Reading My Library Progress, Past Tense

As I clean up my reading piles from last year, I'll be tossing out a bunch of mini-reviews so that I can remember these books in years to come. For example, here are some more Reading My Library picks, back from the L-M shelves:

Alvin Ho, Allergic to Camping, Hiking, and Other Natural Disasters, by Lenore Look, followed the same pattern as the earlier books about Alvin, but less time was spent at school and more time with his loving and tolerant family. I found some of the tall tales too tall for my taste (Alvin and his toddler sister really rig a trap that leaves his father dangling head-down from a tree?), but over all it was a funny story about a timid boy.

I grabbed Starfields as soon as I read the blurb on the back, and it had several things going for it. First, the author, Carolyn Marsden, had the same name as another author that I like (John Marsden), and second, it's set in Mexico, making it eligible for my Global Reading challenge as well.


Unfortunately, I felt that it didn't really work on its own respect. The three strands didn't really come together -- the daughter of white scientists studying frog extinctions, the Mayan girl secure in her culture, and the mystical long-ago Mayan seer who magically communicates with the modern Mayan girl. It's wasn't hard to read, but I never felt a real connection with the kids, and I wasn't sure why the scientist's daughter was in the story at all.


I scored a jackpot with Wendy Mass's 11 Birthdays. It was a fresh voice, although I occasionally wished the book were narrated by the boy, since he was a lot more active and creative, leaving the girl to follow in his footsteps. But all was forgiven when my niece sounded interested in the story, and then she READ the book, and has requested the sequels (which I have duly ordered from the library. Go Mass!

The next shelf was entirely filled with Megan McDonald's books about Judy Moody and her brother Stink. Since I'll be doing one of Stink's books with my elementary school book club, I grabbed one of those and had a fairly good time. Stink is a little too precious for my taste, a smart kid who doesn't resent his big sister's teasing nearly enough, but I like his general competence and ability to clean.

May Is Religion Month: Child of Dandelions

The cover of Shenaaz Nanji's Child of Dandelions gives very little hint about the contents of the book, and since it's been over two years since I placed it on my to-read list, I had to just trust long-ago-me and start reading. The bangles around the wrist of the girl on the cover belong to Sabine, an adolescent in 1972 Uganda, soon after the rise of Idi Amin. My memories of history in the '70s told me that he was a bad guy, but they don't actually get more nuanced that that.

The tension in this YA/older middle grade book grew quickly, as Sabine hears that the Indian community will be expelled. She and her father consider themselves Ugandan citizens and assume that the decree doesn't apply to them, but I knew they were underestimating the situation. Nanji does a good job of showing the complexity of the situation through the connections between Sabine and her ethnically diverse circle, starting with her best friend Zena, ethnically close to Amin who trusts him to restore the country and including Indian relatives and store keepers as well as the family servants, all African.

Things rapidly get worse for Sabine and her family and the mother begs to leave immediately. Secure in their wealth and citizenship, Sabine and her father laugh at the crazy orders of the government, but the danger quickly mounts as army officers shoot people at traffic stops and burst into shops demanding bribes and respect. The disparity between Sabine's wealth and Zena's poverty shows how resentment grew, and even though Sabine learns how her family has discriminated against blacks (the servants eat off separate plates, she never thought to ask after the chauffeur's real name or family), her small steps do nothing to avert society's plummet of a cliff.  Although the worst atrocities happen off-stage, Sabine sees the loss of all safety and barely manages to escape with the her life and her little brother.

I enjoyed the taste of events almost unknown to me, and the story should be exciting enough to get my seventh grader to read it as well, but the cover will be a tough sell, since the passive and relaxed arms show nothing of the dangers and actions taken by the main character throughout.

I've just read some discussion of religion in YA books; despite the prevalence of vampires and demons, apparently very few books actually show kids practicing religion. So I thought for this month I'd pay attention to see it that was try for the books I read, especially the YA and children's book.  In this one, although Sabine is a practicing Muslim, she doesn't spend much time thinking about her religion or praying; she respects the Hindu faith of her mother's friends, many of whom do pray for help. So it's part of the background but not in the forefront of her concerns.

Hard Times: Between Shades of Gray

Memories of The Endless Steppe haunted my reading of Cybils Young Adult Fiction finalist Between Shades of Gray, Ruta Sepetys's story of a Lithuanian teenager arrested with her family by the Russian police just as World War II swept across the European continent.  Torn from a rather privileged childhood, Lina and her brother have only their mother to protect them as they are herded into cattle cars and shipped across Russia to a succession of labor camps, each grimmer than the one before.

Sepetys gives Lina a believable voice, from her naive and reckless dedication to her art through her understanding of the dangers they face, both from the bullets and blows of their captors to the slow draining of their souls and selves from the unremitting brutality and deceit. Lina tries various schemes in attempts to reconnect with her father, but the realism in the story prevents any of them from succeeding. The cruelty and sadism of the Russian guards are sadly convincing, as are the appalling conditions at the Arctic camp they end up in. Although there is an epilogue providing a hint that some characters survive, overall the story is as tragic as the time period suggests.

I'll see if my son will try this; he's not much for historical fiction. It would be interesting to see if he understand the context; for example, why some people hope Hitler will save them, or the importance of the Jewish man's concealment of his religion, or what happened to the country of Lithuania at this time. (The library wanted it back before I could talk him into trying it.)

Rescue Dog in Canada: Star in the Storm

Joan Hiatt Harlow's Star in the Storm is one of the "dog" books I see elementary school kids reading fairly often, and a good teacher at our school is Ms Harlow, so I grabbed a copy off the shelf as part of my Reading My Library quest. It's a historical book set in Newfoundland in the early 1900s, where fishing and icebergs occupy most of the conversation. Also, it was short.

Mean people want to ban all dogs except sheep dogs, mostly on the lying say-so of the rich man's daughter.  This spells danger for Sirius, Maggie's big dog. She has to keep him safe from view while navigating the feud with the rich family, her dad's hope for his own fishing boat, and her cousin's illness. It's a cosy little story with enough danger and initiative to keep me occupied, and left me with a nice glimpse of life in Canada in the distant past. (I laugh because of how distant my fifth grade niece described it to me; she classifies anything from the 20th century as Dark Ages.)

Youth Against the Dark: The Shattering

Down in the South Island of New Zealand, Karen Healey's The Shattering places a perfect town.  It has reliable weather, good schools, a good community, a solid economy and nothing changes.  No one notices. And no one knows the price paid for this loveliness, at least until three teenagers who helped pay that price start to figure things out.

I loved this book because it uses the fantasy as a way to work the deeper emotional themes, but never backs away from the essential realism of the characters. They have crushes, some requited and some not, they have secrets, they deal with their grief and emotions in powerful or childish ways. The things they learn and the things they have to do don't come for free; at the end of the book both they and their world have changed fundamentally.

This is the second year Karen Healey appears as a Cybils YA Fantasy and Science Fiction finalist, and she's probably enough reason for me to love this award. I haven't pushed this book on my seventh grader because I think it's a bit adult for him; the tensions and relationships are clearly high school rather than junior high based.  I'm looking forward to whatever else Healey decides to write.

Slovakian Heroes: Dragon Castle

Our elementary school book club started the year with Skeleton Man, a Joseph Bruchac book that features  an Abenaki girl who uses the strength and knowledge gained from her family's folk tales to defeat a scary creature. Other books I've read by him also feature children proud of their Native American heritage. But in the Cybils Science Fiction and Fantasy (Middle Grade) finalist Dragon Castle, he turns to his father's people, the Slovakians, for inspiration and tone. The American kids put a huge emphasis on knowledge and competence; the Slovakian one trusts more in intuition and guidance. The feel of their interior lives is very different.

Not that Prince Rashko eschews competence; although he values his intellect highly (especially since he views himself as the only member of his family with a functioning brain) he also lets the reader know that's he's a big, strong, athletic swordsman, just like his simple-minded brother. And despite his towering intellect, he also rarely sees through to the meanings of the folksy proverbs scattered about by his father and other mentors.

The bad guys were suitably menacing, from the casual cruelties of the retainers to the magical attacks of the visiting prince and his beautiful daughter. Although I suspected from the first that Rashko severely underestimated the comprehension of his relatives, I liked how the entire family loved, trusted, and respected each other even when using vastly different tactics. The frequent intermissions to show the legend of Prince Pavol and the founding of the castle help build the themes of the story without slowing down the suspense.

My seventh grader also liked the book; the dragon and castle cover with its gently creepy color scheme enticed him to pick it up a few weeks ago. I'll see if the fifth grader wants to try it. (Nope)

Depressing Poetry: Requiem

The next Cybils poetry finalist is one I suspect I'm going to have a lot of trouble convincing my boys to read.  The cover of Paul B Janeczko's Requiem: Poems of the Terezin Ghetto promises what it delivers -- notes from the inmates clinging to hope or despair on their way to death.  I think the only survivors are the notes written by the sadistic guards.

My younger son has been depressed lately, and when he came for bedtime reading complaining that he couldn't face the future and wished it would disappear, I cheerfully announced I had just the book for him and brought this one out.  But he couldn't face it, so instead we read about frogs on the brink of extinction and the so far unsuccessful attempt to find a cure for the fungus that has removed them from the wild. I myself carefully selected a beloved bookmark made by my older son to hold my hand when I went back to reading about Terezin.

However, I wish the afterward came at the beginning. Here Janeczko explains that almost all of the characters were fictional, composites or pure invention.  One poem came from a real person.  Somehow the single true character makes the imaginary ones seem shadowy -- there were thousands of real people there; if he's giving names and numbers away than I'm wondering if these are stolen from real victims.  It's an unsettling epitaph for a moving subject.

Go Global!

Last year I ended up scrambling to finish the 2011 Global Reading Challenge, but it was still a lot of fun.  So this year I looked around for another one, and found it at Mysteries in Paradise's 2012 Global Reading Challenge.  At the Expert level, it asks for three novels from each continent, with Antarctica as the seventh continent -- you can substitute books set off world for it.  I am of course back-dating all my reading so far, or at least the books that I consider real novels and that take place somewhere.  I'm going to try not to count books set in the US, so I'll probably count Central America as part of North America to give me some options, although I'll also look for books about American Indians that don't take place in the political United States.

Mysteries in Paradise pointed me to a map that shows where I've been (literarily speaking, not literally), which I shall attempt to reproduce here:


create your own visited country map
         Africa

1. Akata Witch (Nigeria)
• The Other Side of Truth (Nigeria)
2. Child of Dandelions (Uganda)
3. CowTail Switch (Liberia)
• The Big Tent Wedding Party (Botswana)
Asia
4. Twin Spica 3 (Japan)
• Wandering Son (Japan)
5. Between Shades of Gray (Russia)
6. Zahra's Paradise (Iran)
• On the Island (Maldives)
• Words In the Dust (Afghanistan)
Australasia/Oceanea


7. The Shattering (New Zealand)
• Taken At the Flood (New Zealand)
8. The Snow Pony (Australia)
9. The Sex Lives of Cannibals (Kiribati)
Europe

10. Bindi Babes (UK)


11. Anna and the French Kiss (France)
12. Dragon Castle (Slovakia)

North America
13. Half World (Canada)
• A Star in the Storm (Newfoundland, Canada)
• The Girl Giant (probably near Toronto)


14. Starfields (Mexico)
15. Milagros, Girl From Away (La Brisos)
South America

16. Tales From Silver Lands (all over). This is a stretch as a novel, but it does have a tiny frame.
17. Chucaro, Argentina
18. Bringing the Boy Home (Brazil)
Seventh Continent

19. With a Single Spell
(fantasy world)

20. Mastiff (fantasy world)
21. Orbital Resonance (outer space)

21/21