Archive | June 2007

Book-spotting #26

Jun12

Alexander McCall Smith tells Newsweek about his favorite books. A man who lists Pride and Prejudice as one of his five favorites must have something going on in the upper story.

The blogger at The Rap Sheet “e-mailed invitations to more than 100 crime novelists, book critics, and bloggers from all over the English-speaking world, asking them to choose the one crime/mystery/thriller novel they thought had been ‘most unjustly overlooked, criminally forgotten, or underappreciated over the years.'” Here’s the compiled list of all the books that were suggested.
Fuse #8 has a list of best children’s novels you’ve never read. What is your favorite under-appreciated children’s novel or crime/mystery/thriller?

Tom Payne writes in The Telegraph about words and phrases reviewers overuse. I checked it out, and I’m not sophisticated enough to use many of these cliches. I have been guilty of “take one ****, mix in some ****, add a dash of ****, leave to simmer, and what do you have?” But I never actually required anyone to simmer any of my mixtures. Roger Sutton and his commenters take on overused words in reviews of children’s books. I don’t think I’m (over)using many of these either: feisty, endearing, compelling, quirky, spunky, kerfluffle, quotidian, romp, appealing, zany. I’m sure I have my own cliches and frequently used terms. What words do you see overused in blog reviews?

Enna Burning by Shannon Hale

Jun10

Disturbing. Somewhat frightening. Feverish. Violent.

A tale of love and friendship?

Enna Burning is a sequel to Shannon Hale’s successful and enjoyable first novel The Goose Girl, but in this book things turn darker and more violent in Bayern. Tira, their neighboring country and traditional enemy, has attacked, and Bayern must defend its borders and its villages. Enna, Princess Isi’s friend and confidante, has been living quietly in her village in the forest, but now is the time for all good men, and even women, to come to the aid of Bayern. Enna finds that she has the ability to save Bayern, but she may destroy herself in the process.

The book, although it’s fantasy, has an anti-war message comparable to that of another book I read this weekend, Red Moon at Sharpsburg. Again, Hale seems to be saying through her story that although war may sometimes be necessary, it’s never glorious or untouched by moral ambiguity.

I enjoyed Enna Burning, but I liked The Goose Girl better. I’m looking forward to reading a third book in the series, published last year, River Secrets.

Shannon Hale’s website, Squeetus.

48 Hour Book Challenge Final Report

Jun10

Books read: 6 1/2

The Loud Silence of Francine Green by Karen Cushman. (225 pages)

Marika by Andrea Cheng. (163 pages)

Rickshaw Girl by Mitali Perkins. (91 pages)

Keturah and Lord Death by Martine Leavitt. (216 pages)

Red Moon at Sharpsburg by Rosemary Wells. (236 pages)

Marie, Dancing by Carolyn Meyer. (255 pages)

I also started The Miner’s Daughter by Gretchen Moran Laskas and read about halfway (145 pages) through it before the end of my challenge at 10:00 A.M. this morning.

Total pages read: 1331

Time read: I forgot to keep track, so I have no idea.

What I learned:
I like historical fiction and stories from other cultures.
I’m not so fond of contemporary realistic fiction unless it’s done really well.
It’s hard to write really good realistic fiction for kids and young adults set in the the present time.
I still can’t read in the car for very long without feeling queasy.
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Suggestions for next year:
Time the 48 Hour Book Challenge to coincide with the closing of nominations for the Cybil awards, and give extra points for reading and reviewing Cybil nominees.

Maybe it should be just a straight 72 hour book challenge from Friday morning until Monday morning. Some people have church or meetings to work around; others have work on Friday or Saturday. But everyone ought to be able to get in about 24 plus hours of reading and reviewing in three days.

Just a couple of non-binding suggestions. Thanks, MotherReader for sponsoring the challenge.

Marie, Dancing by Carolyn Meyer

Jun10

Edgar Degas’s Petite danseuse de quatorze ans (Little Dancer Aged Fourteen) was the only sculpture he ever exhibited during his lifetime. I had never heard of it, although I have enjoyed his paintings of dancers, until I read Carolyn Meyer’s historical fiction novel about the life of the model for the sculpture, a dancer named Marie van Goethem.

In Meyer’s story Marie’s family is made up of herself, her older sister Antoinette, her younger sister Charlotte, and her mother, a laundress with dreams of stardom for her three daughters. The world of ballet is harsh, especially when the family lives in poverty with hardly enough money to pay the rent and buy food. The little money Marie is paid for modelling for Monsieur Degas helps to buy food and clothing for the girls —and unfortunately, sometimes it goes to feed Maman’s addiction to absinthe. As Marie sees, in Degas’s studio and later in the Paris apartment of American artist Mary Cassatt, a new world of luxuries she hardly knew existed, the little ballet dancer is tempted to follow the example of her older sister and accept the favors and gifts of the men who come backstage to woo the ballet dancers and to gain their “favors” in return. Marie’s final fate is not what I expected, but it does seem realistic, rather than a forced happily-ever-after ending.

I think the artists and the dancers and the dreamers will enjoy this look into the the story behind a great work of art. It’s most appropriate for high school age young people since one of the main dilemmas in the novel is whether or not Marie will become a lorette (kept woman) as her sister and many of the other dancers do. I thought the subject was handled frankly, but also tastefully. Marie must also choose between the attentions of a young coachman, Jean-Pierre, and a young nobleman, Lucian Daudet. Lucien gives Marie jewels and fine meals, but Jean-Pierre has her heart until the day he asks her to give more than she can give.

Carolyn Meyer is one of Brown Bear Daughter’s favorite authors. She especially enjoys Meyer’s novels of Tudor England, including Mary, Bloody Mary and Doomed Queen Anne. I read one of Ms. Meyer’s early novels, Where the Broken Heart Still Beats: The Story of Cynthia Ann Parker, a long time ago, and I remember thinking it quite a good read.

By the way Ms. Meyer’s birthday was yesterday. According to her website, she’s still writing, and her latest project is called Dear Charley Darwin. She also has a book coming out this month called Duchessina: A Novel of Catherine de’ Medici.

Happy 72nd Birthday, Ms. Meyer.

Carolyn Meyer’s website.

The story of a ballet based on the life of Marie van Goethem, Le petite danseuse.

See a picture of the sculpture by Edgar Degas, Petite danseuse.

Red Moon at Sharpsburg by Rosemary Wells

Jun9

I know Rosemary Wells, and maybe you do too, as the author of the Max and Ruby picture books for young children. She can write for young adults, too. Red Moon at Sharpsburg is proof that Ms. Wells has the ability to write and research and create a wstory and a world for young adults as vivid as the one created with very few words and pictures in her Max books.

Red Moon at Sharpburg is, as can be deduced, a Civil War novel. It’s told from the point of view of a southern girl, India Moody, who lives in Northern Virginia with her family —her daddy, a harness maker, her mother, her little brother and her aged grandfather. The Moodys aren’t rich before the war begins, but they are comfortable with a home and a profitable business. The war, of course, changes everything. In spite of a couple of holes in the plot, I thought Red Moon at Sharpsburg was one of the best Civil War novels written for young adults that I have read. The “holes” involve minor characters, namely India’s baby brother and her elderly grandfather, who have a tendency to disappear when they might interfere with the action. I also found it difficult to believe that a young girl in the South during the war was able through a series of fortunate connections to obtain medicines (aspirin?) from Europe that would cure fever since aspirin wasn’t really invented until the late 1800’s. And the one of the characters has a suspiciously modern knowledge of medicine and chemistry and bacteriology that would have made him somewhat prescient in the mid 1800’s.

Still, the narrator and main character, India, is a delightful young lady and role model. And the descriptions of the war, of battlefields and prisons, and of atrocities are accurate and chilling. Ms. Wells says in the back of the book that part of her purpose in writing it was to reveal “the profound immorality of war.” She goes on to say, “Sometimes we must fight wars, but it is unforgivable to pump war full of glamour and glory.” I’m no pacifist, but I agree with Ms. Wells. She also has a mildly feminist agenda, but it doesn’t become overbearing or preachy.

The best thing about this novel was the gems of language and writing that popped up when I was least expecting them. Here are a few examples:

“I follow him down to Buckmarsh Street to catch a last glimpse of him. Then I cry, standing in the the street like a child with a skinned knee.”

Mauve is a pinkish purple of such delicacy I can only hold the silk square to the light and gaze at it. I have seen it only in petunias and stained-glass windows.”

“The moon is in its last quarter. It appears low on the horizon above the smoke. The crescent sits like a bloody smile in the sky.”

“I am aware of a sudden force, as if I have been flung through space at the speed of a comet. I know what this speeding ahead is without being told. It is me being hurled forward in time to the empty spot at the head of my family. It is a place where I was not meant to be for years to come and now I’m there.
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Other good Civil War novels for young adults:

Beatty, Patricia. Turn Homeward, Hannalee.
Beatty, Patricia. Be Ever Hopeful, Hannalee.
Beatty, Patricia. Charley Skedaddle. (Bowery Boys and deserters)
Hunt, Irene. Across Five Aprils.
Fleischman, Paul. Bull Run.
Keith, Harold. Rifles for Watie. (Cherokee Indian leader Stand Watie and the repeating rifle)
Paulsen, Gary. Soldier’s Heart: a Novel of the Civil War.
Perez, N.A. The Slopes of War: A Novel of Gettysburg.
Rinaldi, Ann. An Acquaintance with Darkness. (Lincoln’s assassination)
Rinaldi, Ann. The Last Silk Dress.
Rinaldi, Ann. Numbering All the Bones. (Andersonville Prison)
Wisler, G. Clifton. THe Drummer Boy of Vicksburg.

Keturah and Lord Death by Martine Leavitt

Jun9

This peculiar tale reminded me of Scheherezade in 1001 Nights and of last year’s other Death Personified story, The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak. I told the Eldest the bare outline of the plot, and she immediately said, “Chaucer’s already used that plot device.” Indeed, Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale does have three drunken men go into the forest to meet and conquer Death. And then there’s the flavor in the story, if not the humor, of The Princess Bride.

However, Keturah and Lord Death is neither fish nor fowl, neither romance nor comedy, neither fairy tale nor high tragedy. I thought about saying that it was a sort of prosaic hymn to Death itself, but it’s not that exactly. It may be speculative fiction about the inevitability of Death. Or about the power of love to transcend Death. It may be an old folk tale reworked into a modern novel. Or something else altogether.

I’m not completely sure. And in this book, the uncertainty fits. Keturah and Lord Death isn’t an allegory; it’s a regular old story of the kind that C.S. Lewis would have approved as much as he disapproved of allegory. It’s not exactly a “Christian” story, but it doesn’t contradict the Christian view of life and death.

“Tell me what it is like to die,” I answered.

He dismounted from his horse, looking at me strangely the whole while. “You experience something similar every day,” he said softly. “It is as familiar to you as bread and butter.”

“Yes, I said. “It is like every night when I fall asleep.”

“No. It is like every morning when you wake up.”

Ms Leavitt begins her tale with a snippet of Emily Dickinson (Because I could not stop for Death,/He kindly stopped for me;/The carriage held but just ourselves/And Immortality) and ends with this revelation in the Acknowledgments:

“Finally, I express my love to my younger sister, Lorraine, who died many years ago of cystic fibrosis at the age of eleven. Now, as a mother and grandmother, I realize what a long journey dying must be for a child to make alone. I wish I could have walked with her a little way. This book is my way of doing so.”

If you like faity tale and romantic fantasy and uncoventional quest stories, the journey is well worth your time.

Rickshaw Girl by Mitali Perkins

Jun8

I don’t know if this book really qualifies for MotherReader’s 48 Hour Book Challenge; the books were supposed to be about fifth grade level or above. I’d estimate that the reading and interest level for this book woud be about second or third grade. Nevertheless, I don’t care. I read it, and I loved it. Your little girls (and boys) need to read this book. I’m going to add it to Betsy-Bee’s (age eight) summer reading list. Rickshaw Girl is a great book.

Naima is a ten year old village girl in Bangladesh, and she’s a talented artist. She’s already won one prize for her alpanas, decorative rock paintings. But Naima sees how hard her father works as a rickshaw driver because he has no sons to help him drive the rickshaw. Naima wants to do something to help out, but her ideas are sometimes counter-productive. How can a girl help the family financially when girls are only allowed to “stay home and help their mothers”?

The themes of making mistakes, and being forgiven, and trying to fix your mistakes are universal ones, and at the same time the sense of place in this simple story is strong. Children will get an understanding of what life is like in a small village in another part of the world. And they’ll appreciate the story of how Naima perseveres in her goals even after she has a near-disastrous accident.

The illustrations in the book by artist Jamie Hogan are wonderful, to, and certified as authentic by Mitali’s Bengali mother, Madhusree Bose. It would be fun to read this book aloud and then have the little girls create some of their own alpanas, or an approximation thereof.
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For those of you who homeschool and use Sonlight, this book needs to be part of the Kindergarten level emphasis on world cultures. It would make a great read aloud book at that level, or it would be perfectly suited as a reader for second or third graders. In fact, I need to email the people at Sonlight and tell them about Rickshaw Girl. I think they’ll love it.

Marika by Andrea Cheng

Jun8

A few months ago I read another book by Andrea Cheng, Eclipse, the story of precocious eight year old Peti, the talkative son of Hungarian immigrant parents. Marika, the book I just finished, is narrated by a girl character, a little older than Peti, eleven rather than eight, but it has the same feel of a very serious story about adult problems being told from a child’s point of view.

I’m not sure, judging from the two books I’ve read, that Ms. Cheng is really a juvenile author. I think she writes adult or young adult books with child narrators, told in a child’s voice. The subject matter in the two books includes child abuse, adultery, genocide, and rape (mentioned), and I’m just not convinced that elementary school children would appreciate the rhythm or the content of either book.

That said, however, Marika is a great novel. The blurb in the back of the book says that Andrea Cheng is the daughter of Hungarian immigrants and that Marika, the character and the book, are loosely based on her mother’s story. Marika, the character, is a young Hungarian girl who happens to have three Jewish grandparents. Her family is culturally Catholic, but they can’t escape their Jewish ethnic identity in World War II Budapest. Marika’s struggles to understand this identity and what it means to be Jewish even though you don’t believe in the Jewish religion, even though you don’t want to be Jewish, from the core of the story.

Here’s a sample of Marika’s voice, on the day she is rescued by her father from confinement in a Jewish prison:

“I sat by the window and looked down at the Danube below, flowing so peacefully along its banks. Lots of people wrote poems about the Danube. We had to memorize one in fifth grade about the wind blowing off the water. I recited it to myself, and when I was done, I sobbed.”
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That’s the tone of this book: serious, sad, flowing, yet childlike. Marika does mature over the course of the novel, and that growth is reflected in the way she writes about her experiences. However, as the novel ends, and the reader finds out how the war ended for each of the characters in the story, the feelings continue to be mixed. Some survive the war and the Holocaust, and others, of course, do not, a very adult and true lesson to learn about life.

The Loud Silence of Francine Green by Karen Cushman

Jun8

“It was probably just a silly rumor, but I’d heard that nuns had their heads shaved, and I was afraid they relaxed by taking off their veils and running around bald, something I certainly did not want to see.”

A lot of this book reads like a “silly rumor”. However, some of it is true-to-history, and how is a young adult reader to tell the difference? Were Catholic schools and Catholic nuns back in the 1950’s really repressive and threatening? Probably some were. Were some people blacklisted for Communist sympathies in Hollywood during the so-called “red scare”? Yes, some were. Did those who were blacklisted become so intimidated and frightened by the questions and the pressure from the FBI that they committed suicide? Not unless they were already disturbed and depressed. (The author’s note in the back of the book says that “at least two” of those Hollywood types who were blacklisted committed suicide, but I can’t find any names or independent verification of this fact.) Did children really learn to fear The Bomb and the Reds so much that they worried that airplanes flying overhead might drop a bomb on them? I’m sure some imaginative children did.

Author Karen Cushman lived in California during the late forties/early fifties. I didn’t. She attended a Catholic school. I didn’t.
She says she was taught to “duck and cover” in case of a nuclear attack. I wa taught to go out into an interior hallway and cover my head in tornado drills, but by the time I went to elementary school in the 1960’s, no one was talking about nuclear attacks or fallout shelters to schoolchildren in West Texas. At least, not to me.

So, I’m giving the events in this book the benefit of the doubt. Nevertheless, I found it difficult to read as a straight story. It felt more like a series of caricatures: the angry nun teacher, the poor Jewish liberal actor blacklisted as a consequence of his compassion for the poor and downtrodden, the friend who speaks out and gets herself into trouble, the pious goody-two-shoes who wants to become a nun, the empty-headed teenage sister who’s only interested in fingernail polish and boys, and the bumbling dad who can’t figure out what to do to protect his family from godless Communists and atomic bombs.

Only the narrator, Francine, felt like a real person. Francine is conflicted; she wants to be friends with Sophie, the afore-mentioned outspoken defender of lost causes, but she doesn’t want to get in trouble. Francine is a self-described coward. She’s become accustomed to being overlooked and ignored, and some part of her likes to be unnoticed. The nuns at school and her family at home never ask for her opinion on anything, so Francine isn’t even sure she has any opinions of her own. Francine’s supposed to be a representation of the American public, silent in the face of McCarthyism and persecution of Hollywood Communists. But Francine is more than a symbol. As a character, she insists upon being more complicated and interesting, just as I’m sure the politics and culture of the 1950’s were more complex and multi-layered than this simple presentation would indicate. And the ending is confusing and would be epecially so for those “imaginative young people” to whom I would think this book is targeted. What happened to Sophie and her father? Did the Big Bad FBI put them in a dungeon somewhere? Did they emigrate to Russia? Did they just decide to move and start over elsewhere? The uncertainty is realistic, but annoying, perhaps giving young people the idea that America in the 1950’s was a place like Chile in the 1970’s where people just disappeared never to seen again except as bodies in a mass grave somewhere.
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It’s a middle school/young adult novel of one author’s experience of the 1950’s, the red scare, and growing up to become a person with thoughts and ideas of one’s own. There’s some humor in the vein of the opening quotation, a decent plot, and one very engaging narrator. In Texas idiom, I’d call it “fair to middlin”.

Reviewed, much more favorably, by Fuse #8.

Starting . . .

Jun8

MotherReader’s 48 Hour Book Challenge.

I’ll be reading and reviewing (and transporting and eating and sleeping and taking care of urchins) from now until 10:00 A.M. Sunday morning. Then, I’ll go to church and worship the Lord of all, books and authors and even blogs, with a full mind and a clear conscience, I hope.