October | 2009 | DogEar

This is a great series for middle grade readers. Clean content. It will appeal to boys but includes female roles, one especially strong female. The dialog is humorous and the characters well-developed if not a little stereotypical. Tamora Pierce’s Protector of the Small series comes to mind as a strong pairing. Kids who have enjoyed the Pendragon series or The Books of Umber as well.

With a story line that keeps things moving, kids will be eager to read on. I have finished the first four volumes and checked out the website. Lots of fans already and maybe a movie from United Artists (funding, of course, is the road block).

This story was a lot of telling without much substance, a lot of build up without a climax. The premise is alluring enough for a fantasy fan: Eff is a thirteenth child and the twin sister to a seventh born son. Potentially powerful and destined to turn evil according to Magical numerology, Eff is taunted by others, including family members, and staunchly protected by her twin, Lan.

I don’t know what Wrede was going for. The book took a long time to plod through but I felt I had gotten nowhere when I finished. There were some interesting characters (but the title character was not among their number) and it seemed like a great story was lurking below the surface, but it never emerged.  As Sonderbooks states, the focus “is more on building an intriguing magical world than on the plot.” Well, I wanted both!

I really disliked Robin McKinnley’s Dragonhaven so it comes as no surprise that I’m not a Wrede fan. Both authors are long-winded and lost in the complexities of their own worlds. So, I’m currently rereading Fire by Cashore. She weaves a totally unique world around a delicious plot.

A lukewarm review at Fuse #8.

Kinney does it again. This time our admittedly lazy hero, Greg, must  mend fences with Rowley (his best friend), work off a debt to Rowley’s dad, go above and beyond to attract the attention of the community pool life guard, and become famous by creating a new comic strip for the local newspaper. All this leads to a boring vacation with Rowley’s family, a failed attempt at a V.I.P. Lawn service company, and no girlfriend or fame.

But Greg remains optimistic through it all. Incredulous at the adults around him and baffeled by their misunderstanding of his genius, he holds himself accountable for nothing and is seemingly without empathy. Of course, this results in one seriously funny book.

Greg has been holding on to a library book for a little too long. This is what he imagines will happen if he returns it.

I picked this one up after reading Book Envy’s review. Her summary is spot on and I agree with her assessment so check that out, then continue.

There was a lot of good description:

Let it all out. If only I could. Letting it all out would involve me exploding like a firework, a beautiful riot of rainbow sparks bouncing around the car and lighting up the entire lot. Everyone would look over to see what was going on, and one by one they would understand everything I had inside me (p 132).

But it was occasionally over-written. I often believe YA novels could be better if they were shortened by half.

In addition to BookEnvy’s comments, I found Dade’s relationship with Pablo fascinating. A few years ago, a former high school classmate of mine whom had since come out, said, “I hooked up with a lot of guys from school. In the baseball dugout. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you their names.”

I don’t know if I was satisfied with the ending. Without giving anything away, I would’ve liked to know what could have happened if things ended differently for Pablo.

Those who enjoy Alex Sanchez’s novels will like The Vast Fields of Ordinary. [On a side note, I am totally uninformed when it comes to MySpace music and the newfangled stuff kids are listening to these days to define themselves.]

In the 1960s a guy named J.C. Martin made a living catching the great Hoyt Wilhelm’s knuckleball. Doug Mirabelli always caught Tim Wakefield and his knuckleball for the Red Sox. They were called “personal catchers.” Catching a knuckleball was so difficult and so unpleasant for most regular catchers that if you could do it reasonably well (nobody did it really well), that one skill could keep you on the team. The personal catcher would sit on the bench until the knuckleballer took the mound, and then he and his special floppy mitt would enter the game. It was an odd kind of intimacy, to be joined together like that, a weird baseball marriage (p 74-75).

How can I express how much I enjoyed this book? It blended many of the themes present in several of this year’s best children’s books (see OCL’s Mock Newbery List): death and abandonment, grief and alienation, discrimination and friendship. Yet none of these drowned the story and baseball tied it all together.

[SPOILER ALERT]

Baseball is what helps Molly hold herself together. It helps her come to terms with her father’s death and to discover herself. It is how she codified life:

Molly meanwhile was fantasizing about a scoring system not for baseball but for life. If she said something stupid, if she forgot to bring home her science book – those would be errors. If her mother came through for her and a third of the time – that sounded about right – her batting average would be .333. Back when her locked has been defaces and Lonnie came along and rescued her, he could have been credited with a save” (p 147).

The setting – Buffalo, NY – was a perfect choice. Like Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, whose wintry and bleak Syracuse, NY setting gave the perfect backdrop to Melinda’s troubles, the gloomy Buffalo is “like Siberia, a place you’d go to disappear, or to be punished” (p 115) to this story. It supports Molly’s suspicions that her father’s job was “taking the starch out of him” (p 37) and that her mother was like a flower withering in such grey desolation.

My father, like Molly’s, was a reporter for the local newspaper, covering equally mundane and repetitious stories. While scavenging to salvage some of her father’s memorabilia, Molly stumbles across one of her father’s notepads. At first hopefully it will contain some sort of explanation for his mysterious death, she finds it blank and instead stages a mock interview with her father (p 55). I thought this and all the other little steps Molly took toward forgiving her father was exceptionally well done.

[END SPOILERS]

If you enjoyed this book, I recommend No Cream Puffs by Karen Day and Playing the Field by Phil Bildner.

“I had everything I needed to run a household: a house, food, and a new family. From now on it would just be me and Sammy–the two of us, and no one else.”

I couldn’t help but compare this book to Ann Dee Ellis’s Everything is Fine.

Both books feature a female protagonist whose physical well being has been abandoned by the adults in her life and her mental well being has been disrupted, both by family tragedy.

Love, Aubrey is an excellent first offering from new author Suzanne LaFleur but Ellis’s story is more concise, literary and ultimately more haunting. Both authors navigate their precious girls through the horror and confusion of one life-altering moment and the aftermath with elegance and poignancy. Both also do an excellent job building suspense.

I’ve seen this on some mock Newbery lists but decided to pass on it for our Library’s final list.

The date and time are yet to be determined (possibly January 3, 9 or 10), but we will be meeting to discuss possible Newbery winners! It has been a great year for children’s literature so don’t be daunted by the list. These books are excellent.

If you are in the Ocean County Area and want to join us, let me know! This is the first year we are including Non-Fiction picks

Fiction
The Prince of Fenway Park by Julianna Baggot (review)
All the Broken Pieces by Ann Burg (review)
The Girl Who Threw Butterflies by Mick Cochrane (review)
The Magician’s Elephant by Kate DiCamillo (review)
The Problem with the Puddles by Kate Feiffer (review)
The Dream Stealer by Dis Fleishman (Pictures by Peter Sis)
Brooklyn Nine: a Novel in Nine Innings by Alan Gatz
Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin (review)
Neil Armstrong is my Uncle and Other Lies Muscle Man McGinty Told Me by Nan Marino (review)
The Day of the Pelican by Katherine Paterson
A Season of Gifts by Richard Peck
The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg by Rodman Philbrick (review)
When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead (review)
The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Tate (review)

Non-Fiction
The Great and Only Barnum by Candice Fleming
Traveling the Freedom Road by Linda Barrett Osborne
Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared to Dream by Tanya Lee Stone

I was reluctant to pick this one up because of its Pollyanna cover art. It’s initial tone was as I suspected. Set in Connecticut during the Great Depression, it follows eleven-year-old Allie as her family moves from New Haven to Stamford when her father lands a job.

Much of the story is reminiscent of a simpler time when girls played hopscotch and boys played marbles, where mothers were homemakers and divorce was rare. But while these nostalgic images are pleasant, Hoberman reminds her readers that life was equally as difficult then as it is now; jobs were scarce, hobos weren’t bad people but rather men who could not find work, across the ocean anti-Semitism was growing.

As the story progressed, I grew more interested. Allie developed in so many lovely ways. Take this passage on page 160,

When we got home, I went into the dining room and stared at my grandmother’s cups and saucers. My mother has said that someday they would be mine. I wondered whether when I grew up I would let my little girl drink from them like Mrs. Minnick or be like my mother and keep them safe behind glass doors.

The supporting characters were also well developed and while Allie’s best friend and her family met with a happy ending, her other friends and their families had more ambiguous futures. Definitely a contender for the Newbery but it’s not my front runner.

This follow up to The Devouring did not disappoint. I’m only surprised that more teens at my library aren’t checking it out. I just love the cover art!

Reggie is an anomaly. With her ability to enter fearscapes and free tortured souls from Vours, she becomes a target of both the Vours and the Hunters (of which Eden is a member). It ends on a chilling note and I’m very interested to see where Holt takes the series.

I found that I didn’t recall some of the details from book one (it’s been over a year) but I found that it didn’t really matter. I got the gist and this book is about the fear, the terror. I like that Holt brought the story into the realm of science. It made it more believable.

I posted earlier about Mother Goose but I’ve decided to expand on that earlier post due to interest from other bloggers and my moms. If you would like to see the rhymes I use, I have put them together in a PowerPoint show on my wiki, Bugs in the Coke Machine (click on MotherGoose.ppt). I’m also going to upload videos of myself performing the Mother Goose program.

In this first video, I greet the mom and babies with my usual Hello & How Are You song (from the “Wiggleworms Love You” CD, 2005) followed by the rhyming section with a “Two Little Blackbirds” variation (Quiet and Loud) and “I’m Driving in my Car,” and “Where is Thumpkin?”

In the next segment we move to body rhymes: “Wiggle and Waggle,” “See-Saw Scare-a-down,” “This is the Way,” “Can You?”. Then it’s time for animal fun with ”Five Little Monkey’s” and “Six Little Ducks.”

This is followed by scarf and drum activities (“This is the way,” “The Wheels on the Bus,” “We’re Marching to the Drum”). We close out with our goodbye song, “Twinkle, Little Star.” Many of the moms will remain in the room up to 15 minutes after the program is over, playing with the puppets, instruments, and just chatting/making play dates. It’s a great social time for new moms especially.

So I hope you have an idea of the rhythm and flow of the program. This was a group of non-walking babies so it was a lot more lap time and less movement. The walkers tend to have more scarf/drum/music activity than the non-walkers. You can add rhymes to the program and toss out the ones you don’t like. Some I enjoy singing and sometime I prefer to use the CD player. Coming soon, a Mother Goose playlist with my favorite versions of my favorite songs.