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Victory by Susan Cooper

Dec2

This present tense fad is starting to become annoying. Victory, an historical fiction/fantasy/mystery, is set in two time periods with two main characters. Sam lives in England in the early 1800’s and sails on HMS Victory with Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson. Molly is also British, but unhappily transplanted to the United States as a result of her mother’s marriage to an American. The salinet feature of Molly’s character is that she’s homesick for England. And how do you think the parts of the book that concern Molly’s story are written? That’s right, in third person present tense. I guess it’s supposed to give Molly’s story a sense of present-day immediacy, but I found it distracting.

Aside from the gimmicky present-tense-for-the-present and past-tense-for-the-past, I thought the Molly parts of the story were mostly unnecessary. Molly’s story and her interest in Lord Nelson did add bit of mystery to the book that would not have been there without the present day tie-in. However, I found the story of Sam Robbins, a ship’s boy on Nelson’s Victory, sufficiently interesting and adventurous. Ms. Cooper weaves the historical details of life on a ship in Her Majesty’s navy in 1803 into the story in a way that gives the facts life. And Sam is a sympathetic character who lives a hard but fascinating life. He makes twenty-first century Molly seem whiny and spoiled.

From the Author’s Note by Susan Cooper: “Sam Robbins’s encounters with Admiral Nelson are not historical; they came out of my imagination, and I loved writing them. Perhaps I wrote this whole book only for the chance of meeting one of my greatest heroes.”

That love of Lord Nelson and the time period in which he lived shines through in the book. The Molly parts just don’t have the same feeling of life and enthusiasm. So I give you permission to skip the chapters that are headed “Molly” and just read about Sam Robbins and the Battle of Trafalgar, if you want. By the way, I really like the cover of the book with the picture of the scrap of a flag. If I were in a bookstore or library, I might pick up the book just because of the cover-appeal.

Victory by Susan Cooper is one of the many books nominated for the Cybil Award for Middle Grade Fiction.

Two Reviews by Brown Bear Daughter (age 11, almost 12)

Dec1

These two books are both among the many books nominated for the Cybil Award for Middle Grade Fiction. Brown Bear Daughter is helping me as I read through as many of them as I can.

Rules by Cynthia Lord.
This is a great book. It has all the essential ingredients of a good story. A story needs an intriguing plot, an interesting main character, and most important of all, (I value this in all the books I read) it needs to make me feel sympathetic towards the characters, or it needs to make me laugh. In this case, it was both.

The story is about an autistic child. Autism is: “A mental condition, present from early childhood, characterized by great difficulty in communicating and forming relationships with other people.” Catherine, the narrator and the sister of the autistic boy, after thinking about her brother’s situation for a long time, decides, “David (can’t) learn from watching other people, so (I’ll) have to teach him everything.” And this is where the “rules” come in.

Catherine has lists of rules for David. A few of these are, “If you want to get out of answering something, pretend you didn’t hear,” “If someone is holding something you want, ask if you can have a turn,” and, “No toys in the fish tank.”

Taking her brother to Occupational Therapy one day with her mother, Catherine talks to a boy who can’t talk back; he’s there for Speech Therapy. And this is when the real story begins.

I’ll have to restrain myself from blabbing on and on about this wonderful book; I don’t want to give away the entire story. I want anyone who decides to read this book to find out the ending for themselves. Believe me, it’s quite a story.


Julia’s Kitchen by Brenda A. Ferber.
This book, by Brenda A. Ferber, almost made me cry. Unfortunately, I was at the dentist office when I came closest to being teary, and I kept from letting the tears trickle down my cheeks because of where I was. Had I been at home, however, I would have sobbed over this sad book, because I love to cry over books and movies, though it happens rarely. It’s a great book, despite that fact that it is very pathetic. I absolutely loved it.

Cara Segal, who narrates the story, chose the name for her mother’s catering business. “Julia’s Kitchen” it was called; Julia was her mother’s name. A favorite pastime of the two (Cara and her mother) was to bake. Then Mrs. Segal dies in a fire, along with Cara’s younger sister, Jane. Cara’s father no longer seems like the man he was before the fire, and is seemingly always preoccupied and gloomy.

Cara, having not been at the fire that burned her house down and killed her mother and sister, tries desperately to piece together the story of her mother’s death, because others will not tell her, but she has little success. I really enjoyed the surprising adventure that led to the conclusion of this wonderful story.

This book includes one of the most important ingredients of a great book . . . sadness. This, in my opinion, made it an amazing story.

Out of Patience by Brian Meehl

Nov30

Everyone has his or her obsessions. I like pecans.

Jake Waters is the main character in Out of Patience. He wants to get out of Patience, Kansas as soon as possible. His father, Jim Waters, collects . . . well, he collects toilet plungers. Actually, the plungers are just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. J. Waters, who is of course a plumber, also collects other various and sundry toilet and plumbing paraphernalia, utensils, equipment, and accoutrements. He doesn’t collect all this stuff for business purposes either; he’s planning to build the ATM, American Toilet Museum. Yes, the father in this quirky novel is “a half-bubble off plumb.”

Actually, the entire story is about a half-bubble off plumb, or as I like to say, downright quirky. Examples. You want examples?
Jake’s Pakistani friend Cricket is working on a summer project called “Kansas: 100 Freaky and Fascinating Facts.” For example, in 1908, the Kansas legislature passed a law against eating snakes in public.

The biggest and only business in Patience is Knight Soil and Fertilizer which produces fertilizers with the names such as “Dung Shui” and “Pie-Agri”.

In addition to fertilizer, Patience has a curse, the the Cass Curse of the Plunger of Destiny.

Patience also boasts in its history the first flush toilet west of the Mississippi: an original Dolphin Deluge Washdown Water Closet installed by Jeremiah Waters in 1876 at the request of his wife Regina.

So . . . yeah. If you’re intrigued, read Out of Patience. If you’re mildly amused, you might still want to pick up a copy. It’s potty humor, but it’s not really too tasteless. If you’re appalled already by the examples above of quirky humor, don’t bother.

I looked up author Brian Meehl and found out that he’s actually Barkley the Muppet dog from Sesame Street. That explains everything, I think.

He also shares this interesting fact in his bio:

BEST PIECE OF TOILET TRIVIA I COULDN’T WORK INTO OUT OF PATIENCE: My great-great-grandfather was a justice of the peace in Missouri in the late 1800s. After administering marital vows to a pair of newlyweds, he had a special way of reminding them of the domestic life they were about to share. He asked them to toast their marriage by drinking from a chamber pot filled with beer and a German sausage.

You’ll either love Out of Patience< or hate it. Me? I haven’t decided yet.

This book is another of those nominated for the Cybil Award for Middle Grade Fiction.

Shug by Jenny Han and Rules by Cynthia Lord

Nov25



These two books have a lot in common:
1. Both are fiction, written for middle school age children, specifically twelve year old girls.
2. Both books feature a twelve year old girl as the protagonist.
3. Both are first novels for their respective authors.
4. Both stories are told in first person, present tense, which I found a bit odd. Especially in Shug, there were switches from present tense to past tense which were awkwardly handled. Is telling the story in present tense a new trend in YA fiction? I suppose it gives a sense of immediacy to the story, as if the reader is experiencing the action of the story along withe narrator instead of hearing about what happened in the past from an older and wiser teenager.
4. The themes are similar: first love, a family with secrets that are embarrassing, popularity and the struggle to fit in and be liked.
5. The plots are even similar: Girl meets boy, Girl makes friends with boy by helping him, Girl also befriends cool new girl in town, family problems embarrass Girl, Girl hurts boy’s feelings, they make up. A dance is the setting for the climactic action of both novels.
6. Both books have been nominated for the Cybil Award for Middle Grade Fiction, which is why I ordered them from the Harris County Library and read them.

So why did I like Rules so much and find Shug to be depressing and discouraging? I read Shug first and all I could think about throughout the entire 248 pages was how sad and difficult and hopeless Shug’s life was. I analyzed this feeling of gloom and realized that it wasn’t, as I would expect, because of Shug’s alcoholic mother that her life was so grim; it was because of the grim, cutthroat realities of middle school life. The Pecking Popularity Order is alive and well in Shug’s town and in her school especially. All the children in the book, who should still be playing games and squabbling over ice cream and dress up clothes, are instead worried about popularity, their first date, their first kiss, and who’s the prettiest. The children are cruel to each other, and although I’m under no illusions about how mean twelve year olds can be, I found the verbal cruelty in Shug to be particularly sad and if it’s true to life in the twenty-first century middle school, I’ve found another reason to homeschool.

If I wanted to be particularly harsh with myself, I could question my judgment and say that I liked Rules better than Shug because I find autistic children more sympathetic than alcoholic adults. However, there’s more to my preference for one book over the other than a preference for one problem over another. The children in Rules were sometimes unkind to one another; they made mistakes and needed forgiveness. But there was so much more grace in Rules; Catherine, the heroine of Rules, apologizes to the person she hurts because she is sorry, not because, like Shug, she’s calculating how unpopular she will be if she doesn’t apologize. Catherine loves her autistic brother, David, and shows it, even if she does become exasperated with the difficulties and embarrassments he brings into her life. Shug, on the other hand, has pretty much given up on her parents, not without reason. Shug’s reality should be more hopeful than Catherine’s; alcoholics do recover and become sober while autistic children don’t usually become un-autistic. Nevertheless, Shug’s only hope is to avoid her parents long enough to grow up and move out, but Catherine comes to a kind of peace about her brother and learns not to make his problems hers while still loving and communicating with him on his own terms.

If you want to read or recommend a middle school problem novel, I’d suggest Cynthia Lord’s Rules. Of course, it didn’t hurt a bit that one of the symptoms of David’s autism is that he uses the words of Arnold Lobel (Frog and Toad) to express his thoughts and feelings. Frog and Toad are much more fun than middle school back-stabbing.
And I like Catherine’s self-made rules: Pantless brothers are not my problem.

“I am laughing at you, Toad,” said Frog, “because you do look funny in your bathing suit.”

“Of course I do,” said Toad. Then he picked up his clothes and went home.

Another take on Shug from Jen Robinson at JKR Books.