Book Reviews

At the height of the two mile Coronado Bridge from the California mainland to the Island is a jumping spot. So many people have jumped from the 250 foot height that one of the surveillance cameras is trained right on it. Graycie is a single mom whose job it is to watch the monitors. But she gets distracted. When she looks up there’s an empty car stopped at that spot—but no person. It’s nighttime. A light is broken. The view is hazy. Graycie doesn’t see a person—just the stopped car. She needs this job. She can’t admit that she spaced out.
Graycie is one of at least fourteen narrators who tell the story of “The Incident on the Bridge” by Laura McNeal (Knopf 2016). But it’s seventeen-year-old Thisbe’s story.
Fen drives long distance to visit his Uncle Carl on Coronado Island after his father dies. Carl, a police officer, is also brother to Fen’s father. At the highpoint of the bridge a car stops right in front of Fen and a girl gets out. She leaves the car door open. He’s annoyed. Should he help her? She waves him on.
Officers Lord and Skelly assume that someone jumped. They trace the deserted car to seventeen-year-old Clay, but Clay wasn’t the driver. He’s well and alive and living on his boat, seducing girl after vulnerable girl, just like he seduced impressionable Thisbe.
If someone jumped, shouldn’t there be a body? But bodies get stuck under the pylons or carried far off by currents and aren’t always found.
Ted, Thisbe’s beautiful street-wise younger sister, had told Thisbe that Clay was a creep. But he was so handsome and convincing. If Thisbe had any sense, she would have fallen for tennis playing Jerome, who truly likes Thisbe. Thisbe is school-smart, but she sure isn’t people-smart.
Thisbe, in desperation, had stolen or borrowed Clay’s car. She’s at the center of the incident on the bridge. Thisbe’s mother Anne is, of course, frantic when Thisbe doesn’t come home. Ted knew her sister was depressed, but she doesn’t think her sister would kill herself. She buddies up with Fen and searches for Thisbe.
Frank is an older menacing character complete with an odd backstory. When he was a boy he played realistic pirating games with his sister, until it ended badly.
The backstory and front story unfold in 87 brief chapters told by many voices and deserves to be read in large swaths of time rather than 20 minutes each night before bedtime.
McNeal knows her setting—California’s Coronado Island and she knows California beach kids and their boating and water culture. She knows how her characters think and how they talk—most are either likeable or fascinating in some way. I felt invited into a world I knew little about. The book might start a little slowly but it picks up and begins pulling you along at a rapid pace.

Patricia Hruby Powell is the author of Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker. Her young adult documentary novel Loving vs. Virginia releases in Jaunary 2017. talesforallages.com

In 1939 Krakow, Poland, seven-year-old Anna awaits her father’s return at Herr Doktor’s pharmacy. Gavriel Savit writes “To a child, an empty hour is a lifetime” in his insightful debut novel, “Anna and the Swallow Man” (Knopf 2016). Motherless Anna eventually realizes that her linguist father will not be returning, although she doesn’t know it is the Gestapo that has taken him.

Herr Doktor, afraid to hide Anna, sends the child into the streets where she meets a tall lanky man who carries a doctor’s bag. Whereas he’s somewhat menacing, he feeds and talks to birds, and this attracts Anna. When he sets off across a field, Anna follows. Thus begins four years of wandering—behind the enemy, sleeping under hedges in all seasons, and enacting schemes to cross border control. As Germany pushes through Poland from the west and the Soviets from the east, “Anna and the Swallow Man made it their labor to walk.”

Savit speaks of the “wise clear-sightedness of a child” which some adults name “precocious.” The reader will remember how it felt to be a child, making sense of an incomprehensible world. Both the Swallow Man and Anna speak Polish, German, Russian, easily and well. This helps. They always wait for any stranger to speak first, and they match language and dialect. After all, Anna’s father was a linguist. Anna is adaptable. The pair, overall, speaks the language: Road. They speak in riddles in the presence of others.

The Swallow Man has rules—rules that will keep them alive. “To be found is to be gone forever.” (Her father had been found). When they are in a large town, the pair enacts a prosperous father and daughter out for a stroll. When in the country, the pair became regional country folk. They each have two sets of clothing, one being stored in the thin man’s satchel. Over the seasons and the years, new clothes are procured, oftentimes taken off dead bodies.

Another tenet—“Money divides people into buyers and sellers,” so they use no money. They are given food or exchange tasks for food. The Swallow Man has a knack for making comrades out of each acquaintance. He teaches Anna that other humans are their best bet for survival. He also teaches, “People are dangerous.” In spite of this, Anna makes a friend of an itinerant musician, who accompanies the pair for a time.

Another of the Swallow Man’s rules—he is the riverbank, she flows within. He is in charge, she will follow his lead. Until the day that even the Swallow Man becomes unreliable—grossly unreliable. Anna, now ten, must take their survival into her own hands.

How many people hide themselves in full view? I had never before thought of this in terms of Jews during World War II. Savit, a working actor, professionally takes on other identities. In his book, he probes mysteries of identity, adaptability, death, and ethics. This “young adult” book should be read by 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

Marcus Sedgwick’s “Ghosts of Heaven” (Roaring Brook 2015) is comprised of four haunting stories linked by the concept of a spiral. The four stories span prehistory to the future and is recommended for readers 12 and up.

A Paleolithic girl with no name is intrigued by a fern head, a snail, then the path of a falcon flying the skies. Her tribe is attacked and she runs deep into a cave—into “the black marrow of the earth.” She would like to have been the tribesperson chosen to draw on the cave wall. But her people are gone now. The narrator identifies her as “she who goes ahead when others fall behind.” She must communicate to those with whom she cannot speak. Can you communicate with a drawing? A glyph? She makes a spiral. This could communicate something concrete to the viewer. This is the beginning of written language.

The second story finds Anna in 17^th Century England. Her mother, the village healer, dies. The vicar has also recently died so the town creates its own Christian-pagan funeral ceremony, which includes a frenzy of spiral-patterned dance. The new vicar arrives and sees devilry. With her mother gone, Anna is left to care for her epileptic brother, Tom. Besides working at the mill, Anna continues her mother’s healing work, certain that she can find the cure for her brother’s seizures. Anna’s life is doomed when she spurns the advances of the young lord of the manor house. The townspeople, to save themselves, allow her to be hung with a spiral threaded rope when she is accused of witchcraft.

Part three takes us to a 19^th century New York asylum where a new doctor with a young daughter, treats a mad poet. The poet is terrified by the spiral staircase, which suggests infinity and the endless sea where he lost his wife. In this story, you wonder who is sane and who is not—a common but intriguing theme.

In part four, a young astronaut travels in a craft, spiraling through space. Every ten years he’s awakened from an induced sleep to do his turn in manning the craft. The craft is transporting a couple hundred chosen sleeping people to another habitable planet for colonization. Again, there is the theme of madness. Who wouldn’t go mad in such a situation?

Marcus Sedgwick, the 2013 winner of the YA Printz Award for Midwinterblood, writes masterfully. Each of the four parts of Ghosts is written in a distinct and authentic voice, which spirals us through time, not to return to the same place we started. The four distinct stories could lead readers to genres they’ve never read before.

 

 

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. Loving vs. Virginia comes out January 2017. talesforallages.com

“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