CALDECOTT BONUS ROUND!!! The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Brian Selznick)

Unless you're a book nerd like me, you probably don't remember it being controversial that The Invention of Hugo Cabret won the 2008 Caldecott Medal, but believe you me, it was--usually the illustration award goes to a picture book, leaving the Newbery for middle-grade reading*. Hugo is a hybrid of both, 158 pictures and 26,159 words, not quite a novel and not quite a graphic novel. It is, really--and this is wholly intentional on Selznick's part--closest to a silent film, with extra-loquacious intertitles. The art is all black-and-white, pencil on watercolor paper, with the same otherworldly, dim-yet-glowing quality of those first movies. And it's also pretty darn fantastic. I'm embarrassed I didn't read it until the month the movie came out (directed by Martin Scorsese, in 3D. Seems an odd choice to me, but the boy points out it's the 21st-century equivalent of the experimental techniques the pioneers of cinema used.).

Hugo Cabret lives alone in the recesses of the Montparnasse train station in the early 1930s. His loving father, a clockmaker who taught him the intricacies of cogs and gears, died in a fire, leaving Hugo with his alcoholic uncle, guardian of the Montparnasse clocks. But his uncle has disappeared, and so Hugo keeps the time himself, surviving by pilfering from the station's cafe. His only companion now is an automaton--a magician's prop in the from of a mechanical man seated at a desk with a pen in his hand. Discovered and repaired by Hugo's father, then damaged in the same fire that killed him, the construct is Hugo's last connection to his previous existence, and he's determined to fix it. To do so, he periodically steals parts from a toy shop in the station. When the toymaker catches him, though, it starts a chain of events that ends up with the amazing early fantasy films of Georges Méliès. Which Netflix doesn't have, even A Trip to the Moon. Argh! Time to hit up Photoplay, the actual brick-and-mortar video store in Greenpoint.

*FUN FACT: the Newbery and Caldecott Medals, though American, are both named for Englishmen (John, an 18th-century publisher; Randolph, a 19th-century illustrator).

FURTHER FUN FACT THAT I JUST LEARNED: the U.K. equivalents are the Carnegie Medal (lit) and the Kate Greenaway Medal (illustration).

Kira-Kira (Cynthia Kadohata)

Finished up my newer-Newbery run with the lovely Kira-Kira, a book which encompasses, in no particular order: the Japanese-American experience in the 1950s, the horror of chicken-processing plants (for both the animals and the humans who work there without benefit of union), the love (and friction) between sisters, and the havoc wreaked on a family when one of its members falls seriously ill. That's a lot for any novel to cover, and complex for a middle-grade book, yet Kadohata handles it fluidly.

I feel like I don't have much more specific to say, though? I guess I'll take it general: Kira-Kira's very much in keeping with the tradition of quality young people's historical fiction--like all my rereads and others I didn't get to (Jacob Have I Loved, Dicey's Song, Sarah, Plain and Tall, and so forth). So what's the appeal of this to kids? Speaking from my own experience, I loved reading about other children in places, times, and situations far different from my own, whether realistic or sfnal* (i.e., The Girl with the Silver Eyes, The Boy Who Reversed Himself). It is, I think, a form of empathy--inhabiting the lives of others, comparing reactions and emotions, finding commonalities. I don't think this is as easy to do with movies or television; you can identify with characters, sure, but you're necessarily seeing an actor who's not you. Narration, particularly in the first person, can eliminate this distance. (Of course, first-person narration can also create distance, but that's an essay for another day. OK, an essay I wrote on Poe in college specifically. Dude knew from unreliable narrators.)

Reading these books as an adult is a similar experience--with the added bonus that you can also recapture the feeling of being a child (and if you're rereading, the feeling of being a child reading the same book for the first time). Which is a roundabout way of saying that I've had a fantastic time with this project, and may return to it every November!

Stay tuned for a SPECIAL BONUS ROUND. Probably Wednesday.

*I learned a new word this week! Short for "science fictional." Pretty cool, eh? Also, Anne McCaffrey died. Sad face.

Strawberry Girl (Lois Lenski)

OK, so this one wasn't as good as I remembered. But I can tell why I liked it as a kid: I had a Little House on the Prairie-bred fascination with the everyday activities of pioneer life. Planting crops and tending animals and churning butter and goin' to town for penny candy!  The house I lived in between the ages of five and eight had a vacant lot next door; when the grass got really long, my little sister and I would run through it pretending to be Wilder children. (There are now I think three houses on that lot? With, like, NYC amounts of space between them.)

Anyway, Strawberry Girl is all about daily life on ten-year-old Birdie Boyer's family's farm in backwoods Florida, around the turn of the twentieth century. The book's long on logistics and kinda slim on story, though conflict with the Boyers' even poorer neighbors, the Slaters, propels what narrative there is. The Slaters don't feed their livestock (cows and hogs), just let them roam--and don't take kindly to Birdie's father fencing in his land to keep his crops from ruin. Mostly, though, Lenski seems concerned with simply recording this slice of rural history, the struggles, frolics, and vernacular of the Florida Crackers. (Yep. It's what they called themselves--apparently it comes from the crack of the whip used by the local cowboys.)

I hadn't known before that this is just one in a long series of books Lenski wrote about children's lives in various regions of the United States--some contemporary, others historical. It's an impressive, wide-ranging project, and deserves credit for often focusing on poor communities: coal miners, sharecroppers, migrant workers. She also gets ups for writing about African- and Chinese-American children. Unfortunately, I think the didactic purpose of the books, lost on its intended audience, makes it not an especially exciting read as an adult. Sometimes you can't go back.

Sunday finishes up Newbery November with Cynthia Kadohata's Kira-Kira.

The Tale of Despereaux (plus BONUS DICAMILLO)

Guys, I'm pretty sure Kate DiCamillo is a time traveler. Or a vampire.

How else to explain the way her books read like dispatches from the past? I wrote of The Magician's Elephant that "it feels like it was recently discovered in an attic in London, written in spidery brown ink on yellowed parchment," and the same could be said of The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane or 2003's Newbery Medal winner The Tale of Despereaux. All are fairy tales in a very old sense: before they were morality plays, before they were comforts for children, when they were thought experiments for human emotion and imagination. There's always a great deal of darkness in her stories, and qualified, quiet happy endings--but everything, everything is suffused with love.

Despereaux Tilling is a misfit mouse: born with his eyes open, with overlarge ears and a tiny body prone to fainting. Where a proper rodent forages for crumbs, he's transfixed by the beauty of stained glass and music the others don't hear. Where they nibble books, he finds himself reading them, learning by heart the story of a brave knight and the beautiful princess he loves. One day he seeks out the source of the song and ends up meeting--and speaking to--the Princess Pea, an act forbidden by the Mouse Council that gets him exiled to the dangerous, rat-infested dungeons of the castle. The book is also the tale of a broken-hearted rat named Chiaroscuro, a lonesome, battered servant girl called Miggery Sow, and their plot to kidnap Pea. Despereaux bravely sets out to free her.

Not only is the story exciting, scary, and sweet (with beautiful, inky illustrations by Timothy Basil Ering), DiCamillo's authorial asides frame the whole thing as a story about stories, saying in the end

I would like it very much if you thought of me as a mouse telling you a story, this story, with the whole of my heart, whispering it in your ear in order to save myself from the darkness, and to save you from the darkness, too.
"Stories are light," Gregory the jailer told Despereaux.
Reader, I hope you have found some light here.

I loved this book so much I wished it was three times longer. When I found myself too close to the end yesterday, I had to buy another DiCamillo for the subway ride home: so I acquired The Tiger Rising.

Tiger is as uncompromising and spare as a Flannery O'Connor short story. It's about Rob Horton, a twelve-year-old boy with a dead mother, a persistent rash on his legs, and no friends, who comes across an amazing thing in the Florida woods: a real tiger, pacing and pacing in a cage. A strange, defiant new girl at school, Sistine Bailey, quickly becomes the only person he trusts with his discovery. She is determined to let the tiger go--but at what cost? It's a bleak and heartbreaking little book, with nothing easy or gentle about it. But somehow DiCamillo's prose (which I am trying not to call "luminous") imbues the tale with beauty and joy. Seriously: I think she's my favorite modern children's author. Friends with kids, take note.

The Witch of Blackbird Pond (Elizabeth George Speare)

I was surprised by how much I'd forgotten about The Witch of Blackbird Pond. First of all, the "witch" is only a small part of the tale of sixteen-year-old Kit Tyler, who's left her grandfather's plantation in Barbados after his death to live with an aunt she's never met in the far-off colony of Connecticut. Leaving her pampered tropical existence for Puritan New England proves even more of a shock than she'd thought: the climate is chilly, the work backbreaking, and the religion staid. But there are bright spots here and there--perhaps the brightest is her forbidden friendship with an old Quaker woman named Hannah Tupper, who lives along by Blackbird Pond, and is suspected and feared by the townspeople.

The narrow world of 1687 Wethersfield opens up to a remarkably broad slice of history, much of it to do with freedom: religious (for the Puritans and Quakers), political (Connecticut's struggle to preserve its charter rather than be ruled by Massachusetts--and by extension, the king of England, of whom the Puritans were hardly fans), even simply personal (both Kit and her grandfather owned slaves in Barbados, who were sold to pay for the journey. Her cousins are as shocked by this as she is by their two Sunday services). And, of course, Kit yearns for the lost freedom of her wild childhood, running and reading and paying no mind to the world. Gradually, she learns what we all learn growing up: that pleasing yourself is important, but not all. (Put another, less back-of-the-book way: when to hold 'em, when to fold 'em, and when to just walk away.)

Another great, great read, that I think could easily be an adult novel. Kit is impetuous and opinionated, like all the best romance novel heroines--but everyone else is interesting, too, and full of nuance. Even the townsfolk who persecute Hannah and eventually accuse Kit herself of witchcraft aren't evil, but afraid. The message is more complex than "be yourself!" or "different is good!" Because, of course, both those platitudes don't always apply. More books for kids should acknowledge this, darn it.

(It's also pretty fun to needle my Stamford-born boyfriend in re: New Englanders always being frosty and confrontation-averse. Unless, you know, it's burnin' witches. Everyone enjoys a good witch-burnin'. And Kit's uncle insults someone by calling him a "whited sepulcher," which I must use from now on.)

Sunday: Kate DiCamillo's The Tale of Despereaux! I wish this one were three times longer, because I already don't want it to end.

Crispin: The Cross of Lead (Avi)

So here's the problem: the two medal winners from the oughts I've read this month? Nowhere near as good as the older ones I'm rereading. It is impossible to tell how much of this is due to childhood memory and the gut-level good associations of Roll of Thunder and Island of the Blue Dolphins. I do think the prose in Single Shard and this week's newer read, Avi's Crispin: The Cross of Lead, is objectively less sophisticated--and this is a complaint I didn't have with this year's winner (the stellar & evocative Moon Over Manifest) and 2010's (the brilliant, brilliant, OMGBRILLIANT When You Reach Me). But when all is said and done, I just didn't think Cross of Lead was a good book.

There are good things about it, of course--Avi deftly conjures his medieval milieu, especially the omnipresence of Christianity in everyday life. But rather than stay with his protagonist as he believes himself to be at the outset--the poorest of the peasantry, who's only eaten meat a few times in his life--Crispin ends up being [SPOILER] the bastard son of the local lord, whose mother was gently born and literate. Which moves the narrative from that of a completely neglected class to that of a clichéd Secret Royal tale. Very disappointing.

The death of his previously-unknown father causes him to be pursued by a broadly-evil steward, kin to the lord's wife, who wants to make sure Crispin doesn't claim any part of the estate. Chases ensue. Then Crispin hooks up with a juggler/spy with fabulously anachronistic ideas about the Equality of Man and the Unnecessity of Organized Religion (seriously, in 1300s England? Maybe there was one guy. But not several, and not a secret brotherhood of rebels). More chases ensue. Then nothing is resolved, and there's a sequel I'm not interested in reading.

(Another COMPLETELY UNFAIR thing that bugged me? The old-fashioned-y words and locutions in the prose are three hundred years too late for the time the book is set--vaguely Shakespearean. I know PERFECTLY WELL that they would have been speaking Middle English at the time, and OBVIOUSLY you're not going to write a kids' book in Middle English . . . but if you're going to use anachronistic vocab, why not make it modern-modern? Yes, this is a stupid quibble. But it's one I had, and this is my blog to air my stupid quibbles--really, it should be on the masthead.)

Next Thursday, back to childhood faves! This time it's Elizabeth George Speare's 1959 Newbery winner The Witch of Blackbird Pond.

Island of the Blue Dolphins (Scott O'Dell)

I was obsessed with this book for a while in third grade. I remember writing an extremely derivative story about a girl living on an island by herself. This must be the book where I first came across the words/concepts "abalone" and "cormorant"; while I still have only vague notions of both, they carry with them such an allure of exoticism and self-reliance such that--despite my land-locked distrust of shellfish--I would totes eat an abalone given the opportunity. (I mean, I'm sure it would be gross. But I would eat it.)

Yet I only learned quite recently that Island of the Blue Dolphins is based on a true story. The eponymous island is called San Nicolas, and it's 75 miles off southern California coast--in 1853, a woman was discovered who'd lived there alone for eighteen years, since the rest of her tribe (decimated by Russian-led Aleut otter hunters) departed for the mainland and she was somehow left behind. By the time she was found, her people had all died of European diseases, and she succumbed to the same a mere seven weeks later. No one spoke her language, so no one ever knew her name.

Knowing this gave an undercurrent of melancholy to the reread, but it didn't come close to masking the excitement I remembered from the first several times through--it all came flooding back. O'Dell imagines her isolated life in rich detail: what she eats, wears; where she lives; how she passes her time and assuages her loneliness (mostly by making friends with animals. She's got the best dog). For a little girl without an ounce of self-sufficiency to her credit (I was def. an Indoor Kid, even though I went to a magnet elementary where camping was part of the curriculum), it was hopelessly romantic to think of making my own spears and building my own canoe. Too, while boy adventure stories were (and are) common, this was a book about a girl surviving on her own, by her wits and with her strength--the dudes could have Hatchet. Me, I was gonna be like Karana.

After talking to a customer a few weeks ago about the 50th anniversary of The Phantom Tollbooth, I wondered what on earth had won the Newbery instead in 1961. It was Island of the Blue Dolphins--and you know what? Even with Tollbooth being one of my favoritest favorites, I'm okay with that.

Sunday: Avi's medieval mystery/thriller (at least that's how it's reading so far) Crispin: The Cross of Lead, which won the Newbery in 2003.

A Single Shard (Linda Sue Park)

Linda Sue Park's A Single Shard won the Newbery in 2002, the year I graduated from college. The setting is world-expanding, at least for me: twelfth-century Korea, in a village known for its celadon pottery, celadon being a stoneware glaze producing a unique blue-gray-green color. The main character is an orphan named Tree-Ear, who's lived most of his life under a bridge with his crippled guardian, Crane-Man; Tree-Ear is fascinated by master potter Min, spying on him as he throws pots and fires them into beauty. When he breaks a pot by accident, he offers to work off the debt, secretly hoping Min will teach him his craft. Min, meanwhile, dreams of a potter's highest honor: a royal commission to create pieces for the king.

Beyond the novelty of the mise en scène, it's a pretty straightforward book. It was striking how much simpler the construction of the prose was than Roll of Thunder--twenty-five years certainly affected the complexity of children's literature--though I wouldn't call it simplistic. It is less engaging to an adult reader, however. The cynic in me feels like the real value of the book lies in middle school teachers being able to check off "Asian" in their diversity boxes--but hey, what's wrong with that? I mean, I'm more historically educated than most, and I still know almost nothing about Korean history, except that they were constantly invaded by China and Japan. Also, kimchi. So a book to fill in that gap early--and to provoke thought about the art of pottery, its mix of manual skill, imagination, and chance--is a good thing.

Thursday: Scott O'Dell's 1961 adventure yarn Island of the Blue Dolphins.

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (Mildred D. Taylor)

When I read this year's Newbery winner, Moon Over Manifest, months ago, I found myself listing off all the other historical-fiction medal winner I loved when I was little, and yearning to reread them . . . then my penchant for alliteration got the better of me, and from this was born Newbery November. This month, I'll be rereading four old favorites--and four modern winners from the mid-oughts. Posts will go up Thursdays and Sundays.

First up: 1977's Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. Holy cow, this book is great. I am going to make the bold claim that it's in fact a better kids' book about race relations than To Kill a Mockingbird. (Yes, TKaM is a kids' book.) The biggest reason for this? The little girl learning harsh truths about the racial injustice of the 1930s South is black herself. Scout may be troubled by what she learns about her world, but she can escape it as Cassie Logan never can.

Cassie is far luckier than many of her schoolmates, the children of tenant farmers--her grandfather managed to buy 400 acres of his own land, and the Logans farm for themselves, though her father still must spend months working on the railroad in Lousiana to pay taxes and the mortgage. Her mother is a teacher at the local black school, which runs only from October to March, since the students are needed to plant and harvest. The white school in the community, which hands down dilapidated, outdated textbooks when it feels like it, owns a school bus; every day the driver amuses his passengers by running Cassie and her brothers (one older, two younger) off the road, or splashing them with mud from puddles. These everyday humiliations, which they've learned to take in stride, are eventually eclipsed by far larger, darker acts of hatred.

Taylor's writing is just beautiful. I really think prose like hers is rare even in adult literature these days. Here, the first paragraph of Chapter 9:

Spring. It seeped unseen into the waiting red earth in early March, softening the hard ground for the coming plow and awakening life that had lain gently sleeping through the cold winter. But by the end of March it was evident everywhere: in the barn where three new calves bellowed and the chicks the color of soft pale sunlight chirped; in the yard where the wisteria and English dogwood bushes readied themselves for their annual Easter bloom, and the fig tree budded producing the forerunners of juicy, brown fruit for which the boys and I would have to do battle with fig-loving Jack; and in the smell of the earth itself. Rain-drenched, fresh, vital, full of life, spring enveloped all of us.

LOOK at that long sentence: a colon and a semi-coloned list! Remember how The Hunger Games used nothing but commas? Taylor, quite the contrary, trusts ten-year-olds (like, you know, 1989 me) to figure out those little black specks and come away knowing new ways to put words together.

Another wonderful and brave thing about the book? No happy ending. Little is resolved, in fact, following a truly epic climax featuring a storm, an attempted lynching, and a cotton fire. Instead, Cassie cries, unable to unlearn what the year has taught her.

Wow.

(P.S. The copy I picked up at Housing Works, another 50-cent rack score, is a tie-in edition from a 1978 TV movie--with Morgan Freeman as dapper Uncle Hammer. Awesome.)

Sunday: 2002's A Single Shard by Linda Sue Park, set in a potters' village in 12th-century Korea.