Book Reviews

Xiomara’s strict and ultra Catholic mother fears for her daughter’s virtue. Sexy curvaceous Xiomara seems to be doing pretty well taking care of herself. Males of all ages have been muttering, whispering, grabbing at her for a few years now. Of course she’s angry. Anger serves her well.

Fifteen year old Xiomara lives in Harlem with her problematic Dominican-American parents in “Poet X” (Harper Teen 2018) by slam poet champion Elizabeth Acevedo. Acevedo’s poems tell the story with explosive energy and powerful insights.

Xiomara protects her smaller weaker brother, Xavier, who she calls Twin. Xiomara says, “My brother was birthed a soft whistle:/quiet, barely stirring the air, a gentle sound. But I was born all the hurricane he needed . . .” Twin goes to a “fancy genius school” while Xiomara makes her way in public school that’s fed by students of five boroughs. “I walk through metal detectors, and turn my pockets out,/and greet security guards by name,/ and am one of hundreds who every day are sifted like flour through the doors.”

Xiomara’s father once had a reputation as a womanizer, but ever since the birth of his twin children, he’s been on the straight and narrow, if emotionally distant. “Just because your father’s present/ doesn’t mean he isn’t absent.”

Mamí will allow no dating. Xiomara, who objects, says to her best friend, the more conservative Caridad, “I’m just saying. I’m ready to stop being a nun. Kiss a boy, shoot. I’m ready to creep with him behind a stairwell and let him feel me up.” Caridad responds, “Learn yourself some virtue.” Acevedo packs a lot into Xiomara’s insight, without preaching: “I’m afraid of my mother so I listen to what she says. Caridad genuinely respects her parents.”

The twins and Caridad attend Catholic Confirmation classes, but Xiomara is not sure she believes. She asks, “ . . . what’s the point of God giving me life/ if I can’t live it as my own?/ Why does listening to his commandments/ mean I need to shut down my own voice?” Why have faith “in the father/ the son/ in men/ and men are the first ones/ to make me feel so small.”

And then a boy, Aman, is assigned to be her lab partner in biology. And her English teacher urges her to attend Poetry Club. But Poetry Club meets during Confirmation class. First she begins skipping Confirmation class to meet up with Aman who loves rap music and loves Xiomara’s verse. And respects her. Mamí finds out and that’s a very bad scene.

Now Xiomara skips Confirmation class to attend Poetry Club and her life changes. She’s found what she needs. And the reader is delighted that this bright talented insightful woman has found her way. The story is inspiring. The writing is insightful. It’s no wonder this is the 2018 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature winner as well as the Boston Globe Horn Book Fiction winner. It’s bound to win more major accolades.

 

Patricia Hruby Powell is author of Struttin’ With Some Barbecue: Lil Hardin Armstrong Becomes the First Lady of Jazz; Loving vs. Virginia; and Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker talesforallages.com

Charlie Bobo is an oversized twelve-year-old boy, the son of sharecroppers living in 1858 South Carolina in “The Journey of Little Charlie” (Scholastic 2018) by three-time Newbery Medalist Christopher Paul Curtis. Because Curtis is African American and has always written black characters, I was taken aback when Little Charlie bartered with the sheriff.

Eventually, you catch on. Charlie is white. Curtis has him speaking in dialect, which is slightly challenging for the reader. Fortunately, he lightens his touch once the boy’s voice has been established. And we get Curtis’s overall humor throughout.

Charlie describes his huge strong father, Pap, laying ax to tree when the ax head flies off and gashes Pap’s head. “Pap’s backbone went ramrod stiff, standing him straight as a soldier . . . then keeled o’er backward. . . Didn’t nothing bend on him; he jus’ falled straight back like his foots was hinged to the ground.” And the sheriff tells Little Charlie: “[you] look like a man and a half. It’s easy to forget you ain’t nothing but a boy.”

Charlie’s Pap is dead, his sharecropping mother can’t get out of bed, and the overseer, Cap’n Buck, arrives to say they owe him $50. Buck insists Charlie come with him—as pay back—to round up some “darkies” who he says stole $4000 from the Tanner plantation. Poor Charlie says, “I ain’t never been more’n ten mile from Possum Moan.” In South “Caroliney.”

But off Buck and Charlie ride on horseback up to Michigan. Not only is Buck just about the cruelest human you can imagine, he hasn’t bathed in what seems like years. He stinks bad.

Charlie might seem a trifle dim, but he’s learning fast out in the wild. He remembers Pap saying, “Even dimwits can teach you if you listen careful and pick out the kernels of corn from the horse cr*p they’s dishing out.”

Some pretty horrific things happen, but it’s tempered with humor. Buck finds the two “offending” escape slaves in Michigan, has them jailed, and discovers that they have a grown son in Canada who they could take back to the plantation. Buck and Charlie are advised to clean themselves up because Canada protects its black citizens. Buck has to go through repeated barber latherings before “the cap’n’s skin which went from being brown as any slave you’d see to all the sudden being so white you was tempted to shield your eyes. The whole top of his head looked like a huge chicken had laid a egg there and flewed off.”

You wait for Charlie to see the light of what he’s doing. But when? Canada is a challenge for the slave catchers, but they manage to capture their prey. Now they have three slaves to drive back south. The reader knows, and finally Charlie catches on—the $4000 the slaves were purported to have stolen is the price of their working bodies, their enslaved selves. Simple, impoverished, uneducated, white Charlie gets it: this is very unfair.

And Charlie acts heroically. It’s a simple and devastating story sprinkled liberally with great humor and told so well that it’s a National Award Finalist for 2018.

 

 

Patricia Hruby Powell is author of Struttin’ With Some Barbecue: Lil Hardin Armstrong Becomes the First Lady of Jazz; Loving vs. Virginia; and Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker talesforallages.com

Sy Montgomery, author of “How To Be a Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2018) shows that humans who love other species learn love, forgiveness, and grief, among other necessary human traits. The award-winning author writes for both children and adults and is a naturalist and adventurer. This is an adult book that young adults will love.

Starting with Molly, her childhood best friend, a Scottish terrier, Montgomery says, “I—standing there helplessly in the frilly dress and lacy socks in which my mother had dressed me—wanted to be just like [Molly]: Fierce. Feral. Unstoppable.” Molly inspired the author’s destiny.

Next Montgomery takes us to Australia where she studies three emus and is “caught by their grace and power and strangeness.” She says, “To begin to understand the life of any animal demands not only curiosity, not only skill, and not only intellect . . . but also my heart.”

Christopher Hogwood (like Wilbur in “Charlotte’s Web”) starts as a runt pig and grows into a 750 pound hog over the dozen years he lives with Montgomery and her husband in New Hampshire. “He taught us how to love . . . what life gives you. Even when life gives you slops.”

In the jungles of French Guiana in South America, on a National Geographic expedition, she learns to love a quarter pound spider, Clarabelle. “The huge spider thundered out of the hole . . . her head was the size of a small kiwi and her abdomen was as big as a clementine.” The reader learns: “If a leg was injured, she could pull it off, eat it, and grow a new one.” (She’s as loveable as Charlotte). And “The world . . . [is] rich with the souls of tiny creatures who may love their lives as much as we love ours.”

There’s a pure white ermine, who steals one of their Ladies—that is—a hen. But it is “ablaze with life,” and instead of anger, Sy feels awe.

Then there’s the first of three border collies, Tess, who ages until: “Never before had anyone relied on me so completely . . . loved me more deeply. And never before had I experienced grace so profound.” The love of a mother. And her grief at the loss of Tess and Chris the pig nearly brought her down.

But off she goes to the cloud forest of Papua New Guinea to study the elusive tree kangaroos, where she finds “the wildness that keeps us sane and whole.”

Sally is so different than Tess, the next border collie, but one accommodates the inevitable difference in personalities. “This is the gift great souls leave us when they die. They encourage our hearts. They leave us a greater capacity for love.”

Then there’s Octavia, a short-lived octopus at the Aquarium who endures a false pregnancy, loving and protecting her unfertilized eggs. The author says “love never dies, and love always matters.” “Love is the highest and best use of a life.”

Her present border collie, Thurber, teaches us, “You never know, even when life looks hopeless, what might happen next. It could be that something wonderful is right around the corner.”

You’re going to love this book.

 

Patricia Hruby Powell is author of Struttin’ With Some Barbecue; Loving vs. Virginia; and Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker talesforallages.com

Felix and Lee Vickery, 13-year-old twin boys, live in “The House in Poplar Wood” (Chronicle Books 2018) by K. E. Ormsbee. The book opens with, “The last day of October was creeping into Poplar House. It came through fissures in the gables and mite-sized holes in the floorboards, bringing with it the scent of burnt oak branches.” If you guess that you’re entering an alternate universe—a spooky one, you’d be correct.

The boys live in the same house—but not together. On one side, Felix lives with his father, the town doctor. Father and son serve Death. Felix’s job as apprentice-in-training is to brew herb broths such as rose petals and nightshade as an antidote to flu. On his sixteenth birthday Felix will sign the contract to be Death’s apprentice. Felix may not go to school. In fact no one in town knows he exists.

On the other side of the house Lee lives with his mother, the town psychologist, and they serve Memory. As apprentice-in-training, Lee bottles memories of the townspeople. The bad memories are labeled Forget and the good ones Remember. Lee does go to school and whereas the boys’ mother and father cannot see each other, the boys are close and hang out daily.

Felix is blind in one eye—but this eye sees Death, tall and elegant in a black suit and top hat. Lee is deaf in one ear—the ear that hears Memory. Overall, Lee has a much gentler life than Felix who confronts Death frequently, whenever Death takes the soul of a patient—or when he punishes Felix for some wrongdoing. Both boys want a united family. But the “Agreement” denies them that.

A teenage girl, Essie Hastings, has just died in an accident by falling off Boone Ridge and into the gully. Gretchen Whipple, the second child of the town’s mayor, overhears her father discussing the matter and realizes this was no accident. Gretchen is a go-getter kind of gal and she’s going to get to the bottom of this. Gretchen’s father, the mayor is the town’s Summoner, and his job is to take care of the townspeople. But is he doing his job?

Gretchen isn’t even in line to be the next Summoner. Her rough-edged brother, Asa, as firstborn, gets the job. This irks Gretchen. She knows she can cast a spell, if they’d only teach her. The determined girl goes to Poplar House to see her classmate Lee and discovers the little-known Felix. After some ups and downs the three become allies, if not friends. Gretchen wants to know what happened to Essie Hastings and the twins want to break the Agreement, if possible.

Oh yeah, Death and Memory are Shades and so is Passion. It was Passion who got the boys’ parents together in the first place—and is probably responsible for the divided house.

I’m not normally drawn to fantastical stories, but this is so wonderfully spooky and so well written. Highly recommended.

 

 

Patricia Hruby Powell’s Struttin’ With Some Barbecue: Lil Hardin Armstrong Becomes the First Lady of Jazz (Charlesbridge) releases December 11, 2018 just in time for Christmas.     talesforallages.com

Ronney, fifteen years old, takes care of his little sister Mina. He repairs the damaged wall, reseals the driveway, and has the carpet changed because it’s soaked in blood. Why? His depressed father rarely gets out of his bedroom or even his pajamas, since he lost his job, and attempted suicide. And Ronney’s mother is busy supporting the family and popping pills to calm herself in “All That I Can Fix” (Simon Pulse 2018) by Crystal Chan. “We’re the mixed-race family with two helpless parents, the genius kid sister, and the fix-it son.”

Ronney’s world is falling apart in Makersville, Indiana. What’s more, a keeper of exotic animals has released them all—lion, cheetah, tiger, python, wolf, and others—then shot himself. Not only are the animals loose in town, but so are gun rights activists who say they need guns to protect themselves and gun control activists who are horrified by the pro-gun people shooting the animals. Adults clearly cannot be trusted here.

Ronney’s best friend Jello suggests a suburban safari to make his name as a wildlife photographer. Ronney, thinking this is childish, muses, “Maybe having normal parents means you get the privilege of being a kid.” Ronney’s mother “deemed [Jello] ‘a good influence on me,’ which illustrates her total lack of judgment.”

Ronney yearns for George, a girl on the valedictorian track. Ronney notes her problems: “It has to be pretty precarious, to have only perfection or the abyss as your two real options in life.” George allows Ronney to comfort her, but he’s not her boyfriend. That’s painful.

Then a mysterious little kid Mina’s age—about nine—starts following Ronney. The annoying little kid, Sam, wants Ronney to “fix” his broken family. Sam’s big brother Nick disappeared months ago. Sam sobs, “Like . . . the end of the world is upon us sob. And what could I do?” Ronney sees that “the love that [Sam] had for Nick was big enough to hold up the sky.”

Ronney used to feel that way about his dad, but after a year of disappointment, that big love for his father seems to have snapped off. When his father says, “My life had gotten too heavy.” Ronny calls him pathetic, a hypocrite, and “you’ll like the new carpet I just installed. . . don’t mess it up again.” Ronney’s cruel and honest, after all he’s been through.

The animals have killed area livestock and family pets and now they’re going after people. Gun-toting residents are going after the animals. Everything is a mess and it’s pretty dark. Yes, that shooter might have saved a woman’s live, but “forty-four bullets for one cheetah was a bit much.”

The boy repartee of sarcastic profane Ronney with Jello is a riot. Take my word for it and read the book. It’s wickedly funny. But loyalty and love prevail. Complicated issues invite discussion. This is a winner.

 

Patricia Hruby Powell is author of Loving vs. Virginia; Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker and the forthcoming Struttin’ With Some Barbecue   talesforallages.com