2014 Contenders: Twerp, by Mark Goldblatt

Aren't we supposed to be doing our Second Takes right now, you ask? Why yes, yes we are. But I already had this one on my desk, and now that I've finished reading it, I can't help but want to talk about it.

I have to confess that it took me a long time to get around to reading Twerp. We got an ARC of it ages ago, but neither Rachael nor I felt very enthusiastic about reading it. It wasn't until About To Mock reader Destinee tweeted to us that we should take a look at it that I retrieved it from the shelf, and it wasn't until I'd carried it around in my bag for three weeks or so that I even cracked the cover.

I think part of my reticence was that the language on the back cover of the ARC frames the novel as an anti-bullying message novel. My tepid feelings about Wonder weren't really a secret, and yet that was still one of the best books of its type that I've seen. This didn't seem like all that promising of a haystack to go needle-searching in.

Who knows, maybe the anti-bullying marketing will be successful in bringing Twerp some extra sales. However, the novel is much more complex than that. It's a detailed snapshot of New York City in the 1960s, a thoughtful examination of the awkwardness and fitfulness of first crushes, and an incisive look at what makes otherwise good people do terrible things. Although bullying certainly is a key theme, it's not even close to the only thing going on in the book.

I found the characters believable, especially Julian Twerski, the book's narrator. Also highly effective is the book's structure; it's set up as a lengthy writing assignment that Julian is doing for his sixth-grade English teacher. His teacher wants him to talk about the bullying incident that Julian was involved in, but Julian isn't that keen to discuss it. As a result, the book circles around and around, coming always closer, but never quite hitting the central plot point until the very end of the novel. It's an excellent way to keep the suspense up, and it doesn't -- to me at least -- feel inauthentic.

The end result is a surprisingly strong novel that deals honestly and truthfully with moral complications. Is it better than The Real Boy or Zebra Forest? I don't think it quite is, but it's very solidly in the next tier, and it's definitely worth consideration.


Published in May by Random House.

2014 Second Takes: Navigating Early

I was in the "Moon over what?!" group when Clare Vanderpool's Newbery win was announced. I immediately sought out out and read Moon Over Manifest and... well... I didn't agree with Sam Bloom.* It was good, but not Newbery good.

Then Sam (Eddington) read her follow-up, Navigating Early. He didn't like it. When he described the plot to me, it sounded ludicrous, but other people seemed to like it, so I put it on my "give it a chance" list. And finally, I did.

In the grand Cooperative Children's Book Center tradition, I'll start with the good.

Vanderpool does setting really well here, better than she did in Manifest, I think, and setting was one of the strongest aspects of that book. She captures both the boarding school and the deep woods of Maine effectively, and even gives a sense, in flashback, of the wide vistas of the Kansas prairie.

The side plots are intriguing as well - all of the people that Jack and Early meet in the woods, and the ways their stories entwine. The dream-like nature of those encounters, and the way they advance the plot and the theme, reminded me of Breadcrumbs. 

In terms of integrating what I'll call the Pi Story Plot with the realistic plot though, I think Vanderpool fails where Ursu succeeded. It's just not made clear, either explicitly or implicitly, how the reader is meant to categorize that whole story. Is Early clairvoyant, reading the actual future in the (erroneous, but that's another story) numbers of pi? Is magic at work? Nothing about the tone of the rest of the story suggests that we should take it as magical realism. It's just confusing. Narrator Jack tells us that his mother used to say that "There are no coincidences. Just boatloads of miracles." Are we supposed to take that at face value? I think a series of miracles makes for some weak plot scaffolding. 

I'm also troubled by Early as a character. In the way his disability advances the plot and brings about a revelation for the non-disabled character, he felt a bit like a one-dimensional Magical Disabled Person to me  (especially in contrast to Oscar from The Real Boy, whose disability is just one facet of his identity). I really, really hated the way he formed an instant rapport with everybody they met, like some kind of autistic Pollyanna.

Finally, there are a few too many instances where Vanderpool drives home her point by telling instead of showing. After the encounter between Jack and Mrs. Johanssen, he asks himself, "But how had her words meant so much to me, when she was speaking them to the son she thought had returned? Because she let me hear them as if they were being spoken to me. And I guess, in a way I let her speak to me as if I were her son." Revelations are not so effective when you have to spell them out. 

In the end, I was left feeling the same frustration I felt after reading Moon Over Manifest: Navigating Early is almost a great book, but it never quite comes together.


*Known affectionately around the About to Mock ranch as "Sam Over Manifest". We'd still love to sit down over drinks sometime and pick his brain about that book.

Semi-Final Reading List: Sam Edition

Once again, it's that time of year -- the time when, in the interest of both thoroughness and preparing for the Maryland Mock Newbery, Rachael and I turn a closer eye to some of what seem to be this year's top contenders. There are a few more that we really want to read when we have a chance (Far Far Away, by Tom McNeal, and From Norvelt to Nowhere, by Jack Gantos, are high on that list), but for the most part, we're on to the Taking A Closer Look section.

Rachael has already explained the rules, so here's the list of four that she assigned me:
Flora & Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures, by Kate DiCamillo
The Year of Billy Miller, by Kevin Henkes
P.S. Be Eleven, by Rita Williams-Garcia
The Center of Everything, by Linda Urban

 To these I added:

Doll Bones, by Holly Black
The Thing About Luck, by Cynthia Kadohata


Probably something about torpedoes! Start reading when ready, Gridley!

Semi-Final Reading List 2013: Rachael Edition

We have now reached that point in the year when it's time to start narrowing down our choices. To that end, Sam and I have each "nominated" four books for the other party to read. Sam has tasked me with reading: 

The Water Castle, by Megan Frazer Blakemore
Zebra Forest, Adina Rishe Gewirtz
The Real Boy, by Anne Ursu
Courage Has No Color, by Tanya Lee Stone

Then we each chose two additional books from the other person's reading list, so I will also be reading: 

The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp, by Kathi Appelt
Navigating Early, by Clare Vanderpool

Sometime in November, when we've each read and discussed all twelve of these books, we will announce the final reading list of five books for the Maryland Mock Newbery (in Denton on January 6 - save the date!). If any of you Marylanders would like to get a head start, you can go on the assumption that the final list will be taken from among these twelve books (the six above, plus the six titles Sam is about to reveal).

And.... go!

National Book Awards Longlist

The National Book Awards have published a longlist for the first time, and here are the Young People's Literature contenders.

A couple of thoughts.

1. The Thing About Luck is shaping up to be one of those books that everyone else likes more than I do. At the same time, I can't argue with the idea that its characters, settings, and style are all distinguished. Probably theme too. But... so many combines.

2. The Real Boy! Great to get some vindication here, because I'm not seeing our love for this title reflected in the greater blogosphere or even review-journalosphere. (Except Colby Sharp, and his top choice did just  fine last year.)

3. Glad to see Flora and Ulysses there too. Books that are not super serious and weighty don't get enough award love.

I haven't read Far, Far Away yet, so I guess I need to get on that. The more clearly YA titles will have to wait until January (my designated YA Reading Month).

2014 Contenders: Flora and Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures, by Kate DiCamillo

Last spring, Jack Gantos and I were hangin’ out, shootin’ the breeze*, and talking about which new kids’ books we liked. He said that he really liked Mr. and Mrs. Bunny –Detectives Extraordinaire, partly because Horvath’s animals are smart. He remarked that just because your characters are animals doesn’t mean that they have to be dull-witted. I think he actually used a funnier word than that, but it’s been too long and I don’t remember what it was. If you see him around, ask him about stupid animal stories. 

Anyway, I think that’s what turns a lot of people off about talking animal stories – they associate the genre with cutesiness, preciousness, and simpleminded characters. That stereotype has a basis in reality, of course, especially in picture books. There are some authors who seem to think that if your story stinks, moving it to the animal kingdom will disguise the smell. 

 

Needless to say, Polly Horvath doesn’t fall into that trap, and neither does Kate DiCamillo. I thought of Horvath’s bunnies when I was reading DiCamillo’s newest, Flora and Ulysses, because the two books share a certain sensibility. As the Horn Book review of Mr. and Mrs. Bunny advised, “Look not for logic; this is a romp.” That advice holds true for Flora and Ulysses, whose plot is set into motion when a giant, multi-terrain vacuum cleaner sucks up an ordinary squirrel. Ulysses the squirrel, when resuscitated by Flora, retains extraordinary non-squirrellish powers (mainly flying, understanding human speech, and typing).

It is in the content of Ulysses’s typed compositions, however, that the novel diverges from the “madcap romp” genre. This wouldn’t be a Kate DiCamillo novel if it didn’t whack you in the head with pure beauty when you’re least expecting it. So what does a squirrel write, in DiCamillo’s world, when awakened from his dumb animal nature and presented with a typewriter? Why, he looks around at the trees and sky he loves, and at his new friend, and he writes poetry : “I love your round head / the brilliant green / the watching blue, / these letters, / this world, you.”

And then, because this is still a comic novel, he adds a postscript: “I am very, very hungry.” 

Until that poem appeared, I thought this novel was just okay, but that’s just so exactly the kind of poem a newly reverent squirrel would write that, once again, I found that Kate DiCamillo had totally pwned my heart.

I think this one may have a hard time at the Newbery table. It has those gorgeous DiCamillo moments – Ulysses’ poems, Flora’s struggles with her feelings, her father’s loneliness and awkwardness… But it’s also a comedy, and it doesn’t have the kind of character development you see in, say, The Year of Billy Miller. In Flora and Ulysses, the characters are cartoonish, and I think that’s an appropriate stylistic choice here, but it may count against them when it’s time to vote. Then, too, I’m not sure the sentence-level writing is all that special, for the most part, when compared to Billy Miller or Hokey Pokey. Neither are the settings. Thematically, it shines, but that may not be enough. 

And I should mention the illustrations. These are the “illuminated” adventures of Flora and Ulysses, meaning that some of the plot is advanced by comic strips drawn by K.G. Campbell. They tie in thematically with Flora’s interest in comics and superheroes, but they mean that the book could fall into the same liminal space occupied by Brian Selznick, though not to the same extent.

In any case, I like it a whole lot, and I think Jack Gantos would too.

*Okay, fine. He was here for an author visit and we were waiting for a class to arrive. 

Publication in September by Candlewick Press

2014 Contenders: Beholding Bee, by Kimberly Newton Fusco

So there's a book out this year that's set during World War II. Its protagonist is a girl who lives with a caretaker; said caretaker is older than her, but not by that much. When circumstances conspire to take the caretaker figure away, our main character is led onward by a ghostly presence, which may just help her find her forever home. Which book am I describing?

All right, pencils down. Did you say Gingersnap? If so, then you're correct. But if you answered Beholding Bee, the most recent title from Kimberly Newton Fusco...then you're also correct.

It's not as if we haven't had two oddly similar books come out in the same year before -- just last year, this was part of our discussion around Glory Be and The Lions of Little Rock. However, the weirdly specific plot points that Gingersnap and Beholding Bee share genuinely took me aback. The books were published only a month apart, by different imprints (though of the same publisher), so it's not a case of plagiarism or anything -- just a bizarre, bizarre coincidence.

At any rate, in much the same way that the similarities between them threw into sharp relief how much better Lions was than Glory Be, the forced comparison makes it obvious how much superior Beholding Bee is to Gingersnap. Where the characters in Gingersnap were flat and ill-defined, those in Beholding Bee are presented in much sharper focus. And, perhaps most importantly, the fact that Beholding Bee is twice as long as Gingersnap means that the ideas get a much fuller treatment in the former, as opposed to the latter book's maddening lack of detail.

 

*SPOILERS*

This doesn't mean that all the plot threads are tied up by the end of the book. Although the supernatural elements come to a natural conclusion, and Bee has made great progress in coming to terms with the facial birthmark that has brought her so much social difficulty, several other strands are left hanging. We don't get to see Bobby's much-discussed return, we don't know what happens to Ruth Ellen's father (who seems to be missing in action somewhere in Europe), and we don't get to see the end of the standoff between Bee and the school bully, Francine. If I had to guess, I'd wager that Fusco is planning to return to this set of characters, and has thus left herself enough room for the sequel(s). I have no problem with that, but it's worth noting that a reader who expects a neat ending will be disappointed.

I quite liked Beholding Bee, and I'd love to see what happens next in the story. As I look at the Newbery criteria, however, I can think of other contenders that are a bit stronger in theme (Penny and Her Marble), presentation of information (Courage Has No Color), plot (The Water Castle), characters (The Hidden Summer), setting (Zebra Forest), and style (The Real Boy). As such, I wouldn't put Beholding Bee in my top tier of contenders, but not because it's a weak title -- just because others are especially strong.


Published in February by Alfred A. Knopf / Random House