Patricia Hruby Powell

Author, Storyteller, Dancer

Book Reviews

“Stepsister” by Jennifer Donnelly

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There are fractured fairytales and there are shattered fairy tales, such as “Stepsister” (Scholastic 2019) by Jennifer Donnelly. This is Cinderella told by the elder ugly stepsister Isabelle. Both Isabelle and her sister Octavia were cruel to Ella. But we all know that (Cinder) Ella won out and got the prince in the end. Our story begins just before that outcome.

The Prince comes around with the glass slipper and the stepsisters’ social climbing mother insists that Isabelle cut off her toes so that she might fit into the shoe. It works for a few moments, until the blood pours out of the slipper and her ruse is discovered.

Donnelly writes, “Mama wielded shame like an assassin wields a dagger . . .How many times had [Isabelle] cut away parts of herself at her mother’s demand? The part that laughed too loudly. That rode too fast and jumped too high. The part that wished for a second helping.” Isabelle’s sister Tavi also fails the shoes test and Cinderella’s fate is sealed. She rides off with the Prince.

It’s not easy to write an unsympathetic protagonist but in Donnelly’s hands we eventually love Isabelle and eventually we understand her younger sister Octavia (or Tavi) who had the historically unappreciated traits of being scholarly and outspoken. What is appreciated in past centuries and continues today is beauty. (Cinder) Ella has beauty.

Isabelle is athletic, bold, and her forthright declarations are considered rude—all traits not valued in girls of yore. Even today, this girl can have issues. But we’ve come a long way in our culture. So from our present American culture we can value Isabelle’s traits. She was a tomboy who, with the groom’s son, Felix, played pirates and fought play-battles and actually rode a moody stallion named Nero. Isabelle wanted to be admired. When she wasn’t, jealousy took hold. “Envy’s fine, sharp teeth sank deep into Isabelle’s heart.”

Isabelle says, “Sometimes it’s easier to say that you hate what you can’t have rather than admit how badly you want it.” She claims to hate Ella. Further along in the story she realizes it’s herself that she hates—and that is what she must overcome.

Fate, characterized as a crone, has cast Isabelle’s lot. But Chance, characterized as the handsome Marquis, wagers that he can change Isabelle’s future. Isabelle would be a pawn in their game of chess except for the presence of Tanaquill (Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother) who is not all goodness and shimmer, but shape shifts into a fox, making her quite fascinating. She tells Isabelle to find the lost pieces of her heart. And Donnelly, a master of similes says about the fairy, “Tanaquill snarled like a fox who’d lost a nice fat squirrel.”

Isabelle has lost Felix and Nero, in her mother’s efforts to smooth out her rough edges—to make her the girl Maman wanted. As you know will happen, Isabelle shows that a mean girl can atone, but it requires love—starting with self-love. And in order to have that, she must follow her dream.

 

 

Patricia Hruby Powell is teaches writing at Parkland Community education and is the author of the award winning Josephine; Loving vs Virginia; and Struttin’ With Some Barbecue among others         talesforallages.com

“A Few Red Drops: The Chicago Race Riot of 1919” by Claire Hartfield

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Rarely does nonfiction win big awards in young readers’ literature. But nonfiction “A Few Red Drops: The Chicago Race Riot of 1919” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2018) by Claire Hartfield, is the worthy Coretta Scott King 2019 literature winner.

Hartfield starts her story at a Lake Michigan beach where a black boy is murdered during the extreme summer heat of 1919—right at the color line, between segregated beaches, where the “white” beach meets the “black” beach. She then regresses to the history, starting in the late nineteenth century, and takes us through the years up to the Chicago Race Riot of 1919.

We hear about African American journalist Ida B. Wells, who witnessed the lynching of her godchild’s father, by a white mob. Wells says this sort of lynching was “an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property.” This “tide of hate” changed her life. She and her husband were among the class of black people known as “the Refined.” They were educated, wealthy and property owners.

The next stratum of black society was known as “the Respectables”—people who were making ends meet. While the Respectables struggled to pay rent, the Refined were mapping out plans to make the heart of the black residential area a vibrant place to live.

During the Great Migration of the early 1900s—black people were moving to northern cities trying to escape extreme racism of the Deep South. The black Chicago newspaper, the Defender was the beacon of information for black citizens. Besides news the Defender published the Do and Don’ts for the newly urbanizing black population—such as: Don’t sit outside barefoot. The black church started social groups for women and children, advising them to stay away from “the Riffraff.” Some migrants resisted changing their ways, but most complied with enthusiasm, taking “the walk toward assimilation.”

While black people were working to assimilate, gangs of whites, such as Ragen’s Colts, crept through the streets terrorizing black people. White police protected white mobs and threw black victims into jail.

You can refer to the Chicago Neighborhoods map ca.1919 published at the front of the book. The Union Stockyards were surrounded by Packingtown. You can see the strict division of the Blackbelt and the White Middle-class, which is cut vertically by the State Street Streetcar.

Packinghouse bosses were “always looking to drive a wedge between skilled and unskilled.” The bosses maintained the upper hand by staying united, decade after decade. White eastern European workers tried to start unions to fight the bosses. They would threaten black workers with meat cleavers to make them join. At times interracial groups of workers would unite. If they got a toe hold, management would instill distrust between the races.

This brings us to the unbearable heat of summer 1919 when thousands cooled off at the beaches. The black boy drowns, tempers rage, the police fire a shot, guns become fair play. Rumors soar—it was a white boy who drowned. Fighting erupts. Terror reigns for three days. The author details arrests of black people rather than white. Eyewitness Ida B. Wells reports the injustice.

Should black people go to work? Or get fired? Death now or later when they starved? Slowly calm is restored. The photos are astounding—this is a must read to fill in your knowledge of Chicago.

 

Patricia Hruby Powell is the author of the award winning Josephine; Loving vs Virginia; and Struttin’ With Some Barbecue among others         talesforallages.com

“Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” retold by Ari Folman and illustrated by David Polonsky

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I was younger than Anne Frank when I first read, was mesmerized by and devastated by “The Diary of a Young Girl.” And now I’m so much older than she. Yet, if Anne Frank had survived Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and lived on, she’d have turned ninety, this June 14, 2019. Anne is our contemporary. In the 1952 version I first read, passages that her father had deemed unseemly, had been deleted. Those have been returned to the script in newer editions.

The copyright to the original “Diary” expired in 2016 and now there is a remarkable new version, “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” (Pantheon 2018) retold by Ari Folman and illustrated by David Polonsky. It’s not just a reiteration of the classic. The text and artwork take its readers to new places.

Anne tells her story in the first person, as by definition, a diary does. And the very nature of the visual images shows us Anne, her family members and the van Daans. Instead of Anne telling us that Jews are betrayed, there are frames outside the annex showing a gentile asking an SS officer ‘how much per Jew.’ The officer directs the traitor to an address where a man makes “15 guilders per head,” showing one way Jews were betrayed.

There are passages showing Anne’s fantasies as they get news from their intrepid patron, Miep, about the atrocities happening in German camps. We see Anne peeking through her window to see dirty children playing outside. She wants to reel them in with a fishing rod and scrub them clean, the artwork shows us.

We see Anne’s waking nightmare as rows of Jewish people, some carrying crying children, walk to their deaths in gas chambers.

Anne, as most teenagers do, seethes with rage. She feels wounded by her mother and the other attic occupants. “Everyone thinks I’m showing off when I talk, ridiculous when I’m silent, insolent when I answer, cunning when I have a good idea, lazy when I’m tired, selfish when I eat one more bite than I should, stupid, cowardly calculating . . .” She pretends she’s not bothered, but she’s raging.

Big sister Margot is in control of herself, seemingly docile. It makes you wonder what Margot would say. We’ll never know. She died of typhus alongside Anne in the camp in 1945, shortly before the camps were liberated.

Mr. Dussel, who arrives to the attic annex months after the others, receives goodies from his Christian wife who lives ‘outside.’ Despite the Frank family saving him, he doesn’t share.

These poor trapped crowded beings, struggle with each other’s shortcomings, but together, they feel despair. They are entrapped for two years. As time progresses, guns pop all night. Bombs destroy landmark buildings. Sometimes sirens wail through the nights.

Anne is given valerian tea, an herbal tranquilizer, to sleep. She’s depressed. Of course. And then a break-in of petty criminals in the warehouse below changes everything.

The diary wasn’t just Anne’s personal coping tool, as I’d thought. There had been an announcement that personal accounts of wartime would be published after the war. She dreams of being an author. And what an author she is!

 

Patricia Hruby Powell is the author of the award winning Josephine; Loving vs Virginia; and Struttin’ With Some Barbecue among others         talesforallages.com

“The War Outside” by Monica Hesse

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It’s 1944. World War II is raging across Europe and the Pacific when Margot is taken from Iowa and Haruko from Colorado in “The War Outside” (Little Brown 2018), by Monica Hesse. Now the two teens, each lives with her family in a dusty Texas internment camp for those accused of colluding with the enemy.

German American Margot says, “In the middle of this dust, in the middle of these chaotic arrivals, I feel I am watching a secret.” American families are imprisoned by the U.S. government. What did their parents do? Margot’s father is keeping a secret, clearly, all the while her mother’s health is deteriorating radically. Did her father fraternize with Nazis?

Japanese American Haruko was popular in her Colorado high school. After all, she’s cute and she laughed at the jokes made against Japanese people. Margot goes to the same school as Haruko rather than the German school in Crystal City Internment Camp in order to receive a better education in preparation of her dream to become a scientist.

Each imprisoned family lives in a prefabricated “victory hut,” and the food isn’t bad. The prisoners say, that’s in case the Japanese win the war. The USA wants their prisoners to look well fed. But the Japanese prisoners are fed Chinese rather than Japanese rice—one of many interesting details.

The two girls start meeting in the dark icehouse, sitting on bales of hay. They discuss their families—first tentatively. Then Haruko asks if Margot’s father is a Nazi. No, they just lived in a German farming community—they aren’t Nazis. Her father went to one meeting in Iowa to hear a band and a speaker, as a favor to a friend, just to keep neighborhood peace. Wasn’t that true? Haruko says that she thinks her father is keeping a secret.

Margot says, to survive the camp you must put the experience in a box and keep it there. Tell yourself that you choose to be here, so you have control of the box. Haruko is angry all the time. What did her father do to get them here? He was the one imprisoned but the rest of the family chose to join him.

Haruko’s brother Ken, enlisted as a U.S. soldier, hoping it would help the family cause. When he gets injured he visits his family in the camp. He’s not the same. At the icehouse Haruko cries in Margot’s arms. Their relationship grows more intimate.

Haruko’s father, a hotel manager in Colorado was accused of passing messages to hotel guests. Is he a spy? West Coast Japanese were all evacuated to prison camps, due to their proximity to Japan. West Coast evacuees lost everything whereas Coloradans had the luxury of selling or giving awayt their possessions. Yet, Executive Order 9066 allowed the government to send Americans anywhere—based on the artwork they displayed on their walls or if they practiced martial arts.

There’s so much to learn here. And the girls—is it a crush? Are they in love? One betrays the other. Why? Vulnerability and fear? What is the truth?

 

 

 

Patricia Hruby Powell is the author of the award winning Josephine; Loving vs Virginia; and Struttin’ With Some Barbecue among others         talesforallages.com

“Sweep: The Story of a Girl and Her Monster” by Jonathan Auxier

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Nan Sparrow has been a chimney sweep ever since she can remember, in Jonathan Auxier’s “Sweep: The Story of a Girl and Her Monster” (Amulet 2018) set in nineteenth century London. In the beginning, the Sweep was her guide, but he disappeared five years ago. Now twelve, Nan is changing into a young woman while working for Wilkie Crudd, a cruel master with a pack of boy sweeps. They all live together in a coal cellar. The story and writing is reminiscent of Charles Dickens, specifically, Oliver Twist.

Nan is canny and lithe, but that doesn’t keep her from getting stuck in a narrow bending flue where a competitive boy “nudges” her—or shoves her deeper into the flue—when a chimney fire breaks out. Did she die? If not, where could she have escaped to? And who is with her?

The Sweep had given her a fistful of char—soot and ash—which has lived in her pocket these past 5 years. This clump of char begins to awaken and grow. The glob comforts and eventually protects her. It develops legs and arms and can move about. She names him Charlie. He’s sweet, innocent, but is growing larger and becoming frightening, but not to Nan. Nan protects Charlie from ridicule and her own fear. She doesn’t want him to become fearful. With research, she decides he’s a golem. Research also tells her that golems become obsolete—but what does that mean exactly?

Nan and Charlie move into the House with a Hundred Chimneys, which has lain vacant for years. They use an upstairs window as their front door. In fact, they prowl the city along the rooftops, which the reader will find exhilarating—at least this one did. They watch the streets below and stay hidden from the cruel Crudd who is searching for his best sweep, Nan.

Nan and Charlie assign each room with a purpose—the Tantrum Room (lined with cushions), a Dress-Up Room with all the capes and hats left by the previous owners, and the Rubbish Room, which becomes too smelly to use.

Back in the days when they’d roamed the streets together, the Sweep had sung to her, so now Nan sings. She sings to advertise her service—sweeping chimneys. And it’s effective in getting work.

Toby, a street boy and junk seller, is cocky and sweet and clearly fancies Nan. She’s dismissive of him, but the reader is grateful for Toby’s occasional presence in Nan’s hard life. Nan says, “Toby was one of those irritating people who got on with everyone.” Toby notes that Charlie woke up Nan’s heart—which had been pretty hardened.

At times the writing is lyrical, as when the sun comes out and Nan sees the light “erasing the shadows, street by street.” Reading this book is both comfortable and comforting.

The story addresses child labor of the late nineteenth century and the beginning of laws to protect children. The Sweep, Toby, and another friend, Miss Bloom, are all Jewish and the issue of anti-Semitism is an important thread running through the story. Together, Nan and Charlie, experience wonder, love, and grief—in spite of having no mother.

And on this Mother’s Day, I’m so grateful to the mother I had. Happy Mother’s Day, Mama.

 

Patricia Hruby Powell is the author of the award winning Josephine; Loving vs Virginia; and Struttin’ With Some Barbecue among others         talesforallages.com

“The Chaos of the Stars” by Kiersten White

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This is a guest post written by Megan Sutton

Things aren’t easy when you’re the daughter of ancient Egyptian deities. No one knows that better than Isadora, who is the mortal offspring of Isis, the goddess of magic and wisdom, and Osiris, the god of the dead and ruler of the underworld. The Chaos of Stars traces her steps as she runs off to California in the hopes of escaping their clutches and living a separate life, but she soon realizes that her connection to her parents is much more complicated than mere geography. Dark, terrifying dreams haunt her at night and they’re dangerous enough to kill a god.

Here, author Kiersten White puts a spin on family drama with Egyptian mythology. Other than having immortals for parents, Isadora leads a typical life. She makes friends with interesting fellows like energetic Tyler and the Greek boy Ry, and her days in California are an odd mix of interior design and worshipping god. Although she may resent her parents, she still plans to build a museum dedicated to them someday. It’s confusing, but totally understandable.

Isadora’s feelings, as White relays them, are relatable. She thinks her parents never truly loved her, especially since they made her mortal while the rest of her relatives get to live forever. The grudge grows as soon as she finds out about her mother’s pregnancy. Isadora also has a difficult time with love, like most people her age do. Her witty charm and sarcastic views of the world makes for a delightful read, but sometimes come off as a little too self-absorbed.

All in all, fans of White and her work will understand that her fascination with ancient Egypt runs deep; the first book she ever wrote was set in Egypt. White has said many times that Egyptian mythology is blunt and straightforward, and its family feuds are even more complicated than that of Greek myths — which is delightfully reflected in her printed work.

But the effect of this deep respect and reference to the ancient is that it encourages readers to explore well-known deities and characters in a new light. After all, Egyptian mythological icons have survived generations and become an interesting part of modern pop culture, so much so that both Isis and Osiris are familiar names, regardless of how well versed people are about the lore. For one, they both appear as characters in the 2016 film Gods of Egypt. In the well-known video game Assassin’s Creed: Origins, which is also set in ancient Egypt, both Isis and Osiris are referenced numerous times. On a smaller scale, they are featured in Egyptian-themed games on online portal Slingo. Titles like Temple of Iris, Pyramid: Quest for Immortality, and Crown of Egypt feature the deities’ common images so that players can recognize them immediately. And although not everyone is familiar with Egyptian mythology that doesn’t mean that Chaos of the Stars isn’t for everyone – as it is. It is an enthralling read that doesn’t solely focus on in-depth knowledge about the ancient Egyptian gods.

So, while the book certainly leans on Egyptian mythology, the narrative focuses less on the details of the lore in favor of highlighting common family issues. This may be a disappointment for readers who picked up the book to expand their understanding of Egyptian gods. But if you do enjoy it, it’s important to understand that White has written books with similar fantastical themes. Her latest novel, Slayer, is a story set in Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer universe. She is also author of the Paranormalcy trilogy, a highly acclaimed series that landed on the New York Times best-seller list.

For more book reviews, feel free to explore Tales for All Ages.

 

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