I’m on the nominating panel for the Cybil Award for Middle Grade Fiction. The Cybil Awards are blogger-nominated and blogger-chosen awards for children’s and young adult literature. This year is the second year for the Cybil Awards (2006 winners), and we’ve had a lot of books nominated in seven categories: Picture Books; Non-fiction Picture Books; Middle Grade fiction; Poetry; Young Adult fiction; Non-fiction (YA/MG); and Graphic Novels.

Anyone with an e-mail address may nominate one book per category. Then groups of bloggers get to work. First, a nominating committee reads ALL the titles in a given category. After nearly two arduous months, this committee winnows the nominees to five finalists. A second committee of bloggers considers the shortlist and, after much debate, chooses the best of the best for 2007. The nominations close on November 21. So if your favorite middle grade fiction book, published in 2007, is NOT on this list go over to the Cybils blog and nominate it. Or if you have a favorite 2007 book in another category, check to see if it’s been nominated.

As if I don’t have enough to read . . .

Annie’s War by Jacqueline Levering Sullivan.

Annie: The Mysterious Morgan Horse by Ellen F Feld.

Aurora County All Stars by Deborah Wiles. Semicolon review of The Aurora County All-Stars.

Bearwalker by Joseph Bruchac

Bird Springs by Carolyn Marsden.

The Broken Bike Boy & The Queen of 33rd Street by Sharon Flake. Semicolon review of The Broken Bike Boy and the Queen of 33rd Street.

Camel Rider by Prue Mason. Semicolon review of Camel Rider.

Cassie Was Here by Caroline Hickey.

Cat on the Mat is Flat by Andy Griffiths, illustrated by Terry Denton.

Celeste’s Harlem Renaissance by Eleanora E Tate. Semicolon review here.

Chess Rumble by G Neri.

Clarice Bean, Don’t Look Now by Lauren Child.

Class Favorite by Taylor Morris.

Cork & Fuzz: Good Sports by Dori J. Chaconas, illustrated by Lisa McCue. Betsy-Bee and Semicolon joint review of Cork and Fuzz.

Cracker by Cynthia Kadohata.

A Crooked Kind of Perfect by Linda Urban.

Dear Jo by Christina Kilbourne.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney. Karate Kid reviews Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

Edward’s Eyes by Patricia Maclachlan.

Elijah of Buxton by Christopher Paul Curtis.

Ellie McDoodle by Ruth Barshaw.

Emma-Jean Lazarus Fell Out of a Tree by Lauren Tarshis. Brown Bear and Semicolon joint review of Emma-Jean Lazarus Fell Out of a Tree.

Freak by Marcella Pixley.

Friskative Dog by Susan Straight.

Greetings From Planet Earth by Barbara Kerley.

Home of the Brave by Katherine Applegate. Semicolon review of Home of the Brave.

Honestly, Mallory! by Laurie Friedman

How To Steal A Dog by Barbara O’Connor. Karate Kid’s review of How To Steal a Dog.

If a Tree Falls At Lunch Period by Gennifer Choldenko. Brown Bear and Semicolon review If a Tree Falls at Lunch Period.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick.

The Isle of the Swords by Wayne Thomas Batson

Kiki Strke: The Empress’s Tomb by Kirsten Miller. Brown Bear’s review of Kiki Strike, the first book in this series.

Kimchi & Calamari by Rose Kent.

Leap of Faith by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley.

Leepike Ridge by Nathan D. Wilson. Karate Kid’s review of Leepike Ridge. Semicolon review of Leepike Ridge.

Lemonade War by Jacqueline Davies. Karate Kid’s review of The Lemonade War. Semicolon review of The Lemonade War.

Letters from Rapunzel by Sarah Lewis Holmes.

Louisiana’s Song by Kerry Madden. Semicolon review of Louisiana’s Song.

Lucy Rose: Working Myself to Bits and Pieces by Katy Kelly.

Me and the Pumpkin Queen by Marlane Kennedy.

The Middle of Somewhere by JB Cheany Semicolon review of The Middle of Somewhere.

Middle School is Worse Than Meat Loaf by Jennifer Holm. Semicolon review of Middle Is Worse Than Meatloaf.

Miss Spitfire by Sarah Miller. Semicolon review of Miss Spitfire.

Moxy Maxwell Does Not Like Stuart Little by Peggy Gifford. Besty-Bee and Semicolon joint review of Moxy Maxwell Does Not Love Stuart Little.

My Last Best Friend by Julie Bowe.

Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Stewart. Semicolon review of The Mysterious Benedict Society.

No Castles Here by ACE Bauer

No Talking by Andrew Clements. Karate Kid and Semicolon joint review of No Talking.

Paint the Wind by Pam Munoz Ryan.

Penina Levine is a Hard Boiled Egg by Rebecca O’Connell.

Perch, Mrs Sackets, and Crows Nest by Karen Pavlicin.

The Puzzling World of Winston Breen by Eric Berlin.

Qwikpick Adventure Society by Sam Riddleburger

Reaching For Sun by Tracie Vaughn Zimmer. Semicolon review here.

Regarding the Bees by Kate & Sara Klise

Rickshaw Girl by Mitali Perkins. Semicolon review of Rickshaw Girl.

Rising Star of Rusty Nail by Lesley MM Blume. Semicolon review of The Rising Star of Rusty Nail.

Runaround by Helen Hemphill.

The Secret Identity of Devon Delaney by Lauren Barnholdt.

Seeing Sky Blue Pink by Candice Ransom.

So Totally Emily Ebers by Lisa Yee.

Social Experiments of Dorie Dilts: Duped by Popular Demand by PG Kain.

Someone Named Eva by Joan Wolf. Semicolon review of Someone Named Eva.

The Talented Clementine by Sara Pennypacker.

Tales of a Texas Boy by Marva Dasef.

Tall Tales by Karen Day. Semicolon review here.

The Thing About Georgie by Lisa Graff. Semicolon review of The Thing About Georgie.

Twelve by Lauren Myracle

Way Down Deep by Ruth White. Semicolon review of Way Down Deep.

Webb’s Wondrous Tales Book 2 by Mack Webb & Celia Webb (illus).

Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt.

What the Dickens by Gregory Maguire

When Heaven Fell by Carolyn Marsden

Wild Girls by Pat Murphy.

Finally, a book I loved. I was on a bad streak earlier this week, but The Middle of Somewhere is a book to end the losing streak. As Kent Clark says, “Don’t let life’s little surprises get you down. Expect the unexpected! Remember, there’s always a Plan B.” Who is Kent Clark? He’s the author of Seize the Way: Ten Weeks to SuperSize Your Life!. (Don’t bother to go looking at Amazon; I think it’s a made up book.) The quotations from Mr. Clark’s opus that introduce the first several chapters are priceless, as our protagonist and narrator, Veronica Sparks aka Ronnie, uses Mr. Clark’s positive thinking philosophy to guide her through the joys and difficulties of a summer road trip through Kansas.

I’m a bit ahead of myself, however. Twelve year old Ronnie has a younger brother, Gee, who’s six years old and seriously ADHD. Now, I must admit to being something of a skeptic when it comes to attention deficit and hyperactivity. I saw too many zombies overdosed on Ritalin when I was a school librarian in another life. However, even though I believe the condition is over-diagnosed and over-medicated, I do believe it’s real. Some kids just can’t pay attention and have a great deal of trouble learning to look before they leap. Gee, short for Gerald, is one of those real cases. I liked the way sister Ronnie accepts her brother the way he is, hyperactivity and all. She gets frustrated with him, defends him, rescues him and wants to get away from him for a break, sometimes all in the same day, sometimes all in the same hour.

When the two children get the chance to accompany their unsuspecting grandfather on a business trip through Kansas in his brand new RV, chaos ensues. Gee hardly ever slows down, and Ronnie has her hands full taking care of Gee and placating her crochety old grandfather so that he won’t turn around and take them back to Missouri. Then, in a plot development reminiscent of Betsy Byars’s Newbery Award book, The Summer of the Swans, Gee disappears, and Ronnie, Pop, the state police, and Ronnie’s new friend, Howard, a Kansas farm boy, all combine forces to find Gee and his hero Canonball Paul, who’s probably the magnet that drew Gee to run away in the first place. If that’s as clear as mud, rest assured that Ms. Cheaney is a much better writer than I am, and if you read the book, all shall be revealed. Plus you’ll develop an appreciation for ADHD kids and their families, and you might even look to see what else Ms. Cheaney has written. I did.

I liked the fact that the characters in this book are Real. Ronnie is a great big sister, but she gets tired and even calls Gee “a dummy” at one point in the story. Pop, the grandfather, is a not-so-great grandfather who’s neglected his progeny in the past, and who has no idea what he has committed to when he takes Gee on a road trip. I liked Pop in spite of his shortcomings; he reminded me of my own grandfather who was a salesman with an itchy foot, too. Ronnie’s and Gee’s mom is a wonderful mother who misses her children, but who can’t help being relieved about being left to recover from her broken leg in peace and quiet.

Then, too, Ms. Cheaney’s writing is great. Try these sentences on for size:

“But as good as Sunday ended, Monday opened up rainbows, sunbeams, and white-water rapids of potential goodness.”

“Now that he was up close and personal with this humongous thing, he seemed subdued —as if its sheer size had packed him into a ball of subduedness.”

The story also features a dog named Leo, a poker game with high stakes, a man who travels around Kansas shooting himself out of a cannon, and a genuine wind prospector selling “power from the sky.” What more could you ask?

The Middle of Somewhere is one of the books nominated for the Cybil Award for Middle Grade Fiction.

J.B. Cheaney’s website, where you can read biographical information, get teacher helps, and read some of Ms. Cheaney’s reviews of children’s fiction by other authors.

Susan Olasky interviews J.B. Cheaney and N.D. Wilson for WORLD magazine.

One of my urchins wouldn’t finish this book because she disliked the main character so much. Here’s the scenario: Queen Marie Rosseau thinks she is a queen, with a real castle and a knight in shining armor, the whole bit. She thinks this because her daddy tells her she is a queen, and although her mother tries to bring her back to reality, Queen is not much interested in anything except her own queenliness.

“I used to be homeschooled until two years ago. But I go to regular school now. Mother thought I needed to be around other kids. She said she didn’t like how grown-up and stuck-up I was acting. Only I can’t help it if I’m cute and smarter than most kids my age.”

This paragraph is the only time homeschooling is mentioned in the book, but we all get the message, don’t we? Queen’s daddy’s indulgence and her sheltered homeschool experience have made her into a snot. And Queen is socially challenged, to say the least. She doesn’t know how to make friends, doesn’t keep the one friend she has, and generally alienates everyone around her. Her teacher doesn’t like her, really doesn’t like her, and Leroy, the broken bike boy, comes to her house for the food Queen’s mother makes and for the attention Queen’s father gives him, but he’d just as soon Queen would get lost. The feeling is mutual, and Queen tries to get rid of Leroy several times, then tries to prove he’s a liar, then tries to steal Leroy’s only friend.

I don’t know about this one. There are some kids who are hopelessly stuck on themselves, unable or unwilling to think about the feelings of others. But Queen seemed to be awfully intelligent to be so dim when it came to people-skills. She didn’t come across as autistic or socially handicapped so much as just selfish and unwilling to admit that other people don’t like being treated as slaves to the Queen.

Then, there’s the part of the book where Queen goes to visit a reclusive old man in his apartment without permission from her parents, without their even knowing about it. I just don’t think that’s a great idea to put into kids’ heads, even though it turns out just fine in the book. The old man, Cornelius, is a mentor who helps Queen to see the error of her ways.

In fact, The Broken Bike Boy and the Queen of 33rd Street is full of mentors and involved and loving adults. Queen’s parents are quite attentive, and Queen’s mother tries to coach Queen in the fine art of winning friends. Queen’s dad helps Leroy fix his bike and invites him to eat dinner with Queen’s family. Cornelius, although somewhat eccentric, teaches both children about their African heritage and gives them the attention they both crave, along with a bit of a reality check for Miss Queen when her behavior becomes insufferable.

I give it a B-.

Again others liked it better than I did. Maybe they didn’t have my knee-jerk reaction to homeschool stereotypes:

Elizabeth Bird of A Fuse #8 Production: “I had difficulty recognizing when I was supposed to be annoyed by my protagonist. Kudos to Ms. Flake then. It takes guts to make an unlikable hero. Guts and talent.”

The Broken Bike Boy and the Queen of 33rd Street was nominated for the Cybil Award for Middle School Fiction.

Bad history:
Joseph McCarthy didn’t do any investigation of Russian expatriates living in New York City that I know of, and he certainly didn’t have the power to shut down a concert pianist’s career and send her into hiding in the backwoods of Minnesota. I’m tired of books that use Joseph McCarthy as a bogie man and arch-villain. He was an idiot, and the Senate eventually got tired of him and censured him. The Communism he feared was very real and dangerous. The nineteen fifties were characterized by anti-Communism, but I doubt very seriously that many people, much less an entire small town, were spending their gossip time finding Communists under the bed, so to speak. They would have been much more concerned about a “foreigner” who didn’t use her purported husband’s last name and may not have been married to him at all, living in the same house with him. Oh, and girls didn’t wear overalls to school in the sixties where I grew up; it was against the rules. You also didn’t call adults by their first names, especially not parents. Franny and Sandy commit both of these social errors, making them as characters feel slightly anachronistic while set among all the very period Communist hunters. Maybe Minnesota was more progressive when it came to clothing and parental respect and more reactionary when it came to politics than West Texas was.

Bad hermenuetics:

“The good book tells us many things,” the mayor reverend exclaimed, and opened his Bible. He read out loud: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” called out old Hans Zimmerman. “I don’t understand a word you jest said.”
“This is what it means, Hans,” thundered Mayor Reverend Jerry, looking right at the Orilees. “It means that the only way to get to heaven is through good deeds. You can’t bribe God, the holy judge of us all. And those of us who think they can are in for a real rude surprise. . .”

I don’t think the author meant to make Mayor Reverend Jerry into a preacher who contradicts his own chosen text, but that’s obviously what happened. Old Hans Zimmerman wasn’t the only one who didn’t understand a word of the verses that the preacher was misinterpreting to make his point. I just don’t see how you get “good deeds get you to heaven” out of “not of works, lest any man should boast.”

Bad writing:

Within a few paragraphs the author tells me that Runty Knutson is the “class troublemaker;” Gretchen Beasley is the “class crybaby;” and Mr. Moody, the principal, “hated kids.” Show, don’t tell. Actually, we get examples of Rusty’s trouble-making, Gretchen’s crying, and Mr. Moody’s hatred for kids. So why do we need the labels?
The characters are unbelievable and cartoonish. Madame Malenkov, with her long black hair and Russian accent, reminds me of Natasha Fatale ( Rocky and Bullwinkle) Franny and her friend Sandy Anne are the Katzenjammer Kids or maybe the Little Rascals. Nancy “Prancy” Orilee, Franny’s and Sandy’s arch-enemy, is Nellie Oleson from Little House on the Prairie (the TV series, not the book). And it all reads like a bad TV sitcom with a suitably unbelievable ending.

The problem with writing a critical review of a book is that I feel as if I’m implying that I could have done a better job of writing the book myself. However, I know I couldn’t. I’m also fairly sure the author could have written a much better story. There are scenes that would have been worth the reading time, especially those in which Franny and Sandy spy on the suspected Commie spy and the scenes involving Franny and Madame Malenkov. As is, it’s a case of might-have-been-maybe-next-time.

In the “Don’t take my word for it” department here are some opposing views from other bloggers:

Miss Erin loved it, and in fact she nominated it for the Cybil Award for Middle School Fiction.

Annie at Crazy for Kids Books liked it, too: “It is well written and the author does a good job of moving the story forward while revealing the strengths and foibles of the town’s inhabitants. The conclusion is quite satisfying as justice and understanding prevail.”

And then there’s Becky:“I loved, loved, loved The Rising Star of Rusty Nail.”

Chris Shanley-Dillman at KidsReads is in agreement with the others: “Lesley M. M. Blume sweeps readers back to another time with her newest book — back to a time when a school principal chain-smokes in his office and everyone fears bombing attacks from the Russians.”

And it got a starred review in Booklist. It does look as if I’m in the minority.

Really different from last year’s Newbery Honor book by the same author, Penny From Heaven, Middle School Is Worse Than Meatloaf is subtitled A Year Told Through Stuff, but it’s really more like a year told through lists, letters, cards, ticket stubs, reminder notes, report cards, newspaper clippings, cartoons, poems, and compositions– and a few other memorabilia and assorted, well, yeah, stuff.

Ginny starts seventh grade with a list of ten things to do, including “win something, anything” and “get a dad” and “ignore horoscope whenever possible.” She also starts out with a good attitude: “There’s nothing like the first day of school with all those waxed floors and hopeful faces. You can’t help but think you’ll get a fresh start and be the girl everyone thinks is cool . . .” Unfortunately, horoscope or no, Ginny’s fortunes go downhill from that first bright, hopeful day of school to an all-time low of five C’s and a disciplinary referral. Ginny’s a resilient character, though, and she comes back by the end of the book with a summer list and some hope for improvement in her eighth grade year.

The thing that’s going to be noticed about this book, of course, is the lack of a regular text and the gimmick of telling the story in notes and junk. I say “gimmick” because, honestly, until about halfway through the book, it annoyed me to have to look all over the page, turn some pages sideways, check the small print, and think in order to understand the story. Then, it got to be like a puzzle. I think kids might get into the game more quickly than I did, but then again my conservative daughter took one look at the book and said, “That’s not a real book.” I haven’t been able to interest her in it at all. My usual not-so-sneaky method is to read the first couple of chapters out loud, but that wouldn’t work at all for this book, so I’ll have to resort to leaving it lying around in conspicuous places and picking it up and laughing ostentatiously.

I do think Brown Bear Daughter, age 12, would enjoy this story of another dancer who struggles through seventh grade writing up gruesome life science experiments, turning her hair pink, and trying to get her mom to buy her the perfect (expensive) sweater. Here’s the verdict from Karate Kid, age 10:

This book is going to be hard to write about. You see, this book is written like… well, I can’t really tell you what it’s written like. It is told from lots of things, like emails, letters, comics, and a lot more that I can’t remember. The, I guess you could say, main character, is named Ginny. She is in middle school and wants a sweater. Yes, a sweater. I can’t really tell you any more about this book, except that I thought it was interesting and I hope you will too.”

The scoop from other bloggers:

Miss Erin interviews Jennifer Holm.

Camille at Book Moot: “I will confess that I was reading the book while I was fixing its MARC record. I became hopelessly involved in the story though and when I saw the image of the program for Ginny’s ballet recital I gasped so loudly the library aide wondered what was wrong with me.”

Miss Yingling Reads: “I came away with the conclusion that this was really rather clever, and was something that reluctant readers might pick up.”

Elizabeth Bird of Fuse #8 Production: “Middle School is Worse Than Meatloaf” is a tale told via “stuff”. Notes, detention slips, photos, CDs, invitations, shopping lists, you name it. A perfect blending of chaotic piles and orderly prose, this book gets to the heart of the best and the worst (more often the worst) of this most awkward and necessary of ages.

MotherReader: “I loved this innovative approach to charting a year, and props go out to Elicia Castaldi for the pictures. My sixth grade daughter (not middle school here, but still) really enjoyed the book too.”

Thirty-six (short) chapters with a cliff-hanger or a plot twist at the end of almost every one. Now that’s an accomplishment, even if it did give me a feeling of whiplash being jerked around that much. Just when I thought I knew which direction the narrative was going, just when I thought I knew what was going to happen next, just when I thought I had the characters’ decisions and motivations figured out, just when I thought something somewhere was resolved, it wasn’t and I didn’t. I don’t honestly know if this would captivate or annoy most children, but it made me keep reading until nearly the end, about chapter thirty-one, when I just wanted everything to be settled and decided. I did finish to make sure that it was settled, but I was ready to slap the author up the side of the head if she wrote another about-face and switch directions.

The story is about an annual baseball game, Walt Whitman’s poetry, an anniversary county history pageant, the death of old man Norwood Rhinehart Beauregard Boyd, and the friendship between House Jackson, pitcher, and Cleebo Wilson, catcher, for the Aurora County All-Stars. All of these things, especially the pageant and the baseball game which happen to be scheduled for the exact same day and time, become entwined and enmeshed and confused, and the only way anything is ever going to work out is for House to figure out Whitman’s words about “the symphony true” and how they apply to events in Aurora County, Mabel, Mississippi, in the summer of whatever year it is in this story.

I dunno. The story was fun and intriguing with its double back somersaults, but maybe it’s too twisty and double-crossing for kids. I think I’ll try it out on some of mine and see what happens. I’ll get back to you on how the experiment goes.

Oh, I did like the quotations at the beginning of chapters from Walt Whitman, who was apparently a baseball fan (who knew?), and from various and sundry famous baseball players. I’ll whet your appetite for the book with a few:

“People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.” —Roger Hornsby, second baseman, St. Louis Cardinals.

“If you come to a fork in the road, take it.” —Yogi Berra, catcher, New York Yankees.

“After the clangor of organ majestic, or chorus, or perfect band,
Silent athwart my soul, moves the symphony true.” —Walt Whitman

“Anytime you have an oppportunity to make a difference in this world and you don’t, then you are wasting your time on earth.” —Roberto Clemente, right fielder, Pittsburgh Pirates.

The Aurora County All-Stars reminds-me-of last year’s Out of Patience by Brian Miehl (Semicolon review here): small town baseball team, historical secrets, possible treasure, single parent dad. The Aurora County All-Stars is nominated for the Cybil Award for Middle Grade Fiction.

Other bloggers chime in:

Elizabeth Bird at A Fuse #8 Production: “House has the same good-hearted reticence as Cooper, complete with strong short sentences and a kind of basic decency you look for in an old-fashioned hero. Since Wiles’ novels all seem to take place in a kind of no-time (an era when soap operas and small town baseball games exist within the same sphere) it makes sense that House’s actions and mannerisms should conjure up the hero of a time past.”

Bookshelves of Doom: “Baseball and Walt Whitman and friendship and family and history and yes, it made me cry. Not in a full-on sobbing-so-much-it-hurts way, but in a pleasant, I-love-baseball-stories and I-love-the-people-in-Aurora-County sort of way.”

Sarah Miller: “The pageant vs. ballgame plot moves along at a healthy clip, and the book is loaded with cliff hangers, from ghosts and garden hose duels to busted elbows with bases loaded.”

Franki at A Year of Reading: “This is a story of baseball, a story of a strong community, and a story of friends. Deborah Wiles ties the story together with quotes from Walt Whitman. She also uses quotes from famous baseball players to set the stage for each chapter. Her writing is brilliant.”

Kirsten at The Kingdom of Books: “Another great book by Deborah Wiles! The lazy days of a small town summer where baseball and 4th of July pageants take center field transport the reader to a nostalgic place in time when neighbors looked out for one another and life was enjoyed outdoors.”

Read, Read, Read: “I liked that the book could appeal to both girls and boys. I also liked that the characters had some genuine qualities that could pull you into the story. I did shed a tear or two during the story. I love stories set in small towns.”

Obviously they (mostly) liked it better than I did.

Way Down Deep is a town in West Virginia: an odd sort of town with several real live characters, including an old lady who throws rocks at kids, a goat named Jethro, and a granny lady with a talking owl. Ruby June, the protagonist of the novel, is a red-headed foundling who appeared in 1944 on the steps of the courthouse. She’s an atypical foundling in that she was approximately three years old when found, but the rest of her childhood pretty much follows the “orphan adopted by a spinster lady with lots of love to give” pattern. The people of Way Down Deep are generally kind, loving and forgiving, a fact which turns out to be key to ending of the story.

In other words the whole book has a sort of fairy tale feel to it (think magical realism for kids), so I wasn’t too surprised when the mystery of Ruby June’s birth, family background, and appearance in Way Down Deep turns out to have a solution that’s part realistic and somewhat surreal, too. And the mixture is never really explained even after the basic facts are ascertained.

I almost felt as if the author had this collection of characters in her mind that she wanted to put into a book, and they all escaped into this one:
Bonnie Clare, Connie Lynn, and Sunny Gaye are identical triplets who spend their spare evenings doing street evangelism, preaching the gospel and a temperance message to passers-by.
Robber Bob is a stranger who comes to Way Down Deep and tries to hold up the bank, with hilarious results.
Robber Bob Reeder has five children: Peter Reeder, Cedar Reeder, twins Skeeter and Jeeter Reeder, and the baby of the family, little Rita Reeder.
A.H. Crawford is an author of independent means with ”two front names” that he prefers not to use. Read the book and you’ll understand why. Mr. Crawford is writing a book about the history of Way Down Deep, but since he spends most of his days asleep in bed, the book isn’t coming along too well.
Miss Worly is the town librarian who delights “in peppering her sentences with fancy words.” The kids in town call her Miss Wordy.
Sheriff Reynolds was an officer whose “heart was way too soft and his mind too fuzzy for sheriffing.”
And Miss Arbutus Ward, Ruby’s foster mother, is the last descendant of the founding father of Way Down Deep, Archibald Ward. She’s also the owner and sole proprietor of The Roost, a boardinghouse for even more odd and quirky characters.

In fact, there’s a list at the beginning of the book of all the characters just so you can keep track of them. It’s a sort of a comic strip in prose, Little Orphan Annie meets Heidi. The book definitely began to remind me more of Heidi and less of Anne of Green Gables in the second half when Ruby June meets her cranky old grandmother who lives at the top of a mountain in a house all by herself and runs off anyone who tries to get close. Ruby June tames Grandma just as Heidi tamed the Alm Uncle, and they all live happily ever after in typical fairy tale fashion.

Don’t worry. I’ve given you some of the plot and introduced you to some of the characters, but there are plenty more eccentric Appalachian oddballs and several more story threads to keep you enjoying this rather pleasant tale. I doubt it will keep anyone awake at night pondering the deeper mysteries of life, but it’s good clean fun.

Way Down Deep is nominated for the Cybil Award for Middle Grade Fiction.

A 1995 interview with author Ruth White.

Publisher’s Weekly 2007 interview with Ms. White.

Other blog reviews of Way Down Deep:

Jules at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast: “White pulls it all together with the cohesive thread that is, at its core, a tender narrative about the relationship between a caretaker and her child — and what it truly means to be a family.”

Leepike Ridge was a book that my mom wanted me to read. She said that I needed to broaden my taste in books. I didn’t read it, and my mom decided that she would read it to us at night. I went along with it, and one night, we had finished reading and the end of the chapter left me in suspense. I picked up the book and started to read, and I learned that it was a very good book. Here is the basic story:

In this book, there is a boy named Tom Hammond. He lived in a house on top of a huge rock. His dad was dead, but his mother was still alive. It all starts out with a new refrigerator. He was catching crawdads in the stream next to his house. He ran to where the delivery men are grunting and heaving the heavy box up the stairs. When the delivery men were done with their job, he took the box and packing foam and brought it down the stairs to the woods. He threw the box and it hit a rock; he threw the packing foam and it fell in a tree. He knockeed it down and threw it again and started to play with it, as though he were in the army. He left it on the bank and went back home. There was his mom’s boyfriend, Jeffrey. Tom didn’t like Jeffrey, and when his mom said that he was staying for supper… Tom was close to blowing. After supper, his mom told Jeffrey about how Tom was playing with a box, and that it sounded like when he played with his army men. “I do not, play with army men.” Tom said and about one minute later, he stormed out of the house. He stood for a moment, and started to climb up the house and onto the roof. He stood on the chimney, and looked down. A couple of minutes later, his mom came out and called him, he didn’t answer. Oh, well, I don’t want to give the whole story away, so I am going to leave you there!

Sherry’s review of Leepike Ridge.