Patricia Hruby Powell

“All the Light We Cannot See” (Scribner 2014) by Anthony Doerr is an adult book, a New York Times Bestseller, and is literary—meaning it’s thoughtful and beautifully written. It’s a good choice for young adults.

Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris as World War II looms. At the opening, she is six years old, has “rapidly deteriorating eyesight” and will soon be blind. The story follows her into young adulthood. Her father, the master of locks at the Museum of Natural History (which is chock full of locks), builds Marie-Laure a model of their neighborhood, which she memorizes by touch so she might navigate the town on her own.

Doerr’s insight into a blind person’s world seems profound.

Werner lives in an orphanage with his sister, Jutta. He becomes obsessed with the workings of radios, becoming, over the years, so adept with the technology that he is sought out by a Nazi military academy. Fellow student, sensitive Frederick, is repeatedly singled out as the weakest cadet and beaten by his schoolmates under the commandant’s approving gaze. Werner would like to help.

“Werner tells himself that he tries. Every night he polishes Frederick’s boots for him until they shine a foot deep—one less reason for . . . an upperclassman to jump on him.” This strikes me as honest—an insufficient thing one can do when you don’t have the power to do the right thing. But it is a too-small comfort to the helper.

Radio-expert Werner, is drafted into Hitler’s army, when he is only sixteen.

When the Germans occupy Paris in 1940, Marie-Laure and her father flee the city to the picturesque walled town of Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast, where they live with Marie’s troubled, but charming great uncle in his mansion. Uncle too has a love of radios and a history of constructing them. But the Germans have confiscated all radios to cut off communication between the Resistance and the allies.

Working as a German soldier, Werner tracks radios being used by Resistance members. His comrades confiscate the radios and shoot their operators. Werner travels through Germany to Russia, back through Germany and to Saint-Malo.

As the stories of the two young people alternate, parallels are drawn. You know that Marie-Laure and Werner’s stories will converge. They will meet. But you don’t know how or when.

Doerr’s writing opens windows through which the reader can see. A minor character is described thus: “Madame seems like a great moving wall of rosebushes, thorny and fragrant and crackling with bees.” There are hundreds of small glowing images, such as: “The typist twists her cigarette into an ashtray, a bright red smear of lipstick on its butt.” Can’t you see it? Even smell it?

I loved this book. I’m pretty sure you won’t be able to stop turning the pages.

 

Patricia Hruby Powell’s book Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker has recently been awarded a Sibert Honor for Nonfiction as well as a Coretta Scott King Honor for illustration. talesforallages.com

“Taking Flight: From War Orphan to Star Ballerina” (Knopf 2014) by Michaela DePrince is a memoir co-written with her adoptive mother Elaine DePrince.

Mabinty Bangura is born to loving parents in war-torn Sierra Leone. She’s ridiculed in her tribe due to her skin pigment condition, vitiligo, which makes her skin appear spotted. She’s a cast-out nicknamed “leopard.”

The degree of hardship that Mabinty, one of so many war orphans, endures, is difficult for a white middle class American, such as myself, to fathom. First her father is gunned down in the diamond mines where he works. So Mabinty and her mother become part of her uncle’s family. When her mother takes ill, rather than getting care for her, the uncle lets her die. He prefers his other wives.

The uncle walks Mabinty to an orphanage where she befriends a girl with her same given name Mabinty Suma. They are orphans Number 27 and 26. The other orphans and her caretaker, Fatima, consider her ugly due to her spots, and she becomes known as the “devil child.” Eventually she wins over the orphans but not Fatima. Fortunately the head of the orphanage observes Mabinty’s intelligence.

Mabinty finds the cover of Dance Magazine blowing in the dust. She is smitten by the white ballerina dressed in pink and en pointe photographed on the page.

White American parents come to adopt the other Mabinty and at the eleventh hour take Mabinty Bangura as well. There couldn’t be a better family for these 6 year old girls. In the next years the adoptive parents will have lost their second of four grown sons to a congenital disease. They rename the girls Michaela and Mia and adopt more orphaned girls from Sierra Leone.

The parents take the girls to ballet classes, piano lessons, swimming lessons. They are hard-working girls and they excel. But Michaela’s passion remains ballet. She works her way up the ranks from regional to nationally know training centers including that of the American Ballet Theater. She wins scholarships.

A documentary “First Position” tells part of her remarkable story and can be streamed at http://www.balletdocumentary.com/ Eventually Michaela dances with the Dance Theater of Harlem, the famed black company, but she wants a purely classical experience which DTH doesn’t offer. Michaela speaks of the racism of the ballet world. A black pearl stands out in a string of white pearls, but she has found herself a place in the Dutch National Ballet in Amsterdam, which is a purely classical ballet company.

Michaela’s is a simple story: young girl suffers extreme hardship and succeeds. Neither the plot nor the writing is remarkable. And yet the story is. To become a dancer requires huge determination. To become a prima ballerina in a top-notch company requires the height of rigor, talent, and artistry. Consider where Michaela/Mabinty started and where she’s gotten.

I’m betting this will be a best-seller.

 

Patricia Hruby Powell’s book Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker has recently been awarded a Sibert Honor for Nonfiction as well as a Coretta Scott King Honor for illustration. talesforallages.com

 

Gregory Maguire (author of “Wicked”) uses irony and vast imagination along with Russian folklore—Baba Yaga, the Firebird, and a lesser-known northern albino Dragon—to tell his story, “Egg and Spoon” (Candlewick 2014).

At the outset of this 1900 Russian historical fiction we follow two girls—poor Elena whose entire village is starving and Ekatarina, or Cat, an aristocratic girl. Cat with her aunt and governess travel by train to visit the Tsar in St. Petersburg, bringing him a Fabergé egg, when they are detained due to a damaged bridge. Elena asks for food. Ekatarina responds, “I can’t distribute our food. What if we run out, here in Nowhere Forest?” Cat further complains of Elena, saying her only friend is “one stiff-faced, hollow-eyed, knock-kneed skeleton in a patched skirt.” Elena’s pride forbids her from crying.

One third into the 469-page novel, the folklore kicks in.

The prisoner/narrator views the world through the eyes of birds who have visited his prison tower. He says, “Please excuse this interruption at what I hope you are finding an agreeably tense moment.” It’s hard to excuse. It might be good news that he practically writes a research paper with self-observed comments such as “…Russian sense of fate. Tragedy, comedy, and what you might call sardony, all at once.” Or when the girls switch places, he says, “Cat is trapped in a folktale she never believed in. Elena is caught in a web of wealth and luxury that seemed to her more fantastic than magic.”

But Maguire’s wisdom and beautiful turns of phrase won me over. Clever Grandmother Onna says, “What men might steal from girls, girls never miss till it’s gone.” Elena asks if Onna “was being amusing or just stewing in the vagueness of old age…” Elena’s dying Mama “descended ever more steeply into sunless caverns of sleep.” Or a great bird cries “an alarm that sounded like burning bells” and “a volley of sweeping octaves.” He refers to the “Benighted States of America.” Clever.

Witch-loving Maguire gives Baba Yaga the best zingers, calling Cat “you little pain-in-a-pinafore.” Often he takes a contemporary turn such as, “a nasty habit, like binge shopping.” Baba Yaga pulls out a salted codfish from her clothes, “a personal sachet, but the time has come to sacrifice my vanity for the sake of dinner.” And her house, Dumb Doma perched on chicken legs is a hilarious character in itself.

The story holds that we suffer global warming because the northern Dragon cannot sleep. Baba Yaga is Mother Russia. The Firebird is dying and so will Russia if something isn’t done. So the children try. That is the grand action of the last third of the book.

At a more personal level, Cat finally sees beyond herself. She has empathy for her friends and helps them. While Elena lives the luxurious life, loses empathy, before she regains it.

As Maguire says, “Live ever after, happily enough, not too happy—they were, afterall, Russian.”
            Patricia Hruby Powell’s book Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker was chosen by the Huffington Post as the Best Picture Book Biography (artist) and is on many Best Books of the 2014, including, PBS, NPR, NYPL. talesforallages.co

Graphic novels, so often bigger than life, can sometimes be exactly like life. Cousins Jillian Tamaki (illustrator) and Mariko Tamaki (writer) raise the bar of authenticity in “This One Summer” (First Second 2014) a coming-of-age story. Preteens Rose and Windy meet at their summer cottages every summer, but this time it’s different.

Rather than simply playing in the water and digging holes in the sand, they are attracted to an older group centered at the convenience store where they rent R-rated thrillers and eavesdrop on older teens and their problems. Rose develops a crush on the boy whose girl friend is probably pregnant. At home Rose’s parents are fighting.

Rose, a year older than Windy, offers a juxtaposition and a view of changing attitudes of human development. The girls obsess over words like “slut” the meaning of blow jobs and the wonderment of “boobs” in the course of their easy slow summer life. They experience the very real meanness of those slightly older girls. But they experience these things differently—one from the other. Chubby Windy is often wired on sugar while Rose appears calm and sometimes sullen.

Jillian’s paintings, all a deep blue-purple are often lush, such as scenes showing the dappled light filtered through trees onto the gravel road leading to the lake. Or when she depict emotions through unexaggerated but telling postures or facial expressions. The way Jillian shows Rose’s unhappy mother who appears haggard in her depression, a few years back in flashback, is just-right in her prettiness.

The story that Mariko’s tells is true to life. Rose’s parents’ fighting is a real parental fight. When the girls fight, it is just as these girls might. Rose calls the pregnant girl a slut. Windy questions the assessment and Windy walks away to dig a hole in the sand as they did when they were little. Rose returns eventually and joins her. Kids grow up at different rates, but they can remain friends.

Relatives arrive at the lake. You know these people, whether they are like your own family or someone else’s. They’re real.

One of my favorite scenes is the girls discussing the older teens while shampooing their hair in the lake. What nostalgia! What a sensuous scene! Another is the nighttime bonfire which sets the climax of the story is a study in light. And the right climax for this story—not original, perhaps—but it loosely ties up the various threads, not too tight, not too tidily, but in a way that is true to life and still satisfying to the reader.

If you’re not a reader of graphic novels, you might want to try again with “This One Summer.”

 

Patricia Hruby Powell’s book Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker was chosen by the Huffington Post as the Best Picture Book Biography (artist) and is on various Best Books of the 2014, including, PBS, NPR, NYPL. talesforallages.com

While reading “The Unfinished Life of Addison Stone” (Soho Teen 2014) by Adele Griffin, I was reminded of my sister describing her snowboarding son as “tragically cool” from the time he was in 4^th grade. She was speaking of his attitude and it always made me laugh. But saying that the teenage artist phenomenon, Addison Stone, was “tragically hip” is, indeed, a tragedy.

The book opens with the news that prodigiously talented (fictional) Addison Stone—a Mozart of the contemporary New York art scene—has died tragically at the ripe age of 18. We occasionally hear Addison’s voice from an interview in an art magazine, but mostly we hear about her from a chorus of voices that include her best friend Lucy Lim, who always supports her; Jonah Lenox her high school boyfriend; Zach Frat her first New York high society boyfriend who is clearly destructive; from artist and love-of-her-short-life Lincoln Reed; and from family members, art agents, high society characters, and others.

The book is made to look like a biography, in part, by including abstract and fascinating portraits that Addison has painted and photos of Addison, played by a slightly too-pretty model, as well as newspaper articles and art magazines featuring Addison as cover girl.

We are told Addison, née Allison, was bored in her Peacedale, Rhode Island high school in spite of being lauded as a singular art prodigy—even by the other art students. She’s mentally unstable and under the care of several psychiatrists and her precarious balance is maintained by a drug she calls Z—when she takes it.

Her well-meaning but flawed high school art teacher and his wife—the Fieldbenders—help get her a toe-hold in the New York City art scene. They think it will help Addison to break away from her ineffectual mother Maureen and her angry redneck father Roy. Interspersed among the many voices, which often tell more about themselves than about Addison are “Author’s Notes” in which the author talks of her “research” into Addison and her contemporaries, furthering the construct of this faux biography.

A favorite aspect for me is the performance art events constructed by Addison. For instance, she films herself stealing her self-portrait from a new exhibit at the prestigious Whitney Museum, and leaves a film loop of the heist running, in place of the portrait. The way in which she carries off the heist with two other street artists is pretty believable.

There is some question about the exact circumstance of Addison’s death but we know it has occurred while trying to install her work, illegally, of course, on a Manhattan bridge. Are either or both of her last two boyfriends involved? The nefarious former drug dealer Gil? But this is not what drew me to the final page as much as the innovative format of many voices offering not only their opinions but telling the story of Addison’s wild life.

 

Patricia Hruby Powell’s book Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker was chosen by the Huffington Post as the Best Picture Book Biography (artist) and is on many Best Books of the 2014, including, PBS, NPR, NYPL. talesforallages.com

Jandy Nelson writes ecstatically—beautifully and truthfully—about first love in her young adult novel “I’ll Give You the Sun” (Dial 2014), as she did in her first book “The Sky is Everywhere.”

Jude and Noah are artists and twins living in northern California. Noah writes about the younger years, when they are 13. Noah—the loner, outcast, the “real” artist—is falling in love with Brian, the athlete who arrives from boarding school out east where he is a baseball star. Brian might like Noah back—he seems to—but then he wanders off with a girl. Noah is confused by this wrenching betrayal. The reader feels it right along with him. Noah loses himself in his art.

The siblings both want to apply for CSA, the art high school, but it’s Noah who seems desperate to get in, to live among “revolutionaries” where he might fit in. His sister Jude seems to have it all. She’s hot. She’s traipsing around in a bikini with the popular girls. They’ve always been so close and her befriending the popular (and vacuous) crowd is another betrayal to Noah.

Noah describes the paintings he will make. One is, “Jude braiding boy after boy in her hair.” He says, “She gives off light. I give off dark.”

He’s jealous of Jude’s talent seen in the bird women she sculpts from sand on the beach. Noah snaps photos of them, then destroys them before the tides wash them away. Then he deletes the pictures so his mother doesn’t see them. Afterall, he finally has his mother’s undivided attention. Noah feels that he has finally eclipsed Jude, the golden girl, in his mother’s eyes.

Jude conveys the later years, when they’re 16. Now she is the outcast. She’s chopped off her beautiful flowing blond hair, dresses in baggy sweat clothes, and is a hypochondriac. Now the voices alternate back and forth as we find out what happened in those three years in between—from 13 years old to 16. First we think one thing, then another, until finally the picture comes together. Jude falls in love for the first time at 16 and it’s another whopper of ecstasy and danger.

A young British man, shows up in both Jude’s and Noah’s story. The way he looks at Jude, she says should “be illegal or patented.” Nelson’s use of words is powerful, succinct, wonderful.

This is deservedly a National Book Award Finalist for Young People’s Literature. The ending is perfect for young adults. Being a not-young adult myself, the ending was a little too ecstatic for my somewhat jaded tastes, but great for bedtime reading. I don’t mean to say the book itself does not include some heart wrenching real tragedy. It does. But you can usually count on hope by the end of a YA book, if not ecstasy.

 

Patricia Hruby Powell’s book Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker won a Boston Globe Horn Book 2014 Honor for Nonfiction and a Parents Choice Gold Award for Poetry.