Strange things had happened at Innisfree before. In fact, strange was usually normal at Innisfree. But what had happened the night before was a new sort of strange. A frightening, unsettling sort of strange, the sort of strange that nags at you when you try not to think about it, flickers behind your eyelids when you try to go to bed at night and won’t let the sleep come.

Sadie hadn’t come home.”

The setting is the backwoods of Mississippi during the Great Depression, and Sadie is the wannabe poet and writer mother of our heroine, Tennyson. She disappears during a game of hide-and-seek, at dusk, when Tennyson, her little sister Hattie, and their father Emery come home but Sadie doesn’t. Emery is so besotted with his Sadie that he goes to look for her and leaves the girls at his childhood home, a decaying hulk of a Louisiana plantation home called Aigredoux. There the two girls make the acquaintance of their long estranged family members:

Aunt Henrietta Fontaine, a faded Southern matriarch who writes dozens of letters on thin blue paper to the U.S. government each week, asking them to return her family’s fortune, lost in the Civil War, so that Aigredoux can be restored to its former glory.

Uncle Twigs, the President of the Louisiana Society for the Strict Enforcement of the Proper Use of the English Language.

Zulma, the black servant, cook, and confidante, descendant of slaves, who stays at Aigredoux because “there’s more of my family’s bones buried out back than there are Fontaine bones. Aigredoux belongs just as much to me as it does to you–more so, maybe.”

While reading this hauntingly strange Southern novel, I felt as if Blume were channeling Faulkner—for children. Then again, I’ve never actually read Faulkner, so how would I know? The atmosphere of faded and rotting gentility built on a foundation of slavery and brutality was so strong and was just what I would imagine would be found in Faulkner’s novels. Aigredoux “pushed its way into Tennyson’s dreams and made her see funerals and spiders.”

I must say that I liked this novel, but I’m not sure children or even most teens would “get it.” It’s not very realistic, but then I’m not sure it’s meant to be. (SPOILERS) Tennyson dreams things that actually happened. Then, she writes stories that are accepted by a New York magazine and published to universal acclaim. No explanation is given for these events. No ghosts. No clairvoyance. No magic. No precocious genius. Zulma does call Tennyson a “voodoo girl.”

Still, there was certain something about the story that has me still thinking about it days after reading it. Tennyson might be for the poet and the dreamer and the quirky, individualistic wild child in all of us.

Other reviews:

The Reading Zone: In many ways, Tennyson reminded me of Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting. Both books treat children as intelligent human beings by handling realistic situations and stories. Yet they both embrace the magical realism that is all too often missing in children’s fiction.

Book #4 for Mother Reader’s 48 Hour Book Challenge.

Wow! This first book in a new series by best-selling author Margaret Peterson Haddix is a page-turner. If you’re a fan of Haddix’s other books, either the Shadow children series or her stand alone novels such as Leaving Fishers or Double Identity, you’ll love this new book and be longing for the others in the series to hurry up and get published. If you like Caroline Cooney’s Janie series or her Time series, as I did, you should also enjoy Found and, eventually, its sequels. Ms. Haddix has written another imaginative and compelling novel that combines realistic YA fiction with elements of supernatural sci-fi.

And that’s all you need to know if you haven’t yet read the book. WARNING: Hereafter there be spoilers. Do not enter if you want to read the book without preconceptions and fore-knowledge.

The Missing: Found starts out like a book about adoption. Jonah is adopted, but to him it’s no big deal. His parents have been excruciatingly honest with him, retelling his adoption story ad nauseum until Jonah is so comfortable with his origins that he’s a bit embarrassed about how very open and psychologically correct his parents have been. However, almost before the reader realizes the book has changed from a book about adoption to a book about time travel and the danger that lie therein. Or maybe it’s a book about trust and about whom you can trust and about betrayal of trust.

I liked way Ms. Haddix put a twist to time travel and the inherent problems that such travel entails. I liked Ms. Haddix’s characters, typical adolescents thrown into a very atypical situation. I liked the fact that although I saw some plot developments coming, others were a complete surprise. In fact, I had only two minor problems with The Missing: Found: the title, combined as it is with the series title, is awkward, and the sequels aren’t due out until ???

I seriously can’t wait.

Book #3 for Mother Reader’s 48 Hour Book Challenge.
Recommended by Becky at Becky’s Book Reviews.

I thought while reading it that this book was reminiscent of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl or last year’s Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Stewart. It turns out that there’s a reason for that deja vu feeling. In the acknowledgments, Ms. Feldman thanks “the student who returned Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to the school library on day when I was volunteering. He asked the librarian for another story like it, but neither she nor his teacher could find a title to satisfy him. It was at that moment that I decided to write a book for that ten-year-old boy.”

So The Gollywhopper Games was born. Gil Goodson, a good son indeed, has made it his ambition to restore his family’s fortunes and vindicate his dad’s reputation by winning the Golly Toy and Game Company’s Gollywhopper Games, a huge publicity stunt in which several thousand kids compete for the grand prize: a college scholarship, a cash prize of several thousand dollars, a set of all the toys and games ever made by Golly Toy and Game Company, and other unnamed prizes. Gil wants to win because his father was fired by the company over a year before for allegedly embezzling money from the company. Gil’s father is, of course, innocent.

Ms Feldman doesn’t quite have Dahl’s almost macabre and earthy sense of humor, but she does have a great story, intriguing puzzles, and caricatured characters that still seem somehow real and approachable. And if the puzzles are not as multi-layered and tricky as those in Mysterious Benedict Society, the kids are more normal, not geniuses or super-heroes, but rather just regular kids. That ten-year-old boy Ms. Feldman was writing for would be able to picture himself participating in the Gollywhopper Games and maybe even winning.

The Gollywhopper Games is Jody Feldman’s first book for children. May she write many more. My eleven year old Karate Kid loved The Gollywhopper Games. I daresay the kid in your life will, too.

The Gollywhopper Games has already (on the first day) been nominated for a Cybil Award in the Middle Grade Fiction category. Nominate your favorite children’s and YA books of 2008 in nine categories at the Cybils blog.

Book #2 for Mother Reader’s 48 Hour Book Challenge.

100 Cupboards is the story of Henry who finds 99 cupboards behind the plaster in his attic bedroom in his Uncle Frank’s and Aunt Dottie’s house in Kansas. Each cupboard has its own secrets to reveal, but the most exciting, magical cupboard is behind the locked door of of an ancient bedroom belonging to Henry’s grandfather, dead for the last two years. Grandfather, however, left a legacy of secret journals and magical cupboards and mysterious messages. Henry and his three girl cousins are the beneficiaries of that legacy.

I don’t know if most kids are passionately fond of metaphors and descriptive language in general, but I am. And Mr. Wilson has some great language fun, as in:

She was diligently eye-wrestling him.

The paint was scum-brown, the sort that normally hides at the bottom of a pond, attractive only to leeches and easily pleased frogs.

There is no known protocol for how young girls ought to behave when discovering small older men puttering around in an already mysterious bedroom. Henrietta did her best.

Dottie . . . was looking past years, sorting summers in her mind.

Those are few of many examples. The story itself reminded me of Narnia, especially The Magician’s Nephew with its multiple entrances into other worlds and the terrible Jadis. It also felt a bit like the game Myst that our family spent a great deal of time decoding a few years ago. There are locks and keys and combinations and again portals into Other Places. 100 Cupboards is bloodier and scarier than either Narnia or Myst however.

Some of the action was a bit confusing, and although I kept most of the characters and worlds straight, I kept confusing the protagonist Henry’s two younger cousins, Henrietta and Anastasia. I’m trying to remember that Henrietta is the one who actually helps Henry, and Anastasia is the one who only wants to be part of the action. And Penelope is the mature older cousin who’s too old to do much.

I must say that I liked Leepike Ridge much better than this second novel by N.D. Wilson, and I found the epilogue at the end totally incomprehensible. Nevertheless, it’s a good magical adventure story in the tradition of the Narnia stories or Edward Eager’s magic stories or Ende’s The Neverending Story. If you’re fond of any of those, you might want to try 100 Cupboards. And if you like this one, Mr. Wilson has left plenty of room, and several unanswered questions, for sequels.

Ah, yes, I see in looking at Amazon that 100 Cupboards is Book 1, and there is a Book 2 called Dandelion Fire due out in February 2009. Of course.

Book #1 for Mother Reader’s 48-Hour Reading Challenge.

Synesthesia: a neurologically-based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. In other words, people with synesthesia, synesthetes, hear colors, or associate certain smells with days of the week or with numbers.

I picked up this book at the library because it was published in 2008 and because it was about a synesthete. Unfortunately, although it starts out well, and the ending is very nice, the in-between part is a bit lacking in plot, action, and believability. American kids would notice all the British terms, although in this case it’s Irish because the book is set in Ireland. So the narrator Olivia, whose age I never did get, talks about biscuits (cookies) and having a lie-in (sleeping late) and going to the Garda station (police station). It’s a bit of a problem that I never could figure out how old Olivia and her friend Hal are; it makes a difference to the plot, what there is of it. She’s younger than fifteen because she says her older brother is fifteen.

Anyway, the book isn’t about synesthesia; it’s more about stepfathers and wierdness and, I suppose, about growing up. It reminds me of the Casson family books by Hilary McKay, but not as good. Still, I think maybe a fan of those books would enjoy Blue Like Friday. Clever Olivia definitely has her moments:

“I began to hallucinate about food. I could see mounds of mash and great big troughs of porridge and a whole gingerbread house, just waiting to gobbled and chomped and munched and swallowed.”
Been there, done that.

“I don’t know. Parents have the weirdest attitudes to their own rules. It’s like house arrest not applying to going to church. When I grow up, I will be more consistent.”
And have I ever heard that one before! My urchins are going to correct all my parenting mistakes when they have their own kids.

Hal went paler than pale. I thought, if he goes any paler, I am going to be able to see through his skin and see all his bones and veins and everything, with all the blood pumping around. He really doesn’t like the police. Anyone’d think he was a criminal or something.

So, Blue Like Friday has a droll narrator of undetermined age, a synesthete whose synesthesia doesn’t affect the story, and some mildly comic mix-ups that don’t really amount to much. Oh, and there’s a major plot element that involves a mother doing something that most mothers would never resort to doing.

OK, but nothing to write home about.

By the way, I never have known, although I’ve seen the name before. How do you pronounce “Siobhan”?