Children of the Soil

This is the first 1930s Newbery I have read in a long while that I actually had a hard time putting down. And I'm not sure why. The story follows a very poor mom and her two kids during one year in Sweden. There is never any real peril or conflict, though a few of the kids' classmates are punks. I just loved that through the kids' resourcefulness and incredible hard work, they are able to improve their family's situation considerably in just a year. At the start of the novel, they are too poor to even afford an egg for Christmas and by the next winter they own TWO cows. In fact, upon completing the book, I immediately felt the desire to start earning more money for my family. The urge only lasted one morning, but still!

Additional notes:

- The boy's name is Guldklumpen, which may be the most unique name I have ever read in a book ever. And he never uses a nickname! He is Guldklumpen the whole book through.

- Guldklumpen and Nikolina refer to their mom as "the mother" which was weird every time they said it.

- I would much rather my kids grow up poor than rich. So far, so good.

Jane's Island

I would argue there is more explanation of the scientific method and very specific science research in this 100 year old Newbery than in any other I have read. Ellen, a Chicago college student, goes to Massachusetts to be a "nanny" to a 12-year-old aspiring scientist and adventurer named Jane for the summer. Jane's dad is a scientist and does research on planaria (flat worms?) at a nearby laboratory. Ellen and Jane go on all sorts of sciencey, marine-lifey adventures. The characters were interesting. The setting was cool. I had to read it very quickly over Thanksgiving in Texas so I could hand it off to my dad before he went home to return it to his university library in Utah. But he brought me two more!

Out of the Flame

Another biographical fiction! And now that I know it's a legitimate genre, I wasn't as bothered by all the made up stories about real people. EXCEPT for this minor detail: I can't find any internet evidence that the main character actually existed?? 

The story follows Pierre de Bayard, an orphan page who serves King Francois I during the early 1500s, and his life at court with the children of the King (Prince Francois, Prince Henri - future king of France, Prince Charles and Princess Magdaleine and Princess Marguerite). He is nephew of the famous knight Pierre de Bayard, student to the scholar and philosopher Master Fabri and he "owns" a little hunchback dwarf named Jac who is his dearest friend. They go on adventures, he butts heads with Prince Henri, he aspires to be a great knight but also longs to be a scholar like Fabri, he idolizes his Aunt Marguerite, he learns about humanism from Sir Thomas More, he almost gets kidnapped with Henri, then he actually gets kidnapped and gets freed by Native Americans that Cartier brings back from the New World. And the author writes a postscript about what happened with all the characters, including Pierre (who apparently became a famous scholar and mathematician). So I of course looked them all up to read their stories and everyone in the book is totally real - the king, the princes, the king's sister, Cartier the explorer, Thomas More, Pierre's famous uncle who he's named after - but I can't find anything about HIM. 

So was the main character made up? 

Boy of the South Seas

After a somewhat reluctant start, my dad now seems fully committed to helping me achieve my Newbery goal. Completely self-motivated, he consulted my list of remaining Newberys, double-checked with me, and then checked three out from his university library and brought them all the way to Georgia when he came to visit last weekend! Really, he's come a long way. 

Boy of the South Seas was not as bad as some other 30's Newberys. It helped that it was an easy less-than-200-page read. It was really sad, though. The main character is a boy who lives on a sparsely-inhabited island in the South Pacific (100 years ago) and in the first chapter, a merchant ship arrives on the island, he climbs aboard to explore, falls asleep, and wakes up after the boat has set sail and they won't return him to his home. The first chapter ends with the author commenting about how the boy would not lay eyes on his own island again until he was an adult! Tragic!

He jumps ship a little while later and gets adopted by a nice woman at the new island that he swims to, so the story mellows considerably. And it sort of resolves nicely in the end with opportunities for Teiki to share his culture and language with the world so they're not lost forever.

Young Walter Scott

I would classify Young Walter Scott as a historical fictional biography.  Hang on a second . . . I just looked it up and there's a genre called biographical fiction. And here I thought Elizabeth Janet Gray was taking liberties by making up a childhood for Walter Scott when it's actually an entire genre and authors do it all the time! There's apparently an art to making up stories about actual people's lives! 

I've never read any of Walter Scott's books. This made-up story about his childhood may have been more interesting if I had. He was lame (that part is true) and the author uses that to frame basically everything that happens to him ever. And he was Scottish (also true), which made the book fairly difficult to understand because the author had everyone speak in Scottish accents. For example, here's a snippet that I just literally didn't understand.

Wattie turned. "I'm no that lame. I'm off to climb Arthur's Seat."

"Havers," she said admiringly.

"By the Gutted Haddie," he added.

"Havers."

Wha?

I wouldn't recommend Young Walter Scott, unless of course you're a super fan of Ivanhoe or Rob Roy and want a glimpse into what one woman thinks Scott's childhood may have been like.

Swords of Steel

Swords of Steel was another quick read while visiting my dad over the summer and I don't remember much of it. The novel followed a boy who lived in Gettysburg before and during the Civil War. The book itself was fairly episodic and really just jumped from one major event to another major event which didn't make for a very smooth story. The Battle of Gettysburg ended up being fought right in this boy's yard (and house) which was pretty shocking. There was a budding romance I was slightly interested in the whole book, but it had a very anticlimactic peak right at the end.  And that concludes the sum of what I remember. G'night.

The Story of Appleby Capple

I am starting to realize that complaining that "it's so hard to find old Newberys" and then discovering that there is some ridiculously easy way to find them has started to become a theme of this blog.

- First, I found that celebration of women authors website with the entire text of like five of my missing Newberys. 

- Then I discovered some online library where I could virtually check out books and read about four more for free. 

- Just last year, I realized that my bro-in-law is a student at a university with lots of old Newberys and I could read a few every time I visited (though that one does give me a deadline and it's usually a short time period when I want to be spending time with family). 

- My latest discovery is perhaps my most ridiculous oversight. See, my dad has a special "readers" library card at the university just ten minutes from his house (University of Utah) and he's always checking out these whackadoodle books about quantum physics and conservation biology. While visiting him this summer, he casually said that his library might have some of my missing Newbery books and that he would check one or two out for me if I was interested. ?!?! I immediately demanded a laptop and his login information and they had ALL BUT THREE on my remaining list. We planned a trip to the library the next morning and after a considerable amount of discussion, he finally allowed me to check out THREE books (he can only have a max of five checked out at a time and really didn't want to give up some of the books he was reading. "Dad, you can just check them out again when I leave town in 8 days." "But I'm at a really interesting part of my vermicomposting reference book!" "This was YOUR idea, Dad!").

My first quick summer vacation read was The Story of Appleby Capple, the only Newbery written more recently than the 1930s that I have needed to read for the last decade! The author attempted to write an entire novel divided into alphabetic chapters: The first chapter was focused on A and most of the main characters and animals and themes in that chapter started with A. The second chapter was B and so on. It made for a meandering, far-fetched story with lots of hard-to-remember names. And poor Appleby is a little boy who is lost for the entire story and the only people looking for him are ancient, distant relatives. SPOILER: They finally spot a Zebra butterfly in the last chapter.

It has actually now been many months since I read this book so I don't remember much. But one night while I was reading, my 7-year-old joined me and read a couple pages aloud for his 20-minute nightly reading and I distinctly remember us both laughing out loud at one part. So . . . there's that.

Maizy Chen's Last Chance

Maizy Chen was a hard-to-believe 11-year-old protagonist. She was just a little too mature, a little too smart, a little too good at fixing all the problems, a little too kind to everyone who was feeling left out. It sort of felt like she single-handedly fixed all of her family's relationships, repaired her grandpa's closest friendship, kept the family's restaurant in business, discovered everything about her family's ancestry, brought all the Chinese Americans in America together AND she did this all on summer vacation in a place she's never been!

Don't get me wrong; Maizy was awesome! Just not very realistic. The book was entertaining and I loved her grandpa's family history stories. Now I want to go cook some Chinese food . . . or at least eat some.

The Last Mapmaker

I seriously love Christina Soontornvat. The THREE Newberys she has written in the last 3 years have all been absolute gems. In The Last Mapmaker, she created an entirely fresh fantasy world that had little glints of Thailand but was still so unique. I think one of my favorite elements of this story was how effortlessly she incorporated both genders in all professions and personalities. I caught myself on several occasions making assumptions about genders (like assuming the ship captain was male and then being a little surprised she was female) and then loving that she did it without making any deal out of it. 

Here's my quick synopsis:

Characters: Excellent, well-developed, like-able and unlike-able

Plot: Exciting with just the right amount of mystery

Antagonist: Totally believable

Resolution: Too rushed. Everything just happened so fast at the end and so much was hard to believe.

Dragons: Did not disappoint

The Ocean: Terrifying

Iveliz Explains it All

 This book was quick and easy and heavy and sad. Iveliz is messing up again? She hit someone else?! She's still mad at her mom? Why won't she talk to her therapist? Why won't she talk to her mom? I felt the same way while reading this book as I do when I'm close friends with someone with an untreated mental illness: exasperated, incredulous, tired. But honestly, usually I don't stay in those friendships for long because they are so exhausting (which is one reason I thought Amir was, like, the champion of all champions for sticking it out as Iveliz' friend). So, bravo to Andrea Beatriz Arango for what I thought was an excruciatingly accurate portrayal of a mental illness and how absolutely tiring it is for everyone in that person's life. The book was well done and important and a page-turner (surprisingly), but it was also difficult to read. Again, a lot like a person with mental illness is interesting and important, but can be so difficult.

Freewater

Often Newberys will remind me of other Newberys I've read. Plot lines and characters are comparable, settings and situations are similar (don't get me wrong; usually because they're good!). One reason I loved Freewater is because I felt like it was unique. Certainly the setting and idea were original because I literally had no idea before reading this book that people escaped slavery and lived in swamps in the American South! No. Idea. 

I thought Amina Luqman-Dawson was a good storyteller and her characters were interesting. Billy was my favorite. Sanzi drove me crazy. The contrast between kids who had grown up enslaved versus those who had grown up free in the swamp was well done. 

The last third of the book had me on pins and needles. I could not figure out how the kids' crazy plan would turn out any way that didn't end in them all becoming enslaved (again). And then Suleman enters out of nowhere and solves everything? I'm going to have to call that a Deus Ex Machina. But I still loved the book.