Author Gail Gauthier wrote a couple of weeks ago on her blog: “I like connections. I like finding connections between and among unrelated things. Some people say that I see them where they don’t exist, which isn’t true. They just can’t see them.” She’s been finding connections between the books she’s been reading for the Fantasy Fiction Cybil Award.
Not to be a copycat, but I’ve been finding connections, too. I’ve read about twenty of the books nominated for the Cybil Middle Grade Fiction Award, and I’ve found some odd, dare I say eerie, similarities between several of the books.
Four of the nominees have the word “moon” in the title: Alabama Moon, Georgie’s Moon, Half-Moon Investigations, and That Girl Lucy Moon. In two of those books Moon is the last name of the main character. And in Alabama Moon the boy’s first name is Moon.
Popularity and the transition to junior high/middle school are big preoccupations of the characters in Shug and in That Girl Lucy Moon.
I reviewed Shug by Jenny Han and Rules by Cynthia Lord together in the same post because I found them similar in many ways.
I also reviewed Blue by Joyce Hostetter and Weedflower by Cynthia Kadohata together in the same post because both books take place during WW II, both feature a female protagonist who must survive some sort of imprisonment, and other similarities abound.
In both Out of Patience by Brian Meehl and in Framed by Frank Cottrell Boyce, the male protagonist is a resident of a (very) small town/community and must deal with the fact that the town is dying and people are moving out.
Both Penny (Penny From Heaven) and Blue (Blue) have an extended hospital stay. And both girls have families who are terrified of the polio epidemic that is sweeping the country during and after WW 2.
Two of the books I read, Here Lies the Librarian by Richard Peck and Framed are set in and around a garage/filling station in a small community, and the family in the story is trying to make the garage pay —and failing. Also, both garage families use the word “forecourt” for the gasoline/petrol station part in the front of the garage. But one book takes place in Indiana in 1914, and the other takes place in Wales. So why do both use a word I’ve never heard used to refer to the front of the garage?
Two of the books involve competition in the inner city: Heat is about Little League baseball in NYC, and All of the Above is about building tetrahedrons in ?City.
Heat by Mike Lupica and Alabama Moon both feature a boy who tries to tries to survive on his own after the untimely death of his father. Julia in Julia’s Kitchen tries to make sense of the tragic death of her mother, and Penny in Penny from Heaven tries to figure the secrets surrounding the death of her father. Absent parents and parents who desert their offspring on purpose or by accident abound in other books: All of the Above, Framed, Here Lies the Librarian, That Girl Lucy Moon, Bully-Be-Gone, Desperate Journey, Shug.
Wacky inventors of sci-fi contraptions are major characters in The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen and in Bully-Be-Gone.
And finally, in the most unsettling connection of all, two of the books I read spend a great deal of time and prose describing the nasal excretions of one of the characters in excruciating detail: The Clue of Linoleum Lederhosen and Half-Moon Investigations by Erin Colfer are both full of snot.
Connections or trends? Keep a eye out for more as you read children’s and YA fiction this year.
The finalists for the Cybil awards are now posted at the Cybil blog. Check them out; you might find all kinds of connections and trends.