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School UNFriendly

Feb9

Maybe it’s my own personal homeschool bias, but a lot of the books I read for the Cybils (Middle Grade Fiction), didn’t feel very school-friendly.

I’ve already discussed the confusing mixed messages from and about school in Barbara Dee’s Solving Zoe, and how the protagonist, Zoe, learns and thrives much better outside of school than she does in classes.

In The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, Calpurnia has this conversation with her grandfather:

“What are you studying in school? You do go to school, don’t you?
“Of course I do. We’re studying Reading, Spelling, Arithmetic, and Penmanship. Oh, and Deportment. I got an “acceptable” for Posture but an “unsatisfactory” for Use of Hankie and Thimble. Mother was kind of unhappy about that.”
“Good G–,” he said. “It’s worse than I thought.”
This was an intriguing statement, though I didn’t understand it.
“And is there no science? No physics?” he said.
“We did have botany one day. What’s physics?”
“Have you never heard of Sir Isaac Newton? Sir Francis Bacon?”
“No.” . . .
“And I suppose they teach you that the world is flat and that there are dragons gobbling up the ships that fall over the edge.” He peered at me. “There are many things to talk about. I hope it’s not too late. Let us find a place to sit.”

Not exactly a plug for schools, even if the schools that are being criticized are turn of the century, c.1899.

In several of the books, the protagonist is flunking out of school even though he/she is capable of doing the work:
In Bull Rider by Suzanne Morgan Williams, Cam O’Mara is learning a lot more at home dealing with his injured brother, working on the family’s ranch, and practicing his skateboarding and bull riding skills than he does at school.
Author Andrew Clements is known for his “school stories”, and Extra Credit is not an exception to the genre. However, Abby learns more from her extra credit assignment of writing to a pen pal in Afghanistan, completed outside of school time, than she does from her work at school, even though she spends a great deal of time trying to “catch up” so that she can be promoted and go on to seventh grade with her classmates.
In Peace, Locomotion by Jacqueline Woodson, Lonnie loses his motivation to study anything at all when an insensitive teacher tells him he’s too young to be a real poet. He gets his math instruction from his older foster brother at home.

The Homeschool Liberation League by Lucy Frank was actually more school-friendly than many of the other books that were not about homeschooling. The message I got from Frank’s book was that many different kinds of schooling situations work for different children and young adults at different times.

Which is what I believe. Different strokes for different folks, and let’s live and let live. I have a child in a nontraditional public high school, four young adults who have graduated from my homeschool and who have never been to a public or private school, a young daughter who is trying out an online virtual academy (public school) this semester, and two children who are still homeschooling. There are advantages and disadvantages to each situation. It takes time and energy to find the best educational setting for each child each year. And some times you just hope it’s not too late.

Let us find a place to sit.

Many Happy Returns: February 9th

Feb9

Hilda Gerarda van Stockum was born in Rotterdam in 1908. She grew up in Ireland and in the Netherlands. Her brother, Willem van Stockum, was a mathematician and disciple of Albert Einstein. He was “the first to notice the possibility of closed timelike curves, one of the strangest and most disconcerting phenomena in general relativity.” (I don’t know what that means exactly, but it does sound rather LOST-like, doesn’t it?) Willem died in combat a few days after the Normandy invasion.

The author’s first children’s book, A Day on Skates, won Newbery honors in 1935. Her aunt, the poet Edna St. VIncent Millay, wrote a preface to this story of a Dutch picnic, saying, “This is a book which mothers and fathers will sit up to finish, after the protesting child has been dragged firmly to bed.”

Ms. Van Stockum wrote two series of children’s stories: one set in Ireland about the O’Sullivan family and another set in the U.S. and Canada about the Mitchells, a family growing together and enduring the hardships of the homefront during World War II. Here’s my review of Pegeen, one of the books in the O’Sullivan family series. I found the book at ratty old thrift store in Pasadena, and knowing nothing of the book or its author, I took a twenty-five cent chance. Good call.

Links and Thinks

Feb3

Melissa at Book Nut has an interview with Roseanne Parry, author of one of my favorite Middle Grade Fiction books of 2009.

This movie sounds good. Has anyone seen it?
Actually, Brown Bear Daughter went to see it with some friends from church and she said it was pretty good. She didn’t rave about it; however, she wants me to see it so that we can discuss.

Haitian author Edwidge Danticat: “My cousin Maxo has died. The house that I called home during my visits to Haiti collapsed on top of him.”

Sarah Palin on Rahm Emmanuel’s hate speech: “His recent tirade against participants in a strategy session was such a strong slap in many American faces that our president is doing himself a disservice by seeming to condone Rahm’s recent sick and offensive tactic.”
I tend to not agree that people should be fired from their jobs because of the words they use, no matter how crude, rude or socially unacceptable. However, Mr. Emmanuel really doesn’t get it, does he?

What Karate Kid Read: January 2010

Feb1

Operation Redwood by S. Terrell French.
Julian’s uncle decides to chop down all the redwoods around Big Tree, which is a large redwood next to the farm of Robin Elder. Julian and Robin try to save the trees.
I didn’t enjoy this book as much as others, to tell the truth. But it was still pretty interesting. I thought the characters were very funny. I think that this is a good book for really any age, as long as you can read.

Other blog reviews and interviews: Cynsations interview with author S. Terrell French, The Reading Zone, A Patchwork of Books, Into the Wardrobe interviews S. Terrell French.

Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli.
Maniac’s parents hate each other. Maniac hates his parents. So he runs away from home and meets up with a black family who take him in and let him live with them.
Definitely a great book! It was funny, creative, and kept you on the edge of your seat. I think that the ending could have been a little better, but all in all, this book is awesome.

(Maniac Magee won the Newbery Medal in 1991, and a movie version of the book was released in 2003.)

Jerry Spinelli’s homepage.

Mathematical Puzzles by Martin Gardner.
This book is full of math puzzles. Some were easy, some were hard, but they were all great. I challenged my parents to few of them. This book strains your brain, but is still lots of fun. Don’t be deceived by the fact that it has math, it has some puzzles that can be solved by pure logic. A fun book, and a good one too.
(I think KK read an older edition of the book pictured to the right. His book was a hardback, and it had a different cover. But the author is the same. Martin Gardner is “an American mathematics and science writer specializing in recreational mathematics, but with interests encompassing micromagic, stage magic, pseudoscience, literature (especially the writings of Lewis Carroll), philosophy, scientific skepticism, and religion. He wrote the Mathematical Games column in Scientific American from 1956 to 1981, and he has published over 70 books.” See Wikipedia for more information)

Al Capone Shines My Shoes by Gennifer Choldenko.
Moose lives on Alacatraz Island where the most dangerous criminals are kept. His father is a prison guard.
This book was just a little confusing, but still my favorite for the month. The characters were interesting, and the plot was great. This book has many twists and turns in the story. Betrayals, roses, flies, criminals, shoes, babies, you name it, this book has it. I was confused by the ending, though.

What Betsy-Bee (age almost 11) Read: January 2010

Feb1

11 Birthdays by Wendy Mass. The book was about a girl and a boy. Since they were born on the same day, a lady thought that they should spend every birthday together, and they did–until their tenth birthday when the boy said something that made the girl mad, and they didn’t talk to each other for a whole year. Then, on their 11th birthday strange things started happening to them, but I won’t tell you what they were because you have to read the story.

The story reminded me of the movie Groundhog Day, and my mom says it also reminds her of the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty. However, I don’t think it’s like Sleeping Beauty much.

The Watsons Go to Birmingham by Christopher Paul Curtis wasn’t my favorite, but it was interesting. We talked about the book in my online book club. We talked about how Byron was kind of a bad influence and didn’t exactly follow the rules. He liked playing with matches, and he almost started a fire. It was good book.

The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale was my favorite book of the month. It was about a goose girl named
Ani, and you always wondered what would happen next and if people were going to catch her. It was very adventurous, and Ani gets almost captured so many times, but she always escapes. Ani also knows how to hear animals and talk to them and to the wind. I wouldn’t like to be in her situation, but I would like to talk to animals and to the wind. And Ani was a princess, and that’s always awesomeness.

(Betsy-Bee actually listened to the audio version of this book and followed along sometimes in the book. I think she could read the book herself if she wanted, but I’m not sure she’s quite ready for the other books in the series.)

Moxy Maxwell Does Not Love Practicing Piano by Peggy Gifford. I’ve read other Moxy Maxwell books, and she is funny and very determined. In this book, she doesn’t like to practice the piano. Her mom wants her to just play the piece Heart and Soul all the way through with her little sister Pansy, but she won’t because she’s busy making fur-trimmed capes with cut-up towels and a black marker, and getting ready to get on stage, and be applauded. And while she’s doing that, her father is trying to figure out a word that rhymes with “spear” because he’s a poet. And her aunt is sleeping, after falling off of a ladder where she was feeding a giraffe. But her mom is frustrated that Moxy won’t play the piano. Moxy is just crazy.

What Z-Baby Read

Jan27

Z-Baby (age eight) listens to a lot of books, but I think this is the longest one she’s read herself, not by herself, mind you; I slogged through each and every page with her. But she read it and finished it and enjoyed it.

Amelia Bedelia, Bookworm by Herman Parish. Illustrated by Lynn Sweat.

Z-Baby’s Thoughts:

Amelia Bedelia takes everything literally. Mrs. Page says, “Take our bookmobile . . .” And Amelia Bedelia thinks she means literally “take our bookmobile.”

Amelia Bedelia makes coats (jackets) for the books. A girl named Lisa says that Sam devoured the book, and Amelia Bedelia thinks that an actual person ate the book. But it was a dog named Sam. And there’s one more funny part. When they tell Mrs. Page that Sam devoured the book, Mrs. Page thinks that Lisa means that Sam really, really liked learning form that book. So she asks Lisa, “Did he enjoy it?”

And Lisa says, “He sure did.”

I learned that a thesaurus is a book that has words that mean the same.

Texas Tuesday: Flygirl by Sherri L. Smith

Jan26

What an inspiring and absorbing book! Ms. Smith writes about Ida Mae Jones, a self-identified “colored girl” who is light-skinned enough to pass for white. The book begins in late 1941, and of course, that means Pearl Harbor, and World War II. Ida Mae learned to fly airplanes from her daddy, who was a crop duster. So when she hears that the U.S. Army has formed a group called the WASPs, Women Airforce Service Pilots, Ida Mae Jones is determined to sign up, even though she lives in Louisiana and the training is to take place in Sweetwater, Texas, two places where the very idea of a young black woman serving alongside white women is sure to be anathema. So in order to get into the WASP’s, Ida Mae basically pretends to be white.

A lot of the book is about the training and the dangers these pioneering women pilots faced as they bravely gave themselves and their abilities to the war effort. I don’t know much about flying airplanes, so although I thought the parts of the book that described the training and the women’s heroics were wonderfully written, I don’t know how accurate they were. I assume Ms. Smith did her research since the book Flygirl started out as a master’s thesis.

Another aspect of the book is the discussion and treatment of race and skin color. I thought this was fascinating, especially in light of recent discussions in the kidlitosphere. What does it mean to be black or to be a person of color? How do POC themselves see the variations in skin color? Is it wrong to pretend to be white and leave your darker-skinned family and friends behind? Even for a good cause?

One of the scenes in the book reminded me of Esther in particular. Ida Mae, like Esther has hidden her heritage and her connection with her people, but she is asked by her mother to go to the military authorities and ask for help in finding her brother who is MIA. Ida Mae knows that if she asks about her brother, she may be discovered and sent home. Her story doesn’t exactly parallel Esther’s, but it is similar. And Ida Mae shows similar courage.

All the issues, discrimination against women and against people of color, the varied reasons that people have for volunteering to fight in a war, misunderstandings and rifts between family members and friends, the cost of following one’s dreams, are explored with both sensitivity and humor. I would recommend this book to all young women who are in the middle of deciding who they are and what they want to be. And as an older woman, I enjoyed reading about Ida Mae Jones and her adventures. I wanted her to be able to “have it all,” even as I knew that the time and place where the story was set wouldn’t allow for a completely happy ending.

Reading in Color: “Flygirl made me want to go out and learn how to fly an airplane (or at least fly in one so that I can sit in the front and observe the pilot). The way the characters describe their love of flying makes you want to try it.”

One Librarian’s Book Reviews: “The setting is absolutely perfect, with the details from the time period completely enhancing the whole feel of the book. I absolutely felt like every part of it seemed like it could be true.”

Liz at the YALSA blog: Flygirl examines universal questions of identity, family, and growing up, with flying being both what Ida Mae wants to do, as well as working as a metaphor for a young woman trying to escape the limitations her country places on her because of her race and her sex.

Interview with Sherri L. Smith at the YaYaYa’s

Semicolon’s 12 Best Middle Grade Fiction Books of 2009 plus Newbery Predictions

Jan14

1. Anything But Typical by Nora Raleigh Baskin. Semicolon review here.
2. Dani Noir by Nova Ren Suma. Semicolon review here.
3. Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg by Rodman Philbrick.
4. Heart of a Shepherd by Roseanne Parry. Semicolon review here.
5. William S. and the Great Escape by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. Semicolon review here.
6. Leaving the Bellweathers by Kristin Clark Venuti.
7. Bull Rider by Suzanne Morgan Williams. Semicolon review here.
8. When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead. Semicolon review here.
9. Any Which Wall by Laurel Snyder. Semicolon review here.
10. Black Angels by Linda Beatrice Brown. Semicolon review here.
11. Born to Fly by Michael Ferrari. Semicolon review here.
12. The Girl Who Threw Butterflies by Mich Cochrane. Semicolon review here.

What I Want to Win the Newbery (tba on Monday, January 18th):
Any of the above, but Heart of a Shepherd or Anything But Typical or Any Which Wall would please me to no end.

My Prediction for the Newbery Award and honor books:
The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly. Semicolon review here.
Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose.
When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead.
I predict that one of those three will win the Newbery with the other two as honor books.

I’m not very good at this predicting thing, though. Last year, I tried to read The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman twice and never did make it through the entire book.

Cybils Nominees that Betsy-Bee Read

Jan13

Betsy-Bee is ten years old, and she read:

Love, Aubrey by Suzanne LaFleur. A very sad book. Aubrey’s dad and sister died in a car crash, and then her mom ran away from her. So she had to go live with her grandma, and she meets a new friend named Brooke. Every chapter has a little sadness in it. Grade: A+

Jemma Hartman, Camper Extraordinaire by Brenda Ferber. Good book. Jemma gets to camp, and she thinks it’s going to be perfect with her best friend, Tammy. But her best friend’s cousin comes to camp, too, and Tammy spends all of her time with the cousin instead of Jemma. Grade: A-

Callie’s Rules by Naomi Zucker. Callie’s family isn’t really poor but they have a lot of kids. The mom and dad are kind of weird. The mom of the popular girl at school talks to Callie’s mom about replacing Halloween with Autumn Fest. Callie and her friend try to keep Halloween. Grade: A-

Red White and True Blue Mallory by This one was a cute little book. I learned some stuff about Washington, D.C. Mallory’s best friend deserts her and just wants to talk about this boy named C/Lo aka Carlos. Grade: B+

Boy Trouble (Claudia Cristina Cortez) by Diana Gallagher. This book is very short, and it’s about boys. Claudia, who’s thirteen years old, ends up with the boy she always dreamed of. The book didn’t have anything bad in it, but there was a bully and a popular mean person. Everything turned out OK. Grade: C-

Sometimes a Light Surprises by Jamie Langston Turner

Jan12

OK, right up front, this one is not my favorite Jamie Langston Turner title. That honor might go to A Garden to Keep or maybe the first book I read by Ms. Turner, Winter Birds. I supppose I’d have to say I liked Some Wildflower in My Heart better than this one, too.

And still Sometimes a Light Surprises is a nice slow ride through the psyche of an older man, Ben Buckley, who has encased himself in ritual and hidden himself in books and wordplay and is now living in a “gated community of [his] own making.” He’s walled himself off because of the death of his wife Chloe, murdered by an unknown assassin nearly twenty years before. After Chloe’s death, Ben withdraws emotionally from his four children and becomes an unapproachable, unloving father. I never did quite understand what Ben had done to make his family, especially his daughter Erin, quite so angry with him. He seems to have been an emotionally distant, but decent, father. He gave the children financial support, but not much love and caring. I would have liked a couple of flashback scenes or memories in which I could have read about exactly how Ben’s neglect of his children affected them. However, we are told that it did, and that has to be enough.

The book switches from one point of view to another frequently, and in addition to Ben Buckley, the reader is introduced in turn to:

Kelly Kovatch, a young Christian homeschool graduate whose mother, Kay, is dying of cancer,
Caroline Mason, Ben’s cranky and nosy secretary, who discovers a secret and doesn’t know what to do about it,
Erin Buckley Custer, Ben’s estranged and barren daughter,
and a host of minor characters who are mostly well-realized and interesting in their own right.
It would have been easy for Ms. Turner to go off on a tangent, telling us the stories of any one of the minor characters, and it almost feels as if she did that when Caroline and Erin, in particular, occupy center stage and the spotlight moves from Ben Buckley and his limited life to the people around him and how they interact with other people, some of whom never even come into contact with the main character. In this sense, the novel sometimes reads like a set of intertwined short stories or novelettes: one about Kelly Kovatch and her coming to terms with singleness, one about Caroline and her thirst for intrigue and significance, and another about Erin and her struggles with wanting a child and distrusting her father’s attempts at mending their broken relationship, and a final over-arching narrative about Ben Buckley.

The book should be enjoyed for what it is: an attempt at writing Christian fiction in which the characters are complicated and some of the issues remain unresolved at the end of the story. I do think I know what Ms. Turner was trying to do. In fact, she telegraphs her intentions in a scene where Kelly, who is also Mr. Buckley’s employee, visits her mother’s grave:

“I read one of those Christian novels you gave me, and I hated it,” Kelly said suddenly. . . . I mean I hated the fact that everything came out so happpy at the end, because it didn’t seem real. The girl acted too perfect, even when things went wrong, and then the man came along at just the right time and loved her at first sight, and at the end they overcame all their problems and got married . . . of course, they got married. Everybody gets married. The whole world gets married. Somebody ought to write a novel that doesn’t turn out so—”

This novel doesn’t turn out so, and Ms. Turner is to be commended for writing such compelling characters. I like character-driven novels. However, a little more plot in the next novel might be nice.