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A String in the Harp by Nancy Bond

Apr5

A String in the Harp was a Newbery Honor book in 1977. (Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry was the Newbery Award winner in 1977.) A String in the Harp is a long book, with lots of descriptive passages that evoke a sense of setting in the Welsh countryside. Mrs. Bond, an American, wrote her novel after spending two years going to library school in Wales. In fact, Wales itself, its scenery and its history, is almost the central character in the book. One critic said, “Without the traditional Welsh materials, A String in the Harp would be just another adolescent problem novel.” Well, without the entire setting in Wales, there would actually be no novel at all. It made me want to visit Wales, in spite of the cold and the incessant rain that are emphasized in the book.

The story is about the Morgan family: an American professor and his three children, Jennifer, Peter, and Becky. The story is written in third person, but mostly told from the point of view of Jennifer, age 15, and Peter, age 12. The Morgan family has moved to Aberstwyth, Wales for a year for Professor Morgan to teach and pursue research at a university there, leaving Jennifer behind with her aunt so that she can continue high school. As the story opens, Jennifer is coming to join her family in Wales for the winter/Christmas holidays.

There are, of course, problems to be overcome. Peter hates Wales and everything about it. Becky, age 10, just wants the family to be happy. Professor Morgan is distant and impatient with Peter’s inability to adjust to living in Wales. Jennifer is unsure of what her new role in the family is since they are all trying desperately to learn to be a family without their mother who died in a car accident just before the Morgans moved to Wales. All of the problems in the novel have a lot to do with the grief process that each of the Morgans is going through, but the mother is only mentioned a few times in the course of this long novel. We never get to know her, really, and you get the sense that grief is about forgetting and moving on somehow.

Into all of this rather chaotic family emotion and misunderstanding comes a magic artifact, a harp key. Peter finds the key and becomes attached to it, wearing it around his neck on a string as a sort of talisman. He believes that the key is showing him, even taking him into, the past and the life of the sixth century bard and poet, Taliesin. The novel borrows from C.S. Lewis’s with the children, especially Peter, moving into and out of another time and place. At one point a Welsh professor friend is talking to Jen and Becky about whether or not Peter has imagined all of his stories about Taliesin, and he says to them, “What do they teach in your American schools?” The entire conversation is quite reminiscent of the Professor and the children, Peter, Susan, and Edmund, when the professor asks, “Why don’t they teach logic at these schools?” and later, “I wonder what they do teach them in these schools.” Only the Welsh professor is asking more, “Why don’t they teach wonder or magic at these (American) schools?”

There are a couple of minor elements to the story that didn’t bother me, but someone else may find them problematic. The characters curse sometimes, even the children, mild curses, mostly damn and hell. I wouldn’t have expected to find cursing in a children’s book published in 1976, but there it is. And Jen at about the halfway point in the novel offers to stay on in Wales and take charge of the household, cooking and cleaning and mothering her siblings. It’s taken for granted that someone (some female?) has to be at least a parttime caretaker and homemaker for the Morgans, and for the first semester of the school year they’ve had a local woman paid to clean house and cook meals for them. One critic called this minor plot element “sexist.”

There’s usually a place in any good book where I “fall into” the story, so to speak. I am immersed and intrigued to find out how the story will play out and how it will end and what truths and affinities I will find along the way. For A String in the Harp, it took a while for me to fall in, but eventually, I did. I suppose it’s a matter of wanting to know how the story and the relationships of the various characters will finally be resolved. I think this story of family disorder turning to order, and coming of age, and magical occurrences without clear boundaries or explanations, would be a hard sell to twenty-first century readers who are used to more action and less atmosphere. But anyone who loves Narnia or Tolkien or Welsh mythology or Arthurian legend might really appreciate this small gem of a book.

When the Sky Falls by Phil Earle

Mar31

2022 Middle Grade Fiction: When the Sky Falls by Phil Earle.

I received a review copy of this book, originally published in Great Britain in 2021, and scheduled for publication in April of 2022 in the U.S. The tagline on the front of my ARC says, “Friendship can come from unexpected places,” and that line does summarize at least one of the themes of this story. In 1940, with his parents unavailable and his grandmother unable to control him, twelve year old Joseph Palmer isn’t to London (instead of being evacuated out of the city) to live with his grandmother’s old friend, Mrs. F.

Joseph is filled with anger, rebellious and quick to take offense from the hurts he has sustained in his short life. When he finds out that Mrs. F. is the sole proprietor of a run-down, war torn zoo in the heart of the city, with most of the animals either sent away or barely surviving, Joseph is even more confused and angry with his grandmother for sending him away, with his father for leaving to go to war, with Mrs. F. for her unyielding personality, with the whole world and the war and “Herr Hitler” and just about everything else, including the silver back gorilla called Adonis.

Joseph continues throughout most of the book to be a prickly and rage-filled character, although we do learn some of the underlying reasons for Joseph’s anger and inability to trust. And just as Adonis is not a tame gorilla (there is no such thing), Joseph is not so much tamed as educated, learning that his impulsive anger and rage do not really serve him well as he navigates the city and the zoo during a war that takes and takes and takes away all that is good and hopeful. Mrs. F. says, at one point in the story, “I hate this war. All of it. All it does is take.”

The story is good. Joseph does grow and learn over the course of the book, in a believable story arc that ultimately ends in both tragedy and hope. But . . . the writing and the details felt a little off in some way. Rough. There’s some language, using God’s name in vain and a few curses sprinkled through, but that wasn’t the real problem. Joseph nurses his rage and anger over and over, and I just couldn’t see where it went, what it really was that redeemed him or relieved him of his fear and hatred. Mrs. F. says more than once that there’s something good deep down inside Joseph. Joseph and Adonis do form a connection, or perhaps even a friendship. And the friendship and loyalty of Mrs. F. and others with whom Joseph lives and works become important to him.

Nevertheless, even with a “four years later” epilogue chapter at the end, the story felt unresolved. I think it would be absolutely traumatizing for animal lovers in the younger end of the middle grades. Joseph’s age, twelve, is a good minimum age for reading this harrowing, but somewhat hopeful, tale. It is a war story, and maybe it would be helpful for middle grade and young adult readers who are having to deal with the horrors of war, at least in the news, again, in Ukraine and elsewhere.

I’m ambivalent. It’s certainly not James Herriot and All Creatures Great and Small, but it might resonate with readers who need something a bit more grim and gritty, but still with a glimmer of hope.

The Lion’s Paw by Robb White

Jan1

I got this book for Christmas, and it was the last book I read in 2021. Author Robb White wrote for magazines and for television (several episodes of Perry Mason) and the movies, but he is best known for his 24 novels for young people. His books would be classified as “Young Adult” nowadays. Although they are full of adventure and feature somewhat rebellious and independent heroes, by today’s standards they probably wouldn’t be quite edgy enough for the YA market. I have read four of his books now, and I like them very much.

The Lion’s Paw is the tale of three runaway children who sail fifteen year old Ben’s father’s boat through the inland waterways of south Florida, down the Atlantic coast all the way to Captiva Island in the Gulf of Mexico. Ben is running away from a guardian who wants to sell his father’s sailboat because the uncle/guardian believes that Ben’s father, a Navy sailor, is dead. (The book was originally published in 1946, so Ben’s dad is assumed either dead or captured by the Japanese in the Pacific during WWII.) The other two runaways, Penny and her little brother Nick, have escaped from an orphanage. The orphanage doesn’t sound exactly cruel, just sterile, regimented, and uncaring. The story begins with Penny and Nick deciding that that they aren’t likely to be adopted by anyone decent and they just can’t stand life in the orphanage anymore. So they run away and meet up with Ben, and off they go!

The story includes tropical storms, bounty hunters, alligator encounters, near escapes, and the hunt for a seashell called the Lion’s Paw. Ben is convinced that if he can find a Lion’s Paw for his dad’s seashell collection, then his dad will come home. The story itself is beguiling with three plucky, courageous, and determined children facing both the dangers of sailing and surviving on the ocean and the strictures of the adult world which threatens to put an end to their freedom and adventure. There are couple of caveats: the children and an adult in the story use slang to refer to the Japanese (“Japs” and “Japoons”), and at one point the children use some potentially deadly weapons to fight a man who wants to turn them in to the searchers for a reward. Being prepared to use deadly force to counter an intruder would probably be disallowed or at least disapproved of if the book were written and published in the twenty-first century.

Still, I thought it was an exciting story with some brave and admirable characters. Both boys and girls, anyone over the age of twelve or so, would enjoy the tale and be inspired, not to run away from home or go out alligator hunting alone, I hope, but to “do hard things” and face difficulties with courage and ingenuity.

The 6 Best Middle Grade Fantasy and Science Fiction Novels I Read In 2021

Dec30

I only read 14 middle grade fantasy/scince fiction books this year. So these are the best of those I read.

Published in 2021:

  • Once Upon a Camel by Kathi Appelt. My favorite middle grade fiction book of 2021.
  • The Beatryce Prophecy by Kate DiCamillo. My second favorite. At the monastery of the Order of the Chronicles of Sorrowing. Brother Edik finds the girl, Beatryce, curled in a stall, wracked with fever, covered in dirt and blood, and holding on to the ear of Answelica the goat. (Answelica is the stubborn star of the book.) It turns out that the king’s men are searching for Beatryce, but Beatryce doesn’t remember who she is or why the king wants to capture her. Can she elude the search long enough to recover her own story?
  • Stowaway by John David Anderson. A little bit Star Wars and a little bit Ender’s Game or even Dune, Stowaway takes space opera into the middle grade fiction genre and does it well. When Leo is separated from his father and his older brother and lost in space with a bunch of space pirates, he truly doesn’t know whom to trust. But he’s determined to find his father who has been kidnapped (maybe?) by the enemy Djarik soldiers. Can he trust the pirates to help him? Are the Aykari, Earth’s allies in the universal war to control the valuable mineral ventasium, even trustworthy? Can Leo be smart enough to get to his father beforetime runs out, and can he find his brother, too?
  • Children of the Fox by Kevin Sands. First book in a projected series.
  • The Accidental Apprentice (Wilderlore) by Amanda Foody. Also the first in a series.

Published before 2021:

10 Best Adult Novels I Read in 2021

Dec28
  • Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry (re-read)
  • That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis (re-read)
  • The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
  • The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham
  • Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
  • His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik
  • The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson
  • Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  • Reunion by Fred Uhlman
  • Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (re-read)

First there are the re-reads: Hannah Coulter, That Hideous Strength, and Mansfield Park. Hannah Coulter was just as good as I remembered it. This fictional memoir of an old woman remembering her life and the lives of her children made me think about my grown children and how their lives have taken such different turns and directions from what I expected. Russell Moore writes about “why you should read Hannah Coulter”, and I second his motion.

“Most people now are looking for a ‘better place’, which means that a lot of them will end up in a worse one. . . . There is no ‘better place’ than this, not in this world. and it is by the place we’ve got, and our love for it, and keeping of it, that this world is joined to heaven.”

~Hannah Coulter, p. 83

I re-read all three of Lewis’s space trilogy books this year: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. I must say that I enjoyed That Hideous Strength the most of the three, whereas previously I thought Perelandra was my favorite. That Hideous Strength is just so prophetic. How did Lewis know that men and women would become so confused about gender roles or that mixing Christianese (talk) with pagan concepts would become such a problem? Or that many would move past naturalistic materialism straight into the occult? Just like 1984 by George Orwell, which I understand was written partially as a response to Lewis’s book, That Hideous Strength is full of images and ideas that speak directly to today’s issues: the manipulation of the press/media, police brutality and accountability, psychological techniques used for rehabilitation, crime and punishment, education, gender roles, procreation or the lack thereof, and much more. I read That Hideous Strength with Cindy Rollins’ Patreon group, and we had lots of good discussion about all of these ideas.

The Death of Ivan Ilych and Reunion were two more books I read along with the Literary Life podcast folks (Angelina Stanford, Thomas Brooks, and Cindy Rollins), and I’m sure I enjoyed them extra-specially because of the podcast discussions. Both books are novellas, rather than full length novels, and both are well worth your time.

“He felt that he was trapped in such a mesh of lies that it was difficult to make sense out of anything. Everything she did for him was done strictly for her sake; and she told him she was doing for her sake what she actually was, making this seem so incredible that he was bound to take it to mean just the reverse.”

~The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham was a book read back in February, about a woman torn between fidelity to a seemingly loveless marriage and adultery with a seemingly exciting and passionate man. The keyword is “seemingly.” I didn’t review this book, but here’s a review at Educating Petunia that includes thoughts on the movie version as well. I think I’d like to watch the movie sometime, and I was reminded of this reading project that I’d like to restart in 2022. So many projects, so little persistence.

“You know, my dear child, that one cannot find peace in work or in pleasure, in the world or in a convent, but only in one’s soul.”

~The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham

Our Mutual Friend was my Dickens novel for the year, and although it’s not my favorite Dickens, any book by Dickens stands head and shoulders above the pack. I also watch duh mini-series of OMF and enjoyed that quite a bit. I plan to read Hard Times (with the Literary Life folks) and maybe re-read David Copperfield (my favorite Dickens novel) in 2022.

“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of it for anyone else.”

Our Mutual Friend, Mr. Rokesmith

I discovered Naomi Novik’s fantasy novels early in 2021, both Spinning Silver and her Temeraire series about Napoleonic era dragons and men working together to defeat Napoleon and remake the world, especially England, as a comfortable and welcoming place for friendly working dragons. These book are just fun, and if you like adult fantasy, with some non-explicit hanky-panky going on (not the focus of the novels), then I recommend these.

I also read Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive trilogy in early 2021 while I was coughing with Covid, beginning with The Way of Kings. It was good, absorbing, with lots of good character development and plot twists that I didn’t see coming. This author is so prolific, more than thirty, mostly huge, sprawling novels published, that I will never read all of his books, but I may dip back in again to his Cosmere (fantasy world), from time to time. The following quote was particularly timely:

“There are worse things . . . than a disease. When you have one, it reminds you that you’re alive. Makes you fight for what you have. When the disease has run its course, normal healthy life seems wonderful by comparison.”

Brightness Shallon in The Way of Kings, p. 506

Fanny Price and Mansfield Park. I knew I had read Mansfield Park before, but all I could remember was the play-within-a-novel that turns into a disaster. I initially found both the book and the protagonist somewhat lackluster and plodding, but the more I read, and the more I listened to The Literary Life podcast episodes about the book, the more I grew to love Fanny. I can only aspire to the humility and servanthood that she exemplifies. (Aspiring to humility is something of an oxymoron, but it actually makes sense in a Chestertonian sort of way.) Anyway, I would like to be able to keep my mouth shut more often as Fanny does and to think of myself less and others more. I think that sort of attitude comes by practice, though, and it’s hard to be willing to practice humility.

So, what are the themes that emerge from all this fictional reading? Endure hardship patiently. And brighten the corner where you are. If I could learn these two lessons, deep in my soul, by means of story or situational experience, I’d be, well, certainly better, farther along the path to virtue. Not that I read to become virtuous, but stories do seep into the soul.

What fiction formed your life in 2021? What novel(s) will you be reading in 2022?

2021 MGF: Problem Novels

Dec14

Problem novels are those in which a prevailing social problem, such as racial or class prejudice, mental illness, poverty, or something else, is dramatized through its effect on the characters of a novel. These kinds of novels are popular in middle grade realistic fiction because they are supposed to help children understand and cope with these issues and problems. I dunno. Sometimes the story itself transcends the problem-of-the-week genre, sometimes not.

Anyway, I read, and for the most part enjoyed, the following problem novels published in 2021:

Carry Me Home by Janet Fox. Issue: Homelessness. Twelve year old Lulu and her little sister Serena are living in a Suburban parked in a trailer park with their Daddy. Mama died of cancer. When Daddy doesn’t come to pick them up from after school care one day, Lulu must take care of Serena by herself while keeping the secret of their homelessness and abandonment from the authorities since Lulu is sure that if anyone finds out about their plight the girls will be separated and never find their Daddy again. The chapters alternate between “now” and “before” and “way before”, telling about Lulu’s struggle to provide for herself and her sister and about the family’s backstory of how they came to be homeless and alone. At 193 pages, it’s short, sweet, and ultimately encouraging in showing that there are people in the world who can be trusted and who will help.

Breathing Underwater by Sarah Allen. Issue: Depression, helping a family member who is mentally ill. Thirteen year old Olivia is sure that this road trip from Tennessee to California along with the photographs that Olivia will capture with her new camera along the way will be the keys to helping her older sister Ruth remember the happiness that the sisters used to share. Taking pictures and making memories as well as unearthing the time capsule the two sisters buried years before just must be enough to shake Ruth out of her depression and make her smile. The trip doesn’t quite turn out the way Olivia plans, and I must admit to mixed feelings about this book that didn’t turn out exactly the way I wanted. The theme is personal for me since I have family members who deal with depression, and like Olivia, I’m not sure how to go about loving or caring for or even talking to them sometimes. So, while I didn’t find this story to be, well, depressing, I also didn’t find any great revelations here. I did identify with Olivia and her desire to help as well as her fear of saying the wrong thing or not saying the right thing. And I did want to shake the negativity and moodiness and self-destructive behaviors right out of Ruth (not a solution, I know).

Paradise on Fire by Jewell Parker Rhodes. Issue: Trauma recovery. Aduago (A-DAH-go, Addy, for short) is haunted by her incomplete memories of the fire that she escaped as a young child but that killed her parents. Her grandmother guardian sends Addy to a wilderness summer camping program out west that is supposed to introduce black inner city teens to the joys and dangers of living close to nature. I hated the writing style in this novel. The sentences are short and choppy and fragmentary. Lots of sentence fragments. Survival skills. Addy is growing. Then comes the fire. (You get the idea.) But the story itself, inspired by the Camp Fire in 2018 that destroyed the town of Paradise, California, is compelling. If you can get used to the way it’s written, you might really like this book, especially if you like survival stories.

Boy, Everywhere by A.M. Dassu and World In Between by Kenan Trebincevic. Issue: refugee resettlement. Boy, Everywhere “chronicles the harrowing journey taken from Syria to the UK by Sami and his family, from privilege to poverty, across countries and continents, from a smuggler’s den in Turkey to a prison in Manchester, England.” World In Between, based on the author’s own experiences, tells about Kenan’s journey from Bosnia to the United States. Both books are decently written, worth reading to get different insights into the refugee experience. But neither book is nearly as memorable as last year’s Everything Sad Is Untrue by Daniel Nayeri.

Playing the Cards You’re Dealt by Varian Johnson. Issues: gambling addiction, family secrets. I feel as if Varian Johnson is a good writer who just hasn’t quite hit his stride. This story of a boy, Anthony–Ant for short, who has a family legacy to uphold in the annual community spades tournament is good, but just not great. (Spades is a card game, by the way.) The reveal about the story’s narrator at the end of the book is clever, and Ant is a believable and lovable character. It’s a lot like Louis Sachar’s book, The Cardturner, but I liked Sachar’s book better because it didn’t feature a problem-of-the-week to be solved.

2021 MGF: Children of the Fox by Kevin Sands

Nov19

Warning: this book ends with the main characters setting off on a new quest to save a life. So, it’s the beginning of a series, the Thieves of Shadow Novels, and although the story itself is tied up in a somewhat satisfying way, the ending is only a beginning.

That said, I enjoyed Children of the Fox. It reminded me of Megan Whalen Turner’s Thief series, and I would definitely recommend Children of the Fox to fans of Turner’s novels. If references to pagan gods, in this case Shuna the Fox Spirit and Artha the Bear Spirit, and spooky magic mediated by a jeweled Eye, are bothersome to you, you won’t like this story at all. I take these things as story, not as invitations to the occult, but your convictions may be different.

A group of children are hired to steal the powerful magical artifact, The Eye, from the palace of the most powerful sorcerer in the country because the adults have failed to even get close, and this heist can only be performed by children. The team consists of Callan, the gaffer or conman, Oran, the muscle, Meriel, the knife-thrower and charmer, Gareth, the scholar, Lachlan, the scrounger, and Foxtail, a masked and mute mystery girl who can climb walls and infiltrate fortresses. As well as being skilled at thievery, the children are all survivors of trauma, and that means that learning to trust each other and work as a team may be the hardest part of the job.

Why does Mr. Solomon, the children’s recruiter and employer, want The Eye? Why is he willing to pay so much money to get it? How did the adult thieves who already tried to steal The Eye fail? Why did one of those adult thieves lose his sanity in the attempt? How can each of the children use his or her particular skills to contribute to a successful heist? Can the team encounter and deal with magic without getting burned? And what will they do with all that money if they do succeed?

Kevin Sands, author of the Blackthorn Key Adventures (I read the first book in this series, but decided not to continue), has written an intriguing start to a new fantasy adventure series. I’m looking forward to the next book in the series, Seekers of the Fox, due to be published in 2022.

2021 MGF: In a Flash by Donna Jo Napoli

Nov11

I’ve enjoyed Donna Jo Napoli’s books in the past; the author blurb says she’s published more than eighty books for children in her long career. Most of the ones I’ve read have been fairy tale and folk tale retellings (The Wager and Zel) or historical adventure tales (Alligator Bayou and North and Song of the Magdalene). Ms. Napoli, a professor of linguistics and social justice at Swarthmore College, is a good writer. Her books tend to fall toward the upper end of the middle grade fiction age group, maybe even pushing into young adult. In a Flash has a child narrator/protagonist, eight years old at the beginning of the story, but the subject matter and setting, the horrible plight of two Italian sisters surviving on their own in WWII Japan (1940-1946), is harrowing enough to call for some maturity in the reader. I was appalled by the suffering that SImona and her little sister Carolina undergo, and I’m a grown up who knew what to expect when the children, toward the end of the story, end up in the city of Hiroshima.

Because the chapter headings have dates affixed at the beginning and the book is written in first person from Simona’s point of view, I thought at first that the author was trying to pretend that this was SImona’s diary or journal. However, the writing isn’t a child’s writing, and the story is told mostly in present tense. Neither of those choices works for a diary entry. So, I soon realized that the dates were just there to assist the reader in knowing how much time had passed between chapters and where the children were in terms of age and in regard to the war. I found the story fascinating, a little slow-moving at first, but the details about life in Tokyo and in Japan as a whole were vivid and enlightening. The cultural differences between Japanese manners, language, and expectations and Italian cultural mores manifest themselves through the eyes of two little girls who struggle to live as the Japanese do while remembering that they are also Italians.

As I indicated, the book doesn’t shy away from the gruesome details of the starvation, fear, political repression, and sheer misery and trauma of living in wartorn Japan, especially as hated Westerners, Italians who were at first welcomed as friends of the Japanese, then despised as traitors after Italy’s surrender to the Allies. The suffering of the common people of Japan, as well as the choice of some of them to resist the suicidal “patriotism” required of them, are also portrayed in the story.

Because of all the suffering and bombing and starvation and imprisonment, the novel read like a Holocaust story, but with a very different setting. I would recommend In a Flash for mature young people who have been reading about the horrors of World War II as a different perspective and view of the atrocities and difficulties of that time.

2021 MGF: Playing the Cards You’re Dealt by Varian Johnson

Nov9

Ten year old Anthony Joplin (Ant for short) has a family reputation to uphold: he needs to win the junior division of the annual spades tournament, just like his brother Aaron and his dad before him. When Ant’s best friend and spades partner, Jamal. gets in a fight and gets grounded, Ant needs a new partner. And he has a an idea of who that could be: the new girl, Shirley, from Texas.

Unfortunately for Ant and Shirley, there’s a lot more happening in Ant’s family and at school than just preparations for the spades tournament. Ant’s dad is struggling with the losing business in his accounting firm, the kids at school are teasing Ant for partnering with a girl, Jamal is talking trash and being plain mean, and Ant just wants everything to settle down and let him play his best game. And when Dad asks Ant to keep a big secret, who can Ant talk to? His brother Aaron who’s away at school? Or Jamal? Or his new friend Shirley?

Varian Johnson tells a good story about a Black family in crisis, but also a family that’s strong enough to deal with the problems they face. Ant’s dad is struggling with more than just work and finances, and while the gambling and alcohol issues that Dad has are dealt with compassionately, the Joplin family (and ultimately the author) still hold Dad responsible for recognizing his problems and getting help to deal with them. Ant has to face his own issues of wanting to be liked and recognized more than he wants to be a friend sometimes, but he eventually realizes that his dad’s problems are not something that Ant can be responsible for or solve.

I liked the book. There is a bit of a ghostly presence in the background of the story, a narrator who pops into the story off and on, but he’s not too intrusive. And there’s a lot of strategy for playing spades embedded in to the story, which I enjoyed but it may be off-putting to some who are not so familiar with the card game. Overall, it’s a good solid novel about playing cards and family secrets and learning how to deal.

2021 MGF: Sisters of the Neversea by Cynthia Leitich Smith

Nov6

This take-off on Barrie’s Peter Pan with Native American characters (to correct the portrayal of “injuns” in Barrie’s story) starts off great. The characters, twelve year old sisters, Wendy and Lily, and their little four year old brother, Matthew, are complex and engaging. Their family dynamics and structure are a little bit confusing: Wendy and Lily are step-sisters, and Matthew shares a mother with Lily and a father with Wendy. (There’s also an older brother, John, who remains a minor background character.) Lily and Matthew both have Native American heritage, while Wendy is of British extraction. This ethnic heritage is emphasized in the story, partly to counteract the unfavorable characterization of Native Americans in Barrie’s original story.

Anyway, diversity aside, the story is exciting, and the themes of family bonding and dealing with anxiety and responding with grace to change are well handled without becoming too preachy. Although divorce is a possibility—the girls’ parents aren’t getting along well—no one reading this book will feel as if they are being duped into a “book therapy” session. Peter Pan in this iteration is a self-absorbed bully, but again his characterization is a part of the story, not an exercise in the psychology of bullies.

I thoroughly enjoyed the story, and I was completely absorbed in figuring out how Wendy and Lily were going to save Matthew from becoming one of the Lost Boys and how they were all going to escape from Neverland. I wanted to know what would happen to Peter. Would he reform and grow into maturity or remain a selfish tyrant in Neverland? Would his shadow come back to him? Could the Native children on one side of the island, the Lost Boys on the other side, and the pirates in their ship, not to mention the innumerable, mostly invisible, fairies, ever come to terms and be at peace with one another? Was Neverland big enough for all of these groups, or would someone need to “leave town”, so to speak.

BUT just FYI, although it’s well written and engaging, about halfway through, the author introduces a minor character named Terri who goes out of her way to tell the reader that she is “two-spirit”. What in the world? The book never explains what the designation “two-spirit” is supposed to mean (not even in the author’s note at the end), and the Wikipedia article is more confusing than illuminating. But I gather that it’s some sort of alternative gender designation, and it was totally unnecessary to the story for Terri to be introduced with that identity. I found it to be confusing and propagandistic. As you can see, by my need to look it up and then try to understand what purpose the two-spirit identity had in the story, that particular passage, a very minor part of a good story, completely threw me out of the narrative. I think children will either skim over it or be similarly confused and inquisitive.

If “two-spirit” indicates a kind of third or fourth or whatever number alternative gender, the gender confusion that is rampant in our society at this particular juncture in history doesn’t need to be inserted into children’s literature. If it’s an indicator of some sort of Native American spirituality, the lack of an explanation doesn’t serve the reader or the story. In fact, this propaganda unfortunately rather spoils the entire story.