-12T01:39:00.000-05:00

Title: The Door in the Wall
Author: Marguerite DeAngeli
Pages: 128
Published: Yearling 1990 (orig. 1949)
My Rating: 3 stars

Perhaps the pickings were slim in 1950, or perhaps the Newbery's were simply in a period of highly valuing the simple, moralistic type of book, but The Door in the Wall was slightly disappointing to me. I loved the choices from the late '40s, and again those from the late '50s, but some of these guys in between leave me frustrated. (Ginger Pye in 1952, and The Light at Tern Rock, 1952 Honor, felt similarly moralistic and boring to me, although all the honor choices in 1953 were fabulous: Charlotte's Web, Moccasin Trail, The Bears on Hemlock Mountain, Red Sails to Capri.)

The Door in the Wall is not without value, my 11 year old son quite enjoyed the historical aspect of it, but when compared to other Newbery winners that deal with the Middle Ages (Adam of the Road, Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!) this one falls short. The medieval dialect is surprisingly readable, (though some of the vocabulary is a bit difficult to understand,) and the way of life is vivid. Although it remains rather boring during the first half, the pace does pick up toward the end, and is overall quick to read.

If the moralistic aspect doesn't bother you, then definitely give this one a shot. Otherwise, read Adam of the Road and Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! instead.

2011 Newbery goes to...

2011-01-10T12:20:00.003-05:00

Moon Over Manifest by Clare Vanderpool.

The Honor Books are:
Turtle in Paradise by Jennifer Holm,

Heart of a Samurai by Margi Preus,

Dark Emperor and Other Poems of the Night by Joyce Sidman, and

One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia, which also won the Coretta Scott King Author Award.

Kira-Kira by Cynthia Kadohata

2011-01-05T21:15:00.001-05:00

Title: Kira-Kira
Author: Cynthia Kadohata
Publisher: Atheneum
Language: English
ISBN - 10: 0689856393
ISBN - 13: 978-0689856396
Rating: 4/5

According to the Blurb

"Glittering. That's how Katie Takeshima's sister, Lynn, makes everything seem. The sky is kira-kira because its color is deep but see-through at the same time. The sea is kira-kira for the same reason. And so are people's eyes. When Katie and her family move from a Japanese community in Iowa to the Deep South of Georgia, it's Lynn who explains to her why people stop them on the street to stare. And it's Lynn who, with her special way of viewing the world, teaches Katie to look beyond tomorrow. But when Lynn becomes desperately ill, and the whole family begins to fall apart, it is up to Katie to find a way to remind them all that there is always something glittering—kira-kira —in the future."

Thoughts

Katie and her family's life is anything but kira-kira — the life of Japanese Americans in the 1950s was anything but glittering due to the "Anti-Japanese sentiment" across America. Katie could see reality: no one wants to make friends with her at school, not even with her sister Lynn, despite her natural charm and brilliance at schoolwork and her father had to work back-breaking hours to provide for his family. On the other hand, Lynn, despite also seeing reality, chose to be the optimist and was the one who taught Katie to see things differently, that all things are kira-kira.

The author has drawn perfectly believable characters, from the humble, hardworking father, to the sweet, adoring little brother. Their voices are clear and their words are accurate. Katie describes her world with the simplicity and practicality you would expect from her age, and a natural awe for her older sister. Added to the mix are interesting characters, Uncle Katsuhisa and his family, Amber, and Silly, who provide the necessary humor and perspective that turns the plot from an otherwise depressing narrative to a hopeful, coming of age story of a young girl and her family.

Winner of the 2005 Newbery Medal, this novel, though sad, will not disappoint. It is a story of hope at its core, convincing the readers to find the kira-kira in little things, reminding everyone to keep dreaming big, and appreciating the world for all its flaws.

Amos Fortune: Free Man

2011-01-02T09:19:00.000-05:00

by Elizabeth Yates,
read by Ray Childs

This book won the Newbery Medal in 1951. Mistakenly classified as nonfiction, it is really a biographical novel or, more accurately, historical fiction. Amos Fortune (c. 1710 - 1801) was a real person, but very little is known of his life.

Indeed, in an interview in The Writer in March 1998, author Elizabeth Yates said she was inspired "when I was standing by the stone that marked the grave of Amos Fortune in the old cemetery in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. Reading the eloquent though brief words about a man whose life spanned from Africa in 1715 to America in 1801, I wanted to know more, to find the story within those lines."

About all that was available was Fortune's homestead (now private property) and some documents at the Jaffrey Public Library, such as his will (written and signed in 1801), some receipts (for loans, medical services, and purchases, including those that bought the freedom of two wives), two letters of apprenticeship of young men to Amos the tanner, and an unsigned letter of manumission for Amos, written by Ichabod Richardson in 1763. Yates adds another owner and another wife for Amos, as well as a king father and lame sister in Africa, but there is no evidence for any of these.

This book wasn't thrilling, but it wasn't boring either. It provided insights into life in colonial New England. Descriptions of the processes of bark tanning and the vendue of the poor were particularly interesting - the latter was something I'd never heard of before. The audiobook narrator Ray Childs' bass was perfect for Amos Fortune, but not so good for the female voices.

This book has received a lot of criticism, particularly since the early 1970s, for being racist and/or white-supremacist. In "A Submission Theology for Black Americans: Religion and Social Action in Prize-Winning Children's Books about the Black Experience in America" (Research in the Teaching of English, May, 1990), Ann M. Trousdale states, "The book is clearly an attempt to pay tribute to a historical character whom Yates found admirable. She portrays Amos Fortune as an honest, respectable, even noble man" (p. 124). But (pages 126-127):

The problems with Yates' book do not lie with her conscious intent, which surely has been to portray Amos as an admirable, even saintly figure. The problems lie with her perspective, which has been shaped by her own cultural heritage, and with the selective tradition which informed it. An underlying assumption of white supremacy permeates the book in spite of its casting Amos as a noble figure.

In keeping with trends in biographies for children at the time, Yates presents an idealized view of Amos. She also presents an idealized view of slavery. Amos' own owners are model slaveholders; his first owner wants to set Amos free before Amos himself wants to be free. Slavery is presented as a practice that was of ultimate benefit to the Africans who were enslaved; it resulted in their being brought to live in a superior land and to practice a superior religion.

It is Amos' Christianity that has caused him to recognize the benefits of slavery. Christianity also informs the model of social action by which he lives in America. This model reflects some values which are non-racist in tone: honesty, industry, generosity, and loyalty. But Christianity also involves for Amos an attitude of racial submission, acceptance of mistreatment at the hands of white people, and forgiveness of white oppressors. In Yates' book, Amos Fortune is, in essence, the stereotypic "good Negro" - submissive, non-threatening, respectful of white people. The implication that it is God who has shaped Amos' character to be so is added leverage for what is basically a white supremacist view of the appropriate role and attitudes for blacks in American society.

In "Challenging the Pluralism of Our Past: Presentism and the Selective Tradition in Historical Fiction Written for Young People (Research in the Teaching of English, May, 2003), Chandra L. Power cites Amos Fortune: Free Man as an example of readerly presentism, "a reader's perception that a book written in or about the past is, for example, racist or sexist" (p. 426). While she feels books like Amos Fortune are

seriously flawed, I am not suggesting that they are flawed because the main characters do not resist the hegemony of their day. Rather, they are particularly problematic because they are so often advanced as the accurate and authentic representation of their era, yet they do not present the complexity of their respective eras. Instead, they reify a particular perspective (p. 449).

The crucial issue here is in how these titles continue to be advanced and defended....as winners of the prestigious Newbery Award, these books are virtually guaranteed a long shelf life and continual selection by libraries and teachers. Therefore, the cumulative effect of what these critics say about the lack of choices or the lack of alternative voices in any given era serves to deny that there were oppositional voices, voices of resistance, or alternative ways of life, belief, and thought within a given time period (p. 450).

I am not advocating censorship in any form; yet as long as these books continue to be presented as exemplary in major textbooks in the field and continue to be reviewed favorably, they should be presented along with titles that offer a competing perspective on those historical eras to prevent the omission of alternative points of view and the continuation of the selective tradition dismissing an inclusive and pluralistic past (p. 456; emphasis mine).

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a good list of suggested titles to present along with Amos Fortune, Free Man. While I have not yet read these books, I suspect that suggestions by Sandy D in her review of this book of Paula Fox's The Slave Dancer, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and Christopher Paul Curtis' Elijah of Buxton as alternatives are probably good, while Julius Lester's To Be A Slave, a Newbery Honor Book in 1969, would be another possibility.

In the same 1998 interview mentioned above, Yates tells of a question from a group of fourth-graders:

"Have you ever regretted anything you've written?" came the next question. Again, I sent my mind back over the years and their books. The answer was at hand, and it was No, for I have had a rule with myself that nothing ever leaves my desk unless it is the best I can do at the time with the material I have. Then I go back to Amos Fortune as an example.

The idea that took hold of me as I stood by that stone in the old churchyard and that became the book Amos Fortune, Free Man was written in 1949 and published a year later. All the pertinent, reliable material that I could find went into the book and became the story. It could not be a biography but an account of a man's life, with facts assured and some imaginative forays based on the temper of the times. The research, the writing, was done long before the Civil Rights upheavals of the 60's. I might today write a very different story, but that was then.

It would be quite interesting to read a different version of Amos Fortune's story, written to address the concerns of Trousdale, Power, and others.

© Amanda Pape - 2010

Ginger Pye

2010-12-01T10:57:00.003-05:00

I was looking for something light after reading Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry last week, so I turned to Ginger Pye for my next Newbery winner. I thought the 1950's era story of a puppy and his family would be a charming read, kind of like Roller Skates, but set in a small town. Since I grew up in a small town in the Midwest, and still maintain a rather love-hate relationship with the community, I like reading about how small towns are portrayed in kids' books, whether they're historic or contemporary, ridiculously idealistic or humorous or filled with gritty realism.

Well, I was wrong on a couple counts. First all, although Ginger Pye was published in 1951, it's set in a much earlier era. I sat and tried to figure out exactly when the story took place by thinking about the trains, the "jalopies", and the general technology used in the story (milking cows by hand, gas lights, pier-glass mirrors, a "horsehair parlor"), but not a whole lot of date-specific things are actually mentioned in Estes' fictional town of Cranbury (which I later read was based on West Haven, CT), which is located somewhere between Boston and New York.

I turned to the Internet next, where people stated with great certainty (and in all but one case, mistakenly) that the story was set in 1919, 1924, the 1950's, and even the 1960's and 70's. The latter dates were a particular stretch, given the book's publication date and the fact that it is NOT science fiction. Anyway, one post mentioned the date on a newspaper in one of Estes' illustrations (on pg. 161), and I checked, and it is indeed 1919. This is a bit earlier than I would have guessed, but since the story is such a timeless one - based entirely on the activities of a couple kids, their family, their dog, and a couple of neighbors - the date doesn't actually matter much.

The second thing I was mistaken about was that the story was going to be charming. I didn't find Ginger's story (or more accurately, Jerry and Rachel's story) charming so much as mostly insipid and meandering.There were a few nice parts - I particularly liked Rachel's "reasonable unreasonableness" - but mostly, I was bored. I did like Ginger's point of view, and the ending was rather satisfying - but these were little sparks of interest in a sea of wholesome family bland. Maybe reading it right after Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry was a mistake, because I couldn't help comparing the sibling interactions, the historical setting, and lots more in the two books, with Ginger Pye coming up distinctly lacking.

I didn't care about the Unsavory Character (a man in a yellow hat, not to be confused with the one in Curious George), I hated Estes' illustrations (shown here on the original cover), and the most fun I had was comparing the historical differences of kid behavior and parenting then and now. Talk about your free-range kids (and dogs - leashes were not just optional but totally disparaged).

Jerry and Rachel (ages 10 and 9, respectively) go swimming at the reservoir by themselves, sometimes taking their 3 year old Uncle Bennie with them. One of their favorite places to play is on a "skeleton house" - the framework of a house under construction. If this were gritty realism instead of an idyllic small town story, someone would have drowned, or fallen into the basement hole from the top floor scaffolding, or gotten tetanus, or something like that. Even German measles (rubella) wasn't a big deal in the book. There just wasn't enough drama for me, even when things did happen. And the fact that Jerry and Rachel's mother met their father when she was 17 and he was 35 didn't seem quite so romantic to me as it was told in the book, though the fact that he was a famous "bird man" (aka an ornithologist) was a little interesting - but not enough to make me truly care.

I haven't read anything else by Eleanor Estes, so I'd be interested in hearing how this compares to her other books, which people talk about with some affection. I can see how some people might enjoy the rambling narratives by Jerry, Rachel, and Ginger....but I really didn't get much out of it.

A Foreboding Roll of Thunder

2010-11-26T21:09:00.002-05:00

I started reading Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry almost a year ago. I'd heard it was a powerful book, and an important one, but it wasn't one of the Newbery winners that I really wanted to read. It was one that I felt like I should read.

After reading the first five chapters, I was filled with foreboding, waiting for a major character to be horribly killed or wounded. It didn't help that I had read Sounder not too long before I started Roll of Thunder.

I had the same feeling when I started reading The Kite Runner a few years ago, which I also put off reading for a couple years despite the fact that it seemed like half the people I know had already read it and recommended it. What can I say? One reason I read is for relaxation and escape, and I don't generally like Oprah-esque literary fiction. I did end up being very happy that I read The Kite Runner, mind you.

Then I got a part-time writing job, and happily abandoned Roll of Thunder (and indeed, all the remaining winners I hadn't yet read), and filled my drastically reduced reading time with books that didn't engender feelings of impending doom.

I finished my job last month, and finally returned to Roll of Thunder again. I was still worried about the characters - and reading They Called Themselves the KKK by Susan Campbell Bartoletti (one of the books in the running for this year's Newbery prize) just before resuming Roll of Thunder didn't exactly make me feel any better about Cassie, Stacey, Christopher-John, Little Man, and their extended family's prospects in Mississippi in the 1930's. It was pretty depressing. So I did something that I know drives some people crazy - I skipped ahead and read the last couple of pages. I wanted to be prepared for the worst that Mildred D. Taylor could throw at me.

Well, I could tell from the last few pages that Taylor's worst wasn't unbearable, and so I was able to finish the book with less foreboding, not wincing quite so much at the (sometimes heavy) foreshadowing, or every time Cassie lost her temper. I have to say that Taylor did an excellent job of describing the Logan siblings, and she used history - as in Mr. Morrison's Reconstruction-era story that he told on Christmas, which could have come straight out of They Called Themselves the KKK - very skillfully. The history doesn't ever overpower the Logans' story, but it serves as powerful backdrop, enriching the plot and putting the the characters' actions into a carefully constructed and entirely believable context.

It's a timeless book, too - Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry was written in 1976, but you really couldn't tell, unlike some of the other Newbery winners that feel a bit dated now (like Summer of the Swans, for instance, or It's Like This, Cat). I wonder if this accounts for some of the appeal that historical fiction seems to hold the Newbery Committee. At any rate, Roll of Thunder reads like a classic. And yes, parts of it were disturbing, but it was not a horribly depressing book. I actually want to read some of Mildred Taylor's other books about the Logan family now!

Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! by Laura Amy Schlitz

2010-10-28T15:59:00.000-04:00

Title: Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices From a Medieval Village

Author: Laura Amy Schlitz

Pages: 81

Published: 2007 Candlewick Press

Read For: School, Aloud to my kiddos

My Rating: 4 stars

Despite the glowing reviews I'd read of this book, and the shiny gold medal affixed to the front cover, I remained skeptical about how much enjoyment could be found in a book which looked rather dry and unapproachable. The fact that it was written by a school librarian for her students to perform only added to my skepticism: how could a group of 19 monologues and 2 dialogues possibly end up as an entertaining whole?

Whether it is because I read the plays aloud, or because I read it with the intention of teaching/learning about the Middle Ages, I ended up enjoying this collection much more than I thought I would. In fact, my final thought was: What a perfect way to get an overview of Medieval times. It is impressive in its uniqueness and wholeness, in its ability to retain humor while teaching, in how easy it is to follow even with the large amount of characters and information. In these small sketches (and the bits of background information) we learn about religion and class restrictions, government and war, relationships and business. We get to know people, their behavior, feelings, opinions and activities.

I'm not a huge fan of poetry, but I did enjoy what was included in this book. It would be great fun to see them performed. I now understand why, even though the book seemed to be a bit of an oddball choice for the Newbery, it is so valuable. Not a typical story, to be sure, but exactly what was lacking in Junior Fiction/Nonfiction.

(cross-posted at Fingers & Prose)

The Midwife's Apprentice

2010-10-12T14:19:00.001-04:00

Beetle found in a dung heap has but one way to go.

Upward, Onward, only her true heart will show.

Lessons abound for her soul and mind,

and she learns them well, leaving the dung heap behind.

The Midwife's Apprenctice has depth with insight to the medieval era and driving home the fact that if one persists through hard times in life, it is possible to overcome hardships. Karen Cushman's book is not "cushy". It is written with matter-of-fact life's difficulties and hard times. From Brat and Beetle and clear through to birthing, Karen Cushman brings the story to a conclusion of a young woman gaining confidence and a growing sense of inner worth topped off with a compassionate heart for others.

Life's not always kind, but Alyce learns she likes the life around her and assisting with life being brought into the world.

I loved the book, yet maybe not so much for really young readers. One for the shelf till they can understand the ways of birthing!

Strawberry Girl by Lois Lenski

2010-10-11T14:11:00.000-04:00

Title: Strawberry Girl

Author: Lois Lenski

Pages: 192

Published: 2005 Harper Trophy (orig. 1945)

Read For: School--Aloud to my kiddos

My Rating: 4 stars

Strawberry Girl won the Newbery Award in 1946, beating Justin Morgan had a Horse by Marguerite Henry. While I really enjoyed learning about the beginnings of Morgan horses, I can understand why Lois Lenski's book won the gold. Even with it's somewhat unrealistic happy ending, Strawberry Girl does a great job depicting life in Florida at the turn of the last century--a time when Florida was still the backwoods frontier land characteristic to the west 30-40 years prior. The forward begins:

Few people realize how new Florida is, or that, aside from the early Indian and Spanish settlements, Florida has grown up in the course of a single man's lifetime.

Admittedly, one of the reasons that I enjoyed this book was that I love well written dialect. I love to read it aloud. It makes me happy. If dialogue written in dialect is not your thing, you may have a difficult time with this book, because it is simply filled with it (or should I say "plumb filled"?) I knew I was in for a treat from the first page:

"She's got our markin' brand on her, Pa. A big S inside a circle," said Essie.

The man, Sam Slater, looked up. "Shore 'nough, so she has."

"She's headin' right for them orange trees, Pa," said Essie.

"Them new leaves taste mighty good, I reckon," replied her father. "She's hungry, pore thing!"

A clatter of dishes sounded from within the house and a baby began to cry.

"You'd be pore, too, did you never git nothin' to eat," said the unseen Mrs. Slater.

There was no answer.

Most of the book is consumed with a feud between neighbors: the Slaters and the Boyers. The Boyers are new to the area, and Slaters aren't too happy about that. Despite the sweet illustrations throughout, and the fact that it was written over 60 years ago, the book is not the innocent story you might expect. There is drinking and gambling, fighting and arguing; there are hateful words and actions. None of this behavior is condoned, and it is mostly isolated to interactions with the Slater family. Although those interactions make up the majority of the book, you aren't left with a feeling of hopelessness. Rather the opposite--it's never too late to make a change for the better. Thumbs up from my kiddos. We found it to be engaging and fun.

(cross posted at Fingers & Prose)

Ginger Pye

2010-09-29T17:14:00.000-04:00

Title: Ginger Pye

Author: Eleanor Estes

Pages: 320

Published: 2000 Sandpiper (orig.1951)

Read For: School--Aloud to my kiddos

My Rating: 3 stars

Ginger Pye won the Newbery Award in 1952. It looked like such a happy puppy dog story that I was looking forward to reading it aloud to my kiddos. Unfortunately, we were all disappointed to find that this book, while using Ginger as an anchor, is more about the rambling thoughts and activities of two well-adjusted siblings. Jerry and Rachel get along wonderfully, and are proud of the fact that their mother is the youngest mother in town, and their father is a famous "bird man". Much of the book is taken up by the search for Ginger after she is stolen, and is filled with happy little detours exploring the town and explaining their thoughts.

The book is not without its charms. It was nice to read a book filled with happy people, however unrealistic that may be. There are many things in the book that recall a different era in small town American life, although many of those things are more confusing than they are endearing. Better choices on that regard are, in my opinion, Mr. Popper's Penguins (Newbery Honor 1939), Miracles on Maple Hill (Newbery 1957), Gone Away Lake (Newbery Honor 1957) and Thimble Summer (Newbery 1939).

If you approach Ginger Pye as an introduction to the Pye family and the bygone times and town they lived in rather than a cute puppy story, I'm guessing you'll have a better chance at liking it. Don't be in a hurry to get through, because it really takes its time. My kids thought it boring, although I wouldn't be surprised if--at some point--they remember it fondly.

(cross-posted at Fingers & Prose)

It's Been So Long Since Anyone's Posted!

2010-09-21T11:49:00.000-04:00

Where is everyone? People write and say they're excited about contributing, but then they don't post. :(

I've been reading and writing a lot for a job, and haven't had much time for reading for pleasure. The job wraps up in October, though, so I will definitely finish Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and Dicey's Song and the eight or so other Newbery winners I still haven't read yet at some point after that.

Meanwhile, here's an issue that has come up frequently here (and specifically mentions Dr. Dolittle):

What to Do About Classic Children's Books That Are Racist

And if you're interested in getting a jump on the Newbery winner for 2010 (my vote is already cast for A Conspiracy of Kings, whether it's the best choice or not. I love that series so much I can't be an impartial judge), the Heavy Medal blog is up and running again.

Boy, it is really annoying that when you Google "Heavy Medal Newbery" they automatically switch your search term to "heavy metal Newbery".

Caddie Woodlawn, by Carol Ryrie Brink

2010-05-06T09:41:00.002-04:00

I did love this book during my tween years, and now rereading it as an adult, all I can think of is how very much like the Little House books it is. But this story takes place at least 15 years before Laura Ingalls Wilder's birth. And interestingly enough, I counted at least two stories in this book that I also remember having read in the Little House series. I think perhaps they simply became Wisconsin urban legend. I did my google maps homework and found that Laura was born less than 40 miles from where this book takes place, which explains the common themes- Caddie Woodlawn is based on the true story of the author's grandmother.

Caddie takes place during the Civil War. Caddie's father, who runs the local mill, is affluent enough that he was able to pay to have a man sent in his place. The family also has hired men living full-time on the property. Caddie is the middle child of five. There used to be six, however, when the family moved west from Boston the youngest girl, Mary, was ill and died. Because Caddie was weak and sickly also, Mr. Woodlawn convinced his wife to allow her to run wild with the boys to regain her health, convinced that she would take up more feminine behavior when she became ready.

In addition to their own small family, the Woodlawns are on very good terms with the Indians that live locally, especially Indian John (who has the advantage of command of the English language, although it's unfortunately depicted as the stereotypical pidgin English common in books from this period). The book follows a year in Caddie's life- picking nuts, riding horses, going to school, and worrying about rumors of Indian massacre, eagerly awaiting the mail after a long winter, and eating entirely too much turkey. Over the course of events, Caddie does mature and become ready to at least consider that a lady's skills have some merit.

Also impressive for the time the book was written in is the way the Woodlawn family is scornful of a man in the community who had taken an Indian wife in the days when the town was not yet settled. Not because he took an Indian wife, but because he is clearly ashamed of her and their three children, and because he sends his wife away to rejoin her people when rumors of massacre have made her uncomfortable to keep. Stereotypes notwithstanding, it's a perspective that you don't often see represented. As their mother tells the Woodlawn children, "Sam Hankinson hasn't a very strong character. Now if your father had married an Indian. . . you may be sure that he would never have sent her off because he was ashamed of her."

I did love my paperback copy of this book with Trina Schart Hyman illustrations; they have so much more character than the airbrushed bland ones that are in the 1958 edition I borrowed from my library this week (see right). Who makes a better-looking tomboy, I ask you?

Cross-posted from http://oldnewberries.blogspot.com/ in which Melanie and Sue have made it a personal mission to read all Newbery Award and Honor books.

Island of the Blue Dolphins

2010-04-21T11:02:00.003-04:00

I remember when my children read Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell. It was many years ago but I still remember that my daughter cried while my oldest son tried not to cry. So I remember it as a sad book because a dog dies.

It is much more than that. This book was awarded the Newbery Medal in 1961. I was only eight years old and I wonder why (or if) I did not read the book. This was published in a time of women's liberation in the United States. I don't know that I would say that liberation is what this book is about, but certainly Karana moved outside female cultural roles as she survived alone on an island off the coast of California.

The book is based on the life of a real woman who lived alone on the island of San Nicolas from 1835 to 1853. She was named Juana Maria by a priest who was with her when she died only seven weeks after she was rescued by George Nidever. She is buried at the Santa Barbara Mission in California. To learn more, click HERE.

In Island of the Blue Dolphins, our heroine Karana stays behind on her island after the Aleuts killed many of the men of her tribe and the others had left on a large ship. She stayed because she could not find her brother on the ship. After her brother's traumatic death, Karana lives alone on the island. O'Dell uses imagery to help the reader visualize how Karana takes care of herself and the island. A strong girl, Karana does what she must do to survive. In the end, she has experienced joy and sorrow on the island. I liked the story and feel the students would as well.

TITLE: Island of the Blue Dolphins
AUTHOR: Scott O'Dell
COPYRIGHT: 2006
PAGES: 184
TYPE: fiction
RECOMMEND: I would recommend this to Middle School children who are naturalists (no matter what your definition) or for girls who need to learn that they can do anything they wish to do.

Shen of the Sea by Arthur Bowie Chrisman

2010-04-04T12:05:00.002-04:00

Shen of the Sea: Chinese Stories for Children by Arthur Bowie Chrisman. illustrated by Else Hasselriis

Pages: 221 pages
Ages: 8+
Finished: Mar. 31, 2010
First Published: 1925
Publisher: E.P. Dutton
Genre: short stories, folktales
Rating: 4.5/5

First sentence:

"A shamelessly rainy day, my honorable Brother Chi."

Acquired: Bought and own a copy.

Reason for Reading: Read aloud to my 9yo son. We always have a book of folktales, fairy tales, myths, etc. on the go, reading one story every school day.

Comments: I have read this book once before to myself some time ago, as an adult, and came away with the impression that it was OK (maybe 3 stars) but now I think I've found out the problem with that first reading. This book is meant to be read aloud! The stories are told in a storyteller voice that just rolls off the tongue when reading out loud and brings them gloriously to life. The stories are hilarious and I can't say that my ds or I didn't like even a single one the tales. I'm not convinced these are traditional Chinese stories (I've read a lot of folktales in my life and never heard any of these before) but would guess that Chrisman wrote them himself based on the style of Chinese tales. The tales often rely on repetition, some are origin stories and they cover a wide spectrum of characters from peasants to princesses and Kings. A number of the stories are about someone who is not too bright or is incredibly lazy or stubborn. While the great majority of tales are folktales a few pass over into fairytale territory with the appearance of a few dragons and other Chinese mythical creatures. Every single time this book came out my son's face lit up, he thoroughly enjoyed it! I also had a ton of fun reading it. This book has a habit of getting mixed reviews and to those who give it low ratings, I ask you to read aloud a couple of stories to a child or group of children. Then see if you don't change your mind! I've found in my 21 years as a mother that some children's books just beg to be read aloud and don't do the trick when read silently. The only thing I'm not too keen on are the silhouette illustrations. Yes, they add to the ethnicity of the book but detailed drawings would have been more fun to look at.

2010 When You Reach Me

2010-03-13T10:20:00.007-05:00

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead is a fascinating novel with a number of story lines. While I enjoyed the book (and stayed up until 12:30 in the morning to finish it, which speaks volumes), I wonder if the seconday story lines will be understood by young readers who might not have previous knowledge to support full interest. Certainly it appealed to the Newbery panel!

The novel takes place in 1979 and is narrated by twelve year old Miranda, who lives with her mother. Miranda experiences the pains of growing up while a mystery surrounds her. Miranda's mother is excited about being on the $20,000 Pyramid, a television game show which was popular in the 1970s. Along with her mother's boyfriend, the family helps the mother practice for the show. This story line might be an unknown for young people today.

Another story line, which is at the heart of the mystery, focuses on Madeline L'Engel's book A Wrinkle in Time and the idea of time travel. Marcus, who becomes a friend to Miranda, has theories on time and space. If one were unfamiliar with L'Engel's book, perhaps this story line might also have some gaps. Of course the simple answer to this problem is to read L'Engel's classic book and start over.

I liked this book. I didn't love it. The writing and tone were good and I wanted to get to the bottom of the mysterious notes. Overall, When You Reach Me should hold broad appeal for the age range Grade 5-8, which is where we have placed the book in our collection at the library.

TITLE: When You Reach Me

AUTHOR: Rebecca Stead

PAGES: 197

TYPE: fiction

RECOMMEND: A slightly off-kilter book for middle school students - should spark good discussion

Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis

2010-03-01T10:41:00.002-05:00

Bud, Not Buddy
by Christopher Paul Curtis

This book won the 2000 Newbery Medal for "the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children" and the award is well-deserved.

Set in Flint and Grand Rapids Michigan in 1936, the story covers three tumultuous days in the life of Bud Caldwell, orphan, age 10. Bud's single mom died when he was six and he has lived in the orphanage and various foster homes since. Bud's already wise to the system. So wise that he can feel sorry for the six-year-old who's being sent to a foster home in the most recent "deployment" from the orphange.

...Six is a real tough age to be at. Most folks think you start to be a real adult when you're fifteen or sixteen years old, but that's not true, it really starts when you're around six.

It's at six that grown folks don't think you're a cute little kid anymore, they talk to you and expect you to understand everything they mean. And you'd best understand too, if you aren't looking for some real trouble, 'cause it's around six that grown folks stop giving you little swats and taps and jump clean up to giving you slugs that'll knock you right down and have you seeing stars in the middle of the day. The first foster home I was in taught me that real quick.

(If that doesn't break your heart, what will?) To cope with his world in which children must be "too wise, too soon", and can't trust any adult, Bud has composed "Bud Caldwell's Rules and Things for Having a Funner Life and Making a Better Liar Out of Yourself". Sprinkled randomly throughout the book (#3, #63, #29, #16 etc), they're a melange of timeless childhood advice, hilarious reasoning, and poignant realizations.

Bud's busting out of the padlocked shed his newest foster parents have locked him in, and he's off to find his unknown father. When she died, his mother left a half-dozen small stones inscribed with letters and numbers, and five different flyers for the jazz band Herman E. Calloway and the Dusky Devastators. Bud is convinced that Herman E. Calloway is his father.

This is a young adult book that will be enjoyed by adults and adolescents alike. Bright and polite Bud narrates his own story and, although he relates the precarious position of an orphan during the Great Depression, he never sounds like he feels sorry for himself. Life is full of unpleasant situations but with his self-authored book of "Rules and Things...", he can find a way to deal with anything. You'll be uplifted by his story.

I rate Bud, Not Buddy 4.5 out of 5 stars.

2010 - When you Reach Me

2010-02-26T07:42:00.005-05:00

I just finished reading When You Reach Me, by Rebecca Stead. It won the Newbery award this year, so I figured it would be worth reading.

I found the book rather disappointing. In the last few pages, all of the bizarre and confusing things that happened through the book are all explained, and everything falls in place but the fact is that until that moment, the book is hard work to get through. I think it's unlikely that my kids, anyway, would persist through to that Ahah! moment, and so would dismiss the book with their usual designation of "boring."

Added to that, the book relies heavily on the reader being familiar with "A Wrinkle in Time", a book which (yes, I know, it's heresy) I can't stand. So, if you're familiar with Wrinkle, and if you liked it, perhaps this will resonate with you. But it really didn't work much for me.

Here's a review that completely disagrees with me.

Some Great Reviews and Links on Newbery Winners

2010-02-11T10:14:00.004-05:00

are going up now in Elizabeth Bird's blogging on the "Top 100 Children's Novels". She's updating every day or two, and has done 24 books so far (starting at #100 and counting down), and some of my favorite Newbery winners have already been listed. The covers and video clips she finds are amazing.

Crispin: The Cross of Lead, by Avi, 2003

2010-02-03T01:18:00.007-05:00

Recently I read Avi’s Newbery winning young adult novel, Crispin: The Cross of Lead. My initial opinion was that it was extremely well-written. I was especially enamored of Avi's descriptions of life in and around a tiny medieval English village. The death and burial of Crispin’s mother, Asta, set the scene for traumatizing upheavals in young Crispin’s life. Before long he was an outcast, his home burnt, his name dishonored. A false accusation sent him running into the woods for safety.

Crispin’s sole possession, a cross of lead, was a common one at that time. His mother had written something on it but since he had no education, he couldn’t read it. At the age of thirteen, a rather young age for the main character in a young adult novel, Crispin set out as a fugitive to make a life of his own.

Though thirteen is young for the main character in a young adult novel, Crispin: The Cross of Lead should not be classified as middle grade, in my opinion, because of the subject matter, which includes violence. My library has it labeled 'young adult'. Perhaps Avi chose this young age for Crispin because this is intended to be the start of a trilogy, and during subsequent novels he will be growing older.

Toward the end of the novel there were a few events that I couldn’t believe Crispin could be capable of. My suspension of disbelief wavered. I was also distressed by his tendency to disobey -- something that normally would get a child in a lot of trouble! Instead Crispin managed to be a hero each time his disobedience surfaced. This annoyed me, yet I was happy that he wasn’t destroyed by the enemy and that he lived to disobey again.

Compared to other medieval age historical novels on the Newbery list, I thought this one to be one the best. Others I’ve read include The Door in the Wall, which bored me, and Adam of the Road, which is sweet but simplistic compared to today's standards.

Avi’s story-writing talents are well-developed and current. As I’m also a writer of middle grade and young adult novels (though not published yet) I cannot help but spot anything that’s not on the current PC list for writers. Older Newbery Medal winners sometimes make me shake my head thinking, “If that book was written now it would never get published,” because it breaks the rules that I, as a modern writer, must live with. Avi’s books, of course are cream of the crop... a good source of novels we more modern writers can learn from.

Crispin: The Cross of Lead kept my interest and did not disappoint. I loved reading it! I also liked Avi's novel, The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, which was named a Newbery Honor Book in 1991.

My writing blog: Linda Jo Martin.

Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze

2010-01-24T19:39:00.009-05:00

You know, a fair number of adults today seem to enjoy Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze, by Elizabeth Foreman Lewis. A couple of my friends have said positive things about it, and it's got an average rating of 3.56 on goodreads.com, which gives it more stars than 1/3 of the other Newbery prize winners. The Allen County Newbery Book Discussion Group even rated it relatively high (at 61 out of 88).

I can't figure them out. I liked Secret of the Andes more than Young Fu! Heck, I actually had more fun reading Dobry. And it's not that I don't like reading about historic China. I liked The Good Earth when I read it in high school, and I liked it even more when I read it again a couple of years ago (interestingly, Pearl S. Buck wrote an introduction to Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze for the 1973 edition that I checked out of the library).

Unfortunately, unlike the characters in The Good Earth (which won the Pulitzer Prize 1932, the year before Young Fu won the Newbery...hmmm, is there a connection?), I found the characters in Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze rather uninspired. Downright boring, in fact. I kept waiting for Young Fu to do something exciting, but even his minor transgressions were disappointing to me (unlike Johnny Tremain, for instance, another Newbery-winning apprentice whose flaws kept me reading).

I thought Scholar Wang was going to be an important character in his own right (especially as he appears in the first chapter), but he seems to exist mainly to embody "Classic Wisdom" (p. 10), to provide the means for Young Fu to learn to read and write, and for Young Fu to be able to show appreciation for the elderly and to display compassion when Scholar Wang is sick.

The women in Young Fu are even more disappointing. Fu Be Be, Young Fu's mother, is portrayed as rather stingy, short-sighted, and superstitious, and there really aren't any other important female characters in the book. The idea that men in Chungking (modern Chongqing) considered women to be foolish, emotional, and weak is often mentioned, and although it is clear (I hope!) that this is an historic cultural perspective, it is unfortunate that this idea is not countered by a single remotely sympathetic female character - with the possible exception of a blond foreign doctor (or possibly a nurse). I don't think it's true that girls don't enjoy boy's coming-of-age stories, but I don't think that too many girls today would enjoy this one. And it is just discouraging to keep reading about women's roles in this society without ever hearing their voices, like you do in The Good Earth.

Girls always cried during the tedious moons of foot binding. He had seen them often enough in the village, though a few of the farm women kept their daughters' feet of natural size that they might help in the fields. But this was not common. Everyone agreed that it was better to stand the agony of foot binding than the stigma of possessing large feet. And even though deformed feet permitted a woman to work only around the house, they were important in getting a husband.....He, Young Fu, was glad that his mother's feet were small; that she was not a coolie woman was plain for all to see (p. 39).

I didn't mind reading about the mechanics of making brass (although Young Fu is apprenticed to a coppersmith, the story revolves around brass), and of the selling of pots, kettles, braziers, and trays, but I thought Lewis was at her most interesting when she was describing the city of Chungking itself. The city streets, steaming paving stones, shops, the tenement in Chair-Makers' Way, and the soldiers, political activists in the tea shops, and the deadly flood - I thought that all of these things were much more interesting than hardworking, virtuous Fu Yuin-fah. But I really want more than a travelogue and history when I'm reading historic fiction; I want interesting characters and a compelling plot, too!

The chapters in Young Fu are rather disjointed - each chapter reads like a separate story, which works well for some books (like The Graveyard Book, for instance), but didn't help keep my flagging interest in Young Fu's story. Lewis' frequent use of proverbs annoyed me, too, even when I agreed with the sentiments. They just seemed a bit trite and forced to me:

Laziness never filled a rice bowl (p. 16).

At birth, men are by nature good of heart (p. 54).

Character is made by rising above one's misfortunes (p. 149...doesn't this contradict the previous one?).

He who rides on a tiger cannot dismount (p. 180).

Medicines are bitter in the mouth, but they cure sickness (p. 197).

The story (in my edition, anyway) concludes with ten pages of Notes by Alison R. Lanier, updating readers on some of the technological and political changes that have taken place between Young Fu's original publication in 1932 and the printing of the new edition in 1973. Since almost as long a timespan has passed since the Notes were written ("Planes reach almost any part of China the same day. Many of the planes are British turbo-jets; others are of Russian make", p. 259), with some pretty major changes occurring in China, I think it's time for an update of the update.

2010 - When You Reach Me

2010-01-18T22:37:00.006-05:00

Today's Newbery Medalist had been mentioned or talked up a lot in various blogs (including this one) and Mock Newberys, so this past Saturday I went to my small-town library looking for it and some of the other contenders. Luckily this one was on the shelf.

It's a quick read - at 197 pages, I read it in less than two hours while working out on my elliptical trainer. It's not going to be easy to review, as it's part mystery, part realistic fiction, part science fiction, and part historical fiction (it's set in 1978-79 Upper West Side New York City). It's funny, but it's also very meaningful.

We Newbery Project folk will get a kick out of the book right off. Miranda, the 12-year-old main character, reads her favorite book, the 1963 winner, over and over. I'm glad I recently read that book (although I have not reviewed it here yet - soon, I promise!). There are a number of parallels between that book (its title is not revealed until page 135) and this one. It inspires a discussion between Miranda and two other characters, Marcus and Julia, about time travel. I'm not sure if this book will resonate as well with people who haven't read the earlier winner.

Another plot device is Miranda's mother being selected to be a contestant on the TV game show $20,000 Pyramid. Variations of this show (with different dollar amounts) were on from 1973 though 1988, and a basic familiarity with the show is helpful. Kids today can find clips of it on YouTube and elsewhere, and the game is explained pretty well in the book. Most of the book's short chapters have titles that reflect the second "Winner's Circle" round of the game show, when contestants have to guess categories ("things that...") that a group of words fit.

I really liked this book. The interesting characters and their development (and the way the book started out) reminded me of Criss Cross. Like that book (set around 1970), in many ways it could be a contemporary story--although I doubt that sixth-graders there today are allowed to leave campus and eat lunch at the nearby delis and pizza places. The story has a lot to say about friendships and family relationships in children of this age.

The science fiction part of the plot was carefully constructed, as it was in The Time Traveller's Wife (okay, not a Newbery, or even a kid's book, but another book I love and am reminded of by When You Reach Me). The mystery kept me guessing, although I had my suspicions.

The cover and title (which appears in the text on page 189) may not inspire kids to pick up the book. Its short chapters and intriguing plot make it great for reading aloud to a class or your own children - and that will probably be all it takes to hook them in to finishing it or re-reading it on their own.

This is only the second novel for author Rebecca Stead. There are some good interviews with her on Amazon, the Fuse #8 blog, School Library Journal, and Time Out New York Kids, all probably best read after reading the book. I've tried not to spoil it in this review, either. Just go read it. Highly recommended - five out of five stars.

[A variation of this review also appears on my blog, Bookin' It.]

2010 Newbery Announced

2010-01-18T10:16:00.011-05:00

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead.

Honor Books:

Claudette Colvin: Twice Towards Justice by Phillip Hoose (also named a Robert F. Sibert honor book - a runner-up for the most distinguished informational book for children, and it was the 2009 National Book Award winner in the category for Young People’s Literature);

The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly;
Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin; and
The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg by Rodman Philbrick.

A review of the winner is in the next post (above this one).

The 2010 Newbery Winner Will be Announced...

2010-01-13T16:35:00.008-05:00

...next Monday, January 18.

I've read some of the contenders already:

When You Reach Me, by Rebecca Stead
The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, by Jacqueline Kelly
The Dunderheads, by Paul Fleischman
Charles and Emma: The Darwins' Leap of Faith, by Deborah Heiligman
Anything But Typical, by Nora Raleigh Baskin
Written in Bone, by Sally Walker
Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins
Season of Gifts, by Richard Peck

and I'm on the library wait list for Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, by Grace Lin, and Claudette Colvin, by Phillip Hoose. From reading at the School Library Journal's Heavy Medal blog, I think that Stead, Lin, and Hoose are the front runners. But I know that the both the critics' and popular favorites are quite often not chosen. Tune in next week for the results.

Dobry

2010-01-13T09:40:00.013-05:00

Well, I didn't really hate Dobry, by Monica Shannon, but then again I didn't have very high expectations for this 1935 winner.

I liked reading about the round of seasonal chores in a Bulgarian village. A lot of the story reminded me of an old-fashioned ethnography, with its dispassionate depictions of the peasants plowing, planting, hoping for rain, taking their cows to mountain pastures, harvesting tomatoes and peppers, winnowing wheat, and making bread (note the hanging peppers and the bread and oven on the cover). There were some mildly interesting and exotic words to ponder, and a few nice descriptions of food:

Roda served cherry sladco to all her guests. They sat on three-legged stools around the jamal fire which had only new air to warm up because the windows looking onto the village street were open to let the music of rain and the smell of rain come into the room. Grandfather brought in a tubful of red peppers at a time and got out a jug of sauerkraut juice from a cubby-hole back of the jamal. Peppers went on strings so fast that he could do nothing at all except serve his guests and refill the pepper tub (p. 35).

I think sladco is some kind of sweet, but it's not listed in my food dictionary or the Oxford English Dictionary, and when I Google sladco I get a thousand hits for a Russian candy company. A jamal is apparently some kind of clay fireplace stove (again, too many hits, given its popularity as a first name). I also liked the spelling of "bowlder" for boulder, the Wickerwockoffs, the descriptions of the tunnels through the snow in the village in the winter, and some of the Christmas and New Year's traditions that Shannon describes, although at times it seems like she's trying to load as many extraneous facts about Bulgarian culture as she can onto poor Dobry's shoulders.

The "massaging Gypsy bear" - first mentioned on the second page, and then appearing periodically - is just bizarre. Did such a thing really exist? Did this bear not have claws? Was it really that exciting to have a bear walk on your back? It's a little hard to believe that this gave "every peasant man in the village" something that "wiped out all thought of his summer toil and gave him the feeling that a long vacation gives to other men (p. 93)".

I don't know if the gypsy bear was stranger than when Dobry envies the older men in the village who have icicles on their chest hair in the winter. When Dobry says "I'll be proud the day I can stride in here, clinking at the chest. It's a noise I love even better than the noise of sledge bells on our oxen (p. 131)", all I could do was goggle at the page in disbelief. And then there's the idea that if you sneak a piece of pig's skin to munch on at night from the slaughtered animal hanging in your house, the ghost of the pig will ride on your back. But these passages did keep me from being bored, as I was with some of the other Newbery winning exaltations of "simple" cultures (see Secret of the Andes and ...And Now, Miguel, for instance).

But what happened to Dobry's father? He must have died sometime after Dobry was born (there's a story about him on the day of Dobry's birth), but no one seems to mourn him, not even Dobry's mother, Roda. Then again, it was hard to care much about any of the characters in the book, given the way they are portrayed. Dobry is interested in art instead of farming, but this big conflict in his life isn't even mentioned until page 80 (of a 176 page book). He's really just a generic happy Bulgarian peasant boy and his mother is a hardworking farm wife. Dobry's grandfather is a hearty man who is most notable for the number of things he is able to keep in the sash belted around his waist (on page 46, this includes "two loaves of bread, a goat cheese, garlic, and his tall wooden salt-and-paprika box," along with six tomatoes!), and of course his ability to melt snow with his body heat.

I really didn't like the illustrations by Atanas Katchamakoff (including the original cover), and agreed with Alicia's comments on them. I didn't like the stories that Grandfather told in the book, either - I think my least favorite was the story of Hadutzi-Dare and the Black Arab. I did wonder why the illustration for this story was listed in the front of the book as "Heidout-Sider Pulling the Water Buffalo with a Chain" (are Hadutzi-Dare and Heidout-Sider different translations of the same hero?), but not enough to research it after a cursory Google didn't enlighten me. I also didn't like the fact that the chapters are neither titled nor numbered, and that the only way you can tell it's a new chapter is by the fact that there's an illustration on the upper third of the page.

I didn't much care for Shannon's descriptions of Dobry's art, either:

Only youth could have brought the freshness Dobry brought to his Nativity, and only a primitive genius, Indian or a peasant like Dobry, could have modeled these figures with strength, assurance, sincerity - untaught in any school (p. 146).

I would be very surprised to hear that any kids today care for this book.

Johnny Tremain

2009-10-30T17:08:00.000-04:00

Here are some of the things I liked about Esther Forbes' 1944 Newbery winner, Johnny Tremain. The historical characters - stocky, practical Paul Revere, proud businessman John Hancock, and Samuel Adams with his shabby house - are all portrayed in an interesting and not overly simplistic way. They're real, complicated characters, not icons of the Revolution.

The colonial setting is also very well drawn, and Forbes has included many details about life in the late 18th century - especially food (syllabub! salt alewives, apple, mince, pumpkin and plum tarts, squabs, "a wreath of jellied eels" and "tipsy parson - white bread tied into little knots, buttered and baked", p. 58-59), and the apprentices' work, and a bit about the Puritans' religious strictures, and the general feel of the busy wharves of Boston. In addition to the silversmiths (Johnny starts out as an apprentice silversmith), there are also clockmakers, wool weavers, barbers, butchers, tailors, bookbinders, instrument-makers, printers, delivery boys (or "horse boys", which Johnny becomes, with some wonderful descriptions of his horse, Goblin), as well as chimney sweeps, oystermen, and knife-grinders. Boston and its hinterland of smaller towns and farms really is shown in a historically accurate (as far as I can tell) and colorful manner.

I did not like the cover. Peter D. Sieruta blogged about the different Johnny Tremain covers (some with Johnny in a tricornered hat and some without), but I have to say that this is one of the few Newbery winners where I think that recent covers are actually an improvement over the original. Seriously, Johnny's pale, ghostly face and the lines of redcoats and huddled houses made it harder for me to pick the book up and start reading it than it should have been. I did like the black & white illustrations every few chapters, though they weren't especially memorable.

Johnny himself is an interesting but often not very likable character, starting out with his thoughtless name-calling ("pig-of-a-louse"!), and his bullying of the "whitish, flaccid, parasitic Dove" (p. 3). He doesn't treat the women in his life very well, either, taking them for granted, pulling away from Cilla when she needs him, and then only getting interested in her when it appears she might be involved with his friend Rab.

Johnny does carry the story, though, and this is true partially because of his flaws. He does mature, and I liked how he thought better of his dead mother and the sacrifices she made as the story developed. His understanding of his own personal shortcomings and his increasing knowledge of politics and subsequent patriotism are also heartening to read about.

Paragraphs like the following infodump, however, reminded me a bit too much of the history I didn't like reading in high school (it wasn't until I got to college that I realized that I really loved history, and that it is full of the most bizarre and amazing stories that you couldn't make up):

The tension in Boston grew. Everyone knew that with the coming of spring General Gage would leave the safety of Boston, strike out into the country as commanded by his King, and this time in considerable force. He would never dare send out a mere handful. He knew how well the provincials were arming, preparing to welcome him. King George was in a fury over the dilatory, cautious behavior of his general. Rebellion had not been put down as he had ordered and every day it was growing stronger.....Word came to Boston that three generals, more ferocious than mild General Gage, were already on the way over to take command - Generals Howe, Clinton, and Burgoyne. Doubtless, perhaps against his better judgment, Gage would make his big sortie before the Cerebus arrived with the three new generals (p. 197-198).

Luckily, paragraphs like this didn't constitute the majority of Johnny Tremain's story, but they were frequent enough to make me sigh and wish for a little more showing and less telling. This is probably why a lot of kids today also dismiss Johnny Tremain as boring and old-fashioned. Which is a shame, since the story is really rather compelling, and I can think of loads of good discussion questions for kids (or adults!). You could look at how Johnny deals with his disability, what it means "that a man can stand up", and how different things were for 14-16 year old boys in the late 18th century, for instance. And why did Johnny became a Whig, and whatever happened to Dove? And Cilla and Isannah?

Secret of the Andes

2009-10-02T11:00:00.005-04:00

Secret of the Andes, by Ann Nolan Clark, is a short and rather heavy-handedly poetic story about a boy named Cusi, who lives in an isolated mountain valley, tending a flock of llamas with an older man. The story follows Cusi as he learns about life outside the valley and subsequently discovers why he lives there alone with Chuto.

So - a few things I liked about Secret of the Andes. It's relatively short, and I did like Clark's language sometimes, especially when she describes sunrise and spirituality in the mountains:

The morning was cold with the coldness of before dawn. It was gray with the grayness of before dawn. It felt unfriendly because the world had not yet wakened to make it happy with living things.

Chuto was a dark shadow moving the gray shadows. Cusi followed him swiftly lest he become lost in the earth clouds that billowed around them (p. 19).

Earth clouds! What a great description of fog.

Then the sun came. Chuto's voice rose to meet the sun, and Cusi knew forever the joy of welcoming the coming of the Great Father who lightened and warmed the world.

After the call was finished Chuto stood for a minute with head bowed, lost in thinking. For a brief time he had touched the Spirit World, and he hated to return to the realness of living. But it was only for a moment. With a sigh the old man raised his head, straightened his thin shoulders, and turned to the homeward trail (p. 36).

Furthermore, I have a fondness for descriptions of food in books (what can I say? I studied ethnobotany for several years), and I really enjoyed the parts about traditional Andean coca use, the frozen (actually freeze-dried) potatoes that Cusi grinds up, chicha (Clark missed a wonderful chance to describe how it's made with saliva), and the obscure grains - canihua (which is related to the better known quinoa) and "pigweed" (which may be amaranth [kawicha], or canihua or quinoa) - and of course the "guinea pigs and sweet potatoes" that Cusi eats a couple of times.

I didn't like the rather plodding plot of Secret of the Andes as much. I didn't care much about the heavily foreshadowed secret, and the emphasis on pure, royal Inca blood annoyed me - not to mention that these elements precluded any kind of normal family life for Cusi (one of the major sources of conflict in the story). The characters were all rather stoic and flat, and I didn't appreciate the pseudo-profound statements about following your heart, not grieving if your searching circles (no, I didn't mean you're, it's about searching in circles), and the like. I did rather enjoy Cusi's quasi-mystical relationship with the llamas, though I got a little tired of hearing how haughty and graceful they were.

In a lot of ways, Cusi's story reminded me of ...And Now, Miguel, which won the Newbery the following year (1954) - both are slow (if not ponderous), thoughtful stories about a boy's coming of age, with a lot of ethnographic detail. Is it possible that a lot of the same committee members were still there a year later?

When I went looking for the cover of the 1963 edition that I have checked out of my library, I couldn't find it online. So above you see a photo that I took (hopefully my local librarians won't hunt me down for putting the open book face down to get a shot of the wrap-around effect of the dust jacket).

Although I'm not a huge fan of illustrator Jean Charlot (and he illustrated ....And Now, Miguel, too! how interesting), I think his cover and the endpapers (seen here in a photo taken from Peter D. Sieruta's wonderful post on Secret of the Andes) fit the book very well. Much better than the modern adaptations. Why the heck do publishers keep slapping new cover illustrations on these classics?

Peter D. Sieruta's post also led me to an absorbing online discussion of The Secret of the Andes at the Heavy Medal blog, and how Secret compares to the Newbery Honors books of 1953 - especially Charlotte's Web, by E.B. White. I don't think anyone can deny that Charlotte's Web is the more widely read and loved book today. But is Secret of the Andes actually a better book? Be sure and read the comments, they're quite enlightening.

Secret of the Andes - Part I (should Charlotte's Web have won?)
Part II (or why some people do like Secret of the Andes)
Part III (why some people think Secret won)

Sounder (1970)

2009-09-30T22:35:00.002-04:00

My rating 3/5 stars.

I got Sounder from the library, and put off reading it. I could tell just from the dust jacket that it was bound to be a Dead Dog Book, and I tend to avoid those. I was right, but it was far more and far less than that.

First of all, Sounder is the only character in the entire book who is given a name. The rest are referred to as "the boy" or "his father" or "the red-cheeked man." This would make you think that Sounder is the most important character in the book, and yet he isn't. The boy is. I still can't quite figure out why the author chose to give the dog a name and no one else. Well, that's not true. I can tell why the people don't have names; it is meant to be a story that could apply to the experiences of many in the sharecropping days of the South.

So why is the dog special? I'm still not quite sure. He is loyal, of course, and waits for his master - the boy's father - to return from his sentence of hard labor for years on end. And he is symbolic of...something. Perhaps I just missed the point of the dog. Maybe it is that the book didn't really do it for me so I not only put off reading it for a while, but then I put off writing this review for even longer and now I have forgotten what I thought the author's intent was.

So it is more than a Dead Dog Book because it is about a human experience of waiting, longing, unfairness, love, learning, hope. It is less because unlike books like Where the Red Fern Grows, you aren't as attached to the dog and therefore it isn't as heartbreaking when he dies. That's as much of the ending I will give away, and only because the summary of the book reveals it as well.

Even so, I found that I read it quickly (a sure sign of a plot with good movement), and there were a few memorable parts of the book that I can share with you.

Favorite quotes:
"...a human animal, like Sounder..." (p. 30) I love this. Anyone who has had a cat or dog (or perhaps other pets, I wouldn't know) can relate to this idea that those animals have a human quality.

"The boy liked the woods when they were quiet. He understood quiet. He could hear things in the quiet. But quiet was better in the woods than it was in the cabin. He didn't hear things in cabin quiet. Cabin quiet was long and sad." (p. 51) I like this way of thinking about different types of silence.

"'Go, child. The Lord has come to you.'" (p. 101). This line comes from the mother to the boy after he has told her about meeting a teacher in his journeys who has offered to let the boy live with him while he goes to school. The boy is asking his mom if he may go. What speaks to me about what she says to him is the idea that God can work in our lives through other people.

The boy would not tell her that the teacher had told him that dog days got their name from the Dog Star because it rose and set with the sun during that period." (p. 103) I didn't know this! The dog star, I learned from J.K. Rowling, is Sirius. Yes, you can get smarter from reading children's books! :-)

"Everything don't change much, the boy thought. There's eatin' and sleepin' and talkin' and settin' that goes on. One day might be different from another, but there ain't much difference when they're put together." (p. 109) An interesting way to look at one's life. Reminds me of a quote I found on The Happiness Project: "The days are long, but the years are short." Any particular day has its differences, but the years go by fast because there is a similarity about the days when they are thought of together.

"'Only the unwise think that what has changed is dead.'" (p. 114) The boy reads this in a book he finds at the teacher's house. He doesn't understand it at first, but he does by the end of the story, for reasons I can't say without giving away the ending.

A Gathering of Days (1980)

2009-09-30T22:34:00.002-04:00

My rating: 3.5/5 stars

A Gathering of Days was a very quick read, being only about 145 pages and written in the form of a teenage girl's diary with frequent breaks. This would be a great book to read with elementary students who are learning about 19th century New England because it chronicles a year of a girl's life in Connecticut from 1830-1831 and deals with many relevant issues of the time. The main historical one is about fugitive slaves as Catherine and her friends come across one who needs help on his way to freedom in Canada.

Catherine deals with a number of other issues in this year in which she keeps the journal, and because it begins with a letter from her to her great-granddaughter, we get a preview of what's going to happen. I found that I didn't like this because it kept me wondering the entire time when her best friend Cassie was going to die (which is given away in the first page by the aforementioned letter). It made me feel unattached to that character throughout the book because I knew she wasn't going to make it.

One thing that I think is well-done about the book is the voice of Catherine as she tells what's happening to her. Not having researched how children thought, talked, or behaved in the 19th century very deeply, I can't attest too much to its accuracy. However, it felt accurate as I was reading it. I also liked how she makes it clear how she is feeling in very few words or sentences. It would be great for teaching skills on inferring from texts. (Once a teacher, always a teacher, I guess).

I didn't give it a higher rating only because it didn't grab me quite as much as some of the other Newbery books have. I still zipped through it and enjoyed it.

Great vocabulary:

abcedarian (p. 63): noun. dictionary.com suggests that the current spelling of this is "abecedarian" who is someone just beginning to learn the alphabet. Great word!

dimity (p. 118): noun. "a thin cotton fabric, white, dyed, or printed, woven with a stripe or check of heavier yarn."

loquacious (p. 129): adjective. "talking or tending to talk much or freely; talkative; chattering; babbling; garrulous: a loquacious dinner guest"

Favorite quotes:

"Trust, and not submission, defines obedience." p. 139.
I like this one because it speaks to me as a teacher and as a parent. Sometimes I need the children to obey what I tell them or ask them to do, and it is clear that children follow more readily out of trust than fear of negative consequence.

"I wonder if it common to feel that never is a place so loved as when one has to leave it?" p. 142
I think this is entirely common, so I'm not sure why I liked this quote so much. Perhaps because I feel this way about Michigan every time I have to come back to Washington, which happens regularly these days.

The Witch of Blackbird Pond (1959)

2009-09-30T22:33:00.003-04:00

My rating: 4/5 stars

I am fairly certain that I originally read The Witch of Blackbird Pond when I was in elementary school. As it's historical fiction, it seems likely that it was assigned to me to learn about colonial history. In any case, I remembered none of it, so I figured it was time to reread it.

It turned out to be the perfect chore book, which for me is a book that has chapters of just the right length with which to reward myself after completing some task. It feels like just the right length a break from housework should be: 10-15 minutes. It also kept me wondering what would happen just enough to encourage me to complete another task so I could get back to it.

My quick summary is that Kit comes on her own from Barbados to New England to live with her aunt and uncle, who don't know she's coming. She tries to fit in with the Puritan town, but is an outsider before she even arrives, due to her outlandish behavior and ideas, like knowing how to swim. (!) Of course she makes friends with those who are also outsiders, including Hannah who is the "witch" mentioned in the title. She isn't a witch but rather a Quaker and she helps make the year bearable for Kit, though a bit dangerous as well. There is also a bit of (historically accurate) colonial politics thrown in as Kit's Uncle Matthew and the other townsmen debate the potential dismantling of the Connecticut charter.

I decided to forgive the book its easy resolution of the difficulties Kit faces because a) I like happy endings, b) I liked the characters and c) it's a children's book and not required to delve quite so deeply into what would have actually happened to someone accused of being a witch in 17th century New England. Just seemed like a lot of characters did faster about-faces than they would have, but perhaps I am selling the Puritans short.

My favorite character in the book was Nat, but I suppose the best one in real life would have been Hannah.

All in all a good read, but I don't think I'll be assigning it to my fourth graders any time soon.

Great vocabulary word:

obstreperous: adjective. "noisy, clamorous, or boisterous: obstreperous children"

Rifles for Watie (1958)

2009-09-30T22:32:00.002-04:00

My rating: 4/5 stars

Finished reading Rifles for Watie a couple days ago. It is about a boy from Kansas who joins up with the Union army because he and his family want the Kansas territory's slavery status to be determined by the settlers, not by people crossing over from Missouri to stuff the ballots. He begins by being very excited about the prospect of fighting in battle and is dismayed when his own involvement is delayed. Of course he comes to be in many battles, fighting on both sides (one side undercover), before the war is over and sees they are nothing to be excited about after all.

I enjoyed the book, and was especially hooked when he was undercover with the rebel forces. What I liked best was that it was about a faction of the war that I never really learned about before, namely the Cherokee nation's split loyalties to the North and South, depending on which side had offered them what they considered the best treaty. Their people were just as split as the white settlers throughout the nation. The author did considerable research for the book, which made me wonder what the Cherokee perspective is on the war and the book today.

I also liked that Jeff, the main character, maintains his honor and treats everyone with respect, regardless of which side they are on. I particularly like that he is able to see the good and bad that exist no matter where he is.

What I did not like is that in the end, though the author seems to be starting off by showing Jeff (and the reader) that war is awful, ends up glorifying it anyway. There is even a line about how Jeff "lived life more fully" than most people throughout his three years in the army. I suppose if one person had indeed done all of that, it would be true. However, I felt like there should have been more acknowledgment that war is ugly and brutal.

Overall likeable characters, great use of dialect, and important messages about what it means to be human in the middle of difficult times. The Yankee soldier, Rebel girl love story didn't hurt, either.

The Trumpeter of Krakow

2009-09-27T10:20:00.009-04:00

Everyone seems to love The Trumpeter of Krakow, by Eric P. Kelly. Amazon.com has mostly four and five star reviews, and the few one and two star reviews on goodreads.com say non-specific things like "I couldn't finish it" or "really boring" - things that I think kids say about a lot of assigned books that they have no real interest in reading.

So I expected that I would like The Trumpeter of Krakow. I was looking forward to reading about medieval (or mid-evil, as one kid wrote in his review) Poland, as I like historical fiction, and have especially liked most of the other Newbery winners set in the Middle Ages.

Sadly, I really didn't enjoy The Trumpeter much. Maybe I'm becoming curmudgeonly, because the only medalist I've really liked out of the fourteen I've read in the last year is Criss Cross. Or maybe I picked all the best ones first, and now that I'm near the end of all of the Newbery winners, I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel. But I thought I was going like The Trumpeter of Krakow!

My problem with the story started right away in the first chapter - "The Man Who Wouldn't Sell His Pumpkins". The first sentence of the chapter states that "It was in late July of the year 1461 that the sun rose one morning red and fiery as if ushering in the midsummer's hottest day" (p. 7). Some interesting descriptions of wagons and people on the road to Krakow follow, and we meet the villain, whom you can tell is really bad because he's so ugly:

"It was the face, however, that betrayed the soul beneath. It was a dark, oval, wicked face - the eyes were greenish and narrow and the eyebrow line above them ran straight across the bridge of the nose, giving the effect of a monkey rather than a man. One cheek was marked with a buttonlike scar, the scar of the button plague that is so common in the lands east of the Volga, or even the Dnieper, and marks the bearer as a Tartar or a Cossack or a Mongol. The ears were low set and ugly. The mouth looked like the slit that boys make in the pumpkins they carry on the eve of Allhallows" (p. 12).

Now hold it right there. In 1461, boys in Poland did not make jack-o-lanterns out of pumpkins. Squash and pumpkins were domesticated by the American Indians in prehistoric North America, and before 1492, there wasn't much of chance for Europeans to grow pumpkins (or tomatoes, chili peppers, kidney/pinto/Lima beans, tobacco, maize, potatoes, zinnias or petunias, either). Well, maybe this wasn't widely known in 1928, and anyway, it's only a descriptive passage.

But wait a minute. A few pages later, we learn that a man, a woman, and their son have a huge yellow pumpkin in their wagon - and the man (Pan Andrew, or Mr. Andrew) refuses to sell it to the villain, even for its weight in gold. Well, that's where the name of the chapter comes from, obviously, but this late-season pumpkin from the steppes just bothered me. It made me suspicious of all of the other historical descriptions in the book.

I never really felt close to any of the main characters - Joseph (Andrew's son), his mother, Andrew the trumpeter, the alchemist Kreutz, or Kreutz's niece, Elzbietka. The mystery and the suspense that others applaud felt mechanical and forced to me. Although I enjoyed the rather lengthy descriptions of medieval Krakow, with its pillories, university students, cloth traders, night watchmen, and priests, I suspect my 12 year old son wouldn't find it as interesting as I did, especially in the absence of more engaging characters.

I guess I'm glad that so many other people still enjoy this story, but (as with Shen of the Sea), I'm at a loss as to why I don't like it more when so many others do. The whole alchemy and hypnotism story line didn't do much for me, either. But maybe I would have liked it a lot more if not for the pumpkins.

Call It Courage - 1941

2009-09-27T00:21:00.002-04:00

Sandy D’s call for someone else to post a review of this book beside her excellent one inspired my choosing it for my next Newbery review. I recently purchased (for my library) and listened to this audio version. Actor Lou Diamond Phillips provides a dramatic, exciting reading that is enhanced with original music composed by Richard DeRosa. Especially effective were the drumbeats in the climax of the book. The combination brings this classic adventure/survival/coming-of-age tale to life.

Mofatu, whose name means “stout heart,” is 15 years old and the son of the chief of Hikueru, a real island in the South Pacific. His mother drowned when Mofatu was three (he survived the hurricane that capsized their canoe), and since then he has been afraid of the ocean. Taunted by his peers and feeling he is an embarrassment to his father, he decides to leave by canoe to test his courage, accompanied only by his dog and (sometimes) a pet albatross. He survives a huge storm on the water, landing on an uninhabited island that’s apparently used occasionally for ritual cannibalism, ultimately escaping from the “eaters of men” when they arrive on the island and returning to his home. He kills a shark, an octopus, and a wild pig. More interesting, to me at least, were the ways he fashioned tools and utensils, a canoe, and tapa cloth, the latter from the inner bark of a mulberry tree.

Author Armstrong Sperry’s observations from his trips in 1920-21 and 1924-25 to French Polynesia are evident in Call It Courage. For example:

While his breakfast roasted in the coals, the boy cleared the brush away from the base of the great tamanu. There was no wood better for canoe building than this. It was tough, durable, yet buoyant in the water. Mafatu could fell his tree by fire, and burn it out, too. Later he would grind an adze out of basalt for the finished work. The adze would take a long time, but he had made them often in Hikueru and he knew just how to go about it. The boy was beginning to realize that the hours he had spent fashioning utensils were to stand him now in good stead. Nets and knives and sharkline, implements and shell fishhooks—he knew how to make them all. How he hated those tasks in Hikueru! He was quick and clever with his hands, and now he was grateful for the skill which was his.

I liked this book and I think it would appeal to both boys and girls. (I’ve now completed Island of the Blue Dolphins - review to be posted later – and I much prefer Call It Courage). It may need to be read aloud to younger children (or they can listen to this audiobook), as the reading level measures out to 5th-8th grade. It’s relatively short (only 95 pages in my university’s 1941 hardbound reprint) with a lot of exciting action, yet there’s much interesting information about South Sea island life of a century ago, plus a valuable message about personal courage.

An autobiographical note (written in third person) published in Newbery Medal Books: 1922-1955 (Horn Book, 1955) concludes (page 198), “it is in this book that Armstrong Sperry has put not only what he saw and felt on the islands of the South Seas, but something of his own philosophy of living as well.” I would have to agree.

[A variation of this review appears on my blog, Bookin' It.]

Shen of the Sea

2009-09-23T11:40:00.002-04:00

It's interesting that all of the Newbery winners from the 1920's are set in exotic locations, isn't it? And it's a little strange that Shen of the Sea, by Arthur Bowie Chrisman, won the Newbery just a year after Tales from Silver Lands (a collection of South American stories) did. Were ethnic (or faux ethnic) folk tales really popular in the 20's, or were they seen as new and exciting? Maybe all the other children's books published in 1925 seemed like the same old stuff to Newbery committee?

I can't help wondering why it won, you see, because I really didn't like Shen of the Sea at all. And by the way, what were those teachers and librarians in Allen County smoking, to rank Shen at 48 out of 88? It's better than Hitty, Her First Hundred Years? Better than Criss Cross and Miracles on Maple Hill? Better than The Graveyard Book??!!

No way. I put it down in the 80's in my personal rating, close to Tales from Silvers Lands and The White Stag, if not quite as terrible as Amos Fortune or Daniel Boone.

Some passages in Shen of the Sea were enjoyable for the images they engendered, or for their poetry. Here's a short one that I liked, from the story that gave its title to the book:

And the water demons danced in the dew. Jubilant were they, flinging their toes high, spattering dew drops upon the palace roof, and singing the terrible song of the ocean (p. 34).

And here's a passage I didn't like, describing the perfect girl. It starts out well enough (and "the depraved and shameless" dances of today made me laugh), but then you see the importance of not outshining men:

If she was not so tall, she seemed equally strong and daring. She played ball with the prince. She climbed trees and rode donkeys. She could place her arrow in the target's eye, and she could swim where few would venture. More, the princess could broider, and sew, and dance most gracefully - not in the depraved and shameless manner of today; she danced the olden dances. And Chai Mi was a discreet maiden. She took good care not to excel Prince Tou Meng. If the prince's arrow struck the second ring, then her arrow came no inch closer to the mark. When swimming, the prince always won his races by the slightest margin (p. 103).

I can't help thinking that this is Chrisman's perfect girl. Though maybe that's Radiant Blossom, whose face "was shaped like a seed of the melon", whose eyebrows "were like the leaf of the willow", whose "eyes resembled the heart of an apricot" and whose feet "were three-inch golden lilies. And when she walked, she swayed as a poplar sways in summer zephyrs" (p. 112). Too bad that dishonest court painter portrays her as "a gruesome crone, a witch, a slattern" (p. 116), but this did save her from being one of the emperor's "Many Wives" (that's the name of this story). It's amazing Radiant Blossom was able to escape when the emperor sent her to marry Wolf Heart, the Barbarian, though, with the bound feet and unsteady walk.

Anyway, I didn't find the tales particularly "amusing and appealing in themselves", as promised on the dust jacket, and even without reading Amanda's review, I would be suspicious about the dustjacket's further claim that "hidden beneath their surface is the wise and practical philosophy that has influenced Chinese life for thousands of years".

The cutesy names (like Ah Mee and Ah Fun) annoyed me, and the sexism annoyed me, and it's all just sanctimonious and pretentious somehow, without the disturbing and yet compelling qualities in real folk tales (or even Tales from Silver Lands). Shen of the Sea made Smoky the Cowhorse (which won the following year) seem positively genuine - and much less annoying - in comparison.

Criss Cross - 2006

2009-09-12T22:30:00.004-04:00

I finished this book over four months ago, but life (in the form of my husband’s bleeding ulcer, and then taking over teaching a children’s literature class for a professor who became ill) intervened. I’ve finally had a chance to catch up.

I LOVED this book! Author Lynne Rae Perkins is only a year older than I am, and this book mirrors her (and my) adolescence. Described in a discussion guide as “a companion novel to the award-winning All Alone in the Universe, Debbie is fourteen...;” she, the main character, is also described as being 13 and the year being 1969 in All Alone, so Criss Cross must be set in 1970. ”Words of Love,” the Mamas and the Papas song that Hector is listening to on pages 105-106 of the hardbound edition, came out in November 1966, and would still be getting airplay in 1970. However, much of what happens in the book has that timeless quality that makes it possible for anyone to relate to it.

The title comes from a fictional music and comedy radio show Debbie and her friends Lenny, Hector, Patty, and Phil listen to on Saturdays. It’s also reflective of the criss-crossing (but not always intersecting) activities and relationships of the characters in the book. I loved the illustration near the title page of “the spectrum of connectedness,” showing dots for “people move back and forth in this area like molecules in steam,” the area being that between 0% and 100% connectedness, both of which say “no one is here—no one.”

The book is very humorous, in a subtle way. Chapter 8, called “Easy Basin Wrench, or Debbie Has a Mechanical Moment, Too,” is one of my favorites, with Debbie reading aloud to her father the instructions for a basin wrench, which were obviously not originally written in English. There’s a funny scene in chapter 16 where Debbie plays one of those games with the letters in the names of herself and the jock she has a crush on, trying to see what permutations bring up the result (married!) she’s looking for. There’s even a clever reference to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (quoted from at the beginning of the book), with an illustration of Debbie’s crush as a donkey (page 140 in the hardbound edition).

I thought the writing was wonderful, conjuring up images and memories based on the words alone. This book is definitely character-driven rather than plot-driven, and that may make it hard for many of today’s vampire-loving teens to relate to it. Despite interesting male characters, I see this book appealing more to introspective girls, ages 14 and up.

I loved Broadway actress Danielle Ferland’s reading of this book, and I can’t understand why others have disliked it so much. I felt she used great expression in the reading and in coming up with some variations in voices for the characters, often sounding like a sarcastic or bored or self-conscious teen herself. I had no trouble following the haiku (which I thought was wonderful!) in chapter 14, nor the conversation between Debbie and Patty in chapter 10 (where, I note in the print version, the author quits using initials to designate who is speaking partway through the conversation – thereby, in my opinion, emphasizing the universality of such “girl-talk.”). However, I have to agree with Sandy D that the numerous illustrations (black-and-white photographs, pen-and-ink drawings, or a mixture of those media) in the print versions add a LOT to this book, probably making it more accessible to the target audience.

According to a January 24, 2006, report on NPR, Criss Cross was praised by the Newbery Committee chair as "an orderly, innovative, and risk-taking book in which nothing happens and everything happens." In a USA Today article the day before, Perkins said she “was inspired by her own adolescence as a ‘late bloomer’ who needed reassurance that ‘life doesn't always happen like it does in movies and books, but that's OK.’"

While the audiobook and hardbound edition I used for this review have the same cover illustration as those shown in Sandy’s and other reviews of this book on this blog so far, I decided to use the paperback cover in this post because I really like it – that could be me at 14.

[A variation of this post appears on my blog, Bookin' It.]

The Dark Frigate, 1924

2009-09-11T12:05:00.001-04:00

There will be no piracy here. Curb your Arrrs and your mateys. Remove your daggers and hooks, your parrots and eye-patches. Stop prancing around on that wooden leg. The Dark Frigate reveals the sordid side of piracy: selfishness reigns, boastfulness passes for courage, and the gallows awaits.

Philip Marsham is raised at sea and set for a sailor’s life. But pirates overcome The Rose of Devon, and Phil finds himself forced into an outlaw existence. Should he serve the pirate captain, the shrewd man they call the Old One? In so doing, he would betray his country and risk death in a hundred ignominious ways. Should he seek help? By escaping and turning himself in to the authorities, he may be hanged. In fact, Philip cannot escape; on the open sea there are few choices. Life on the “dark frigate” is dark indeed.

At first, The Dark Frigate was a hard slog. After the sweet candidness of The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle and the lively forthrightness of The Higher Power of Lucky, I was lost in the foreign world of England under King Charles I. And, in truth, the book is a slow starter. But once those pirates crept on board, I was drawn in as helplessly as Phil Marsham.

Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be pirates.

In this day and age, we play with the notion of pirates. And why not? They have been romanticized into free-spirited heroes—wild enough to bring fear to the hearts of stuffy old men and stuffy old countries, but essentially loyal, relatively benign, and even honorable in their way. Besides, they just dress so well.

But piracy is a dreadful thing, and I appreciate that The Dark Frigate does not cast a glowing eye on such a career. Though some of the pirate crew are wise and loyal—and the Old One could match the bravery of any man—for the most part we find a host of dull-witted, strutting cowards. These men are gluttons and drunkards, egged on by promises of gold, wine, women, and palaces in the tropics. Rash in their actions and quick to complain, their own lack of discipline bungles many of their efforts.

Yet the author wisely does not paint all pirates in this color. The Old One, fearsome as he is, possesses a wit and courage that give Philip Marsham (and the reader) pause. Harry Malcolm is sea-wise and loyal. Jacob (one of the book’s most intriguing characters) owns an intelligence that could have been shaped to a much better purpose.

I also appreciate that the author paints clearly the choices of those in the grip of piracy. When The Rose of Devon is taken, the remaining crew have two choices: serve or die. Life at sea is as much a prison as it is a place of freedom.

What, this a Newbery?

Forget one little word in The Higher Power of Lucky. What’s “scrotum” on the first page of Lucky compared to the first chapter of The Dark Frigate, where our hero accidentally fires a gun, injures a “fat man,” breaks open a barrel of wine, and gets run out of town? In the third chapter, two drunken sailors brawl until one pulls a knife on the other. And then there are the pirates, who kill their victims and each other. This book wins an award for young adult literature? Bad Newbery book! Bad!

Yet just as the word scrotum can teach us to be inquisitive, guns and drink and all manner of shady characters with knives can teach us about honor, strength, and wisdom. In The Dark Frigate, what prevails is principle. The pirates’ lawless self-interest falls at the feet of a disciplined, law-abiding crew. The protagonist, young Philip, has to tread the line of right and wrong and find his own way. And choosing the right may cost him his life.

“A lobock?” “A lapwing?” “Thou puddling quacksalver—”

What did you just call me? One initial obstacle to my reading was the language. On land, I wandered through antiquated vocabulary and (to my sense) pompously contrived constructions. At sea, I floated helplessly in nautical terminology: “Cast off the topsail sheets, clew garnets, leechlines and buntlines!” (page 86) Anyone reading this book today has to wade through a slough of words—and in the beginning it is very hard going! I had to persist, let a lot of sentences slip through my grasp, in the interest of adhering to the plot. The writing style is a barrier, but the story is rewarding.

And the writing does win its share of triumphs. I even have some favorite quotes:

“Our ship is the Porcupine ketch and our quills are set.” (p 133)

“We know what we know; there be those who come toward us with their feet, but go from us with their hearts.” (p 138)

“But although he changed his manner as fast and often as light flickers on running water, under the surface there flowed a strong, even current of liking or ill will, as sooner or later all men that had dealings with him must learn, some to their wonder and some to their sorrow.” (p 124)

In conclusion

The Dark Frigate is a great adventure and a worthy, if unexpected, Newbery winner. To my surprise, I was reluctant to return the book to the library. I would like to read it again and feel again that sense of adventure.

. . .

Boardman Hawes, Charles. (1971) The Dark Frigate, decorations by Warren Chappell. An Atlantic Monthly Press Book; Little, Brown and Company, Boston. Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 77-117023.

[Also posted at Karen edits.]

2010 Mock Newbery Awards

2009-09-09T18:22:00.002-04:00

Want to get started reading some the potential winners for next year's award?

Mock Newbery Award

and the ACPL's Mock Newbery Blog

The Most and Least Reviewed Books Here

2009-09-09T17:49:00.005-04:00

People can pick any of the Newbery winners they want to review here. Initially, we tried to get people to commit to reading all 88 of the books, but life gets in the way, even without a deadline, and people have dropped out and new people have joined and no one's managed to read and review all of the books yet.

But how many reviews there are for a given title is somewhat of a measure of popularity, or at least a measure of how controversial and easy it is to talk about a given book.

Over the past few years, the most reviewed winners here have been:

The Tale of Despereaux (10)
The Giver (10)
A Wrinkle in Time (7)

Books that have only been reviewed once include:

The Westing Game
Rifles for Watie
Ginger Pye
Call It Courage
Invincible Louisa

I'm surprised no one else has reviewed The Westing Game! I thought it was a beloved favorite. Someone else really needs to write about it. I'm also really curious to hear what you think of Call It Courage and Miss Hickory.

Smoky the Cowhorse

2009-09-08T20:02:00.002-04:00

I like horses a lot. I was one of those girls that constantly drew horses, grabbed every opportunity to go riding, and read all of Marguerite Henry's books (including King of the Wind) before I was 12. My daughter is taking riding lessons right now, and it makes me want to go again, too. I love feeding the horses treats and the smell of the stable, and when I saw The Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss recommended at my local Border's, I checked it out of the library and enjoyed every minute of the story of a horse breaker in pre-World War I Montana.

So I had high hopes for Smoky, especially after reading Will James' preface:

To my way of thinking there's something wrong, or missing, with any person who hasn't got a soft spot in their heart for an animal of some kind. With most folks the dog stands highest as man's friend, then comes the horse, with others the cat is liked best as a pet, or a monkey is fussed over; but whatever kind of animal it is a person likes, it's all hunkydory so long as there's a place in the heart for one or a few of them (pg. v).

I have a pretty high tolerance for old fashioned writing styles, including lots of slang and dialog (one of the things I liked most in The Dark Frigate). Despite this, I had a really hard time getting through Smoky, the Cow Horse. It seemed so long, and although experiencing the story from the horse's point of view was interesting at first, very little happened for much of the book.

One of the things that did strike me was that soon after Smoky's first experience with humans, when he is branded, he is thereafter referred to "the mouse colored gelding". (Field mouse? House mouse? Turns out it must be a house mouse, because the color illustrations - which are pretty nice in my library's 1929 edition, anyway, as shown above - portray him as dark gray). Smoky must have been gelded when he was branded, but it wasn't mentioned, and the omission bothered me a bit. I guess that castration wasn't an appropriate topic for a children's book in 1926.

Will James' language did start to wear on me as the story plodded along, too. Crethure (creature) and eddication (education) particularly got on my nerves, and they appear repeatedly. I didn't mind the cayotes so much, and I enjoyed the use of kinky as a synonym for wild (just as gay was different when Gay-Neck was written). Those kinky calves sure ran wild on the range.

I loved a few of the old terms that James pulls out: gazabo (just some guy), "ganted up" (not sure about this, but it happens after a horse has been ridden too hard and not watered), and beezer (nose) were my favorites.

But why do half the chapters have quotation marks around them? There's "The Squeak of Leather" and the next chapter is Smokey Shows His Feelings. Weird.

The racism that I'd heard about didn't pop up until the last half of the book, and it is pretty notable that every bad man in the book is dark "complected". I didn't realize that "the vegetable man" in the last chapter was not fair-skinned until I read this shocking remark from the sheriff to Clint, the cowboy who breaks Smoky and then rescues him from an abusive owner:

"Say, cowboy," he finally says, "don't scatter that hombre's remains too much; you know we got to keep record of that kind the same as if it was a white man, and I don't want to be looking all over the streets to find out who he was (p. 257)."

Anyway, I'm glad I read Smoky - although I think much of that is because reading about Will James is utterly fascinating. You should see Amanda's review for more about him, and then you might want to check out a couple of recent museum exhibitions and articles on his work:

Cattle-Rustler Turned Author-Artist Featured at University

Plains-Panhandle Historical Museum exhibit

Canadian Cowboy Country magazine

Even as a horse lover, though, I don't recommend Smoky the Cowhorse. Those first one hundred pages were just too long.

About Sounder...

2009-09-04T13:40:00.002-04:00

This was such an interesting blog post about Sounder that I just had to link to it:

He Does Have a Name After All

You should read it if you've ever wondered about what happened to the unnamed boy in Sounder after the book ended (like I did), or if you want to know more about author William H. Armstrong.

The Graveyard Book (2009)

2009-09-04T13:36:00.002-04:00

My rating: 4.5/5 stars

I must confess to not being a huge Neil Gaimon fan. The first time I read Coraline, I found it a little weird and creepy. I reread it as a literature circle book with my students, and found it slightly more enjoyable, but it does have the distinction of being one of the few books I liked less than its movie.

However, The Graveyard Book was wonderful (and incidentally would make an incredible movie if one were so inclined), and far less bizarre than I was expecting. There are all the characters that you'd expect in a fantasy novel - ghosts, werewolves, ghouls - but the story itself is one that feels familiar. Bod's family is killed in the first chapter, which is the only one that would almost certainly freak out my elementary students. He is a toddler at the time and wanders out of bed and into the nearby graveyard where he is adopted by two ghosts and saved from being killed himself. He is given the name Nobody Owens, or Bod for short. His guardian is the mysterious Silas, who I am guessing is a vampire, though that is never told to the reader specifically.

Bod has a number of adventures, most of which involve his brief forays into the outside world, all intertwined with the overarching plot of the man Jack who is still searching for him. I absolutely love the way his life growing up in the graveyard is described, how he plays with children who were buried there, is taught by those who were teachers before they died, and longs to learn more about everything. It's particularly great how the graveyard teachers want him to learn ghostly skills like Fading, which comes in pretty handy throughout the book. After all, who among us wouldn't want to be invisible sometimes? To get out of a sticky situation, to scare the bullies at school... it's the superpower I'd be choosing, that's for sure.

One clever strategy that Gaimon uses to put humor in the book is to tell us what the headstones are of the ghosts as we meet them. One of my favorite serious ones is from p. 140: "Miss Liberty Roach (What she spent is lost, what she gave remains with her always. Reader be Charitable). This one from p. 209 made me laugh: "Thomas R. Stout (1817-1851. Deeply regretted by all who knew him). I know it's supposed to be that they regret his death, but the phrasing suggests the opposite. Anyway, I thought the author must've had fun thinking up the epitaphs.

My only complaint about the book really is the way it ends. I find that I am torn between giving a complete review and not wanting to reveal the ending to those who like to be surprised (not you, Mom, I know - I'll tell you what happened later). I love the resolution of why Bod's family was killed and he was targeted, particularly the aspect of meeting one's fate in trying to avoid it. It's what happens when Bod grows up that I don't like. I'll let you read it and see what you think, because you *should* read it.

Favorite Quotes:
p. 104 talking to Silas about people who commit suicide
Bod: "Does it work? Are they happier dead?" Silas: "Sometimes. Mostly, no. It's like the people who believe they'll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn't work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you. If you see what I mean." Bod: "Sort of."
This quote is great on so many levels. First, because it's such a great point about people trying to make changes in their lives. Superficial changes work only if the problem in your life is really external. Internal difficulties are much harder to fix. Of course most of us would rather believe our problems are external, but that's a different issue for another time. The other reason this quote is great is just the interaction between a boy and an adult. The adult says something wise and the kid doesn't quite get it, but also isn't really sure what he doesn't get about it. So well done.

p. 149 "There were people you could hug, and then there was Silas." I'm not sure why I liked this quote so much. I guess because I know people like this, and so do you.

The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle

2009-07-22T12:45:00.009-04:00

The first thing that I had to chose when I decided to read The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, by Hugh Lofting, was which edition to pick. I tried reading the original edition online here, but I don't have an e-reader and I really like reading in bed.

After looking at Amanda's post on the different editions and the content that was removed, I settled on Bantam's Yearling 1988 paperback (shown here), which was the one my local library had on the shelf anyway. I like the fact that it has many of the original illustrations and it is upfront (well, in the afterword) about the editing and the reasons for doing it. I don't really like the cover, though. Pink? Are they trying to drive boys away from it? When I went Googling for this cover, though, I found that Bantam had changed the design and the cover, and the new blue-green one was much nicer.

Anyway, I really enjoyed the first part of the story. I think that I had read at least the beginning of this book as a child (I remembered Tommy Stubbins and Polynesia and Dab-Dab, though maybe this was from a different Doctor Dolittle story), but it didn't make enough of an impression on me that I ever re-read it, or asked for my own copy.

As an adult, I particularly liked the description of the Doctor's garden (in the chapter appropriately titled 'The Garden of Dreams'), probably because it really is my dream garden:

When breakfast was over the Doctor took me out to show me the garden. Well, if the house had been interesting, the garden was a hundred times more so. At first, you did not realize how big it was. When you were sure that you had seen it all, you would peer over a hedge or turn a corner or look up some steps, and there was a whole new part.

It had everything. There were wide lawns with carved stone seats, green with moss. Over the lawns hung weeping willows, and their feathery bough tips brushed the velvet grass when they swung with the wind. The old flagged paths had high clipped yew hedges on either side of them, so that they looked like the narrow streets of some old town; and through the hedges, doorways had been made; and over the doorways were shapes like vases and peacocks and a half-moons all trimmed out of the living trees. There was a lovely marble fishpond with golden carp and blue water lilies in it and big green frogs. A high brick wall alongside the kitchen garden was all covered with pink and yellow peaches ripening in the sun. There was a wonderful great oak, hollow in the trunk, big enough for four men to hide inside. Many summerhouses there were, too - some of wood and some of stone - and one of them was full of books to read (p. 44-45).

There's more, too - there is also an outdoor fireplace, couches (with wheels on them) to sleep upon on warm summer nights, rocks, ferns, and a treehouse, and loads of birds, and "stoats and tortoises and dormice" and "toads of different colors and sizes" (p 45).

So I was happily reading along, enjoying Lofting's aptitude for description, and the character of Dr. Dolittle, who is rather charming, and then Tommy and the Doctor (does anyone else think of Doctor Who with all these references to "the Doctor" and with everyone calling John Dolittle "Doctor" instead of Dr. D. or Dr. Dolittle?) and Bumpo and some animals set out on their journey to Spider Monkey Island.

I got increasingly uncomfortable at the way the Indians on Spider Monkey Island are portrayed. Long Arrow is a great naturalist, but his people - the Popsipetel - are so backwards they don't even know how to use fire, or cook their food. Now this is interesting, because this was a huge Victorian myth in the 19th century - that there were actually humans in far off "savage" places who had so little material culture that they didn't have fire (or clothes or tools) or cook their food.

There is absolutely no evidence that any people anywhere in the world did not use fire, by the way, as Richard Wrangham describes in a recent book (Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human), which proposes that the use of fire was as essential to human evolution as walking on two legs, hunting, or using tools. So having John Dolittle not only show the Indians "what town sewers were and how garbage should be collected each day and burned" (p. 271), and make a dam and purify their drinking water to prevent "many of the sicknesses that they had suffered from before" (p. 272), and teach them metallurgy, democracy, and "the proper care of babies, with a host of other subjects" (p. 273), but for him to give them something that essentially makes them human? Yeah, more than a little condescending. And this part of the book can't be as easily removed as the pictures of Bumpo and the descriptions of his wife.

The journey home in the great glass sea snail is wonderful and whimsical, and something I'm glad to have read. I just wish the Doctor had stuck to animals and never met the Popsipetels or the Bag-jagderags, or become King Jong Thinkalot.

The Graveyard Book - 2009

2009-07-10T19:34:00.002-04:00

This audiobook, written and performed by Neil Gaiman, was better than I expected. I didn't really care for Gaiman's American Gods, and I'm not much of a fan of horror or fantasy - The Graveyard Book has a little of the first and a lot of the second. But so many people were so happy about this book winning the Newbery that I decided to listen to the audiobook right away after purchasing it for our library's collection.

A toddler wanders away from his home after his parents and older sister are murdered, and into a nearby graveyard, where he is adopted and raised by the mostly-ghostly residents and renamed Nobody Owens, "Bod" for short. There are a number of similarities to Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. Indeed, in an interview with The New York Times published January 26, 2009, Gaiman stated that he used to take his son to ride his trike in a graveyard across the street from their yardless house:

“I remember thinking once how incredibly at home he looked there,” Gaiman said. “I thought you could write something a lot like The Jungle Book and set it in a graveyard.”

Bod has a number of amusing adventures as he grows up (I especially liked his playmate at age 5, Scarlett Amber, whose parents think Bod is her imaginary friend), but the story eventually turns dark when he is 14 and the murderers of his family come back to do in Bod as well. This was actually the weakest part of the book for me, as Gaiman doesn't explain the backstory very well. It's never very clear why Bod's family is murdered and why he is still targeted, nor just who (or what) his two main protectors (Silas and Miss Lupescu) really are.

Still, I can see how this book would be really popular with children who are fans of Harry Potter, Lemony Snicket, and the like. With its cast of eccentric characters, many with wonderfully old-fashioned names, it will probably make a great movie. And Gaiman did an outstanding job reading his book aloud. This book would work as a read-aloud for about fourth or fifth grade, and an easy read for middle-schoolers.

[cross-posted at Bookin' It]

Hello, Is Anybody Out There?

2009-07-10T14:10:00.003-04:00

We have seventy bloggers signed up here, and we haven't heard from many of you for a long time. Have you given up reading the Newbery winners? Were you traumatized by Miss Hickory or did you get bogged down in The Story of Mankind?

There are a lot books here that only have one or two posts on them. We could really use some more perspectives.

You don't have to read every single book, folks. Or if you decide to read them all, you don't have to do it this summer. Come on, now's the perfect time to read Thimble Summer or A Year Down Yonder and tell us what you think.

New bloggers are always welcome, too. We can have up to a hundred different posters on this site, and we can always remove old posters that haven't posted in years (or ever).

I, Juan de Pareja

2009-07-08T18:40:00.009-04:00

I think that the best parts of I, Juan de Pareja are embodied by the very first sentence of the book:

I, Juan de Pareja, was born into slavery early in the seventeenth century.

Juan's story is also that of his master, the painter Diego Velázquez, and a rambling exploration of art, Christianity, slavery, and Spain in the mid-1600's.

Although I like historical fiction, I'm afraid I was often bored by Juan de Pareja's narrative, and I frequently wondered just how probable the story was. Several other Newbery medalists have taken famous people and made stories out of their lives - sometimes basing their books on very little evidence or historical research. I think that the worst of these stories - Amos Fortune and Daniel Boone - are the least deserving of all the Newbery winners, and should be shelved in the fiction section (if the library bothers to keep them at all) instead in 921 with the other biographies in my local library.

Island of the Blue Dolphins and Carry On, Mr. Bowditch are better stories (and both are also shelved in fiction, along with I, Juan de Pareja), but I still wonder about how much in these books is based on accurate history, or how much the author really got right when it comes to the characters and how they think. (I haven't read Invincible Louisa yet, so I don't know how the Newbery winning biography of Louisa May Alcott stacks up.)

Elizabeth Borton de Trevino actually notes that very little is known about de Pareja and Velázquez in her afterword, which I appreciated. But what about her portrayal of 17th century Spain, King Philip IV and his court, or the life of a Black slave there? Would Juan de Parejo really have worried that painting in secret was a sin? Was he really so happy as a humble, unpaid servant? I'm not an expert on the time and place, but the story just seems shallow somehow, especially when I compare it to other historical fiction (for adults, granted) like Geraldine Brooks' People of the Book, for instance.

Also, the style of Borton de Trevino's writing grated on me sometimes, and I thought the sentiments expressed were often rather trite:

The months went by, and at first I thought every day of Miri. But Time is a great traitor who teaches us to accept loss. I was young, and young hearts cannot always be sad (p. 76).

I did enjoy the way that Borton de Trevino put things at other times. When she describes Juan de Pareja's first trip to Italy with Diego Velázquez, her description of food and shopping is rather interesting and fresh:

I often went into the inn kitchen to cook for Master because he was used to a diet of meat and bread, whereas the Italians ate paste dressed with various spicy sauces, and very little meat. And when Master felt well enough to go about looking at art works, visiting galleries and shops, and pricing and bargaining, I went with him, carrying his sketchbook, his clean handkerchief, and his money, which I wore in a sash bound tightly around my waist (p. 85).

I guess I just expected more, somehow. It certainly appears that lots of other people love this book, and especially like Borton de Trevino's (you can't really say they're Velázquez's!) thoughts about art and beauty. It wasn't enough for me, though I did enjoy Googling Velázquez's paintings (especially his portrait of Juan de Pareja) and paintings by Juan de Pareja himself.

Sounder

2009-06-27T10:35:00.006-04:00

I had a feeling this was going to be one of the sad Newbery winners. So I wasn't too surprised by the violence and tragedy that happens to the father of the unnamed boy that is the main character (and Sounder, the family coonhound) about a third of the way through the book.

I wasn't really prepared for the unrelenting bleakness of the rest of the story, though. It starts out grim, with a cold October wind blowing, the boy can't manage to go to school, the hunting is hard, everyone's hungry, and the boy suffers from "night loneliness." Things don't get a whole lot better after his father is sent to jail, of course, and the part about Sounder's injured ear is one of the saddest things I've ever read in a kid's story.

As with Island of the Blue Dolphins, the beauty of the writing saved me from hating this book. I don't think that I would have liked this book at all as a child, though. I wouldn't have appreciated the stark poetry of its language when I was depressed (and bored, because aside from a couple episodes of violence, not much happens) about the story. Quiet endurance is not a favorite kid topic, and unlike To Kill a Mockingbird, say, there seems to be little hope that things will ever change for the family in Sounder.

Armstrong's descriptions of the sounds of a woodstove, the creak of a rocking chair, and the dirty, cold space under a cabin are amazing, and I'm glad that I read them, even if I was unhappy with the story in general. His best descriptions are of Sounder, though. I would guess that not too many kids today have heard the soulful baying in the moonlit woods that he describes so beautifully:

Years later, walking the earth as a man, it would all sweep back over him, again and again, like an echo on the wind.

The pine trees would look down forever on a lantern burning out of oil but not going out. A harvest moon would cast shadows forever of a man walking upright, his dog bouncing after him. And the quiet of the night would fill and echo again with the deep voice of Sounder, the great coon dog (pgs. 115-116).

Miss Hickory is Weird

2009-06-15T13:03:00.009-04:00

It's just a weird, weird little book. I don't know how else to put it.

It felt strange from the get-go, with its cast of characters ("Hen-Pheasant: Sad and without pep....Doe: With God.") and the pair of "large yellow feet" that Miss Hickory sees out of the corner of her eye (she can't turn her head, as it is a hickory nut glued to an apple twig) as she sweeps her corn-cob cabin with a pine needle broom.

The story just gets weirder, especially when Miss Hickory starts talking. What a contrast with Hitty (and is there anyone on earth who has read both of these Newbery winners that can not compare the two)! The first words out of Miss Hickory's inked-on mouth set the tone for her dialog in the rest of book:

"Are you at home, Miss Hickory?" Crow asked in his hoarse voice.

"Well, what do you think, if you ever do think?" she asked. "I heard your big yellow clodhoppers, and I saw you pass by. If you think there is one kernel of corn left in my house walls that you can peck out you are mistaken. You have eaten them all." (p. 11)

Even though I didn't like Miss Hickory all that much (so hard-headed...not to mention prim, judgmental, and crabby), I admit that I felt for her when she was abandoned. There are several moments of deep despair in Miss Hickory. She keeps right on going, collecting berries and sewing herself garments out of leaves and moss, which is admirable, but the sad moments are never really balanced out by the happy bits. Actually, there aren't really any joyous or fun parts in Miss Hickory - I guess that's part of the reason I didn't like it much. There are some moderately interesting parts about fall, winter, and spring in New Hampshire, the bleak parts, and then some truly "wow, this is almost as weird as that psychedelic part in the first Willy Wonka movie where the rowers keep on rowing" parts.

The worst part about all of the truly weird parts in Miss Hickory is that they are just there - something a little disturbing happens (like on Christmas Eve, which in Miss Hickory has a few macabre parts that reminded me more than a little of The Graveyard Book), and you're left hanging. There's no follow-up. The plot is one non sequitur after another, right up to the surreal ending.

I kind of liked the ending (with its vocabulary word for the day: scion), once I surrendered to the one-weird-thing-after-another vibe - it's the perfect culmination to the story - but I don't think I'll be recommending this one to anyone soon, except as an historical oddity. I did learn that bullfrogs shed (and eat) their skin, though, which is something I didn't know before this.

Strawberry Girl

2009-06-01T12:09:00.015-04:00

Strawberry Girl, by Lois Lenski, struck me as a rather strange little book. I couldn't help comparing it to all of the other Newbery winning odes to rural life that I've read recently, especially Thimble Summer and Caddie Woodlawn (which both won the Newbery in the 30's, a decade earlier than Strawberry Girl). Although Strawberry Girl was set in central Florida at the turn of the 20th century, not during the Depression (like Thimble Summer), the narrative had a very Depression-era feeling of desperation to it. And much like Thimble Summer, Strawberry Girl features a not terribly exciting story (though it should be more exciting, with all that happens in it!) and a not particularly memorable 10 year old girl who lives on a farm with her brothers and sisters and parents.

This was the weakest part of the book for me. Birdie Boyer, the daughter of a strawberry farmer, just doesn't do enough to make me care about her. She works hard, she wants to play the organ, and at her most interesting, she hates the neighbor boy who swings a snake that drops onto her Sunday hat:

She ducked her head with a sudden, violent motion. The snake fell to the ground and slipped off into the bushes. She saw that it was a young harmless blacksnake, but that did not change her feelings.

"You! You!" she yelled, shaking her fist at the boy.

She was so angry she wanted to kill him. She hated him with a cold hard hate. She hated his overalls and his black felt hat. She hated his thin face, tight mouth and half-shut eyes. She hated every bone in his skinny body. Her anger was black enough to kill him, but he ran so fast she could not catch him (p. 47).

If only Birdie had sustained this level of passion in the story, or Lenski had described more about Birdie's feelings and her point of view. Birdie is curiously passive for most of the story, which is why I think that even the most exciting passages (grass fire threatens Birdie's house and younger siblings, alcoholic neighbor threatens her family and poisons their mule) left me curiously detached.

Caddie Woodlawn, now? She's a memorable character. So is Lucky, from The Higher Power of Lucky - in fact, I liked Lucky so much that I just checked out Lucky Breaks, the sequel to The Higher Power. (I didn't think Lucky Breaks was as noteworthy as The Higher Power, but Lucky managed to keep me reading with the force of her personality alone).

What did interest me in Strawberry Girl was Lois Lenski's obviously well-researched description of the hardscrabble life of Florida farmers and ranchers in the early 1900's. A little Googling shows that Strawberry Girl was the second installment in Lenski's American Regional books, which seem a bit like today's American Girl books (without the accompanying merchandising), featuring girls and a few boys in different settings in the U.S.

In her autobiography (Journey into Childhood), Lenski wrote that she was struck by the fact that there were "plenty of books that tell how children live in Alaska, Holland, China, and Mexico, but no books at all telling about the many ways children live here in the United States (p. 183)." So that's kind of cool, especially given the regional homogenization that has occurred in the last half century.

The language Lenski uses in Strawberry Girl is interesting, too - I particularly liked the word "biggety", which means stuck up. The characters have wonderful names: Birdie's father is Bihu Boyer, and her sisters are Dixie Lee Francine and Dovey Eudora Boyer. Birdie's full name is actually Berthenia Lou Boyer. And then there are the Slaters, the neighbors that the Boyers feud with - Jefferson Davis (aka Shoestring, who throws the snake), Essie, Zephy, Gus, Joe, Sam, and Azalee Slater. Classmates include Mary Jim, Lank, Rofelia, Latrelle, Coy & Loy (twins), Shad, Billie Sue, Roxie May, Kossie & Kessie, and Olema.

I'd never heard of cooters (they're a kind of edible turtle), or chufers (aka chufas), which the Boyers feed to their hogs along with sweet potatoes. Thank goodness for Google again, which tells me that chufas are the edible tuber of the nutgrass or yellow nutsedge (Cyperus esculentas).

In her foreword, Lenski writes a bit about "Florida Crackers" (check out this explanation of the term: What's a Cracker?), and the two families in her book are both Crackers through and through. The Slater family is so poor that the kids have never seen a comb or a tablecloth, and they consider their new neighbors, the Boyers, biggety. The Boyers feed their livestock instead of letting them range free, build fences to protect their crops (a major source of conflict in the story), and can afford luxuries like a new cooking stove and store-bought summer hats.

This Florida Cracker Homestead site shows what I imagine the Slater family cabin looked like (and isn't too different from some of Lenski's illustrations). Speaking of the illustrations, some of them were pretty interesting, and I was glad to see how cane grinding worked, but Lenski's style of pencil drawings just didn't do much for me. From Lenski's biography, I gather she was more well-known as an illustrator than an author, too.

Finally, like many other reviewers, I really didn't care for the ending. All the conflict in the story, suddenly solved by a Camp Meeting? I just hope Pa Slater really did stop drinking. He might do a lot worse than shooting the heads off his wife's chickens otherwise, since his new job has him touching off a fuse in the pits for phosphate mines, running as fast as he can, then listening to it "go BOOM and blow the whole place up! (p. 187)."

The Bronze Bow by Elizabeth George Speare, 1962

2009-05-26T11:41:00.003-04:00

To see one's loved ones taken away, tortured and killed can turn anyone into a rebel. Daniel vowed revenge after his father and uncle were carted away and publicly executed by the forces occupying his country. He is then sold to a master blacksmith so cruel that Daniel had to run to the mountains. Starved and barely conscious, he is rescued by the legendary robber, Rosh, who was rumored to be building an army so mighty, it would crush the invaders and free their people once more. Daniel grows up under Rosh's tutelage, and he sees his fighting skills and strength improve, even while the flames of his hate are fanned higher.

Then one day, through an old acquaintance, Daniel is pulled back to the village life from which he cannot escape - he is the only living relative of a sick younger sister. But he still believes in fighting for freedom and begins to recruit from the young, disillusioned men around him. They believe that their Lord is behind them and take their strength from a passage in their holy writings:

" - God is my strong refuge,
and has made my way safe.
He made my feet like hind's feet,
and set me secure on the heights.
He trains my hand for war,
so that my arms can bend a bow of bronze."

The group takes the Bow of Bronze to heart as only a man on whom the Lord bestows his righteousness and might may bend it.

In the meantime, a new leader is rising in the country. A carpenter speaking in the mountains, the market places, the fishing wharves - reaching to the common people in public places - is rallying people to a new cause. Is he the one that will rouse the people to fight against military oppression?

Disappointment is Daniel's when he learns that the new preacher's message is love and mercy. And yet he is attracted again and again to hear the man, even as his heart denies the message. Daniel is full of questions and doubts. He asks, Was it possible that only love can bend the bow of bronze? In the end, Daniel realizes that it is love and mercy that heals and strengthens.

----
The novel could easily be about anti-Americanism in certain middle eastern nations and yet, Elizabeth George Speare's novel, published in 1961, is about the struggle in Palestine against their Roman conquerors. It is also about a young man, so steeped in hate since boyhood, and his struggle understand what is good for himself and for the people around him. Daniel's service to the renegade Rosh nearly cost him the life of his best friend. His hatred for all Romans nearly killed his only family - his sister.

Of all the Newbery medalists I've read, this one made me the most uncomfortable. I didn't want to be reading what seemed like a classic case of extreme fundamentalism - young men skulking in caves, plotting the downfall of an evil empire, justifying their acts through holy writings, sacrificing themselves in the struggle while at the same time hurting the cause and the people they aim to free.

This is not an easy read - not for the children and certainly not for their teachers nor parents. Teenagers may find it a hard slog, living in Daniel's brain, the hardships of his life, the pain he has suffered as a young men. It may seem that the reward of reading it is in seeing that love does conquer all and is the solution to life's problems. But I would disagree with that. The reward here is in the effort. It is in stepping into the sandals of people who see themselves as oppressed and peek into why they may engage in desperate acts of self-annihilation.

I do not know how a child living in Daniel's place would view this book. Love? Mercy? Let's see you feel that when you're an orphan and you're hungry and your sister is not getting the psychiatric care she needs. But for the children who are lucky enough to be born in the free world, seeing this life through the eyes of another may add to their wisdom and compassion.

I find my new prayer in Psalms 46:9. May the Lord make it so:

" He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth;
he breaks the bow and shatters the spear,
he burns the shields with fire."

M.C. Higgins, the Great

2009-05-14T16:18:00.007-04:00

M.C. Higgins didn't seem all that great to me, unfortunately. I just didn't like the guy that much, even if pole-sitting and wearing lettuce leaves stuck in rubber bands around your wrists greeting the sun was interesting. (And why no lettuce leaves on this cover, the one on the book I checked out of the library? Would no kid ever check out a book with a teenager doing something that looks that silly?).

I wanted to like this book by Virginia Hamilton. I thought her descriptions of southern Ohio (or was it West Virginia or northern Kentucky?) were magical, and the characters were complicated. The parts about strip-mining were ominous and probably realistic. The witchy six-fingered Killburn family and their vegetable farm enclave were fascinating. The stuff about the dude coming to collect folk music was fun, and I wished I could hear some of the songs Hamilton described. I loved the historical perspective and the family legends and the whole relationship between the Higgins family and Sarah's Mountain.

But I couldn't get past my initial dislike of M.C. and his father. I didn't like their relationship. I absolutely hated the way M.C. met Lurhetta, and I wasn't too thrilled with most of his later interactions with her. I couldn't believe she was willing to have anything to do with M.C. (spoiler - highlight to read rest of sentence if you don't mind me giving away some of the story) after he cut her with a knife because she was going to bash him in the head after he jumped on her. Ugh.

And there wasn't much of a plot in M.C. Higgins, the Great. I guess I don't mind that so much in some books (like Criss Cross, for instance)....when I like the characters and are curious about their lives and their thoughts. But that didn't work for me here.

It's not you, M.C., it's me....we're just not compatible. I enjoyed hearing about your home, though.

Lincoln: A Photobiography - 1988

2009-03-31T23:12:00.003-04:00

I’ve always had a soft spot for Abraham Lincoln. Like my dad, I was born in Illinois (my mom and my four other siblings are all native Houstonians). In fact, my paternal great-great grandfather, Fred Dienes (1828-1896), owned a hat store in Springfield, Illinois and supposedly sold a hat to Lincoln. Maybe his store is somewhere in this photograph (also found in black and white in the book on page 29):

About 40 years ago, I wrote an essay on Lincoln and won a trip to Washington, DC, for the inauguration. And now I live in Granbury, where John Wilkes Booth (who allegedly was not killed after the assassination of Lincoln) lived as John St. Helen. Supposedly his ghost haunts the Opera House on the downtown square (just a half mile from my house), and the gun used in the assassination was found just two blocks from my home.

So I was excited to see that Russell Freedman’s 1988 Newbery winner, Lincoln: A Photobiography was now available as an audiobook (no doubt due to the 2009 Lincoln Bicentennial). The second disc includes an interview with the author and is enhanced with a Flash slideshow of a few (but nowhere near all) of the archival photographs from the book. Broadway and movie actor Robert Petkoff narrates the book, providing variation in voices for the numerous quotations (by and about Lincoln) used throughout it.

This audiobook was fascinating. Freedman chose details (and quotes) that would be of interest to both children and adults, and wove them into a cohesive narrative. I thought I knew a lot about Lincoln (thanks to all that essay contest research years ago), but I learned a lot from this book.

Despite my fondness for audiobooks, this is one that definitely should be paired with the book. The Flash slide show only includes a few photos from the book, probably because permission could not be obtained from the various sources (listed on page 145 of the book) to use all of them in the Flash format. There are a couple of great series of photos of Lincoln, one set (pages 64-65)showing the progression of his beard growth in 1860-61, and another set (pages 116-117) showing how the strain of the Civil War aged him. The print book also includes appendices on Lincoln memorials/monuments/museums and books about Lincoln, and an index. I could definitely see a struggling reader using the audiobook along with the print version.

On the other hand, the interview with Freedman on the audiobook is valuable, with some great quotes of its own: his advice to "...make use of the library and the precious help of the librarian, and not to trust everything you see on the Internet,” and “Biography lends itself to the art of narrative…to the fascinating spectacle of character meeting circumstance and either changing events or being changed by them—or both, as happened to Lincoln.”

Referring to the research he did for this book, which included travel to many sites relevant to Lincoln, Freedman also said, “Everything you see with your own eyes adds to your understanding of the life and times you are writing about.” He also said, “I wish I’d been able to include more in my book about Lincoln as a writer...He wrote every word of every speech himself, and yet writing did not come easily to him...he re-wrote, revised, and polished...He was a writer I admire greatly.”

Speaking of writing, one of Sandy D’s favorite Lincoln quotes about writing “enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and of space” (p. 135) is also my favorite I discovered this quote has an interesting history, being part of a much longer lecture on “Discoveries and Inventions” that Lincoln delivered in a number of Illinois towns. Probably the best thing about Lincoln: A Photobiography is that it took me days to write this review, because I kept exploring little tidbits in it like the photograph of 1858 Springfield (part of a postcard series) and quotes like the one on writing (which led to learning Lincoln actually had an invention patented). A book that can inspire that kind of curiosity is rare. I wish this book had been available when I wrote my essay all those years ago!

[This post also appears on Bookin' It]

Criss Cross

2009-03-24T11:08:00.006-04:00

It took me a while to get into Criss Cross, by Lynne Rae Perkins. There are multiple points of view (which I just complained about in The View from Saturday), and the whole tone of the narrative is rather off-hand and breezy. It didn't pull me into its criss-crossing stories right away. It was easy to put it down, which I don't think is particularly advantageous for a book. Too many readers might never come back.

I'm glad I kept coming back to Criss Cross, though. Over and over again, Perkins reminded me of what it was like to be 13 or 14. What it was like to wonder obsessively about your adult life-to-be, to stare at yourself in the mirror, and to question your identity and your relationships. Relationships with people you'd just met, changing interactions with people you'd known for years, pondering how minor decisions with these people could change your whole life. Perkins also shows how a teacher's encouragement leads one student towards a vocation and certain corresponding social roles, how seeing a guy playing a guitar at a coffee shop shop sends another kid in a different direction, and how something as random as a locker's location sparks an attraction to a neighboring classmate. It's all presented in a rather timeless manner, though I soon figured out that Criss Cross was set in the 1970's.

There are no overt references to Watergate or Viet Nam or to pop culture (no M*A*S*H* or Charlie's Angels or Led Zepplin or Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex*). A couple of the female characters fret about the perfect bell-bottomed jeans. Perkins' drawings of the jeans (including a thought bubble of what you say to your mom in the dressing room) is one of my favorite illustrations, one of the many illuminating cartoons that add something special to the narrative. It reminded me (favorably) of both Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid. And it should be noted that this is something that audiobook readers just won't get, which is a shame.

Criss Cross captures a bit of everyday life in small town: block parties, summer evenings spent listening to the radio in a truck in the driveway, and chance encounters at the Tastee-Freez - all things that I don't think are that different today than they were 30 years ago. I liked this, and I liked how Perkins handled the historicity of the story in such a subtle way.

One thing that did strike me as inescapably dated: near the end of Criss Cross, Debbie gets a letter from a boy she met (which is actually how my relationship with my husband started after a chance encounter twenty-six years ago). Obviously, this was back before e-mail, cellphones, or texting:

Debbie heard footsteps, and she quickly stuffed the picture of Peter down between her bed and the wall. The curtain moved, and her mother's head appeared.

"You have a letter," she said. "From California." (p. 279)

...Helen did sense something, an undercurrent. She thought that Debbie probably had a crush on this boy. But California was pretty far away, and she couldn't have gotten to know him very well in such a short time. Maybe they would exchange a few letters.

"He looks very nice," she said. "He's a cute boy."

"He is nice," said Debbie.

It was as close as she could come to saying, "I need to go to California. Can I?"

But it wasn't very close, not close enough. Her mother had no way of knowing that this would have been a good time to tell her daughter that she had once known a boy who went away. A boy who had made a game of finding little figures of dogs, and giving them to her. They might have talked then about how that felt, and what you did next. But their secrets inadvertently sidestepped each other, unaware, like blindfolded elephants crossing the tiny room (p. 281).

Readers looking for an exciting action-filled story with definite conclusions will probably be disappointed by Criss Cross, but I found myself wanting to know more about the characters after I finished it (see Peter D. Sieruta's blog post on "You Know It's a Good Book When...."). What happens to Lenny? He was one of the most appealing characters I've run across in a kids' book lately. Does Dan Persik redeem himself or turn into even more of ass? Does Hector keep playing the guitar? Does Debbie write back to Peter? Maybe she can go to college in California.

Yes, I guess I did like Criss Cross quite a bit.

*But Were Afraid to Ask - a book I remember sneaking quite a few looks at in my early teens in the 70's. Sex is not really an issue broached in Criss Cross, though romantic attraction is important in it. This makes the book more accessible to younger readers, though they might be bored with adolescents' ruminations about life.

The View from Saturday - 1997

2009-03-21T22:30:00.003-04:00

I have mixed feelings about this book. Personally, I loved it, I could really relate to it, and I thought it was very well written. Conversely, this is one of those Newbery winners that probably appeals to adults more than children.

This book received the Newbery in 1997, the year my son started sixth grade. He was in an advanced program and on the math team. I was a bit of a nerd myself at that age (Who am I kidding? I’m STILL a nerd), winning the science fair and the spelling bee. I could SO relate to the Academic Bowl team in this story (from page 148, “Here were four kids who could speak in complete sentences without a single you-know as filler”). I think my son and his classmates could as well.

Nevertheless, even though its reading level is grade 4-5, the structure of the book will be daunting for many even-older readers, because it’s not linear and it is not plot-driven. E. L. (Elaine Lobl) Konigsburg ties together the first-person narratives of the four sixth-grade Academic Bowl team members (who call themselves "The Souls"), Noah, Nadia, Ethan, and Julian (who are interconnected in other ways), with the third-person limited story of their coach and teacher, the wheelchair-bound widow Mrs. Olinski, and an overall third-person omniscient tale of the team’s progress in Academic Bowl competition.

In “The View From Saturday: A conversation with E.L. Konigsburg, winner of the 1997 Newbery Medal” by Judy Hendershot and Jackie Peck (Reading Teacher, May 1998), Konigsburg says,

When I got to where Julian was telling Ethan about the B and B, I remembered that I had in my files a story about a young man named Noah whose mother insists that he write his grandparents a bread and butter letter, a B and B letter. That made me remember another story about a dog named Ginger that plays the part of Sandy in the play Annie. And that led me to another story about an Academic Bowl team. Before I had finished my walk, I realized that all those short stories were united by a single theme. Taken together, they reinforced one another, and the whole became more than the sum of the parts.

...all of my books deal with a child's search for identity....children want two things at the same time: They want acceptance for what makes them the same, and they want acceptance for what makes them different from everyone else. That conflict between those two needs reaches a climax at the age of 12. When I was growing up, it probably was age 14, but I think it's now 12. That problem of wanting acceptance for being different from everyone else and wanting to be the same is a strong conflict. I can continue to write for children because the basic problem has not changed.

Although never explained in the story, I think the meaning of the title is in the way the students’ bonding at tea on Saturdays at Sillington House gave them a different view of the world. Ethan says,

Something in Sillington House gave me permission to do things I had never done before. Never even thought of doing. Something there triggered the unfolding of those parts that had been incubating. Things that had lain inside me, curled up like the turtle hatchlings newly emerged from their eggs, taking time in the dark of their nest to unfurl themselves. I told jokes I had never told before. I asked questions I had never asked before....When it was my turn to tell what day I would like to live over...The Souls...were not embarrassed to hear, and I was not embarrassed to say, "I would like to live over the day of our first tea party. And, look," I added, "every Saturday since, I get to do just that." (page 93)

And near the end of the book (page 157), Julian’s father says to Mrs. Olinski:
“The Souls…found on their journeys what you found at Sillington House.”
“A cup of kindness, Mr. Singh? Is that what I found?”
“Kindness, yes, Mrs. Olinski....found kindness in others and learned how to look for it in themselves.”

In her Newbery acceptance speech, Konigsburg said, “A person must experience kindness to recognize it. He must recognize it in order to develop it. Being kind makes us kind....there is a critical age by which we must experience kindness to be kind. And that critical age is before adolescence. That critical age is in the cruelest year — grade six.”

The book subtly and gracefully deals with issues of race and disability as well. It’s sometimes sad and often funny. It was very amusing how Konigsburg tied in questions they received in Academic Bowl competitions with the team members’ individual narratives.

The book is filled with wonderful similes and metaphors; for example, Ethan describing Julian on page 66: "His skin was the color of strong coffee with skim milk-not cream-added." Nadia says (on page 26) her “Grandpa Izzy's eyes are bright blue like the sudden underside of a bird wing." On page 64, Ethan says the Sillington place “is a huge old farmhouse that has had so many add-ons it looks like a cluster of second thoughts." My favorite on page 23 compared painting Nadia without her freckles as “like brushing the cinnamon off cinnamon toast.”

A teacher could use examples from this book to study these figures of speech as well as other vocabulary and cultural references, and the use of humor, flashback, irony, perspective, and point of view (the "view" from Saturday?). I enjoyed a book with a positive view on academic excellence written by an author who doesn’t write “down” to her readers and believes they can understand her. The unabridged audiobook really contributed to the story, with a full cast of separate voices for each team member, Mrs. Olinski, and the overall narrator.

[Cross-posted at my book blog, Bookin' It.]

Thimble Summer

2009-03-16T18:01:00.004-04:00

Thimble Summer, by Elizabeth Enright, is a quiet and very old-fashioned children's story. It was a pleasant read, full of the sensory pleasures of summer on a farm in southern Wisconsin - but the characters never seemed real nor particularly interesting to me. Even the main character, nine year old Garnet, remained distant right up to the end of the book.

There were hundreds of odors in the night air; Garnet raised her nose like a puppy to smell them all. Cabbages decaying richly in gardens made her hold her breath in passing; but the cornfields were wonderful, they had a special smell after dark that you never noticed in the daytime. It didn't smell like corn at all, but strange and spicy like incense in a church (p 33).

I can attest to the fact that corn has a distinctive smell on a hot summer night (though it never reminded me of incense), but I couldn't help but remember that Garnet's family raises pigs in Thimble Summer. You can smell a pig farm from close to a mile away - or more, if it's windy. Forget cabbages. Anyway, that's what I remember when I think about the smell of cornfields in the summer. That and speeding down gravel roads with the wind blowing through the windows and the 8-track player blasting Pink Floyd, but that really dates me.

I know that there's no need to dwell on all of the not-so-wonderful parts of farm life, like pig manure, but despite the fact that Thimble Summer is set (and was written) during the Great Depression, there's not much in the book that isn't overwhelmingly nice.

There are lots of other Newbery winners that celebrate rural life (and A Year Down Yonder and Out of the Dust, which I both loved, are also set in the 1930's), but the other winners - even the mainly upbeat books, like Miracles on Maple Hill and Caddie Woodlawn - have drama and emotion and memorable characters along with their portrayals of farm life. I kept expecting to get more of this in Thimble Summer, but before I knew it, the summer was over and nothing more had materialized.

I did have a good time talking about Depression-era food with my mom, who grew up on a farm then:

The two girls went into the kitchen for something to eat. They found a chocolate cake in the cakebox and some hermits in a crockery jar. That was the wonderful thing about Citronella's house; there was always a cake in the kitchen at the right time. Often there was a dish of vinegar candy, too; and the cooky jar was never quite empty. Probably that was why most of the Hausers were so fat (p. 28).

Cakeboxes! A few people probably still have breadboxes, but I'll bet only antique dealers and people with family heirlooms have still cakeboxes (or pie safes, come to think of it).

If you want a pleasant interlude in a time and a place that is far away from most of our lives, you might enjoy Thimble Summer. Just don't expect much action, depth, or development with your nostalgia.

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry - 1977

2009-03-13T14:18:00.006-04:00

Where to begin? For starters, Mildred D. Taylor's Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is a must-read, and most deserving of its 1977 Newbery Award. The unabridged audiobook version, brought to life by actress Lynne Thigpen (of Carmen Sandiego fame), is excellent.

Although the narrator and main character, Cassie, is nine, the book is written at a fifth- to sixth-grade reading level. That, and the subject matter, makes the book more appropriate for middle school, and perhaps some advanced fourth- and fifth-graders.

Taylor introduces the complexities of race relations, even between children. She portrays African-American characters who recognize discrimination and fight it with dignity where they can. In her 1977 acceptance speech, Taylor said, “I had a driving compulsion to paint a truer picture of Black people…I wanted to show a Black family united in love and pride, of which the reader would like to be a part.”

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is actually part of a historical fiction series written about the Logan family, which is modeled on Taylor’s own family, from her great-grandfather’s purchase of land in Mississippi in the 1880s to their move to Ohio in 1943 when Taylor was three months old. It has an interesting history. In the Horn Book Magazine article, “How the Little House Gave Ground: The Beginnings of Multiculturalism in a New, Black Children's Literature” (Nov/Dec2002, Vol. 78, Issue 6), Barbara Bader writes:

Mildred Taylor had tried to write parts of her family history...before she heard about the Council on Interracial Books contest in 1973. She had tried to tell the story that became Song of the Trees from the perspective of her father, the original of the boy Stacey, but she had trouble speaking in a boy's voice. Then, with four days to go before the contest deadline, she made his sister Cassie the narrator....

...Heading home to California after the award ceremony in New York, with a publishing contract for Song of the Trees to boot, Taylor stopped off in Toledo to visit her family and, around the dinner table, heard her father and uncle tell the story of the black boy who broke into a store, and how he was saved from lynching, that provides the climax to Roll of Thunder. Hear My Cry. Taylor didn't think of the book as a story for children, she says, but rather as an adult novel along the lines of To Kill a Mockingbird. No, editor Phyllis Fogelman told her, it would be "more recognized" as a children's book. In the event, those words rank as a major understatement: Roll of Thunder took almost every available prize including the erratic Newbery, which assures a book of maximum attention and puts the rare, very fine winner over the top.

Although it was the second book written, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry falls in the middle of the series chronologically. I’m eager to read the other books: prequels The Land (about main character Cassie’s grandfather), The Well (about her father), and Song of the Trees (its plot is referred to in Roll of Thunder), and sequels Let the Circle Be Unbroken and The Road to Memphis. Two other books, Mississippi Bridge and The Friendship, are set at about the same time as Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and include characters from the other books.

The book hasn't endured without controversy. In a September 2001 interview in Booklist Taylor stated that "when Roll of Thunder first came out twenty-five years ago, there were white families who criticized it, saying, 'oh, this would never have happened.'...Now the same thing is going on with black families who don't want their children to hear the 'n' word and to hear about the truth. How can I tell a story about this period in our history without using this word?"

Similarly, in the foreword to the 25th anniversary edition of the book (published in 2001, and read by Taylor herself at the end of my audiobook edition), she writes,

...there are those who seek to remove books such as mine from school reading lists....There are those...who would whitewash history.

...In recent years, because of my concern about our “politically correct” society, I have found myself hesitating about using words that would have been spoken during the period my books are set. But just as I have had to be honest with myself in the telling of all my stories, I realized I must be true to the feelings of the people about whom I write, and I must be true to the stories told....My stories will not be "politically correct," so there will be those who will be offended…, but as we all know, racism is offensive. It is not polite, and it is full of pain.

At the end of this foreword, Taylor indicated she had “only one more story to tell about the Logan family. It is the story of the family in the North, the days of World War II, and the first seeds of the Civil Rights Movement.” In another interview in February 2008, Taylor said, “With the passing of many members of my family from my father’s generation - the resources of many of my stories - as well as the passing of my own generation, I hope I can still do that.”

[Cross-posted at my book blog, Bookin' It.]

Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!

2009-03-10T21:17:00.004-04:00

Olivia and I just finished this book, which we had to take turns reading and act out our parts. What a great book. It was well written, super fun to read and act out, and I think it may be one that I buy for my bookshelf. I highly recommend it to anyone, whether they like poetry, England, one man plays, or none of the above. Two thumbs up from the 9 year old. :) - Alicia

It is very very cool because they are one man plays. It is not what you think. Um, one of the best books that I have read in that reading level. - Olivia

Walk Two Moons

2009-03-07T15:12:00.009-05:00

It seems like most readers love Walk Two Moons, by Sharon Creech. My 12 year old works in his school library (which serves 400+ 5th and 6th graders), and reports that it is checked out often and that both adults and kids say it's great, though he hasn't read it and doesn't really want to do so - I suspect because he thinks it's a girl book. I'm hoping he gets past this phase soon.

Anyway, I was a bit surprised when I didn't start out liking Walk Two Moons very much at all.

I felt like Creech did a good job of capturing how some different kids think (and Phoebe and Sal were both wonderful, complicated characters), and there were some great portrayals of stiff-necked parents and grandparents and loud (vs. mildly neurotic) kids:

"I don't how you can stand it," Phoebe said to Mary Lou.

"Stand what?"

Phoebe pointed to Tommy and Dougie, who were running around like wound-up toys, making airplane noises and train noises and zooming in between us and then running up ahead and falling over each other and crying and then leaping back up again and socking each other and chasing after bumblebees.

"I'm used to it," Mary Lou said. "My brothers are always doing beef-brained things." (p. 62)

But I was increasingly annoyed by the tone of the story - in an early draft of this review, I even wrote a snide sentence about how there were enough chickabiddies, gooseberries, whang-doodles and the like to last me 'til the next blue moon. And as someone who has regularly driven from Indiana to Illinois near the spot where both states touch Lake Michigan, the part where Gram and Gramps and Salamanca see Lake Michigan after a big curve in the road just bothered me. We've tried all of the different routes into the Chicago area, and there is just nowhere where you can see "a huge jing-bang mass of water....as blue as the bluebells that grow behind the barn....like a huge blue pasture of water" (p. 36-37) from any highway or road into the Windy City. It's all abandoned steel mills and grain elevators and huge industrial complexes around there. You can't see the lake until you're way past the state border, and there is just no way you can swerve across two lanes of traffic and be standing barefoot in Lake Michigan "faster than you can milk a cow".

I know, you may think it's a petty complaint, but it's always jarring when your reality is so very different from an author's.

Similarly, some American Indians aren't particularly thrilled by Creech's use of rather generic nature-loving Indian stereotypes in Walk Two Moons (or the fortune-cookie title). And I thought the whole Native heritage part of the book actually detracted from the story - it didn't really serve any purpose that I could see except making Sal and her mother slightly exotic, with their unusual names, and giving them an excuse to feel closer to nature. Can't a sixth-grader with African or German great-great-grandparents feel just as much connection to their environment as Salamanca Tree Hiddle does?

Around the middle of the book, though, I was so drawn into Phoebe and Sal's intertwined stories, that most of my earlier criticisms faded. I thought I had figured out the mystery of Sal's mother, Chanhassen, early on in the story, but it turned out to be much more complicated than I had anticipated. And I really appreciated the way that Creech examined women's roles as mothers and wives in this part of the book, and Salamanca's increasing understanding of her mother, and her understanding of how other people (like Phoebe) see their own mothers.

Phoebe's obsession with cholesterol is one of the funnier parts of the book, and pretty prescient when it comes to orthorexia (an overriding focus on eating the right kinds of foods), recently popularized by Michael Pollan in his latest book - In Defense of Food.

I was surprised and moved by the plot twists in the second half of the book - it was undeniably powerful and cleverly mapped out, the way more and more of the story was revealed. I think I'd like to read something else by Sharon Creech, and if I don't endorse Walk Two Moons as whole-heartedly as some of its other readers, I do have to say that I am very glad to have read it.

What Newbery Winners Have You Given Up On?

2009-03-04T12:57:00.004-05:00

Or which ones have you had to force yourself to finish (because it was assigned, or you were doing it for something like this project, or because you can't stand not finishing books)?

This post inspired by Roger Sutton's post on Giving Up, which also asks:

Fessing Up: how much of a book do you have to have read in order to say that you read it?

Which I would guess is something that many of us could answer when it comes to The Story of Mankind (for me, maybe about two thirds, but it's hard to say because I jumped around so much).

I haven't read all the Newbery winners yet - and some of the ones that seem the least interesting to me are in my unread pile. But out of the fifty-some that I've read, Shadow of a Bull, ....And Now Miguel, and Up a Road Slowly were a few that I would have bailed on if I weren't on a mission to read all of the winners.

I was glad that I'd persevered with all of these, at least, which isn't always the case with some books. With unredeemingly bad books, you resent the author and blame them for the time you wasted and the money you spent. Or you're sorry that the library is counting the fact that you checked that book out as a positive in circulation records for a particular title (I think Daniel Boone is the only Newbery book in that category for me).

I'm curious about which winners the rest of you have tried repeatedly to read, or which of the ones you've read that you really wanted to give up on?

The View from Saturday

2009-02-12T17:04:00.002-05:00

I was predisposed to like The View from Saturday, by E.L. Konigsburg, because From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler was one of my favorite childhood books, and remains a favorite today. And I like reading about smart misfits, having been one myself, especially in junior high school.

But the four kids' stories in The View from Saturday didn't really grab my interest. The kids' voices didn't seem quite right to me, and as soon as I got used to one character - bam, a new point of view appeared.

There were a few passages that made me laugh, or nod my head in agreement, like the ones below - but in general, I just couldn't seem to connect to the characters or their situations. They never seemed real to me - except when Nadia gets mad at everyone and stays home watching daytime tv and decides that everyone is either pathetic or disgusting - that I could see myself doing when I was 11 or 12 year old.

Here are a few passages that I liked, anyway:

There were times in school when a person had to do things fast, cheap and without character (pp. 9-10).

Such public displays of affection can be embarrassing to a prepubescent girl like me who is not accustomed to being in the company of two married people who like each other (p. 27).

I read a book a few years ago called Ballyhoo, Buckaroo, and Spuds, by Michael Quinion (entitled Port Out, Starboard Home: And Other Language Myths in the U.K.), which includes a rather lengthy discussion of the origins of the word posh. And as much as I liked the Grandpa's song in his flying "laboratory" in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang:

"O the posh posh traveling life, the traveling life for me
First cabin and captain's table regal company
Pardon the dust of the upper crust - fetch us a cup of tea
Port out, starboard home, posh with a capital P-O-S-H, posh...

...my inner word nerd didn't really approve of Julian's use of this folk etymology to score points in an academic contest (see Quinion's essay on the origins of tip here). Then again, it wasn't as easy to fact-check stuff like this in the pre-Google era, and I certainly didn't know all of the "Fifteen Questions with Thirty-Six Answers" that Konigsburg adds to the end of the story.

Fact: Mrs. Konigsburg is pretty perceptive when it comes to describing people's reactions to physical disability and to subtle bullying amongst 6th graders.

Further Fact: The slightly mystical part of the story - Epiphany, The Souls, the choice of the teammates, Mr. Singh's statements to Mrs. Olinski, all the little synchronicities, and (most unreal of all) - the kids coming together and not fighting at all - didn't work so well for me.

And like Aunt Sara, the whole use of the noose as a team symbol bothered me - though its use as a racist threat wasn't as prevalent in the 90's as it is today (see an interesting article on "The History of the Noose"), it still made me uncomfortable. It didn't jibe well with what I saw as the other symbols in the story - the cups of tea, or the calligraphy and fountain pen, for instance. Then again, symbolism is not really my cup of tea.

I can't help agreeing that kindness is something that 6th graders and teachers really need. So even though many of the disparate pieces of The View from Saturday just didn't work for me (and why the title? I don't like it when the reason for the title isn't explicit in the book), I can see why many others - especially adults who like to speculate about the decline of Western civilization - like this book.

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

2009-02-04T07:51:00.002-05:00

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
Illustrated by Dave McKean

Pages: 309
First Published: Sept. 30, 2008
Genre: children, fantasy
Award: Newbery Medal 2009
Rating: 4.5/5

First sentence:

"There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife. "

Comments: After his family is killed a baby escapes by wandering out the open door and making his way to the graveyard. A married ghostly couple adopt him and name him Nobody Owens, Bod for short. Nobody then commences to grow up in the graveyard and can see and talk with all the ghosts of those buried there. In fact, he himself is not quite in the land of the living but somewhere between the life and death. He must stay here in the graveyard until he is old enough to look after himself on the outside as the man who killed his family is still looking for him and will continue until his job is completed.

I really enjoyed this book. Finally a 21st century Newbery winner I can rave about and recommend. The story and the characters are just wonderful. I really enjoyed the premise. It reminded me a bit, at first, of Terry Pratchett's Johnny and the Dead even though the plot's are completely different. Even though I don't believe in ghosts and my religion tells me differently what will happen in the afterlife, it still is so much fun to imagine a world of ghosts. To imagine graveyards are full of the people buried there talking to each other. The book is really well written, fun and exciting. I think this is the type of book that will appeal to pretty much anyone, even those who don't like fantasy as a rule. Finally a Newbery winner that *will* be enjoyed through the ages!

My only reason for not giving a full rating of 5 is that I really did not like the illustrations at all. They were dark, hard to see the details and I thought the faces were horrible. They definitely did not enhance the reading experience at all. From looking at covers at LibraryThing I see there is an edition with illustrations by Chris Riddell. Now that is someone whose art I appreciate and I'd love to have a look at those illustrations.

The Graveyard Book

2009-02-01T18:50:00.003-05:00

It's an unexpected pleasure, writing a review of The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. As I said back in December, it was my favorite book out of the ones I read on the Mock Newbery's short list, but I didn't really think it would win. I thought it was too funny, too macabre, just too different from previous winners. I couldn't be happier to have been proved wrong.

There were a lot of things that I loved in this book. The story of Nobody's childhood is wonderfully clever, but it is Gaiman's writing that really stole my heart. Combine his way with words with the British references (airing cupboards, kettles of tea, pupils instead of students, etc.), fascinating history, his humor, and the delightful illustrations by Dave McKean, and you have.....well, you have a winner.

A few examples of Gaiman's winning (and winsome) storytelling:

The child had fallen asleep in Mrs. Owens's arms. She rocked it gently, sang to it an old song, one her mother had sung to her when she was a baby herself, back in the days when men had first started to wear powdered wigs. The song went,

Sleep my little babby-oh
Sleep until you waken
When you're grown you'll see the world
If I'm not mistaken
Kiss a lover,
Dance a measure,
Find your name
and buried treasure...

And Mrs. Owens sang all that before she discovered that she had forgotten how the song ended. She had a feeling that the final line was something in the way "and some hairy bacon," but that might have been another song altogether, so she stopped and instead she sang him the one about the Man in the Moon who came down too soon, and after that she sang, in her warm country voice, a more recent song about a lad who put in his thumb and pulled out a plum, and she had just started a long ballad about a young country gentleman whose girlfriend had, for no particular reason, poisoned him with a dish of spotted eels, when Silas came around the side of the chapel, carrying a cardboard box (p. 26).

Ah, I do love those weird old nursery rhymes. And powdered wigs! Hairy bacon! Not to mention the "dish of spotted eels". I can't really explain it, but Gaiman's descriptions just delight me. Even when he is talking about revolting European foods:

Miss Lupescu continued to bring Bod things she had cooked for him: dumplings swimming in lard; thick reddish-purple soup with a lump of sour cream in it; small, cold boiled potatoes; cold garlic-heavy sausages; hardboiled eggs in a grey unappetizing liquid (p. 71).

I've always loved old-fashioned names, and have kept a list of my favorites from the genealogy my grandmother drew in her spiky, shaky old lady handwriting (including Comfort Littlejohn, Mindwell Phelps, Squire Boone, Gad Noble, Sylvanus Crook, etc.). Gaiman clearly has a feel for historic names (and epitaphs) too, and has picked the best of both the graveyard and an English town for us. There's Mother Slaughter, G^eo. and Dorcas Reeder, Thomes Pennyworth, Abanazer Bolger, Amabella, Portunia, and Roderick Persson, and a host of other memorable minor characters - not to mention the extraordinary Nobody Owens himself, who "could greet people politely over nine hundred years of changing manners" (p. 189).

I feel I should mention that I am not a fan of horror in general, and that reading about the first scary chapter of The Graveyard Book initially made me want to give the book a pass. And it was scary - every mother's worst nightmare, perhaps - although it was not particularly graphic. Parents might want to read the first couple of chapters (you can listen to Neil Gaiman reading it himself here), and think about their kids' particular sensitivities and fears before giving a child that is younger than say 10 or 11 years old a copy of this book.

I'm happy that my preconceptions about horror and scary stories didn't prevent me from reading The Graveyard Book, obviously, and I think that it's great that a lot of people who wouldn't think this book was right for them might give the book a chance now that it's won the Newbery.

I could go on, but I'm afraid I'm running out of words like delightful, wonderful, winsome, and the like. I will say that I first read The Graveyard Book last November, and enjoyed it just as much (if not more) upon re-reading it this week. And I still cried happy tears on the last few pages. This is one of those books that stand up to repeated re-readings - a classic, if you will. Which I guess makes it a pretty good choice for the Newbery Medal after all.

Despereaux Despair

2009-02-01T14:33:00.001-05:00

I’m sorry, but I HATED the 2004 winner, The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo. I’m not going to bother with a picture, because there’s already one in Nicola's post just below. On the positive side, I agree with Sandy D. that the story will introduce some readers to some new vocabulary. But I definitely agree with the suggestion in Dr.Bacchus’s post that “You may want to read this yourself before you read it with your kids.”

This story was too dark for me. I know some kids like such stories (like the Lemony Snicket books), and if yours is one, they might enjoy this. I was bothered by Despereaux’s father and brother turning him in (because he dared to talk to a human!), even though they knew it would mean certain death in a dungeon of rats for such a minor crime.

Even more disturbing to me was the treatment of the character Miggory Sow. She’s named for a pig; she’s ugly and gets fat; her father SELLS her for a hen, a red tablecloth, and some cigarettes; and the man who buys her BEATS her until her ears look like cauliflowers and she loses part of her hearing. She’s described as “not the sharpest knife in the drawer”—boy, doesn’t that reinforce stereotypes!

I do think Graeme Malcolm did a great job narrating the audiobook. His British accent was perfect for this medieval tale, and he created different voices for the various characters – Italian accents for the Italian-named (Botticelli was especially amusing) rats, French for Despereaux’s mother Antoinette, Scottish for the threadmaster Hovis. Some of the voices may sound evil, but it IS a dark tale. DiCamillo’s use of asides to the reader/listener comes across as very intrusive and irritating in the audiobook. I did like the lovely cover and and deckled paper of the hardbound version, but found the pencil illustrations by Timothy Basil Eving generally only added to the grimness of the story.

[Originally drafted 8/26/07--thanks to Nicola's post for helping me to realize I never actually posted this!]

The Tale of Despereaux

2009-02-01T11:21:00.001-05:00

The Tale of Despereaux, being the story of a mouse, a princess, some soup, and a spool of thread by Kate DiCamillo
Illustrated by Timothy Basil Ering

Pages: 270
First Published: 2003
Genre: children, fantasy, fairy tale
Award: Newbery Medal (2004)
Rating: 3.5/5

First sentence:

This story begins within the walls of a castle, with the birth of a mouse.

Comments: Written in a tradition fairy tale manner this is the story of four characters, two good and two evil (or shall we say mislead). They include a princess, a mouse, a serving girl and a rat. All good ingredients for a fairy tale. We learn the background lives of all four characters then we are told how they met up with each other and created this story which ultimately is about the mouse, being a knight in shining armour, and how he rescued the princess and helped the evil doers as well.

I know there are a million reviews of this book and many raves. It also won the Newbery in 2004. It is one of the better Newberys that have won in the 21st century but I wasn't that taken with it. Perhaps I am too grown up and cynical for this type of story but I found it very sickly sweet. Even though I am a great fan of fairy tales I found here that the good were too good and the evil were not all that evil, simply mislead. It is a very fast read so certainly worth the effort. I think girls in particular will enjoy the story but it's a bit too much "honey" for my tastes.

The Grey King

2009-01-30T16:23:00.010-05:00

Sometime back when I was in grade school, I picked up my older brother's copies of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and got forever hooked on fantasy. This was right around the same time that Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising sequence of books was published, but unfortunately (because I'm sure I would have have loved them then) I was oblivious, and only became aware of these books in the last few years.

My recent reading and appreciation of The Grey King was hampered by a couple of things. First of all, I have not read the other books in the series, and I'm guessing that you really need to have read Over Sea, Under Stone, and then The Dark Is Rising, and Greenwitch (the three books preceding The Grey King) to really get into Will Stanton's story.

Secondly, I just finished a couple of other fantasy books that were so very, very good that other fantasy just pales in comparison (Lois McMaster's The Sharing Knife: Horizon, and a re-read of Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, in case you were wondering). Do you ever have this happen? That what you read influences your views so much on the very next book you pick up? Maybe I should have read some non-fiction next, or something else that really couldn't be compared.

Finally, I was stuck in bed recovering from a stomach bug when I read The Grey King. I will say Cooper's book helped me forget my surroundings for a while. But overall, I was a little disappointed. I didn't think that the fantastic parts of The Grey King meshed particularly well with the details of everyday life on a farm in Wales (at first, at least, I think it got better as the story went on), and I was confused about the relationships of the "Old Ones", the Dark, the Sleepers (pictured in the cover above), Merriman, and the Grey King.

The main character, Will Stanton, was an appealing character, and I liked his aunt's family and his friend Bran and Bran's dog Cafall very much, and the use of Celtic myth and history. But I don't have a strong urge to read the rest of The Dark Is Rising series - which I guess tells you something about my feelings about The Grey King. I don't have any problems with recommending it for young readers who enjoy fantasy, but for whatever reasons (and probably at least partially for the ones given above), it's not a keeper for me.

Check Out Neil Gaiman's Blog Post

2009-01-26T14:07:00.003-05:00

upon learning he won the Newbery Medal this morning: (Insert Amazed and Delighted Swearing Here). His labels on the post are pretty sweet, too.

Newbery 2009

2009-01-26T10:46:00.006-05:00

The Winner:
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

Honor Books:
The Underneath by Kathi Appelt
After Tupac and D Foster by Jacqueline Woodson
Savvy by Ingrid Law
The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba's Struggle for Freedom by Margarita Engle

The Cat Who Went to Heaven - 1931

2009-01-25T21:49:00.006-05:00

Sandy D’s recent post intrigued me; I had to read this book and do a bit of research.

Elizabeth Coatsworth was inspired to write this book by her travels in Asia. According to her editor and Vassar classmate, Louise Seaman Bechtel, in her essay “From Java to Maine with Elizabeth Coatsworth” in Newbery Medal Books: 1922-1955 (Boston, Horn Book Inc., 1955, pp. 94-98), Coatsworth said:

Its main inspiration was the Buddhist temples of Borobodur, in Java, a magnificent carved stupa, standing, scarcely in ruins, in a plain surrounded by volcanoes. Among the many carvings on its terraces are some of the animal rebirths of Buddha, which very much took my imagination. Many years later, in the Pasadena Library, I was to read translations of the rebirths and string them together on the thread of a Japanese legend which we had been told in a Kyoto temple, one day in the enchanted October of 1916. Later, Tom Handforth* sent me a print, which, like the temple scroll, showed a cat coming to mourn the death of Buddha. It was unusual to see a cat among the other animals. These things lay, with a thousand other impressions, long in my mind, and happened to be the ones I could use.

[*As an aside: Tom Handforth is probably Thomas Scofield Handforth (1897–1948), an American artist and etcher who wrote and illustrated the 1939 Caldecott Medalist Mei Li about his personal experiences in China.]

The animal rebirth stories would be the Jataka, fables Buddha originally told to his disciples to illustrate his teachings. Like Aesop, each tale features animal characters, as well as an incarnation of the Buddha from an earlier life, usually as an animal himself. These amusing parables embody some of the central tenets of Buddhist principles of wisdom, heroic action, nonviolence and compassion. Other stories are from the Buddha’s life or other sources.

The snail (pp. 21-22) comes from “The Snail Martyrs” (scroll down to that section of the web page), a story that explains Buddha’s hair curls. The elephant tale (p. 24) can be found at the website Himalayan Art, which has translations of Jataka tales from Tibet.

Kanthaka (p. 26) was the favorite horse of Prince Siddhartha, who later became the Buddha, while the tale about the horse who captured seven kings (pp. 26-28) is this one, "Siddhartha and the swan (p. 31) is in a number of places; I also found it in Buddhist Stories (2006, pp. 9-10) by Anita Ganeri.

The buffalo story (p. 34) appears to be "The Ox Who Won the Forfeit" from Jataka Tales: Animal Stories retold by Ellen C. Babbitt and published in 1912. I can see how a water buffalo and an ox might be confused.

The story about the dog Shippeitaro (pp. 36-37) can be found in Mary F. Nixon-Roulet’s Japanese Folk-Stories and Fairy Tales (1908). The deer tale(pp. 43-44) is “The Banyan Deer”, also from Babbitt’s 1912 Jataka Tales.

After this story, Coatsworth mentions a number of other animals that “in each of them the spirit of the Buddha had at one time lived, or it had rendered service to him when he was a prince on earth” (p. 46). Many of the tales of these animals – the woodpecker, the lion and hawks, the goose with golden feathers, and the wise goat and the wolves, can be found in Babbitt’s 1922 More Jataka Tales. The story about “the hare who jumped into the frying pan of the beggar” can be found in Eastern Stories and Legends, by Marie L. Shedlock, published in 1920.

The monkey or ape story (pp. 46-48) appears to be “The Story of the Great Ape,” which can be read in The Illustrated Jataka & Other Stories of the Buddha by Dr C. B. Varma, a multimedia collection based on the digital collections of the Indira Ghandi National Centre for the Arts in India.

The reference about the tiger (p. 51) is from The Light of Asia, Book 2, by Edwin Arnold, originally published in 1879.

And what about the cat? On the Laws of Japanese Painting: An Introduction to the Study of the Art of Japan by Henry P. Bowie, published in 1911, has this to say on page 97:

Shaka’s [a Japanese term for Buddha] death is commemorated in the picture called NEHAN, nirvana. The lord, Buddha, is stretched upon a bier tranquilly dying, an angelic smile lighting his countenance, while around are gathered … the different animals of creation, all weeping. A rat having gone to call Mayabunin, mother of Buddha, has been pounced upon by a cat and torn to pieces. For this reason in paintings of this moving scene of Shaka’s death no cat is to be found among the mourning animals. The artist Cho Densu, however, in his great painting of NEHAN (still preserved in the Temple To Fuku Ji at Kyoto) introduces the portrait of a cat. It is related that, while Cho Densu was painting, the cat came daily to his side and continually mewing and expressing its grief, would not leave him. Finally Cho Densu, out of pity, painted the cat into the picture and thereupon the animal out of joy fell over dead.

Similarly, in her book Cat (2006) Katharine M. Rogers writes (on pages 28 and 30):

In Buddhist folklore, a rat was sent for medicine to cure the Buddha when he was mortally ill, but it could not fulfil [sic] its mission because a cat seized and ate it on its way. In another version, the cat was the only animal not overwhelmed with awe when the Buddha was passing into Nirvana: it was too intent on eyeing the rat.

And on page 75:

a cat came regularly to sit by the famous late medieval artist Cho Densu in the monastery Tofuko-ji, where he was painting an enormous picture of the entrance of Buddha into Nirvana. One day he ran short of ultramarine blue, and he joked to the cat, "If you would be good enough to procure for me the mineral [lapis lazuli] powder that I need, I will portray you in this painting of Nirvana.” The next day, the cat not only brought him some powder but showed him where an ample supply could be found. In recompense, the artist included the cat in his composition, and thereby improved its moral reputation throughout the country. This rehabilitation was important, because in Buddhist tradition the cat was often disparaged as impious for showing disrespectful unconcern when Buddha ascended into Nirvana.

From all this, I would say Coatsworth’s book is well-researched and true to the cultures it is trying to portray, blending Buddhist folklore and Japanese legend she first learned about on her own travels. Perhaps calling it “The Cat Who Went to Nirvana” would have been more politically correct, but I believe the book is more accessible to children with its present title.

As for the cat on the cover: my library’s copy (a 1967 edition) does not have the Newbery sticker over the tail, but it did have our bar code and shelf label, so I have superimposed the title area of a photo of the cover without those over my photo of the cover illustration. The cat is probably a Japanese bobtail, which are “considered symbols of good fortune in Japan.”

[originally posted at Bookin' It]

It's Like This, Cat

2009-01-22T09:27:00.005-05:00

It's Like This, Cat is a the perfect title for this book. Because I think that what it does best is describe a time and a place - neighborhoods in New York City in the early 1960's. A lot of the Newbery winners do excel in capturing particular settings, come to think about it. Maybe I've come to expect that as a given, and that's why I didn't like this book more than I did, which was moderately.

It's interesting, too, because Neville gets the feel of it down (I think pretty well, though I don't know the setting myself) without mentioning current political events or too much of the pop culture of the time. It reminded me of Betsy Byars' Summer of the Swans in that way - except instead of a girl and her tennis shoes and backyards and Green Acres, Neville shows us a boy with his duck tail (which gets turned into a "butch" cut) and apartment buildings with stoops and cellars full of storage lockers, and record players with needles and Belafonte records. Young teenagers ride their bikes everywhere and explore the city by themselves, calling their parents (even if their parents are beatniks) at dinnertime if they're going to be late.

Apart from the setting, the story is a quiet coming-of-age story of a young teenaged boy (unnamed for a few chapters, but you finally learn he's called Dave) who befriends a number of different characters in his neighborhood. One of the more eccentric ones, whom the local kids call Crazy Kate the Cat Woman, gives Dave a young tomcat. Dave is a rather lonely kid - he has no siblings, and he fights with father - and his adventures with Cat lead him to some new perspectives on his family and new friends.

It was all very nice, and I enjoyed reading it, but it didn't really make the profound impression on me that I feel like a Newbery winner should make. Am I expecting too much? Do I really need more "issues" in a story? Is it weird that my main thought after finishing It's Like This, Cat is on the lack of drug use in the big city?

I did find the whole book, including illustrations, online at the University of Pennsylvania's digital library. Take a look at it and see what you think.

2009 Newbery Predictions

2009-01-18T09:48:00.003-05:00

The 2009 Newbery award will be announced Monday, January 26 at 7:45 a.m. Mountain Daylight Time. There’s been a lot of speculation on possible winners. A former Newbery judge and longtime children’s librarian at the Donnell Central Children’s Room of the New York Public Library system, Elizabeth Bird, made her predictions in her Fuse #8 blog for School Library Journal. She also makes predictions for many of the other American Library Association Youth Media Awards. Another former Newbery judge, teacher Monica Edinger, has some thoughts on possible winners that appealed to her on her blog.

The results are also in for Heavy Medal, a Mock Newbery blog also at SLJ, and for the Allen County (Indiana) Public Library’s Mock Newbery, which has had all the previous winners on their short list of contenders since 1999 (except The Higher Power of Lucky in 2007). Read the rest of their blog for the winners of other mock contests.

Any guesses out there on this year’s Newbery winner and honor book(s)?

The Cat Who Went to Heaven

2009-01-09T17:12:00.001-05:00

There were some things I liked very much in The Cat Who Went to Heaven, by Elizabeth Coatsworth, and some things that I was very dubious about.

I liked the descriptions of the cat, Good Fortune, as well as all of the deftly portrayed animals that the unnamed Japanese artist thought about for his painting of the Buddha's death scene. Coatsworth uses simple yet poetic words in her short story (is this the shortest of the Newbery winners? I think it must be, except perhaps for one of the poetry collections - it's only 74 pages!):

So the old woman put down the basket and opened the lid. Nothing happened for a moment. Then a round, pretty, white head came slowly above the bamboo, and two big yellow eyes looked about the room, and a little white paw appeared on the rim. Suddenly, without moving the basket at all, a little cat jumped out on the mats, and stood there as a person might stand who scarcely knew if she were welcome. Now that the cat was out of the basket, the artist saw she had yellow and black spots on her sides, a little tail like a rabbit's, and that she did everything daintily (p. 10).

She is like new snow dotted with gold pieces and lacquer; she is like a white flower on which butterflies of two kinds have alighted...(p. 11).

I did wonder why the cat had such a short tail. Was this some genetic thing, like a Manx cat, or was it cropped or lost in an accident? Frustratingly, my library book had a sticker over the rear end of the cat shown on the cover, but it did appear that the pencil illustrations by Lynd Ward and Jael inside this 1990 edition showed a short-tailed cat. When I went to look at what I think was the original cover art, this is what I saw:

Every single copy of this cover image that I can find on the internet has the Newbery medal stuck on the cat's tail! Is it a tiny nub or what? I think if the cat had a normal tail it would extend out beyond the medal.

Now for the things I didn't like about this quiet little story that a lot of people find so charming and inspirational.

I really wondered about its authenticity (ooh, big literary word alert), and question how much of Coatsworth's portrayal of Japanese culture and Buddhism is accurate. I did some Googling and didn't turn up a legend about cats spurning the Buddha's blessing on the first couple pages of hits. Does anyone know if Coatsworth made this story up out of whole cloth, or is it really a Japanese legend? The fact that schools and homeschoolers alike use this book to fulfill a reading or social studies requirement on world cultures and/or religions makes this question rather important, I think.

In a similar vein, the Newbery Book Discussion Group at the Allen County Public Library ranked The Cat Who Went to Heaven 81st out of 87 winners, noting that it was:

Blessedly short. Some of us were bothered by seeming cultural insensitivity in the title, since the book is a story about an artist and the Buddha...So, shouldn't it be "The Cat Who Went to Nirvana"?

Finally, I absolutely hated the book's ending. I don't want to spoil it for those who haven't read it, but if you want to read about the part that bothered me, highlight the following paragraph.

The cat dies because she's so happy? WTF? What kind of ending is that for a children's story? I don't demand "and they lived happily ever after" for all kid's books, but isn't it a little disturbing to suggest that "pure joy" will kill you?

Anyway, it was a mostly enjoyable story, but not one I'll probably ever re-read or recommend to anyone but hard-core cat lovers, who might enjoy the gentle creature that Coatsworth portrays as colorfully as the artist in the story.

The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle - 1923

2008-12-20T13:39:00.004-05:00

I've been working for some time on a post comparing four different editions of the 1923 Newbery winner, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting. The post got so long that I set it up on its own website. Let me know what you think in the comments there or here.

Bottom line: There are some editions out there that do not make it clear that they have been revised from the 1922 original. Even with those that are upfront about changes, it's good to know exactly what is different. Buyer beware!

Criss Cross

2008-12-18T02:14:00.000-05:00

Author: Lynne Rae Perkins
Narrator: Danielle Ferland
Published by: Harper Childrens Audio (2006)
Originally Published (2005)
Length: 5 hours, 8 minutes
Award: Newbery Medal
My Rating: 2/5
Amazon Rating: 3/5 (72 customer reviews)

This is a hard book to review--I've written something and erased it about ten times now. Can I just say that I didn't like it? The first disc was frustrating to listen to, because I didn't really know that there wasn't much of a plot, and I kept waiting for something to happen. The narrator's voice was completely wrong for the tone of the book. Once I accepted that this wasn't a plot-driven novel, it got a little better, but I have to admit that the only reason I continued to listen is because when I have an audio book in the car, I follow the path of least resisitance, which is to not take out the CD. There are moments when Perkins really captures the essence of adolescence, and looking back to when I was younger, I could identify with some of the feelings and agree that that is how things felt. I just am not sure that teens living in the midst of this time of transition in their lives would find as much meaning in it. It had more of a reminiscent feel, maybe because the setting is sometime around the 70's.
I assume this won the Newbery Medal because it was somewhat innovative. I think some of that quality was lost in the audio version (haikus, song lyrics, etc. that weren't so obvious listening to.) I much preferred Princess Academy by Shannon Hale that won the Newbery Honor for that year.
Bottom line: Writing about nothing may have worked for Seinfeld, but not for Criss Cross. If you've got the five hours it takes to listen to this audio book, watch about 10 Seinfeld reruns instead!

Hitty (aka Mehitabel)

2008-12-16T13:30:00.004-05:00

I didn't expect to like Hitty: Her First Hundred Years, by Rachel Field. A story about a doll? A book that is commonly referred to as dated and "not politically correct"? It sounded both ho hum and distasteful.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

Although there definitely are some rather outdated parts in Hitty, as well as a few unfortunate stereotypes, these passages were not as bad as I feared. I thought that the rest of the story was an unusually charming, occasionally exciting, and truly interesting look at American history and "the good old days".

Hitty's story begins sometime before 1830 in the great "State of Maine" (as it is often referred to in Hitty), where she is carved out of mountain-ash wood by an Irish peddler. She is given to young Phoebe Preble (and fans can read more about the Preble family here), and accompanies Phoebe and her parents on a whaling expedition to the South Pacific, where mutiny, shipwreck, a desert island, "savages", an exciting rescue, and "a dirty old snake-charmer" of India (p. 92, also described as a heathen Hindoo) are encountered. And this is just in the first half of the book. That's a fair amount of action for a small wooden doll.

The not-so-PC passages are mostly from some of the parts described above, such as when the natives on the unnamed island are repeatedly described as childish, flamboyant, and possibly cannibals, who take Hitty to be an idol. When Hitty is lost in India, she describes a "babble of strange voices uttering heathenish gibberish" (p. 85). Later in the book, southern Black Americans are described as dirt poor but exceptionally musical, and then Hitty goes on meet "a noisy, unattractive lot of young men and women whose clothes shocked me by their tightness and lack of modesty" (p. 189).

Hitty's perspective is basically that of a rather old-fashioned, upper-middle-class white lady of the 1930's, so these comments are not particularly surprising. I think that the outdated passages are worth discussing*, especially with your kids, but I don't think it should lead readers to condemn the rest of the book when there is so much more to recommend it. Quakers, social class, the Civil War, theft, fashion, growing old, children's unthinking cruelty, and religion - all are touched upon, usually very graciously - in the second half of Hitty's memoir.

Plus, Rachel Field introduced me to the word "wadgetty", a regional term from Massachusetts and Nantucket (which means fidgety) that is used repeatedly and to great effect in Hitty. Although I was shocked to find that wadgetty isn't in the Oxford English Dictionary, it was fun to discover that H.L. Mencken defined it in 1948.

Dorothy P. Lathrop's gorgeous artwork adds a whole new dimension to the story. The original cover (shown above) isn't bad, but I have to admit that I like the new cover, a colored version of the illustration on pg. 13, even more.

Which leads me to the latest edition of Hitty: Her First Hundred Years (and no, it's not a sequel, though like Peter D. Sieruta, I wouldn't be surprised to read about the publication of Hitty: Her Second Hundred Years).

In 1999, a new book entitled Rachel Field's Hitty: Her First Hundred Years was written (or adapted, with substantial abridging and some entirely new adventures) by Rosemary Wells, and lavishly illustrated by Susan Jeffers. A discussion on goodreads.com led me to this interesting article in the New York Times Book section: Children's Books: The Name is the Same.

Boy, people are not happy when you mess with their beloved classics, and there are apparently a good number of Hitty fans out there - see Hitty Preble, presented by the Great Cranberry Island Historical Society; Hitty.org - The Hitty Research Pages; or HittyGirls, to begin with. I've never seen so much discussion of a character from a classic Newbery book, or one with as many related eBay auctions. I hope all of this encourages people (including kids) to read the original Hitty before passing it by as hopelessly outdated and politically incorrect.

*And not just the passages on race. For instance, when Phoebe's father, the captain of a whaling ship, says that if he strikes it lucky on his next voyage, he might "bring back six or seven hundred barrels of sperm" (p. 34), you probably want to explain to your children that Captain Dan'l is referring to oil made from sperm whale blubber.