The House of the Scorpion

For the next seven exquisite days, I am living in the lap of luxury in my parents' home. That means no alarm clocks, a regular supply of free fruit snacks and home-cooked meals, and, my personal favorite, a whole house vacuum! Seriously, it just hooks into the wall and the tube reaches anywhere in the house (and sucks up everything)!

While here, I decided to shop around my mom's library in the basement and read one of my old favorite Newberys - The House of the Scorpion. I had a vague idea that it was a dystopian novel, that the main character was a clone, and that at some point in the book he gets really bad acne (I always commiserate with bad skin), but beyond that, it was like reading a new book! And I still seriously enjoyed it. My dad noticed me reading it and said he remembered hating the book because it was so depressing. But it's hopeful at the end!

Matt grows up locked in a house with a loving caregiver, Celia, who only comes home late at night. Then, at age six, he breaks out of his house when he sees other children for the first time just outside his front door. He injures himself in the process and is carried to a mansion just miles away by the children. He is treated for his wounds at first, but someone discovers that he is a CLONE and everyone is immediately disgusted, calls him names, and locks him away. Matt slowly grows to understand that he is a clone of Matteo Alacran, the fuhrer of Opium, a country created 100 years before on the border between Mexico and the United States. The country is run by drug lords who take care of the "immigrant problem" by putting computer chips in their brains and making them work their opium fields. Matt is well-beloved of El Patron (Matteo Alacran), so others in the household must suppress their disgust of him.

I found Matt a complex and somewhat frustrating hero. I got mad when he responded to situations childishly, but then realized he was just a child (but not like a Katniss/Harry Potter "I'm-so-whiny-about-being-forced-to-be-the-savior-of-my-entire-race" child; I can't handle that kind of child). And despite the plethora of dissolute and downright pathetic characters in the novel, there were some absolute gems (Celia, Tam Lin, Ton-Ton) that kept my faith in humanity. Thankfully, Matt listens more to these positive voices than he does to the others as he comes of age and discovers his real purpose.

Five stars.

Windy Hill

I've read this before. Recently. But I have no record of it and it's not highlighted on my Newbery book list, so even though I realized in the first chapter that I had read it and immediately knew the basic plot line, I had to read it again. Because I had to make sure that I had read it and that it was recorded.  The last few chapters did seem new to me, though, so it is very likely that I started and never finished.

Oliver and Janet visit their mother's cousin Jasper for the summer and discover something has been weighing on him for a long period of time. Annoyed by Jasper's neglectfulness, Oliver tries to go back home but runs into a beekeeper, the Beeman, and his daughter, Polly, on his way to the train and they convince him to stay. The Beeman tells several stories throughout the book (that constitute entire chapters) and I found them much more intriguing than the story of Oliver and Jasper. In the end we discover that the stories he has been telling are family history stories! They are accounts of his and Oliver's ancestors (spoiler alert: the Beeman and Jasper are cousins) that he has read in the genealogical books and records he has inherited. Oliver's story ends when the bad guy (who has been bullying and cheating cousin Jasper) suddenly repents and leaves town so everyone is happy.

Overall Rating: Meh, but I will give it credit for being much more readable than the medal that year, The History of Mankind, a book I have checked out from the library at least a dozen times and still have not managed to finish. Read Windy Hill online!

BOMB: The Race to Build - and Steal - the World's Most Powerful Weapon

The weekend I read BOMB: The Race to Build - and Steal - the World's Most Powerful Weapon, I talked and thought of little else. I turned down my best friend's offer to join her for a pool party, I barely spoke to my boyfriend and I went to a BBQ where I told everyone with whom I spoke how much I wanted to get home to finish my book. And then, of course, I told them ALL about it.

It was by far the most riveting book I've read in years. And it was nonfiction, to which I usually claim indifference, but very different from the nonfiction I have read. The book follows all the major players (mostly physicists and spies) in the creation of the atomic bomb during WWII and the Soviet attempts to steal it from the United States.Why did I not know these people before? Robert Oppenheimer? Leslie Groves? Ted Hall? Knut Haukelid?! How have men with such exciting, important contributions to World War II escaped my notice until now? And how did I not know about the KGB's intricate network of spies in the U.S.? I actually learned several things that I feel I should have known long ago. Like the fact that the Soviet Union actually stole the model for the atomic bomb from us. Yeah, I should have known that.

One of my favorite (true!) stories from the book was that of the Norwegian resistance fighters and the Vemork heavy water plant. See, Hitler "held tight to the world's only supply" (p.75) of heavy water which is one of the few materials that "can be used to slow down neutrons and create a chain reaction in uranium." Thus, the British and the Americans were very interested in destroying the German's heavy water plant (Vemork) in Norway to retard their progress in developing the bomb. Enter Knut Haukelid and the Norwegians. After escaping Norway and getting trained at a special spy school in Great Britain, they blind parachuted into northern Norway and cross-country skied to the plant. Instead of approaching Vemork across the heavily guarded suspension bridge that was the only entrance, they hiked down into the gorge in the middle of the night and then scaled the vertical rock face with their bare hands. Because they're Norwegian. And then the ten men broke into the plant, destroyed the heavy water machinery and escaped on skies toward Sweden. Perhaps best of all: "not a single one of the Norwegians was ever caught" (p.87).

I also want to tell you about how the Germans started to rebuild the plant and what Knut did to thwart those efforts and what the German physicists said post-war about how much the destruction of Vemork stunted their progress toward the atomic bomb, but there just isn't time. You simply must read the book.

The One and Only Ivan

Honestly, this book only got really exciting to me when I learned (in the epilogue) that not only is Ivan (loosely) based on a real live gorilla, but that I MET him. He lived in Zoo Atlanta! And I went there! And spent lots of time with the gorillas! And it was right before he died!

Yes, the book was creative in its first-gorilla narrative. Yes, it was a fresh perspective and a well-written story. But I found myself not terribly riveted by Ivan's slow life and a little impatient with the lack of rising action until the last few chapters. And I think it's a shame that the author veers from the story of the real live Ivan to create a really unbelievable situation about Ivan painting a giant mural made up of numerous individual paintings that the janitor's daughter just happens to put in just the right order to discover the picture he has drawn and she is just convincing enough to get her father to glue the entire assembled mural made up of individual sheets of paper onto a freeway billboard. That's when you lost me, Katherine.

Still, I wept when Stella dies and when Ivan sees Ruby happy with other elephants. Oh, and when he sees Julia at the zoo. That was sweet.

Splendors and Glooms

I was mesmerized by this story. It was unique and suspenseful and Ms. Schlitz had me convinced of its plausibility (even when manifestly fantastical). Grisini was a terrifying and believable villain, Lizzie Rose and Parsefall were complex and loveable main characters, and the witch was horrifyingly captivating.

Splendors and Glooms follows two orphans (not related) who are apprentices to a master puppeteer, Gaspare Grisini, who is resolutely dissolute. They put on a show at the birthday party of a young girl about their age, Clara, who lives in a wealthy home with two loving parents, but also is the only surviving child of her parents' five kids. The next day, Clara disappears. Lizzie Rose starts to suspect Grisini and the plot thickens!

There is a scene at the beginning in which Clara watches the puppet show at her birthday party and finds one act with a skeleton puppet particularly entertaining. She is so overcome with amusement, in fact, that her loud, uncontrollable laughter disgraces herself in front of her parents and all her party guests. Her party ends disastrously. And while reading that scene, I unequivocally related to Clara. Sometimes you just can't control yourself!

Three Times Lucky

If I were to describe the "typical" Newbery winner, it would go something like this: The protagonist is an adolescent (girl more often than boy) from a broken/dysfunctional family who seeks to understand more about his/her identity and/or family connections through the course of the book. And maybe that stems from the fact that many adolescents come from broken families and struggle to understand their own identity! Nevertheless, it has become a trite Newbery plot line for me.

Three Times Lucky seemed to fit the stereotype UNTIL, suddenly, there was a murder (and a fairly terrifying confrontation with an alcoholic father). A murder in a Newbery? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that is unprecedented. I kept thinking it would turn out to be just a case of a missing person (and a clue to Mo finding out something about her family), but it really was a murder. And there really was a murderer, and Mo even interacts with him. The book lacked the suspense I associate with crime novels, but largely because I knew it had to end happy because it was a Newbery.

While the book was spunky and fun, I had a major problem with the resolution. They find the murderer, they figure out his accomplice, and simultaneously discover the Colonel's (Mo's adopted caregiver) past and his relationship with Miss Lana all in a few pages. And get this: The Colonel and Miss Lana had been in love, then he had lost his memory in a car accident and couldn't remember who he was or his love for her. BUT SHE DOESN'T TELL HIM!!! Instead, she just waits for 11 years for him to recover his memory and love her again. WHAT?! So, nobody (including the Colonel himself) but Miss Lana knows the Colonel's past, but she lives with him in a house (separate bedrooms) and helps him raise a girl, Mo, for over a decade. Don't you think, if you had been in love with someone and he lost his memory, you would at least tell him his name and explain what happened to him and how he ended up in a creek and what he'd been doing prior to ending up in the creek and who you were to him? Perhaps she had a really good reason for withholding that information, but for the sake of the book's believability, that reason should have been explained somewhere.

Some Lowrys for a Long Flight

After planning a brief trip to Georgia for Presidents' Day, I found myself in the library looking for a book to read for the first time in almost nine months. Nine months! This is what teaching public high school has done to me. I had hoped to find one of the new 2013 Newbery winners, but I should have known better than to find them available just a few weeks after they were announced. So, I did what any Newbery lover would do in a bind; I checked out two Lois Lowrys and headed out on my trip.

The Giver has long been in my top ten (since my first read in 6/96) and I could barely remember the details since my last read (11/98), so that fully entertained me on the flight to Atlanta. I had totally forgotten about The Stirrings and the previous Giver and the process by which the Giver transmits memories (which is still pretty unbelievable to me), but I remembered the controversial ending quite vividly, most likely due to many a heated conversation with friends and family about the boy's ultimate fate. And I still, no matter what you say, am hopeful.

 I pulled out my next Lowry masterpiece, Number the Stars, right as I sat down on the plane leaving Atlanta. I was only a few pages in when I noticed the woman across the aisle eyeing me and my literature. She finally mustered the courage to say, "This is so crazy, but that was my favorite book growing up! What are the odds that you would be reading it?! It's such a random book to love!" I smiled and told her I loved it, too, but was very amused that she thought it was so crazy and random that we both liked Number the Stars. Wasn't it a staple in most kids' reading diet? Anyway, it turns out I had completely forgotten this one (first and only read in 11/95) despite always claiming to like it (mostly because I love anything Holocaust-related) and discovered again that I do. Reading the dusk jacket about the Danish resistance movement (and subsequent research I conducted about it) intensified my appreciation for the sacrifices non-Jews made for their Jewish friends and acquaintances. Did you know that Denmark saved over 99% of its Jewish population by hiding them and ferrying them to Sweden? And then there's Niels Bohr! He's a story for another day.

Lois Lowry for the entertainment win!