Book Reviews

Everything is going wrong for David Greenberg. Entering Harman Middle School is hideous. His best friend Elliott befriends the guy who has always bullied them both. His mother left the family two years ago. But David finds comfort in his own talk show, “TalkTime” modeled after his idol Jon Stewart and “The Daily Show.” Thus begins “How to Survive Middle School” by Donna Gephart (Delacorte 2010).

David has much in common with Jon Stewart. They’re both Jewish and both vertically challenged, not to mention, they both have talk shows. David films in his bedroom, sharing camera time with his hamster, Hammy. Because his former best friend, Elliott, doesn’t show up, David must be writer, cameraman, editor, interviewer, and interviewee of his film production.

David interviews Magazine Cover Jon (Stewart). David reports, “This is tough because though I’m a guy, my voice hasn’t quite caught on yet.” His voice could crack at any moment. Still David asks Jon, did you really play French horn in school? Magazine Cover Jon responds, “That’s right, David. For viewers who don’t know what the French horn is, it’s a large shiny girl repellent.” Alas, David’s voice squeaks mid-joke.

Camera rolling, David barges into big sister Lindsey’s room to find her face covered in zit-cream. Lindsey rants in a fury. David retaliates by using the footage in “TalkTime,” saying “Today’s acne forecast is cloudy with a chance of blackheads.” Okay, cruel, but funny.

David and Lindsey, united in grief over their absent mother, eventually work things out between themselves.

Thank heavens for classmate Sophie, who was formerly home-schooled. When she and David are paired to do a science project together, she discovers David’s “TalkTime” posted on YouTube. She gets the word out to her home-school network, and overnight David becomes a YouTube sensation. This brings more perks to David’s life.

However, his classmates haven’t quite caught on yet, how cool this kid is, but the reader surely will. I wish I’d gone to school with him.

David Greenberg is  funny. That is to say the author Donna Gephart is a riot. Her previous book, “As If Being 12 ¾ Isn’t Bad Enough, My Mother is Running for President” (Delacorte 2008) won the Sid Fleischman Humor Award in 2009. She has another book forthcoming from Delacorte, so keep your eyes peeled for that one, too.

“All the World’s a Stage: A Novel in Five Acts” by Gretchen Woelfle (Holiday House 2011) centers around twelve year old Kit, a street urchin in 1590 London.

Kit’s first apprenticeship to a gang of thieves involves stealing purses from audience members at the Theater playhouse. That “career” ends with shouts of “cutpurse” and clever Molly tackling and pinning him the ground. The theater managers offer Kit the opportunity to work off his debt cleaning the grounds and eventually running errands. The resident playwright, one William Shakespeare, takes great interest in every detail he sees, including the capture of a young and spirited orphan thief–Kit.

It’s a little hard for me to believe that Kit is so reluctant to be fed in exchange for working for the Chamberlain’s Players, considering how hard life was on the street, but okay, he is. Eventually he’s bitten by the theatre bug, but what will he do? Work to become an actor? Women’s roles in Elizabethan theater are played by young men before their voices mature and deepen. Kit is still young enough that he’s eligible and he’s fascinated by acting, but there is the issue of his stage fright.

Kip, a fictional character, lives through a historic episode, when Shakespeare’s players had to dismantle their theatre, beam by beam, in secret and rebuild it across the river to escape its being demolished by the landlord. It’s a grand adventure and a perfect opportunity to learn stagecraft or woodworking. There are opportunities for a young man and Kit needs an opportunity. This device shows much about filthy stinking exciting Elizabethan London in the more specific setting of the rowdy and ribald Shakespearean theater.

Instead of chapters, the story is built in five acts, which are broken into scenes, like a Shakespearean play. In Kit’s eyes, the people behave like characters in a play, all of which furthers the meaning of the book’s title.

Way-too-fun vocabulary includes: bung – a little purse; cutpurse – the person who steals the bung; thribble – the actors’ comeback to hecklers in the audience. I invite you to throw those gems into conversation. And there are others to be found by anyone who reads the book.

What a fine book to introduce Shakespeare’s life and times.

 

 

Most Newbery winners and honor books are fiction. Sometimes they’re non-fiction. On occasion books of poetry are awarded, such as “Dark Emperor & Other Poems of the Night” by Joyce Sidman and illustrated by Rick Allen (Newbery Honor 2011).

Each of twelve lyrical poems is presented as a double spread. Each explores the mystery of an animal in the night forest and is further explained in a sidebar. In the poem, “Night-Spider’s Advice”, she says “eat your triumphs/ eat your mistakes” referring primarily to those unfortunate insects caught in her web. In the succinct sidebar we learn that most orb spiders, at dawn, eat their damaged webs for the nutrients needed for the next night of silk spinning.

“Dark Emperor”, the title poem, is a dramatic concrete poem written in the shape of the great horned howl. The poem speaks of owl’s “hooked face and/hungry eye” as he hunts a mouse. The sidebar tells us that owl flies silently due to his soft-edged feathers, so that its prey never hears his approach.

In “Cricket Speaks”, cricket tells us all day he is “napping and gnawing.” By “midnight/the trilling hour” he sings a “single/ searing/ unstoppable/ sound.” The sidebar explains how noisy the woods is at night, due to chirping frogs and hooting owls. But the loudest sound is made by the stridulating of the male cricket. One wing scrapes against the other, which has a serrated edge, and this can make a deafening sound. Stridulate. I love this word, which is included in the glossary. I’m looking for as many ways as I can to use it.

The illustrations are ink prints made from linoleum cuts then painted with gouache. The process is more fully described in the book. The resulting artwork is beautifully detailed and invites the eye to scan and discover. You might want to try the art form for yourself.

This book can be used in the classroom to study various forms of poetry, for natural science, for vocabulary, for artwork, but mostly it’s a great read.

I now plan to stridulate. I’m clapping, rubbing, brushing, slapping. No wonder Aesop’s grasshopper plays a violin—or maybe that’s just the Disney version of the “Ant and the Grasshopper”. I’ll supply links on my blog.

1934 The Grasshopper and the Ants – Walt Disney http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM1DgihKHVI

So…the last four reviews I’ve written have been books that have are all the Newbery Winners of 2011, all books published last year. If you’ve read some of them, you might want to leave a comment telling whether you’ve liked them. In fact, you might want to vote for your favorite. It’s always interesting to discuss books you’ve read. So please let me know. For review those books are

Moon Over Manifest

Turtle in Paradise

Heart of the Samurai

One Crazy Summer

Dark Emperors and Other Poems of the Night

My choice for the Newbery Award for 2011 would have gone to “One Crazy Summer” (Amistad – HarperCollins 2010) by Rita Williams-Garcia. It is one of the group of five winners. That is, a Newbery Honor.

In 1968 at the height of the civil rights movement, three black sisters, Delphine, (eleven years old), Vonetta (nine), and Fern (seven) travel from Brooklyn to Oakland, California to visit their mother, Cecile.

Delphine only has fleeting memories of her mother who abandoned them and Papa days after Fern was born. Now Cecile, who calls herself Nzila, writes poems and prints them on a press in her kitchen. She has neither time nor warmth for her children and so sends them to the People’s Center summer camp each day. The Black Panthers run the camp, feed the poor, and educate the children of poor black Oakland to what they called revolution, but we today see as “black pride.”

Through Delphine’s practical eyes we begin to understand a changing world where she, in charge of her sisters, does not want them to make a “grand Negro spectacle” of themselves on the airplane and where the summer camp teachers insist they are “black” when she and her sisters insists they are “colored”.

Through the responsible and straight-forward Delphine, we experience the rifts that occur between “showy crowy” Vonetta, sweet baby Fern, and herself. Each character is distinct and well-developed, and we feel we know and love this family. In fact, we’ll never forget them.

As the story unfolds, and as the girls develop black pride, we begin to discover, through Delphine’s eyes, why their mother left them. We see the fragile connection between mother and daughters build to an honest, aching climax. We see how a political movement affects personal life in the example of one family. This is an emotionally charged and honest—oh so honest—novel. A jewel.

My second “reading” of this book was listening to the Recorded Books production of “One Crazy Summer,” read by Sisi Aisha Johnson. Ms. Johnson’s inflection is a perfect portrayal and support of the author’s voice, giving just enough softness to Delphine’s voice and Fern’s gentle little girl-ness with one half ounce of sass added in. Her adult voices and men’s voices are all spot on. What a fine collaboration between reader and author.

—

“One Crazy Summer” also won the Coretta Scott King Award, I’m happy to report.

“Heart of a Samurai: Based on the True Story of Manjiro Nakahama” (Amulet 2010) by Margi Preus won a Newbery Honor in 2011.

In a freak storm at sea, Manjiro, a teenaged Japanese fisherman, is shipwrecked on a barren Pacific island with three companions in 1841. Just short of starving, they’re rescued by an American whaling boat. Amidst the brutal but fascinating whale hunting adventures, we experience the cultural distrust between the Japanese, who had isolated themselves for centuries and see the Americans as stinking barbarians, and the Americans who see the Japanese as godless cannibals.

Fortunately, the ship’s Captain Whitfield befriends the open-minded and curious Manjiro. When he drops Manjiro’s compatriots in Hawaii, he offers Manjiro the opportunity to continue the adventure—whaling–and sail to Massachusetts to be his son.

Manjiro attends school in New Bedford where he works to bridge the mistrust and misunderstanding of his country. When he finally returns to his homeland, the Japanese imprison him, until he’s able to explain to his countrymen the marvels and industry of Americans.

Had Manjiro’s life not been set askew, he would have remained a fisherman in Japan. His adventures led him to become a high-ranking Samurai who helped bridge the differences of two great cultures. The drawings of the actual person, Manjiro, are sprinkled throughout this beautiful page-turning cultural and sea-faring adventure.

“The Secret World of Whales” (NRDC/Chronicle 2011) by Charles Siebert is the perfect companion piece, offering the history and early technology of the brutal business of whaling. Eight thousand years ago, people world-wide risked their lives in small boats to hunt a whale which would feed their village for a winter.

The invention of the harpoon with trailing rope was bad news for the whale. By the thirteenth century, the Basque who live between Spain and France, supplied all Europe with whale meat, blubber boiled down for lamp oil and machine lubricants. Bones, skin, and baleen were used for shoes, fence posts, and whips.

By the nineteenth century, world economy was built on whale products and these stately beings were hunted nearly to extinction. Scientists began researching and discovered that whales’ brains are much like humans. They sing. They’re compassionate. They dream. Work began to save the remaining whales and continues today. The final chapter relates interactions between humans and whales that moved this reader to tears.

I recommend you read both these books.

(end of review, but there’s more)

I hope you’re reading these books and perhaps ranking the 5 Newbery Winner/Honors. Next up are: “One Crazy Summer” and “Dark Emperor”.

“Moon Over Manifest” (Delacorte 2010) by Clare Vanderpool won the middle-grade literature jackpot, the Newbery Award, for 2011.

In 1936 Kansas, 12 year-old Abilene drops into the town of Manifest. That is, she literally drops off a freight train after years of riding the rails with her daddy Gideon. The Great Depression and the dry scorching dust bowl are both in full swing.

There are two stories here. The second is set in the same town, but 1917 through 1918 when Abilene’s daddy grew up–the time of World War I and the years that the Spanish influenza killed more thousands of people than did the war itself.

Rough and tumble Abilene aims to find out about her daddy’s earlier life, but it’s not easy, in spite of consulting Miss Sadie, the Hungarian “diviner”, who tells stories about and sheds insights into a huge cast of townspeople from 1917. They’re immigrants from all over Europe who worked in the coal mine and whereas it was a hard life it was a happier time for the people of Manifest. Twists and turns in this densely plotted book will surely surprise you.

“Turtle in Paradise” (Random House 2010) by Jennifer L. Holm is the first of four Newbery Honor books and is also set during the Great Depression, but in colorful tropical Key West, Florida.

The 11-year-old protagonist, similar to Abilene, is likeable, smart and hard-shelled, which is why she’s called Turtle. Similarly, she has only one parent who has sent her away, but in this case, a mother who remains in New Jersey where she earns a living as a housekeeper.

Turtle is sent to her aunt’s house and must endure four pesky but industrious boy cousins who run a mobile baby-care operation called the Diaper Gang. When Turtle finds a treasure map it looks like she might end up on Easy Street. I appreciated the stream-lined plot.

The Newbery Award is decided each year by a committee of fifteen hand-picked librarians. Interestingly, they must all agree on the winner, so certainly some negotiations and deal-making must ensue, but I can only guess because it is a secret process. You can bet that the pool of winners and honors will be fine books, but I would have ranked these five books differently. You’ll find out more on my blog.

And here’s the blog part that goes beyond the review…

Both these authors used family stories–their grandparents’ stories–as the basis for their books. And each book explores the value of family.

Jennifer Holm is the author of two other Newbery Honor books–“Our Only May Amelia” (Harper Collins 1999) and “Penny from Heaven” (Random House 2006). But she hasn’t won the jackpot (the Newbery Award) which would pretty much ensure that her book would remain in print forever and be in every children’s library collection, probably for the duration of book publishing and/or  the existence of libraries.

The jackpot winner is Clare Vanderpool debut novel, so you can hope and expect more good books to come from this author.

The other three books that I’ll be reviewing in my next posts are “Heart of a Samurai” (Amulet 2010) by Margi Preus; “Dark Emperor and Other Poems of the Night” (Houghton Mifflin 2010) by Joyce Sidman; and “One Crazy Summer” (Amistad/Harper Collins 2010) by Rita Williams-Garcia. All four novels, from the group of five books are historic fiction. And the two yet to be reviewed are FABULOUS. I think you all should read them or the ones that sound interesting and then we’ll rank them the way we see fit. Deal?

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