Dead End in Norvelt

I first became acquainted with Jack Gantos (the author) when I read his book Joey Pigza Loses Control (2001 Newbery Honor) in high school. I specifically remember Joey because he pitched on a baseball team and was known for not leaving his mound under any circumstances. I was playing on a softball team during that time and our pitcher was exactly the same way. I even read an excerpt from the book during a softball party and everyone thought I was reading a description of our pitcher, Kim.

Dead End in Norvelt is somewhat autobiographical, but some parts are clearly fabricated. Gantos describes a summer in his hometown of Norvelt, Pennsylvania (named after EleaNOR RooseVELT), the entirety of which he spends grounded. I think I spent most of the book aggravated by the injustice of Jack’s grounding. In the first chapters, he mows down his mom’s corn plants at the express command of his father. Jack’s mom then grounds him for the entire summer. Wha?! He even tries to defend himself by explaining that his dad made him do it, but she just says something about how he’ll be in trouble, too. Clearly, there are significant communication issues his parents need to work out and I couldn’t let that go for the rest of the book. I found the main plot only mildly interesting and Jack’s constant nosebleeds annoying rather than endearing. There was one part toward the beginning when an old woman who Jack befriends is melting wax on her hands to soothe her arthritis and Jack, ignorant of this process, is under the impression that she is melting off and eating her own skin. I giggled through the entire scene, the ending of which I included here:

“Now peel it off,” she ordered.

“Peel what off?”  I asked.

“The sticky stuff on my arms,” she said impatiently, and then she held a rounded stump up to her mouth, bit off a cooked chunk, and spit it into the trash.

I felt faint. I staggered back a few steps and by then my nose was spewing like an elephant bathing himself. “Please . . . Miss Volker,” I said with my voice quavering. “Please don’t eat your own flesh.” Mom didn’t know Miss Volker had gone insane, and I knew I would go insane too if I had to watch her cannibalize her own body down to the white boiled bones.

“You’re bleeding all over the floor,” she said, turning her attention toward me as if she wanted to wash her flesh meal down with my blood. “Let me have a look at you.” Then she reached toward me with her deformed stumps and touched my face and at that moment I yelped out loud and dropped over dead.

The Quaint and Curious Quest of Johnny Longfoot, the Shoe King's Son

Sometimes I pity the tweeners of the early nineteenth century and The Quaint and Curious Quest of JL is one of the reasons. Was this really the best children’s literature available in 1948? Did someone really read this and think, “This book deserves an award!”? Apparently. I’m not even sure how to describe the book. I wouldn’t call it fantasy, but it is absurd and everything talks (including the wind) so it might be classified as fantasy. The dialogue is unnatural, the story is unbelievable, and the repentance of the bad guy is sudden and unconvincing.

That being said, I used this book as a motivator while working on my semester-long project (that I started two days before it was due) in my problem-solving class and it actually worked! My system was as follows: after each problem I completed in my problem-solving binder (these were fairly in-depth problems requiring several pages to complete), I could read a chapter from Johnny Longfoot. And it totally worked! I found myself wanting to continue reading past one chapter every time, but always exercising great self-control and solving a problem in between each one. I can’t explain this phenomenon (since I thought the book was awful), so I won’t try.

Want to read the full text online?

Breaking Stalin's Nose

I am grateful to live in a country that is not ravaged by war or oppressed by a dictator or stifled by lack of freedom. Learning about countries that are not blessed with these privileges fills me with sadness and anger. But it fascinates me to read about them.  I gobble up every book or movie about the Holocaust and the U.S. Civil Rights movement. I cry and become indignant and immediately want to spend all my time fighting injustice. Fighting injustice, after all, is in my blood (Mom!).

Given my interest with injustice, it is surprising that Breaking Stalin’s Nose was my first novel set in Russia under Stalin’s reign. The author, Eugene Yelchin, grew up in post-Stalin Russia and experienced the aftermath of Stalin’s sociopathy, but he claims that few people in his generation even know what happened under Stalin and that the government has maintained (to a large extent) the secrecy of his crimes. Despite the silence, Yelchin says that the Russian people had lived in fear for so long that they passed it on to successive generations. This book about a young boy living in Stalinist Russia is Yelchin’s confrontation of that fear. The book was short, but communicated well the deception and bullying of the government through the eyes of a naïve boy. I was startled by its rather abrupt resolution (one minute you think the boy will be imprisoned or executed and on the next page he has escaped and is informally adopted by a nice woman), but otherwise the book made me think  about my freedom and be grateful.

Ella Enchanted

I had the great (mis?) fortune to attend graduation (actually, two of them) this past week (not my own, though mine was taking place at the same time). In anticipation for the event, thankfully, I remembered the #1 Hard and Fast Rule of Literature: There is no occasion, no matter how tedious, that cannot be made entertaining by Ella Enchanted. As a result, I actually looked forward to both ceremonies and didn’t have to listen to a single boring talk!

Ella immediately became my favorite book after the first read (10/1998) and remains in my top five to this day. The heroine is smart, strong-willed, witty, and adventurous, and the hero is madly in love with her for it. It is the quintessential girl-power Newbery. I am still disappointed about what they did with the movie, but let’s not talk about that.
 

I still remember this passage (wherein Ella is telling Char about her experience at finishing school) making me giggle out loud the first time I read it:

I seated myself on a large rock. "Observe." I plucked an imaginary napkin out of the air, shook it twice, and placed it on my lap.

 "Very ladylike," Char said politely.

"I shake the napkin twice. That's important."

"Why?"

"Mice."

Now on the rare occasion that I shake a napkin, I always think of Ella and mice. And, of course, I little-girl swoon when I read her and Char’s clever and (ultimately) romantic letter correspondence. Though I’ve never talked to a male who has read it, I am quite certain that Ella Enchanted is a book that appeals to all ages and genders. It entertains, breaks down barriers (I made friends at the graduation just by having it my hand), and gives a girl hope.

Li Lun, My One-Day Loan

Last checked out: 1970.

I received notification this morning that my book from repository was ready to be checked out. Li Lun! I rushed over to the curriculum materials library (instead of having one big library, they have a bunch of small, specialized ones all over campus – I still think that’s weird) to pick him up and found some of the 2012 winners while I was there.  As he checked out my books, the librarian told me about an interview he had just listened to with the 2012 medal-winner author (Jack Gantos – apparently he went to jail for smuggling drugs when he was young!). He ended by saying, “OK, your books are due back on . . .” and then looked quizzically at the screen. “. . . today.” I don’t even graduate until Friday! And yet my library privileges ended today, just 24 hours after my last final. The University of Georgia library system runs a tight ship. I assured him I would return the books by their due date and hurried home (on my roller blades). Good thing Li Lun was only 96 pages long! 

Li Lun’s father is a fisherman, but Li Lun is afraid of the sea. When he tells his dad he does not want to go on his coming-of-age fishing trip, his dad slaps him, calls him a coward, hands him seven grains of rice, and tells him he must go to the tallest mountain on the island and grow seven times that number of grains. Li Lun visits a wise man to learn how to grow rice and then climbs the mountain with soil and bamboo sticks.

Crawling along the narrow ledge

 He plants his rice seeds on the top of the mountain and then fights off seagulls, rats, and drought for four moons until his rice is ripe.

Watering the precious rice plants

He only has one stalk left when he comes down from the mountain and goes to the temple where a temple-worker (who visited him on the top of the mountain) calls the whole village over and honors him as a courageous lad. And yes, he more than doubles his dad’s 49 requested grains.

"Li Lun has grown rice," the Good One tells the people.

Favorite part: I was going to write it verbatim, but I just realized that I already returned Li Lun to the library (these one-day library loans are rough).  When the temple worker guy visits Li Lun on the top of the mountain and hears his story, he tells him this cool thing about how planting or growing or harvesting or eating a grain of rice is as powerful or courageous or cool as moving a mountain, or something. It was deep, trust me.

Review: This book smelled AWESOME! I mean, most books from repository have great old-book smells, but this one was particularly pleasing. Also, I enjoyed the pictures. The story, however, was fairly uninteresting, although I did get this feeling of impending doom when he only had one stalk left and was quite relieved when it survived. And the book made me want to garden. That’s something. Finally,  I believe there might be more words in this blog than in the entire book of Li Lun, Lad of Courage.

The Goal

Long ago, I made a goal. I was 8 (at least that’s what I always tell people) and really liked reading. I believe it was my favorite thing to do. I was big into the Nancy Drew series (I read 61 of them in third grade alone) and Little House on the Prairie and anything Roald Dahl. I learned about the Newbery medal probably around that time since one of the Little House on the Prairie series received one and we read Island of the Blue Dolphins in my class at school. My mom’s library at home was also extensively stocked with tweener books and several had won the Newbery medal.

Enter a woman named Helen Halls. She was acquainted with my mom somehow. Apart from that, I have no idea how she became my reading mentor. She didn’t work at my school nor go to my church nor live close by and we were definitely not related. Whatever the connection, she found out I liked to read and gave me a bunch of book lists. One had a list of all the Newbery medals from 1922 to 1976, and later she gave me a list of all the Newbery medals and honors from 1922 to 1996. She would give me prizes when I finished a certain number of books from my list (usually a book) and even took me to Barnes and Noble once when I reached a particular goal, but talked me into getting a reference book about Greek mythology rather than the Roald Dahl book I wanted. :(

One fateful day (or maybe it was over several fateful days), I decided that as long as I had the list of Newberys, I ought to read them all. I liked checking things off of lists and I loved all of the Newberys I had read. Goal set, I began diligently reading books with the gold or silver medal on the cover. I fell in love with Number the Stars, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, The Giver, Banner in the Sky, and the list goes on. I think I envisioned completing this goal by the time I finished elementary school. Or maybe middle school. High school? I now have a graduate degree and am still not finished. In my defense, there are currently 386 books that have either received the John Newbery medal or received an honor from the committee. I am not a fair-weather-only-read-the-medal-winner kind of Newbery fan. I read them all. And as such, at age 27, I still primarily read books intended for 12-year-olds. And I am totally fine with that.

I have met with some opposition. In a discussion with peers in a high school English class, it came out that I read significantly more books than the other kids in my class. A girl (not a friend) then asserted, “Yeah, but Jenny only reads kids’ books.” Gasp! How did she know? Honestly, I was a little ashamed when I realized I hadn’t been devoting any time to the classics that *apparently* my classmates had all read. I tried to read some classics at that point (and of course, there are some that I love) and have dabbled in “good literature” since then, but I always return to my love. I also dated a boy who tried to discourage me from reading the old Newberys on more than one occasion, which only served to heighten my desire to achieve it and fuel my belief that we were not meant to be together (‘twas true).

 I have met with issues of accessibility as well. It turns out that out-of-print children’s books from the 40s are not available in most libraries even if they received a medal. I make a new search for all my remaining Newberys at every library I visit. Thankfully, BYU had a great juvenile library and I found many of the ancient hard-to-find Newberys in its catacombs. I checked out at least two dozen books from BYU that had never been checked out before. Some did not even have a barcode on them (which always threw the student librarians into an anxious mess until I directed them to the drawer where new barcodes were kept and assured them I had done this before). Despite this great library and other university libraries I have checked, there are a consistent 30 or so that have remained out of my reach over the years. They have not caused me much anxiety since there were always other Newberys that were available that I had not yet read. Until now. Last month, I finished A Pageant of Chinese History, a book that took me seven months to read (but really). It was a history of China from the beginning of time until 1935, when it was written (I give you this detail in an attempt to assure you of the book’s boringness and thus excuse the incredible length of time it took me to complete it). Anyway, this book was significant not for its content nor my feelings toward it (largely indifferent), but because it was the last available Newbery at the University of Georgia library that I had not yet read. Suddenly, I discovered that I did not have a single Newbery to read and not a place in the world to find one. That’s when I used the internet.

Shockingly (I feel even this adverb is an understatement), I had never thought to search for Newberys online before. I recognize that the internet wasn’t really even a thing when I first set my goal, but it has been for a really long time. I guess I never needed it because I could always find one in a library. Whatever the reason, I have never before searched for my old Newberys online (but I always looked up the new ones online – anxiously, at the end of January) and I made several AMAZING discoveries. Firstly (and most entertainingly), at least four of the Newberys on my list are spelled wrong (Helen Halls!) and I have been entering them into library databases incorrectly for 20 years. In fact, after discovering that Le Lun, Lad of Courage is actually Li Lun, Lad of Courage, I looked it up on the University of Georgia database and discovered that they do have it (in the repository, of course)! Ha! Who knew that one letter could be so dang important?

My second discovery was equally as exciting. There is some crazy internet site dedicated to celebrating women authors that has the FULL text of a few Newberys written by women from the 30s, 40s, and 50s, five of which I cannot find in any library. Christmas!!

And finally, the BLOG. I found this blog written by who knows who with a stupidly clever title about Old and New Berries wherein the author reviews each Newbery she reads and blogs about it! First thought: WHY DID I NEVER THINK OF THAT? Second thought: It’s still not too late. OK, it is too late. I could go back and read them all over again (goal: before I die?) just to blog about them, but we all know that is silly, and I just don’t remember most of them enough to give a good review of them from memory. And yet, the idea of this blog won’t leave me alone. Maybe because I want evidence that I did (will), in fact, achieve this goal. So that someday, in the far future, when I plead and beg the Newbery committee to allow me to join their ranks without any library science education or librarian experience and I have only my word that I know Newberys like nobody else knows Newberys, I’ll have something to show for it. It may even be my pride, because despite the fact that I can’t think of any real connection between my pride and this blog right now, it is the reason I do a lot of things and is thus probably a motivator.

Thus, I give you: The Newbery Goal (I could think of nothing as clever as whats-her-face blogger, so I decided to go with simple).