Book Reviews

War looks imminent and tensions are mounting. In 1812, at what is now Fort Wayne, Indiana, James’ family runs the trading post. Anikwa, a Miami Indian, helps reinforce his family’s reed house. The twelve year old friends fight to survive a tough winter in “Salt: A Story of Friendship in a Time of War” (Frances Foster 2013) by Helen Frost.

The Miami Indians weave mats of cattail reeds, which they stuff with moss for the walls of their homes. The poems in Anikwa’s voice are shaped like diamonds and triangles to replicate the traditional Indian weaving work. Will his people fight alongside the Americans? Or with the British who claim they will allow the Indians to remain on their homeland?

James, the European American, speaks in long parallel lines like the stripes of the American flag. His family’s values align with the Indians who are stewards of the earth. But there are those settlers who prefer to dominate the earth. Will James’ family abandon the trading post—and their Miami friends–and seek refuge in the American military fort?

A third thread interspersed in this story of a challenged friendship is the story of salt beginning with its geological origin. Animals need salt to survive. Humans use it, also, to flavor and preserve food. In the saddest part of the story—during war—the poem depicts tears, “leaving salt streaks on our faces.”

James and Anikwa understand only a few words of each other’s language. Misunderstandings abound yet they forge a friendship. James has much to learn from Anikwa about woodland survival. He sees that in the Miami culture, as in all Native American cultures, generosity is valued. A strong character gives. This is what the Miami do. Give.

Frost clearly aligns with Native American culture, which is just one reason I love this book. Anikwa speaks lyrically and simply, and always about nature. “The geese form into arrows pointing south…”

Frost builds each of her novels with shape poems. The diamond-shaped poems of “Diamond Willow,” each holds a “scar” of bold type. Reading these “scars” offers a deeper message to Willow’s story. In nature they are knots in the willow wood where a branch has fallen away.

In “Crossing Stones” the poems of some characters are round like stones. Poems of other characters meander back and forth across the page like the creek bed that houses the stones.

In “Keesha’s House” (Printz Honor book) seven teen characters, each with serious problems, tell their stories in sonnets and sestinas, yet their voices sound natural.

Frost uses complex forms, which she always describes in the endnotes and that the avid reader can analyze. But always, the story sings out beyond the form. Add to that magic—Frost’s books are all quick reads, with much white space on the page.

Patricia Hruby Powell is a nationally touring speaker, dancer, storyteller, occasional librarian, and children’s book author. See more at www.talesforallages.com/

“Temple Grandin: How The Girl Who Loved Cows Embraced Autism and Changed the World” (Houghton 2012) by Sy Montgomery is a book for anyone who is weird or knows someone who is odd. That’s all of us, right?

Montgomery assures us that being different does not mean being less. In describing Temple’s relationship to the world, she describes the world of many autistic people. While reading you wonder if many of us are not “on the spectrum.” Loud sounds can feel like torture. Childhood clothes (like a stiff petticoat) felt like “needles stabbing her skin.” Smelling someone else’s perfume was hideous and distracted you from the task at hand, such as school. Sound familiar?

As a toddler, Temple did not laugh or smile. She couldn’t understand what people said. She didn’t speak until she was five. Her father wanted to institutionalize her, but her mother wouldn’t allow it. Little was known about autism in the 50’s when Temple was growing up. But her mother found tutors and a nanny who understood that “Temple needed images more than words to understand” the world.

Temple thinks in pictures. Many of us do. But Temple retains the pictures in her mind in rich detail and with great accuracy. Instead of being “retarded,” as her father thought, Temple is brilliant. She just processes information differently than that which is considered normal.

Her mother enrolled Temple in a small rural school. Eventually her schoolmates took her oddities in stride. Temple learned that what was torturous to her (loud school bell) didn’t bother others. Her classmates were interviewed for this book, offering another dimension to her story.

Temple did more than overcome a disability. Temple writes in the Foreword that many kids are quirky or nerdy and “The ones who become successful in life are those who figure out how to use their unique abilities and passions in work they can pursue with other people.”

Temple’s major success involves treatment of farm animals. Half of the cattle in the U.S. “are handled in systems I have designed for meat-packing plants,” she says.

Her ability to observe details includes Temple’s seeing through the eyes of cattle. She understands what they fear. From her teen years spent on her aunt’s ranch, she learned that cows walk in large circles. Therefore she developed a spiral walkway for the cows to get to the dipping tank. They walk down a stable platform for their bath, rather than being wrestled and dumped into deep water.

In order for a steer to be vaccinated, ranch hands, for their own safety, press the animal between two panels. Temple saw the steers calm down. Temple let herself be squeezed in the chute and found that the even pressure calmed her. She built her own squeeze machine and took it to college with her.

Temple acknowledges that nature is cruel. We owe cattle respect. She devised a way that steers aren’t afraid and they don’t feel pain. So we can eat our hamburgers with a little less guilt.

 

Patricia Hruby Powell is a nationally touring speaker, dancer, storyteller, occasional librarian, and children’s book author. See more at www.talesforallages.com/

In “Rump: The True Story of Rumpelstiltskin” (Knopf 2013), Liesl Shurtliff retells the story that the Brothers Grimm collected in Germany and first published in 1812. In Shurtliff’s story Rump is not an imp, but a smallish boy.

Why in the past did they think he was an imp? Rump mistakenly steps on a pixie nest and they retaliate by biting his face, arms, legs, and yes, his rump. The painful bites swell and disfigure the boy, so he probably looked like an imp. Temporarily.

But back to the beginning. After whispering the name of her newborn in his ear, his mother dies. He can only remember “Rump.” In his world, his name is his destiny. The naming of babies is so important that people name nothing else. They live in the Village at the base of the Mountain in the Kingdom. The animals don’t even have names, but Rump identifies his goat as Milk and his donkey as Nothing. His mother came from Yonder or maybe Beyond. With a name like Rump, of course he’s teased relentlessly.

The Mountain was once full of gold and it is the villagers’ unfortunate task to mine what little remains and pay it as a tax to the greedy Miller who in turn hands it over to the gold-loving King. As is true in the Grimm version, the Miller tells the King that his daughter can spin straw into gold. Great. The greedy king takes the miller’s daughter as his bride. Now what? They need Rump who can spin straw to gold. What a heartless clever Miller!

In this romp with Rump, Shurtliff offers some sly turns of wisdom. The sludge-slurping trolls are known to eat human flesh. Not true, but the trolls keep humans at bay by letting them think this because, one says, “Humans take one look at any living creature and think only how they can use it.”

There’s more fun to be had. Gnomes pop out of holes in the road, take messages, and deliver them to individuals throughout the Kingdom. What a great way to send and receive messages.

As for the pixies, usually Rump is just swatting them away like we might swat at insects. But unlike most insects, pixies have garish colored hair and spectacular wings. The pixies are attracted to Rump because they love gold and they sense that Rump has a way with straw (in that he can spin it into gold) long before Rump knows of his talents.

Rump must discover his full name—and with it, his destiny. Afterall, You are what you’re named. Rump? No, there must be more to this guileless self-deprecating boy. And why ever would he want the new queen’s firstborn? Shurtliff explains it all in her clever retelling of “Rumpelstiltskin.”

Patricia Hruby Powell is a nationally touring speaker, dancer, storyteller, occasional librarian, and children’s book author. See more at www.talesforallages.com/

The paperboy stutters. He has difficulty uttering his own name, which begins with V— a sound difficult to make. The paperboy is known as Little Man. Not until the very end does the author, Vince Vawter, disclose the paperboy’s name—Victor Volmer—in the book “Paperboy” (Delacorte 2012).

In 1959 Memphis, 11 year old Little Man has taken over the paper route of his best friend who is vacationing with cousins. Needing a tool to cut the cord of bundled papers, Little Man takes his knife to the junkman/knife sharpener, Ara T, in spite of being warned to steer clear of him. Ara T, an adult bully, will not return the boy’s knife unless he says his own name. Little Man can’t do it.

Little Man assigns new names to those difficult to say. His best friend Art becomes Rat. The protagonist uses a technique called Gentle Air, breathing an s-s-s sound in order to voice difficult-to-say words—of which there are many. The reader is shown the challenge a stuttering kid must overcome in order to speak, to read aloud in class, and how those efforts result in being teased and taunted.

His paper route customers provide relationships, which lead to Little Man’s maturity. A learned merchant marine, Mr. Spiro, calls the boy Messenger when he shows up to collect the weekly paper fee. Spiro offers pithy dollops of wisdom such as Voltaire’s: “Speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts.” Spiro gives Messenger one part of a torn and quartered dollar bill each week, with one word written on each piece. Along with the protagonist we wait to solve the mystery of the four words.

Another client is the beautiful whisky-drinking Mrs. Worthington. Our boy is infatuated and concerned about her relationship with an abusive husband. We are drawn to find out the outcome.

His closest ally is Mam, his (white) family’s (black) maid. Together, Mam and Little Man confront the dangerous Ara T, risking their lives in a seedy part of Memphis where we learn about the self-governing justice system in this African American community.

Thank heavens Little Man excels at pitching a baseball. This gives him much needed confidence and an arena in which he is highly respected.

I loved the details shown of childhood as when Vawter writes, “I ran from lamppost to lamppost without stopping like I was running the bases.” The lampposts might tag him out. (I’d have been running from tree to tree as an Indian avoiding the cavalry).

Just as the paperboy carefully chooses words according to their starting sound—such as saying story rather than book with it’s difficult b sound—Vawter carefully chooses his words. We understand when he says, “…the D sound stuck tight in my throat like a tennis ball in a chain-link fence.”

Vawter knows his setting as only one who has lived it—details such as which streets had less traffic on Saturdays. This beautiful story is clearly personal to its author, yet universal for his readers.

Patricia Hruby Powell is a nationally touring speaker, dancer, storyteller, occasional librarian, and children’s book author. See more at www.talesforallages.com/

One small shorebird, a rufa redknot, tagged B95 many years ago, has probably lived longer than 20 years. His history and that of all rufas is told by master storyteller Phillip Hoose in “Moonbird: a Year on the Wind with the Great Survivor B95” (Farrar 2012).

Every year B95 and his compadre rufas migrate from the southern tip of South America, Tierra del Fuego to the Canadian Arctic and back again. “But trip by trip,” Hoose informs us, “B95 threads the sky with fewer companions,” a fact attributable in large degree to human activity. “Can humans and shorebirds coexist?” 80% of rufas have disappeared in B95’s lifetime. He was first banded in 1995 when he was an adult, at least 3 or 4 years old. (The “95” happens to be his number, not the year he was banded).

Maps and photos show the yearly route, pole to pole. We know their route because scientists recapture banded birds, record data, and release them. Some rufas are fitted with tiny radios. Why do they go so far? The preliminary answer is: for food, space, and light. They breed in the Arctic where they have nearly 24 hours of summer light to find food. But when winter returns in August they head south seeking the Antarctic summer light.

They gorge themselves before they set out for flights that last 3 to 5 days—without landing. When they do land at various points along their way, they’re depleted and in dire need of food, but still far from their final destination. “…this bird has to be among the toughest 4 ounces of life in the world.” At each landing spot a particular food is available on which the tiny birds gorge. At Delaware Bay, it’s been eggs of horseshoe crabs. But that crab population has been decimated by humans—first to be ground and used as fertilizer, now as bait to catch conch, which is a cuisinary delicacy. 80% of the crab population is gone. If rufas doesn’t eat, he doesn’t survive.

Hoose builds on his premise that “plants and animals keep us alive and improve our lives.” It was discovered that horseshoe crabs whose eggs feed the rufas provide a liquid that keeps our medicines safe from bacterial contamination. Scientists have found a way to extract what they need and return the crabs to Delaware Bay.

Interspersed in the rufas’ life narrative are profiles of scientists who often began as kids with a fascination for shorebirds and who volunteered in the quest to save them. Some of the profiles focus on kids volunteering today, bringing the study to their classrooms. As an added bonus, an appendix lists how an individual or a class can help the shorebirds.

This nonfiction story keeps readers on the edge of their seats. There is the mystery of why rufas fly nine thousand miles to breed? Why don’t they just stay put? “For nearly 20 years now, B95 has followed a ripple of food and a beam of light across the globe just as his ancestors did long before.”

 

Patricia Hruby Powell is a nationally touring speaker, dancer, storyteller, occasional librarian, and children’s book author. Find out more at www.talesforallages.com/

In and around the town of Placid, Wisconsin, 1871, wild pigeons are nesting by the millions. Pigeons were so plentiful they blacken the sky and “a kind of sleed (the birds’ dung) fell from the winged ceiling.” Money can be made trapping and selling the birds as food, so “pigeoners” arrive in droves. The pigeoners need guns, barrels, nets, and camping equipment—which is supplied by the well-stocked store owned by Georgie’s family.

“One Came Home” (Knopf 2013) by Amy Timberlake opens, amidst this historic setting, with the burial of an auburn-haired teenaged girl. Agatha had been missing for weeks, but at least the family could now bury her mangled body. But Georgie doesn’t think the unrecognizable body belongs to her older sister Agatha. Yes, she was wearing Agatha’s green dress, meant for her wedding, but Georgie isn’t convinced.

Besides overseeing customer accounts and working the store counter, Georgie is a sharp-shooter—the best around. A few months prior, not wanting her sister to leave town, Georgie says the wrong thing—a rather mean thing about Agatha—to Agatha’s suitor Mr. Ormstead. At that point, Agatha flees town—with a group of rough pigeoners.

While her family mourns Agatha’s death, Georgie procures a mule and provisions with the help of Billy, Agatha’s ex-boyfriend. She sets off north in search of her sister. Teenaged Billy follows. The independent Georgie reluctantly allows him to accompany her.

Billy is handsome and likeable. Georgie is thirteen. But Georgie feels betrayed by his following her. Their adventure is swathed in dark mystery and the presence of thousands of nesting carrier pigeons, and the filth they leave behind. The two encounter some unsavory backwoods folk. Always present in the midst of the perilous action, are Georgie’s feelings for Billie, which are complex and honestly written.

Georgie unravels the mystery of Agatha’s hurried departure and resultant adventure through the course of her own high adventures, all the while coming to terms with her future. Spunky Georgie reflects on the use of guns and taking animal lives. The twists and turns are surprising and keep you turning pages.

The beautifully written story hovers between middle grade and young adult and will be enjoyed by adults. Bear in mind that there is a degree of gore, death, and guns. However, the resultant violence, rather than being gratuitous is essential to the development of the story.

About those pigeons—the story’s historic nesting is the largest ever recorded—850 square miles of nesting passenger pigeons, 6-10 miles wide, 125 miles long—in 1871. By 1914, the carrier pigeon (wild or passenger pigeon) was extinct. Pigeoners cleaned them out. Historical fiction is one great way to learn about odd or even bewildering events. And this story of European American pioneers, set in an adjoining state, might feel pretty close to home for many of us in Illinois.

 

Patricia Hruby Powell is a nationally touring speaker, dancer, storyteller, occasional librarian, and children’s book author. Her Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker (Chronicle) (illustrated by Christian Robinson) comes out in January 2014