Paperboy

A tornado warning in my county has given me a much-needed free morning and an opportunity to write about Paperboy, my final 2014 Newbery. The book was actually due at the library yesterday, so my blog-writing procrastination may actually cost me 10¢, a fee I refused to pay even for The Story of Mankind (see previous post), but I would say Paperboy is worth it.

This semi-autobiographical novel is told in the first-person perspective of an 11-year-old boy who stutters. His name is Victor, but that fact is not revealed until late in the book because he himself struggles to pronounce it. His best friend, Rat (actually Art, but that's harder to pronounce with his stutter), leaves for a month over the summer and Victor takes care of Rat's paper route while he's gone. I thought Victor was an endearing and eloquent protagonist. His struggle to speak makes him the kind of underdog that I live and love to champion, but is also reminiscent of others (Moses, Demosthenes, Enoch) who changed that specific weakness into a strength. His mother's inability to connect and lack of involvement frustrated me, but Mam's and Mr. Spiro's care for and interest in Victor inspired me.

Mr. Spiro is a former merchant marine and book-lover who lives on Victor's paper route. Victor looks forward to collecting from him each week because he treats him as an equal. Apart from Victor's housekeeper Mam, Mr. Spiro is the only adult with whom Victor is able to carry on conversations (including his parents). During one of his Friday afternoon collections for the paper, he goes inside Mr. Spiro's home and gets to see his collection of thousands of books for the first time. Inspired, Victor reveals that he wrote a poem, but immediately realizes he won't be able to recite it to Mr. Spiro because of his stutter. Mr. Spiro suggests they say it together (a strategy that is apparently very helpful for those who stutter), so Victor types it up and they recite it. 

 I wish I had a book

That did not have an end. 

I go to pick it up 

And it is new again. 

The words feel real 

And mine to share. 

They have no sound.

 They have no air. 

My voice is clear 

And lets me speak. 

My fear is gone. 

I'm never weak. 

My words all come 

And right on time. 

The words are true.

The words are mine.

The poem didn't sound like my words even though I had just typed them. Each word floated out of my mouth and joined up with Mr. Spiro's to make one. I didn't stutter once or have to worry about Gentle Air or sneaking up on sounds or fainting. My legs were itching. I looked down to see sweat trickling over my kneecaps and down my legs. For the first time I had said words out loud that I had written on paper.

Mr. Spiro was smiling with his big arms folded across his chest. He looked at me for a while without saying anything and then stood. "My bias against poetry has been properly challenged. A wonderful poem. I'm grateful to you for sharing, my Stuttering Poet."

If someone had called me a Stuttering Boy or a Stuttering Sixth Grader or a Stuttering Pitcher I would have probably tried to pick up something and bust them. But Stuttering in front of Poet seemed to make stuttering a good thing for the first time in my life.

The Story Of MANKIND

The Story of Mankind has always had an impressive power over me. My history with the book extends over two decades, but it has exerted its particular influence in such a way so as to prevent me from reading it in its entirety until now. I first checked it out at around age ten and have repeated that process literally dozens of times since. Every library has it because it received the medal in 1922, the first year the Newbery medal was ever awarded. And so, unlike all the other Newberys I have yet to read, accessibility has never been the problem. No, the actual issue that I have always faced with The Story of Mankind is more complex. I will reveal its power, but you must know that I am being completely and unadulteratedly honest with you on the subject. Once I discovered it, I tested it repeatedly and discovered the same result without fail (like, not even one time). Are you ready? I cannot read more than ten pages of The Story of Mankind without falling asleep.

Now, if you will allow me to do some math, I will illustrate why this book's particular power has been so debilitating for so long. The book contains 562 pages and since the average number of pages I reach before falling asleep is actually much lower than 10 (but never more than 10), reading the entire book would amount to roughly 80 naps. Now factor in that each of those naps could be anywhere between 30 minutes and 3 hours (let's say the average is 2 hours) and I would sleep roughly 160 hours before reaching the final page. If it takes me 1.5 minutes to read a page of text, the reading portion of this calculation would amount to around 14 hours. This means that if I checked out the book from an average public library and renewed it the maximum number of times (twice), I would have six weeks to complete my 174 hour task (I take overdue fines very seriously). With 168 hours in a week minus 56 hours for sleep (the book naps were never part of my night sleeping), 14 hours for meals, 50 hours for work (or 70 if I'm teaching public school), 12 hours for church and church activities, and 7 hours for "getting ready" time, I would have approximately 29 hours left in the week to dedicate to other pursuits. If I had spent all of my free time for six straight weeks, I could have reached the last page on the day my last renewal expired. As a pre-teen and teen, my attention span was never long enough for this type of endeavor (I usually pooped out before reaching page 50), and as an adult I preferred using those 29 free hours for social interaction (though I did still check it out and attempt it on numerous occasions). Is it any wonder I've tried and failed to read this book for the last 20 years?

I had to try something new. This past summer, I decided it was time. I hadn't spent an entire summer reading a book since I took a used copy of Les Miserables to the Philippines 11 years ago. I worked out a system where I brought the book back to the library every 6 weeks and asked the librarians to check it in and check it back out to me ("As long as there isn't a hold on the book." "Nobody has ever placed a hold on this book, I assure you."). I did this twice (18 weeks). I took dozens and dozens of naps. I fought indifference and boredom. I learned a few things about Napoleon. I laughed twice. I cried never. I solidified my belief that European monarchy history is painfully uninteresting. The word "revolution" transformed me. And, finally, I read the last page.

The Big Tree of Bunlahy

As described in my first post, there are several Newberys for which I have searched in vain for decades in libraries across America. Just hours (literally) before I moved away from Washington, D.C. about a year ago, I learned that the Library of Congress has a copy of every book with a copyright and a 'reading room' wherein patrons with a library card (easily obtained by anyone who appears in person with a valid form of ID) may read any one of those copyrighted books for as long as the library is open. My last act in the nation's capital before loading up my car and driving 600 miles south was obtaining that library card. It has remained unused for nine months . . . until today!

Six hundred miles is nothing, really. I drove back this weekend to visit friends and, while they were all at work today, went to the library to spend the afternoon accessing its vast catacombs of old Newbery awesomeness! Unaware of 'reading room' protocol, I talked to the first librarian I saw about my endeavor. She responded that most books were actually kept in off-site locations and had to be requested online up to three days in advance. Of course! There was no way they could keep 50 million volumes in this little teeny building! All dreams of spending the afternoon on a comfy couch in the reading room devouring old Newbery after old Newbery were dashed. I had been foiled again!

She said there might be hope, though, and sent me to a more expert librarian. The next one was an angel. She talked me slowly through the steps to creating my own password and then revealed the "Electronic Copy" link. This, of course, is only available for books when their copyright has expired (really, really old books). Luckily, really, really old books were exactly what I wanted. I didn't have to request a book and wait for three days (when I would already be back in GA); I could read it on a computer instantaneously!

My first Library of Congress book (since it was the first title that came to mind while talking to the angel librarian): The Big Tree of Bunlahy: Stories of My Own Countryside by Padraic Colum (1933 honor)

Story-telling! The novel is told by a boy who lives near a large oak tree in a half-village (there are only houses on one side of the street) named Bunlahy. We never learn in the text who this boy is nor what he does, but we hear all the stories he hears from various travelers under the Big Tree of Bunlahy. Some are folksy and some are fantasy-y and some are fairy tale-y and some are interesting and some are not. But what this novel really made me think of was the ART of story-telling. It's certainly not a lost art, though I've never sat under a tree in a village and listened to a stranger tell one. My mom is an avid story-teller and I think I inherited a few of the genes. I tried telling one of my favorites (the story of my first kiss!) just yesterday, in fact, but my listener spent the entirety of it checking emails on his phone. :(

And then I discovered (on wikipedia) that the author of the book - Mr. Colum - is the boy recounting the tales and they are actual stories he heard growing up in a village called Bunlahy in Ireland! I felt a little more connected after that. There is one I liked about the Luchra and the Luchrapauns (or, as we call them today, Leprechauns), but it was a story of lost love and it left me feeling a little unsettled. "Nannie's Shoes" was my favorite.

Recommendation? Only if you're really into Irish history. Or story-telling.

The Year of Billy Miller

I have officially procrastinated the writing of this review longer than any other in the [very short] time I've been blogging about Newberys. Perhaps I delay because I have very little to say about The Year of Billy Miller. I liked it. It was cute. It was funny (Sal and the Drop Sisters got me every time). It was heart-warming. It was short.

One highlight of the novel (the climax, actually) was Billy's assignment to write a poem about one of his family members for his final project in second grade. He feels bad picking one parent over the other, but realizes choosing his mom would make her really happy. So, he decides to let Mama and Papa choose a number between one and ten and automatically declare his mother's number the winner. It works. In class the next day, he spends time on his poem.

Billy had trouble getting started. He opened his poetry journal to the first page and wrote: My Mom. He couldn't think of anything else to write, so he drew a series of volcanoes in progressive stages of exploding. There was still enough space in the margin on the left-hand side of the paper to write the word MOM vertically, so Billy decided that he would try an acrostic. In a burst of inspiration he wrote:

 My

Only

Mother

Poetry's not too bad, he thought. He could definitely memorize this poem. He returned to drawing volcanoes.

I suppose Billy's poem is a little like this book: cute, funny, heart-warming, and short.

One Came Home

So it comes to this, I remember thinking on Wednesday, June 7, 1871. The date sticks in my mind because it was the day of my sister's first funeral and I knew it wasn't her last - which is why I left. That's the long and short of it.

How could this book not be good with an opening paragraph like that?! And how could you not love a heroine (Georgie) who, at 13, treks out on her own in the Wisconsin wilderness with just her Springfield rifle and a borrowed mule because she is not convinced that the remains of a girl found in her sister's dress were actually her sister's remains? She made me laugh out loud, inspired me to learn how to shoot a gun and impressed me with her vocabulary. The mystery was captivating, the historical significance interesting and the resolution complete. Two thumbs up.

A (not so) brief aside:

For the first time ever, I actually read online reviews of this book before I wrote my own. It happened accidentally and I vow to avoid it in the future, but I will comment here on a critique that I found odd. There were a few adult readers who thought that even though they had enjoyed the book, "children might not be able to relate to the novel" and thus rated it lower. How odd, I thought. To this, I have two responses.

1. Why would one rate a book lower because it might not appeal to a different audience? There are several books I have read that I don't think my brother would like, but it doesn't make me like them any less. Even if the book was intended for an audience of 25-yr-old males, I wouldn't like it less because I thought he wouldn't be able to relate to it.

2. If these readers were acting as if they were on the Newbery committee or soon would be (seriously, who does that?) and for that reason rated the book lower based on their faulty claim that children could not relate, I submit the following: This is perhaps not true for everyone, but I've noticed that the change in my literature preferences over the years is almost nonexistent. Books that I loved as a child are still my favorites now. Books that made me laugh out loud and that I struggled to put down at bedtime still have the same effect on me. I can only assume that the converse is true (especially since most books I read as an adult are intended for kids anyway). So why would these book critics feel that a book written in the perspective of a tween that captivated and entertained them as adults be so out of reach for tweeners themselves?!?

*phew* And that, folks, is why I am going to lay off the book reviews for now.

Doll Bones

Have you ever fallen asleep in your car after work and woken up at 2am at which point you go into your apartment and realize you're no longer sleepy so you read a Newbery until 5am? If so, let me give you some advice: Make sure under these very specific circumstances that you do not choose Doll Bones for your middle-of-the-night, alone-in-the-house pleasure read. Because while the title is fairly creepy, I can assure you that the book is far creepier.

Maybe if I re-read it now in the daylight surrounded by friends, I would sing a less terrifying tune. But I am willing to submit that the creepiest inanimate object in the world is a doll, and then let that doll have a terrifying back-story about being made out of the bones of a murdered girl named Eleanor who appears to the doll-owner in a dream wanting to be buried in her home-town cemetery and then let the ashes of said girl be in a little bag the doll-owner discovers inside the doll after removing the bone china doll's head and THEN let all adults see the doll and think she's a real girl and have the doll disappear and show up in random places where nobody put her and I challenge you to imagine something creepier.

I liked Doll Bones. I liked the well-developed characters and their sufficiently-developed families (well, I didn't necessarily like their families, but I liked their well-developedness). I loved the "game" Zach, Alice and Poppy played and how devastatingly it affected Zach when his dad ended it. I liked the complex themes and the connections the kids made. I liked how they changed and how Zach and Alice helped to allay Poppy's fears of change.

One of my favorite moments was Zach's reaction to discovering Eleanor's gravestone in the cemetery exactly as Poppy had dreamed it. Several negative experiences with his flaky dad had made him somewhat of a cynic up to this point in the novel. And then:

The large marble headstone bore the word KERCHNER on it, and over that, a carving of a willow tree. They stared at it, incredulous smiles giving way to genuine grins and laughter.

It made him feel, for a moment, like maybe no stories were lies. Not Tinshoe Jones's stories about aliens. Not Dad's stories about things getting better or things getting worse. Clearly, not Poppy's stories about the Queen [their name for the doll]. Maybe all stories were true ones.

Recommendation: Read it, just not under the circumstances specifically described above.

Flora & Ulysses

Two wonderful events occurred this past week - one greatly anticipated and one blissfully unexpected. Firstly, I always look forward to the end of January for the announcement of the new year's Newbery winners, but I'm never sure exactly what day they'll be revealed (Is there a specific day? Last Monday in January perhaps?). I usually wait for the first-ish week of February and by the time I look them up, they're checked out of every local library with 17+ holds and I don't end up reading them until some time in late summer.

Well, last Tuesday SNOW began to fall in Georgia. School had already been released early and I was on my way home when it occurred to me that I might like some light reading for my free afternoon and (hopefully) my day off the next day. I had my bf check the internet to see if, by chance, the committee had published their decisions and they HAD! The day before! And CNN had written about it just four hours previously. I sped to my local library (since it was closing early due to the inclement weather) - three were checked out and two were not even in the database. All hope was not lost, however, since the University of Georgia campus was still open for another half hour. I sped to their juvenile library and the medal and two of the honors were AVAILABLE! Snow day and new Newberys?! Life doesn't get much better than this.

Snow Day Entertainment

I read the medal first - Flora & Ulysses - since the librarians said I could only check it out for a week due to "course holdings" by "professors." Not a fan of the book. It was a typical Newbery in the sense that it followed the most common Newbery storyline, but atypical in its inclusion of a squirrel superhero (named Ulysses). Yes, this is my first exposure to a squirrel superhero in any literature and it was enough. forever. I was frequently frustrated by Flora's interactions with other people, as well, since nothing is ever explained. If someone says something odd or untrue (a frequent occurrence), she never requests clarification or rectification. Adults don't listen to her and her only peer is oblivious in a very frustrating way.

One redeeming element of F&U: The love Ulysses feels for Flora, the girl. Read this adorable poem he typed her:

Nothing
would be
easier without
you,
because you
are
everything,
all of it-
sprinkles, quarks, giant
donuts, eggs sunny-side up-
you
are the ever-expanding
universe
to me.

 If this poem were not typed by a squirrel that was once sucked up by a vacuum, I would like it even more.

On a slightly related note, did you know "squirreled" can be considered monosyllabic? And is debateably the longest one-syllable word in the English language?

A Day on Skates: The Story of a Dutch Picnic

I am really quite embarrassed to admit that before reading the first line of this book and then conducting some curiosity research, I was unaware that Holland was simply a pars pro toto for The Netherlands. Did everyone else know that? And did everyone else know the meaning of pars pro toto? 'Cause I had to look that one up, too.

Anyway, A Day on Skates was a dull 30-minute online read. I probably found the foreword by Edna St. Vincent Millay the most entertaining part of the book. She begins, "THIS is a book which mothers and fathers will sit up to finish, after the protesting child has been dragged firmly off to bed." I found this manifestly false. I wasn't in any way curious what would befall Evert or Afke on their school skating picnic (which (in case you've never been on one) involves ice-skating on frozen canals all over Holland from dawn to dusk with your 4th grade teacher). Nor did I have any difficulty "putting it down" when my bedtime arrived.

Three main critiques:
1. As an educator (of a particularly rough crowd at a Title 1 middle school), I was bothered by the picture the author painted of the ease of teaching. You just tell your class you're going to skate around all day all over the country! And then they all show up that morning on time and you skate around with no worries and every student behaves and the trip is a wild success even though you haven't planned anything! This, my friends, is not public education. Then again, I wasn't an educator in Holland in the 1930s.

2. As a woman, I found many of the female author's assumptions about women annoying. Personally, if "Teacher" had told me I had to stay inside to make the pancakes because I was a girl and all the boys got to go outside to play in the snow, he would have had some serious Jenny to reckon with. Then again, I wasn't a 9-year-old girl in Holland in the 1930s. But it still would have bothered me.

3. This book made me feel cold almost constantly.

I don't recommend it, even though Edna claims, "this is a book which should be in the library of every child who likes to read," but here is the full text online. Maybe it would be worth it to read the three-paragraph foreword. It really is pretty funny.