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?