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Journey From Peppermint Street by Meindert DeJong

Mr. DeJong has a talent for getting inside the mind of a child and writing about the imaginations and embarrassments and fears and delights and misapprehensions and insights that run through a child’s thoughts. In Journey From Peppermint Street, eight year old Siebren, a little Dutch boy, goes on a journey with his grandfather, and he experiences all of the above, in addition to much adventure, as we readers walk along with him on a trip from Weirom, near the coast of Holland, to his great-aunt’s monastery home near an inland swamp full of frogs and fireflies and giant pike.

At first the story seems rather mundane. Siebren walks along behind Grandfather, and Siebren’s thoughts run hither and thither. Siebren talks a lot, but he also listens carefully, although not with full understanding. When Grandfather calls the miller with whom he has been feuding “handball of Satan”, Siebren latches onto the phrase and wonders whether he himself might be a “handball of Satan” since he sometimes listens to and acts on his fears and temptations rather than his good sense. (I googled the term “handball of Satan”, but nothing came up. It must be an insult peculiar to Grandfather alone.)

The story becomes more and more exciting, however, and filled with both real and imaginary dangers: a giant pike who can eat a whole frog in one gulp, the swamp muck that can suck up and drown the unwary traveller, an attack from a pack of village dogs, a frightened neighbor with a gun, a bottomless cistern that empties out to the river, a night alone in a dark house, and last but not least, a tornado. (I didn’t know that the Netherlands even experienced tornadoes; I halfway thought tornadoes were only a peril in Kansas and the rest of the midwestern United States.) Siebren must sort out his real fears and dangers from the imaginary ones, and he must learn how adults can be trusted and whether he himself is meant to be a handball of Satan or a believer in miracles.

Journey From Peppermint Street was the winner of the National Book Award for Children’s Literature the very first time that award was given in 1969. I’m on a quest to read all of Meindert DeJong’s books for children, and so far this one is one of his best.

Content considerations: Siebren gets a spanking for disobedience from his dad at the beginning of the story. There’s the whole “handball of Satan” question and discussion. And Siebren more than once lets his imagination and curiosity run away with him, stealing cookies, disobeying his grandfather and his great-aunt several times with mixed results. Sometimes his disobedience turn out okay, and other times it gets him into trouble, which is the way it worked for me when I was an imaginative and exploring child like Siebren.

Take Wing by Jean Little

I’ve been talking to several families who are trying to teach their children, mostly girls, about friendship—how to make friends, how to deal with “mean girls”, how to forgive, how to take the initiative to make and heal friendships. It’s hard stuff for adults sometimes, much harder for six to fourteen year olds who are apt to misinterpret nonverbal communication, take offense easily, become shy and inhibited, or on the opposite end, be inconsiderate and even rude to one another.

Take Wing is an older book, published in 1968, for middle grade readers by Canadian author Jean Little. It’s primarily about ten year old Laurel Ross and her eight year old brother James. Laurel realizes, even though no one else in the family agrees, that James is different, slow to learn and immature for his age. Then when Mrs. Ross breaks her hip and has to stay in the hospital for months, everyone in the family, including Aunt Jessica and cousin Elspeth, must come to terms with James’s problems and try to find out what to do to help him. So James and his “mental retardation” (the term used in the book which would need to be discussed and reinterpreted in today’s terminology) are the main issues in the story.

However, the book is also about friendship and how to make friends and how to resolve differences and misunderstandings. Laurel and her cousin Elspeth start to become friends when Aunt Jessica and Elspeth move into the Ross’s house to help out while Mom is in the hospital. But it’s a false start, marred by a series of missteps and crossed wires. Finally, Elspeth and Laurel learn to communicate with one another and restart their friendship. The same kind of misunderstanding and hurt feelings has been holding Laurel back from being friends with the girl down the street. The road to mending this friendship also takes communication and some courage on the part of both girls.

I would really like to hand this book to a couple of eight to twelve year olds I know. It’s a quiet, gentle story, but I think it might be good bibliotherapy for some sensitive, insecure, and easily discouraged young ladies who need an extra push to “take wing.”

This poem by Jean Little, who “has been partially blind since birth as a result of scars on her cornea and is frequently accompanied by a guide dog,” is featured in the book. From the poem and the book and Mrs. Little’s other novels, I would guess that Jean Little knew what it was like to be different and a bit diffident when she was growing up. And perhaps she can teach some of us, adult, teen or chlid, to “endure through the (friendship) journey’s stress.”

A friendship is a fragile thing
Like the dust of the moon on a butterfly’s wing
Presuming on it is like trying
To keep a butterfly from flying
You cup your hands, try not to clutch
But it is crippled by your touch
By all the self-involved demands
Implicit in your closing hands
Yet, deep in love, there also lies,
The bravery of butterflies.
Butterflies go through nights of storm
Migrating to a land that’s warm.
They drift in brilliant frailty,
Testaments to mortality,
And all the while, they own the strength
To mount the wind and come at length
Home again, their loveliness
Enduring through the journey’s stress.
A treasured friendship also can
Survive the blundering of man.
Although it is a fragile thing,
It has the courage to take wing,
Dare to ride the dark, and come
Bravely home.

Yoko Ono, Collector of Skies by Nell Beram and Carolyn Boriss-Krimsky

51zA84zWYPL._SX258_PJlook-inside-v2,TopRight,1,0_SH20_BO1,204,203,200_I wouldn’t say that Yoko Ono would be someone I would be interested in reading about on my own, but since this biography was nominated for the YA Nonfiction Cybils award, I gave it a go. And I learned some interesting things.

First of all, I was confirmed in my preconceived opinions about so-called “rebels” and “nonconformists.” Yoko Ono was “sick and tired of that middle-class scene”—“the value system adopted by her parents.” So she turned to her avant-garde friends in Greenwich Village—composers John Cage and Philip Glass, artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns and art patron Peggy Guggenheim— for validation. The biographers tell us over and over that Yoko struggled all her life to impress and leave a mark on the art world, and later the music world. She was just as conformist as her parents; she just chose a different culture to conform to and inhabit.

Yoko Ono:
“The thought of being able to do something, that thought that I may be able to leave a mark on the world excited me tremendously.”

“Many people thought that I was a very rich girl who was just ‘playing avant-garde.’ . . . I had to say, ‘I know you are a talented artist. All you have to do is reciprocate that and just realize that I am a talented artist.'”

“I was an outcast in avant-garde because the rest of the avant-garde was trying to alienate the audience. . . . I was trying to communicate. I was trying to say ‘love’ and ‘yes’ and ‘peace.'”

Finally, after becoming frustrated with the art world and its critics and their failure to recognize her genius, she found her own worshipper, John Lennon. The biography descends into hagiography as the biographers try to justify and be completely non-judgemental about Lennon’s desertion of his wife and child and Yoko’s abandonment of her (second) husband and child so that the two could be together and revel in their misunderstood genius-ness. When Yoko and John later travel to Majorca to kidnap the daughter that Yoko had abandoned for the previous three years, the authors assure us that “all she (Yoko) wanted was her fair share of time with her daughter.”

They did it all for art’s sake. I did find some of Yoko Ono’s “art instructions” interesting and somewhat thought-provoking. But she was much less profound than she thought she was. “Yoko believed that words, and even ideas themselves, could be art. She wanted viewers to ask: What makes something a painting? What makes something not a painting?”

Well, I would answer those questions rather simply. Words and ideas may be art, but for something to be a painting, it requires paint. An idea in the artist’s head, especially if communicated very imprecisely to the viewer by means of words and/or enshrined objects, is not art, and it is certainly not a painting. I would say that so-called “found objects” are not sculpture either, since sculpture requires an artist who manipulates a medium in some way. “Found poems” are only poetry if a real, live poet puts the words together in a way so as to create meaning.

And primal screams do not make music either. So, Ms. Ono and I are in disagreement about the nature of art, the definition of music, and the art and discipline of making a beautiful and loving life. Still, I found her life story interesting, but rather sad.

The Twelve Little Cakes by Dominika Dery

I have had this memoir on my TBR shelf for a long time, but I finally got the urge to go ahead and read it when Brown Bear Daughter left about a week ago to go back to Slovakia for her third summer mission trip there. Dominika Dery’s memoir of her childhood lived under Communist rule in a village on the outskirts of Prague, Czechoslovakia, obviously doesn’t take place in Slovakia, but rather in the Czech Republic. However, it’s as close as I can get right now. (Does anyone know a really good book, fiction or memoir, set in Slovakia?)

Dominika grew up in a loving home with her mother, a writer of technical reports, and her father, a former economist who is now a taxi-driver, and her much-older sister, who comes across mostly as a spoiled brat and a world-class flirt. Dominika herself seems to be somewhat spoiled, but not a brat. The parents are dissidents associated with the 1968 failed “revolution” called the Prague Spring, which ended when the Russians invaded to stop the reforms of Communism that were being instituted in Czechoslovakia. As a result of their complicity in the Prague Spring reforms, Dominika’s parents are consigned to low level jobs and constantly in danger of being denounced to the political authorities.

Dominika, born in 1975, slowly becomes aware over the course of her childhood of her parents’ political predicament, but she nevertheless remembers a mostly idyllic childhood enlivened by the resilient optimism of her father and the style and panache of her beautiful mother. Even when the family goes on vacation to Poland of all places and the car breaks down because some corrupt mechanic replaced the working engine with a defective one, Dominika and her parents manage to have a good and memorable holiday under ostensibly trying circumstances.

I think I’ll loan this book to Dancer Daughter(23) because of the Czech setting (she’s been to Slovakia a couple of times, too) and also because Dominika spends a lot of her childhood studying to become a dancer. The story of how she gets into a dance school that normally excludes the children of dissidents and only admits children whose parents have Communist Party connections is fascinating, and Dominika’s indomitable spirit is sure to charm the readers of her memoir.

The book ends in 1985 when Dominika was only ten years old. But it seems an appropriate place to stop. Dominika has been accepted to study at the State Conservatory in Prague. Her parents are still stuck in political limbo, but there is some stirring of hope for the future. Things are beginning to change, with the Solidarity movement in Poland and Mikhail Gorbachev‘s rise to power in the Soviet Union. In November-December 1989, The Velvet or Gentle Revolution restored democracy in Czechoslovakia. In 1993, Czechoslovakia became two separate nations, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

From an adult looking back at childhood point of view, Dominika Dery sees things this way:

“This was the country of little cakes and sausages. This is the memory of my childhood. Driving back home in our old, rusty Skoda; my father’s big hands steering us safely through the night; the soft touch of my mother’s hand on my head. This was the happiest time in my life. The time when we had no money, no choice and no chance.

It would take me another eighteen years to realize that what we had back then was as much as anyone on earth would ever need.

We had each other, and plenty of love in our hearts.”

Twelve Little Cakes by Dominika Dery was recommended by Kerry at Shelf Elf.

Creation: God Did it, I Believe It

I have had trouble, in the past, articulating what I believe about God and creation in a way that doesn’t either offend or compromise the gospel. Thanks to R.C. Sproul, one of my favorite Bible teachers, I can give it to you in a nutshell. This excerpt is from an interview Mr. Sproul did with blogger Tim Challies:

Have you ever had second thoughts about the stand that you took in favor of a six-day creation and a young earth, especially in view of all the new material on the subject that has come out since 2006?
Well, that’s kind of a complex question because when I took the stand, I took the stand on a six-day creation. I didn’t take a stand on a young earth. I don’t know how old the earth is. I didn’t know then. I still don’t.

And what do we mean by “young earth”? If you’re thinking six thousand years, I doubt that. If you’re thinking 12 billion years, I doubt that, too. All I was speaking about was the understanding of what the Scriptures teach regarding the six days of creation. And I’m not even sure it’s correct to say that I took a stand. I said that’s what my view was.

When you say you have a view, it’s one thing to say, “I think that this is the way it is.” It’s another thing to take a stand where you say: “Here I stand. I’m going to die on this mountain.” I could be wrong in my understanding of Genesis. It’s very difficult to deal with the literary genre in the opening verses of the beginning chapters of Genesis. I think there has to be some room for some flexibility on it.

I don’t know how old the earth is. I would go even further and say that I don’t know how long a day was when God created the earth in six days and rested on the seventh. I do know that God created it and said that it was good.

We’ve been reading in Genesis in our daily family Bible reading time, and I am reminded of just how poetic and rhythmic and vivid the words of of those first few verses and chapters of the Bible are:

1967-68: Movies

Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood by Mark Harris, reviewed by Lazygal, is a nonfiction history of the five movies that were nominated for Best Picture Oscars in 1968: Dr. Doolittle, The Graduate, Guess Who’s Coming for Dinner, In the Heat of the Night and Bonnie and Clyde. I haven’t read the book, but I have it on hold at the library.

I’ve seen four of the five movies; I may have seen In the Heat of the Night. I did see a few episodes of the TV show that came after the movie. If I did see the movie, I don’t remember much about it. The Academy found it much more memorable: In the Heat of the Night won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1968.

The Graduate was the top-grossing film of 1967, and Bonnie and Clyde was probably the most violent and disturbing film of the year. I didn’t see either of those two when they first came out, since I would have been too young for the content of either. I did see them later on, but by that time The Graduate was already history, somewhat passé. And Bonnie and Clyde was, well, violent and disturbing.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was OK, a Sidney Poitier vehicle about racism and interracial marriage, but Poitier’s better film of the year was To Sir With Love, which starred the popular black actor as a schoolteacher in an inner city high school in London.

Dr. Dolittle was silly, with Rex Harrison as the doctor who could speak to the animals. He certainly couldn’t sing, and I don’t know why he ever tried. It didn’t matter so much in My Fair Lady, since Professor Higgins was such a pretender anyway. It made sense that he would only pretend to sing.

The film version of Camelot also came out in 1967, and it won three Academy Awards, but it was not even nominated for any the biggies: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director. If I were choosing the best film of 1967, I’d certainly choose Camelot over any of the above nominees for Best Picture. Richard Harris and Vanessa Redgrave were amazing and memorable as King Arthur and Guinevere, and the “messages” of the movie about temptation, pride, sin and imperfection are spot-on. The screen-play is based on T.H. White’s version of the King Arthur story, Once and Future King, published in 1958.

1968: Events and Inventions

January, 1968. The Czechoslovak Communist Party chooses a new leader, liberal Alexander Dubcek.

January 30, 1968. The Tet Offensive begins, as Viet Cong forces launch a series of surprise attacks across South Vietnam.

February, 1968. the North Korean government refuses to release the U.S. spy ship Pueblo, captured last month within Korean waters.

March, 1968. In the U.S., Lockheed presents the world’s largest aircraft to date, the Galaxy.

April 4, 1968. Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. is shot dead in Memphis, Tennessee by escaped convict Jams Earl Ray. The night before his death Dr. King gave a speech at a church in Memphis:

“Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. So I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

May 6-13, 1968. Paris student riots; one million march through streets of Paris protesting the war in Vietnam and other grievances.

May 19, 1968. Nigerian forces capture Port Harcourt and form a ring around the Biafrans. This contributes to a humanitarian disaster as the surrounded population already suffers from hunger and starvation.

June 6, 1968. Robert Kennedy, younger brother of John F. Kennedy and Democratic candidate for president of the U.S., is assassinated in Los Angeles by lone Jordanian gunman Sirhan Sirhan.

'Prague Spring' photo (c) 2008, Joonas Plaan - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/July, 1968. Thirty-six nations, including the United States, the USSR, and Britain, sign a nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

August 22, 1968. The Prague Spring of increasing freedom in Czechoslovakia ends abruptly as 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 5000 tanks enter the country to force the Czechs to remain within the Soviet sphere. Unarmed Czech youths try, unsuccessfully, to resist the Soviet tanks in the streets of Prague and other cities. Prime Minister Alexander Dubcek’s goal and policy was “socialism with a human face”, but the Soviet Union and its vassal states will not allow changes in Czechoslovakia.

August 24, 1968. France explodes its first hydrogen bomb.

September, 1968. At least 11,000 people die in a series of earthquakes in Iran lasting for two days.

One Crazy Summer by Rita-Williams-Garcia

I had trouble getting past the initial premise of this story: loving father sends his three daughters (ages 11, 9, and 7) across the country on an airplane from Brooklyn to Oakland, California to spend a month with their crazy mother who deserted them seven years previously and doesn’t really want them to come. Negligent mother, Cecile, doesn’t even have a phone and may be living on the streets for all the father knows. How did he get in touch with her in the first place? How will he know if the girls arrived safely or if anyone met them when they did get there? What if Cecile is in jail (a real possibility considering the rest of the story)? Why would any decent parent send his young daughters on such a journey?

After I swallowed the implausibility of that opening gambit, I enjoyed reading about Delphine and her sisters Vonetta and Fern and their selfish, crazy mother, Cecile/Nzila, who in addition to being totally obsessed with writing poetry is also associated with the Black Panthers. The summer of 1968, the year in which the story takes place, saw the Panthers’ leader, Huey Newton, on trial for manslaughter, and the Black Panthers were holding rallies and demonstrations with the slogan “Free Huey!” The Panthers also ran a feeding program out of a church in Oakland, providing breakfast for poor children, a program which figures into the story of Delphine’s crazy summer.

The book tries to present a balanced view of the Black Panthers and of the political and social climate of the time, and as far as I can tell, it does maintain some objectivity. While the Black Panther group is providing breakfast and a place of safety during the day for Delphine and her sisters, Delphine also becomes aware that that the Panthers have been involved in some serious violence, that they carry weapons, and that being close to the Panthers might not be so safe after all. The real villains in the book are not the “pigs” (police) or white people, but rather Delphine’s negligent mom and a traitor within the Panther group itself.

Final verdict: it’s a decent story, but I don’t think it should be the number one choice for the National Book Award. The ending is a little sudden and unbelievable.

Other takes:
Melissa at Book Nut: “There wasn’t enough of a happy ending to suit me; it almost felt like they were spinning in the same place all summer. The growth that does occur is very, very subtle. I sit and think about it, and the pieces fall together… and yet there seems something a bit off.”

Liz B. at A Chair, a Fireplace and a Tea Cozy: “I’m not satisfied. I want a second book. I want to spend more time with the Gaither sisters. I want One Crazy Summer to be the start of a new series.”

Six Boxes of Books: “Delphine’s voice is well done; she’s an eleven-year-old who’s had to grow up too quickly and help take care of her sisters, but she still has the emotional maturity of an eleven-year-old.”

One Crazy Summer has been nominated for the 2010 Cybils Awards in the Middle Grade Fiction category.
One Crazy Summer is also one of five books shortlisted for the National Book Awards, Young People’s Literature division.