Archive | November 2007

Sadie Hawkins Day

Nov3

Anybody here old enough to remember the origin of this holiday?

Al Capp, cartoonist, wrote the comic strip Lil Abner and created the characters of Daisy Mae, Lil Abner, Pappy and Mammy Yoakum, Joe Btfsplk, Schmoo, and, of course, Sadie Hawkins.

From the official Al Capp website:

Sadie Hawkins Day, an American folk event, made its debut in Al Capp’s Li’l Abner strip November 15, 1937. Sadie Hawkins was “the homeliest gal in the hills” who grew tired of waiting for the fellows to come a courtin’. Her father, Hekzebiah Hawkins, a prominent resident of Dogpatch, was even more worried about Sadie living at home for the rest of his life, so he decreed the first annual Sadie Hawkins Day, a foot race in which the unmarried gals pursued the town’s bachelors, with matrimony the consequence. By the late 1930’s the event had swept the nation and had a life of its own. Life magazine reported over 200 colleges holding Sadie Hawkins Day events in 1939, only two years after its inception. . . . When Al Capp created the event, it was not his intention to have the event occur annually on a specific date because it inhibited his freewheeling plotting. However, due to its enormous popularity and the numerous fan letters Capp received, the event became an annual event in the strip during the month of November, lasting four decades.”

Sadie Hawkins Day is often celebrated on the first Saturday in November, but you can have your own Sadie Hawkins event anytime in November. You single ladies have any plans?

Terms from Mr. Capp’s famous comic strip were an integral part of my childhood, and I never even knew that most of them came from L’il Abner. How many of you are familiar with: Kickapoo Joy Juice, Lower Slobbovia, Fearless Fosdick, Jubilation T. Cornpone, “if I had my druthers”, and “double whammy”? All of those familiar-to-me characters and phrases and places came from the creative mind of Al Capp. I think my parents must have been weaned on L’il Abner and Co.

America’s Game: More Great Baseball Stories for Kids

Nov2

The Aurora County All-Stars is a pretty good book about kids and baseball, but there are others, some better. If you know a kid who loves books and baseball, or if you are one, here are some titles to check out:

Heat by Mike Lupica. Published in 2007, this book got a lot of attention, and it was a finalist for the 2006 Cybil Award for Middle Grade Fiction. Semicolon review here.

Skinnybones by Barbara Park. “I’ve played Little League baseball for six years now. But to tell you the truth, I’m not exactly what you’d call a real good athlete. Actually, I’m not even real okay. Basically, what I’m trying to say here is, I stink.” The smallest kid on the team aspires to basebll greatness.

Catcher With a Glass Arm by Matt Christopher. Others by this classic sports fiction writer: The Lucky Baseball Bat, The Kid Who Only Hit Homers, Return of the Home Run Kid, Comeback of the Home Run Kid, Stealing Home, Baseball Flyhawk, Baseball Pals, Baseball Turnaround, and more. From Matt Christopher’s website: “Matt Christopher is America’s bestselling sports writer for children, with more than 100 books and sales approaching six million copies.”

Hang, Tough, Paul Mather by Alfred Slote. “One thing Tom Kinsella could do that none of my other doctors could do was juggle. I found that out one day when he came into my room and spotted the three autographed baseballs.” Baseball and leukemia.

Honus and Me: A Baseball Card Adventure by Dan Gutman. Joe travels through time to meet baseball’s greats. The series includes Babe and Me, Shoeless Joe and Me, Abner and Me, and Sach and Me.

Bobby Baseball by Robert Kimmel Smith. “Baseball is a simple game, people. You catch, you throw, you hit, AND YOU THINK. I will not yell at anyone for making an error. Everyone makes errors. BUT I WILL NOT PUT UP WITH MENTAL MISTAKES!”

Summerland by Michael Chabon (YA) “A baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day.” Computer Guru Son is a big fan of Chabon, but I don’t think he’s read this one.

Children’s Fiction of 2007: The Aurora County All-Stars by Deborah Wiles

Nov2

Thirty-six (short) chapters with a cliff-hanger or a plot twist at the end of almost every one. Now that’s an accomplishment, even if it did give me a feeling of whiplash being jerked around that much. Just when I thought I knew which direction the narrative was going, just when I thought I knew what was going to happen next, just when I thought I had the characters’ decisions and motivations figured out, just when I thought something somewhere was resolved, it wasn’t and I didn’t. I don’t honestly know if this would captivate or annoy most children, but it made me keep reading until nearly the end, about chapter thirty-one, when I just wanted everything to be settled and decided. I did finish to make sure that it was settled, but I was ready to slap the author up the side of the head if she wrote another about-face and switch directions.

The story is about an annual baseball game, Walt Whitman’s poetry, an anniversary county history pageant, the death of old man Norwood Rhinehart Beauregard Boyd, and the friendship between House Jackson, pitcher, and Cleebo Wilson, catcher, for the Aurora County All-Stars. All of these things, especially the pageant and the baseball game which happen to be scheduled for the exact same day and time, become entwined and enmeshed and confused, and the only way anything is ever going to work out is for House to figure out Whitman’s words about “the symphony true” and how they apply to events in Aurora County, Mabel, Mississippi, in the summer of whatever year it is in this story.

I dunno. The story was fun and intriguing with its double back somersaults, but maybe it’s too twisty and double-crossing for kids. I think I’ll try it out on some of mine and see what happens. I’ll get back to you on how the experiment goes.

Oh, I did like the quotations at the beginning of chapters from Walt Whitman, who was apparently a baseball fan (who knew?), and from various and sundry famous baseball players. I’ll whet your appetite for the book with a few:

“People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.” —Roger Hornsby, second baseman, St. Louis Cardinals.

“If you come to a fork in the road, take it.” —Yogi Berra, catcher, New York Yankees.

“After the clangor of organ majestic, or chorus, or perfect band,
Silent athwart my soul, moves the symphony true.” —Walt Whitman

“Anytime you have an oppportunity to make a difference in this world and you don’t, then you are wasting your time on earth.” —Roberto Clemente, right fielder, Pittsburgh Pirates.

The Aurora County All-Stars reminds-me-of last year’s Out of Patience by Brian Miehl (Semicolon review here): small town baseball team, historical secrets, possible treasure, single parent dad. The Aurora County All-Stars is nominated for the Cybil Award for Middle Grade Fiction.

Other bloggers chime in:

Elizabeth Bird at A Fuse #8 Production: “House has the same good-hearted reticence as Cooper, complete with strong short sentences and a kind of basic decency you look for in an old-fashioned hero. Since Wiles’ novels all seem to take place in a kind of no-time (an era when soap operas and small town baseball games exist within the same sphere) it makes sense that House’s actions and mannerisms should conjure up the hero of a time past.”

Bookshelves of Doom: “Baseball and Walt Whitman and friendship and family and history and yes, it made me cry. Not in a full-on sobbing-so-much-it-hurts way, but in a pleasant, I-love-baseball-stories and I-love-the-people-in-Aurora-County sort of way.”

Sarah Miller: “The pageant vs. ballgame plot moves along at a healthy clip, and the book is loaded with cliff hangers, from ghosts and garden hose duels to busted elbows with bases loaded.”

Franki at A Year of Reading: “This is a story of baseball, a story of a strong community, and a story of friends. Deborah Wiles ties the story together with quotes from Walt Whitman. She also uses quotes from famous baseball players to set the stage for each chapter. Her writing is brilliant.”

Kirsten at The Kingdom of Books: “Another great book by Deborah Wiles! The lazy days of a small town summer where baseball and 4th of July pageants take center field transport the reader to a nostalgic place in time when neighbors looked out for one another and life was enjoyed outdoors.”

Read, Read, Read: “I liked that the book could appeal to both girls and boys. I also liked that the characters had some genuine qualities that could pull you into the story. I did shed a tear or two during the story. I love stories set in small towns.”

Obviously they (mostly) liked it better than I did.

Children’s Fiction of 2007: Home of the Brave by Katherine Applegate

Nov1

I like poetry as much as the next guy, which is to say I have my favorites (mostly rhyming poetry with a distinctive metric pattern) but a lot of it leaves me, well, sort of . . . confused. Home of the Brave is a novel for middle grade children written in free verse form (is that a contradiction in terms?). It’s not confusing, but it’s really a prose story in spite of the author’s admittedly masterful use of poetic images and devices. At least, I think it’s prose, and the arrangement of the words on the page annoyed me all the way through to about page 150 when I finally came to terms with the gimmick and forgot about it. Here, I’ll give you the first lines of the novel as an example:

When the flying boat
returns to earth at last,
I open my eyes
and gaze out the round window.
What is all the white? I whisper.
Where is all the world?

I’m a little fuzzy about the line between poetry, especially free verse, and prose, but I could read those sentences more fluently if they stretched across the page and wrapped around like prose instead of breaking off each phrase and falling down to the next line. I guess I’m just a creature of prosy habit.

Home of the Brave is the story of Kek, a refugee from Sudan who is being resettled in Minnesota with his aunt and his cousin, Ganwar. Kek’s family all died in the wars in Sudan, except for his mother who is missing and may also be dead. Kek indeed needs a great deal of bravery to make himself a home in this new place of America. Slowly Kek makes friends with a girl named Hannah who lives in his apartment complex, with some of the other immigrants who are in his ESL class at school, and, best of all, with a cow to whom he gives the name, Gol, family.

Maybe the arrangement of the words in verse form was meant to mirror the way Kek thinks and talks in his new language in fits and starts and phrases, but why couldn’t it look like this instead:

When I bury my face in Gol’s old hide I smell hay and dung and life. She shelters me like a warm wall, and that is enough for this day.

I rather liked this story of an immigrant’s experience in acclimating to the U.S. and of family and what it means from the persepctive of a diiferent cultural background. Do you think the publisher might put out a new edition in prose form for the prosaic among us? It would make the book a lot shorter, I think, not so much white space. But the story and the language would still be there, and those are the parts I enjoyed the most.

I have a friend, Aruna. from Sierra Leone; he’s the adopted son of one of my best friends. I would love to give Aruna a copy of this book. I think he could identify with the character of Kek.

Home of the Brave by Katherine Applegate, who by the way is the author of the Animorphs series, is nominated for the Cybil Award for Middle Grade Fiction.