Out of the Flame

Another biographical fiction! And now that I know it's a legitimate genre, I wasn't as bothered by all the made up stories about real people. EXCEPT for this minor detail: I can't find any internet evidence that the main character actually existed?? 

The story follows Pierre de Bayard, an orphan page who serves King Francois I during the early 1500s, and his life at court with the children of the King (Prince Francois, Prince Henri - future king of France, Prince Charles and Princess Magdaleine and Princess Marguerite). He is nephew of the famous knight Pierre de Bayard, student to the scholar and philosopher Master Fabri and he "owns" a little hunchback dwarf named Jac who is his dearest friend. They go on adventures, he butts heads with Prince Henri, he aspires to be a great knight but also longs to be a scholar like Fabri, he idolizes his Aunt Marguerite, he learns about humanism from Sir Thomas More, he almost gets kidnapped with Henri, then he actually gets kidnapped and gets freed by Native Americans that Cartier brings back from the New World. And the author writes a postscript about what happened with all the characters, including Pierre (who apparently became a famous scholar and mathematician). So I of course looked them all up to read their stories and everyone in the book is totally real - the king, the princes, the king's sister, Cartier the explorer, Thomas More, Pierre's famous uncle who he's named after - but I can't find anything about HIM. 

So was the main character made up? 

Boy of the South Seas

After a somewhat reluctant start, my dad now seems fully committed to helping me achieve my Newbery goal. Completely self-motivated, he consulted my list of remaining Newberys, double-checked with me, and then checked three out from his university library and brought them all the way to Georgia when he came to visit last weekend! Really, he's come a long way. 

Boy of the South Seas was not as bad as some other 30's Newberys. It helped that it was an easy less-than-200-page read. It was really sad, though. The main character is a boy who lives on a sparsely-inhabited island in the South Pacific (100 years ago) and in the first chapter, a merchant ship arrives on the island, he climbs aboard to explore, falls asleep, and wakes up after the boat has set sail and they won't return him to his home. The first chapter ends with the author commenting about how the boy would not lay eyes on his own island again until he was an adult! Tragic!

He jumps ship a little while later and gets adopted by a nice woman at the new island that he swims to, so the story mellows considerably. And it sort of resolves nicely in the end with opportunities for Teiki to share his culture and language with the world so they're not lost forever.

Young Walter Scott

I would classify Young Walter Scott as a historical fictional biography.  Hang on a second . . . I just looked it up and there's a genre called biographical fiction. And here I thought Elizabeth Janet Gray was taking liberties by making up a childhood for Walter Scott when it's actually an entire genre and authors do it all the time! There's apparently an art to making up stories about actual people's lives! 

I've never read any of Walter Scott's books. This made-up story about his childhood may have been more interesting if I had. He was lame (that part is true) and the author uses that to frame basically everything that happens to him ever. And he was Scottish (also true), which made the book fairly difficult to understand because the author had everyone speak in Scottish accents. For example, here's a snippet that I just literally didn't understand.

Wattie turned. "I'm no that lame. I'm off to climb Arthur's Seat."

"Havers," she said admiringly.

"By the Gutted Haddie," he added.

"Havers."

Wha?

I wouldn't recommend Young Walter Scott, unless of course you're a super fan of Ivanhoe or Rob Roy and want a glimpse into what one woman thinks Scott's childhood may have been like.

Swords of Steel

Swords of Steel was another quick read while visiting my dad over the summer and I don't remember much of it. The novel followed a boy who lived in Gettysburg before and during the Civil War. The book itself was fairly episodic and really just jumped from one major event to another major event which didn't make for a very smooth story. The Battle of Gettysburg ended up being fought right in this boy's yard (and house) which was pretty shocking. There was a budding romance I was slightly interested in the whole book, but it had a very anticlimactic peak right at the end.  And that concludes the sum of what I remember. G'night.

The Story of Appleby Capple

I am starting to realize that complaining that "it's so hard to find old Newberys" and then discovering that there is some ridiculously easy way to find them has started to become a theme of this blog.

- First, I found that celebration of women authors website with the entire text of like five of my missing Newberys. 

- Then I discovered some online library where I could virtually check out books and read about four more for free. 

- Just last year, I realized that my bro-in-law is a student at a university with lots of old Newberys and I could read a few every time I visited (though that one does give me a deadline and it's usually a short time period when I want to be spending time with family). 

- My latest discovery is perhaps my most ridiculous oversight. See, my dad has a special "readers" library card at the university just ten minutes from his house (University of Utah) and he's always checking out these whackadoodle books about quantum physics and conservation biology. While visiting him this summer, he casually said that his library might have some of my missing Newbery books and that he would check one or two out for me if I was interested. ?!?! I immediately demanded a laptop and his login information and they had ALL BUT THREE on my remaining list. We planned a trip to the library the next morning and after a considerable amount of discussion, he finally allowed me to check out THREE books (he can only have a max of five checked out at a time and really didn't want to give up some of the books he was reading. "Dad, you can just check them out again when I leave town in 8 days." "But I'm at a really interesting part of my vermicomposting reference book!" "This was YOUR idea, Dad!").

My first quick summer vacation read was The Story of Appleby Capple, the only Newbery written more recently than the 1930s that I have needed to read for the last decade! The author attempted to write an entire novel divided into alphabetic chapters: The first chapter was focused on A and most of the main characters and animals and themes in that chapter started with A. The second chapter was B and so on. It made for a meandering, far-fetched story with lots of hard-to-remember names. And poor Appleby is a little boy who is lost for the entire story and the only people looking for him are ancient, distant relatives. SPOILER: They finally spot a Zebra butterfly in the last chapter.

It has actually now been many months since I read this book so I don't remember much. But one night while I was reading, my 7-year-old joined me and read a couple pages aloud for his 20-minute nightly reading and I distinctly remember us both laughing out loud at one part. So . . . there's that.