2012 Contenders: Breadcrumbs, by Anne Ursu

"No matter how many theories you apply to it, life presses on indifferently toward its own inscrutable ends. The fun is in asking questions. Answers are a form of defeat."
          ~Roger Ebert

*****

Ebert was talking there about the 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad, but he could just as well have been talking about Breadcrumbs. And if that isn't a moral that one expects from a children's book, it only adds to the power of a novel as hypnotic as a blizzard, as ominous as a dream, as fragmented as reality.

The plot is an extended reinterpretation of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen," set partly in modern-day Minnesota, and partly in The Woods, one of the most unfriendly landscapes in the history of children's fantasy. Fifth-grader Hazel Anderson's best friend Jack is missing, and she takes it upon herself to find and rescue him, even in the face of mounting evidence that he may not want to be rescued after all.

The prose is masterfully poetic, evocatively descriptive, and desperately sad. Indeed, though I've read children's books in which sadder things happened, I'm not sure I've ever read one in which the tone was so consistently haunting, melancholic, and existentially troubled. Even the book's ending, the nominal conclusion of the heroic quest, refuses to bask in happiness or allow Hazel a moment of pure joy.

The book's received decidedly mixed reviews, which I think is related to the fact that it resists so many conventions of popular literature in general and children's fantasy in particular. Even the most frightening of the characters, the Snow Queen herself, hardly qualifies as a villain, and there's no Aslan or Gandalf to help guide Hazel on her quest either. Secondary characters flit through the book half-visibly, especially in the second part; we see the portions of their stories that intersect with Hazel's, but no more. The precise meaning of several of the book's most arresting images -- the wolves, the clock in the woods, the demon with the mirror -- remains maddeningly obscure. Even though various people, including Hazel at times, want the plot to be organized as a classic good vs. evil conflict, it steadfastly refuses to go that way.

We don't expect that from our fantasy novels, especially for children. We expect archetypes, black and white, plots that tie together all the loose ends at their conclusion. But isn't a lack of those more like the way life actually operates? Existence is painted in shades of gray. There are few true villains, and fewer heroes. People come and go from our lives, often with little explanation and with seemingly important questions unresolved. Even narrative itself is an illusion, a cloak we weave from broken threads to try and keep the cold of chaos away. What, under those circumstances, is more real: an epic battle of Good and Evil, or the attempts of a flawed but determined girl to save a fracturing friendship, with results that, even at the end of the story, aren't fully visible? As the Jens Lekman song goes, "What's broken can always be fixed; what's fixed will always be broken."

Strangely, given that it's a fantasy novel, I think many people would like this book more if it were less true. But I love it for its truthfulness, its gorgeous weariness, and its (successful) attempts to find beauty and meaning in things that are not only broken, but both being fixed and breaking more all the time. I gave it five stars on Goodreads, and it's my single favorite book of the past year. It may be too divisive to win the Newbery, but if I had a vote, it's the one I'd pick.

And that's my two cents.

2012 Contenders: Amelia Lost, by Candace Fleming

The Newbery guidelines specifically state that "the committee shall consider all forms of writing—fiction, non-fiction, and poetry," and the very first Newbery medal was, of course, awarded to a work of nonfiction, The Story of Mankind. However, in anything like recent years, it's an extreme rarity that anything other than a novel receives the top honor. In fact, since 1956, when Jean Lee Latham's lightly fictionalized biography Carry On, Mr. Bowditch won the medal, it's only happened four times: twice for poetry (A Visit to William Blake's Inn in 1982, and Joyful Noise in 1989), once for drama (Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! in 2008), and once for nonfiction (Lincoln: A Photobiography in 1988). It just doesn't happen very often.

Nonfiction may be the toughest sell of all for the Newbery. Most nonfiction, after all, is essentially informational. The kinds of adult nonfiction that we think of as making a "distinguished contribution to literature" tend to be essays or "creative" nonfiction, things written by the Annie Dillards and John McPhees and Studs Terkels of the world. Precious little of that appears for a children's audience; what's published is almost entirely "nonliterary." Heck, even, though I greatly admire Russell Freedman's work and consider him essentially the best at what he does, the only nonfiction award in the past five and a half decades still doesn't look all that good in hindsight, what with 1988 being The Year That Hatchet Didn't Win.

With that in mind, one of the books that is getting a lot of buzz in the week leading up to the Newbery is Candace Fleming's Amelia Lost: The Life And Disappearance Of Amelia Earhart. The illustrious Elizabeth Bird is even picking it as this year's winner. It was one of the candidates for the Maryland Mock Newbery, and though, for the record, it was the one I liked, I'm uncomfortable with giving it the award.

This is despite the fact that, what it sets out to do, it does very well. I find most children's biographies tiresome, especially given that they are often forced to sanitize the more problematic portions of their subjects' lives. Amelia Lost, on the other hand, is a captivating read, one that makes excellent use of chapters that intercut Amelia's life story with her disappearance and its immediate aftermath. The structure goes a long way toward keeping the story interesting for a young reader, and for this reader as well -- no mean feat, given that we already know even before picking up the book that the ending is as predetermined as that of the Titanic.

It also doesn't shy away from Amelia's downsides. She was unafraid to take risks, a champion of women's rights, and an important figure in American history; she was also a mediocre pilot, a master manipulator of the media, and prone to skimping on preparation -- which is a large part of the reason that her last flight ended in disaster. All of this is covered in the book, in a sensitive and honest manner.

I think my problem is that, though it tells a good story, it doesn't transcend the story it tells, which is what makes something -- and especially something nonfictional -- a "distinguished literary contribution" to me. It was a great biography, but it wasn't great literature, not in the way that I'd hope for in my Newbery winners. It told me the facts, and told them very well, but it didn't spend much time meditating on what the facts mean, either directly or indirectly; the last half-page was about Amelia's legacy, but that was essentially it. I contrast it with something like Amos Fortune, Free Man, the 1951 winner, in which the story of Amos Fortune's life becomes a meditation on the nature of freedom itself.

I may be alone in thinking this way, and in a year that's generally been regarded as weak and without a clear winner, Amelia Lost may well take home the medal. But while I like the book and think it's well constructed, it doesn't hit the Newbery mark for me.

And that's my two cents.

Okay for Now: A Counterpoint

As he notes below, Sam dislikes Okay for Now. I don't love it either, but I don't feel as strongly about it as he does.

As Sam mentions, the overarching theme is that Art Can Make Everything Better. In most books with that theme, the "everything" actually has a pretty limited scope, but in this book "everything" really is everything. One boy's artistic awakening saves the spiritual life of an entire town.

In order to parse what Gary Schmidt was trying to do, I think it's instructive to read what he says about the book: "Okay for Now began in the Flint, Michigan, public library, which displays its own lovely copy of Audubon's Birds of America, and which itself affirms, through its many programs and committed librarians, the power of art and story over despair and loss." 

I think the key word in that is "story." This is not reality, it's story. It's not a realistic book about wishes coming true in implausible ways, it's a parable about the way we spin stories in the hopes that one day they will become reality. Gary Schmidt is too good of a writer to throw a luckless kid into a Broadway show, coincidentally attended by his hero, Joe Pepitone, without having a good reason for it. And though, personally, I don't think that part of the book works very well, I do think Schmidt is playing by his own rules. In story, anything can happen, so why not this? 

I find Perry Nodelman's thoughts on the subject interesting as well. 

It reminds me of Dickens, in a way. Poor, abused kid succeeds beyond his wildest dreams. And there's screaming. 

2012 Contenders: Okay for Now, by Gary Schmidt

The Mayland Mock Newbery was last week, and in preparation for it, we read five books that have received some buzz for the medal. I adored one, loved one, liked one, thought one was okay, and genuinely disliked one, which isn't a bad spread as these things go.

The winner was Gary Schmidt's Okay for Now, which has been racking up a lot of wins in various other mock Newberys as well. It also happens to be the one I genuinely disliked, and though I'm in anything but the majority, I wanted to talk a little about my reaction.

We expect fictional universes to play by a set of rules. The rules can be as close to those of reality as the form of the fiction will allow; they can be utterly fantastic; they can even, as in much of Lewis Carroll, have the sense of being constantly shifting, controlled by something that never quite becomes visible. However, once the rules are set up, the author is generally obligated to play by them.

One of my two biggest complaints about this book was that it failed to play by its own rules. It sets itself up as a sort of children's novel version of a John Prine album, a more-or-less realistic tableau of abusive parents, wary neighbors, and sundry Vietnam-era unpleasantnesses. It ends as a sort of credulity-free daydream. Nothing that happens in the last 100 pages of the book should be able to happen, given the way the first 200 have framed the story, and as a reader, I found that intensely frustrating.

The other of my major complaints is that this is the sort of self-congratulatory story that people heavily invested in the arts tend to tell. As a librarian, (amateur) musician, and author (of no renown at all), I'm all about the transformative power of the arts. But in this book, a middle-school boy a) becomes an excellent artist by studying the works of John James Audubon under the tuition of a kindly librarian, b) finally learns to really read under the tuition of a kindly schoolteacher, c) has a successful Broadway debut under the tuition of a kindly if eccentric playwright, and d) ... but nevermind. One of these things would have been more than enough. Having all of them makes the book collapse under its own weight.

There's more, such as the ridiculous and unearned change in the father's heart during the last 20 pages of the book, the fact that Doug breaks through his brother's PTSD basically by giving him a stern talking-to, and the overwrought, soap-opera-style twist that the story with Lil takes. But the upshot is that there was not any point at the book in which I was not aware of the author pulling the strings behind the scenes -- and, for my money, getting most of them tangled up. I understand why people want so much to like this book, but if you look past the Art Can Make Everything Better stuff, what's left is a bewilderingly inconsistent hodgepodge, something that I don't think succeeds as a story at all, much less one that should get an award.

And that's my two cents.