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“Mexikid: A Graphic Memoir” by Pedro Martín

August 18, 2024 By Patricia Hruby Powell Leave a Comment

Author Pedro Martín tells us in his remarkable “Mexikid: A Graphic Memoir” (Dial 2023), that he is the seventh of nine kids in his Mexican-American family and their apá decides to drive them all from California down to Pagueros, Mexico in a Winnebego and a truck, to pick up their abuelo which will make their already large family crowd into a house as an even dozen. Pedro is not happy about this.

The first five kids were born in Mexico, but Pedro and three others were born in the U.S. Pedro/Peter shows us his large family at dinnertime in 1977. Amá is cooking, Apá is reading the paper, two siblings sit at the table. The rest are on the floor or in overstuffed furniture, reading, drawing, watching TV, or punching each other. On the next spread they’re arguing. Sometimes they speak Spanish and sometimes English. It’s chaos.

Their grandfather is a legend, having lived through the Mexican Revolution which lasted from 1910 – 1920. He ran a mule train to deliver food between the two warring sides, who would each call a cease fire when Abuelo arrived. He’d get robbed on occasion and he always whupped the thieves. He was a super-hero. And this is attractive to Pedro.

Martín says his apá has Mariachi music (which he says sounds like “chun-ta-ta” to American ears) running through his blood. His big brother Leon’s blood is full of “Today’s Top 40 hits and R&B favorites.” Not only does he offer us a cultural comparison, but he gives a music lesson. There’s so much here. This is not your simple graphic novel. This is Newbery quality and in fact it won a Newbery Honor.

On the day they set out on their journey, you see the line up of the five big kids and the four little kids against a map of their route. We see the whole family sleeping amidst their luggage in the Winnebago. Each sibling has a distinct personality and really get to know them all. We get a transection of the vehicle and their supplies. The detail is remarkable. We see the chilaquiles they eat, the customs officers searching the Winnebago, the toys they play with, Apá’s emotions as he drives, the sides of the Mexican roads, the topography, the little flags waving across streets, the markets, and so much more.

And Pedro does such a good job with gross: slurping, flies, the diarrhea, poots, and more. One big sister delivers history and in this context we want to hear every word of it.

In Pagueros, they find their legendary grandfather and kiss his hand, “it’s what we do.” The whole family helps load a truck with bales of hay. The old man is stronger than any of them, throwing his bale up onto the top of the load while the others struggle to varying degrees.

Abuelo won’t leave long-dead Abuela behind, so they dig up her bones and take her with them. What a wonderful quest. Of course, Pedro loves his grandfather by the end.

Patricia Hruby Powell is the author of the award-winning books: Lift As You Climb; Josephine; Loving vs Virginia; and Struttin’ With Some Barbecue all signed and for sale at Jane Addams bookstore. Her forthcoming books are about women’s suffrage, Martha Graham, and Ella Fitzgerald. talesforallages.com

“Keeping Pace” by Laurie Morrison

July 7, 2024 By Patricia Hruby Powell Leave a Comment

Grace has been working her entire middle grade career to win top scholar at her school. She knows it will impress her writer father who has divorced her mother. But her arch enemy, rival, and former friend, Jonah Perkins, gets the accolade and his name will go on the plaque at school in “Keeping Pace” (Amulet 2024) by Laurie Morrison. At the graduation ceremony, Grace begrudgingly accepts second best, wearing her sister’s three-year-old hand-me-down home-made dress.

Now that it’s summer and she wasn’t accepted into the intensive writing camp she’d applied for, she doesn’t know how she’ll fill the hours. She starts running with her older sister, Celia. She says about the hill, “It doesn’t seem like much of an incline, but slopes feel a lot steeper to your legs and your lungs than they look to your eyes.” In a way, this sums up what Grace will be learning this summer. Life isn’t always as it looks. But the endorphins from the workout are making her feel wonderful.

She decides she’ll run the marathon at the end of summer—something that Jonah and she, years ago, had said they’d one day do. Their friendship grew strained a couple years prior to eighth grade when Jonah’s father died unexpectedly. Jonah started saying mean things about Grace, to his friends. Grace didn’t know what she’d done to deserve this.

Grace’s best friend and cousin, Avery, is hanging out with other girls. It turns out Grace spaced out and missed hearing or caring about a friend’s summer plans. Jade says, “‘I think you’ve missed everything that doesn’t have to do with exams or Jonah Perkins lately,’” Grace has been sparring academically with Jonah, for sure. But next year he’s going to a private school and Grace will sort of miss competing with him. But she can’t stand him!

Grace finds a training program for marathon running on-line and starts a rigorous daily workout which she outlines at the beginning of each chapter. Jonah tags along one day and wants to join her daily run. Grace thinks, Great, then he can win the marathon as well. No way. But over time they run into each other on the trails. We know what is going to happen, but it’s the way it happens gradually, with authenticity, subtlety with sly humor, that grabs us.

Grace is also in touch with her clueless father who is too busy writing to truly care about her, but he thinks she might want to babysit his girlfriend’s three-year-old. “Brie—that’s his girlfriend’s name. Like the cheese. Ironic since Dad is lactose intolerant.” The babysitting job works well, but Dad even botches that.

Along the way, Grace learns that there are more important goals in life than achieving good grades.

“The Enigma Girls: How Ten Teenagers Broke Ciphers, Kept Secrets, and Helped Win World War II” by Candace Fleming.

June 18, 2024 By Patricia Hruby Powell Leave a Comment

In 1940 England, teenaged girls were called, individually, to mysterious personal interviews with high-ranking British military men. Each girl was good at math or languages. They were told to report to Bletchley Park, a subway stop south of London, in “The Enigma Girls: How Ten Teenagers Broke Ciphers, Kept Secrets, and Helped Win World War II” (2024 Scholastic) by Candace Fleming.

Nearly every Brit wanted to stop Hitler from taking over Europe, so the girls went unquestioning to their interviews. Fleming follows each of ten interviewed girls who is advised that “you will be told only what is necessary for you to know, and you will never, never seek to find out more.” They signed oaths to keep their work secret—to not tell their parents or their fellow workers.

The girls arrived at Bletchley, one by one, to find a mansion and many recently constructed out-buildings or “huts.” They would be working alongside the “geniuses,” the men who were working to decipher messages. The girls would feed the geniuses their niche information so that together they could crack the military communication among Hitler and high-ranking Nazis in the field. What were the Germans planning? What did they know about the Allies’ plans?

Germany’s Abwehr, their intelligence-gathering organization, used Enigma machines with four rotors rather than the standard three rotors to encode their communications. Each rotor turned over a new code, frequently, making the ciphers impossible to crack, or so the Nazi’s thought.

The various girls worked in the many huts where cryptographers “had unsuccessfully wrestled with [intercepted Nazi communications] for months.” The girls arrived and each worked on small aspects of each cipher, each day. Fleming gives examples of the puzzles the girls might have worked on and shows how they could, bit by bit, assume, guess, try, conquer, and decipher. Note that deciphering is more complicated than decoding which exchanges one word for another. The most common cipher is an alphabet cipher. Morse code, in spite of its name, is a simple cipher—each letter is encoded in dots and dashes.

Once a cipher is broken, all the messages of that day could be read. But only the highest-ranking British officials could read the complete message. The Nazis clearly did not know that their messages were being deciphered. That was important. For example, Bletchley knew that Germany thought the Americans would land at Calais for the huge invasion. Bletchley officials counted on the Nazi’s ignorance and advised the Allies to land elsewhere. They landed at Omaha Beach, much further south, in June 1944, and took the enemy by surprise.

Whereas the girls didn’t know the details, they felt the excitement in the air and knew they’d helped to make possible the Allies’ ruse.

At the end of the war, the girls, as they had vowed to do, kept their secret. Their friends and families—even their husbands—thought they were just regular people, not the heroes they were. Only recently have they been allowed to tell their stories. Fleming, a great researcher, was able to read the women’s stories and write this suspenseful page-turning true story. This is a book for many ages.

“The Eyes and the Impossible” by Dave Eggers

June 17, 2024 By Patricia Hruby Powell Leave a Comment

“The Eyes and the Impossible” (2023 Knopf) by Dave Eggers won the Newbery this year and what a book! The story is told by Johannes, a dog living a wild and free life on a large island, amongst other animals and some people. Johannes is “the Eyes” of the community and races around letting the others know what is happening on their island domain.

Johannes tells us that he runs faster than sound, faster than light, so fast we can’t see him. He needs to run. And he’s invincible. I have known kids like this, and they are wonderful. So is Johannes.

Johannes is ecstatic as well as lyrical: “I ran until I saw the first lavender light of day, and I greeted the Sun with a happy grin and wild eyes and it was only then that my muscles told me it was time.” Time to sleep. Johannes sleeps in a hollow tree: “…I had turned and turned within and was ready to sleep, the sky was pale and sighing.” You want to join him in his hollow. At least I do.

First Johannes brings news of his sightings to the three bison. Our protagonist has help from various other animals who are assistant Eyes. Most importantly is Bertrand, a seagull who can fly above and notify Johannes of danger. And there is danger.

A small group of ne’er-do-wells, who Johannes calls the Trouble Travelers, traps Johannes with a rope, pull him into their van and drive off. Johannes hates the rope and is worried about being leashed, but not distraught. He feels his friends will help him. We hope he’s right because we’re SO in love with this free and wild dog. However, “My idea of myself had diminished. Until my captivity I thought I was faster, cleverer, closer to invincible.” Such is life.

Freya is thousands of years old, Johannes tells us, and the number one bison. She has a sensible approach to life on the island, saying they have three acres on which to roam, and no one tells them what to do. But Johannes believes they must be freed.

In the meantime, they’ve hung “squares” on the walls of the new park building and Johannes is mesmerized by them. That’s how the three kidnapped him. He was caught off guard while in a trancelike state while looking at the artwork in the frames.

A large flock of goats is brought to the island to graze down the underbrush. Johannes comes up with an outrageous plan, involving a complicated distraction, to free the bison. At dawn on a particular day a boat will come to pick up the goats. It is not until learning from one particular goat, does Johannes realize there’s an immense world beyond his island and this is where he decides the bison must go.

Johannes is given credit for the dozen color illustrations in the book which are all classical 17^th though 19^th century landscapes to which Shawn Harris has added Johannes, the wild dog.

Please get this book and read it to your kids after dinner or before bed, not because they can’t read it themselves, but it’s a great book to read together.

“Skater Boy” by Anthony Nerada

March 10, 2024 By Patricia Hruby Powell Leave a Comment

Stonebridge High School senior, Wes “Big Mac” Mackenzie, is angry, is slacking off, and ditching school in “Skater Boy” (Soho Teen 2024) by debut author Anthony Nerada. Wes is failing senior year, but he sure doesn’t want to stick around town for another year. He and his two skateboarding buddies are known as the Tripod, and even his two friends plan to get out of town after graduation.

Wes’ single mother is dating a nice man whose young daughter wants to see the Nutcracker ballet production at Christmastime. Wes is expected to go with them. What a nightmare—until Wes is mesmerized by the Nutcracker dancer himself. Tristan Monroe has a bio in the program and is openly gay. And beautiful. And Black.

Wes, who is white, is deep in the closet and the Tripod would be freaked if they knew he fancied a man, and of all things, a man as prissy as a ballet dancer. But Wes sees Tristan as the athlete he is. Tristan is also sensitive, smart, and responsible and couldn’t be more different than the punks that Wes and his buddies all are.

Tristan is not immediately drawn to Wes. Instead, he ridicules him with his best friend, a ballerina in the Nutcracker production. But the two young men begin to spend time together and appreciate each other’s sensitivity. Wes has been taking photos secretly and he takes some great ones of Tristan dancing, when they meet up at a deserted nighttime stage.

Influenced by Tristan, Wes finds himself in the uncomfortable position of having to give up old friends, the Tripod, for new ones, specifically the nerdy members of the photo club. This comes with some violence. Nerada uses great physical images, as when he describes Wes’s two old buddies bullying the photographers. “Their brown eyes scan the hall like they’re hunting for their next victim.”

When the fight breaks out, former-bully Wes says, “Any confidence I felt evaporates, leaving my body with the release of my breath. I want to crumble to the ground…” or “I bite back a scream.” He describes Brad, his Tripod opponent, who “huffs through gritted teeth” and “the muscles in his neck convulsing.” The details might not sound spectacular but in the fabric of the story, you feel the anger, the emotion. You’re in the fight with them.

Wes is discovering who he actually is, which is not the person that people expect him to be. He never wanted to be a bad boy, in the first place. He was put in that role by bad luck and following the easiest route. Not only does this story show an authentic evolution of character, a beautiful coming-of-age, but it shows that there are lots of ways to be gay. This is so worth reading.

“The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be: A Speculative Memoir of Transracial Adoption” by Shannon Gibney

February 11, 2024 By Patricia Hruby Powell Leave a Comment

“The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be: A Speculative Memoir of Transracial Adoption” (Dutton 2023) by Shannon Gibney.

That intriguing title holds a lot of information. And yes, it’s genre-bending. Shannon Gibney is a mixed race (white and African American) girl, adopted as an infant into an upper middle class white family in the Detroit area. She has two white brothers, Ben who is younger and Jon who is older. She feels loved by her family, but very much the odd man out.

The timeline bounces around. We hear from ten-year-old, then the nineteen-year-old Shannon Gibney who the author portrays as a difficult bright child. We also hear from the 44-year-old Shannon.

We also hear from Erin Powers, Shannon’s birth name, which is part of the speculative aspect. Erin is born to Patricia Powers, and the author invents the life she might have led, had she been raised by her single mother surrounded by a large loving Irish Catholic family in Utica, New York. Erin has a best friend, Essie who is Hispanic.

The real Patricia writes letters to Shannon’s mother, Sue, mostly warning Shannon of an inheritable, rare breast cancer. Excerpts of these letters are published in the book. Shannon meets Patricia when she is nineteen years old, and they have an on again off again relationship until Patricia dies of breast cancer in her forties.

Patricia has told Shannon that her African American father, Boisey Collins, was brilliant and interested in physics. Shannon eventually finds records of Boisey, specifically that he was killed in a high-speed police chase in California when Shannon was six years old. In the meantime, both Shannon and Erin have “met” their father, briefly, due to the “wormhole” that Boisey created with his collider time machine.

Sometimes the author changes from third person to first person in mid paragraph. This makes the narrative clearer rather than more confusing. Occasionally a long passage is repeated, and this, interestingly, serves to show us the difficulty of being raised outside of and ignorant of your birth culture. Shannon is mixed and light skinned, but there’s that one-drop-rule: if you are Black at all, you are Black. She’s not only an outsider in her family but at her school.

As a young adult, Shannon has an article accepted for publication in an anthology. In the article Shannon points out some racist dialogue within the Powers family. Before publication Shannon thinks that Patricia might be interested in reading it. Patricia is livid and denies that the racist things about Mexicans were ever said. Shannon withdraws her article to honor her mother, although it would have been her first publication in the career she aspires to. Nevertheless, Shannon and Patricia’s relationship never fully recovers.

There’s so much food for thought in this ground-breaking speculative memoir which is, rightly, cataloged as fiction. With its adoption documents, family photographs, and medical records, this book is a fascinating dive into adoption as well as racism. It has the distinction of being granted a 2024 Printz Award Honoree.