Book Reviews

 

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.

 

“Brown Girl Dreaming” (Paulsen/Penguin 2014) is Jacqueline Woodson’s memoir about growing up in a loving, but broken family, in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement. Written in accessible vivid verse, and a National Book Award Finalist—we’ll find out tomorrow, November 17, whether it wins. It should.

To set the time frame, the March on Washington took place in August 1963 the year of Woodson’s birth. LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Jacqueline is born in Ohio to a southern mother and a northern father whose grandparents were free men during slave times. The Woodsons were doctors, lawyers, and teachers.

He refuses to visit his wife’s family—the Irbys—in Greenville, SC, saying, “Told her there’s never gonna be a Woodson/ that sits in the back of the bus./ Never gonna be a Woodson that has to/ Yes sir and No sir white people./ Never gonna be a Woodson made to look down/ at the ground.”

So Mama takes her three young children south. Their father shows up, apologizes, but the marriage breaks up soon after. The three children go live with their Irby family in Nicholtown—the black community of segregated Greenville—filled with the scent of pine, honeysuckle and slow days.

Jacqueline is the youngest and not yet one year old. Readers can refer to the Woodson-Irby family tree—their birth and death dates—at the front of the book and handsome family snapshots in the back.

In Nicholtown, Gunnar Irby, Mama’s Daddy, becomes “Daddy” to Jacqueline because that’s what Mama calls him. And he fills the role.

Mama takes off for New York to start a new life. She’ll send for the children as soon as she can. In New York, Jacqueline’s younger brother, Roman, is born.

Jacqueline is not as good a student as her big sister Odella, but she loves words. She knows she wants to write. She adores “Daddy,” her grandfather who sings as he walks the dusty road home from work. After he dies, Grandmother says, “I watch you with your friends and see him all over again.”

Jacqueline Woodson is true to her youthful self and to young reader. She writes, “Sometimes, I don’t know the words for things,/ how to write down the feeling of knowing/ that every dying person leaves something behind.”

The children move to New York, but the grace of the south lives within them. They are urban and country and feel out of place in both places.

As Jacqueline grows up, she refers to song lyrics and MoTown artists. She riffs on Love Train/Soul Train. Her mama loves James Brown. Her Uncle Robert is too wild and pays for it in prison. Jacqueline sees Angela Davis on TV saying “Power to the people.” The Black Panthers are feeding breakfasts to black children out in Los Angeles. You feel the excitement first hand.

I want to quote this whole book so you know its beauty. It’s probably better to buy it or get it from the library.

 

 

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.

 

 

Overview: Young Adult—a.k.a. YA or Teen—Literature is designed for, let’s say, twelve to eighteen year old readers. But it’s catching on with all-aged readers. Certain books hover between Young Adult/Teen and Juvenile so that libraries will hold copies in both departments.

Such is “Blood Guard” by Carter Roy (Amazon 2014). At the onset, Evelyn Ronan Truelove fevered, wearing pajamas, inches along the ledge of his Brooklyn brownstone after his house has mysteriously caught fire. He tells us his mother keeps him busy taking classes in gymnastics, fencing, archery—every kind of lesson available, it seems. For a boy named Evelyn, it’s not surprising that a bully “with fists the size of cantaloupes” nearly gets him. These classes seem like a good idea. And it’s time people started calling him Ronan.

Post fire, the family moves to Stanhope, PA and the next thing we know there’s a high speed car chase, his mother driving him down the concrete steps of a city park, quite adeptly. Strangely robotic men in suits are chasing them. His mother tells him his dweeby father is missing, lets Ronan off near a train station with a train ticket to Washington DC and says that someone in the Blood Guard—a group of good guys of which she is part—will help him there. And “trust no one.” All this is news to twelve year old Ronan.

Ronan is met by a skinny Brit pickpocket, Jack Dawkins—oh yes, isn’t that the name of the Artful Dodger in Dickens’ “Oliver Twist”? Dawkins explains that the Pures, a handful of truly good people—keep the good of civilization in balance. He says, “The Pure can’t know what they are because it would change who they are.” What a great line. And concept.

The book is straight ahead action as meek Ronan and the good Blood Guard fight the evil Bend Sinister, which should engage boy readers. The theme of good versus evil is not new, but this is well written and alternately hilarious and exciting, could catch some reluctant readers with its cast of terrific characters—spunky Greta, foster child Sammy, even the villains are grand. Or listen to it read by Nick Podehl (Brilliance 2013) with nuance and subtlety. What a treat!

 

Patricia Hruby Powell’s new 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.