Book Reviews

“Wild Dreamers” by Margarita Engle

December 8, 2024 By Patricia Hruby Powell Leave a Comment

In Margarita Engle’s stunning novel-in-verse, “Wild Dreamers” (Atheneum 2024), Leandro speaks first: “My family fled Cuba/on a lashed-together jumble/of inner tubes, balsa wood, and fear/exactly ten years ago, when I had just learned/ how to read, and all I craved were tales/ of adventure.” But his father drowns on their way to Florida. Now Leandro is frightened of water and struggles with panic attacks.

The other main voice, Ana, also seventeen, is unhoused, living with her mother out of their car, and hiding from her father who is wanted by the FBI. The two teens meet at a California wilderness park, not far from where they live, and spot a pregnant puma. The teens share an immediate magical connection in part because they’re both drawn to both animals and science.

The third voice is Cielo, a blue merle puppy who was a stowaway on Leandro’s raft ten years prior. Cielo says: “I hum a song/ into his hand/ until he understands…” Cielo is telling Leandro to be still before he faints and avoid the worst of a panic attack. Cielo knows that Leandro and Ana are “scent mates,” and the “singing” dog acts as their matchmaker, delivering a thread of wisdom to the new lovers and to the reader, throughout the book.

Leandro’s uncle is a champion athlete who surfed from Cuba to Florida and who now owns Dulce’s Cuban Bakery, where Leandro works, as well as a plant nursery. Ana’s mother gets a job at the plant nursery which includes quarters for Mother and daughter.

The pregnant puma shows up one night at the plant nursery, which is both frightening and invigorating. Should Ana feed the hungry puma or alert the scientists? She knows she’s not supposed to feed wild animals. It’s ultimately dangerous for the puma, but she’s emaciated. And still pregnant.

The two teens start a rewilding club at their school, working with scientists. They pledge to build wildlife crossings so wild pumas and other animals will be able to cross the highway more safely, increase their areas of habitat, and be able to search for each other. Both teens become immersed in wildlife biology and work.

This National Book Award long listed offers wisdom about immigration, wildlife, homelessness, and romance. If you know a reader who is interested in even one of these topics, get this book into their hands.

Patricia Hruby Powell is the author of the award-winning books: Lift As You Climb; Josephine; Loving vs Virginia; and Struttin’ With Some Barbecue all signed and for sale at Jane Addams bookstore. Her forthcoming books are about women’s suffrage, Martha Graham, and Ella Fitzgerald, as well as waterfowl. talesforallages.com

“Buffalo Dreamer” by Violet Duncan

November 17, 2024 By Patricia Hruby Powell Leave a Comment

Twelve-year-old Summer is on her way, driving, from Arizona to Canada, with her mother and little brother to visit her mother’s people on the Cree Reservation in “Buffalo Dreamer” (Nancy Paulsen 2024) by Violet Duncan. They do this every summer, and her Apache father will join them soon.

Before they arrive at her grandparents’ home on the Northern Alberta Cree Rez, Summer falls asleep. The next short chapter sounds like a different voice, an historic voice, another twelve- year-old girl who is running away when a blizzard starts up. She doesn’t want to be punished and thrown in the isolation bin, but someone named Ann has disappeared. The girl knows that Ann never would have left without her. We’ll eventually discover that this is Summer’s dream.

We return to contemporary times. Summer is hugging her cousin Autumn, and all her aunties and her grandparents are crowding around the newly arrived family. Soon, Summer will ride her horse Luna, a gift from her grandfather, Mosom. But first, this warm supportive family will eat a meal together outside.

Together the family witness trucks headed for the old deserted residential school. Summer doesn’t know much, but she knows that Mosom was kidnapped and forced to attend that residential school, starting at the age of five. He had a sister, but she was in the girl’s quarters, and he never saw her again once they’d arrived at the school.

Because Autumn wants to become a detective, the girls eavesdrop outside the kitchen where the aunties are talking. The women are discussing the graves of girls found at the old residential school. Summer and Autumn are aware that graves of children are being discovered at old residential schools throughout Canada and the northern United States, and it’s disturbing to them. The aunties discover the listening girls and instead of punishing them, draw them into the conversation, having decided they’re old enough to know about their Indian history.

Auntie Crystal says, “You know those schools were created to make kids forget about their own culture so that they could be assimilated into the dominant white culture, right?” Summer and Autumn want to talk to Mosom about his experience, but he never talks about it, so they must be sensitive and wait for the right moment.

The girls ride their horses out to where Summer’s mother and brother are picking sweetgrass. Uncle has given Summer a tuft of tobacco to give back to the Earth in exchange. The women and children braid the sweetgrass so they can give these as offerings to the Earth or light them to smudge their homes thereby cleansing them of bad energy.

When Summer has more dreams, her mother hears her speaking a Cree phrase in her sleep, but Summer doesn’t speak Cree. Then she dreams about a Buffalo.

The girls dance at a powwow, and we learn the history of the jingle dance. The community creates a commemorative event at the gravesite of the residential school and we learn why Summer is dreaming about the Buffalo Dreamer. And it is beautiful. Grandfather Mosom calls his former classmates, “fellow survivors” and he tells the girls stories from his life.

I wanted a book like this when I was twelve but nothing like it existed. I love learning the history—and even more, the culture—of Native Peoples in books such as this, which is on the long list of the National Book Award for Young People. It’s a great quick read, at only 100 pages. Put it in the hands of a young reader.

“How to Raise a Rhino” by Deb Aronson

September 15, 2024 By Patricia Hruby Powell Leave a Comment

Deb Aronson’s book, “How to Raise a Rhino” (Dragonfeather 2023) begins with the tense rescue of a baby rhinoceros in Kenya. Anna, a small white woman is “wedged next to the crate…She knew an attack could come at any moment. She was cold. She was anxious. She was scared. She was ecstatic.” She had her first rhino in a wood crate. And what a great title: How to Raise a Rhino. We wait quite a while for her to actually raise that baby rhino, but first Anna has to make a sanctuary and rescue the rhinos.

Author Aronson visited Kenya to writer her book. She uses statistics such as: “An estimated 20,000 black rhinos roamed the Kenyan countryside in 1970, but be the time Anna moved there in 1980, there were only 300.” She uses Anna Merz’s extensive diaries to illustrate poignant moments in her story.

Aronson shows us how Anna Merz, as a child, saved sick animals. As a young girl in World War Two London, in the midst of exploding bombs, Anna was comforted by animals. War taught her how brief life could be and decided to live fully. For her, that meant travel and adventure.

With her husband, she lived in Ghana for some twenty years, raising horses. Someone brought her a sick baby chimp. Anna nursed him back to health then sent him to a reserve for orphaned chimps. She watched in horror as plants and animals became extinct. Poachers were killing rhinos for their horns and selling “bush meat” in the markets.

The couple moved to Kenya to retire. Even here, “stacks of zebra or Colobus monkey hides…lion teeth and dick-dik horns were piled high in the stalls.” Anna wanted to create a sanctuary “where wild animals are free to roam in safety.”

She found friends who would help by donating their land, build fences and help her bring in black rhinos. But over the “eighteen months of building the sanctuary…wild rhinos continued to disappear.”

Anna used her life savings to procure a little red plane, a helicopter, trucks and local trackers. The plane would search from over the treetops. After days of searching, a rhino would be spotted. A veterinarian would shoot a sedative into its hide from the helicopter. The trucks, with Anna, would race in and using a ramp, drag and push a sedated rhino into a wooden cage. The rhino would be given drugs to slowly wake him. Sometimes they were angry. Sometimes they were calm. The workers were always kind and gentle, but careful.

Eventually there were nine rhinos in the refuge. A couple rhinos became pregnant. When Samia was born, her mother wouldn’t nurse her, so Anna took over the rearing of the sick baby. Samia slurped gallons of the formula that Anna devised. Anna learned the meaning of Samia’s various snorts and huffs. Samia lived in Anna’s house and barn. They were so bonded that in adulthood Samia would protect Anna from charging rhinos on the reserve.

This is a great story for anyone who loves animals. And those who might start loving them.

“Mexikid: A Graphic Memoir” by Pedro Martín

August 18, 2024 By Patricia Hruby Powell Leave a Comment

Author Pedro Martín tells us in his remarkable “Mexikid: A Graphic Memoir” (Dial 2023), that he is the seventh of nine kids in his Mexican-American family and their apá decides to drive them all from California down to Pagueros, Mexico in a Winnebego and a truck, to pick up their abuelo which will make their already large family crowd into a house as an even dozen. Pedro is not happy about this.

The first five kids were born in Mexico, but Pedro and three others were born in the U.S. Pedro/Peter shows us his large family at dinnertime in 1977. Amá is cooking, Apá is reading the paper, two siblings sit at the table. The rest are on the floor or in overstuffed furniture, reading, drawing, watching TV, or punching each other. On the next spread they’re arguing. Sometimes they speak Spanish and sometimes English. It’s chaos.

Their grandfather is a legend, having lived through the Mexican Revolution which lasted from 1910 – 1920. He ran a mule train to deliver food between the two warring sides, who would each call a cease fire when Abuelo arrived. He’d get robbed on occasion and he always whupped the thieves. He was a super-hero. And this is attractive to Pedro.

Martín says his apá has Mariachi music (which he says sounds like “chun-ta-ta” to American ears) running through his blood. His big brother Leon’s blood is full of “Today’s Top 40 hits and R&B favorites.” Not only does he offer us a cultural comparison, but he gives a music lesson. There’s so much here. This is not your simple graphic novel. This is Newbery quality and in fact it won a Newbery Honor.

On the day they set out on their journey, you see the line up of the five big kids and the four little kids against a map of their route. We see the whole family sleeping amidst their luggage in the Winnebago. Each sibling has a distinct personality and really get to know them all. We get a transection of the vehicle and their supplies. The detail is remarkable. We see the chilaquiles they eat, the customs officers searching the Winnebago, the toys they play with, Apá’s emotions as he drives, the sides of the Mexican roads, the topography, the little flags waving across streets, the markets, and so much more.

And Pedro does such a good job with gross: slurping, flies, the diarrhea, poots, and more. One big sister delivers history and in this context we want to hear every word of it.

In Pagueros, they find their legendary grandfather and kiss his hand, “it’s what we do.” The whole family helps load a truck with bales of hay. The old man is stronger than any of them, throwing his bale up onto the top of the load while the others struggle to varying degrees.

Abuelo won’t leave long-dead Abuela behind, so they dig up her bones and take her with them. What a wonderful quest. Of course, Pedro loves his grandfather by the end.

“Keeping Pace” by Laurie Morrison

July 7, 2024 By Patricia Hruby Powell Leave a Comment

Grace has been working her entire middle grade career to win top scholar at her school. She knows it will impress her writer father who has divorced her mother. But her arch enemy, rival, and former friend, Jonah Perkins, gets the accolade and his name will go on the plaque at school in “Keeping Pace” (Amulet 2024) by Laurie Morrison. At the graduation ceremony, Grace begrudgingly accepts second best, wearing her sister’s three-year-old hand-me-down home-made dress.

Now that it’s summer and she wasn’t accepted into the intensive writing camp she’d applied for, she doesn’t know how she’ll fill the hours. She starts running with her older sister, Celia. She says about the hill, “It doesn’t seem like much of an incline, but slopes feel a lot steeper to your legs and your lungs than they look to your eyes.” In a way, this sums up what Grace will be learning this summer. Life isn’t always as it looks. But the endorphins from the workout are making her feel wonderful.

She decides she’ll run the marathon at the end of summer—something that Jonah and she, years ago, had said they’d one day do. Their friendship grew strained a couple years prior to eighth grade when Jonah’s father died unexpectedly. Jonah started saying mean things about Grace, to his friends. Grace didn’t know what she’d done to deserve this.

Grace’s best friend and cousin, Avery, is hanging out with other girls. It turns out Grace spaced out and missed hearing or caring about a friend’s summer plans. Jade says, “‘I think you’ve missed everything that doesn’t have to do with exams or Jonah Perkins lately,’” Grace has been sparring academically with Jonah, for sure. But next year he’s going to a private school and Grace will sort of miss competing with him. But she can’t stand him!

Grace finds a training program for marathon running on-line and starts a rigorous daily workout which she outlines at the beginning of each chapter. Jonah tags along one day and wants to join her daily run. Grace thinks, Great, then he can win the marathon as well. No way. But over time they run into each other on the trails. We know what is going to happen, but it’s the way it happens gradually, with authenticity, subtlety with sly humor, that grabs us.

Grace is also in touch with her clueless father who is too busy writing to truly care about her, but he thinks she might want to babysit his girlfriend’s three-year-old. “Brie—that’s his girlfriend’s name. Like the cheese. Ironic since Dad is lactose intolerant.” The babysitting job works well, but Dad even botches that.

Along the way, Grace learns that there are more important goals in life than achieving good grades.

Patricia Hruby Powell is the author of the award-winning books: Lift As You Climb; Josephine; Loving vs Virginia; and Struttin’ With Some Barbecue all signed and for sale at Jane Addams bookstore. Her forthcoming books are about women’s suffrage, Martha Graham, Ella Fitzgerald, as well as poems about waterfowl. talesforallages.com

“The Enigma Girls: How Ten Teenagers Broke Ciphers, Kept Secrets, and Helped Win World War II” by Candace Fleming.

June 18, 2024 By Patricia Hruby Powell Leave a Comment

In 1940 England, teenaged girls were called, individually, to mysterious personal interviews with high-ranking British military men. Each girl was good at math or languages. They were told to report to Bletchley Park, a subway stop south of London, in “The Enigma Girls: How Ten Teenagers Broke Ciphers, Kept Secrets, and Helped Win World War II” (2024 Scholastic) by Candace Fleming.

Nearly every Brit wanted to stop Hitler from taking over Europe, so the girls went unquestioning to their interviews. Fleming follows each of ten interviewed girls who is advised that “you will be told only what is necessary for you to know, and you will never, never seek to find out more.” They signed oaths to keep their work secret—to not tell their parents or their fellow workers.

The girls arrived at Bletchley, one by one, to find a mansion and many recently constructed out-buildings or “huts.” They would be working alongside the “geniuses,” the men who were working to decipher messages. The girls would feed the geniuses their niche information so that together they could crack the military communication among Hitler and high-ranking Nazis in the field. What were the Germans planning? What did they know about the Allies’ plans?

Germany’s Abwehr, their intelligence-gathering organization, used Enigma machines with four rotors rather than the standard three rotors to encode their communications. Each rotor turned over a new code, frequently, making the ciphers impossible to crack, or so the Nazi’s thought.

The various girls worked in the many huts where cryptographers “had unsuccessfully wrestled with [intercepted Nazi communications] for months.” The girls arrived and each worked on small aspects of each cipher, each day. Fleming gives examples of the puzzles the girls might have worked on and shows how they could, bit by bit, assume, guess, try, conquer, and decipher. Note that deciphering is more complicated than decoding which exchanges one word for another. The most common cipher is an alphabet cipher. Morse code, in spite of its name, is a simple cipher—each letter is encoded in dots and dashes.

Once a cipher is broken, all the messages of that day could be read. But only the highest-ranking British officials could read the complete message. The Nazis clearly did not know that their messages were being deciphered. That was important. For example, Bletchley knew that Germany thought the Americans would land at Calais for the huge invasion. Bletchley officials counted on the Nazi’s ignorance and advised the Allies to land elsewhere. They landed at Omaha Beach, much further south, in June 1944, and took the enemy by surprise.

Whereas the girls didn’t know the details, they felt the excitement in the air and knew they’d helped to make possible the Allies’ ruse.

At the end of the war, the girls, as they had vowed to do, kept their secret. Their friends and families—even their husbands—thought they were just regular people, not the heroes they were. Only recently have they been allowed to tell their stories. Fleming, a great researcher, was able to read the women’s stories and write this suspenseful page-turning true story. This is a book for many ages.

Patricia Hruby Powell is the author of the award-winning books: Lift As You Climb; Josephine; Loving vs Virginia; and Struttin’ With Some Barbecue all signed and for sale at Jane Addams bookstore. Her forthcoming books are about women’s suffrage, Martha Graham, Ella Fitzgerald, as well as poems about waterfowl. talesforallages.com