Six Boxes of Books

Newbery: What I Said Before They Won

2012-01-23T07:11:00.000-08:00

It's incredibly difficult to review Newbery winners and honors in an objective way after you KNOW they've won. Sometimes you feel stupid about what you said earlier, after you found out they won. (Though I don't take the attitude that I was "wrong" about a book based on its win; I just figure "well, we like different stuff, then".)

I'm going to own what I said earlier. I don't know if I would do it if I didn't like what I'd said, though. These are from my Goodreads reviews and comments on Heavy Medal.

Honor, Inside Out and Back Again:

(three stars) I find it difficult to review this, just like I found it difficult to review the last novel-in-verse about a Vietnamese refugee in the 1970s that I read, All the Broken Pieces. Like anything negative I might say is me judging the immigrant experience itself. At first I didn't like this that much, but it's growing on me some after the fact. Ha reads like a more original character than many, and the thoroughly-sketched mother and sketchily-sketched brothers are all so clear to me in my mind. One heartbreaking sentence at the very end made me feel that Brother Khoi has his own fascinating book in a parallel universe. The sense of place is much greater for the scenes in and memories of Vietnam than they are for Alabama. Overall: good, but not great. I don't think it's a Newbery.

******************

Hmm. While Inside Out and Back Again isn’t one of my top choices, nor is it one of my favorite novels in verse (a small group; I react to these with distrust and they have to win me over), I don’t find the line breaks ineffective. They feel a little more daring, innovative, than what you quote from Eddie’s War (which I haven’t read). And the style also evokes to me (I hope I can say this without sounding horribly racist) both the harshness of life depicted in the book, and the rhythm/sound/feel of what spoken Vietnamese sounds like to someone who doesn’t understand it. [ETA: I should have said "what it sounds like to me as a nonspeaker"] I felt like it added to my perception of the mother, in particular, as a living breathing character.

Honor, Breaking Stalin's Nose:

(four stars) An intriguing little book, certainly a perspective I have not read before (devoutly Communist child). Does not waste any words or any time. The ending is pretty ambiguous and I'm not convinced it will work for young readers. I don't know enough about Stalin and Communist Russia to know how much of this is realistic and how much might be propaganda. Pulls no punches.

Winner, Dead End in Norvelt:

(three stars) I got impatient with this about halfway through. Occasional moments of clever brilliance, but Newbery-wise, I can't see this standing out in a field that includes Okay For Now. Also, the punk kid with quirky elderly neighbor plot ought to be locked in the vault for the next ten years or so.

***********

I finished Dead End in Norvelt last night. I thought there was a great sense of setting–I was interested enough to read the Wikipedia article on the town, and as I read I could picture the town I’d imagined from the book very clearly. But I agree on the plot getting lost, and I’m also iffy about most of the characters. I’m not sure whether this is intentional or not, though. Jack is a fully-realized character; Miss Volker comes close; but everyone else felt pretty muddled to me. Mrs. Gantos, in particular, I couldn’t get a handle on. I didn’t understand her or her relationship with Jack, and certainly not her relationship with her husband. But since so much of the book takes place in Jack’s head, maybe we’re seeing all the characters through his eyes without nuance. I could sort of support that.

It irritated me that there are a couple of references to Girl Scouts selling cookies to make money for themselves/their families. That’s one of those small things that shouldn’t matter and probably only matters to people with specialized Girl Scout knowledge, right? It’s a much smaller point than the Eagle Scout inaccuracies that actually affected the plot of Mockingbird last year.

Miss Volker felt like the secondary character equivalent of a Mary Sue. She always seemed to have the precise 21st-century liberal view of every issue. The teasing Harold-and-Maudey jokes about Jack being her boyfriend that people kept making did not ring true to me as being things people would really say, especially not the boy himself.

I did think there were moments of comedic brilliance. My favorite scene was the initial one with Miss Volker cooking her hands. I’m unfamiliar with Gantos’s work, so I can’t compare this to my reaction to his humor in general.

****************

The books have a lot of similarities and it’s unfortunate that they came out in the same year; I said in my Goodreads review that I didn’t think Norvelt would get attention in Okay For Now’s year. Yet looking back on both books, after not having looked at either in quite some time, it seems like Norvelt is the more daring, risky book; Okay For Now is easier to like. It may actually be better (as was my first impression) or it may just be more comfortable.

Morris Finalists 2012: Under the Mesquite

2012-01-16T11:54:00.000-08:00

Under the Mesquite is the story, told in free verse, of Lupita, a Mexican-American immigrant in Texas. Lupita's mother is diagnosed with cancer when Lupita is 14, and of course this drastically changes life for her family. The novel follows Lupita through her high school years, but her family life is the real center of the book.

And it's a heartbreaking tale. But the free verse didn't really work for me. I didn't see a compelling reason for it to be told in verse, besides that being what the author wanted to do (apparently it grew from a group of poems to a novel in verse). For instance, in the case of Inside Out and Back Again (a 2011 National Book Award winner), the use of verse complemented the story, which was being told by a younger child in a child's language. I felt like the use of verse also helped make the story more intense with that book. But in Under the Mesquite, I wanted more. I wanted more details; I wanted to get more inside Lupita's head and Lupita's world.

Maybe there's more to that than the use of verse. I suppose the author (Guadalupe Garcia McCall) could have gotten more in-depth while still using verse. And she did skim right through a lot of Lupita's life. It's a short book, only 144 pages (of verse, which has fewer words per page), considering the amount of time it covers and the potential depth of the story.

So while it's a good novel, I think there could have been more to it, free verse or not.

Morris Finalists 2012: The Girl of Fire and Thorns

2012-01-14T20:50:00.001-08:00

Yes, I really did read this in between posting about Between Shades of Gray last night and right now, 24 hours later.

The Girl of Fire and Thorns is Princess Lucero-Elisa de Riqueza of Orovalle, soon to be Queen Lucero-Elisa de Vega né Riqueza of Joya d'Arena, and familiarly known as Elisa. We meet her on her wedding day, when she is to be married to King Alejandro de Vega of Joya d'Arena. It's a political match, naturally; she's given in exchange for an alliance and protection from the invading forces of Invierne.

And while the names and titles sound impressive, Elisa is actually the fat, awkward second daughter of the king of Orovalle. But she's also the chosen one of her generation: on her naming day, as a baby, a stream of light from the heavens bestowed on her a Godstone, a blue gem embedded in her navel. A child is chosen in this way every hundred years, destined to complete some great service to his or her people.

So Elisa is an unlikely heroine, about to undertake her heroine's journey in this book. And she is a heroine, though she doesn't always feel it: strong, intelligent, morally and spiritually aware, but not afraid to question. She is a leader of others; a true queen.

I enjoyed both the story and the setting. Author Rae Carson builds a world that is both strange and familiar. It's earthlike, but there is just a bit of magic, and it's made clear that this is not the first world that these people have lived on. There are references to the old world that died before God brought them here. It's also a pre-modern world -- people ride horses and camels and fight (mostly) with swords and arrows and spears.

The story moved along at a good pace and never went quite where I expected it to, especially in terms of romance.

Spirituality is an important part of Elisa's life. Neither she nor anyone else in the story ever questions the existence of God. After all, he put the stone in her belly, right in front of everyone! And she senses God through the stone when she prays or when she is involved in worship. However, Elisa does have questions about God's will and God's purpose for her. She wonders why everyone, both friend and enemy, has a different interpretation of God's will. And she wonders whether all of the killing she and her people have to do is worth it, even if it is done to protect others.

Elisa doesn't resolve these questions. She completes her mission to protect the people of Joya d'Arena and Orovalle, but people do die. And I had other unanswered questions after reading the book -- like where did the people of this world originally come from? Their religious practices do have things in common with Christianity. For instance, Elisa prays something called the Glorifica, which is similar to Mary's Magnificat (and it's entirely fitting for Elisa):

My soul glorifies God; let it rejoice in my Savior
For he has been mindful of his humble servant
Blessed am I among generations
For he lifted me from the dying world...

There's also a ceremony similar to a communion service in which people are pricked with the thorn of a rose instead of receiving communion bread (hence the thorns of the title, I suppose). Aside from these elements (and the priests and monasteries which are also in the story), there are no overt references to Christ or Christianity. So I'm interested in seeing whether anything else will develop in future books (this is apparently the first of at least 3 books).

I'd have to say this one is my favorite of the Morris finalists so far. I've got one more to read -- Under the Mesquite.

Morris Finalists 2012: Between Shades of Gray

2012-01-13T20:17:00.000-08:00

Yes, I did read this over my holiday break! But then, well, life got in the way and I never reviewed it. And it had to go back to the library!

But I can tell you that it was well worth reading. Between Shades of Gray is the story (not based on any one true story) of 15-year-old Lina, whose family is taken by pre-KGB Soviet secret police from their home in Lithuania and sent to Siberia. Horrible things happen. The ending is not particularly happy.

This is good storytelling. Author Ruta Sepetys does a good job unfolding the events in a not-totally-predictable manner. I also liked a theme that ran through much of the book: kindness matters. Lina's mother is in the habit of being kind to people, even when they are not kind to her, and it does matter in the end, even though Lina thinks it silly.

However, I did notice that despite the really horrible things that happen in this book, emotionally, it didn't pull me in as deeply as other books have (for instance, The Birchbark House). I couldn't pinpoint exactly why; perhaps just because this story is told fairly starkly.

Between Shades of Gray takes place during World War II (it begins in 1939), but tells a different, little-known part of the war story. It would make a good companion to World War II studies in the classroom. And if you've read Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, this would make a great comparison read.

The Newbery is Coming

2012-01-08T04:53:00.000-08:00

It is possible that I have completed my pre-Newbery reading for the season, with sixty books.

Sixty! That's almost as many as I had to read in order to read all the winners in the first place. I have a better-funded library system here, so I was able to read almost twice as many contenders as I was last year. (The two years before that I didn't keep track in the same way.)

Yet still, I have the nagging feeling that I'm missing something. Even though every year I've already read most of the books that get make the podium, and this year I've read so much more. I think there are always the books that don't get attention from any of the attention-makers that the committee has ferreted out. And, of course, sometimes the ways of the committee are mysterious.

My ideal Newbery results are when I have read everything on the podium except one book; it gives me a good feeling of satisfaction, but I still have something exciting to read. (Last year it was Moon Over Manifest, which I did have out of the library to read next; it hadn't escaped my notice. In 2010 it was Homer P. Figg, which I admit I still haven't read because the cover is so wildly unappealing to me. In 2009 I hadn't read The Graveyard Book, because we didn't think it was eligible, or The Surrender Tree, which would have been my own frontrunner if I'd read it.)

I don't feel invested in the results this year. There are so many books that are considered frontrunners that I don't think are good enough that none of them even particularly stand out as "ANYTHING BUT THAT". There are a lot of books that I think are pretty good. Most of all, I think the theme of this year for me is the number of books that I really enjoyed but don't think will win. They're books for readers, regardless of award podiums. Books like One Day and One Amazing Morning

on Orange Street, and Jefferson's Sons, and The Great Wall of Lucy Wu, and Akata Witch, and Icefall.

You can see my list of everything I read that has been mentioned as a possibility for the Newbery somewhere here. (You'll see only 57 books. I count 60, but I didn't include any of the three Mo Willems books that have been suggested as possibilities. I can't bring myself to believe that these books' Newbery chances are anything but manufactured by the blogosphere.)

And the Goodreads poll for Newbery winners always makes for interesting reading. I've read 50 of the 69 listed there as of today.

There are still a few books I would like to read--Wildwood, Blizzard of Glass, The Freedom Maze, Eddie's War--but looking at the hold list, I'm unlikely to get to read them before the ALA Youth Media Awards on January 23.

As soon as they're over, I'm going to read NOTHING but adult non-fiction for a solid month.

Morris Finalists 2012: Paper Covers Rock

2011-12-27T22:30:00.000-08:00

Alex is a junior at a boys' boarding school in North Carolina. He and three friends decide to drink some vodka and jump off of a rock into the French Broad River. One of them dies. This book is about the aftermath. Will the school find out that the boys were drinking? Will Alex and his friend Glenn get kicked out? Or is there something more going on?

Alex is also a talented writer who has a crush on his fresh-from-Princeton female English teacher. The book is told from his point of view, as a journal/novel he's been writing.

I kept hoping the novel would turn into something better, but it pretty much stayed the same throughout: annoyingly angsty. I also kept wondering why the book was set in 1982. It didn't seem relevant to the story. Pop culture references were few and unnecessary. There were no 1980s fashion references. There were no news stories from that time involved. I didn't feel like I was being immersed in 1982 in any significant way. The only thing I could think of is that there are some issues around homosexuality in the story, and I suppose it was more of a taboo to be gay in 1982 than it is now.

There were two parts that really struck me. One is when then English teacher, Miss Dovecott, really gets the boys talking about Emily Dickinson's "There's been a Death, in the Opposite House." Alex brings God into it, suggesting that the minister in the poem represents God, who in the poem owns "all the mourners...And little boys. Dickinson is saying he owns all of us." And his friend Glenn promptly shuts down the discussion, saying that "God does not own any of us." And no one has anything to say after that. I could relate to the frustration of that moment. "One of these students...wants desperately to come back to her world -- her heavenly, wide-open world -- but it is roped off now, like an unsafe balcony."

The other is another God-moment. One of the teachers substitutes in chapel and preaches a sermon.

"There is God in all of us," he says. "God is programmed into our DNA, so He's there under our skin, biologically there, to connect us to a force larger than ourselves. It's what makes me feel not so alone in this world, as if inside of me is a seed, and if I nurture that seed, I can become my best far-reaching self." This is the first time that God has made sense to me, and I am writing it down so I won't forget it.

This is followed by:

The other guys do not see what Miss Dovecott is doing for us. They do not see how she is working by degrees to get us back to a time when our inds were freer, more connected to the world around us. More connected to what was programmed inside our DNA, just like Mr. Parkes said.

Things get even weirder after the sermon. I had a really hard time with the ending, and I'm going to hash it out here, so if you don't want to know, don't read any further.

--SPOILERS BELOW--

Okay, so all through the book, Glenn has been trying to convince Alex that Miss Dovecott suspects they were drinking and is trying to get them to reveal it. And Glenn has a plan to harass Miss Dovecott, possibly going as far as to get her to leave or be kicked out of the school.

Alex doesn't want to follow the plan, although much of the time he ends up doing it anyway -- because, as he says at one point, the real honor code at a boys' school is between friends -- you protect your friends and you never, ever turn them in.

I didn't think he'd really end up getting Miss Dovecott kicked out, though, but he does. And that bothered me.

Alex thinks that Glenn thinks Miss Dovecott is onto them about the drinking. But when Alex finally confesses to Miss Dovecott, she's not so worried about that. What she thinks she saw was Glenn possibly suffocating Thomas (who may or may not have been already dead) while Alex ran for help. She doesn't know why, but Alex knows that if Glenn had done it, it might have been to hide his own (Glenn's) homosexuality -- because Thomas had seen Glenn and another boy coming out of the same shower stall.

But NOBODY, besides Glenn, knows whether Glenn is really gay, or whether he tried to kill Thomas. Glenn says neither is true, and swears on the Bible that he was only checking to see whether Thomas was breathing.

And then, after Glenn swears on the Bible, Alex goes through with the plan, invites Miss Dovecott to go for a walk, and kisses her in front of a waiting Glenn. Glenn reports this to the school authorities, and voila, no more Miss Dovecott. And she doesn't report anything at all on her way out.

Alex's final actions don't make any sense to me, except in the context of the honor code between friends -- Alex decides in the end that his friendship with Glenn is more important than the teacher he respects and thinks he loves? Alex decides that this action really is in his own self-interest? I don't like either of those motivations.

Maybe I'm missing something. Maybe there's supposed to be some deeper meaning here. I'm purposely not reading any other reviews until I publish this, because I want to be honest about how I saw it. But for me, this ending doesn't work. It's painful, and leaves me not liking Alex. And I mostly didn't like Alex anyway -- he seems like a stereotypical angsty, intelligent teenager.

So while this was an interesting book in many ways, it's really not for me, and I'm not sure it's original enough to be award-worthy.

Morris Finalists 2012: Where Things Come Back

2011-12-25T18:09:00.000-08:00

I've decided to read the finalists for the 2012 William A. Morris YA Debut Award! If you're new to the Morris, it "honors a debut book published by a first-time author writing for teens" and celebrates "impressive new voices in young adult literature." I've requested the five finalists from the library and am hoping they all come in while I'm on winter break.

My first read is Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley. This book was a bit of a mystery to me after reading the inside of the jacket. The jacket copy talks about lighthearted tales of adolescent love, the disappearance of a little brother, an extinct woodpecker, zombies and talking birds, without weaving any of those items into any kind of plot summary.

So I have to tell you that there are no real zombies. Real inside of the book, I mean. They're imaginary, both outside and inside the story. If you're looking for a good zombie story, this isn't it.

But it's definitely worth reading anyway. Here's what really happens: Cullen Witter's younger (and not so little) brother disappears around the same time that a college professor arrives in his small Arkansas town to search for signs of a rare woodpecker that is believed to be extinct. The whole town goes gaga over the possibility of the woodpecker being found there, and while they do care about the Witters and search for Gabriel (the brother), Cullen often feels like the stupid and probably non-existent woodpecker is getting too much attention.

Meanwhile, in alternate chapters, we hear about failed teenage missionary Benton Sage, and his college roommate Cabot Searcy. This is confusing, because there is NO explanation in the beginning for how this fits in with the Cullen Witter story. Rest assured, it does tie in eventually.

The story as a whole seems a bit haphazard at first, but things are revealed at a good pace, which frequently had me thinking "What the HECK?!" (in a good way). And at a couple of points, "OMG, I'm going to be sick." Again, in a good way.

The Cullen Witter portions of the book are told in first person, while the other portions are in third person. I enjoyed Cullen both as a character and as a voice; he seemed like an authentic teenager. Whaley has him simultaneously dealing with his brother's disappearance and dating and worrying about girls and sex, which sounds ridiculous, but it works.

Overall, this is a well-written and engaging novel. It's complex enough to be interesting, but easy enough to read in a day or so. I look forward to seeing more from John Corey Whaley.

Reading Broadly

2011-11-12T07:16:00.000-08:00

I keep a list on Goodreads of "award possibilities" each year. It's mostly Newbery; this year it's pretty much all Newbery. (I did not love them all. They're just part of the discussion.) Here are the titles on my list with authors and/or protagonists who I know to be people of color, plus a few that are still on my shelf, waiting to be read.

Hidden, Helen Frost
Drawing From Memory, Allen Say
Can I See Your ID? True Stories of False Identities, Chris Barton (some stories)
Jefferson's Sons, Kimberly Brubaker Bradley
The Grand Plan to Fix Everything, Uma Krishnaswami
Lunch-Box Dream, Tony Abbott
Akata Witch, Nnedi Okorafor
Trapped, Marc Aronson
The Great Wall of Lucy Wu, Wendy Shang
Words in the Dust, Trent Reedy
Inside Out and Back Again, Thanhha Lai
The Queen of Water, Laura Resau / Maria Virginia Farinango
Heart and Soul, Kadir Nelson
Bird in a Box, Andrea Davis Pinkney
Never Forgotten, Patricia McKissack

Close to Famous, Joan Bauer

and a shoutout for Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys, about a cultural minority.

What have I left off?

Newbery Watch

2011-10-25T21:17:00.000-07:00

I had an extraordinary reading experience at Elliott Bay Books today. I went there to read some of the easy readers that are being talked up on Heavy Medal. This is going to make me sound like a mooch--I REALLY DO spend money at bookstores usually--but I also went to finish Wonderstruck, which I'd gotten halfway through when I was waiting there for Laurie once. I'm on hold for it at the library, but I'm never, ever going to get it. I was loving Wonderstruck when I stopped. I almost bought it, but it is not an inexpensive book, and I seldom buy books I haven't read, so I am waiting. If I buy it, I promise to buy it from Elliott Bay. If I don't buy it, I promise to buy whatever I do buy from Elliott Bay, EVEN THOUGH I get triple points on my online bookstore-linked credit card if I buy books THERE. I have approximately 72 nieces and one nephew, so I buy a lotta books.

I read three Elephant and Piggie books. I was not impressed with them as Newbery Hopefuls. In a way, the discussion about them (and especially the reading experience) reminded me of how sometimes people tell me things like "you're such a good nurse, you should be a doctor!" I don't want to be a doctor. I'm happy being a nurse, which was pretty much always my dream. I try to be the best nurse I can be. The Elephant and Piggie books are great at what they are: marriages of text and illustration. Why try to shoehorn them into an award that's primarily for writing? I think it almost devalues the foundation of what makes these books good. Let them win the Geisel and let it go.

Secretly (oops) I don't think the Elephant and Piggie books are THAT great. I didn't think any of the three from this year were as good as We Are In a Book (also read for the first time tonight) or I Will Surprise My Friend (which I read with surprise and delight during my first year of ALA-awards-fandom), but none of them strike me as great literature. But that MAY have been influenced, tonight, by the fact that I reread Where the Wild Things Are first. In a recent discussion on Heavy Medal, I suggested delicately that it is not the text that makes WTWTA a perennially best-loved classic. I still feel that way (see "marriage is the foundation of our society" or whatever it was I was talking about above), and I think most adults remember the pictures and not the text. But the text is GREAT. I read it three times in a row. I was blown away. That is good stuff. The Elephant and Piggie books paled in comparison. Especially the ice cream one, which seemed overly didactic, and very like the filmstrips we used to watch in first grade that were supposed to teach us social skills but clearly had no effect on most of my generation. (I read a blog post or an article or something recently about those film strips and the theme song I've never forgotten, "The most important person in the whole wide world is you!" The author pointed out that this is not something first graders need to be taught.)

I also picked up No Passengers Beyond This Point by Gennifer Choldenko, which is one of my personal Newbery picks. I read it long ago so haven't been able to defend it well. I flipped through the first chapter and was immediately sucked in. The first chapter alone SCREAMS Newbery quality to me. It is everything that we want all these other novels we're discussing to be.

But I still have not gotten to the extraordinary reading experience.

I picked up Wonderstruck, and also happened to see Drawing From Memory by Allen Say, a book I have seen mentioned in passing as an unlikely Newbery contender because of too much dependence on illustrations. I hadn't bothered putting a hold on it because it wasn't getting any airtime. (Why is it accepted that we can toss away books for older kids because the illustrations are too important, but if we imply this about easy readers and picture books, we are being closed-minded? Hmm?)

After a few pages of Drawing From Memory, I gasped. After I finished half the book, I stopped and texted my brother-in-law and told him to put it on hold immediately. By the end, I'd held back tears twice.

I got up and returned Wonderstruck to the shelf, unread, and went home, so that nothing would interfere with thinking about Drawing From Memory, hopefully ever again.

This is a book that will be enjoyed equally by my seven-year-old niece and her father (they are both Japanophiles; the book takes place in Japan) and my mother. Think of that, three generations of moved, delighted readers at once.

Extraordinary.

The Uprise Books Project

2011-10-25T20:41:00.000-07:00

We at Six Boxes, like many of you, have been known to have strong feelings and opinions about banned/challenged books. So do the people at the Uprise Books Project.

The Uprise Books Project is dedicated to ending the cycle of poverty through literacy, providing new banned and challenged books to underprivileged teens free of charge.

Uprise Books is currently seeking funding through Kickstarter to establish a website that will help connect underprivileged teens with banned and challenged books, which they might not otherwise have access to. Basically, the program will help get the books from donors to readers.

I could go on -- but Uprise has a great explanation up on their Kickstarter page, and I'd love for you to read it. What's Kickstarter? It's a crowd-funding system. People pledge to donate a certain amount to a project (in return for rewards specified by the project creators), and if the project meets its pledge goal, then Kickstarter (via Amazon Payments) puts all the donations through. If they don't meet goal, then no one gets charged and the project gets no money. :-(

Uprise Books is trying to reach a $10,000 goal by midnight, Monday, October 31 (hey, an often-challenged holiday!). They have $5771 pledged so far. Can you help? Donations of any amount are accepted.

The Uprise Books Project Kickstarter Page

The Uprise Books Project Blog

Best Plot Ever, Where Are You Now?

2011-09-17T07:51:00.000-07:00

My sister Laurie is a middle school librarian, and I am surfing her couch. To be more specific, I am sleeping on the bottom bunk of my seven-year-old niece's bunk bed ("ONLY THE BOTTOM"; Iris sleeps on the top bunk even when no one's in the bottom, and why wouldn't she? Everyone knows the top bunk is way cooler). I moved to Seattle last Wednesday. After a thorough, exhaustive search, I finally rented an apartment on Sunday. Today all my stuff is being delivered. (When I say "all my stuff", I mean "books and a few other things".)

Anyway, as I said, Laurie is a middle-school librarian. A couple of days ago we were sitting at dinner and talking about our days. Laurie said a couple of big classes of kids had come in to take out books. "Did they take out science fiction and fantasy?" Iris asked. "No," Laurie said. "Some of them probably wanted to, but their teacher wanted them to take out real estate fiction and memoirs."

I opened my mouth to ask incredulously if there was really "real estate fiction" in Laurie's library. But before the words were even out, about a dozen examples of real estate fiction flashed before my eyes, so I didn't bother.

"It's hard, because on the one hand there's so MUCH real estate fiction, but on the other hand, what exactly constitutes real estate fiction?" Laurie's husband Matthew nodded sagely. This is just the kind of topic all four of us like to wax eloquent about.

Of course, it was not long before I realized that what Laurie was actually saying was "realistic fiction", and not "real estate fiction" at all.

It was a disappointing moment.

Not that we didn't discuss real estate fiction ANYWAY.

I mean, it's a really common plot in older books, once you start thinking about it. I call it "We move to a new house and everything is awesome."

Do I even need to start listing examples of books like this? I can start with Return to Gone-Away, probably the best book about buying a house and redecorating it ever, and then there's The Four-Story Mistake, and Go to the Room of the Eyes. There are variations, like Dandelion Cottage. There is a book I just read by Hilda Van Stockum called Canadian Summer about a big family moving to rural Quebec. There is Anastasia Again, where Anastasia cleverly tries to prevent her family's move by choosing impossible things for the "must have in the new house" list her parents invite her to contribute to, but instead she just ends up in the Best House Ever. (Please to put more examples in the comments.)

Clearly, moving to a new house and everything being awesome was a topic of Great Interest to previous generations. BUT WHERE ARE THESE BOOKS NOW?

I don't really buy the thing about how all kids' books are problem novels now--I don't think anyone who actually reads kids' books does--but I can't really conceive of a book about a family house-hunting, moving, and redecorating, written now, being a book with a plot other than "we move to a new house and everything is not awesome".

I tested this by doing a quick scan of the books I've labeled "award possibilities" over the last few years. It's hardly an exhaustive list, but I don't see many books about moving at all, and none about it being awesome or fun.

Is this a lost plot? Did it get tired, or is it just Not of General Interest to readers today?

The Boxcar Children: Graphic Novels

2011-08-07T18:48:00.000-07:00

I've written before about graphic novels for reluctant readers. My kids' school was offering a book order specifically for graphic novels, and I thought it was OK. My kids like reading comics, but they also read regular books at and above their grade levels.

Today, they went to the library and brought home a couple of graphic novels of the Boxcar Children books.

My reaction was mixed. I do recognize that graphic novels work for some kids. I also think there's some value in simplifying classics and harder works of literature. If kids read the graphic novel versions of Shakespeare now, maybe they'll be more interested in reading the real thing (or seeing the plays) later on.

However, the Boxcar Children books are already easy. Here's part of the note about author Gertrude Chandler Warner:

"As a teacher, she discovered that many readers who liked an exciting story could not find books that were both easy and fun to read. She decided to try to meet this need."

Well, I believe in having informed opinions, so I decided to read the books the girls brought home. These two are versions of original Gertrude Chandler Warner books (she wrote only the first 19 in the series): The Bicycle Mystery and The Lighthouse Mystery. Most of the graphic novels published so far are versions of Warner's books. They're adapted by Joeming Dunn and illustrated by Ben Dunn.

I read each in about 5-10 minutes. The stories are condensed down to the basic plot elements. Since the Boxcar Children books don't have complex plots, this doesn't leave much. I felt like all of the charm of the original books was missing.

So what is the charm of the books? Some people suggest that it lies in being able to imagine what everything looks like. I don't think think that's the case.

You see, the Boxcar Children books are about independence. They're about Benny, Violet, Henry and Jessie doing things and solving problems on their own, without a lot of adult interference (other than often supplying money and material things). I loved reading about how they did things: how did they prepare for a bicycling or canoeing trip? What supplies did they need? How did they set up camp? What did they cook for dinner, and where did they get the food?

The stories usually involved solving a mystery, but it was the journey that was important, and that's what is left out of the graphic novels.

As for the drawings, they're OK. They depict an odd mix of objects from different time periods -- a 1950s station wagon, an older-looking sports car with a modern-day California license plate, simple shorts and t-shirts for the kids (including girls), women in 1950s-style dresses, basic, non-descript bikes, bike helmets worn at all times. Each of the two books I have on hand includes one or two panes drawn in silhouette, which I'm guessing is an homage to the original illustrations.

I do feel nostalgia for the original books and original illustrations. But nostalgia aside, since the original books are already so accessible, and far superior, I don't see a need for the graphic novels.

Joey Pigza

2011-07-03T13:34:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key, which my 11-year-old daughter was pressing me to read. It's the first in a series about a boy with ADHD (plus family issues). It was also a National Book Award finalist in 1999, and one of the later books was a Newbery Honor book in 2001.

Joey begins the book in a regular classroom, but has trouble sitting still and focusing, and keeps getting into trouble when he can't stop himself from acting on whatever his thoughts lead him to. For instance, after his teacher puts him to work sharpening pencils for the class (which seems like a good strategy on her part) he injures himself by trying to sharpen his fingernail in the pencil sharpener.

Joey ends up going to the special ed room part-time, for help with sitting still and focusing (not for anything academic). But when he injures a classmate in his regular classroom, he is suspended from school and sent to a special ed counseling center day program for six weeks.

Meanwhile, Joey has recently been reunited with his mother. His grandmother had been raising him, in a chaotic and abusive manner. His mother seems to have mostly pulled herself together, and is trying to do the right things for Joey.

Joey does get help from the counseling center. They change his medication from pills to a new patch that gives him a constant stream of medication, and it seems to work better than his previous medication. The counselor talks about helping Joey change the way he makes decisions, too, and I was eager to see what they would do with this, but nothing really happened there (at least not on the page). Joey ends up going back to his regular school, although they start him off in the special ed room again.

This book, while well-written, left me feeling sad. You see, I work in a school. I'm on the adult end of this story. Joey's the kind of kid I often really don't enjoy working with, because I feel helpless around them. Gantos' descriptions of Joey bear this out -- Joey apparently can't help what he does. He transitions from sharpening pencils to sharpening popsicle sticks to sharpening his finger without really thinking about it. The only thing that seems to help is medication.

The teachers in the story don't always make good choices. But sometimes it's hard to see how to really help kids like Joey. Sometimes none of the strategies in your toolbox work.

My 11-year-old, on the other hand, doesn't have my biases or adult point of view. She enjoys the Joey Pigza books because they're about a kid her own age, and she can relate to that. And while she doesn't have ADHD, she knows kids who do, and as she just told me "why shouldn't there be books about them? There are books about every other kind of kid."

I wonder whether these books are helpful for kids with ADHD? Do kids with ADHD read them, or care about them? Maybe Joey Pigza can help by letting them know that they're not the only ones? And I suppose if typical kids read the Joey Pigza books, it might help them to be more understanding of classmates with ADHD.

I was really struck by the difference between my reaction to this book and my reaction to Mockingbird, which is about a child with Asperger's syndrome. Children with Asperger's can also be difficult to deal with in school -- but when I read Mockingbird, I was delighted by its accurate depiction of Asperger's syndrome, and even though it deals with difficult subjects, it didn't leave me feeling sad.

Anyone else read one or both of these books? Care to comment?

The Absolute Value of Mike by Kathryn Erskine

2011-06-08T20:15:00.000-07:00

Kathy Erskine wrote my favorite book of last year (and winner of the National Book Award for juvenile literature), MOCKINGBIRD. Her follow-up novel, The Absolute Value of Mike, hits shelves today.

Mike is the child of a single father, an engineer, who suddenly has to travel to Romania for work, and decides that Mike should spend the summer with aging, eccentric relatives.

Life with Poppy and Moo takes a lot of getting used to. But soon, Mike gets involved in a project -- raising money to help a local pastor adopt a child from Romania. And along the way, Mike ends up helping several other people in town, too. And he finally tells his dad that he's just not interested in math and engineering, and Dad is OK with it.

Mike is an enjoyable story, and I liked seeing him (and his father) come to the realization that people are gifted in different ways, and that having a learning disability in math doesn't mean that one will be crippled for life.

I didn't fall in love with this book the way I did with MOCKINGBIRD, though. I think Mike himself just didn't feel as real to me -- he seemed out of the ordinary for a 14-year-old boy. I don't know many 14-year-old boys who are so community-minded and relate so well to adults! Then again, I suppose he would be different, given that his father is both highly intelligent and displays many characteristics of Asperger's Syndrome (never mentioned explicitly, but it's there). Mike is used to having to take care of his absent-minded father, so he feels he has to take care of others, too.

But I and my 11-year-old daughter enjoyed reading this book, and I can recommend it!

Visit author Kathryn Erskine on the web at kathyerskine.com.

Young Adult Books: Too Dark?

2011-06-04T21:05:00.001-07:00

I'm steaming through the ears right now, because I've just read the Wall Street Journal article in which Meghan Cox Gurdon claims that current young adult literature is too dark for most parents and kids.

I won't disagree that there's a lot of dark and paranormal "literature" out there right now. In fact, I think some of it's trash, too.

I won't disagree that books with sex, violence, or difficult subjects like rape and incest may not be appropriate for all children. I don't let my 11-year-old read these books. They're generally not intended for 11-year-olds. I don't let her read many of Lauren Myracle's books (mentioned in the article) because I don't think she's ready for them yet.

But there are several things I do disagree with in this piece.

First, the idea that one might leave a bookstore EMPTY-HANDED because there is nothing, nothing appropriate out there (which is what the mother in the beginning of the piece did). Please. There is such a rich variety of literature available for children and teenagers right now that you'd have to be in a pretty sad bookstore for that to happen. Surely you could at least come away with a selection from the classics of youth literature?

And then this:

As it happens, 40 years ago, no one had to contend with young-adult literature because there was no such thing.

Are you kidding me? 40, 50, 60 years ago, maybe the term Young Adult Literature didn't exist, but the books were definitely there. Look up Rosamond Du Jardin, Maud Hart Lovelace, and Betty Cavanna, among MANY others. Were they different from young adult books today? Yes. The world has changed, and so have the books.

But here's the meat of what made me angry:

By f—ing gatekeepers (the letter-writing editor spelled it out), she meant those who think it's appropriate to guide what young people read. In the book trade, this is known as "banning." In the parenting trade, however, we call this "judgment" or "taste." It is a dereliction of duty not to make distinctions in every other aspect of a young person's life between more and less desirable options. Yet let a gatekeeper object to a book and the industry pulls up its petticoats and shrieks "censorship!"

Absolutely you should use your judgment and taste in deciding what YOUR children should read. I do! But please, for the love of all that is holy, why should anyone get to decide what other people's children should read?

You're right, Ms. Gurdon. There are a lot of books out there that I don't want my children to read. But I'm perfectly capable of drawing those boundaries for myself, even if my boundaries are different from yours.

By the way, your lists of books for young men and young women? I certainly hope my daughters will be reading from BOTH categories. Just saying.

"Ready!" by Lydia Ondrusek

2011-04-16T09:12:00.000-07:00

"Ready!" is the first e-book in King of the Marshmallows, a series of short stories for children and teens published by Echelon Press (publisher of Killer Cows). Mark has Asperger's Syndrome, and has a hard time at school. Mom's looking for solutions, and ends up signing him up for taekwondo classes, where ends up in a class with both adults and kids. And one of the other kids also has Asperger's Syndrome.

Mark also figures out how to deal with his book report at school -- and ends up reading one of my favorites, Mockingbird!

Author Lydia Ondrusek is a friend of mine, so I can't claim objectivity here. But I thoroughly enjoyed the story, and look forward to the next installment (the first one is only about 3000 words). I would suggest this story for kids ages 9-14 (or younger if they read well).

"Ready!" is available through SmashWords for only 99 cents! You can read it either online with a regular computer or on an e-reading device.

Edges by Léna Roy

2011-01-11T19:50:00.000-08:00

"It's about addiction, and twelve-step programs, and mysticism. In Utah."

My husband just looked at me and shook his head. Yes, it sounds weird. But Léna Roy's Edges works!

Luke is seventeen, and has left his home in New York for a youth hostel in Moab, Utah. Why? Well, that's part of the story.

Meanwhile, in New York we meet Ava, nineteen, sober only a few weeks, and attending AA meetings. Her path and Luke's are about to cross.

As the book moves along, Roy unfolds for us how Luke came to be in Utah, how Ava came to be a recovering alcoholic, and how their lives are about to connect. I really liked the pacing of this.

There's also a strong dash of mysticism and spirituality. AA, of course, has a spiritual basis, with its reliance on a Higher Power, and Roy's characters do frequently refer to the Higher Power concept. And in Utah, we meet a Southwestern mysticism, with kachinas, spirit animals, and a shaman. But, subtly, Roy shows us that it's all one -- that there *is* something out there, surrounding us and caring for us. Is it God, the spirit of the bear, the power of love, or just our collective souls working together? Perhaps it depends on the eye of the beholder. Whatever it is, it's life-changing for the characters in Edges.

I really enjoyed reading Edges, and in fact, I read it TWICE before reviewing it, because after the first time I felt like it was still sinking in; I wasn't sure I got everything the first time. The story's well told, and the characters and descriptions are vivid. And love and community both run throughout the book.

Finally, yes, Léna Roy is Madeleine L'Engle's granddaughter. I had contacted Léna several months ago with a question about her grandmother's work, and found that she had a young adult novel coming out soon! Naturally, as a huge L'Engle fan, I was interested -- and I'm very glad now that I tracked her down and got to read this book!

Find out more about Edges at http://lenaroybooks.com, and visit Léna Roy's blog at http://lenaroy.com.

Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Macmillan for providing me with a review copy of Edges.

Books I Read in 2010 (Kathleen)

2010-12-31T10:37:00.000-08:00

Apparently a lot of people make these lists, and like to see other people's lists. I'm not sure mine is totally accurate. This is based on a combination of my Goodreads list, my e-book history on my phone, and my reading history at the library (my library system will save your check-out history online if you allow it). It only includes books read for the first time in 2010. It may or may not be missing a few books. They are in no order at all, but I did put a star in front of those titles I rated five stars on Goodreads.

Blogger doesn't want to show you the line numbers, so I'll just tell you that there are 102 books on the list.

Creepers, Joanne Dahme
Tombstone Tea, Joanne Dahme
Lompoc: Padres to Pinot, John McReynolds
Rock What You've Got: Secrets to Loving Your Inner and Outer Beauty from Someone Who Has Been There and Back, Katherine Schwarzenegger
Ship Breaker (Ship Breaker, #1), Paolo Bacigalupi
*Lockdown, Walter Dean Myers
Dark Water, Laura McNeal
Breathless, Jessica Warman
A Blue So Dark, Holly Schindler
Red Glass, Laura Resau
Cookie, Jacqueline Wilson
On The Wings of Heroes, Richard Peck
The Canning Season, Polly Horvath
Bread and Roses, Too, Katherine Paterson
The White Darkness, Geraldine McCaughrean
The Slave Dancer, Paula Fox
Peak, Roland Smith
A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, Rebecca Solnit
One Crazy Summer, Rita Williams-Garcia
As Easy as Falling Off the Face of the Earth, Lynne Rae Perkins
Louisa May Alcott, Susan Cheever
Twelve by Twelve: A One-Room Cabin Off the Grid and Beyond the American Dream, William Powers
Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy
Colors of God, Dave Phillips
Makers, Cory Doctorow
Peter and the Starcatchers (Peter and the Starcatchers, #1), Dave Barry
On the Hill, Lisa Jahn-Clough
The Beatles: The Biography, Bob Spitz
Starter Vegetable Gardens, Barbara Pleasant
A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table, Molly Wizenberg
Ash, Malinda Lo
*Frindle, Andrew Clements
Gimme Refuge: The Education of a Caretaker, Matt Love
Illyria, Elizabeth Hand
Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture, Shannon Hayes
The Clearing, Heather Davis
Confessions of a Prairie Bitch: How I Survived Nellie Oleson and Learned to Love Being Hated, Alison Arngrim
The Watsons Go to Birmingham - 1963, Christopher Paul Curtis
Will Grayson, Will Grayson, John Green
Wintergirls, Laurie Halse Anderson
*Before I Fall, Lauren Oliver
Unwind (Unwind, #1), Neal Shusterman
Forget-Her-Nots, Amy Brecount White
The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes from an Accidental Ranch Wife, Ree Drummond
The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #1), Rick Riordan
*Cabin Fever: Notes from a Part-Time Pioneer, William L. Sullivan
Anastasia Krupnik, Lois Lowry
Quaking, Kathryn Erskine
The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott, Kelly O. McNees
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Philip Pullman
The Town That Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food, Ben Hewitt
*Mockingbird, Kathryn Erskine
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Seth Grahame-Smith
Shadow Tag, Louise Erdrich
Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany, Bill Buford
Love is the Higher Law, David Levithan
House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest, Craig Childs
Heat, Mike Lupica
For The Win, Cory Doctorow
Red Inferno: 1945: A Novel, Robert Conroy
Bamboo People, Mitali Perkins
Anything But Typical, Nora Raleigh Baskin
Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women, Harriet Reisen
Cracked Up to Be, Courtney Summers
The Ask and the Answer (Chaos Walking, #2), Patrick Ness
The Knife of Never Letting Go (Chaos Walking, #1), Patrick Ness
The Drifters, James A. Michener
The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, Jacqueline Kelly
Thy Kingdom Connected: What the Church Can Learn from Facebook, the Internet, and Other Networks, Dwight J. Friesen
The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, Katherine Howe
Alcott in Her Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates, Daniel Shealy
Live Sent: you are a letter, Jason C Dukes
Genius of Common Sense, Glenna Lang
Jenny Kimura, Betty Cavanna
How to Hook a Hottie, Tina Ferraro
*Crush It!: Why Now Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion, Gary Vaynerchuk
The Dead-Tossed Waves (The Forest of Hands and Teeth, #2), Carrie Ryan
Restoring Harmony, Joelle Anthony
Elske (Kingdom, #4), Cynthia Voigt
What I Saw And How I Lied, Judy Blundell
*When You Reach Me, Rebecca Stead
One True Thing, Anna Quindlen
The Glory Cloak: A Novel of Louisa May Alcott and Clara Barton, Patricia O'Brien
Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, Francine Prose
Hungry City, Carolyn Steel
Lips Touch: Three Times, Laini Taylor
The Sixty-Eight Rooms, Marianne Malone
Bicycle Diaries, David Byrne
Crunch, Leslie Connor
Tin Lizzie, Allan Drummond
I Am the Ice Worm, Maryann Easley
Sweet Treats & Secret Crushes, Lisa Greenwald
Zombies vs. Unicorns, Holly Black & Justine Larbalestier
*The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times, Carol Deppe
White Sands, Red Menace, Ellen Klages
Edges, Léna Roy
The House of Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Agnes Grey, Anna Brontë
The Abbot's Ghost, Louisa May Alcott
The Sleeper Awakes, H.G. Wells
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Brontë
Origin, J.A. Konrath

Mock Newbery in Oregon

2010-12-17T20:31:00.001-08:00

I just came across this in my local newspaper -- a group of kids at Boones Ferry Primary in Wilsonville, OR (near Portland), have chosen Out of My Mind as their Mock Newbery winner. There's also a nice picture in which they're all holding up books (presumably their individual favorites?).

I haven't read Out of My Mind. What say you?

Reflections on the 2010 National Book Awards (YPL)

2010-11-27T18:01:00.000-08:00

I've finally finished reviewing all five of the 2010 National Book Award finalists in Young People's Literature. Yes, I did read them all before the award ceremony! But I didn't get my review of Ship Breaker posted until yesterday.

Naturally, I'm thrilled that Mockingbird won. Of the five books, the two I rated most highly were Mockingbird and Lockdown (both got five of five stars on Goodreads). I gave four stars to both One Crazy Summer and Ship Breaker, and three stars to Dark Water.

Mockingbird is still my favorite, mainly because I think Kathy Erskine nailed the voice of Caitlin, an eleven-year-old with Asperger's Syndrome, as well as the reactions of the people around her.

One Crazy Summer and Mockingbird are both being discussed as Newbery contenders on Heavy Medal. However, the guidelines and criteria for the National Book Award are very different from those for the Newbery Medal. The NBA is awarded by a panel of authors, who are allowed to make up their own criteria, while the Newbery Medal is decided by a committee of librarians, who are given very strict criteria. So winning the NBA doesn't make Mockingbird a favorite for the Newbery; in fact, One Crazy Summer seems to be holding that position.

So what's next? I may read a few other Newbery contenders, but as we're heading into the holiday season, I have no formal plans.

Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi

2010-11-26T20:15:00.000-08:00

This is the fifth and final installment of Kathleen's reviews of the 2010 National Book Award finalists in Young People's Literature.

Ship Breaker is a dystopian novel, set in a post-oil future. Oil is scarce, and the earth is showing the effects of climate change (New Orleans is all or mostly underwater). The rich have developed alternative travel technology in the form of fast-moving clipper ships, but naturally these are only available to the rich.

The poor, like Nailer, live in squats, camps and shacks, and earn a bare living doing salvage work or working in shipyards. And the workers aren't much better off than slaves. Nailer's job is to scavenge copper wire from wrecked and abandoned oil tankers in the Gulf of Mexico. But a "city-killer" hurricane leads him to a clipper ship, a girl, and adventure.

The book is fast-moving and cinematic. Bacigalupi's descriptions of Nailer's adventures would fit right into an action movie. It's also suspenseful and kept me reading.

Bacigalupi has a sequel on the way, titled The Drowned Cities. It's due out in 2011.

One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia

2010-10-29T19:10:00.000-07:00

This is the fourth of Kathleen's reviews of the 2010 National Book Award finalists in Young People's Literature.

As you may have heard, One Crazy Summer is the story of three sisters who are sent to spend a month with their mother, in Oakland, California, in 1968. Their mother doesn't seem to particularly want them there, so she has them spend their days at a Black Panther day camp. In day camp, the children learn "Power to the people"-style slogans, make "Free Huey" posters, and post flyers for a big Black Panther rally, which is the climax of the book.

The story is told through the older sister, Delphine, who is the only one old enough to remember their mother at all (she was four or five when her mother left them). She's eleven in the book.

It was a quick read for me; I think it's well-paced for middle grade children. The period details are good, but not overwhelming -- the focus is really on the story, and the mother and children finally coming to terms with each other. Delphine's voice is well done; she's an eleven-year-old who's had to grow up too quickly and help take care of her sisters, but she still has the emotional maturity of an eleven-year-old.

I also thought the development of Cecile/Nzila was well done. She's totally off-putting at first. I wondered what in the world their father was thinking, sending them out there. And she doesn't change that much during the book. But there are little things along the way. She starts accommodating the children in small ways: giving them a radio, letting Fern into the kitchen to cook, and getting a stool for Fern to sit on in the kitchen. And more. It's subtle, and gradual, and she's not a completely different person at the end of the book. But she has made a little bit of room for the children in her heart, and (one hopes) in her life.

I've noticed elsewhere that people have nitpicked on the geographical details. I've lived in Oakland, and felt like the atmosphere described in the book fit. The geographical details are fairly vague (or renamed, or made up; I'm not sure), and this was well before I lived there, so I never placed the story in any particular location in my head.

Overall: excellent story and writing. I can see why it's in the award-watch category.

Sweet dreams

2010-10-26T06:48:00.000-07:00

Last night I went in my daughter's room to tuck her in and turn out the light. She had started a new book.

"The animals can talk, in Narnia," she said thoughtfully. "The beavers can. And going through the wardrobe is cool."

Lockdown by Walter Dean Myers

2010-10-25T21:35:00.000-07:00

This is the third of Kathleen's reviews of the 2010 National Book Award finalists in Young People's Literature.

I had never read anything by Walter Dean Myers before, despite his award-winning status, so I really had no idea what to expect from Lockdown.

This book took me into another world, but not a fantasy, sci-fi, or dystopian post-apocalyptic world. It's the world of a juvenile detention center, and a world where violence, drug use and drug-dealing are common. And yes, it is also a world of mostly non-white people.

The blurb says "Lockdown explores an unlikely friendship between fourteen-year-old Progress inmate Reese and a man he meets through his work program at a local senior citizens’ home. " However, this is only part of the story. Myers shows us the violence inside the detention center, the cluelessness, cynicism, and cruelty of several adults there, and the cycle that keeps so many detainees coming back into the prison system.

Reese matures in this book, but at a reasonable pace. He starts figuring out what he needs to do to stay straight on the outside, but he doesn't have it all together by the end of the book. And he makes plenty of mistakes throughout.

Interestingly, the adults in the book grow, too. Mr. Hooft at the senior citizens' home at first fears Reese, because he is African American and an inmate, but learns to accept him and perhaps call him friend. Mr. Pugh, a guard, is a bully at first, but becomes friendlier later. And other adults who seem to think there's no hope for Reese begin to come around, too. I think this adds a lot to the book.

Lockdown is rich with detail and action. When I finished reading it, I actually went straight back to the beginning and read the first few chapters over again, because I felt like I hadn't gotten everything out of them the first time. If I didn't have several more books to read, I might have read it straight through again!

I think this book might be a keeper -- I'd like to read it again and get to know it better. Definitely award-worthy.

Dark Water by Laura McNeal

2010-10-21T21:01:00.000-07:00

This is the second of Kathleen's reviews of the 2010 National Book Award finalists in Young People's Literature.

Fifteen-year-old Pearl is the child of recently divorced parents, pretty much abandoned by her father. She and her mother are economically destitute, living in a cottage on her uncle's avocado ranch in southern California while her mom earns money as a substitute teacher.

Pearl falls in luuuuuuv with an undocumented immigrant ranch worker and starts making all the wrong choices, one of which leads to someone's death.

The book is well-written, and there are some gems, like this:

I've always been suspicious of those who say, Things happen for a reason and What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. things happen all the time for no reason at all, and what doesn't kill you scares you witless.

But Pearl drove me nuts a lot of the time. She's selfish and petulant. Like a teenager, which she is. But her realisticness was annoying rather than endearing. Maybe a teenager reading this would see it differently?

I can see that Dark Water is well done. I just didn't enjoy it enough to say "Yes, this is one of the best books of the year."

National Book Award Finalists, 2010

2010-10-14T21:19:00.001-07:00

Back in March, I reviewed a new book called Mockingbird, by Kathryn Erskine. I loved it, and my 10-year-old daughter loved it, and I said

I'm predicting that MOCKINGBIRD will be one of the best middle-grade/YA novels of the year.

So I'm very excited to share that Mockingbird is now a finalist for the National Book Award in Young People's Literature!

The other finalists include:

Ship Breaker, Paolo Bacigalupi
Dark Water, Laura McNeal
Lockdown, Walter Dean Myers
One Crazy Summer, Rita Williams-Garcia

I haven't read any of the others. I've heard a lot of buzz about One Crazy Summer, and I do have it on my to-read list. I think I'll add the others, read 'em, and report back. The National Book Awards Dinner and Ceremony is on November 17, so I've got a month!

Has anyone else read any of these books? Do you have a favorite in this race?

Uncle Hobart will never be the same

2010-07-27T13:35:00.000-07:00

Since I am now 34 and not nine years old, and since I just went to see Ramona and Beezus, I've been pondering the question below. Please vote, and feel free to comment with casting suggestions. As I looked over my bookshelves I thought, "Hmm... Uncle Pin, as played by Sean Connery?"

Which book dad would be most hot in the movie version?customer surveys

Killer Cows, by D.M. Anderson

2010-06-23T19:16:00.000-07:00

Killer Cows is the first novel from D.M. Anderson, a middle school language arts teacher in Portland, Oregon. It’s published by Echelon Press, a smaller publisher, and currently available as an e-book. The paperback version is scheduled to be out in August 2010.

Randy Meyer and his mother have recently moved to fictional Satus Creek, Oregon from Portland. They’ve moved around a lot because of difficult financial circumstances, and Randy hates being the new kid.

But then a meteor crashes on a nearby farm, and a mysterious cow starts trying to run down the town bully…and then the world. And only Randy and his friends can stop them!

Killer Cows was really fun to read, despite my not being an adolescent boy. Yes, there is fart-joke humor, but it’s not the focus of the book. It’s just a fast-moving, fun story that young people will enjoy.

Now. If you’re nit-picky like me, you’ll notice that this book could have used more careful editing. I’m figuring this has something to do with the small publisher. It’s worth overlooking the errors.

I think this book will be most enjoyable for ages 9 and up, but like I said, it was fun for me to read, too. I look forward to reading more books from Mr. Anderson.

Killer Cows is available now for Kindle and in other e-book formats, and it's only $2.99!

Read my interview with author D.M. Anderson at ParkroseGateway.com.

Book Challenge Update: The Sixty-Eight Rooms and Wrap-Up

2010-06-06T22:12:00.000-07:00

Technically I have another hour left in my 48, but I'm going to close my 48-hour Book Challenge after this post.

But first, The Sixty-Eight Rooms. Ruthie and Jack discover a magical key that allows them to shrink down to five inches tall and explore the Thorne Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago. I haven't seen the real thing, but this is a real exhibit -- sixty-eight perfectly detailed, miniature rooms representing various countries and historical periods.

Of course, there are similar books already out there -- From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Night at the Museum both come to mind, as well as The Diamond in the Window, which has kids both shrinking to dollhouse size and entering other time periods. But it's still a well-told and engaging story.

Now for the statistics.

Since last post: Time spent reading, 2 hours, 15 minutes. Time spent blogging: 10 minutes.

Total accumulated time: 15 hours, 35 minutes.

Number of books read: 4 entire novels. 1/3 of Unwind, which I had started reading before. One chapter of a non-fiction book. One poem and several speeches/scenes from Shakespeare.

I love to read, but I have to admit that this was pushing it a bit for me. Maybe if I'd spread it out a little more, it would have helped. It's weird, because most weekends I'm wishing I could just sit around and read. I guess all I really want is a few solid hours, and maybe I can make room for that.

Book Challenge Update: Wintergirls

2010-06-06T19:46:00.000-07:00

I've just emerged from another world, and feel as though I'm still waking up.

Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson takes you inside the mind of an anorexic 18-year-old, and it's a frightening trip. Definitely well done, although the frequent use of strikeout-text annoyed me (it annoys me on the internet, too).

I'm afraid I stopped to nap after an hour of reading this. But after the nap, my 10-year-old asked about the quotation "something wicked this way comes" which she saw used in Harry Potter movie preview. I pulled out our complete Shakespeare, and we read the "double, double, toil and trouble" scene from Macbeth, as well as several other famous scenes and speeches from Shakespeare. And we read the poem "The Phoenix and the Turtle" to see what that was about (we're still not sure).

And then I finished Wintergirls. Wow.

Since last post: Time spent reading Wintergirls, 3 hours. Time spent reading Shakespeare: 20 minutes. Time spent blogging: 10 minutes.

Total accumulated time: 13 hours, 10 minutes.

Book Challenge Update: Calpurnia Tate

2010-06-06T12:14:00.000-07:00

I'd seen a few discussions of The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate prior to reading this book. It's slightly controversial because of its use of the terms quadroon and octoroon.

I do agree with Laurie that seeing quadroon on the second page of the book was surprising, and it didn't seem necessary there. The words are presumably used to provide cultural context for 1899 Texas. Octoroon seems more in context in the following passage, and quadroon might have fit in better here. Viola, by the way, is the family's cook.

Viola's skin was no darker than mine at the end of summer, although she was careful to stay out of the sun, while I didn't care. She was only one fourth Negro, but that made her the same as full- blooded. I guess she could have "passed" in Austin, but that was a terribly risky business. If the passer was unmasked, it could result in a beating or jail or even worse. An octoroon woman in Bastrop had passed and married a white farmer. Three years later, he discovered her birth certificate in a trunk and pitch-forked her to death. He only served ten months in the county jail.

Was either term necessary? Maybe not. But it does help paint a picture of the time Calpurnia lived in, which placed limits on people of color as well as on girls and women. And Calpurnia's story is about how she deals with those limits. Calpurnia is interested in (and talented in) Science, not in the housewifely arts she is expected to learn. And she doesn't really come to any resolution about this -- at the end of the story, we're still left with her parents expecting her to be like other girls, and Calpurnia not liking this. But Calpurnia's grandfather encourages her and teaches her, so perhaps there is hope for her. I'd like to see a sequel.

Since last post: Reading time, 2 hours, 45 minutes. Blogging time: 15 minutes.

Total accumulated time: 9 hours, 40 minutes.

Book Challenge Update: The Dead-Tossed Waves

2010-06-06T08:52:00.000-07:00

The Dead-Tossed Waves (by Carrie Ryan) has been on my Goodreads list for a long time, so of course I have no idea how it got there. And it turns out that it's a sequel to The Forest of Hands and Teeth, although I think it held up well by itself.

In this story, humans have learned to live in and protect themselves from a world infested with zombies. But Gabry finds herself repeatedly leaving the protection of her walled town, eventually leaving for good, and having a couple of romances along the way.

I put in 3 hours, fifteen minutes on The Dead-Tossed Waves, and now I've moved on the The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, which has also been on my Goodreads list forever. Apparently this book is somewhat controversial. I'm actually enjoying it. I read it for an hour last night and I'm going to pick it up again now.

Since last post: Reading time: 4 hours, 15 minutes. Blogging/networking time: 10 minutes.

Total accumulated time: 6 hours, 40 minutes

Book Challenge Update: Time for New Material

2010-06-05T19:00:00.000-07:00

So I've been reading this book I'm supposed to review for a different blog, which has a rather long and interesting title:

Who Really Goes to Hell?

THE GOSPEL YOU'VE NEVER HEARD

What a Protestant Bible written by Jews says about
God’s work through Christ

(A book for those in the church and those offended by it)

However, it took me nearly an hour to read nineteen pages plus a foreword. It's interesting and makes sense, but it's also dense and more difficult to read. And it's a PDF on my computer, which is also harder for me to read. So I think I'm gonna switch it up and read some of my library books instead.

I also have few remaining responsibilities for the evening, so I can devote myself to books.

Time reading since last post: 50 minutes. Time blogging: 15 minutes (2 entries). Total accumulated time: 2 hours, 5 minutes.

Book Challenge Update: Unwind

2010-06-05T10:12:00.000-07:00

Just so you know, I'm not taking this super-seriously. I just looked at someone else's posts which detailed their hours spent reading and then writing about the books, and I'm just not going to go into that much detail. I'm also not going to spend every waking hour on this. But I will be reading!

Unwind was a really good story. It's about a future in which people can send unwanted teenagers to be harvested for body parts, and in which there is a huge market for such parts. Basically, people just replace broken body parts instead of attempting to heal them. If you break an arm, you can just get a new one instead of having a cast put on. Bald? No problem. Get a new scalp.

The story follows three characters: Connor, whose parents are sending him to be "unwound" for being unruly, Risa, who is a ward of the state and is being unwound to save money, and Lev, who is being "tithed" by his super-religious family.

At first it seems rather ludicrous -- after all, what kind of parent would really give up their teenager, no matter how unruly, to be unwound? But there is an explanation for how all of this came about. And I'm not going to tell you what that is, because that's part of the book -- things get revealed.

Reading time last night: 1 hour. No, it didn't take me an hour to read -- I was already 2/3 through it.

48 Hour Book Challenge

2010-06-04T23:19:00.001-07:00

Okay! I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna read as much as I can for 48 hours (like I don't do that anyway). Check it out over on MotherReader. Heck, you can probably still sign up yourself!

I'll be working around a softball game and other normal family activities, but I'll keep you updated on the books I'm reading. Tonight I'm reading Unwind by Neal Shusterman.

Official starting time: Friday, June 4 at 11:24 p.m.

The Clearing by Heather Davis

2010-05-29T22:29:00.000-07:00

Amy has recently ended an abusive relationship, and is being sent away from her hometown, Seattle, to live with her aunt in a small, rural town in Washington state. She’s not too sure about the other kids in town, but just before school starts, she meets a boy she does like, out in the back of her aunt’s farm somewhere.

And it turns out that Henry really isn’t like those other kids. He doesn’t show up in school, because he’s actually stuck in a little pocket of 1944 that’s hiding on Aunt Mae's land.

But Amy doesn’t spend all her time with Henry. She’s also re-learning how to interact with kids her own age, especially boys, with whom she is naturally skittish.

I won’t spoil the ending, but it was satisfying. I really liked this book and stayed up late to finish reading it. Definitely recommend!

Find out more about author Heather Davis at her website.
This review is part of an ARC tour through Around the World Tours.

Forget-Her-Nots by Amy Brecount White

2010-05-19T20:43:00.000-07:00

The blurb:

When someone leaves three mystery flowers outside her dorm door,Laurel thinks that maybe the Avondale School isn’t so awful after all — until her own body starts to freak out. In the middle of her English presentation on the Victorian Language of Flowers, strange words pop into her head, and her body seems to tingle and hum. Impulsively, Laurel gives the love bouquet she made to demonstrate the language to her spinster English teacher. When that teacher unexpectedly and immediately finds romance, Laurel suspects that something — something magical — is up. With her new friend, Kate, she sets out to discover the origins and breadth of her powers by experimenting on herself and others. But she can’t seem to find any living experts in the field of flower powers to guide her. And her bouquets don’t always do her bidding, especially when it comes to her own crush, Justin. Rumors about Laurel and her flowers fly across campus, and she’s soon besieged by requests from girls — both friends and enemies — who want their lives magically transformed — just in time for prom.

Another blurb on the cover of Forget-Her-Nots says something about Laurel discovering that she's part of a "secret society" of people who know the language of flowers. My daughter read that and immediately asked "How can someone be part of a society without even knowing it?" I promptly replied "Harry Potter, hello?"And there are similarities -- Laurel's attending boarding school, and learning her own brand of magic. But instead of attending a school for magical people, she's learning her magic in the midst of the Muggles.

Laurel's a freshman in this book, but boys and girls from all years of high school (as well as adults) are part of the story. It will probably appeal most to girls ages 12 and up.

I enjoyed reading the story, as well as learning a bit more about the Victorian language of flowers, which was actually used in the 19th century to convey messages to friends and romantic interests. You might recall the words Ophelia used in Hamlet: "There's rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray, love, remember: and there is pansies. that's for thoughts." Shakespeare wrote that long before the Victorian era, but the meanings remained and are included in Forget-Her-Nots. And in Louisa May Alcott's Jo's Boys, she has Demi propose to Alice using roses, and Alice gives her response accordingly. So the idea of using flowers to convey feelings and messages was both familiar and charming.

Amy Brecount White lives in Arlington, Virginia with her husband, three kids and Jessie the Wonder Dog. Forget-Her-Nots is her first novel.

This review is part of an ARC tour through Around the World Tours.

Restoring Harmony by Joëlle Anthony

2010-04-17T20:31:00.000-07:00

Heading off on her own to a big American city might have been a fun adventure for sixteen-year-old Molly McClure in the good old days before the Collapse, when nearly all the oil ran out; but in 2041, when family calamities strike all at once and Molly must leave her isolated farming island in Canada for the very first time, the world she meets is anything but fun.

Hey! Peak oil is one of my, er, favorite subjects. Not that I want us to run out of oil, just that I think it’s a real possibility. So of course, a fictional treatment of the situation intrigued me. Author Joëlle Anthony is also a former schoolmate; we attended the same high school in Portland, Oregon.

Restoring Harmony follows Molly from her home in Canada to the Portland area; her grandparents live in Gresham, just outside Portland. Molly has to travel alone to Portland because her grandmother has been ill, but due to spotty telecommunications, they don’t know whether she’s still alive or whether her grandparents need help. And Molly’s mother is nearing the end of a high-risk pregnancy and the local doctor has died, so they want her grandfather, also a doctor, to move to the island to help out.

This novel is full of action, as Molly moves from one crisis to the next. Sometimes it feels like the crises are resolved too quickly and easily; I would have been happy to delve further into the problems of a post-oil world, although the pacing may work just fine for young adult readers.

Anthony’s detail and description are very good; her descriptions of Portland are spot-on. In fact, a day after reading this novel, I rode MAX (the local light rail system) into downtown, and seeing all of the graffiti and damaged or abandoned buildings along the rail line, it wasn’t hard to imagine Portland descending into disrepair pretty quickly, something like this:

From the wide windows I could see an old highway on one side, rutted with potholes and so overgrown that saplings had struggled through the cracks. A few people walked along it, and I saw a couple of carts and horses, and more cyclists than we have on our entire island.

Another thing I appreciated about this novel is that it doesn’t involve teenage sexual activity, which seems to be a feature of so many contemporary young adult novels. There is a romance, but the focus of the story is on the action – getting to Portland, getting food and money, getting back to Canada.

Restoring Harmony is a good first novel. Again, I’d like to see Anthony go a little deeper into the crises, and not resolve things so easily (one technology solution in particular made me uneasy; as a sci-fi reader it didn’t seem plausible to me). But it’s an enjoyable read, and I would recommend it especially to young adults who like reading about dystopian futures.

Restoring Harmony will be released May 13, 2010, and is currently available for pre-order. This review is part of an ARC tour through Around the World Tours.

Predictions

2010-04-02T06:14:00.000-07:00

This week I've been visiting my sister Wendy (we live far apart) so we had the pleasure of discussing the Fuse #8 Top 100 Children's Novels countdown each morning. (Before I got to Wendy's, I was in Portland, where I spent an afternoon exploring Beverly Cleary's neighborhood with my mom, sister Kathleen, and eldest niece. My family is pretty great.) Last night we came up with what we are absolutely certain will be 1-7 (though we are not certain about the order). Anything else we will consider a major upset.

From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (#5)
The Giver (which was indeed #7 this morning)
A Wrinkle in Time (#2)
Holes (#6)
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (#3)
Charlotte's Web (#1)
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (#4)

I have read and liked all of these books (two of them, Mixed-up Files and Wrinkle, were on the top ten list I submitted), so I'm OK with this list. But Wendy and I were feeling melancholy over the books that are not on the Top 100 list at all, such as Anastasia Krupnik (which is, at least, referred to in the post about The Giver) and Wendy's beloved The Diamond in the Window.

Here's the updated complete list of what's in the Top 100 so far.

Mockingbird by Kathryn Erskine

2010-03-24T16:51:00.000-07:00

MOCKINGBIRD is due out April 15, 2010, and is currently available for pre-order. This review is part of an ARC tour from Around the World Tours.

Caitlin is a ten-year-old girl with Asperger’s syndrome. She’s recently lost her older brother, and she lives with only her father (her mother also died, of cancer, several years previously). Devon's room, all of his things, and his unfinished Eagle Scout project are still in the house, and Caitlin and her father are still haunted by The Day Our Life Fell Apart. This book is about Caitlin’s search for Closure for herself and for her father.

Author Kathryn Erskine does a beautiful job of immersing the reader in what it is like to be Caitlin. You’ve heard that an author should show, not tell? This book is a perfect example; rather than telling us what it’s like to have Asperger’s syndrome, Erskine puts the reader squarely inside Caitlin, while also showing us the reactions of people around her.

I also like that neither Caitlin nor the other characters are perfect. They are flawed human beings that the reader can relate to. While understanding Caitlin’s point of view did make me sympathetic toward her, there were also times when I could sympathize more with the other characters’ frustrations with her! But those other characters, especially the adults, also have flaws. They don’t always Get It when Caitlin is trying to communicate. Caitlin’s father sometimes behaves selfishly in his own grief.

My ten-year-old daughter also read MOCKINGBIRD and enjoyed it. While she couldn’t tell me anything in particular that she liked, I can tell you that she read it in one sitting and complained when I interrupted her reading for dinner.

I'm predicting that MOCKINGBIRD will be one of the best middle-grade/YA novels of the year. It’s already been nominated for the ALA/YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults list. I think it’s really a middle-grade novel (the publisher has it marked for ages 10 and up), although young adults will enjoy it, too.

According to Erskine, this book was inspired both by her daughter, who has Asperger’s syndrome, and by her own reaction to the 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech.

“In the aftermath of this tragedy, Kathryn was driven to understand how community and family – particularly families with special needs children – dealt with this violent event, and how our lives might be different if we understood each other better.”

Ms. Erskine was kind enough to answer a few questions for me by email; here is the interview.

You really immerse us in how Caitlin, a girl with Asperger's syndrome, sees, hears, and feels the world. I know you have a daughter with Asperger's, but did you do anything else to help you get inside that point of view?

Yes, I read LOTS of books on Asperger's, researched, observed, took workshops, etc. I do that in all my writing. I have two dozen books and maps of Medieval England and Scotland on my desk right now for one novel, and all kinds of details of my own town's recent history, including first-person accounts, scattered around my feet for another novel. It's important to me to be able to tell a story as authentically as possible.

My ten-year-old daughter also read MOCKINGBIRD. She would like to know why the dialogue is written in italics, instead of with quotation marks.

I did that because my own daughter had no use for conventions like punctuation, spelling, or capitalization norms. I wanted to mirror the way she described her world as well as how she saw her world. In fact, I started writing the manuscript with random capital letters in the middle of sentences and lower case letters at the beginning of sentences but it really was too confusing for most of us to be able to follow! I compromised by using no quotations and no punctuation except periods (and commas only to introduce dialog). I felt that making it a little bit difficult or odd for the reader would help bring home the point that people with Asperger's experience differences in every aspect of their lives.

Which is your favorite scene in the book?

That's a tough one, but I think it's the scene in the cafeteria when Caitlin is trying to make friends. It shows how awkwardly she comes across but how difficult it is for her to communicate the way kids generally do.

You were a lawyer before you were an author. When and how did you know you wanted to switch?

My mother died when she was right around retirement age. She'd always wanted to write and she wrote beautifully. I'd always thought I'd wait until retirement to write seriously. I realized that if you really want to do something, you should do it right away -- like today.

What are you working on now?

I just finished the edits on my next book, THE ABSOLUTE VALUE OF MIKE, which comes out in the summer of 2011. I'm working on several projects: a middle grade novel dealing with endemic racism, a middle grade adventure set in the Middle Ages, and a contemporary novel about a girl and neighborhood adjusting to tough economic times--as well as a picture book and a novel for adults. There's so much to write about and I have at least a half dozen more partially written novels--I just haven't figured out how to squeeze more hours in the day!

Kathryn Erskine is also the author of Quaking. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with her husband, two children, and dog Maxine.

Top 100 Children's Novels from Fuse #8

2010-03-12T06:06:00.000-08:00

NYPL children's librarian Betsy Bird is counting down the Top 100 Children's Novels on her blog, Fuse #8. I really wanted to see a simple list all in one place; figuring others would like the same, I typed it in here. Comments are turned off on this post, as it is for information only. To discuss, please visit Fuse #8.

1. Charlotte's Web
2. A Wrinkle in Time
3. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
4. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
5. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
6. Holes
7. The Giver
8. The Secret Garden
9. Anne of Green Gables
10. The Phantom Tollbooth
11. The Westing Game
12. The Hobbit
13. Bridge to Terabithia
14. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
15. Because of Winn-Dixie
16. Harriet the Spy
17. Maniac Magee
18. Matilda
19. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
20. Tuck Everlasting
21. The Lightning Thief
22. The Tale of Despereaux
23. Little House in the Big Woods
24. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
25. Little Women
26. Hatchet
27. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
28. A Little Princess
29. The Dark Is Rising
30. Winnie-the-Pooh
31. Half Magic
32. Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
33. James and the Giant Peach
34. The Watsons Go to Birmingham, 1963
35. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
36. Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret
37. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
38. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
39. When You Reach Me
40. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
41. The Witch of Blackbird Pond
42. Little House on the Prairie
43. Ramona the Pest
44. Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing
45. The Golden Compass
46. Where the Red Fern Grows
47. Bud, Not Buddy
48. The Penderwicks
49. Frindle
50. Island of the Blue Dolphins
51. The Saturdays
52. The Invention of Hugo Cabret
53. The Wind in the Willows
54. The BFG
55. The Great Gilly Hopkins
56. Number the Stars
57. Ramona Quimby, Age 8
58. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase
59. Inkheart
60. The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle
61. Stargirl
62. The Secret of the Old Clock
63. Gone-Away Lake
64. A Long Way from Chicago
65. Ballet Shoes
66. Henry Huggins
67. Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher
68. Walk Two Moons
69. The Mysterious Benedict Society
70. Betsy-Tacy
71. The Bad Beginning
72. My Father's Dragon
73. My Side of the Mountain
74. The Borrowers
75. Love That Dog
76. Out of the Dust
77. The City of Ember
78. Johnny Tremain
79. All-of-a-Kind Family
80. The Graveyard Book
81. Where the Mountain Meets the Moon
82. The Book of Three
83. The Thief
84. The Little White Horse
85. On the Banks of Plum Creek
86. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
87. The View from Saturday
88. The High King
89. Ramona and Her Father
90. Sarah, Plain and Tall
91. Sideways Stories from the Wayside School
92. Ella Enchanted
93. Caddie Woodlawn
94. Swallows and Amazons
95. Pippi Longstocking
96. The Witches
97. The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane
98. Children of Green Knowe
99. The Indian in the Cupboard
100. The Egypt Game

The Frog Scientist by Pamela S. Turner

2010-02-22T17:53:00.000-08:00

Back in January, as Wendy was in the throes of Cybils judging, she emailed me, "You should read The Frog Scientist. You will really dig the protagonist."

I was delighted to hear that The Frog Scientist won the Cybils Award for Middle Grade/Young Adult nonfiction, even though I hadn't read it yet; I had faith in my sister's good judgment. I read The Frog Scientist, written by Pamela S. Turner, photographed by Andy Comins, this past week and oh, I loved it!

Part of the Scientists in the Field series from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, The Frog Scientist gives a close-up (very froggy) view into the life of biologist Tyrone Hayes. Hayes and his students at Berkeley move between pond and lab as they study the effects of atrazine (a pesticide commonly used in the U.S.) on frogs.

"Watch out, they kill some frogs," my daughter solemnly warned her father when he picked up this book. While readers don't actually see the dissection, Turner describes in fascinating detail how the experiments are set up and conducted, including the removal of tiny, tiny kidneys and testes from young frogs in the lab.

Science teachers will rejoice in the clear, concise explanations of how a hypothesis, manipulated variable, responding variable, and control group are used in the real world.

Students will be fascinated by the photographs and descriptions of unusual, sometimes endangered or extinct, amphibians.

And everyone who loves books, like me, will thrill to the sight of Tyrone Hayes reading his children the book that started it all, a gift from his own mother when he was a little boy.

Thanks, Cybils panelists and judges, for sharing The Frog Scientist with all of us.

Cybils finalists for Non-Fiction Middle Grade & Young Adult Books

Complete list of Cybils winners

A New Kind of Book Order

2010-02-17T07:38:00.000-08:00

In the homework folder today: “Dear Families: Our school has the amazing opportunity to pilot a new book order through Dark Horse Comics. The books are all comic books and graphic novels. They range in price from $5 to $7. There is an order form on the back of this flyer.”

And from the order form: “At Picture Literacy, we know that comics make readers! Increasingly, educators worldwide are recognizing the graphic novel as a great way to reach at-risk and reluctant readers at a young age.”

My children are neither at-risk nor reluctant, but they do enjoy reading comics. Their father/my husband is a comic book aficionado, so he encourages it. Reading and discussing comics is a good bonding activity for them. And they don’t only read comics; they also read books far beyond their grade levels, so it doesn’t worry me at all.

I’m interested in this book order because Dark Horse is local to Portland, and because it’s something new and different (i.e., not Scholastic). I do like the idea of supporting a local company as well as the school.

The front of the order form features two children's series I haven't seen before: Johnny Boo and Korgi. Inside are more familiar titles: Star Wars, Bugs Bunny, Powerpuff Girls, Scooby Doo, Justice League, Teen Titans. Most of these aren't actually Dark Horse titles, so I suspect that Picture Literacy is some separate program that Dark Horse is working with (I can't find any information about it online).

The choices are limited. There are only twenty titles in all to choose from. I think we’d be more likely to buy in the future if we had more options, especially books for older and more advanced readers (or, you know, if we could buy Serenity books). We’ll probably order at least one or two books this time, to support the school and to see what the books are like.

What do you think about this type of book order? Would you support it at your school?

---

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jkannenberg/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Celebrate with Confetti Girl

2010-02-03T12:22:00.000-08:00

"It's exactly like Spanish class," I emailed my brother a little over a year ago from Oaxaca, Mexico, where I was spending Christmas. "I mean, people are literally running around hitting each other over the head with eggs full of confetti."

"REALLY?" he responded. We were surprised, and delighted.

Four of the six Burton siblings studied Spanish in high school. We succeeded in learning very little Spanish, but boy, did we learn a lot about La Llorona and pinatas and El Dia de los Muertos and... cascarones, the aforementioned eggs full of confetti, which feature prominently in the delightful Confetti Girl.

I enjoyed so many things about Confetti Girl that I've tried to write this review five times already today, because I couldn't figure out what to focus on. Like Kate Messner's The Brilliant Fall of Gianna Z, Confetti Girl stars a protagonist who is a smart-but-not-bookish girl. I don't think we could ever have enough of those in fiction aimed at middle school students.

In one of my favorite scenes, protagonist Lina and her friend Vanessa sell cascarones at the school fair, which results in--naturally--confetti everywhere. It's a scene that's joyous and authentic, and it didn't surprise me when I found out that author Diana Lopez teaches middle school. But for all its joie-de-vivre, Confetti Girl never descends to High School Musical-level hokiness.

Or to Lurlene McDaniel maudlinness. Because, you see, it could have--Lina's mother died unexpectedly not long ago, and Lina's father shows signs of clinical depression, and Lina is in charge of cooking dinner every night, and she has to get help with buying "girl stuff" from her best friend's mother--do you feel like you read this book in middle school twenty years ago? It isn't like that, I promise.

In another parallel with Gianna Z, there's a lot going on in this book. The loss of a parent, single parenthood, early romance, middle school friendships, environmental science, sports, poor grades; but it is all woven together beautifully by Lopez, and infused in every part with Latino culture in a way that is neither forced nor didactic. It will not feel confusing to girls of other cultures, nor, I think, tiresome to the most culturally aware Latina girls.

You have kids waiting for Confetti Girl in your homes and your schools. It'd be an excellent choice for these mother-daughter book clubs I keep hearing about. And from the depths of my inexperience, I'm going to guess that it'd be a successful hand-sell.

Oh, how I wish this book had gotten some Pura Belpre recognition. It is full of life and pure joy.

Banning Knowledge

2010-01-26T13:23:00.000-08:00

You've all heard about this thing where a school has pulled the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary from its shelves, pending review, right?

This is ridiculous on so many counts, and I'm glad the school board members are speaking up and wondering where their voice is in this, but in a way this is hitting me more personally than some of the other book challenges and removals that have been publicized lately.

I DEPENDED on the dictionary when I was a kid. I grew up in a very modest kind of family where even the mildest of "bad" words were never heard and children didn't watch R-rated movies--usually even PG-13. To be honest, I liked it that way. My home seemed peaceful compared to many other homes I visited, and I wasn't forced to have embarrassing conversations with my parents.

But I did hear about things sometimes, in books, on TV, in school. Sometimes kids would be amused if I didn't know what something meant. Then it would turn out they didn't REALLY know, either.

I remember reading a children's book about the Salem witch trials; it mentioned that Abigail Williams grew up to be a prostitute. I could tell from context clues that this was something shocking, but I had no idea what it was. It sounded kind of like a lawyer (I knew the word "prosecute"). Maybe it was something that was considered a man's job in those times, like being a lawyer was. I remember innocently asking Laurie "What's a prostitute?".

Dead silence from the bottom bunk. "I think the dictionary could explain it better than I could," she said. And she reached for our paperback dictionary and read the definition aloud. I got the picture, although I had never heard of such a thing. We both continued reading. Embarrassing conversation smartly averted.

After that, I remember turning to the dictionary again whenever I needed to. My friend's sister called her a "lesbian". Those two were always having shouting matches and namecalling was a daily occurrence, but neither of us knew what this meant. Over the telephone, when my friend asked me if I knew, I looked it up in the dictionary. "A female homosexual," I said. Then I looked up "homosexual". We both thought this was a strange word to use as an insult against a ten-year-old girl, but at least we knew what it meant.

I looked up "condom" when I heard it used on the show Head of the Class (the first dictionary I checked, a children's dictionary, had only "condominium"; this was very confusing). And I looked up "oral sex" when I heard kids making jokes about it on the bus.

Why, why, why would people want to keep kids away from information? I can't understand it for a second. Usually I can at least see a smidgen of the other side's view. But it isn't like kids are going to be looking up "oral sex" if they haven't already heard of it. It isn't like the dictionary says something controversial. If a parent's relationship with a kid is such that they think the kid would (and should) come to them with a question about what oral sex is, that conversation isn't going to be derailed by the dictionary definition (for the record: "oral stimulation of the genitals").

"It's hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we'll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature," Cadmus [a district spokesperson] said.

************************************
Anyone else have "saved by dictionary" tales?

The 100 Best Kids' Books EVAR

2010-01-26T08:20:00.000-08:00

Blogger Betsy Bird is running a poll: What are the top 100 middle grade novels of all time?

Readers are invited to submit their top ten, ranked. There are some limitations and suggestions for determining age level; read the post, vote.

I've been working on my list all month. Well, not really. On the first day I brainstormed titles; on the second day I ranked and revised. I haven't looked at my list in weeks, and am amused to see how my list that I thought was totally objective was influenced by what I was reading and what people were talking about on Goodreads. I made some last minute changes.

My biggest problem was in sorting out what was young adult and what was middle grade. My standards for this are stricter than Betsy's, but I'm going to go by them, anyway. I went back and forth on The Witch of Blackbird Pond--then glanced at the comments just now and saw that others have the same question. Ultimately, I decided it was a young adult book and didn't include it. I disagree with a commenter who says it's not YA just because the characters are older and it really has a middle grade treatment; that's probably the kind of person who thinks there wasn't any YA until the 1970s. Or the 1990s.

I'm not going to tell you my list, but I'll tell you the following things:

1. One author is male, and nine are female.
2. All of the authors are white, which is sad, but reflects my childhood reading (that will come in a new post soon)
3. Two of the authors are Jewish; the rest are Protestants.
4. Bizarrely, eight of the ten are part of a series. I wonder what this says about me and my reading? I selected the books individually, not as "I love this series and I'm going to pick a book to represent it".
5. The oldest book was published in 1940. (Actually, two of them were.)
6. The newest book was published in 1978. Despite all the great books published during my lifetime, I believe in this list and would like to think nostalgia is only a small part of it. That was a Golden Age.
7. Three of the books won the Newbery Medal.
8. Eight of them should have. (Two of my choices I acknowledge as being not quite right for the Newbery.)
9. One of the books won a Newbery Honor.
10. The one book that is possibly, POSSIBLY a pure nostalgia pick is All-of-a-Kind Family.

Now, submit your own lists! Or just tell me in the comments what a couple of your choices would have been. Or both. Or speculate on what my list includes. (I think the clues above could make it pretty easy to figure out at least six, if you were dedicated.)

Reactions As They Happen

2010-01-18T05:42:00.000-08:00

6:43 Ignoring everyone on twitter except @ALAYMA for the mo--don’t want to miss anything, plus don’t want to affect my own thoughts.
6:45 Alex--have heard of more of these books this year; I wonder why?
6:47 Everyone cheers because they know what’s COMING…
6:50 Schneider, no surprises there… I read one person who detested the way Marcelo “portrayed the disability experience”, but only one. Congrats, Cheryl Klein!
6:54 CSK! I’m going to read all of these this year.
6:58 Curious how many illustrator awards have been for photography.
7:00 Isn’t that a surprise for the author award? Can’t remember hearing about that. Sounds interesting, though.
7:01 Sigh. Laurie sleeping through the YALSA awards. It’s 5:01 in Seattle AND it’s a holiday, why aren’t you AWAAAAKE?
7:02 Ooh, nonfiction author for Margaret Edwards, that should please a lot of people (I like his books too)
7:05 Flash Burnout, the one that takes place in Portland, right? Will definitely be reading.
7:08 Charles and Emma! Fascinating. Not on my Cybils shortlist. Enjoyed very much.
7:09 Printzy printzy printzy!
7:10 Charles and Emma again! A surprise, for me…
7:11 YEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAH! I was fairly crazy about Going Bovine. Already mourning Lips Touch and surprised about Marcelo, BUT.
7:12 (Laurie awake, yay)
7:15 Pura Belpre--will be reading all of these, too… Return to Sender, maybe? Though I didn’t like it much.
7:16 am a big Yuyi Morales fan, but who isn’t?
7:20 Two Diego books, nice (for me, I mean)
7:20 Return to Sender, yup yup
7:26 Um, Laurie says the publisher of the Newbery book just tweeted it. What up with that?
7:26 I have A Faraway Island in my TBR…
7:27 stupid social media, ruining everything.
7:28 Moonshot, one of my favorite books of the year!
7:28 if Claudette Colvin got an honor, then…
7:29 WHAAAAAT?
7:34 Knowing that Laurie knows who won the Newbery is SPOILING EVERYTHING. How many people in the audience are following twitter and already know?
7:35 Last year I had read more than three picture books. But I’ve heard of some…
7:36 at least one thing isn’t a surprise… clearly a VERY popular choice! Think that was the biggest cheer of the evening.
7:38 THANK GOODNESS. I WAS GOING TO SWEAR.
7:39 Hmm. Have read everything but Homer P. Figg. How is it I did better this year than last year? Last year I’d read, like, 40+ possibilities… maybe everyone did better at predicting this year.
7:40 STILL HOPE RANDOM HOUSE GETS IN TROUBLE FOR PRE-TWEETING.

Demand Diversity at Midwinter

2010-01-14T05:46:00.000-08:00

"Hi, I'm a middle school librarian, and I'm especially looking for fiction with multi-ethnic characters to share with my students."

Really, it wasn't a trick question. I wasn't a plant. Actually I was thrilled, beyond measure, to be at ALA Annual for the first time. I was over the moon as I walked around the exhibit floor, brushing past famous authors at every turn (Sarah Dessen! Sherman Alexie! Jacqueline Woodson! Laurie Halse Anderson! For a book lover, it was like being at the Academy Awards). And I wanted to bring something back to the 1000+ students in my diverse urban public school, so when I stopped at publisher booths I asked, "Could you please show me some books with multi-ethnic characters to share with my students?"

My request was greeted with polite puzzlement. Mildly frantic hunting around the booth. Offers of good middle-school titles about white main characters. The answer I remember most clearly came from the Penguin employee who thought hard for a moment, then said brightly, "What about NONfiction!" and presented me with an advance copy of Marching for Freedom.

I was pleased to have an ARC for Marching for Freedom. I purchased Marching for Freedom for my school library. But oh, what a disappointing response to my question.

Colleen Mondor's post Demand Diversity in Publishing is very timely, as ALA Midwinter begins this weekend. I hope ALA members and visitors will read my post, and hers, and start conversations on the exhibit floor. Every publisher will have at least one book to offer. Ask for more.

Look for some of the new books like Eighth-Grade Superzero (Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic) and One Crazy Summer (Amistad/HarperCollins). Then demand MORE.

***
At ALA Annual I went to a YALSA session called Strengthen Your YA Collection with Small Press/Diverse Publishers. I also looked for diverse publishers on the exhibit floor. Since Annual I've gotten some great book recommendations and resources from the e-newsletters, websites, and Twitter posts of these publishers. Take a look.

Pinata Books/Arte Publico Press (@artepublico)
Brown Barn Books
Cinco Puntos Press
Curbstone Press
Just Us Books
Lee & Low Books (@leeandlow)
Rolling Hills Press

Harlequin is not a small publisher, but I want to mention that they highlighted diverse books for teens at Annual with the Kimani TRU imprint.

Updating to add more publishers:
Charlesbridge Publishing
Groundwood Books
First Second Books (guess they're not a small publisher, but a photo on Fuse #8 from Midwinter reminded me how great they are and that they publish ethnically diverse graphic novels)
Tu Publishing (new, first books coming in 2010)

Bookstore Birthday

2010-01-09T16:56:00.000-08:00

University Book Store is where I learned to work in the world of children's books. As a parttime children's bookseller twelve years ago I learned, under the tutelage of professionals like Tonyia Vining and Duane Wilkins, about the world of books beyond just What I Like to Read--the world I live in now, as a middle school librarian.

University Book Store is where I buy my books. It's where I buy birthday presents, wedding presents, and new-baby gifts (wonderful board books, like Peek-a-Who by Nina Laden and Lola at the Library by Anna McQuinn).

University Book Store, which was already my favorite bookstore in Seattle, won my heart with its booksellers' devotion to recommending my husband's first book, Hungry Monkey, when it was published in 2009.

University Book Store is celebrating its 110th birthday. If you're in Seattle, the party is Sunday, January 10 (that's today, as I type) during store hours (12-5).

To celebrate UBS has published 110 stories, each 110 words long, by 110 local authors. A lot of great young adult and children's authors--Peg Kehret, Lensey Namioka, Deb Caletti, Chris Crutcher, Karen Cushman, Carl Deuker, and Justina Chen--contributed stories.When you buy a book by one of these authors (in store or online), you will receive your own copy of 110/110. Take a look online, or get your own copy of this unique collection. It's part of 110 years of encouraging, celebrating, and selling books by local authors and illustrators.

Great post from Bookstore People about University Book Store

HalfPintIngalls for a Shorty!

2010-01-08T21:43:00.000-08:00

It's no secret that we at Six Boxes of Books love @HalfPintIngalls from Twitter. Wendy has already interviewed Half Pint (and the interview was even linked on the Christian Science Monitor). And I've been plugging her over on Twitter itself ever since I discovered her. After all, who can resist gems like these?

"You really should follow @clothesline if you don't want to get lost out on the prairie in this blizzard. #FollowFriday"

"Just walked 160 acres for this stupid piece of candy. 160 acres until the next one. HATE trick-or-treating on the prairie."

And don't miss her Christmas wishing-list from Mr. Amazon's Mercantile.

Anyway, if you like @HalfPintIngalls too, here's something you can do: help nominate her for a Shorty Award!

No, it's not an award for short people (although our Half Pint would certainly qualify). The Shorty Awards honor "the best producers of short, real-time content" on Twitter. There are 27 official categories, such as Celebrity, Customer Service, Education, Food, Government, etc.

@HalfPintIngalls has been nominated for the Humor category, but she needs more nominations! This is how it works: Twitter users send nominations via Twitter. Sometime in February, the Shorty Awards people will determine the top five nomination-getters in each category, and these will be the finalists. The winners will then be chosen by a combination of popular vote and the choices of the Real-Time Academy of Short Form Arts and Sciences. Yes, there is such an academy. I did not make that up.

So, if you are a Twitter user and would like to nominate @HalfPintIngalls, just visit her Shorty Awards page. You can either tweet your nomination directly from that page, or copy and paste the text to your own Twitter client or web page. Be sure to include a reason after the "because..."; otherwise, your nomination won't count.

The competition is stiff, but as Half Pint herself said, "Out of all the folks up for 'Shorty Awards,' only ONE is as small as a half-pint of cider half-drunk up. I'M JUST SAYING."

Buzz Begets Buzz

2010-01-02T11:48:00.000-08:00

We were talking on Heavy Medal about which books might be getting overshadowed in the award discussions for one reason or another. Nina mentioned The Book of the Maidservant, which she hadn't heard talk about much of anywhere.

I first heard about this book in July at ALA, at the wonderful Random House presentation of books coming for fall. I seized a review copy eagerly afterward; I couldn't wait to read it. But it's been sitting in my to-be-read pile ever since. Why?

I'm sorry to say, folks, it's in large part because I put a lot of effort toward reading the books everyone else is talking about (or the books I think everyone might be talking about soon). I want to join in the conversation. And when I review a buzzed-about book, people respond more here. There's nothing wrong with that, in theory. But I think most bloggers do it... and what happens then? Books with buzz get more buzz. Books without buzz get left on the to-be-read pile. Even when I read a book that isn't getting a whole lot of attention--even if I LIKE it--sometimes I don't bother reviewing it, especially here (I review some books on Goodreads and not here).

What if I put that effort in another direction? There's still a dearth of books being published by and about people of color, and even more of a dearth of buzz about those books. As things stand, I'm missing a lot of those books.

It's going to be a struggle, but I'm going to try to do something different this year. Instead of making it my priority to read the books I hear about the most, I'm going to put the same amount of effort into reading books by authors who are people of color. I know I won't actually make a change in my reading unless I sacrifice something else for the sake of these books; I know it's unrealistic to think I'm going to read more and can just add those books to what I'm already reading. It wouldn't happen. So what you're going to see is a conscious effort (I hope and plan) to rechannel my energy into "books I really want to read, and books by authors of color"--instead of the current "books I really want to read, and the books everyone else is talking about" focus.

I've been debating for a while having a post-tag that links to my/our posts reviewing or discussing books with protagonists or authors who are people of color, but I've never done it because I wasn't sure how it would appear to others--I thought it might seem insensitive, or white-guilt induced. And I couldn't think of the right tag. But I think it will be necessary for this plan to have maximum effect. Should it just be "authors-of-color"? or "POC", and then include books I might read by white authors about people of color? Suggestions/comments needed.

I hope those of you who read our posts and then go put the books we review on hold, or on to-read on Goodreads (you've no idea how exciting it is to see that happen!), will be just as open to the books I review in the future. Thanks for reading, thanks for commenting, and I'm looking forward to this new year.

Cybils Shortlists: I Am Grumpy

2010-01-01T19:12:00.000-08:00

I can't help it, I'm grumpy about the number of my favorite books that didn't make the Cybils shortlists. I'm anticipatorily grumpy about the favorites that won't make the Newbery and Printz lists. It makes me want to make up my own thing where I choose my favorite books in each genre and tell you why they're so good...

...oh, right. That's my blog.

So while I'm very excited about starting the process of Cybils judging (I'm a judge for middle-grade/YA non-fiction, which is why you won't hear a word about that category here), I'm going to go ahead and write one-sentence reviews for the nominated books that I really, really wish had been in some of the categories.

Middle Grade Science Fiction/Fantasy
When You Reach Me, a time-travel-involving novel set beautifully in the New York of 1978-1979 that is probably one of the best books I've read in years.

Any Which Wall, a delightfully playful book about old-fashioned magic--what do YOU picture when I say someone is "the worst pirate in the world"?

The Magician's Elephant, a slight and fascinating dream-like novel that made me feel like I was back in Paris; "I intended only lilies" is one of my favorite lines of the year.

Young Adult Science Fiction/Fantasy
Shadowed Summer, which I would not have called SF/F at all because I pretty much believe in ghosts, and is a must-read for people who know middle-schoolers.

Fiction Picture Books
I don't really know the field that well this year, but I'm saddened by the absence of

Princess Hyacinth (The Surprising Tale of a Girl Who Floated), which is an impeccably written and illustrated funny fairy tale, even if it isn't quite right for either Newbery or Caldecott.

Middle-Grade Fiction
The Brilliant Fall of Gianna Z, a satisfyingly rich school story.

Young Adult Fiction
Going Bovine: trying to make sense of this entertaining road-trip story made me feel smarter than I am.

What I Saw and How I Lied: this absolutely splendid noir coming-of-age book was one of my favorites of "last" year, and I would recommend it unhesitatingly to everyone from my mom to my hipster friends.

I really, really pared that list down, and didn't include books that I thought were really good if I could maybe see how they didn't quite make the cut. And especially in the YA Fiction category, there were many books that I'm pretty sure I would have included in this list if I'd actually, you know, gotten around to reading them yet.

I never know quite what I want the Cybils books to be. I mean, on the one hand, I look to them to maybe recognize some books that aren't going to win the Newbery for one reason or another but "what they do, they do perfectly". On the other hand, if they DON'T include what is clearly... to me... the best book of the year, even if it probably WILL get other recognition--well, I wonder.

Now, I don't mean to criticize the first-round Cybils judges, even when I don't quite understand, but in the spirit of We Love Books, let's recognize the ones that aren't there. What books were you hoping to see on the list? What is, perhaps, a surprise omission--even if it isn't your favorite?

Virginia Lee Burton, My New BFF

2009-12-31T22:23:00.000-08:00

While Wendy’s busy eating Little House On the Prairie-style, I’ve been exploring another Little House author – Virginia Lee Burton of The Little House. I've also decided I want Virginia for my BFF.

Unfortunately, she was born in 1909 and died (of cancer) in 1968.

Burton was the author and illustrator of several classics of children’s literature; besides The Little House you might recognize Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and Katy and the Big Snow. I just finished reading her biography by Barbara Elleman – Virginia Lee Burton: A Life in Art.

I loved this book. I mentally hugged myself in delight the entire time I was reading it, and physically ached when it was over. I longed to go to school with Virginia, and to work with her at summer camp (yes, she really was a summer camp counselor). I wished I could learn design from her at Folly Cove. Folly Cove! That’s what her home was called.

The photographs and artwork included are superb. Burton herself was obviously both joyful and photogenic. The artwork includes familiar and less familiar illustrations from her books, concept sketches, and printed fabric pieces from her Folly Cove workshop, where she trained and worked with a large group of designers.

Oh, and there’s a photo of Burton with her sons, which shows the scenes the she painted or drew on their bedroom walls! It’s like they lived in one of her books!

And her sons do remember her fondly. None of this “yeah, she was a great artist but she sucked as a mom” trash.

The biography is cataloged as juvenile literature, but it’s really not. It’s a biography about juvenile literature, and the book is short (127 pages, including all the pictures), but it’s written at an adult level. Older children or teens might enjoy it, especially if they are interested in art. I did show some of the sketches and designs to my almost-10-year-old, and she was interested enough to stop and look.

Artists and designers may be interested in Burton’s work as well, and in her thoughts on design. Burton had been working on a book on design before her death, but never finished it.

I highly recommend this book, and I’d like to thank Melissa of KidLit History for pointing me to it.

P.S. – as far as I know, Virginia Lee Burton is no relation to us.

Shelf Discovery Chat (or, Exactly What You'd Hear If You Spent an Hour With the Burton Sisters)

2009-12-30T11:48:00.000-08:00

Lizzie Skurnick’s column, Fine Lines, frequently featured some of our very favorite (or at least, very familiar to us) books. Born in 1973, she falls right in the middle of the three Burton sisters. Kathleen is slightly older than Skurnick, and Wendy and I were always delving into Kathleen’s books. Like Skurnick, we read many popular titles of the ‘70s and ‘80s, along with earlier classics and ‘50s favorites.

So we’d been looking forward to Shelf Discovery, subtitled “The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading.” While not all of them are teen, not all of them are classics, and several of them we have never read, a quick skim of the Table of Contents assured us that we are the “We” of the title.

Wendy and I opened our books together one Saturday morning to talk about Shelf Discovery.

[Online chat transcript has been edited for clarity, brevity, and to remove side comments about PG Tips, Constant Comment, and Wendy’s zumba class that she missed while were chatting.]

Wendy: I'm really afraid to read some of these because they might get my ire up, for two reasons. One: if she disrespects books I think are awesome. Two: if she makes the points that I always make about these books, except she published them first.

Laurie: OK, take a look at the Table of Contents.Several of the authors--Zindel, Peck, etc.--I never read at all, but she read a lot of L'Engle, which led me to find her a kindred spirit (though she was clearly much more interested in Judy Blume than I was; that seems true of everyone I know).

I've spotted several I've NEVER HEARD OF.

And You Give Me a Pain, Elaine. To Take a Dare.

Wendy: First one I haven't read: Harriet the Spy. I TRIED. I was bored.

Laurie: My favorite Fine Lines post (which was not actually written by Skurnick) is included: Laura Lippman on Willoughby Chase. It’s titled, "Life's a Bitch, and So is the Governess."

So, let's read one.

Wendy: Oh, this is hard. I pick Stranger With My Face.

Laurie: Oh, goody. (Not Goodwife Cruff, though.) I find Lois Duncan holds up very well, re-reading as an adult.

Wendy: When I think of SWMF, I think that it's a sexy book.

Long black hair and almond eyes--twice over! and gorgeous guys that are accessible to slightly awkward girls because their faces are half burned off.

Laurie: Oh yes--the gorgeous guy who is literally smoldering. (sorry)

Wendy: HEE.

Really, all that stuff where Lia is telling Laurie about their past and astral projection, it reads like a seduction scene.

Kind of vampiric, I guess.

Laurie: And it has SECRET ADOPTION, which is something all kids/teens love to read about

Your parents aren't your real parents!

Wendy: Secret adoption with exotic past!

Everyone knows it is cooler to be "ethnic" than generic Caucasian.

Laurie: Indeed. It's practically wish fulfillment.

Wendy: It's also one of those books I bemoan where the heroine is plain and then suddenly gets beautiful and then Life Begins.

Laurie: You're right--just like in Moon by Night. Actually, the guy in SWMF is not unlike Zachary. OK, I'm going to page 277.

Wendy: Hey, what's it like to read a book where the main character has your name? Especially a SCARY book. It seems like it could be awesome.

Laurie: Yes, I always liked that about this book.

Wendy: I was reading the excerpt from SWMF and getting so into it that I was both startled and disappointed when it ended and went back to commentary...

When I was a kid I couldn't picture Jeff Rankin; I had trouble believing his face was really that messed up. Now that I've seen a lot of burn victims, I get it.

I like that she's pointing out all the dichotomies in this book. Clearly, this is a book Lois Duncan worked hard on, and that's what makes it so good.

Did you realize when you were a kid how shocking and horrible it was to split up twins? I didn't.

I mean, really, that makes the parents seem kind of cruel. But I was FASCINATED (and still am) by the idea of the evil baby that the mother didn't like holding.

Laurie: I think I had an idea splitting twins wouldn't usually be done, but I never questioned it in the context of the book because we all knew LIA IS EVIL!!

Laurie: Yes, this is a good piece. It reminds me why I like Stranger with My Face, which I assume is the goal of the book (Shelf Discovery), along with, possibly, sparking our interest in some we haven't read before.

Laurie: So, before we conclude this chat, I have two questions

What book are you very happy to see included in Shelf Discovery?

What book do you wish was included in Shelf Discovery?

I'm happy to see: Tell Me if the Lovers are Losers

Wendy: I was going to write that, too! It is so of this era.

Laurie: Like with other Newbery winners, Cynthia Voigt's other books tend to be overshadowed by Homecoming/Dicey's Song and Lovers is really, really good

Wendy: Also very strange, but yes.

Laurie: You should pick something else, though, since I picked that first

Wendy: Okay, then. Are You In the House Alone? I've never been that interested in Forever, which I find so one-note. Are You In the House Alone? is a book about rape, obviously, but it is so much more than that, and is also a book about teen sex during that era, just like Forever is.

Laurie: I wish she had included: at least one book by Lois Lowry. Preferably Find a Stranger, Say Goodbye, which would have been my choice. A Summer to Die seems an odd omission. And of course I love Anastasia Krupnik. NINE Judy Blume books, FIVE Lois Duncan books--but not a single Lois Lowry?

Wendy: I was just thinking that there ought to be some Norma Johnston up there.

Laurie: Yes, I would have been interested to read her take on The Keeping Days. But I wouldn't be surprised if she had missed Norma Johnston growing up; we easily might have, if Kath hadn't had that one paperback Keeping Days.

Wendy: Oh, there's so much we might have missed; it's scary to contemplate.

Laurie: So, what do you think about the Lowry? Is Keeping Days your answer to what you wish had been included?

Wendy: Well, I knew you were going to say Find a Stranger, Say Goodbye, but I probably would have said that, too...

Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones, maybe, which might be too old for Skurnick's teendom. Plus it is too precious to me; no one's allowed to snark that but ME.

Wendy: Let's do one of our favorites.

How about Tell Me If the Lovers, since you brought it up?

Laurie: no, something more fun. Westing Game?

Laurie: or Basil E. Frankweiler? or Moon by Night?

Wendy: Westing Game, I'm already there. I remember the magic I immediately sensed, the first time I read the first page of this book. I think you might have read it to me, actually.

You used to laugh aloud at books, and I would ask you what was so funny, and if you were in a good mood you would read it.

Laurie: I just remembered to tell you that I am not a big Harriet the Spy fan either. Never read it as a kid. It always strikes me as one of those books that people who have never read anything cite as their favorite (you know, like George Bush and The Very Hungry Caterpillar.)

OK, The Westing Game.

Wendy: Ah, "oh, yes, one was a bookie, one was a burglar, one was a bomber, and one was a mistake." That's the line you laughed at and the one you read out loud to me. Though I didn't know what a bookie was.

Laurie: "Denton Deere was troubled. Just what did Angela mean by 'nun'?"
Yes, this was the first time I had ever heard of a bookie.

Wendy: Angela is probably my favorite character, although of course I resented her beauty.
I certainly didn't understand that being a bookie was illegal until I saw them on Dragnet years later.

Laurie: Angela is the most satisfying character, because she changes the most.

Wendy: I really like this Westing Game essay. It's solid.

Laurie: I like the Westing Game essay too. "A profound meditation on how humans, given a set of clues, miss what's actually missing right in front of them, and instead project themselves onto the negative space."

Wendy: And that is why it is the best Newbery winner of them all.

Laurie: The End.

Now I have to wake up Iris, and some time after that I am going to read your latest post on Six Boxes. Bye!

Wendy: Ciao!

Lizzie Skurnick very kindly spoke with Wendy for an hour about Shelf Discovery and YA then and now. Look for the interview piece coming soon.

Shelf Discovery also spurred an interesting and humbling conversation about the lack of racial diversity in our childhood reading, which will also be its own post, eventually.

Making Like a Muskrat

2009-12-29T21:02:00.000-08:00

I was going to think through this whole Little House eating thing (help, please! I need a catchy title for my theme week!) a little longer, but had a chance to go shopping with a car today, so I quickly made a list of staples and "specials" I thought I would need. The perishability of some items means I'll be starting soon, maybe sometime tomorrow. (I meant to start tomorrow at breakfast, but realized I accidentally bought some avocados--they were looking good and weirdly cheap and I KNOW they come from Mexico, but, well. Powerless. Anyway, there's almost nothing further from something the Ingallses/Wilders would eat than avocados, so of course I have to eat them first.)

Here's what I laid in, to add to a few things I already had on hand (such as PLENTY of maple syrup): apples, heavy cream, whole wheat flour, cornmeal, molasses (I've never bought such a big bottle of molasses), buttermilk, whole milk, free range organic eggs, pea beans, oysters, oyster crackers, nutmeg, popcorn (I expect popcorn, popped in a kettle, to be one of my primary snacks; it'll be like Christmas every day. I mean, like an ordinary winter evening on the Wilder farm), buckwheat flour, dried corn, potatoes, carrots, parsnips, squash, pumpkin, turnips, lettuce (yes, I know there's no way they would have had THAT in winter, but I'm not going to carry accuracy that far), salt pork, bacon, cinnamon, and cloves. I still need to pick up some dried fruit, and I might get some fish. And I'm going to go ahead and eat my natural organic cheese occasionally (mostly because I forgot and opened some a few minutes ago); I don't figure it'll be that different from what they might have had.

Just realized I'm dooming myself to a week without hot cocoa. I'd better go make some now. It's interesting--I can't remember that chocolate appears in the Little House books at all (anyone?), yet twenty-five years later in the Betsy-Tacy books, it's absolutely ubiquitous. Mr. Ray wasn't kidding when he said that when HE was a boy, they managed to study without all the fudge.

I'm aware that I'm likely to be eating every day as if it were a feast, in Little House terms, but I know too that for me this will be an exercise in self-denial the likes of which would make Mary proud. Already I'm sort of gasping internally at the idea of the limited snacks, the lack of garlic, the single orange. (Hmm. I suppose I could have canned peaches, too, couldn't I?) But I'm also kind of surprised at the Plenty I have. And when the week ends and I can drink that cocoa, it'll be like the supply train has finally made it to DeSmet*.

*Except that's total hyperbole, because instead of starvation rations of brown bread, tea, and maybe some baked potato with salt for months, I'll be feasting on bird's nest pudding and baked beans and oyster stew for one week. But you get the idea. Hmm, I probably should have laid in some more heavy cream.

Almanzo ate four large helpings of apples 'n' onions fried together.

2009-12-27T09:31:00.000-08:00

Stupidest idea I ever had? Eat like I'm living in Little House for a year. Secondary idea I had that I realized was actually practicable? Eat like I'm living in Little House for a week.

Armed with the Little House Cookbook and other resources, this will be coming soon. And I won't limit myself to heart-shaped cakes, fried potatoes, cambric tea, and other such "safe" foods, I promise. (Likely I will even eat some meat.) My first thought was just to create random menus from all foods available, but I could also feature one book each day (which would make it eight or nine days, of course), or just make sure that I did eventually eat from all of them, or something else. I doubt I will try to replicate any actual full meals, because I have different needs, but you never know.

If you have any suggestions or requests for specific foods, let me know. Or if you would like to join in a Virtual Dinner Party sometime. I did this once with Laurie and Kathleen, where we all made waffles for dinner one night, hundreds of miles apart. And once I sponsored a Meat Pie Monday with my Betsy-Tacy friends, where I donated a can of food to a food pantry for every person who agreed to make a meat pie on a particular night (it's a Thing from Betsy's Wedding). Several others matched my donations, and in the end, hundreds of cans were donated. Anyway, my point is that virtual dinner parties can be a lot of fun. So if you have a hankering for fried codfish balls, bean porridge, or corn dodgers, be in touch.

The Best Christmas Present Ever

2009-12-26T06:47:00.000-08:00

It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good knitter. Wendy is both.

This is one side of the beautifully soft, cobwebby scarf that my sister sent me for Christmas. I have hardly taken it off since opening the package.

Thank you, Wendy!

The Charlotte A. Cavatica scarf was designed by the talented Rebekkah Kerner.

Thank You, Aunt Wendy!

2009-12-25T08:00:00.000-08:00

The Christmas Box

2009-12-22T11:00:00.000-08:00

Having a box of Christmas books is an important Burton family tradition. The box itself is nothing special (mine is beat-up cardboard that once contained copy paper), but the books are precious because they only come out once a year.

Our treasured family copy of The Night Before Christmas is illustrated by Gyo Fujikawa, who specialized in multi-ethnic picture books. The only characters in this one, though, are a white 19th-century family (plus white St. Nick).

Recently I've gotten some great recommendations for new and diverse Christmas books. This year Wendy is giving our youngest niece The Night Before Christmas (Putnam, 2009), illustrated by Rachel Isadora with African characters and setting, for her own Christmas book collection.

The Brown Bookshelf recommends multi-ethnic holiday books: Shades of the Season

Shen's Books shares four Christmas stories: Multicultural Minute #16

(In addition to the Fujikawa, my family's Christmas box includes Cookie Count by Robert Sabuda, A Newbery Christmas, I Like Winter by Lois Lenski, and a Little Golden Book about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, among other favorites.)

No Afterword, Thanks

2009-12-13T07:07:00.000-08:00

I liked The Witch of Blackbird Pond, but I really think there should have been an author's note explaining that some women (and one man) really were executed as witches, along with something about the real-life persecution of Quakers (or Friends, as they prefer to be called) in New England. I'm not sure kids would get from the book what a very serious situation this was.

You can relax that horrified expression now; that isn't a real quote. But it could have been.

Have you noticed how common lengthy afterwords are on kids' historical fiction these days? In fact, I think we've come to expect them. When I read The Green Glass Sea (Ellen Klages), one of my favorite books from the last several years, I felt something odd when I'd finished it. Something refreshing. It was... the lack of an author's note.

One major complaint: Where's the explanation note? I cannot believe Klages ends the book without one. Her list of further reading materials doesn't take the place of something on the topic in the book. What happened to the scientists and their families? How did they react to what they created (hinted at in the story) What about radiation poisoning? Etc. Etc. There are dozens of additional questions readers could ask. Several have come to my mind since I finished the book. I don't expect her to answer all of them fully but I do expect her to say something. What the scientists created changed the world. Surely this deserves more than a footnote's worth of explanation.

That IS a real quote, from Goodreads, and it pretty much sums up most of what I don't like about afterwords.

I commented about this before on a post in Marc Aronson's Nonfiction Matters blog, Historical Fiction Seminar. I said "there was nothing to take me out of the book [after finishing]" Marc responded "Seems Wendy is one of those readers who wants to stay within the dream between the covers of the book". We were talking about whether people read historical fiction for a hallucinatory experience, so I can see why he thought that's what I was getting at. But it isn't that I don't like author's notes because they break the spell; it's because I think too often they interfere with both the enjoyment and the learning experience of the book.

The person who commented on The Green Glass Sea above said that "dozens of additional questions" came to her mind after she finished the book. She wanted them answered in an author's note. My question is--if there had been an author's note, would she ever have had those questions? Would she have spent time pondering the answers? Would the other Goodreads reviewers who were troubled by the ambiguity of the book have spent that time clarifying their own positions?

Let's take another classic, On the Banks of Plum Creek by Laura Ingalls Wilder. One of the central incidents in that book is the plague of grasshoppers. If it was written now, the author's note might include other descriptions of the devastation caused by the grasshoppers. Maybe there'd be a map showing how widespread the damage was. Maybe we'd get information on how the grasshoppers affected other families and whether there was any government relief.

It'd be factual. It'd teach kids something. Some of us would read this additional information with great interest. But the book is so well-written that it doesn't need any of this; in fact, I think it would only take away. We read On the Banks of Plum Creek and we get a clear picture of how the grasshoppers affected the lives of one family. We know the creepiness of the grasshoppers getting into our clothes, of hearing the neverending chomp-chomp of their jaws; we know the helpless feeling of watching our year's worth of work be destroyed in a matter of hours.

The last thing I want--or need--after experiencing something like that is to read an author's note where someone tells me what to think about it.

In most cases, if a book is written well enough, we get everything we need from the text. A curious reader can investigate the subject more; and we can say "but most kids won't do that"--if the book is good enough, that won't matter. If it's so important you have to say it, say it in the story.

I read The Rock and the River (Kekla Magoon) recently. I enjoyed the book. I hated the author's note. This is a Black Panther-positive book; most of those who review it comment on how good it is to have a book showing another side to the Black Panthers. But not only does the author's note pretty much reiterate the information that's already integrated in the text, but it makes the last sentence of the book--this book that shows the Black Panthers as a force for good--"In 1982, the Black Panther Party officially disbanded." So what, exactly, is my take-away there? How do I align that with the note the actual story ends on?

Magoon actually has the perfect author's note there. It's similar to the one at the end of The Witch of Blackbird Pond; it says the story is fictional but contains some real people. She's even got a line there that would have been a great last sentence, one that wouldn't destroy the power of her story's end. She could have finished her author's note with "The struggle that Sam faces in the story is based on the real-life challenges that many teenagers went through."

Do we need any more than that?

Live Tweets on the Prairie

2009-12-07T15:11:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago Mother Reader asked me who she should be following on Twitter--did I know anyone who was making really good use of the 140-character medium? I responded promptly, @halfpintingalls.

Half Pint is the online persona of Laura Ingalls Wilder (on the right there--she's the one who looks ever-so-slightly bitter, ), and this fall she's treated us to such messages as Twisting 33 hay sticks a day for #NaTwiHayMo is hard, but it's so satisfying when you win! Because then you don't freeze to death. and Today I have low self-esteem because my corn cob doll has unrealistic body proportions. and It'd be a riot if I dressed up as a grasshopper plague for Hallowe'en, wouldn't it? Or is that "too soon?" (Really, I could just sit here copy-and-pasting @halfpintingalls tweets all day, but you can go peruse them yourself.)

After reading these insights into the fascinating mind of ~~my dearest childhood friend~~ this talented author, I had many more questions. Half Pint kindly consented to an interview. (Though she wouldn't answer my "marry, shag, kill" question about Mr. Edwards, Mr. Loftus, and Reverend Alden.)

**************************************************************************

Okay, let's get one thing straight. My sister Kathleen wants to know: when you use the twittergraph do you have to go all the way to the railroad station, or do you have a portable device?

I walk two miles to the depot most days to send my dispatches, but I also have a hand-held Twittergraphone made of iron that I use sometimes. It's a pain to drag all that wire around but it comes in handy during blizzards and keeps you from wandering out on the prairie.

(I don't know why you future people like "wire-less" things so much! It makes you harder to find when you're buried in a snowdrift!)

Wasn't Eliza Jane totally pissed when you married her brother after she tried to get you expelled from school? I love that picture of you rocking the seat, by the way. FIERCE.

She's not mad at me because I married Almanzo. She's mad because I once told her, "You're really insufferable for a suffragette."

What's better, vanity cakes or heart-shaped cakes?

A VANITY-SHAPED cake would be the best of all, because it would be HUGE. At least it would be if Nellie Oleson and her gigantic ego baked it.

Tell us the truth. Did you or didn't you marry Almanzo because Pa promised him his prettiest and most capable daughter in exchange for a plate of buckwheat pancakes?

See, when Pa said that Almanzo was "a pancake man," I was really excited, because I thought he was a great big pancake man like the ones Ma used to fry up on Christmas morning. Those are my FAVORITE kind of men!

Turns out Almanzo's just a regular man who MAKES pancakes. Oh well, at least they're tasty.

Worst party ever: Nellie Oleson's birthday or the dime social?

The Donner Party was the worst party ever.

Did you ever regret not giving Rose away to Mr. and Mrs. Boast?

Actually, the deal was that the Boasts wanted to trade a horse for Rose. I'm glad we kept Rose but I will say that a HORSE wouldn't have plagiarized me and written Let the Hurricane Roar.

Green pumpkin pie is awesome. I made it once. But what were some of Ma's spectacular failure experiments in frugal cooking that never made it into the books?

Ma once cooked my corn cob doll to make stock. The soup was good, but afterwards my doll was never quite the same.

What's for Christmas dinner this year?

Whatever Pa has left in his pockets after being buried in a snowdrift for three days. You know, the usual.

Read This Now: Lips Touch: Three Times

2009-12-04T11:50:00.000-08:00

I was going to write this whole post about "When is a book too old for the Newbery?". I still might, because I think that's an interesting and often misunderstood question. But this book has been living in me so thoroughly over the last few days that it's asking for a post of its own. You know how occasionally you can love a book so much that you feel lonely for it after you're done reading? It's almost like being homesick.

There is a certain kind of girl the goblins crave. You could walk across a high school campus and point them out: not her, not her, her. The pert, lovely ones with butterfly tattoos in secret places, sitting on their boyfriends' laps? No, not them. The girls watching the lovely ones sitting on their boyfriends' laps? Yes.

Them.

The goblins want girls who dream so hard about being pretty their yearning leaves a palpable trail, a scent goblins can follow like sharks on a soft bloom of blood. The girls with hungry eyes who pray each night to wake up as someone else. Urgent, unkissed, wishful girls.

Are you aching with the wonderfulness of that? Shivers went down my spine the first time I read it. Shivers went down my spine just now, retyping it.

Lips Touch: Three Times is a made up of three novellas, all of which involve a fateful kiss of some kind. I think it's being classified as fantasy, and I was about to say "it's so not", but then I thought over the characters in the stories: goblins. Demons. Immortal shapeshifters. Okay, I accept that this is fantasy, but to me it didn't feel like such; the characters (the main characters are basically mortal) are so very real, and while there are some fantasy elements to the settings, they're pretty much in the real world, too. While I was reading the book everything seemed perfectly plausible, even natural.

"Goblin Market" is the story quoted above, and it's about a modern teenager. It's one of those "if Twilight was actually good" kinds of stories. "Spicy Little Curses Such as These" is set in colonial India, like if Frances Hodgson Burnett had written fantasy, or if LM Montgomery had written fantasy AND stories set in colonial India. "Hatchling" is set in modern London and medieval eastern Europe (and I haven't yet found the right "it's like" for it).

These are gorgeous stories, pulse-beatingly romantic at times, just a little terrifying at other times. Sleeping Beauty curses, children's lives bargained for in hell, ghosts walking clockwise around people for protection, one-eyed birds spying for the immortal queen--I think all the mythology in this book has its basis in real mythology and religion, which is probably what gives one the shock of recognition while reading it; but it's used in new, creative, delicious ways.

Each story has several pages of illustration at the beginning, done by the author's husband. They illustrate events that happen before the story starts; events sketched out within the story. The art is, I would say, sort of a Pre-Raphaelite-meets-manga style, but I don't really know what I'm talking about there. I think the illustrations are going to be very, very appealing to most teenagers, but I think they will make many adults think this isn't the book for them. I'm going to assure you now that it IS.

My interest in this book was piqued by discussion on the Heavy Medal blog--I hadn't considered reading it before, because I thought it would be too high-fantasy for me. It was discussed there in the context of whether it was suitable for the Newbery or too mature. Packaged differently, this would totally be a Newbery contender, and we aren't supposed to look at packaging. But. More on that to come later, probably.

A Sucker for E-Books

2009-11-29T10:07:00.000-08:00

100 Scope Notes writes about e-books today. He's taking a wait-and-see approach and asks where we are with e-books; my comment turned into a post of its own. (And I almost titled this post "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love E-Books", but luckily I didn't, because... that's the title of the 100 Scope Notes post, which I hadn't noticed.)

I started reading e-books about five years ago when I had to get a Palm Pilot for nursing school. I discovered that I could download books from Project Gutenberg for free, and read many, many forgotten old books (no classics for me, thanks! I'd rather read Patty in Paris and The Campfire Girls Go Motoring) on that tiny screen. I went to Europe for two weeks that year and instead of taking one book and trying to parcel out the reading, I took dozens and was able to read whatever and whenever I felt like. (At this point people say "Well, if I was in Paris, I wouldn't be doing much READING"--hogwash. There's two long long flights to get through, Paris has trains like anywhere else, and I always do a lot of reading at night when I'm on vacation, once I'm too tired to keep going but it's still, like, 8 PM.)

Now that I've finally started to get over the feeling that we count our wealth in books--that I don't need to buy every used book I see that happens to be something I enjoyed--though I'm still struggling with the idea that if I don't have enough books, people will walk into my apartment and think I'm not a reader--I've started to like e-books even more. My local library is underfunded and unimpressive, and this year doesn't carry many of the new children's and YA books I want to read. So I've been buying more new books than ever before. And I'm buying them in "e" form. I'm not going to want to keep most of them, and I don't want them cluttering my apartment, and they're slightly more affordable.

I kept feeling a rosy glow when I bought an e-book, thinking that I was helping to sustain the author and publisher, but I was concerned that maybe the glow shouldn't be so rosy. I wondered whether authors really made much from the sale of e-books--was this like that writer's strike business, where the screenwriters were making squat from Internet downloads of TV and movies? I asked about this on twitter, and my understanding is that while authors make less from e-book sales, that's more because they cost less than because they're being cheated. Since I wouldn't buy all these books in hardcover--there's no way--I keep feeling rosy.

The downside is that I'm buying these from Barnes and Noble (since I don't have a "device" and read them on my computer, the tiniest of netbooks) instead of an independent bookstore. If there's somewhere else I ought to be buying from, do let me know.

My good friend CLM of Perfect Retort, whose apartment was blissfully wall-to-wall books last time I visited it ten years ago, asks about rereads. I'm happy to buy hard copies of books I want to read over and over, just as I always have. For me, that isn't a change at all--it used to be extremely rare for me to purchase a new book I hadn't already read; I only did it in the case of an author I knew I loved, or perhaps something deeply discounted on the sale table that looked interesting, but even then almost never. (I know that eventually hard copies will become proportionally more expensive, as fewer are produced, but it'll be something I'm willing to pay for.) People often mention that it isn't as cozy to curl up with an e-book as it is with a "real" book; for me, if I want to be cozy, I'm choosing one of those "I've read this more times than I can count" books I own anyway. And I've never been one to take books into the bath with me. (Shudder! Didn't you all see the instructional film in elementary school about how sad it is when books get wet?)

I do keep some of the e-books I buy, though. And I still mourn the passing of my Palm Pilot--I don't have an IPhone--because being able to read a snippet of Rilla of Ingleside anytime I happened to be caught in line was delicious.

A Season of Gifts and Racism: one more round

2009-11-20T12:04:00.000-08:00

There's been tons and tons and tons of discussion about whether Richard Peck's newest book, A Season of Gifts, is racially insensitive. (I know many of you have heard a lot about this, but since I've discovered that a lot of my readers are not regularly blog people and -- gasp! -- don't know about every blog controversy that comes along, a summary: this book takes place in the 1950s; there's a new Methodist preacher in town who's having trouble getting people to come to his church; to drum up publicity, his neighbor Grandma Dowdel pretends to have found the skeleton of an "Indian princess" in her garden and gets the preacher to stage a Christian burial with accompanying media frenzy.)

Let's get one thing straight: yeah, the bones are fake. There's no doubt about it. Only a "but the bones are fake!" defense doesn't wash with me. I'm also not going to say it doesn't make a difference that the bones were fake. The difference is just that it would be WORSE if the bones were real.

Yes, Jonathan Hunt et al, I get that Richard Peck was making fun of white people and their obsession with all things "Native American". But digging up American Indian bones and re-burying them in white Christian cemeteries?

Dude. That's not something to joke about*. It's disrespectful to use something like that as a way to make this mild sort of point, especially in a book that is not ALL about the white obsession with Indian mysticism, because come on, it's not like the white people don't come out on top in this book. They're a little silly in their reaction to the "Kickapoo princess", but they're also down-home good people.

Okay, but what surprises me: in all of the discussions of this book I've read, I can't remember anyone mentioning the part where Richard Peck makes an effort to show that he knows this might come off as being disrespectful. Because the sermon the minister gives is all about how great the Indians who used to live on that land were. Yes, Debbie Reese, I'm using "used to" and "were" on purpose, because that's how they're presented here. "The stewards of this land that now we till" and "How lightly her people lived here/In the seasons' ebb and flow;/May we leave this land as lovely/When it's our own time to go."

He tries, Richard Peck does. He knows that American Indians are more than mascots and "princesses" and headdresses. But this sermon--it's nice. It could be worse. The insensitivity of the book would be worse if it were left out altogether. But what it does is make the people of the town, and the Caucasian reader, feel good. It's okay that the local Indians are gone; they lived a good life and now it's our turn. It was their "time to go".

When, you know, it actually wasn't.

Now, when I first heard about this issue on Roger Sutton's blog, I commented "oops, there goes A Season of Gifts's Newbery nod". But now that I've read it, I don't think this book is Newbery-quality, anyway. It's well-written stylistically, because Richard Peck is a writing master, but the plot and characters are most thin. I don't think it's distinguished or that it adds anything special either to this trilogy (the first two books are excellent; one is a Newbery Honor and the other a Newbery) or to children's literature.

*Always allowing that I could find a joke about this really, really funny if it were done well and made an important point.

Oops! I Didn't Mean To Say That.

2009-11-06T16:04:00.000-08:00

I was talking with the lovely author Laurel Snyder recently about her book, Any Which Wall (a thoroughly modern Edward Eager homage I enjoyed very much). I can’t remember how we got on the subject, but she mentioned that after it was published, she found things she wished she had written differently; I think she said she even has notes in her copy about what she would have changed.

I’m sure this is common among writers. “Actually, some authors really do that,” I told her.

Madeleine L’Engle was the first one who came to mind. Her first young adult novel, And Both Were Young (it’s really good--takes place in a Swiss boarding school, lots of fun stuff about skiing), was published in 1949. In 1983, she released a newly-edited version, which, she says in the foreword, is more accurate to the book she wrote. The 1949 editor insisted she tone down the main character’s grief over her mother’s death, the gentle romance between the teenagers, and the woman who’s after Philippa’s widower father.

I’ll be honest: I like the original a lot better. And when I say “original”, I mean what was published first. I think it’s sharper, clearer, more even in tone. Of course, it’s also what I read (and internalized: I read it many times) first.

I’m not sure how many times L’Engle did this in smaller ways. When I was re-reading a new-to-me copy of her book The Twenty-Four Days Before Christmas, I kept thinking “huh. I don’t remember it that way”. On comparison, I discovered several small differences in the text between the edition of this book I knew and the one I own now. I don’t know why L’Engle or the editors might have made these changes, or which is the original, or which L’Engle might say was more authentic.

PL Travers did it in Mary Poppins. She has a chapter where Jane, Michael, and Mary Poppins go time/space traveling with the help of a compass. They visit the four corners of the world, and meet stereotypical people from the north (“Eskimos”), south (Africans), east (Chinese people), and west (American Indians, or, as many people in England call them even now, “Red Indians”). The chapter is charming in structure, but the stereotypes are awful. They’re worse than what you’re imagining right now. In 1981, Travers revised the chapter completely, having them meet animals in each corner instead. The writing isn’t as good as it was in the original, which is unfortunate but not surprising. When this chapter of Mary Poppins comes up in discussion, I always ask the same question: if you were the author, wouldn’t you be embarrassed? Wouldn’t you welcome the chance of a rewrite? (Amazingly, the original illustrator, Mary Shepard, was also around to do new illustrations for the chapter.) And Roald Dahl did something similar for the American edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; for some reason that’s not as well-known, though the book is more famous. In the original, the Oompa Loompas are pretty much happy lazy African slaves. I’m not kidding.

Debbie Reese of American Indians in Children’s Literature has an interesting post discussing a passage from the book Dear Genius, in which editor Ursula Nordstrom talks about a small change Laura Ingalls Wilder agreed to make to a new edition of Little House on the Prairie--agreed wholeheartedly. While I don’t agree with the suggestion that the publisher might have stopped publishing the book entirely instead, I think it’s an interesting point to wonder what else Wilder might have changed in this book and her other books. Certainly her intent was never to depersonalize American Indians.

What else might Madeleine L’Engle have changed in her books? Did she mean for A House Like a Lotus to be underminingly homophobic? I don’t really think so. After she became a Christian, did she think back on her early books and wish she had written things differently? Would Jean Webster take the eugenicism out of Dear Enemy (sequel to Daddy Long Legs)? Would Ann M. Martin surgically remove Mallory Pike from the Babysitters Club? (Actually, she did eventually send Mallory to boarding school, to the great relief of all.)

We’ve posted recently about the ways Scholastic Book Fairs has asked authors to edit their books to make them “safe” for the school market. (Laurie pointed out elsewhere the funniest example of this: in Lois Lowry’s Anastasia On Her Own, Freddie Valente is changed in the [edit: not Scholastic's fault this time] Weekly Reader edition from a bra-snapper to a hair-puller. I guess bras are mature content, just like gay parents.) Laurie urged authors not to make changes in content after their books are published, at least not for Scholastic Book Fairs’s reasoning. What do you think? When is it okay for an author to change something, and when should the book be let stand as is?

Scholastic censors Luv Ya Bunches

2009-11-01T07:26:00.000-08:00

The headlines last week read:
Luv Ya Bunches Will Be in Middle School Book Fairs
Scholastic reverses decision regarding 'Luv Ya Bunches'
Scholastic to Sell 'Luv Ya Bunches' at Middle School Book Fairs
Scholastic Reverses Decision to Exclude Gay Friendly Book from Fairs

An accurate headline, though, would read: Scholastic Sells Censored Luv Ya Bunches in Middle School Fairs; Refuses to Include Gay Parents in Elementary Schools.

Luv Ya Bunches is about fifth graders. Publishers Weekly recommended it for ages 9-13. Clearly it is intended for both elementary and middle school students.

Let's talk a little about book fairs. Scholastic dominates the U.S. school book fair market. From 2003-2007 I hosted a Scholastic book fair at my middle school (continuing the previous librarian's tradition). On the appointed date the deliverymen wheel in giant carts that open to become book displays. The middle school fairs offer certain titles, which have been advertised in advance to students via posters and book fair brochures. The books, published by Scholastic and other publishers, range from paperback classics to brand-new releases. Schools can make special requests; I always asked for more multi-ethnic books to reflect the interests and diversity of my students. The person in charge of the book fair can choose to remove items from the display if they don't want to sell them. Most librarians I know do: expensive software, toys with small parts, books you don't think students are interested in might stay packed in boxes. At my last Scholastic fair I didn't display the posters for sale, because space was tight and I wanted to focus on books.

My point is that with any book fair, including Scholastic, you can choose what to offer from the books provided. No school is forced to offer a book for sale.

If you (librarians or book fair chairs) live in a community that is so homophobic that parents will protest a book with gay characters, and you are not willing to take a stand and offer the book, you don't have to. But Scholastic Inc., whose credo says they strive "To enlarge students' concern for and understanding of today's world," should not pander to this homophobic constituency by refusing to offer Luv Ya Bunches or other books with gay characters in its elementary school book fairs.

Michael A. Jones of Change.org writes, "This was a victory for us all." I see no victory. Scholastic Book Fairs concluded their review process and decided to include an expurgated edition of Luv Ya Bunches in its middle school book fairs. This may be what they were already going to do before last week's outcry. It represents no brave stance on the part of Scholastic, despite what Lauren Myracle claims. Here's what needs to happen to achieve a real victory.

School librarians/Teachers/PTA (anyone who hosts a book fair in a school): Look into other options, such as local independents, for book fairs to reduce Scholastic's corporate monopoly. With any book fair (Scholastic or otherwise), be sure to request age-appropriate books that include LGBT characters. Let the book fair provider know that these books are both welcome and necessary in your school book fair to meet the needs of your community.

Scholastic Inc.:
1) Make your book fair criteria public and transparent. Are books with gay characters automatically excluded from elementary school? Sometimes excluded? As a customer of Scholastic Book Fairs (both as a school librarian and as a parent of an elementary-school child), I want an answer.
2) Apologize for asking Lauren Myracle to change the sexual orientation of characters in Luv Ya Bunches. Yes, you have a review process and you can only include a small number of books in the fairs each year. You can exclude books; it's your choice. But there is NO EXCUSE for asking to change gay characters to straight. NONE. You made a big mistake. Apologize, and make a donation to Lambda Legal or some other organization that helps families.

Authors: Do not agree to Scholastic Book Fairs or anyone else censoring your book. You wrote your book a certain way--maybe with hell, damn, Oh my God--because you, and your editor, believed it was right for your book. If it's not right, take it out in the editing stage. If it is right, DON'T CHANGE IT. This is disrespectful, dishonest, and deceptive to your readers. You can't champion the freedom to read while you are agreeing to sanitized versions of your own books.

Three weeks ago another librarian and I were talking about how there are quite a few picture books with gay characters, and more YA books all the time, but very few novels with gay characters for readers in grades 4-8. I mentioned Dear Julia by Amy Bronwen Zemser as a good new example: the main character's best friend has two moms. Children need these books. We need to keep the pressure on.

Elephant Run: Mother-Daughter Reviews

2009-10-29T13:46:00.000-07:00

My nine-year-old daughter's teacher enjoys sharing contemporary children's novels with his class. Recently, he did Elephant Run by Roland Smith as a read-aloud for the class. Suzy enjoyed it and wanted to read it on her own, too, so she checked it out from the county library.

When she arrived home with the book, she suggested I might like to read it, too.

OK. Elephants, Burma, World War II, it sounded pretty interesting. And I wasn't disappointed. I thoroughly enjoyed Elephant Run. We've both finished it now, so we've both reviewed it. You can read Suzy's review on her blog, SuperBookGirl.

The book begins in London, 1941. Thirteen-year-old Nick Freestone's mother sends him to live in Burma with his father after their home is destroyed in a bombing raid. Nick's father owns a teak plantation, which uses elephants for logging. Unfortunately, the Japanese arrive almost immediately after Nick does, taking his father to a prison camp and occupying the plantation. It's a story of Nick's survival and eventual attempt to rescue his father.

It's a great novel for ages 9-12. The book is well written, with an engaging and exciting story. It doesn't gloss over bad things that happened in World War II (deaths of some people on the plantation, for instance) but also doesn't get excessively graphic. Nick is clearly attracted to his friend Mya, but it's not overly emphasized (it's not a kissing book!).

I also thought it was interesting to see a different piece of the World War II story. History and historical fiction doesn't often focus on Burma, and personally, I've read much more about the European part of the war.

I would highly recommend this book for ages 9-12, and older kids and adults will enjoy it, too.

A Quick Note on Scholastic/Myracle

2009-10-29T11:44:00.000-07:00

Laurie and I are not impressed with Scholastic's response to the Lauren Myracle uproar. This is just a quick note to say that; Laurie will be posting later with more book fair thoughts. (I'm interested to hear what she has to say.)

Scholastic is getting a lot of credit for "reversing" their position and putting Luv Ya Bunches in its book fairs, lesbian moms intact. But they're allowing it in their middle school book fairs. Not their elementary school ones. Luv Ya Bunches is an elementary-level book, and gay parents are not mature content.

I'm indignant, as a consumer!

2009-10-27T08:24:00.000-07:00

As usual, my first thought when I heard about the Scholastic Book Fair/Lauren Myracle book controversy (to sum up: middle grade author of non-gay-themed book asked to turn gay parents into straight parents for book fair edition) was a selfish one.

WAIT, HOW MANY ALTERED SCHOLASTIC EDITIONS OF BOOKS HAVE I READ?

I have fond memories of book fairs. We didn't have a lot of extra money when we were kids, and in my memory, book fairs were one of the only times I got to pick out my own books to keep. (My sisters may remember this differently, and I'm not even sure if book fairs were common when Kathleen was in elementary school. History of book fairs, anyone?) Why I wasted such opportunities on books like How to Draw Horses and The Ghost at Dawn's House is a mystery to me. (The fact that I remember buying these books specifically shows how significant the fairs were, I think.) I also remember buying a copy of Beverly Cleary's A Girl From Yamhill, though, and I think Daddy Long Legs.

Oh, how I remember the class visits to the book fairs to pick out what books we would buy when we came back with our parents, and how the teachers would try to shoo the kids away from the picture books once we were in upper elementary, which seems sad.

But how many of those books we bought at the book fairs had been changed from their original form? How many had words or characters or scenes altered? I learned about this practice a few years ago; I think it applies to the "book orders", too (those colorful fliers the teachers sent home every couple of months; I got a few books from there as well, like the first Pen Pals book). And I started to remember how occasionally I've noticed a difference in editions--like my ancient Scholastic copy of Anne Emery's Senior Year, in which teenagers are suddenly dancing the hustle instead of the original foxtrot.

I want to read the books as they're written. I think most people do. At the very least, I want to know I'm reading an altered edition. Are there disclaimers on Scholastic books now? I can't remember seeing one before. Don't we need a "this book has been edited for length and content" kind of message on there, so at least we KNOW the real book is out there?

If you were a parent and bought a no-gay-parents edition of Luv Ya Bunches (sorry, the sweetness of that title gives me the willies, too) for your kid, wouldn't you feel sort of dirty? I would.

Scholastic has put out a weird update on this situation of a neither-confirm-nor-deny stripe. (It makes no sense: if they "recognize Milla’s two moms as a positive and realistic aspect of the story", why would they ask to have them removed?) I'm puzzled that they mention carrying After Tupac and D Foster at book fairs. Is it an edited version or not? If not... why one and not the other? Perhaps it's because After Tupac skews slightly older; maybe it's the very middle-gradeness of Myracle's book that made someone think two moms were inappropriate. ("You can learn about different kinds of families when you're older, honey.") Maybe they know that the kind of parents who would be offended by Myracle's two moms would never, ever pick out After Tupac in the first place. Maybe they think the book is insidious because it looks "safe" but OMG liberal agenda!!!1!

Let's call it like it is, Scholastic. Let's put out Luv Ya Bunches: The Homophobic Edition.

Newbery Project Revisited

2009-10-21T17:00:00.000-07:00

It's been just over a year since I finished reading all the Newbery winners, something I only thought about after I was able to put my Newbery skillz to work recently and call out Peter of Collecting Children's Books (which I referred to this weekend as, I think, "the best blog in the world" or similar), who graciously posted all about it.

Recently I said to Jen Robinson "I'm just really invested in the Newbery," and she responded "I can see that," possibly with a little "hello, Ms. Crazypants" in her eyes.

If I was formal about this kind of thing, I would start a Newbery Challenge and try to convince bloggers to read one Newbery they think they have zero interest in. Or to pick the decade of which they've read the fewest books (probably the 20s or 30s for almost everyone) and read one from there. Or to read the book published the year they were born, or the year their mothers were twelve. (The Westing Game and Amos Fortune: Free Man for me, respectively, which is very funny--of all the books on the list, I put The Westing Game at the top and Amos Fortune at the bottom.)

Every once in a while I revisit the idea of reading all the Newbery Honors, too. I've always avoided that for two reasons--one, I am not a compulsive person in the slightest, and two, a lot of the Honors sound really boring. But compared to most people, I have very little knowledge of most of the Honor books. (Um... when I say "most people", I mean... people with specialized children's literature knowledge. YOU know.) I did have an idea for a series of posts that deal with the winner and all the honors for one particular year; in fact, I finished all my reading for 1953, and if I ever post that year, I'll be soliciting for other year suggestions.

But for now, I'm going to do a decade-by-decade suggestion list. You could take it as a challenge, if you wanted.

1920s: Best read: The Trumpeter of Krakow; interesting setting, characters, and easy-to-enjoy plot. Most important read: The Story of Mankind. I think you really have to know this book.

1930s: Best read: Hitty, Her First Hundred Years, a delightful story of adventure. Most important read: probably Caddie Woodlawn is the one with the most cultural resonance, though I found it unremarkable.

1940s: Best read: The 21 Balloons. This is really the book I wish everyone would read (especially if you like food). Most important read: depending on why you read, maybe The Matchlock Gun. It's easy for me to write off most of the racist books on the Newbery list, because most of them aren't very good. The Matchlock Gun is VERY good. It's a good (and safely in the past) point of reference for discussion about cultural insensitivity vs. distinguished writing.

1950s: Best read: Oh, The Witch of Blackbird Pond. I was talking with a writer who isn't familiar with most of the Newbery books, and she was asking if I agree that most of them aren't very appealing to children. "Like, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, do you really think that's a great book?" she asked. "It's in my top five," I said enthusiastically. She hadn't read the book, had just heard something about it. I loved it when I was a kid and love it more now. Ladies and gentlemen, THAT is a great work of literature. Most important read (other than that): Secret of the Andes. Depending on who you are, you'll read it and see how horribly wrong committee discussions can go (that's me), or you'll read it and come off brilliantly when you're the one person in the group arguing that the right book won that year.

1960s: Best read: From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, but you've already read THAT. Most important read: probably the same. If you look at the list of winners, this book seems to usher in a new modern era of children's books; most everything before could be called somewhat old-fashioned, even, in some ways, A Wrinkle in Time. This book has an immediacy and modernity and envelope-pushing quality that seems important in Newbery history.

1970s: Best read: Well, The Westing Game, of course. Most important read: Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, I think, which is so central to discussions about period-appropriate offensive language. Incidentally, in the 1970s, four of the books focused on African American themes, one is about an Alaska Native, and The Westing Game has quite a bit of race-relations conversation, too. It's an interesting decade for the Newberys.

1980s: Decade of my childhood, and none of the winners are thrilling to me, which is maybe why I avoided Newbery winners for so many years. Best read: maybe Lincoln: A Photobiography. (Most of the books are good, just not thrilling.) Most important read: um... Jacob Have I Loved might be the most YA book in the entire list, so maybe that's important.

1990s: I sense another cultural shift here. Perhaps the best read is The Giver, and the most important is Holes, which is generally held up as "both popular and profound".

2000s: Best read: A Year Down Yonder, which is spare and funny and meaningful. Most important read: Too soon to say, but Bud, Not Buddy might be the one it's most important to be conversant with, culturally.

As always, I am delighted to hear any agreement or disagreement or to take any "what did you think of" questions. And I'm nudging you--do it now!--take just one of the books I've listed above and put it on hold at the library. Let me know which one you're choosing and why.

The Indigo Notebook or Why I Ate Quinoa Last Night

2009-10-04T09:24:00.000-07:00

I'm a big fan of Laura Resau's first two books, What the Moon Saw and Red Glass. (Disclaimers are so in right now that I feel like I should put that at the bottom--Disclaimer: I do not know Laura Resau, but I really like her other books and I read her blog sometimes.) When I heard that she'd just started a new series, I was pleased but surprised. YA series are not the most common thing (despite the fact that almost every book seems to be one of a trilogy these days), so I sort of assumed we were looking at something Babysitters Club-esque, or maybe like SASS, which it sort of resembles on the surface. Nope. Not. At. All. (I confess that I have yet to make it all the way through a single SASS book, even though I love the idea; I was hooked on this from the first paragraph.)

Resau's new Notebook series follows 15-year-old Zeeta and her mother, Layla, an itinerant ESL teacher. Each year of Zeeta's life they've moved to a new country. You know Layla now, don't you? You already know that she wears wrap skirts and quotes Rumi. What keeps Layla from being a cliche? You met her when you went to Thailand and Guatemala and Ireland. She's real.

And your mind is already turning, isn't it, thinking of what it would be like to have Layla for a mother? I am completely in love with Zeeta. If I wanted to be anyone else when I was fifteen, it was her. She's pretty and interesting and comfortable with all kinds of people and speaks seven languages fluently (over a dozen not so fluently) and somehow escapes being annoying. She's like Polly O'Keefe without the self-absorption. I'm afraid I'm making her sound like a Mary Sue, and in fact I do sort of wish she had more flaws, but I swear, to read Zeeta is to love her. I'm so looking forward to traveling all over the world with her. (Next stop: Provence.)

This first book in the series takes place in Ecuador, and the first sign that I wasn't in Babysitters Club territory was the richness of setting. It's obvious that Resau knows her Ecuador, but it comes out of her naturally, without delving into travelogue territory. The last two days I felt like I WAS in Ecuador, and so the only possible thing I could have for dinner last night was Ecuadorean quinoa vegetable soup from Moosewood Restaurant Daily Special. Sights, sounds, smells, tastes--you may think you've never been that interested in going to Ecuador, but after reading this book, I predict you'll be looking up plane fares.

The setting and lovely characters are definitely the strengths of the book; to be honest, it gets a little overdramatic in the last part with a lot of cloak-and-dagger stuff, and maybe a little sentimental about international adoption (Zeeta's buddy is an American boy who was adopted from Ecuador as a baby and is back seeking his roots). But those characters! That setting! The food!

Now, I don't know how long Resau plans to make this series; I think it will be a challenge to keep it from being too Cherry Ames, with a new love interest and a dramatic mystery for Zeeta in every country. But if anyone can do it, I think it's Resau, who just keeps coming up with creative and original takes on YA. The fact that Zeeta and Layla stay in each place for a year will help, because that gives enough time to really develop the situation; it won't be like Zeeta is facing a near-death experience or being held for ransom every month.

I think your bright middle-schoolers and maybe high-schoolers will love this series. I was desperate to travel when I was that age, and it seems like something even more teens aspire to now. Zeeta is both a real girl (multiracial, by the way) and a wish-fulfillment fantasy, something YA can never have enough of.

You know you want to see Ed Young illustrate "One Night in Bangkok".

2009-10-02T07:49:00.000-07:00

My brother-in-law (and Laurie's husband), Matthew Amster-Burton, has written both a delicious book about kids and food and a guest post for this blog.

Looking for a picture book set in modern New York City? I can think of about a hundred. How about a picture book set in historical, mythical, or rural Asia? Plenty of those, too.

But where are the picture books set in modern Asian cities? I'll bet you can't name many, and that's a shame. It gives English language readers an inaccurate image of Asia (all rice paddies and pagodas) and robs us of a potential treasure trove of children's stories.

Why the missing books? I have an idea. Come on a short trip with me; when we get back, I'm going to recommend some books.

1
I went to a slide presentation by Cecilia Hae-Jin Lee, author of two great Korean cookbooks. She talked about regional food and sightseeing in Korea (she's also the author of Frommer's South Korea). She showed at least fifty slides, of which one or two were taken in Seoul. There were several slides of an ersatz rural community set up for tourists, like a Korean Colonial Williamsburg. About half of all South Koreans live in Seoul or its outskirts. Seoul is one of the largest, most technologically advanced, safest, and presumably delicious cities on earth.

2
Around the same time, I had dinner with Dan Gray, a Korean food writer who has a blog called Seoul Eats. We talked a lot about Korean food and I told him that I'd never been to Korea but really wanted to go. He offered encouragement and a warning. "You have to understand," he said, extending his arm to indicate green Seattle, "Seoul isn't beautiful."

3
My five-year-old, Iris, is a fan of this cartoon called Ni Hao, Kai-Lan. Kai-Lan is a Chinese-American girl whose best friends are a monkey, a koala, a tiger, and a rhino.

Recently we watched a special 45-minute episode, "Kai-Lan's Great Trip to China," where the whole crew flies to China to visit Kai-Lan's great aunt and meet a baby panda. The first thing they do in China is stop at a roadside stand for dandan noodles. I heartily approved. Then they arrive at the aunt's house, which is a rural mansion.

Soon it's time to shop for presents for the baby panda's naming ceremony, so the crew goes into the city. The city looks like the China pavilion at Epcot, only with fewer people. The funny thing is, actual cities in China look a lot like this artist's conception of the original plan for Epcot.

4
We read a lovely picture book called Erika-san, by Allen Say. Erika moves to Japan to become a teacher. She begins in Tokyo, which she finds overwhelming. She moves on to a smaller city. Still
overwhelming. She ends up in a rural area, where she learns the tea ceremony and marries a Japanese man. The real Japan, the book seemed to imply, isn't in the city.

Phooey, I say.

In 2000, Laurie and I went to Bangkok. It was our first trip to Asia. We brought the Lonely Planet book, some travel pants from Lands' End, and a Seattle-honed appetite for Thai food. We arrived in the city at night, breathed a lot of diesel fumes, ate some bland stir-fried chicken from a street cart, and checked into our fleabag hotel thinking maybe we'd made a mistake.

In the morning, everything looked a lot better. We found a new, clean hotel with air conditioning. We rode the river taxi up and down the Chao Phraya. We ate perfect fried fish at a restaurant called Cabbages and Condoms, perfect grilled chicken at Sara-Jane's, and many perfect things at street carts. To say that the best food I ever ate was in Bangkok would be a huge understatement. Compared to the food I ate in Bangkok, most of what I eat isn't even food.

We spent a week in Bangkok and didn't bother with any side trips. A lot of people in Seattle, especially young people, have been to Thailand, and everyone we spoke to found our trip puzzling. You mean you didn't go to the beach? To the floating market? To meet the hill tribes? Isn't Bangkok a cesspool of traffic and sex tourism?

Because I'd been to Bangkok, I knew what Dan Gray meant when he said Seoul wasn't beautiful. Bangkok is, well, ugly. There's a whole lot of dirty concrete. It's also wonderful, with unexpected glimpses of beauty everywhere, like smooth mounds of colorful curry paste at the market, orchid sellers on the street, a truck piled high with pineapples.

Rice paddies and historical Asian architecture are picturesque in a way a Bangkok streetscape isn't. Instead of seeing this as an artistic challenge, authors and illustrators (or maybe publishers) have largely surrendered. Imagine if Ezra Jack Keats looked around the streets of New York and said, "Nothing to see here; I think I'll head to Central Park."

When I traveled in Asia (specifically Bangkok and Vientiane), I saw children involved in all sorts of play, especially rambunctious, unstructured street play, the kind American parents like to lament the passing of. I'm not saying urban Asia is a children's paradise, but--like Keats's New York--it's a rich and untapped well of stories.

The few urban Asian picture books I've found have left me with an appetite for many, many more. Here are a couple of my favorites, mostly set in Japan:

* The Way We Do It in Japan, Geneva Cobb Iijima, ill. Paige Billin-Frye. Gregory grew up in the US but moves to Tokyo with his parents when his (Japanese-American) father is assigned to the Tokyo office. They live in a small apartment outside Tokyo. Gregory has to get used to rice and fish for breakfast; putting his bed in a cupboard every day; Japanese toilets; and school. This book wrings a lot of interest out of the profoundly ordinary, but my favorite thing about it is how it shows, without saying it outright, that a lot of things about being in a new country are cool and annoying at the same time. This is a perennial favorite in our house, even though the end is kind of dumb. (Also, according to School Library Journal, "some of the 'way we do it...' elements are a bit stereotypical of the traditional way of Japanese life." I'm not sure whether this supports or negates my thesis.)

* Tokyo Friends, Betty Reynolds; My Japan, Etsuko Watanabe. These are essentially vocabulary books, not great for reading aloud, but with fabulous, colorful artwork. Reynolds is the author of a series of adult picture books about Japan, the best of which is Squeamish About Sushi. My Japan has a great page about Japanese food which includes like ten of Iris's favorite foods.

* City I Love. This book combines poems by Lee Bennett Hopkins with artwork by Marcellus Hall. It does a great job of making Asian cities seem dramatic and cool. The Tokyo page features the dazzle of Ginza, complete with wild-eyed anime characters, and the Shanghai page highlights the insane Shanghai skyline. There's a fun scavenger hunt aspect to the book; on each page you need to find the traveling dog and figure out which city he's in. (Cities from every continent feature in the book, not just Asia.)

City kids--all kids--in the West deserve to know more about their counterparts worldwide. To cover one of my favorite continents, I'd like to see more good urban picture books set in China, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, and elsewhere in Asia.

Thanks, Matthew. Hungry Monkey includes kid- and adult-friendly recipes for pad thai, larb gai, and bibimbop, as well as an appendix with kids' books about food.

First Paragraph Awe

2009-10-01T12:46:00.000-07:00

I've been looking forward to The Indigo Notebook (out this month) for AGES, and I've had the ARC for a while but I've been saving it. I just opened to the first paragraph (quoted from ARC, obviously), and I am SO HAPPY:

It's always the same, no matter where in the world we happen to be. Just when I get used to noodle soup for breakfast in Laos, or endless glasses of supersweet mint tea in Morocco, or crazy little tuk tuk taxis in Thailand, Layla gets that look in her eyes, that faraway, wistful look, as though she's squinting at a movie in the distance, and on the screen is a place more exotic, more dazzling, more spiritual than wherever we are.

Sometimes--very, very occasionally--a book will say to me "Here, Wendy. This was written especially for you."

Betsy Was a ???

2009-09-29T06:00:00.000-07:00

It’s finally release day for the new editions of the Betsy-Tacy high school books! I’m not buying copies right away, but I am re-reading the high school books in honor of the re-release.

My re-read has given me a burning question: What is up with the title Betsy Was a Junior? Thankfully, Maud Hart Lovelace did not give us Betsy Was a Freshman, Sophomore, Junior and Senior, but given that none of the other books has this type of title, why this one?

I suspect that naming the book was as difficult as reading it. Not that it’s a particularly challenging book – it’s just not the most fun of the Betsy-Tacy books. Perhaps it simply didn't evoke any other title for Maud or her publisher.

I mean, look at what happens:

Betsy accomplishes almost nothing she had planned to during the school year.
The Crowd becomes even more cliquish and alienates the rest of the school.
Betsy dates Dave Hunt, the strong, silent one. Whee.
Margaret almost blows herself up because Betsy doesn’t come home on time.
No Essay Contest for Betsy. No committee chairmanships for the Crowd.
Tony almost drifts off into perfectly-awful-land.
Cab’s father dies.

Valuable lessons are learned (Aber ja! Naturlich!), and there are high jinks as well, but it’s pretty depressing overall.

If you were going to give this book a different name, what would it be? Betsy and the Okto Deltas? Gang Aft Agley?

Would You Ever Challenge a Book?

2009-09-26T10:15:00.000-07:00

It's Banned Books Week, the week when bloggers and teachers and librarians and so on bemoan attempts to ban classic literature (and sometimes less than classic literature) from our classrooms and libraries.

I'm not going to lie, Banned Books Week kind of gets me annoyed every year, for two main reasons, both of which I've probably mentioned before. One: "reading banned books" and wearing banned books jewelry and whatnot seems to make some people feel like they're actually doing something wicked and progressive. Are they? And are they just freaking out the reactionaries? Two: a lot of our objections, a lot of our shock, goes to the book challenges and the reasons for those challenges and how dare anyone try to challenge this book. But wait--isn't that any parent's right, to file a challenge? Isn't that why the schools and libraries have the system in place? Should we really object to parents exercising the right to show their opinion and displeasure? There's a difference between filing a complaint and actually going and stealing the books or coercing a librarian or principal to give them up (not that that doesn't happen sometimes). Hooray for parents taking an interest in education, even if we think it's a misplaced interest. Because what if disturbing material--say, history books with a distinct anti-immigrant or anti-Arabic bias--started creeping into our schools, and we didn't have any way of objecting? It's not like it hasn't happened before.

(In fact, it almost happened in my lifetime. When I was in eighth grade, Oregon had a ballot measure up that would have required schools to teach actively that homosexuality was abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse. 43.53% of Oregon voters voted "yes" to that in 1992. That isn't hyperbolic fear-mongering language. That's the actual text of the ballot measure. I was thirteen and my childhood probably would have ended that year anyway, but it was a profoundly scary time.)

Banned Books Week has taken on a new urgency this year that I actually share, though. The uproar over Obama's speech, Juliana Baggott's experience with a planned school visit, and Ellen Hopkins's canceled school visit are all disturbing things. This summer has been bad, and this fall may be beyond imagining--as far as lies and fear go. So I'm not just going to grumble and leave. I'm going to ask you that question I put as my post title: would you ever challenge a book?

It's easy to think "no, books are powerful learning tools, I would never be so ignorant". I'm not a parent, or a teacher, or a librarian, so my perspective is sort of detached and maybe not worth much. But to be honest? Yes, I would.

Go Ask Alice is my favorite example of the most-challenged-books. It's brought up frequently in discussion, maybe because so many people have read it. ALA says that Go Ask Alice has been challenged because it has drugs, offensive language, and sexually explicit content. I've got no issue with any of those things. Go for it. No, I'd challenge Go Ask Alice for sheer stupidity.

I've said it before: unless Go Ask Alice was being used as a cautionary tale about how authors and publishers can manipulate readers, yup. I might file a complaint if it was being used in my kid's classroom. Go Ask Alice tells lies about drug use that can be totally counter-productive. It's unrepentantly anti-gay. The writing is TERRIBLE. It claims to be a real diary, which it isn't. Why is it being used in ANY classroom? I would never, ever want it banned from the library, including the school library, or tell any kid they shouldn't read it (in fact, I'd want them to, so we could have a good laugh over it). But I think classroom time could be better used on other books, and to be honest, the idea of a teacher-sanctioned homophobic book makes me uncomfortable. (Are teachers addressing this aspect of the book? Do they even notice?) So I'd make a complaint, and mine would be added to the others on the ALA list.

A Child Called It? Amos Fortune, Free Man? The Girl Who Owned a City? Is there any book you might object to seeing in your kid's classroom, for any reason? Intellectual freedom is a more complicated concept than being A-OK with And Tango Makes Three.

Take a minute, this Banned Books Week, to consider whether you fall completely on the other side of the fence. And take a minute to be glad that we're allowed to challenge books.

Depraved Deep Valley

2009-09-22T01:30:00.000-07:00

It's all over the place: lovely reissues of the high-school-and-beyond Betsy-Tacy books are coming out soon. People keep discovering Betsy-Tacy for the first time; just this morning I was giggling at a blogger who mentioned averting her eyes from a Wikipedia page for fear of Betsy in Spite of Herself spoilers. (It's hard to believe there was ever a time when I didn't know every word of that book.) This post is, in fact, part of a Betsy-Tacy Reissues Blog Tour. But I'm afraid you all might be getting a little tired of glowing reviews and nostalgia. (I did that before, anyway.) "We need a new angle," I said to Laurie. And she suggested something like this.

TOP TEN WAYS DEEP VALLEY HIGH SCHOOL IS JUST LIKE GOSSIP GIRL

1. They drink and smoke. Gossip Girl: every room has a decanter of brandy, every party has a keg, and Chuck Bass loves a good cigar. DVHS: "Pompey has discovered wine!" Bonnie shrieked. ..."What's more, I'm going to smoke a cigarette as soon as we get to the pond."

2. They date duds just because they're handsome. Gossip Girl: okay, this is pretty much the plot of half the episodes. DVHS: "'Oh, I adore that strong, silent type.'...Betsy was rapturous. 'Really? Maybe I like him better than I think I do.'"

3. They cheat at school. Gossip Girl: Chuck pays people to take his tests. DVHS: "Know what I do when I don't have my lesson? I yawn. Clarke always has to yawn back and when she gets started she can't stop. It slows things up a lot."

4. The teachers go after students. Gossip Girl: Dan unwisely gets involved with incredibly annoying young English teacher Rachel. DVHS: "Passing mimeographed instructions for herbariums, [Mr. Gaston] asked Betsy softly, 'Has your sister left for the university?' 'Not yet,' said Betsy. She tried to throw into her tone the implication that Julia couldn't bear to leave Deep Valley because it held Mr. Gaston."

5. They get spoony. Gossip Girl: This one time, Serena kissed Nate at a party. DVHS: "And just as Julia had warned her he might, he tried to act spoony. She put her hand into her coat pocket for warmth, and his hand followed."

6. They crash parties. Gossip Girl: Dan and Serena storm the Kiss On the Lips party. DVHS: "'Say, I hear the juniors are having a dance. Strictly for juniors. Seniors are urged to keep out.'"

7. They procrastinate. Gossip Girl: Dan never gets around to writing his next New Yorker-quality short story because he's too busy flirting with lovelies. DVHS: "Betsy was scornful. 'There's no law about going to bed the night you have to make a herbarium for botany.'"

8. They pull pranks. Gossip Girl: Serena gets the janitor's key and throws an after-hours pool party at school. DVHS: "I spread the tar."

9. They have frenemies. Gossip Girl: Blair has the power to ban girls from eating yogurt on the steps of the Met. DVHS: "...the attraction she held for the opposite sex kept her from being very popular with girls...'Let one of our beaus see much of Irma and...good-by! He's gone, just as though he had been dashed against a rock.'"

10. They gossip. Gossip Girl: "What's the difference between gossip and scandal? So glad you asked. Anyone can commit a minor indiscretion and generate a day's worth of buzz, but in order for gossip to birth a true scandal it requires the right person to be in the wrong place." DVHS: "He's going around with a perfectly awful girl."

XOXO!

Stay tuned for my next post, "Top 10 Ways Anne of Green Gables is like Queer As Folk".

Yes, Virginia, there was YA when you were a teenager.

2009-09-07T07:54:00.000-07:00

I have no idea why this topic heats me up so much. Maybe I've never gotten over my Ramona-like demand for precision from adults.

I keep hearing phrases along the lines of "we didn't have YA when I was a kid"--most recently among the comments to a post of Roger Sutton's about books being too long, here. (Someone else carried the torch there, I was glad to see. Also, in one of those sisterly coincidences--I was chomping at the bit to write this post yesterday but had to go to work; now I see that Laurie commented on the blog yesterday with the same point I was going to make.)

Yes, there were books specifically aimed at teenagers when you were a kid. Lots of them. This is true no matter what age you are. You might not have read them, but they were there.

I don't mean to claim that there isn't lots and lots of excellent YA today, maybe more than ever before, but there's been a lot for a long time.

One comment I hear often to make this point is that when we were kids, there was only a small YA shelf at the library(if that); this is what I found, also, at my library. Yes, these days most libraries seem to have huge YA sections. But from what I see, the difference here is largely in reclassification. If you go to your library and look at your YA shelves, you'll probably see lots and lots of books that were published before that shelf existed. Where were they before that? In the children's or "juvenile" section. That doesn't mean they weren't YA. The YA shelf at my library in the 80s and 90s seemed to be reserved specifically for books that had very explicit sex in them--but even lots of books with sex were shelved in our children's section. A House Like a Lotus, for instance. Annie On My Mind was shelved in YA, but other books with gay characters that were perhaps not so well-known were shelved in children's.

We can go back further than my youth. One of the comments in Roger's blog has an excellent list of the YA from the 70s and 80s (much of which was yes, shelved in my children's section also), and I'll let her speak for that era; I want to point out specifically Are You In the House Alone? which is definitely an "older teen" kind of book (yes, no matter when you read it), dealing as it does with teen sex and acquaintance rape and a sophisticated POV on teen dating.

I have a big collection of YA from the 1950s and 1960s. I discovered these books in middle school and devoured them and reread them and was fascinated by life back then. These books are sometimes tossed off as "malt shop books", acceptable to read only for nostalgic value. A few of them are pure fluff, but mostly they deal with serious subjects, and the very same subjects we get in YA today--I mean, yes, they talk about sex (and racism and cheating at school and failing college because you spend too much time with your boyfriend and so on). They don't use the same words, and the things kids worry about are slightly different because social mores were different.

After Pat has an argument with Tim, for instance, in First Love Farewell by Anne Emery, copyright 1958, a book about two college students:

She made her good-night kiss a special effort to show him she loved him more than ever. The trouble was, she had to make the special effort...she did not realize that she was beginning to use their love-making for special purposes: to cheer him up when he was melancholy, to reassure him when he was pessimistic about their future, to persuade him that she was deeply in love with him and that he was passionately, single-mindedly in love with her. Making love now meant that she wanted to kiss and caress him not only because she loved him, but because there was some misunderstanding that must be smoothed over, and making love as and when Tim wanted to was the easiest way to keep him content.

Later:
"You don't have to go in for a while," he whispered. "That's why we left by ten."
She pulled away. "Tim, we've got to take it easy."
He looked at her in astonishment.
"What's the matter with you? Don't you love me anymore? Don't you trust me?"
"Of course I love you, darling," she said, feeling weary that it had to be proved and asserted over and over. "But we can't go on like this indefinitely. It's getting harder all the time and --oh, I don't know. I just don't feel like being quite so--"...
"Well," he said angrily, "I guess I don't know what's going on any more. I figure if a girl doesn't want to make love, she isn't interested in a guy."...
"You know I love you, Tim. I've shown you that over and over. But tonight I just don't feel that way, somehow."

I do know that "love-making" didn't carry the same definition then that it does now, but I'm struck by how these scenes would have spoken to a variety of teens--the ones who didn't do much more than kiss AND the ones who were actually having sex. Nicely done, Mrs. Emery.

I think sometimes these books are not considered YA by people because for the most part there's nothing in them that would be too much for a middle-grade reader who happened along them--but that doesn't mean they aren't YA. All media at that time was less explicit--TV shows and movies, too. These were books written for teenagers, displaying the same kinds of characteristics that define YA today--seeking identity apart from one's parents and finding a place in society.

We can go back and back, to Seventeenth Summer published in 1942, to Anne of Avonlea, checked out by Ella and Henny (from the adult section!) just before World War 1, to The Little Colonel's Knight Comes Riding, which Betsy Ray read when she was no less than 15 in 1907. Have I got you convinced?

And I think there's another important reason YA is more plentiful now--a number of adult books published back in the day probably would be published as YA if they were written now (I Capture the Castle, To Kill a Mockingbird, A Separate Peace). My mother, born in 1949, remembers loving Edna Ferber when she was a teenager; I read Show Boat at 16 and loved it, too. Ferber might have been marketed as a young adult author, these days. And it works the other way, too--let's look at my beloved Tender Morsels--Margo Lanagan has mentioned that it wasn't written as a young adult book. In 1940, it definitely would have been in the adult section. Some publisher saw a market (and, I hope, a message) for teens there. And it's still being published as both an adult and a teen book.

Perhaps what bothers me about the claim "there wasn't any YA, or at least any good YA, when I was a kid" is that besides being untrue, it derails what could be an interesting conversation--how is YA different today from how it used to be? In what ways is it similar?

SCREAM!

2009-09-03T23:11:00.001-07:00

OK, so maybe this is how other people felt when the New Kids got back together? I can hardly believe this is going to be real.

The Summer Before (Babysitters Club)
Ann M. Martin
April 1, 2010

"Before there was the Baby-Sitters Club, there were four girls named Kristy Thomas, Mary Anne Spier, Claudia Kishi, and Stacey McGill. As they start the summer before seventh grade (also before they start the BSC), each of them is on the cusp of a big change. Kristy is still hung up on hoping that her father will return to her family. Mary Anne has to prove to her father that she's no longer a little girl who needs hundreds of rules. Claudia is navigating her first major crush on a boy. And Stacey is leaving her entire New York City life behind...

...in order to find new friends in Stoneybrook, Connecticut.

The Summer Before . . . is a sweet, moving novel about four girls on the edge of something big - not just the Club that will change their lives, but also all the joys and tribulations of being twelve and thirteen."

I never, ever though Ann M. Martin would write more about The Babysitters Club. And honestly, I would be a million trillion times more interested in a new book about the babysitters at 16, or 22--but that wouldn't get a "new generation reading the books we loved as girls", which I assume is the aim here.

Also, I only really started to sort of love The Babysitters Club as an adult, for sheer camp value, except for a few select titles that are really kind of awesome (Kristy's Big Day, Boy-Crazy Stacey). I've read far more of them recently than I did as a kid; I originally abandoned them when I was about eleven and couldn't take the ridiculousness anymore.

But. Still. WHAT THE WHAT? Next thing you're going to be telling me that Leonardo DiCaprio is going to be rejoining the cast of Growing Pains for a Very Special Episode.

(sorry about the Amazon link, it was all I could find, and that actually makes me wonder if this isn't some kind of very clever prank put together by female MIT students.)

Negative reviews, and Catching Fire

2009-09-01T07:08:00.000-07:00

I decided not to post a review of Catching Fire today. I didn't like it very much.

I've been thinking about whether I WOULD post a review, ever since I read it back in July--before that I was sure I would, because I was sure I would like it.

And this got me thinking about the purpose of negative reviews.

It doesn't seem like most bloggers post them; I know some don't because if they don't like a book, they don't bother finishing it. There've been several ARCs in the last couple of months that I tossed aside because I wasn't enjoying them enough to finish them and they weren't "big" enough that I really wanted to read them so I could understand what everyone else was talking about.

I got started in book-blogging when I was reading all the Newberys last summer; since I also wrote short reviews of all of them, naturally some of those reviews were negative. Getting started that way may have made me feel more comfortable with posting negative (or more often, middling) reviews. But I still don't do it much, except on Goodreads, which serves a different purpose for me.

So what's the point of a negative review? Especially of Catching Fire, which you're all going to read anyway? I would, no matter how many negative reviews I read. I wanted to find out what happened. And I hoped to replicate that "Oh, I see I'm not going to be getting any sleep tonight" experience of reading The Hunger Games.

Wait, does that mean I sometimes I do write negative reviews in order to dissuade people from reading a book? That sounds awful. Okay, about ten years ago I remember writing a post to a listserv about why exactly I hated ...And Ladies of the Club and feeling very satisified when someone wrote to me and said "Thank you for ridding me of any desire I had to ever read that book." But otherwise I... don't care what you read, don't care what books you buy, am usually happy for the authors of books I dislike if other people like them (unless said book is truly offensive to me, hello ...And Ladies of the Club).

Really, I think I write negative reviews for the most part in order to have a conversation--with myself, even if no one else. It's often in the writing of a review that I'm able to really clarify my thoughts about a book. It makes me dig deeper into the book for concrete examples of what I'm trying to say. And when I read a negative review of a book I loved, it helps me see the reasons that I thought the book was so good. Either that, or it gives me a few moments of righteous indignation--if I'm of the opinion that the reviewer's dislike is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the book--and usually results in me calling my sister to complain.

I'm not sure that anyone is interested in having that conversation about Catching Fire, based on the reaction to the Entertainment Weekly review (which had some factual errors, but don't all of our reviews, from time to time? of course, we're not being published in big magazines, but you know; anyway, I thought it was pretty much spot-on otherwise), but hey, I'm around if anyone does. In exchange, you can tell me why you thought, like, A Swiftly Tilting Planet was bad.

Brothers

2009-08-31T19:26:00.001-07:00

Dude, you think I'm funny? (Um, sometimes, anyway?) You should meet my little brother. I didn't realize he was trying to chat with me on facebook chat, and when I kept not responding, he kept writing. This eventually turned into... a pretend conversation between the two of us wherein we compare Maniac Magee with Little House on the Prairie and On the Banks of Plum Creek.

Wendy: You know, Scott...Maniac Magee is the best book I have ever read.

Scott: Oh, really? Why is that?

Wendy: You know when Maniac has nothing and the old man gives him butterscotch Krimpets.

Scott: Oh, Like Mr. Edwards at Christmas

Wendy: Yes, and the big bully treats him like Nellie Olsen

Scott: Very True

Wendy: And that Biker gang in town is like Willie

Scott: Yes.

Don't you wish Scott was YOUR fourth-grade teacher?

Apropos of Something

2009-08-29T15:30:00.001-07:00

I'm the third Burton sister to post here. Even if you know us, you may not know that we also have three brothers! Once, long ago (I don't even remember how old I was), I accidentally spilled boiling water on my brother Mike's back. I had a pot of macaroni to drain, and as I turned around from the stove with the pot, he ducked under it. He ended up requiring medical attention.

My mother gave me some of her pots and pans a few years ago, and I happened to bring that very pot on a recent extended-family camping trip. Everyone noticed, of course, and I remarked that I never, ever make pasta without remembering the burning incident and checking carefully for children nearby.

More often, though, certain tasks and activities will remind me of a quote from a book. For instance, when cooking potatoes, I always think "Eliza Jane, remember you're paring those potatoes, not slicing them, and don't leave so many eyes they can see to jump out of the pot!" (Farmer Boy, Laura Ingalls Wilder) This is followed by, "Stir the potatoes, Carrie; they'll be too brown." (These Happy Golden Years, Laura Ingalls Wilder)

Do you have any tasks or activities that are irrevocably tied to a quote or passage from a book?

The Brilliant Fall of Gianna Z.

2009-08-27T06:28:00.000-07:00

I was drawn to the ARC of The Brilliant Fall of Gianna Z (Kate Messner) at ALA because of the beautiful cover; almost turned off because the jacket summary mentions cross-country running and I'm not generally into sports books; persuaded by a sentence explaining that Gianna has "a grandmother who keeps losing her false teeth", because I'm a sucker for funny grandmothers. In the end, it was enjoyable from start to finish, smarter, funnier, and more original than I was expecting.

Gianna Z is a book that's busy without being crowded. Messner touches on procrastination, Alzheimer's, young love, middle-school friendships, botany, poetry, running, cooking, art--yet I never felt like she was trying to do too much. Gianna's life is so busy and multi-faceted that I could totally understand why she has trouble getting her science project done.

That science project (collecting and identifying 25 different types of leaves) forms the spine of the book. This is a school story through-and-through, and it really gets across how important school is to seventh-graders. Maybe too often school is almost an afterthought in middle-grade books these days, but I remember what it was like when school was pretty much everything, and when it was always getting in the way of what I'd rather be doing. To a seventh-grader it is honestly very important that a big project get done well and on time, and that can cause all kinds of angst. And as in real life, Gianna's school worries don't go away when her family life gets complicated--projects still need to be turned in. (I remember the relieved amazement I felt when I got to college and discovered that professors would readily grant extensions if a student had too much else going on. I can't remember that I ever asked for an extension, but it was nice to know they were there.)

That funny grandmother? Yes, very funny and lovable indeed; an Italian immigrant who makes co0kies and spaghetti sauce. There's even a recipe for the cookies at the back, always a great touch. I also liked a minor character who is an avid recycler and reluctant cross-country runner. And oh, there are so many funny moments:

"Heck, I eat wedding cookies with dead people almost every weekend."

(...um... maybe you had to be there.)

"My hair and I have already had a long day."

(Oh, Gianna, we are sisters.)

I was surprised by a goodreads review that seemed to want this book to be more neat and didactic, because I loved how messy everything was, how all lessons were not learned, how everything didn't tie together neatly. I think you will, too.

There's only one thing I wish was different--I'd have liked to see the mean girl become a little more three-dimensional. I felt sorry for her.

(Oh, and because I'm kind of a snob, I keep wincing when I think about how many people will pronounce Gianna's name wrong.)

Gianna Z: solid, funny, real, recommended.

The Brilliant Fall of Gianna Z comes out September 1 from Walker Books for Young Readers. All quotes taken from the ARC, which was provided by the publisher.

Not Really a Meme

2009-08-25T07:43:00.000-07:00

Because I've moved semi-recently, and had all my books shipped to me quite recently, and have no bookshelves, my books are all stacked around me; and gazing at them got me thinking along these lines:

Five Books I Know Better Than I Know Myself:

-Heaven to Betsy (Maud Hart Lovelace)
-Ballet Shoes (Noel Streatfeild)
-Sue Barton, Student Nurse (Helen Dore Boylston)
-The Moon By Night (Madeleine L'Engle)
-Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)

Five Books I Wish I Could Read Again For The First Time:

-The Cheerleader (Ruth Doan MacDougall)
-The Four-Story Mistake (Elizabeth Enright)
-The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins)
-The Diary of Anne Frank (Anne Frank)
-A Bright Star Falls (Lenora Mattingly Weber)

Five Books I Look Forward To Knowing Intimately:

-When You Reach Me (Rebecca Stead)
-Impossible (Nancy Werlin)
-A Solitary Blue (Cynthia Voigt)
-The Wheel on the School (Meindert DeJong)
-Nation (Terry Pratchett)

Boy, was that first list hard to narrow down. I could have replaced every title with something else, but I went with the first five that came to mind.

What books do you know better than you know yourself? What have you read recently that you knew right away was the beginning of a lifelong relationship?

Surreptitiously Gay: The Westing Game?

2009-08-06T11:59:00.001-07:00

All right, this piece was written several months ago, and just brought to my attention today via Worth the Trip, but since as you know The Westing Game is my favorite Newbery, I was intrigued by the question of whether there's a gay subtext. Before I read the piece, I quickly scanned my memory for guesses as to what the blogger might be looking at. Angela's friendship with Sydelle Pulaski (those matching checkered outfits!)? Turtle's tomboyishness? Judge Ford's... Judge Fordness?

It's nothing so straightforward as that, and I think this is really more about one person's response to The Westing Game than anything I'd pick out as being queer. (Really, the most surprising thing to me was the author's comment that some of his students wonder about A Separate Peace, even though "sex and sexuality don't feature" in it. I honestly thought that was what A Separate Peace was about, even if it isn't written explicitly. Isn't it?)

Philip mentions a few other books with queer subtext, or possibly queer subtext, like Harriet the Spy. What other children's books have you considered in this context? Since Betsy-Tacy is the hot topic right now, I'll say that I've never noted the slightest hint of a queer subtext between the two of them, though it's questioned occasionally by fans--but in Carney's House Party, in the Vassar chapters, it's barely even hidden. The Sue Barton nurse books are crawling with it (this is probably not a revelation to any of you by this point, but the author of Sue Barton, Helen Dore Boylston, was Rose Wilder Lane's life partner). The boyfriends in Nancy Drew were never anything but a joke. The first Babysitters Club/Friends Forever book, Everything Changes, practically reads like slash fanfic--and speaking of Ann M. Martin, when I read the final California Diaries book (this series is AMAZING, I'm not kidding) I almost cried because she and her ghostwriters never came right out and said Ducky was gay, although they left enough hints for people in the know. My most recent discovery was A Solitary Blue, which I loved loved loved and thought was very gay. Oh, and for a newer book, I haven't got a doubt about one of the characters in The Green Glass Sea and White Sands, Red Menace.

I could (and do) go on like this for a long time, but any other offerings? Or thoughts on The Westing Game? (By the way, my vote for Newbery-with-most-queer-subtext is probably The Twenty-One Balloons.)

Three New Jewish Books

2009-07-22T12:25:00.001-07:00

A few months ago, we had some discussion on child_lit and various blogs about why there weren't more books about Jewish kids that aren't totally focused on being Jewish. (My thoughts are that as far as I can see there isn't any dearth of such books; I can think of lots of examples. That doesn't mean there shouldn't/couldn't be more, but I don't think there's a big lack.)

Anyway, here's a coincidence: the first three ARCs I read from ALA are all about Jewish kids. And okay, it happens that they're all historical fiction, but two of them are straight-up slice-of-life books that I think will please the people who are looking for more of that.

Tropical Secrets: Holocaust Refugees in Cuba, by Margarita Engle (published in April), is another verse-novel, like her Newbery-Honored The Surrender Tree. It's the story of Daniel, a young German Jewish teen who escaped the Holocaust and arrived in Cuba, but without his parents; and Paloma, a Cuban girl concerned with the plight of the refugees. The characters are crystal-clear (especially in the case of secondary character of David, an older Russian Jew who has lived in Cuba for decades), and I just gobbled this book up even when I tried to savor the poetry. One thing I really appreciated about this book is that it assumes some knowledge of World War Two; Engle doesn't waste space explaining details about what's going on back in Germany. I noticed when I was waiting in line to meet Engle at ALA that many people seemed to be picking this up, perhaps more than The Surrender Tree, and I think the subject matter is perhaps more appealing--so many people are interested in Holocaust stories who might not think they'd be interested in a Spanish-American War story. I didn't think this was as compelling and finely-wrought as The Surrender Tree, but it is excellent, and maybe more accessible (and for slightly younger readers). I recommend it highly.

This tropical heat
is a weight in the sky
crushing my breath,
but I will not remove
my winter coat or my fur hat
or the itchy wool scarf
my mother knitted
or the gloves my father gave me
to keep my hands warm
so that we could all
play music together
someday, in the Golden Land
called New York.

(quote is from the ARC)

Strawberry Hill by Mary Ann Hoberman (out this month) surprised me when it turned out to be a book about a Jewish girl. The back cover hooked me because it sounded like a new book of a Gone-Away Lake or Miracles on Maple Hill stripe. ("When ten-year-old Allie learnes that her family will be moving from a two-family home to their very own house, she's hesitant until she finds out they will be living on a street with the magical name of Strawberry Hill. That changes everything!") I was also surprised to open it up and discover that it's set in the Depression era. (The ARC didn't have a cover illustration.) I was hoping for something modern-day, perhaps less arch and derivative than The Penderwicks. So keep this in mind when I don't give this book a glowing review: I wanted it to be something it wasn't.

Allie's family is not very religious, but being Jewish is a part of her identity that becomes more important when she makes friends in her new neighborhood with a popular Catholic girl (Catholics don't come off well in this book) and a Jewish girl who is an outcast. She encounters anti-Semitism for the first time, but it isn't central to the story. Strawberry Hill is a mild and gentle book that will probably please some young readers (and will definitely please their parents), but it lacks the magic of classic we-move-to-a-new-place-and-everything-is-awesome books. But I know those books have generally been pretty WASPy, and this is a nice contrast.

The Importance of Wings by Robin Friedman (out this month) is altogether different, and quite interesting. It's set in the 1980s, juuuust before my time; enough that the setting feels familiar to me and will feel like home to my oldest sister. This book is rough, but, I think, unique, and I enjoyed it more than I expected to. For one thing, I thought with that title this would be a teen angst story about finding your own wings. No, the wings in the title refer solely to feathered hair. Nice.

Thirteen-year-old Roxanne, who immigrated to New Jersey with her family from Israel when she was a little girl, is the star here, and I love her. Roxanne and her little sister spend a lot of time watching TV--Wonder Woman and The Brady Bunch, chiefly. Look, I spent plenty of time playing outside and reading when I was a kid, but I also watched those late-afternoon reruns, and I loved finding a character in a book who did that, too. It sounds like a dull character trait, but Friedman works it in well; the girls just seem REAL.

The story begins when another Israeli girl moves in next door, and this girl, Liat, is a bit larger than life and broadly drawn--but then, that's part of the story, too; Roxanne often compares her to Wonder Woman. Liat is more involved with Israeli culture than Roxanne, who is focused on trying to be a "Real American". In her own mind, she never quite succeeds.

This is a book about growing up in the 1980s, about being an immigrant, and about being thirteen (remember the title--the most important thing in the world, to Roxanne, is feathered hair). While the writing was heavy-handed in spots, especially at the end, and the story was a bit jumpy, I felt like I was reading something new and different but real here. The Importance of Wings won't be winning any awards, and I'm not quite sure what kids will make of the 1980s setting, but this is a solid book that I think will appeal to middle school girls who are bright but aren't advanced readers.

(Except I really hate it in books when it turns out that the plain protagonist is actually really beautiful. Ahem.)

ALA round-up

2009-07-17T06:57:00.000-07:00

I am about to leave for Granny Burton's house, the only place in my life without Internet, so a full report will have to wait until next week.

My weekend at ALA Annual in Chicago was amazing, filled with books, authors, and editors, plus great learning about ALA itself and best practices for working with my students.

Best celebrity author moment: watching Sherman Alexie and Laurie Halse Anderson bump into each other and start chatting, three feet from me, as I lingered by the wall before the Newbery banquet.

Best non-celebrity author moment: learning that the quiet librarian sitting next to me during YA author speed-dating was herself a YA author who had just published Serendipity Market with HarperCollins this spring.

Some great conference reports posted this week:

I was delighted with Tasha Saecker's post about her conference because, while our themes are similar, she attended an entirely different roster of events than I did. That's how big this conference is!

Conference report from Publishers Weekly, and photos

Scholastic authors brunch, which I attended directly after YALSA's YA Authors Coffee Klatch (what a morning that was!)

Two reports on the Newbery/Caldecott/Wilder banquet. I was there.

More to come!

(And again, credit to the Baker & Taylor/YALSA grant that enabled me to have this incredibly memorable experience. I can't say enough about how fabulously I was treated by all the members and staff of YALSA who I met this weekend.)

ALA Sanity Break

2009-07-11T14:01:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting outside the exhibit hall at ALA in Chicago. It's hard to believe that yesterday I worked a full shift at my job as a registered nurse--just as yesterday evening, when I got on the train to Chicago, I had a hard time thinking about books.

I started the day by heading straight to Scholastic for an ARC of Catching Fire, as did many others. I hadn't heard much about whether there actually would BE ARCs, but I already turned one down that someone offered me a few weeks ago, saying "give it to someone else, I'll pick one up at ALA". Yes, they were there! I feel like the last blogger ever to have one, but I'm satisfied.

Since then, I have:

--made Richard Peck laugh (and I'm pretty sure it was at me, not with me; I told him about how I visited Madame Tussaud's to see where Blossom and Alexander posed in the Titanic exhibit, and he said "You believe everything you read, don't you?")

--accosted Elizabeth Bunce, Yuyi Morales, and Garret Freymann-Wehr as they were just walking along, trying to look at stuff themselves

--talked with Roger Sutton about, of all things, The Long Winter

--almost cried talking to Candace Fleming about The Lincolns

--really started to cry when thinking about what I would say to Margo Lanagan about Tender Morsels; luckily for her, she's not appearing until Monday, after I leave, because yeah, there would have been tears

--tried to convince a rep to sell me her display copy of Lincoln: A Photobiography so I could get it autographed by Russell Freedman (they'd sold out--she wouldn't; I bought the Marian Anderson book instead, and I'm sure it's great, but pooh)

--gotten totally tongue-tied when trying to speak to Kadir Nelson, whose gaze is more compelling than should be allowable under the law.

I also collected other ARCs (and bought books too--no one told me many of the publishers would be selling brand-new current books cheap!), and shortly after the Kadir Nelson incident, decided to mail almost everything home. I held onto Catching Fire for the train ride, and I mailed the copies I had autographed for my mother and brother of We Are the Ship and A Year Down Yonder. (The first for my mother and the second for my brother, which is interesting.) I thought I looked at every ARC I took very carefully to make sure it was REALLY something I wanted--but when I was unpacking my backpack, I discovered that most of them I didn't ever remember picking up. I was pleased to get the new Alvin Ho book, and the rep handed me another one that she said I would like too, about a boy in Hawaii. It was a special thrill to see my brother-in-law Matthew's book, Hungry Monkey, at the Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt booth.

Then I headed out to take a break, but had no more than turned on this computer before my sister Laurie called. She wanted to go to a session; did I want to take her place in the Simon and Schuster line so I could have a brownie and meet M.T. Anderson, among others? Um, yes. Simon and Schuster was passing out plain old BOOKS. Piles of Chains and Wintergirls were seized quickly, but I picked up several others that looked good. My backpack is starting to feel heavy again.

Oh, and I've seen many friends old and new--I waved at Nina Lindsay, had lunch with child-lit people including Cheryl Klein, Monica Edinger, Anastasia Suen and Lyn Miller-Lachmann, talked briefly with two Betsy-Tacy friends (there will be a large, jolly Betsy-Tacy lunch tomorrow), and said a quick "happy birthday" to Abby the Librarian. I was bummed to miss Liz Burns due to a schedule misprint, and I'm still hoping to run into her and Betsy Bird. Anyone else around?

Anticipation

2009-07-06T07:26:00.000-07:00

This year, thanks to a Baker & Taylor/YALSA grant and a calendar that puts Annual in July, I am going to the ALA Annual Conference! The stars have aligned to give me not just a great professional experience for a school librarian, but also an opportunity I never imagined as I studied the Newbery Award poster that hung in my elementary school library.

Since it's Wendy who actually read all the Newbery winners, I have promised her a full report from the banquet and will share it here as well. I am very excited, as well, about attending the Printz Award Program. While the Newbery is the award of my childhood, the Printz began when I was an adult working in a bookstore, and the Printz books have been fantastic over the years. This year's winner, Jellicoe Road, is not an easy book, nor can it have been an easy choice for the award, but... WOW.

(I considered also writing a post about Nicholas Kristof's column, but fortunately I can now point you to this response from Lisa Von Drasek at Early Word. "Hoary old favorites" is right. The only thing I will add is that if you did not already know that Kristof grew up in Oregon, the bizarre inclusion of On to Oregon on his list would tip you off. I loved pioneer stories when I was a kid too, Nick, but I don't go around recommending Tree Wagon to kids today.)