Archive | January 2007

Connecting the Dots

Jan1

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.

A Winter’s Love by Madeleine L’Engle

Jan1

I have several projects for January; one of them is to read/reread the major works of one of my favorite authors, Madeleine L’Engle. Some of you may not know that Ms. L’Engle wrote adult fiction as well as the Newbery-award winning fantasy A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels. In fact, all of her books are difficult to confine to one age group or target audience. I think that’s because Ms. L’Engle wrote about her own concerns and didn’t consciously write to a particular audience.

A Winter’s Love was one of her early novels published in 1957, the year of my birth, before the success of A Wrinkle in Time. It was good story to start out my journey through Madeleine L’Engle’s books because it was one of her first novels published and because it takes place just before Christmas. The setting is a Swiss village resort in the Alps; Emily and Courtney Bowen (Courtney is the husband) and their two daughters, Virginia and Connie, are living in a rented chalet. The family is from New York, but Courtney is on a sort of writing sabbatical from teaching classics in a New York university. Sixteen year old Virginia is home for the holidays from her European boarding school, and she has a friend spending the holidays with here, Mimi Oppenheimer.

The action and conflict in the novel are internal, rather than external. Nothing much happens. Emily begins the novel looking out a window at the stars and thinking about her life; she ends the story standing outdoors in the snow looking over the landscape and thinking. Yet, from that beginning to that ending, much has happened inside Emily Bowen. She’s made decisions that will affect her family and her friends for the rest of their lives. The novel is really about a marriage and about the temptation to have an affair or get a divorce when that marriage isn’t working well. Not only is Emily’s marriage not sustaining her; she has very little hope that she can ever communicate with and love her emotionally distant and closed husband, Court. And the Other Man, Abe Fielding, is so open and nurturing and available that Emily can’t help falling in love. She spends the rest of the novel trying to decide what to do about her new love and her old love and her children and ultimately herself.

As far as classification goes, I think this novel, were it to be published today, would be classifed as young adult fiction mostly because of the young adult characters, Virginia and Mimi, Sam, Abe’s son, and Sam’s friend, Beanie. However, the overwhelming theme of the novel is adult: what is the meaning of marriage and how does love grow and change and remain faithful to itself. I don’t think this is Madeleine L’Engle’s best novel, but it is a very creditable effort. She has at least three novels that were published before this one, Ilsa, The Small Rain and And Both Were Young, and I’d like to get those next so that I can read the novels in semi-chronological order. (I’ve already read A Small Rain and maybe And Both Were Young, but I’m planning to re-read them.) Virginia Bowen and Mimi Oppenheimer both appear in later L’Engle novels as minor characters.