Midwinter is Coming!

...but not for me.

While you lucky ducklings are enjoying the grayer pastures of Seattle, I'll be at home this weekend, trying to cast my eyes upon as many celebrated YA titles as I can. Code Name Verity, Brides of Rollrock Island, Seraphina, Beneath a Meth Moon, I'm coming for you.

If you see Sam out there, tell him hello!

I'll be on Twitter Monday morning, squeeing along to the Youth Media Awards. 

(Credit for excellent, excellent meme to http://www.theanalogdivide.com/)

2013 Contenders: Each Kindness, by Jacqueline Woodson

There is a truism that says that the quality that most clearly differentiates children's literature from other types of books is an inherent sense of hope and optimism. Does it have a happy ending? No? Not a children's book, then. I have used this rubric to defend improbably cheerful endings in any number of books, including, this year, Wonder, The One and Only Ivan, and Splendors and Glooms.

Child readers need happy endings, right?  

It has been a long time since I've come across a book that challenges that rule as thoroughly and beautifully as Each Kindness does. It is a book about bullying, in a year full of bullies (both fictional and depressingly real), told from the viewpoint of the bully.

When new student Maya walks into the classroom one morning, narrator Chloe takes an instant dislike to her and her ragged clothes. Lonely Maya reaches out to Chloe with smiles and invitations to play, but her awkward overtures are met with silent disdain. Chloe and her friends give Maya the kind of subtle and effective shunning that tends to go undetected by adults, and eventually Maya gives up and plays alone. After a poignant classroom lesson on kindness, Chloe resolves to treat Maya differently, but it's too late. Maya has moved away.

Is there hope in the ending? Technically, yes. This has been a profound and painful experience for Chloe - one that will clearly change the way she approaches the world in the future. But it won't change her relationship with Maya. It's too late for that. The last line of the book is terribly, effectively sad: "I watched the water ripple as the sun set through the maples and the chance of a kindness with Maya becoming more and more forever gone."

That kind of sentence-level writing, hard and clear as diamonds, characterizes the whole book. A commenter here recently said that it's easier for short books like this one to be flawless, but I couldn't disagree more. It's insanely hard to pack that kind of punch into a single sentence. The way the imagery of the sunset and the ripples parallels Chloe's feelings of regret while still staying true to her voice totally wows me. Woodson anchors her story with so many of these carefully chosen details - a broken shoe strap, a tiny rubber ball, a jump rope too long for one person to use. It's filled with the quiet poetry of the real world.

It's difficult to discuss this book without mentioning the gorgeous paintings, but I think the text clearly stands on its own. The good people at the Cooperative Children's Book Center agree - they just awarded it the Charlotte Zolotow award for outstanding writing in a picture book.

I feel a bit silly, raving about every book I discover at the eleventh hour, but golly this is a good one.

Newbery Stars: Mea Culpa

In case you're wondering where the Newbery winners starred review post went... Well, evidently I made several mistakes in my calculations. I'm going back over my research and retabulating, and I'll put the post back up if/when I'm 100% sure I have it right.

 (Head to desk, face to palm, and various other expressions of personal chagrin.)
 
Sorry about that! Yet another reason to be grateful for Elizabeth Bluemle and her list.

ETA: I think I'm going to turn this into a larger project. It's more challenging than I anticipated. 

2013 Contenders: Chickadee, by Louise Erdrich

In order to properly evaluate Chickadee, I have to begin with a confession: I have not read the other books in the series. I recommend them all the time - whenever someone says "Little House," my reflex response is "Birchbark House" - but I had not personally made the acquaintance of Omakayas and family.

So, coming to the book as a Erdrich virgin, I'm left with two conclusions:

1. You don't need to have read the rest of the series to enjoy it. Total standalone.

2. If you haven't, you'll want to.

Quick plot summary: Omakayas, who readers met as a child in The Birchbark House, is now the mother of twin boys, Chickadee and Makoon. When Chickadee is kidnapped, the family must leave the woods of northern Minnesota and venture onto the Great Plains to retrieve him. In the process, their way of life changes forever.

For some reason Chickadee wasn't getting a lot of Newbery buzz early in the season, but it has certainly been lauded. It just won the Scott O'Dell award, and it's been starred in, I believe, six journals (though it only made Horn Book's "best of the year" list). Come to think of it, I have no idea why the initial buzz passed it by.

The hype (is it still hype if it's all very dignified and literary?) is well deserved: Erdrich writes masterfully for children. Her prose has a cozy, timeless quality that's immediately appealing. It's very clear and straightforward, while still packing in lots of evocative descriptions of the natural world. The novel is also deftly structured, interweaving the family's story with the larger narrative of the Anishinabe/Ojibwe. It has both emotional weight and moments of levity (the bumbling kidnappers are some of my favorite comic villains of the year).

Comparing it to some of the other Newbery hopefuls, I think it matches them in several categories. Setting and style are clearly distinguished, as is theme. Some of the characters are more developed than others - I think Splendors and Glooms may surpass it there. Splendors may be more distinguished in plot as well, especially as I found myself slightly confused about the timeline of events in Chickadee at times.

Will the committee agree? Are we totally off base? Is it going to be another Moon Over Manifest year? We'll know in less than a week! In the meantime, I'm going to go track down a copy of The Birchbark House for my daughter and make it our next bedtime read-aloud.

(Deliberately not using a Field of Dreams reference to title this post.)

So Cen Campbell of Little eLit and I were playing on Facebook professionally networking, and the subject of BWI's recent demise came up. Now, every children's librarian I know pretty much loved BWI, particularly their TitleTales ordering tool. Cen and friends were wondering if it would be coming back, and I said I didn't think so. Boo.

"Alrighty then," said Cen. "We need to build something to replace it, only awesomer."

"I'm all over that," I replied. "You know what would be great? A children's book search engine that included all the review sources, plus tags, blog reviews, and user reviews. Like some kind of Goodreads + TitleTales genetic hybrid monster."

(Except it wouldn't include all of that weird YA author drama that lurks in the dark crevasses of Goodreads. It should include apps, though.)

Seriously, this needs to happen. I am not a software developer or database engineer, or I'd start working on it right now (plus - fingers crossed - I may be real busy with committee work next year). 

Another challenge: something like this should be free, I think, and I know that review content isn't cheap. Somebody has to keep Roger Sutton in bow ties, right? 

2013 Contenders: Penny and Her Doll, by Kevin Henkes

So after my post on Penny and Her Song, a couple of our readers chimed in to opine that I might have picked the wrong Penny book to highlight. Not that they didn't like Song a lot, but they thought that the sequel, Penny and Her Doll, might have been just a little bit better. This intrigued me enough that I decided to have a look at Doll as well.

In this installment, the titular heroine receives a doll as a present from her Gram. She loves the doll, but figuring out a name for it proves to be a real challenge. Which name is the right one?

One of the things I like most about Kevin Henkes is that he has an exceptional grasp of the issues many children take to heart, and a respect for those issues, whether or not an adult might consider them "important." What to name a cherished toy falls firmly into this category, and Penny's parents treat the question seriously, which is nice to see. The love that this family has for each other jumps off the page, and it creates a mood that's sweet without being cloying.

Is it indeed better than Penny and Her Song? In my mind, it's close to a dead heat, but Doll might be ever-so-slightly superior. There's probably a stronger conflict-resolution plot in Doll, and the ending flows satisfyingly from the rest of the book. Doll doesn't have anything quite like the magical childlikeness of the actual words of Penny's song in Song, but the sheer beauty of its construction might nudge it a bit ahead. (It's also worth mentioning that the Notables committee seems to feel so too, since Doll is on their Nominated Titles list, and Song isn't.)

Do I think that little bit extra is enough to make Penny and Her Doll show up on the Newbery list? No, not really, for the same reasons that I mentioned in my post about Song. I think it might well be the front-runner for the Geisel award though.


Published in September by Greenwillow / HarperCollins

2013 Notables Discussion List Announced!

Fresh off the ALSC blog comes the news that the official 2013 Notables list of nominated titles is out!

It certainly looks like a list that would engender great discussion! It also, especially in the nonfiction, seems like a brilliant encapsulation of this year's best books.

There were a few omissions that surprised me a bit. Several established authors had books out this year that I figured were a pretty good bet for the final Notables list, so it's interesting to note that Applewhites at Wit's End, by Stephanie S. Tolan; Will Sparrow's Road, by Karen Cushman; The Great Unexpected, by Sharon Creech; and The Wild Book, by Margarita Engle, all missed the preliminary cut. It's also worth mentioning that this year's National Book Award winner, William Alexander's Goblin Secrets, also didn't make the longlist.

I always enjoy the Notables list, which by nature is able to include a more varied overview of the best children's books of the year than the Newbery and its associated Honors are. I can't wait to see what makes the final list!