This 2024 middle grade fiction book reminded me of another book I read a couple of years ago, Out of Range by Heidi Lang. But I liked The Long Way Around even better because the characters were more likable and more supportive of each other. I was also reminded of Lost on a Mountain in Maine by Donn Fendler, a true story of how a 12 year old boy survived for nine days in the Maine wilderness without enough food or proper clothing and made it back to be reunited with his family.
The Long Way Around takes place on the other side of the country in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of Northern California and features three cousins–Owen, Vivian, and Amy–who become separated from their parents by an earthquake-caused rockfall. There’s only one way to get back to civilization—the long way around on an “unmaintained” trail that’s barely visible on the map.
As the children hike through many miles of wilderness they encounter earthquake aftershocks, dangerous animals, thunderstorms, and roadblocks that challenge their courage, persistence, and survival skills. Each cousin brings with him or her both strengths and weaknesses that give them reasons and the ability to help one another survive. Vivian, age twelve, is the leader in the group, but she carries with her a fear of heights and of her future in scary middle school. Owen, also twelve, has what sounds like PTSD from a car wreck that he recently survived, but he’s really intelligent and his cooking, math, and map skills are an asset to the team. Amy, Vivian’s little sister, is only eight years old, and she is the most vulnerable of the trio, physically speaking. But Amy also has the best imagination of the bunch and a capacity for hope that keeps them all going.
Survival stories, even fictional ones, are inspiring. They show us that we can draw on strengths we never knew we had until the time comes. In the story, Vivian in particular learns that she can expect to be ready when the challenge comes to face whatever comes at her, to overcome her fears one step at a time.
The Enigma Girls: How Ten Teenagers Broke Ciphers, Kept Secrets, and Helped Win World War II by Candace Fleming.
The Bletchley Riddle by Ruta Sepetys and Steve Sheinkin.
Bletchley Park and the code breakers who lived and worked there during World War II are hot topics these days. Maybe it’s because the whole episode is less “mined” because of all the secrecy that surrounded the work there. Maybe it’s just a fleeting trend. At any rate, there do seem to be a lot of books about Bletchley floating around, but not so many for the younger set. Until now.
These two books, one fiction and one nonfiction, were recently published (2024) and are appropriate for young people about 13 years of age and up. The Enigma Girls tells the story of several teenaged girls who were recruited to work at Bletchley either because of their math skills or their language proficiency. But these girls were not, for the most part, doing the high level code breaking that was the most intriguing and intellectually challenging work going on at Bletchley Park. Rather, they were keeping records on notecards of all of the code words and German double speak that had been decoded. Or they were servicing and keeping the huge “bombes” running. These were the machines that were created to infiltrate and determine the settings for the German Enigma coding machines. Machines (or primitive computers) were fighting machines, and teenagers were keeping the machines moving and computing.
By limiting her story to the females who worked at Bletchley, gifted nonfiction author Candace Fleming risks over-emphasizing and even distorting the role that these women and girls played in the overall mission of breaking and intercepting the Nazi communications. But she doesn’t fall into that trap, and instead as I read I was moved to admire the persistence and hard work of these unsung heroines who toiled in harsh conditions doing work that they were unable to discuss or even understand completely. It wasn’t a romantic, spy-novel kind of job. The “bombes” were huge, oily, and loud, and the girls who tended them knew very little about how they worked or what significance their work might have. And after the war was over, the Enigma Girls were still left in the dark about how their work helped England win the war because they and everyone else who worked with them were bound to secrecy by the Official Secrets Acts that they all had to sign. They only knew that they were needed to “do their part” in defeating Hitler—and they did.
The Bletchley Riddle, although it is “based on the real history of Bletchley Park, Britain’s top-secret World War II codebreaking center,” makes the whole setting and story much more exciting and romantic. (Fiction can do that.) Ruta Sepetys and Steve Sheinkin, both well known in YA literature circles, wrote this spy novel together, and the joint authorship shows. It’s a bit disjointed at times, but the two authors do tie up most all of the loose ends by the end of the story. Fourteen year old Lizzie Novis has lost her mother, Willa, a single parent who works for the U.S. Embassy in London. Willa went to Poland to help evacuate tens of U.S. Embassy there in anticipation of the Nazi invasion of Warsaw. And she didn’t come back. Everyone says that Willa is dead, that she most likely died in the invasion. But Lizzie is sure that Willa is still alive, and she’s determined to find her mother no matter what it takes.
I’ll let you read to find out how Lizzie ends up in Bletchley, with several hurried trips back to London. I’ll let you read about Lizzie’s older brother Jakob, and how he becomes the other major character in the story. And finally in the pages of the book, you can meet Lizzie’s new friends, Marion and Colin, and read about a little harmless romance that springs up as they all try to keep up with the irrepressible Lizzie and her quest to find Willa. It’s a book about lying and spying and secret-keeping and persistence in a time and place where all of those qualities, even the dishonesty, are necessary for survival.
But the story never becomes too thoughtful or deep. It’s barely believable that Lizzie can get away with all of the shenanigans that she pulls. And Jakob seems too befuddled to be as intelligent as he’s supposed to be. Maybe he’s a bit of an absent-minded professor at the ripe age of nineteen. Anyway, it’s a lark, but not to be taken seriously. And the minor characters—Alan Turing, Dilly Knox, Gordon Welchman—as well as the setting provide a good introduction to Bletchley Park and its importance to the British war effort and eventual victory.
I recommend both books for those teens who are interested in World War II and Bletchley Park and codes and codebreaking. Oh, both books spend a fair amount time talking about codes and ciphers and Enigma and how it worked and how the Enigma code was broken? Or deciphered? I can never keep the difference straight in my head between codes and ciphers, much decode or decipher anything. But you may have better skills than I do.
Across So Many Seas, the story of four twelve year old Sephardic Jewish girls from different time periods, felt very . . . educational. I didn’t mind the didactic tone of the story, and I was somewhat fascinated by the saga of the Sephardic Jewish experience from Spain to Turkey to Cuba to the United States (Miami). We tend to know and read more about Ashkenazi, Eastern European Jews and Judaism than we do about the Sephardic Jewish people, who came from Spain after the 1492 expulsion of the Jews under King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella (yes, Columbus’s sponsors). These Sephardic Jews spoke a Spanish-derived language called Ladino and either became conversos (converts to Catholicism) under threat of death, or left Spain as refugees, going to Italy and Turkey and other places to find freedom to practice their Jewish faith.
The first story in Across So Many Seas features Benvenida, a Jewish girl living in Toledo, Spain in 1492, during the Spanish Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews. Benvenida’s family is forced to leave Spain, and they end up living in Turkey where the sultan has promised them freedom of religion. Again the story feels as if the author has a lesson to teach: “Here’s a story, children, to teach you about your history and heritage. Listen, while I make it into a tale for your edification.” Benvenida, who speaks and thinks like a miniature adult, never seems like a real person, only a vehicle for the teaching of history. But still, I was interested enough in the history to keep reading.
The other three girls in the story are Reina (Turkey, 1921), Alegra (Cuba, 1961), and Paloma (Miami, FL, 2003). These three are grandmother, mother, and daughter, and their tales are full of more displacement and emigration, as each girl experiences her own story of travel across the seas. Only Paloma seems to have a stable home where she can make free choices for herself without having to labor under the prejudice of others and the expectations that her family has for proper Jewish girls.
The author, Ruth Behar, comes from both Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish ancestry. The book is based in part on the story of Ms. Behar’s Abuela, her paternal grandmother, who came to the United States via Turkey and Cuba and who was of Sephardic heritage. It’s a lovely tribute to Ms. Behar’s heritage and to her grandmother, and I enjoyed learning more about this stream of history. But be warned that the book is heavy on the history and light on believable characterization, dialogue, and plot.
When I first started reading The Tenth Mistake of Hank Hooperman, I thought, “Oh, no! Not another condescending middle grade fiction book full of bathroom humor!” On the very first page, we find out that eleven year old Hank, who is trying to potty train his little sister, Boo, would prefer his sister called him “Superman”. Instead, her affectionate nickname for her beloved older brother is “Pooperman.” However, Boo’s nickname for Hank turns out to be about the only “potty humor” in the book, and precocious little Boo is a delightful breath of freshness and innocence in a book that otherwise deals with some heavy subjects.
A week ago, Hank’s single mom left him in charge of Boo in an apartment with very little food or money. Hank has taken care of himself and Boo so far with no major errors, but now they are completely out of food and money. And the apartment manager is threatening to evict them. With no family to turn to and no idea where his mom could be, Hank takes Boo across town to the home of a stranger that his mom once mentioned. It may be a level 10 mistake, but what else can he do?
The stranger, Lou Ann Adler, turns out to be an old friend of Hank’s dead grandmother, and she takes them in–for now. But Hank has to find his mom, figure out why she abandoned them, and decide whether or not he can trust her to take of him and Boo in the future. Hank is a good kid, hyper-responsible, and deeply afraid of making a mistake that will ruin their lives. I won’t spoil the story, but there is a positive, hopeful ending, after a lot of trauma, anxiety, and dangerous situations have been resolved.
The Tenth Mistake of Hank Hooperman reminded me a bit of Gary B. Schmidt’s novels Okay for Now and Just Like That. All three of these books show good kids thrown into situations that are way too hard for their maturity levels. And in all three books the kids, the boys, are desperately trying to figure out what to do about their situation and which adults to trust. I’m not sure Choldenko is quite as good as Schmidt at showing the nuances and complexities of the situation, but she’s not bad. Hank Hooperman is a good, believable character, and I really, really sympathized with his plight and his desire to avoid both small and catastrophic mistakes.
Cautions: There’s an ongoing thread about Boo’s potty training, including the words “crap” and “poop”. Hank engages in a major deception, for what seem like good reasons at the time, and he pays the consequences. A female friend at Hank’s new school wants to be his girlfriend, and his male friends tease him about the possibility of kissing her.
I would recommend this one for sixth grade and up. The story portrays positive models of compassionate adult behavior as well as the fact that not all adults are trustworthy. Hank himself is a character to root for, even though he does make mistakes and wrong choices.
“Why doesn’t someone invent a way to know if you’re about to make a mistake? A Mistake-a-nator that would light up red if you’re about to mess up. I could use one of those.”
Sparrow Robinson is a nine year old Dennis the Menace or Ramona Quimby. She likes to dance and move and leap and play. She loves all of the cats that belong to Mrs. LaRose next door. Sparrow and her parents have just moved to a new house in a new town, and she has lots to say and lots of questions to ask. And she sometimes “gets carried away”, as her parents put it.
When Sparrow and Mrs. LaRose get carried way, dancing like butterflies, and Mrs. LaRose falls and breaks her hip, Sparrow is sure that it’s all her fault. The only thing she can do to try to make up for the fall is to take care of Mrs. LaRose’s cats, as she promised. But taking care of the cats, seven of them in all, leads to more complications, a few accidents, and even a big lie. How can Sparrow learn to control her actions and her tongue and make friends in this new place?
If you’re looking for stories for yourself or for your children about perfectly behaved little boys and and girls who would never tell a lie or an exaggeration, who always think before they act, and who never, ever argue with their parents, this book is not the right book for you. Sparrow is a normal nine year old, maybe a little over-active (no diagnoses, please!) And the other characters in the book are refreshingly ordinary, too. Sparrow’s parents are practitioners of “positive parenting”, but as with any parenting technique, the positive doesn’t always stay so positive. When Sparrow sincerely apologizes for one of the mishaps she gets into, her new friend Paloma doesn’t immediately forgive and forget, although she does come around eventually. Some neighbors invite Sparrow and her parents to go to church with them, and they go–to a normal, somewhat boring (for Sparrow) church service and a decent little Sunday School class. It’s good to read about regular kids and parents and neighbors doing regular stuff in an ordinary community.
There’s nothing profound here–just Sparrow being Sparrow, lots of cats, a bit of trouble over broken cups and an inadvertent lie, making new friends, and learning to deal with the ups and downs of life. Kids who are fans of Ramona and Clementine and Clarice Bean will enjoy Sparrow Robinson. And it’s short, clocking in at 178 pages, and new, published in 2024. I loved it.
Read for the 1964 Project, and because I wanted to revisit The Three Investigators series that I remember from my childhood.
The Secret of Terror Castle is the first installment in The Three Investigators series of mystery detective stories, also known as Alfred Hitchcock and The Three Investigators. The original series was published from 1964 to 1987 and comprised 43 finished books, written by at least five different authors and illustrated by a multiplicity of illustrators over time. Robert Arthur, who invented the series and had the idea of using Alfred Hitchcock as a character and a marketing ploy, wrote the first nine books in the series as well as Book #11. After Mr. Arthur died in 1969, subsequent adventures were written by various other authors hired by Random House, the publisher. All of Mr. Arthur’s books and some of the others were given a fictional introduction and epilogue said to be written by the famous movie director Alfred Hitchcock (but actually written by the author himself). Hitch also appears as a minor character in at least the first book.
It is Mr. Hitchcock who reluctantly gives the three boys of The Three Investigators Detective Agency their first case: they are tasked with finding a truly haunted house for Hitchcock to use as a setting to film his upcoming movie. The boys discover a deserted mansion called Terror Castle, “located in a narrow little canyon up above Hollywood, called Black Canyon.” And they proceed to investigate to see if the castle is really haunted by the ghost of Stephen Terrill, a star of horror pictures from the silent film era.
The Three Investigators are Jupiter “Jupe” Jones, Peter “Pete” Crenshaw, and Bob Andrews. They are young teenagers, about 13 or 14 years old, who maintain their headquarters and crime/photographic lab hidden away in the back of Jupiter’s uncle’s junkyard. Jupiter is the chief detective with a knack for figuring out riddles and puzzles, Pete is the athletic brawn of the trio, and Bob is the researcher and information guy. (Bob works in a library!) The three boys are too young to drive, but they have the use of a car (gold-plated Rolls-Royce) and a chauffeur (Worthington) that Jupiter won in a contest. And their trusty bicycles come in handy for transportation, too.
The whole book gave me “Scooby Doo” vibes. (For the uninitiated, Scooby Doo is a cartoon series from the 1970’s.) Terror Castle seems to be haunted with some very spooky events and activities, but of course, the ghosts and scary incidents and eerie sounds turn out to have perfectly natural explanations. For those who are worried, there’s nothing occult-ish in any of the first 20 or so books in this series, although there is plenty of “woo-hoo” that seems as if it might be the result of spirits and ghosts and fortune tellers—until Jupe and his buddies figure out the real source of the seemingly supernatural phenomena.
Although these books were written for and marketed to middle school boys, I enjoyed them as a ten to twelve year old myself. The books are from an earlier time, when boys (and girls) were free to roam the community they lived in, talk to adults, and become involved in all sorts of exciting but fairly harmless adventures. The boy characters are unsophisticated by today’s standards, not having been exposed to the wonders of the internet, but they also display a vocabulary, a deductive skill, and an intrepid spirit that would put most 21st century boys to shame.
Unfortunately, my hard cover copy of The Secret of Terror Castle disappeared a couple of years ago, and the one I have how is a 1985 revised paperback edition. Because Mr. Hitchcock died in 1980, Random House decided to replace him with a fictional British movie director named Reginald Clarke (in this first book). And then to confuse us all, I suppose, Reginald Clarke turns into some other guy named Hector Sebastian in Books 2-30. I hope those are the only changes made in the revised editions, but I’m not sure, and I don’t like the jettisoning of Alfred Hitchcock as a character. I just switched the introduction and the cameo appearances of “Reginald Clarke” to “Alfred Hitchcock” in my mind, but I wish I hadn’t needed to do so,
Ratty Barclay isn’t supposed to be a four foot tall rodent. He was born a boy, but something, maybe the Barclay Curse, turned him into a rat soon after his birth. And now Ratty wants to come out of hiding and somehow break the curse. He’s in hiding because people generally hate rats, especially human-sized talking rats. And his uncle Max has protected Ratty from the world of rat-hating humans for almost thirteen years, but Ratty thinks he can break the curse if he can return to Fairweather Island and the Barclay family estate where it all began.
What Ratty doesn’t know is that on Fairweather Island, indeed on the Barclay Estate itself, lives Edweena Gup, granddaughter of the manor’s groundskeeper and Ratcatcher Extraordinaire. Edweena is obsessed with rats, even though the island has no rats and she herself has never had the opportunity to catch or kill one. She has certainly studied them, gathered the tools for exterminating them, and considers herself the heir of her great-great-great grandmother’s legacy and skill at rat-catching.
Will Ratty be able to break the Barclay Curse? Will Edweena find Ratty and trap him before he can? Will something catastrophic happen to Uncle Max on Fairweather Island? What is the Barclay Curse? Why have so many Barclays died in mysterious circumstances? Why is Edweena so afraid of rats? Why is Ratty a rat when he was born a boy to human parents?
Here’s where the spoilers come into this review. If you don’t want to know the answers to the above questions, or at least some of the answers, don’t read any further. It’s a good little story, entertaining and clever and clean of everything except rats, lots of rats, and I recommend it for those who enjoy quirky. If you don’t mind introducing the idea of a family curse (it’s fiction, guys!), Ratty is good, wholesome reading for nine to twelve year olds who enjoy odd little stories about unusual characters and events, with a little humor thrown into the mix.
However as an adult, living in the 2024 world of gender dysphoria and identity confusion, I couldn’t help looking for signs that this simple story had a hidden meaning. Is Ratty’s discomfort with his rat body an allegory for body dysmorphia? Does Ratty’s desire to break the curse and change back into a human boy with a human body mirror the desires of many young people nowadays to change their bodies and to become something they are not? I don’t think kids will read any of this into the story, but I’m not a child. And I’ve seen too many children’s books lately that have a barely hidden agenda.
Well, long story short, here’s the spoiler: at the end of the book, Ratty decides that the Barclay Curse is not what made him a rat, and he accepts the body he has and his rat habits. He stays a rat, albeit a really large and somewhat human-like rat (R.O.U.S?). We never find out how or why Ratty became a rat. So, if the book was intended to support in some way the gender confusion of this decade, it doesn’t work that way. I think it’s just a quirky story, reminiscent of The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins in its inexplicable mysteriousness, about a rat and a family curse and an island and a girl who learns that friendship and firsthand knowledge can overcome fear.
This historical fiction novel, published in 1964, is set on the island of Rhodes during the siege of Rhodes in 1522. The Knights of St. John, or Knights Hospitallers, whose headquarters is on the Greek island of Rhodes, are besieged by the Ottoman Turks under the leadership of Suleiman the Magnificent. The battle will decide who will control trade and commerce in the eastern Mediterranean Sea for the immediate future as well as its being a religious war between the Muslim Turks and the Christian (Catholic) Knights.
Our protagonist, Jeffrey Rohan, is an English merchant’s son, fourteen years old, and an escaped former slave of the Sultan Suleiman. After his escape from Constantinople, Jeffrey ends up by accident on the island Rhodes and finds that he cannot leave since the city of Rhodes is under siege. Jeffrey takes solace in his prayers and his belief in the courage and piety of the Knights Hospitallers, but he is also aware, in a way that his friends are not, of the strength and overwhelming numbers of the Turkish force.
I found this story to be intriguing, partly because I didn’t know how it would end. I didn’t know much about the Knights Hospitallers, and I certainly didn’t know whether the Turks or the Knights would have the victory in this particular battle and siege. I would love to discuss the ending, but I won’t spoil it for you. Suffice it to say that Jeffrey is brought to question many of his beliefs and presuppositions over the course of a very long and wearing siege, and yet in the end his faith in God and in chivalry are validated in an unusual way.
This 1964 novel is still fresh and relevant today. The attitudes in the novel are those of sixteenth century people: the Knights are sworn to kill all Muslim infidels, and they do so without mercy. (No gore, just plainly stated facts.) The Turkish besiegers are more inclined to kill those that they must, but rather to enslave and tax the population if they can —and to require allegiance to Suleiman and to the Islamic religion. These are all very medieval attitudes. Now we are trying as a Western post-Christian civilization to come to some sort of compromise and peaceful co-existence with the Muslim world, and they are what? I’m not sure, and this children’s/YA novel certainly didn’t have the answers to our modern problems. However, it did make me think about the complicated and fraught relationship between Westerners and Christians and Muslims and Easterners over the course of history.
Anyway, Knights Besieged would be an excellent introduction to the history of Middle East and the Mediterranean in the late Middle Ages and a great springboard for discussion of past and current events in that part of the world. You will probably want to learn more about the Ottoman Empire, the Knights of St John, and the history of Europe and the Middle East in general after reading the story. I certainly did. And some boys will just be in it for the war and the knights and the intrigue. That’s fine, too. Not every work of historical fiction has to be a history lesson in disguise, even if it is.
Egan, TIm. Dodsworth in New York. Houghton Mifflin, 2007.
This easy reader with four short chapters is the first in a series of easy readers about Dodsworth and his friend, the duck. The duck is never given a name, and I thought when I read some of the other Dodsworth books that Dodsworth was a mole. He still looks like a mole to me, but I am informed by reliable sources that Dodsworth is, indeed, a mouse. (I can still think of him as a mole. I prefer moles to mice.)
Character identity confusion aside, Dodsworth first encounters the duck in this book in the first chapter at Hodges’ Cafe. The duck is at first Hodges’ duck, and he’s a crazy, pancake-throwing, runaway duck who stows away in Dodsworth’s trunk. Dodsworth is on his way to New York City, from thence to embark on a journey to see the world. But Dodsworth can’t get rid of the crazy duck who becomes the key to adventure in a series of books: Dodsworth in Rome, Dodsworth in Paris, Dodsworth in London, and Dodsworth in Tokyo.
Dodsworth is the straight man in this world-traveling comedy duo. The duck is a rather bizarre comedian who gets lost a lot. I happen to think that easy readers are often perfect for reading aloud to precocious preschoolers, and that idea was confirmed when I loaned these Dodsworth books to my then-three year old grandson. He was smitten by the stories and by the humor. He got the jokes. And we had to read Dodsworth over and over and over again. He got a kendama (from Dodsworth in Tokyo) for his fourth birthday, along with his own set of Dodsworth books.
I read these books out of order, all the while mistaking Dodsworth the mouse for a mole. But I thoroughly enjoyed them anyway. I would recommend beginning with Dodsworth in New York because New York is the beginning of this zany journey. Yankee Stadium. The Brooklyn Bridge. The Statue of Liberty. Radio City Music Hall. And one crazy duck. What’s not to like?
Dodsworth in New York has been added to the updated edition of Picture Book Preschool for the week on United States–Travel.
Lord, John Vernon. The Giant Jam Sandwich. With verses by Janet Burroway. Houghton Mifflin, 1972, 2000.
The setting is the English village of Itching Down. The characters are a full cast of English villagers: Mayor Muddlenut, Baker Bap, Farmer Seed, and more. The problem is wasps, millions of wasps.
They drove the picnickers away, They chased the farmers from their hay, They stung Lord Swell on his fat bald pate, They dived and hummed and buzzed and ate, And the noisy, nasty nuisance grew Till the villagers cried, “What can we do?”
Tis’ a puzzlement . . . until Bap the Baker proposes a giant strawberry jam trap. Funny and clever at the same time, this tall tale in rhyme plays out with grace and humor and ties up all the loose ends on the final page.
John Vernon Lord is an award-winning illustrator and a professor of illustration at the University of Brighton in England. Janet Burroway is an American author who collaborated on The Giant Jam Sandwich by taking Lord’s story and putting it into verse. The illustration style is not exactly my favorite: it’s very busy with lots of activity and caricature characters. The pictures feel British somehow, maybe because the architecture of the village and the look of the countryside is very British or European. Nevertheless, perusing those illustrations would give readers, and listeners, a lot of details to explore as they absorb the rollicking story of how the villagers of Itching Down disposed of four million wasps, give or take a few.
This one is in print, but only in paperback. It’s been popular enough that it’s been in print since 1972. And composer Philip Wharton wrote a narrated orchestral work based on the book. Watch out Peter and the Wolf–here comes The Giant Jam Sandwich! Maybe readers and fans could make up their own tunes for Burroway’s verses and sing the story.
