Phebe Fairchild: Her Book

 Phebe Fairchild was the least interesting of my three BYU-library summer reads. I had to force myself to read it during my last few days of vacation and read the last 50 pages on my final drive before going to the airport.

It felt a little like an Anne of Green Gables wannabe, with a young female protagonist who feels like an orphan (her parents are at sea for the entire book) and shows up in a town that's not quite prepared for her pluck and an older rich great aunt who loves her for it (though in AOGG, it's Diana's great aunt).  But I honestly didn't think there was much to Phebe's personality. The only thing that really makes her stand out from her cousins and others is that she likes nice clothes and jewels and reading Mother Goose (which was apparently quite shocking in 1830 Puritan New England). 

Meh.

Queer Person

During the summer between fifth and sixth grade (1995?), my mom signed me up for a 6 week writing class at Fresno State. I won TWO writing contests in sixth grade and I definitely attribute those wins to the amazing improvement I made during my summer class. One of the best pieces I wrote that summer was a cutesy rhyming poem about a kid who eats goat cheese and subsequently turns into a goat. One of the lines (I probably don't remember this verbatim, but it's close) that I was particularly proud of:

Soon after dinner, I began to feel queer

and by 8'o'clock that night I had grown a small beard.

Our teacher sometimes had us share our work out loud with the class, and I definitely read that poem to my summer school class of older peers and they definitely all burst out laughing when I read that line. I thought that they thought that I was hilarious. And then someone (my mom? one of my older sisters?) broke the news to me about the "new" definition of the word "queer." I was bummed, for sure, because I realized that I was not actually hilarious, but ignorant. Honestly, I think I had learned the word "queer" (meaning "strange") from old Newberys! Authors in the 30s and 40s used queer as a synonym for strange ALL THE TIME. 

As a testament to this claim, I give you Queer Person. I've been searching for this one many years, knowing full well that it was not a 1930s children book about a gender-fluid or homosexual individual. Not until this month did I discover that it is about a deaf-mute Native American boy who is given the name Queer Person by the Pikuni tribe that adopts him when he wanders into their camp as a young boy. 

I liked Queer Person. I had a few problems with it, but it was a total page turner. I thought Granny was a fascinating and like-able character, Singing Moon was an incredible heroine, and Queer Person was fun to watch grow and develop. I feel like the non-Native American author did a good job portraying a foreign culture with respect (despite a few unfortunate outdated words) and moderate accuracy. 

Of note, I discovered the phrase "Newbery Completist" while reading reviews of Queer Person on goodreads. I've never heard it before, but that is totally what I am. I am a Newbery completist! Meaning: I am trying to read all Newbery medals and honors that ever were. How many Newbery completists are there? How many have actually made it? 13 to go . . .

Whistlers' Van

Long ago, I attended a university (BYU) with a never-ending supply of old, out-of-print Newberys. And by never-ending, I mean that I never exhausted their supply while I was a student. It was only after I left that I discovered that not all university libraries are so equipped (which discovery actually led to this blog). Many times I have wished to be close to this library again as I search in vain for my remaining 15 Newberys (none of which, it appears, are even in the state of Georgia). And then, just two weeks ago, I found myself near my old university library and it occurred to me that my husband's little brother had a library card! I immediately set up a library date with him and I now have in my possession THREE old Newberys from my list (the only ones I could remember!!).

Whistler's Van - 1937 Honor - was my first pick for my vacation.

Synopsis: The story follows Gwilym, a teenage Welsh boy, whose grandfather/guardian leaves one night without telling anyone and he suspects it is to follow a band of gypsies. So Gwilym leaves the next day with a band of "gipsies" or "Rommany" in search of adventure/his grandfather/wanderlust. 

Review: It wasn't as bad as some other old Newberys, but the speech used (lots of Welsh and Rommany words) and the style of writing (weird) both made it hard to follow. Half the time I was not actually sure what was happening or who was talking or what they were talking about. 

Discovery: I don't have an ounce of "Gipsy" blood. The idea of traveling around in a "caravan" and never setting up a permanent home was completely unappealing to me. I kept hoping the whole time that Gwilym would just go home already!

A Snake Falls to Earth

The first several chapters of this book were fascinating to me. The whole idea of animal-people as part of Lipan folklore was magical and mesmerizing. I liked Nina, too, though her story never felt fully fleshed out.

I started to get confused when Oli (the cotton-mouth) made a new friend who was a hawk and the author kept referring to the hawk with plural pronouns. At first, I thought she was referring to many hawks, but I went on Goodreads for clarification and realized that this hawk, Brightest, was non-binary. I mean, I understand that many people are experiencing very real confusion about their gender identity and it's a hot issue right now and probably very hard for people, but Brightest is a hawk. And for a hawk to be confused about its gender and think it's neither a male or a female, but actually a "they" and for Oli to just automatically know that without needing to ask or have Brightest explain it to him, felt wrong. It did. I understand that saying that is unpopular, but this is me being honest. And since I'm the only person who reads this blog, I'm going to be honest. I would never recommend this book to my kids. Brightest wasn't the only one, either. There were two non-binary characters, two asexual characters and a lesbian coyote. ::sigh::

The story itself had a little bit of an anti-climactic climax when Oli and Nina finally meet on Earth and everything seemed to work out perfectly in the end. 

Watercress

Short and simple with lovely watercolor art. Watercress won the Caldecott Medal this year, too! Andrea Wang tells an autobiographical story of "harvesting" watercress out of a ditch on the side of the road in Ohio which her mom has spotted from their car. She is embarrassed and won't eat it at dinner, until her mom shares a painful story of growing up in China and losing her brother to starvation during the Great Famine (a disaster that I didn't know about until I read this book). So then 

I take a bite of the watercress and

it bites me back with its spicy, peppery taste.

It is delicate and 

slightly bitter,

like Mom's memories of home. 

 

Together,

we eat it

all

and make a 

new memory of 

watercress. 

The Last Cuentista

A dystopian novel! What joy! Apart from a couple re-reads of The House of the Scorpion and The Giver, this is the first dystopian novel I have read in decades . . . and I've missed them. In fact, I only own 5 Newberys (I don't like having a lot of books . . . that's what libraries are for!) and two of them are dystopians (the ones mentioned above). So, the genre alone had me hooked. 

Here is my recipe for The Last Cuentista:

2 cups Wall-E

1.5 cups The Giver

2/3 cup The House of the Scorpion

1 Tablespoon Interstellar 

1 teaspoon Nazis (pick any book depiction you like)

That's right; it's a space-travel dystopian novel with bad guys who champion same-ness and an ambiguous ending! 

Petra Peña, the protagonist, is really smart, resourceful, good at deceiving people and good at not getting caught. Like, too good at all those things. But the story wouldn't work if she wasn't, so I'll allow it. I mean, she has to pretend she's been brainwashed after 380 years in hyper-sleep and does a convincing job at age 13 while dealing with considerable personal trauma and loss? It's a stretch.

Like any futuristic dystopian story, I had a lot of questions. Is that what would really happen? Could a society like this really survive? Would those kids really have acted like that? Could the Collective really have changed their skin like that in just a few hundred years? How? What? What now?? But considering all these possibilities (and impossibilities) is really the reason these books are so appealing to me and The Last Cuentista did not disappoint, though I should note that this book will not be joining the ranks of my owned books. 

Red, White, and WHOLE

I am pretty sure* the last two Newberys I read that were written in verse were first person accounts of immigrants trying to navigate a new life in the United States (Other Words for Home and Inside Out & Back Again), so it felt comfortable and familiar to discover that this semi-autobiographical story of a second-generation American Indian girl was also written in verse! Reha's parents are from India, but she is born and grows up in the Midwest. Her story is poignant, well-written and TRAGIC. But, unfortunately, I've already started mixing it up with the other two free-verse immigrant Newberys.

*I just looked through the last decade of Newberys after making that claim and I stand corrected: Brown Girl Dreaming and The Crossover were also written in free verse and I've read those since Inside Out & Back Again.

Too Bright to See

When I first began this novel, I remarked to my husband, "I think it's weird that a tweener coming-of-age novel about a girl was written by a man. What would he know about what it's like to be a young girl?" Ha! Joke's on me. 

*SPOILER* Bug decides she's a boy by the end of the novel and the author is actually a trans-man who is  sharing his own experience as a child (in fictional format). 

This book left me feeling unsettled, uncomfortable, confused and a little sad.