2013 Second Takes: We've Got a Job, by Cynthia Levinson

We've Got a Job was a late addition to our Mock Newbery reading list. Actually, it wasn't on our list of semifinalists at all, but after Sam and I read all of the nominees, we found ourselves at an impasse. We wanted a nonfiction title to be part of the discussion, but I vetoed Moonbird and he wasn't keen on Titanic. I hadn't read We've Got a Job, but Sam said it was not only one of the best nonfiction books of the year, but one of the best of the many books published this year on the topic of civil rights.

And, of course, it is. I'm most impressed by the original research and the meticulous documentation. Copious source notes, an index, a discussion of the language of race, and numerous primary documents all help to paint a rich, nuanced picture of a time and place many of us know only through headlines and sound bites. Levinson does an excellent job, too, of getting out of the way of her sources and letting the reader see the events through the eyes of the children themselves.

I have to disagree with Sam about organization, though. Since (after a brief prologue), the book begins with profiles of the four young people, it ends up jumping back and forth chronologically, which I found disorienting. It could really have benefited from a longer introduction to set the historical stage and establish a steady pace before it starts to meander. 

That's a relatively minor point in the overall evaluation of the book, but it's enough to sink it as a serious Newbery contender for me. Staying just within the realm of nonfiction, I felt that both Titanic and Temple Grandin were better organized and more evenly paced, and that's leaving out Bomb, which I have not yet read. A highly impressive piece of research and writing, but not a title I'll be looking for on Newbery Day.

2013 Second Takes: Splendors and Glooms, by Laura Amy Schlitz

Splendors and Glooms requires my single least-favorite kind of review to write. It's fun to write about books that I love, or even about books that I hate. Even writing about books that are interesting but flawed can lead to discussions about what makes a book work or not work. But what of a book where the reaction is "it's perfectly fine, I'm just the wrong reader for it?"

I think of Laura Amy Schlitz as both the most British and the most 19th-century of our contemporary American authors. In Splendors and Glooms, she manages a pitch-perfect homage/update to the Victorian Gothic, with heavy doses of Charles Dickens mixed in. The characters are real and vivid, and the settings -- both the grime of London and the wild beauty of Windermere -- are detailed and well-described. It's distinguised writing, no question of that.

The book's flaws are the kind common to the source genre, and some readers will probably think of them as features. The pacing is phlegmatic, and the narrative takes a long time to get going, and even longer to wind down. Despite the fact that it's a book with an action-oriented plot structure, it's not the kind of thing you enjoy if you're in a hurry to get where you're going. The more you enjoy spending time in the world that Splendors and Glooms creates, the more you'll enjoy the winding road through it.

As for me, I'm not a big fan of Victoriana, and I prefer my fantastical adventure novels either more introspective or more unsettling. Rachael is much closer to the optimal reader for Splendors and Glooms, and her review of it was highly positive. Monica Edinger and Nina Lindsay were also lavish in their praise. Nina did observe, "This seems to be a “love it or hate it” title, and if you’re not loving it, it asks a lot of you." I'm not loving it, and I felt like in the end, it asked too much of me. However, that's a function of the intersection between book and reader, not of any overt problems with the book itself. It actually fits the Newbery criteria quite well, especially in "delineation of a setting" and "delineation of characters." I don't think it's as exceptional as Mr. & Mrs. Bunny, The One and Only Ivan, or Twelve Kinds of Ice, but that's not at all to label it as bad or unworthy. It's quite good -- it's just that it's quite good for Someone Else.

2013 Second Takes: The Lions of Little Rock, by Kristin Levine

It was hard to pick our Mock Newbery list for the Maryland statewide event in January. Like, really hard. There's an embarrassment of riches to choose from this year, and some excellent titles had to be left off.

The Lions of Little Rock is one of those books that we ended up omitting from our list, but that's not to say it isn't an excellent book. Rachael spoke highly of it back in our very first review of a 2013-eligible book, and I agree with pretty much everything she said. There's a skillfully-evoked sense of place and time in this novel, and Marlee is a complex and sympathetic heroine.

Lions blends Civil Rights issues with the interpersonal dynamics of family and friends, and does so almost seamlessly. Indeed, it's basically the book that Glory Be aspired to be, one that fully succeeds in meditating on the changes that adolescence and maturity bring to parental, sisterly, and social relationships at the same time that it discusses race relations and civic justice. I can't think of much to fault it for, except possibly starting out a bit slowly.

As of right now, The Lions of Little Rock is probably towards the back end of my top 10 books of the year, maybe a hair behind Crow. Because the interpersonal dynamics and the plotting are so exceptional, however, it's one that I might be able to be talked into moving up on the list.

2013 Second Takes: The One and Only Ivan, by Katherine Applegate

There's something magical about a book with an excellent voice, and I'm not sure I've read a book this year with a better one than The One and Only Ivan. The prose is spare and terse, but populated with arresting similes and unusual turns of phrase. Ivan, a gorilla trapped in the world's most depressing mall circus, is the narrator, and he's both elegaic and flatly sarcastic, a true wordsmith, but one who is incapable of verbally communicating with the humans in the story. It's a voice full of sublimated tension, which perfectly mirrors the narrative.

It's possible to criticize the events leading up to the book's climax as being unrealistic, or to argue that the narrative moves awfully fast at that point. But I didn't feel like one was meant to take The One and Only Ivan as a fully true-to-life tale, even if its hero is based on a real gorilla -- with its animals who talk to each other and plan to save one another, it's got a certain Charlotte's Web vibe to it. As such, I felt like the narrative played by the rules it had laid out for itself.

Rachael really liked this one, and I have to agree with her. I don't know if I prefer The One and Only Ivan to Breathing Room or Wooden Bones, but it certainly makes my Top Five of the year, at least to this point. It's on our Mock Newbery list, and I really look forward to seeing what people have to say about it at the event.

2013 Second Takes: No Crystal Stair, by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson

Well, Sam was the lone critical voice crying in the wilderness on this one, and I'm afraid he's going to remain that way. I agree with the rest of the universe that this is a very good book. Here's why!

Stylistically and structurally, it appeals to my tastes as a reader. I love ensemble casts and I love narratives with multiple voices. I feel that multiple perspectives, however fragmented, tell me more about a subject than a single viewpoint does.

Personal tastes aside though, I think this approach is a particularly effective one for the subject matter. Micheaux lived his life in public. He crossed paths with hundreds of people daily, and I think the multiple voices give a sense of the scope of his influence. At the same time, the man seems to have been something of an enigma, and the way Nelson uses these fictional fragments to piece together his identity acknowledges that as well. It feels almost like literary Cubism, different facets of Micheaux emerging depending on the angle from which he is viewed.

Sam also wrote that "It also seemed to me that a child reading the book would have a hard time following what was going on without some kind of encyclopedia or timeline of the Civil Rights Movement, as much of the background information felt overly elided." I'm with him on that one, but I don't think it's a flaw in the novel. I think that complexity does place it outside the Newbery range, though. In terms of reading level, it's not inaccessible to a middle school reader, but I think a high school reader is more likely to come in with the requisite background knowledge.


So, no Newbery love from me, but I think the starred reviews and awards are well-deserved.

2013 Second Takes: Moonbird, by Phillip Hoose

Sam is very picky about his nonfiction - specifically about whether it has that ineffable spark that elevates it to literature. He thinks very highly of Moonbird - highly enough that he used the big L word (no, not that one). I'm not sure I agree.

I see where Sam is coming from in terms of Hoose bringing the personal into nonfiction. The best nature writing - some of the best literary nonfiction in general - employs that technique, but it doesn't often make its way into children's books. When's the last time you read a juvenile informational book that used the first person singular outside of the author's note? Hoose does set himself apart by weaving his own experiences into the story of B95 and the other red knots.

Does he do it in the most distinguished way, though? I don't think so. Stylistically, this book falls on the "good" side of the good/great divide. The settings are described vividly, the organization is effective, the profiles of people working in the field add texture... but none of it really thrilled me. I wasn't captivated by  B95's plot arc in the way I was while reading about the plight of the Titanic and the quiet triumphs of Temple Grandin.

And what about character? Hoose does an excellent job of turning an unassuming little shorebird, B95, into a literary hero, and thus giving the reader a point of interest to follow through the book. But how does B95 compare, as a character, with Mr. and Mrs. Bunny? With Parsefall and Lizzie? With Georges and Safer? Not very well, I would argue.

Sorry, Moonbird. If you're still alive, I hope you're not crying little Patagonian birdy tears of literary unworthiness all over the restinga. You're still the star of a very good book.  

2013 Second Takes: Breathing Room, by Marsha Hayles

Book buzz is a capricious thing. A book gets a starred review or two, a word from the right blogger, and suddenly it's the It Girl of Publishing Year 2013. Last year it was Okay for Now. This year it's Wonder. Sometimes they show up in the Newbery pantheon (oh lovely When You Reach Me), but sometimes the committee looks further afield (Moon Over what?). If this year's committee has been casting about for neglected titles (as well they should be), Breathing Room may be up for discussion.

Sam gave it a rave review, and Kirkus and Horn Book reviewed it quite favorably as well, but no one else seems to be talking about it. Personally, I don't think it's gold medal material, especially in such a strong year, but I think it's at least as good as Three Times Lucky and better than Summer of the Gypsy Moths. The writing is quietly elegant, and the story unfolds gracefully, holding my attention even as it (necessarily) lacks action. The sanatorium setting is vividly portrayed. The conflicts are all interior ones, but Evvy's development as a character is still believable and poignant.

There are flaws, of course. In a Goodreads review, one of my friends points out that some of the characters feel stock (the saintly sick girl, the rebellious sick girl, the young nice nurse, the old mean nurse, etc.). That's a fair critique, though I think they are more fleshed-out by the end. And there is the question of age level - Evvy is thirteen, and the coming-of-age narrative is pretty clearly YA - but it still falls within the Newbery range.

In any case, whether or not the committee has taken up its cause, this is a book worth noticing (if nothing else, it will fill that huge "Tuberculosis Sanatorium Fiction" gap in your collection).

2013 Second Takes: Titanic: Voices from the Disaster, by Deborah Hopkinson

I was six years old when they found the wreckage of the Titanic, and though at that point I'd never heard of the ship, I still have distinct memories of watching the National Geographic special about it. Something about the eerie images of railings covered in cascading rust and staircases buried beneath an unthinkable amount of water struck a chord in my mind.

Titanic: Voices from the Disaster has something of the same feeling to it. It's told in straight chronological order, and as the various characters' stories show the impending catastrophe, it just gets creepier and creepier. Like Rachael said in her review, even though I knew perfectly well how the book would end, I still had a feeling of suspense, hoping that it would turn out differently. It's this tone, this sense of impending dread, that I think is the book's most distinguished feature.

I did have some of the same concerns Rachael had regarding the book's very high number of characters. I had some trouble keeping track of them all, and even though the book has a "People in this Book" section in its extensive back matter, it didn't actually include everyone discussed in its pages. (I really wanted to know more about Frederick Fleet, the lookout who first spotted the fateful iceberg.)

One of the biggest challenges in talking about books in a Newbery context is trying to separate the very good from the great. I think Titanic falls into the former category. It's solid through and through, but it doesn't quite have the near-mysticism of Moonbird, or the poetry of Hope and Tears. You should buy this book for your collection, read it, booktalk it, and recommend it, no question about it -- I just don't think it quite reaches the heights of this year's very best nonfiction titles.

2013 Second Takes: Wonder, by R.J. Palacio

Wonder does what it does well skillfully enough to make nearly any reader stop and take notice. It's a "problem novel" -- maybe even a "message novel" -- that talks about kindness and acceptance and features a severely disfigured child as its central personality, but which manages to keep most of the characters from seeming like puppets or authorial constructs. The excellence of its characterization, as well as the fact that its anti-bullying theme is more than a little timely, seems to be why so many people keep coming back to Wonder as a serious Newbery contender.

I have to give credit where credit is due, and Wonder may feature some of the best "delineation of characters" of any Newbery-eligible book this year. However, it seems to me to have serious structural weaknesses -- serious enough to remove it from awards contention for me.

The book is told from six different perspectives, which gives the reader the chance to see that each person in the story has their own challenges and struggles. However, one of the narrators -- Justin, the boyfriend of the protagonist's sister -- seems much less integrated into the story than the other five. His section is used for an item of plot advancement, but it seems to me to be largely extraneous, moving the focus of the story too far away from its center.

(As a quibble, Justin is a musician whose main interest is in zydeco, which makes it really odd that his instrument is a hardanger fiddle, a Norwegian folk instrument that isn't used in that style. It also seems like he would know that there's no such thing as "a flatted third on a major chord," since that's just a minor chord.)

More problematic, however, is the fact that, in a book that makes room for so many narrators, Julian, the main antagonist, doesn't get a chance to tell his story. One of the primary thrusts of Wonder is that everyone is struggling with some challenge, and setting a character up as a villain and then denying him a voice dramatically undercuts that. Even if Julian is wrong -- and there's not really any question about that -- he's still a person, and his interactions with his dominating, shrewish mother indicate a possible source of his problems. He's not some abstraction of evil created in a vacuum, and the absence of his voice looms large.

To me, this last point is a fatal flaw. It's so damaging to the theme of the book that I can't overlook it, and I can't support Wonder as a Medalist or as an Honor book. I think R.J. Palacio is an author to watch, and that the book has real merits -- I just feel that the structural and thematic weaknesses take it off of the level of "distinguished contribution to American literature for children."

2013 Second Takes: Three Times Lucky, by Sheila Turnage

Recently, Sam and I were talking about music, and which genres  we like enough to tolerate mediocrity. For him, it's Euro girl pop - he loves Girls Aloud and Kate Ryan, but he'll listen to any pale imitation thereof. For me, I can tolerate just about any run-of-the-mill world music darkwave, though Dead Can Dance will always be tops. Conversely, we each enjoy the best examples of each other's favorite genres, but the imitators leave us cold.

Does that make sense? Good. Because I think it comes into play in literature as well.

Jonathan Hunt described Three Times Lucky as part of the "Spunky/Feisty/Charming Heroine with a Southern/Country/Folksy Voice with a Dead/Missing/Absent Mother genre."  Y'all, that is a genre that leaves me cold as a li'l ole' glass of sweet tea under a live oak on a hot summer's day. I love Because of Winn-Dixie because it is a brilliant and beautiful book, but I doubt that I could name a lesser member of the genre that I can even tolerate. I prefer my Southern fiction sad and dreamy, like Missing May.

And yet, The Spindlers (a solid but undazzling example of the Girl Travels to Underground Fantasy World, Meets Weird Inhabitants, and Saves the Day genre*) is one of my favorite books of the year.  

This is all to say that I am not the right reader for Three Times Lucky. The characters, voice, and tone all made my eyeballs want to explode. That being said, it's a perfectly solid book. I agree with Monica Edinger that Dale's family is particularly well-drawn. The setting is well-realized (though I'd rather go hungry than eat PBJ and Mountain Dew for breakfast, those kinds of details do set a good scene). The plotting is pretty good, if a bit meandering. 

Still, even if I put on my eyeglasses of objectivity, I don't see anything here that elevates it to Newbery status. Some people are saying it's honor-worthy, but I disagree. I think it'll just hang around in the crowd of perfectly good, workaday, 2012 middle grade novels. Like The Spindlers.

*A genre Sam loathes, by the way. As he told me after I read him the first few pages of The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, he can't deal with any book that makes use of the phrase "ever so." Frightfully short-sighted of him.

2013 Second Takes: Crow, by Barbara Wright

Crow is a singularly effective piece of historical fiction. It both captures and transcends the time and place it describes, and I think structure and pacing are key to its effectiveness.

It begins with a portent - "The buzzard knew." From there, though, it moves on to paint an episodic, leisurely portrait of a way of life that seems idyllic compared to what is to come. Moses's concerns, for the most part, are the concerns of any sixth grade boy: will he get a bicycle? Will he lose his best friend? Who's hiding the treasures near the swimming hole? As Wright takes her time setting the scene, the reader gets a vivid sense of place and of character.

Throughout the first half of the book, though, there is a trickle of race-related trouble - the slogan contest, the accidentally stolen bicycle - which gradually builds, becoming a deluge at the rally in Fayetteville. From there, the pace picks up and we are rushed from one horrific event to the next, culminating in the destruction of everything Moses and his family value. This second half would not be nearly as effective without the hopefulness of the beginning chapters, and the transition between the two is accomplished seamlessly.

I'm not sure where structure fits within the Newbery criteria, because I don't think it's plot, exactly. It's some gray area between plot and style, and possibly presentation of information. I do feel confident in saying, though, that Crow features distinguished characters and settings, and those are key to its emotional impact. The destruction of black Wilmington means something to us because Wright has shown us exactly what is being lost.

If I have a complaint about the book, it's that Moses's presence at every one of the historical events felt a bit forced - like a You Are There! tour of the Wilmington race riots. I think that's a common pitfall of historical fiction.

Sam liked a lot as well, and I'll be curious to hear how he thinks it compares to The Lions of Little Rock as a novel focused on race and civil rights.

2013 Second Takes: Mr. and Mrs. Bunny - Detectives Extraordinaire!, by Polly Horvath

It's really, really hard to describe Mr. and Mrs. Bunny - Detectives Extraordinaire! It exists in a nebulous space between Watership Down and MAD Magazine, and if that doesn't sound like a place that's even possible, I probably would have agreed with you before reading it. This is true even though Rachael's initial review of the book gave me as much of a heads-up as it was possible to provide.

And you know what? It's amazing.

Certainly, in terms of the Newbery criteria, Mrs. and Mrs. Bunny truly excels in its characters. From its questionably competent title characters, to the insufferable Mrs. Treaclebunny, to the perennially exasperated Madeline, each personage who appears in the story is impossible to forget. It's similarly exceptional in setting and style.

If you wanted to criticize the book, the place to go might be to the development of plot critereon. Yes, the book has a plot, but it helps not to think too hard about the plausibility of any given event. However, plausibility isn't the point of the book, and it would require a superlative resistance to Horvath's manic charm in order to complain too loudly on that point.

Mrs. and Mrs. Bunny is a weird, weird book, and it might be one that's not all that easy to build consensus around, especially given how notoriously hard it is to generate agreement on humor. But at the same time, it has some of the same magic that's made novels such as The Phantom Tollbooth and Sideways Stories from Wayside School lasting classics. I need to go through the rest of our semifinal list to see exactly where Mr. and Mrs. Bunny places in my final list, but it's certainly a strong and worthy contender, and a book that I'll probably buy for my daughter for Christmas.


If you have any other thoughts, please feel free to share them in the comments!