With this book I got an education in all things Scottish, including haggis and kilts and castles, and a rousing mystery story in the tradition of my childhood heroines Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden. Not a bad deal at all.

Lucas and Kari (both girls, age about fifteen) are off to Scotland in this second book of a series. In the first book, which I haven’t read, genius Lucas and intuitive Kari solve the mystery of a forged painting, The Mystery of the Third Lucretia. In Rescuing Seneca Crane, the girls meet Seneca, a gifted concert pianist their age who’s wishing for a more normal life. Seneca, also a girl, is caught up in her own desire to be really good at what she does but also in her (stage) mother’s ambitions and dreams on her behalf. Then Seneca gets kidnapped, and the adventure begins.

As I indicated this book reminded me of the set of thirty plus Nancy Drew mysteries that used to sit on the shelf in my bedroom when I was twelve years old and of my beloved Trixie Belden mysteries that still amuse and entertain my children. There’s nothing terribly deep or disturbing or philosophically challenging about Rescuing Seneca Crane, just good clean fun. I liked it.

What’s your favorite children’s or young adult mystery series?

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One or more of these books is also nominated for a Cybil Award, but the views expressed here are strictly my own.

Yes, a girl CAN become a naturalist! (The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly/ Semicolon review here.)

Yes, a girl CAN sell newspapers and even become a newspaper reporter! (Newsgirl by Liza Ketchum)

Yes, girls CAN fly airplanes and perform daring rescues! (Born to Fly by Michael Ferrari)

Yes, girls CAN play baseball! (The Girl Who Threw Butterflies by Mich Cochrane/ Semicolon review here.)

Yes, girls CAN rock out on the guitar and even write songs. (The Kind of Friends We used to Be by Frances O’Roark Dowell/ Semicolon review here.)

Yes, a girl, even a slave girl, can be a spy! (Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson)

Have you got the message yet? Middle grade fiction authors believe in Girl Power! I read Born to Fly by Michael Ferrari and Newsgirl by LIza Ketchum back-to-back, and both of these middle grade fiction novels had strong female protagonists who were obviously meant to be role models for girls reading the books. In his Author’s Note at the end of Born to Fly, Mr. Ferrari says he wrote the WWII action adventure story especially for “a ten year old girl who wanted to fly a P-40 Warhawk and her brother said she couldn’t.” In the book eleven year old Bird not only gets to fly an airplane, she also rescues someone-who-shall-remain-nameless (because I don’t want to spoil the story) from assassination and saves her friend’s life, too. It’s an exciting story, mandatory for anyone, boy or girl, who’s interested in airplanes, flying, or World War II stories.

“Just ’cause I was a girl in 1941, don’t think I was some sissy. Shoot, I saw stuff that would’ve made that bully Farley Peck pee right through his pants. . . . Seeing me in my World War One pilot’s skullcap and goggles and my Huck Finn dungarees, you would’ve never guessed that someone with a neat name like Bird McGill was actually just an eleven-year-old girl. But I was. I worked the controls carefully, scanning the skies for bogies at twelve o’clock.”

Newsgirl by Liza Ketchum takes place a century earlier than Born to Fly, but it has the same theme: Girls Can! Amelia, her mother, and their friend Estelle have come all the way from the East Coast to San Francisco to start a new life. They have their personal effects, some dry goods to make ladies’ clothing to sell, and a small amount of money saved up to buy land on which to build themselves a house. When Amelia discovers that people will pay a whole dollar for a two month old newspaper from New York or New Jersey, she cuts her hair, dresses as a boy, and sets out to sell papers herself, even though San Francisco is a dangerous town for a girl all alone.

Newsgirl is all about the empowerment of girls and women, and about Amelia’s longing to know her father, someone her mother has never been willing to talk about or even acknowledge. Amelia’s desire for a father, or at least a father-figure, is resolved in the book, rather unrealistically, by a succession of male friends who are kind to Amelia and her mother and by Estelle, Amelia’s mother’s friend and partner in business and Amelia’s “second mother.” Still, the story is exciting and fun and full of good solid historical detail. Amelia gets to ride in a hot air balloon, pan for gold, witness a horrendous fire that burns down half of San Francisco, and help her family to survive.

So, if you’re looking for strong, independent heroines in a book with a good story line, check out Born To Fly or Newsgirl —or one of the books listed above. And welcome to Middle Grade Fiction where all the women (and girls) are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average!

By the way, don’t you love those covers? Both books are definitely in the running for my personal Best Cover in Middle Grade Fiction 2009 Award.

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One or more of these books is also nominated for a Cybil Award, but the views expressed here are strictly my own.

Eight seconds of danger . . . a lifetime of honor.

Yeah, well, maybe. Bull-riding is not so much a sport as it is a deliberate courting of death or serious injury. The question is not whether you’ll get thrown off the bull, but when and how hard. And will you be able to scramble up and scale the fence before the bull turns around and tramples you?

Cam O’Mara is a member of a bull-riding family. His grandfather was a bull riding champion. His older brother, Ben, was a bull rider, too. Cam is more interested in skate-boarding, a sport with its own skills and dangers. However, when Ben returns from Iraq with TBI (traumatic brain injury) and confined to a wheelchair, Cam sees only one way to impress Ben and get him to work at his own recovery. Cam makes a bet with Ben: if Cam can ride Ugly, the fiercest, most dangerous bull on the circuit, then Ben will do whatever it takes to recover from his war injuries.

I really thought this book was both well-written and well-plotted. The details about the sports of skate-boarding and bull-riding felt right to me, although I probably wouldn’t know if they weren’t. Cam and Ben and their parents and Grandpa Roy all are full, well-rounded characters, and I wanted to know what would happen to them, how they would cope with the challenges posed by Ben’s injury. Author Suzanne Morgan Williams doesn’t give easy answers; Ben doesn’t miraculously recover to full health just because Cam tries to ride an angry bull. But there is hope and the support of family and friends. I recommend this book and the four others that I’ve read, published this year, about dealing with the stress of having a family member in or returning from Iraq or Afghanistan.

Do you have any other suggestions for this list?

Other 2009 fiction books for children about the family of service members and the aftermath of war:

Peace, Locomotion by Jacqueline Woodson.
Heart of a Shepherd by Roseanne Parry.
Operation Yes by Sara Lewis Holmes.
Scat by Carl Hiaassen.

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One or more of these books is also nominated for a Cybil Award, but the views expressed here are strictly my own.

Nothing deep. No burning political questions. No kids who are out to save the planet. No serious relationship issues. No murder and mayhem. A Recipe 4 Robbery is just a plain vanilla kids’ mystery about a jewel robbery. This mystery is just right for middle school readers who still don’t want to deal with the violence and seriousness of YA and adult mysteries, qualities which are working their way down into children’s mysteries, too. One of my daughters, even when she was junior high age, wouldn’t read mysteries at all because she said they frightened her. A Recipe 4 Robbery would have been something she could enjoy without being scared.

It all takes place at The Bloomsbury Cucumber Festival where Lindy is doing her best to avoid all vegetables, especially any concoction cooked up by Mrs. Unger, aka Granny Goose. Unfortunately, Lindy’s mom helps her plate to a heaping helping of Granny’s cucumber casserole. Fortunately, Lindy finds a ruby necklace hiding under the cukes and goop. Unfortunately, Lindy and her friends know that if they turn in the necklace to the police, Granny Goose’s goose will be cooked, and she’ll probably be arrested for the theft that happened a few days before at the Grimstone Estate. Besides, there’s a reward for the intrepid crime busters who find the perpetrators of the robbery.

So, Lindy, her best friend, Margaret, and saxophonist Gus Kinnard team up to find the crooks. Lindy wants to get enough reward money to go to band camp this summer. Gus wants to show off his skills gained as a member of the computer-based Not-So-Clueless Crime Buster Club (NSCCB). And Margaret just wants to be a part of the band –and vindicate Granny Goose, of course. As I said, it’s good clean fun.

Does anyone remember the Alfred Hitchcock 3 Investigators series? This book reminded me of those books: simple plot, quirky suspects, and kids running around having fun.

Author Marybeth Kelsey’s website.

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One or more of these books is also nominated for a Cybil Award, but the views expressed here are strictly my own.

The Last Invisible Boy by Evan Kuhlman.

Gone From These Woods by Donna Bailey Seagraves.

Love, Aubrey by Suzanne LaFleur.

The Girl Who Threw Butterflies by MIck Cochrane.

Disclaimer: There are some spoilers in these reviews. I couldn’t discuss the books otherwise. If you just want to know the general subject, see the title of this post and go read one or all of them. The Last Invisible Boy uses metaphor and imagination to deal with the grieving process in a creative way. Love, Aubrey is about a girl whose father and little sister have died in an accident and whose mother is so immersed in her own grief that she neglects Aubrey. In The Girl Who Threw Butterflies Molly deals with grief by using baseball as both therapy and metaphor. And Gone From These Woods is about a hunting accident. Read on only if you want to know more.

Betsy-Bee and I already discussed Love, Aubrey by Suzanne LaFleur in this post a couple of weeks ago. I reviewed The Girl Who Threw Butterflies, which I loved, here. I don’t have much to add, except that Aubrey and Molly seem much more resilient than the boys in the other two books featured here.

In The Last Invisible Boy twelve year old Finn Garrett is convinced that he is slowly fading into invisibility after his father’s sudden death caused by a heart attack. Everyone else in the book is also convinced that something is wrong with Finn since his hair has faded to white and his skin has become “as pale as a ghost’s.” I never quite understood what it was that was really happening to Finn, but I decided to just go with it, willing suspension and all that jazz. Obviously, Finn feels like “the Bleached-Out Nearly Invisible Boy,” so metaphor or fantasy or reality, it’s where Finn is, anyway.

And where he continues to be for almost 230 pages. The book is h-e-a-v-y, even though Finn gives the reader permission to take a break and go play outside. Finn has a lot of feelings to work through, and his grief and anger and guilt feel real. As bibliotherapy, the book might work, or might be such a downer that the child reading it would go into a major depression. I don’t know. As a picture of what it feels like to lose a parent and how grief is a process that takes time and energy and even decisions to feel better eventually, the book would be of interest to a certain type of psychoanalytic or morbidly curious child. That’s not a criticism, by the way; I have more than one “mordibly curious” child, and I’m a bit that way myself. I just don’t know if I could read this one, or if I would recommend reading it, when grief is fresh and personal.

Gone From These Woods is a more straightforward narrative about a boy, eleven year old Daniel Sartain, who accidentally shoots his favorite uncle and surrogate father, Clay, while the two are hunting. The accident is fatal, and Daniel feels like a monster. The book is not anti-hunting, although it seems to me as if it might a good book to give to a young man who’s going hunting for the first or the fortieth time to remind him to be careful. Daniel has to deal with not only grief, but also an overwhelming sense of guilt, since the shot that killed his uncle came from Daniel’s shotgun, even if it did go off accidentally. In fact, Daniel is so depressed that he nearly commits suicide, but his uncle’s memory keeps him from completing that desperate act. It is doubly sad that Daniel is bereft of his uncle and also of almost all support in dealing with his uncle’s death, since Daniel’s father is an alcoholic with his own demons of guilt and abusiveness.

I found this book to be “morbidly fascinating,” too. I’ll try it out on Karate Kid, but he may have too sunny a disposition for this kind of reading.

What about you? Do you have any “grief books” that you find especially insightful and even enjoyable to read? I define a grief book as one in which someone dies at the beginning, and the main character spends the book dealing with his or her grief and healing. Any suggestions, either for adults or for children? Come to think of it this recent read by Elizabeth Berg was a “grief book,” and I enjoyed it, too.

Amazon Affiliate. If you click on a book cover here to go to Amazon and buy something, I receive a very small percentage of the purchase price.
One or more of these books is also nominated for a Cybil Award, but the views expressed here are strictly my own.