Patricia Hruby Powell

“Boys in the Boat: The True Story of Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics” (Viking 2015) is the young readers edition of Daniel James Brown’s best-selling original for adults. The story follows Joe Rantz, one of the sons of Washington State lumberjacks and farmers who bested the elite eastern schools just before the outbreak of World War II, in the upper class and wildly popular sport of rowing.

Joe Rantz makes his way through the Great Depression, enduring hardships that we can barely imagine in our times. When three years old, Joe’s happy life abruptly ends with the death of his mother. His bereft father disappears and Joe is sent, alone, cross country by train to an aunt in Pennsylvania. There, he falls deathly ill, lying in an attic bed for a year, at which time his grown brother recalls him to Washington. Joe’s father remarries and Joe is returned to the fold. But when his father and his new young wife, Thula, begin to have children, Joe is banished again.

These heartbreaks toughen the boy, making him vow to never depend on anyone but himself. That’s a problem in a sport where one must give up one’s ego and work as a team. On the college freshman crew, Joe is an oddball, but through the seasons—including a summer working on the Hoover Dam, suspended from ropes, chiseling at a face of rock with two other boys on the team—Joe begins to accept friendship. And thank heavens for his childhood sweetheart Joyce Simdars.

This trend of revising adult bestsellers to younger readers’ edition has varying results. This teen version is perhaps one quarter the length of the original, and each has its pros. The quick read might be just what you want. The most important detail that is left out is the simple science that explains why the sport is so painful to the rowers. Rowing a race is akin to playing two basketball games back to back, but in six minutes. There is no time for the lactic acid building up in the muscles to release, thus causing pains like knives driving into those muscles.

The suspense of the individual races is great, which is quite a feat considering the outcome is in the title. The poor U.S. team wearing ragged clothes arrives in a Germany that has been whitewashed by the Nazis. Hitler and Goebels have designed the Olympics to impress the world—while in the background they’re shipping gypsies and Jews to death camps.

The great filmmaking propagandist, Leni Riefenstahl, the architect of Nazi Germany’s greatness, filmed the Olympics to further the cause. You can see a clip of the Washington team winning the 1936 Olympic rowing, against immense odds. (Google it) The Americans and the Brits in the farthest lanes out in the windy high-current lake hadn’t even signaled their readiness to begin the race.

Your heart pounds as these underdog American boys win against Hitler’s Germany.

 

Patricia Hruby Powell’s book Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker was awarded a Sibert Honor for Nonfiction, Boston Globe Horn Book Nonfiction Honor, and a Coretta Scott King Honor for illustration. talesforallages.com

Ruta Sepetys writes books for teens and adults about “hidden chapters of history.” That perfectly describes her latest, “Salt to the Sea” (Philomel 2016). Set in Germany at the end of World War II, citizens flee Germany, while Russian forces invade from the east, Allied forces approach from the west, and bombs occasionally rain down from above. On top of that, the refugees are fighting a severe winter. Each character has his own pain, which is uncovered gradually throughout their flight toward (what the reader knows is) a doomed evacuating ship.

The narration is shared by four teenagers, three of whom are refugees. Joana, a lonely Lithuanian nurse, is burdened with guilt. Florian, a secretive Prussian boy, worked under Nazi patronage, restoring art. Emilia is a pregnant Polish girl. Then there is a blind girl, Ingrid, who senses approaching danger; an older man they call the Shoe Poet, due to his philosophical pronouncements about life; and a six year old orphan boy who has wandered alone until he meets the group. There is tall Eva, “a giantess” who complains about everything.

The fourth narrator, a young Nazi soldier, Alfred, prepares the ship, the Gustloff, for the rescue mission. Alfred composes a love letter to Hannelore, describing his grandeur and power, when he is interrupted by an officer who orders him to swab out the toilets. The author expertly unfolds the mystery of this boy with delusions of grandeur. We see him building power, building danger, just one of the many threads that pull us along this breathtaking story.

The refugees spend nights in barns, huddled together. They find a deserted mansion one night, but the windows are smashed out. They discover evidence of a grizzly incident that has unfolded upstairs, forcing them to move on quickly. A passage of ocean inlet must be crossed at night when the severe cold freezes it over. As they walk, Emilia describes, “The ice ached and groaned, like old bones carrying too many years, brittle and threatening to snap at any moment.” Who will survive and who will not?

We wonder what precious art item Florian is harboring and why. What has Joana done to feel such guilt? The two are falling in love, but they hold such deep secrets. Is the father of Emilia’s baby really her boyfriend?

The group arrives and finds the German harbor in chaos. Thousands of refugees need passage, but wounded soldiers are boarded first and one’s passage must be finagled. A nurse, a young boy who needs his “grandfather,” and a pregnant girl might manage. But the pregnant girl is Polish. A boy who can forge his papers might get on.

Those who board have more tragedy to endure. The Gustloff is torpedoed and goes down fast. Whereas the book is fiction, the incidents are real. Nine thousand out of the ten thousand people crammed on the boat meant for two thousand, perished. Many were children.

This is a great read for young adults as well as adults.

 

 

Patricia Hruby Powell’s book Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker was awarded a Sibert Honor for Nonfiction, Boston Globe Horn Book Nonfiction Honor, and a Coretta Scott King Honor for illustration. talesforallages.com

David Almond’s “The Tightrope Walkers” (Candlewick 2015) is dark, yet inviting. It feels like magical realism, but it’s straight-ahead realism. Almond, a master-writer, depicts the post World War II northern England British class system showing how it defines its characters.

Dominic Hall grows up with a tough working-class father. Frightened for his sensitive son, the father, who welds in the shipyard, wields cruel love. He pushes his son’s face toward the fire in the kitchen grate, while hammering with the steel poker, saying, “Listen to the thunder, boy…This is what I bliddy do!” He’d like his son to do “Somethin that’s not cleanin the tanks like yer grandfather did.”

Dom’s adoring and wise mother tries to temper the father’s violence, but the father is head of the household, and he won’t back down.

The father may not want his son to be a lowly manual laborer, but when Dom tests into a fine public school, the father resents his son’s ascension toward a higher class. The father says, “They need us to build their ships and dig their coal and lick their boots and arses, but when things get tough they won’t give a thought to kickin us all back down again.”

Holly Stroud, whose father works as a draughtsman (a big step up in the shipyard from laboring) is as smart as Dom. Holly draws and sings. After seeing a small circus, the two are determined to walk the tightrope—starting with a clothesline two feet off the ground and progressing higher, and with better ropes. The metaphor draws us through the coming-of-age story, offering joy, heartache, longing, and hard falls.

Vincent, the neighborhood bully, looks at the “good” people and says, “Look how bliddy tame they are.” Vincent goads Dom to shoplift. Vincent goads Dom to shoot a gun and then to kill small animals. At this point, as a reader, I want Dom caught and punished. I hate what he does.

But I wonder, is this what it is to be a tough boy? Dom looks at adults and wonders if they were once as bad as he is. He says, “Maybe it was the alienation common to all adolescents. But how could I know that when I was in the throes of it?” Or “Does each of us teeter in the space between the artist and the killer in ourselves?”

To great effect, Almond lists verbs that open up this world unknown to most American readers and lets us visualize his characters’ world. About the lowly tank cleaners—“The dark figures climbed, clambered, slithered, emerged and disappeared.” In a harsh winter, he is “sick of teetering, slithering, sliding, falling.”

Dom says, “Mebbe we keep on growing up until we die.” And, “We grow in order to discover ourselves. But maybe we just discover ways of hiding our selves from ourselves.” This autobiographical fiction provokes, insights tears, shocks, and delights. I’d read anything David Almond writes.

 

 

Patricia Hruby Powell’s book Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker was awarded a Sibert Honor for Nonfiction, Boston Globe Horn Book Nonfiction Honor, and a Coretta Scott King Honor for illustration. talesforallages.com

In 1911, on a farm near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Joan Skragg’s father forbids his daughter from getting an education. He burns her books. He crushes her last hope when he shouts, Who’s going to marry her? Motherless Joan tells us her father has “choked-down anger inside him. It’s like stagnant water, heavy and murky and sickening.” Her former teacher Miss Chandler cannot even visit her favorite and best student, Joan, because of Mr. Skragg’s rude behavior. Joan is doomed to cook and clean for her father and four older brothers. Until…
Fourteen year old Joan, runs away to Baltimore and changes her name to Janet Lovelace. Because she’s a “big ox of a girl” she claims to be eighteen. She gets off the train in the dark, gets lost, has nowhere to sleep. A young man comes to her rescue. Catholic Janet is hired by the young man’s Jewish family in “The Hired Girl” (Candlewick 2015) by Newbery Medalist Laura Amy Schlitz.
Janet, a naïve and romantic lover of books, compares herself in various situations to Jane Eyre, or to Rebecca in Ivanhoe. In her analysis she falls short, never to live up to the heroine who might be ennobled, edified, or even impetuous. Janet says “Heroines in novels are proud, but for a hired girl, it isn’t convenient.”
Janet scrubs, cooks, and beats carpets for the Rosenbach family, who live a kosher life. The other servant is Jewish Malka, who raised Mr. Rosenbach, and is like a family member. When touchy Malka complains about Janet’s crucifix, or for using the wrong sink, Mr. Rosenbach must instruct Janet. When he discovers her love of reading and her keen, if naïve, insights, they gently bond. Still, he insists she apologize to Malka.
Following Janet’s thought process is one of the sweetest literary experiences I’ve had in some time. Mrs. Rosenbach, who has no appreciation of Janet’s sense of romance and of doing good, is harder on Janet. Whereas Janet sometimes detests Mrs. Rosenbach, she’s fair about her assessment and appreciates the steely woman for her sharp intellect.
The Rosenbach sons come and go from the house and it’s difficult for Janet not to fall in love. They’re intermittently charming to her. And kind. After living in a farm household filled with rough hewn men, these new kindnesses look like professions of love to Janet. Of course it’s confusing. But when she sees her mistake, she does her utmost to help in the match-making with the young woman she sees as the real object of his desire. This causes worse problems. But Janet means well.
And the youngest Rosenbach, Mimi, is naughty, hates to read, and hates the strictures of her class. Janet will do her utmost to help Mimi. Oy vey!
Did I say it was a diary? It is bound to become a classic. It’s too wonderful.

Patricia Hruby Powell’s book Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker was awarded a Sibert Honor for Nonfiction, Boston Globe Horn Book Nonfiction Honor, and a Coretta Scott King Honor for illustration. talesforallages.com

“These Shallow Graves” (Delacorte 2015) by Jennifer Donnelly set in New York City, 1890, is part Edith Wharton and part Charles Dickens and altogether young adult. Jo Montfort is the 17 year old daughter and only child of Charles, an aristocratic ship and newspaper owner, and Anna his wife. Jo is called home from boarding school when her father has a gun accident in his study at home in Gramercy Square.
But is it an accident? Or suicide? Or something else? If word gets out, the scandal will destroy Jo’s chances of a brilliant marriage. So her Uncle Philip pays off the police to keep it quiet. Jo is somewhat ambivalent about the marriage prospect, but she’s grateful to Philip who is now the head of the household since the mourning period began.
Jo aspires to be newspaper reporter like Nellie Bly—a woman!—who had gone undercover to write “Ten Days in a Madhouse,” bringing to light the brutality and neglect found in such institutions, in a successful attempt to improve the situation of the “insane.” Eventually Jo would be brought to an insane asylum in her own harrowing story.
So the Edith Wharton part is, of course, the subject and setting of the privileged class at the turn of the twentieth century in the shadow of Gramercy Park. Dickens is represented in an Oliver Twist sort of underworld where a Faginesque character, known as the Tailor, pimps for child pickpockets including Nancy of the original, but in this story the Nancy character is the lovely Fay.
When Jo delivers a gift to the family’s newspaper manager downtown, she meets the “cub” reporter, Eddie Gallagher. He’s SO handsome. And Irish. And streetwise. You can guess that there’s a brewing romance. But Jo agrees to marry the far more suitable and gentlemanly Bram Aldrich. But stuff happens.
This is also a mystery and a thriller, and the early forensic information conveyed by the confident medical student, Oscar–is more than fascinating. Jo explains the complicated part of the mystery as she speculates and solves it. It’s, let’s say, surprising that she cannot guess the scandalous ship cargo in which her family’s shipping business is dealing. Well, she’s sheltered. But Eddie Gallagher, who’s working on the story with Jo can’t guess? Maybe the author feels that and a few other obvious clues are best solved by her YA readers, but I kind of think she’s underestimating her audience.
Never mind. While working way too hard on my own writing all day, I couldn’t wait to get in bed and read ten pages of “Shallow Graves” but would usually end up reading about a hundred pages a night. Which is good because it’s nearly 500 pages long, but what a fun read! And it shouldn’t be limited to just young adults. Adults will love it.

Patricia Hruby Powell’s book Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker was awarded a Sibert Honor for Nonfiction, Boston Globe Horn Book Nonfiction Honor, and a Coretta Scott King Honor for illustration. talesforallages.com

“Don’t Fail Me Now” (Penguin 2015) by Una LaMarche is worth getting, for the photo on the cover alone. But there’s so much more.

When her mother is imprisoned for heroin use, 17 year old Michelle takes charge of her siblings. Cass, 13, is diabetic and withdrawn. Denny, 6, is being kicked out of school for behavior problems. Before going off to prison, their mother has charged Michelle with keeping the family together and seeking the aid of Aunt Sam. Aunt Sam doesn’t care about these kids.         She says to Michelle, “‘Honey,’…in a tone that strips the word of its endearment. That’s nice, but what I mean is I need some rent money.” She means—a lot—of rent money.

Even when her mother was clean, Michelle supported the family with her after-school job at Taco Bell in a bad Baltimore neighborhood. She has two hundred dollars saved. That won’t cover her mother’s bail or rent.

Tim arrives at the Taco Bell with his sister Leah and tells her that her long-absent father (who is also Leah’s, as well as, Cass’s father) is dying in California and has something for them. He wants them to come to California before he dies.

Michelle and Cass knew there was a half sister, but had never met her. Oh yeah, Michelle, Cass, and Denny are black, as is their mother. Leah is porcelain-skinned and blonde, as is her step-brother, Tim. Everyone is surprised. But the reader might be even more surprised by their journey.

Still, it’s believable when the five kids take off cross-country in Goldie, the thirty year old heap of a car that Buck, their white father, left with Michelle’s mother thirteen years ago. They are so down, there’s no further to go—they think.

The poor black family knows how to be resourceful—although they will not beg. They have their pride. They stop at malls to eat the food left on the tables. The rich white kids have their resources, too. Leah finagles a fresh hamburger and fries from McDonald’s. The white parents stop payment on Leah’s credit card—the very first night at a motel. The parents know their location. For a moment. An amber alert is issued for the runaway—or kidnapped—white kids.

The two families of siblings are hostile to each other—particularly Leah and Cass—but through complicated and fascinating shifts, it changes, sometimes through the innocent questions of the youngest, Denny. They become a family.

With Michelle’s $200, they buy cheap blankets and a tent and camp at free sites. They siphon gas from concerned motorists, never stealing it. They suffer disasters that are real and keep pages turning at a rate.

The book definitely brings tears, but this is no tear-jerker. You love this damaged family and they deserve your tears. Because this is a young adult book, you assume there will be hope at the end and there is. It’s not gratuitous, it’s real. Terrific book!

 

Patricia Hruby Powell’s book Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker was awarded a Sibert Honor for Nonfiction, Boston Globe Horn Book Nonfiction Honor, and a Coretta Scott King Honor for illustration. talesforallages.com