Library Round-up #11, Part 2: Chapter Books

Mini-reviews of the middle-grade chapter books we currently have out from the library.
 

Project Mulberry by Linda Sue Park.  This book, about a Korean-American girl and her male friend who decide to enter a project about growing silkworms in the state fair, is really about much more.  MUCH more.  It's about racism (particularly mistrust and misunderstandings between Asians and blacks), ethnic identity and assimilation, what it means to be an American, sustainable farming, and novel-writing itself.  The chapters are interspersed with transcripts of "conversations" between the author and her protagonist.  My daughter gave this one 5 stars and I do too!  Also a fun book for those of us who are always on the hunt for books mentioned in other books.  The author actually lists the books mentioned in the text at the end, with the page numbers they are mentioned on, a great bonus since one of the books is identified only by a character in it, not the title, in the text.

Breathing Room by Marsha Hayles.  A historical novel set in a tuberculosis sanatorium in Minnesota in 1940.  The protagonist Evvy struggles to deal with the imposed isolation and rest (at the beginning she is not even allowed to sit up, read, or talk!!), her homesickness (and especially how she misses her twin brother and her father), the deaths of fellow patients, her own mortality, her difficult relationship with her mother, her friendship with the first Jew she has ever met, and the news out of Europe.  The historical note at the end about tuberculosis and the history of its treatment in the U.S. is very informative.  As a bonus, this book also mentions another book; Evvy receives Poems for Every Mood, compiled by Harriet Moore, as a Christmas present from her mother.  A fast-paced absorbing read about a topic most of us know little about.

Fun fact: the authors of Project Mulberry and Breathing Room are writing-critque partners.  (I know this since I always read the WHOLE book - foreword, acknowledgements, and all!)

The Terrible Thing That Happened to Barnaby Brocket by John Boyle.  This book has an intriguing premise: Barnaby Brocket is born without being affected by gravity.  That is, he floats.  His parents, who only want to be normal and avoid all attention (in rebellion against their own parents, who were attention-seeking), "accidentally" let him float away at age 8.  As we follow Barnaby on adventures around (and out of) the world, he - and we - encounter a series of characters, all who have been rejected by their parents for being different from them, from a pair of lesbians (the subject is treated obliquely and I'm not sure my daughter fully understood their relationship), to an artist whose father wanted him to join the family business. I read this book aloud to my 8-year old and the idea that parents might not love their children unconditionally shocked her.  While I thought the treatment of the subject was heavy-handed, with too many examples, she liked it and said "But that's the whole point of the book."  Again, I think I expect too much subtlety than is appropriate for the intended audience.

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson.  I only discovered this classic when it's author died and it was mentioned in her obituaries.  The poor, wild. ignorant Herdman children bring an unintended touch of authenticity to this reenactment of the Christmas story by having the Wise Men bring Mary and Joseph a ham, and having Mary burping the baby Jesus.  Robinson manages to be funny and touching at the same time, not an easy combination to pull off.  I'm looking forward to reading The Best School Year Ever by the same author.

Family Tree #1: Better to Wish by Ann M. Martin.  The first in a series of books following a family through the generations, this one focuses on Abby, who is 8 years old in 1930, during the depths of The Great Depression.  A nice but ultimately forgettable historical novel.

Millicent Min, Girl Genius by Lisa Yee.  This story of an intellectually gifted but socially awkward 11-year-old who tries to change who she is to make friends but in the end finds it is best to be true to herself was a mildly entertaining but predictable read.

Have you or your children read any of these?  What did you think?  What middle-grade fiction have you been reading lately?

Anachronisms and Meta-Moments in the Fudge Series

I recently wrote here about anachronisms in the Fudge series and as I continued reading the series to my daughter we found more.  In the last book, Double Fudge, Peter is 12, only about 3 years older than he was in the first book, set in the late 1970s/very early 1980s.  Yet inexplicably, his dad has a cellphone in this one and Harry Potter is mentioned.  I know the last book was written way after the first, but still.... it drives me nuts!

One of my very first posts was about books that mention other books and I'm always on the lookout for more.  The Fudge series has two that I noticed.  One is, as noted above, the references to Harry Potter in the last book.  The other comes in the penultimate book in the series, Fudge-a-Mania when  Fudge makes a new friend named Mitzi and she insists that the book Tell Me a Mitzi (originally published in 1970) is about her!  I'm really curious about why this was included.  Is it just one of Judy Blume's favorite books?  Or does she know the author?

To Get All Meta on You: Books about Books, Libraries and Reading

Because of my aforementioned library addiction, I hold books that mention libraries and books, and those that feature readers, especially dear.  One of my favorites is the All-of-a-Kind Family series by Sydney Taylor.  This series follows the lives of five sisters growing up on the Jewish Lower East Side (where I grew up!) at the turn of the last century.  All but the first book are out of print, but many used copies can be found online.  There are five books in the series.

One week Sarah, the responsible, studious middle child, loses her book.  She is terrified to tell the librarian and devastated to hear of the cost to replace it.  Don't worry - it all works out in the end.  Not only that, but both the librarian and Ella, the oldest daughter, find love in or through the library.  Ella's beau (a much better word than boyfriend, don't you think?) actually introduces himself by sending her a note in a book she had hidden in the stacks.  What could be more romantic?

But the best book-within-a-book reference in this series comes in the third book (confusingly called More All-of-a-Kind Family, while the second is All-of-a-Kind Family Downtown), when Henny finds Anne of Avonlea by Lucy Maud Montgomery the then-just-published sequel to Anne of Green Gables at the library one day. This reference sent me running to Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_of_green_gables. 

Somehow I'd always thought that the Anne books had been written in the 1920s at least, which would have post-dated Henny's discovery.  But no, the first was published in 1908, with Anne of Avonlea coming out just a year later.  So that means some of my favorite fictional characters were enjoying another one of my favorite fictional characters - how cool is that!

Although this blog is geared more toward younger audiences (at least for now, while my own children are young), I can't write a post about books about books, reading and libraries without mentioning one for older readers, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. 

My fruitless search for an image of the edition I have (how attached we can get to the edition and cover art of a book! - only the link to All-of-a-Kind Family Downtown shows the cover art I remember from that series) did lead me to another nice discovery: that Anna Quindlen, one of my favorite essayists and novelists who has written her own book-length essay on the joys of reading http://www.amazon.com/How-Reading-Changed-My-Life/dp/0345422783/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1293227557&sr=1-1, has written a foreword to this book http://www.amazon.com/Grows-Brooklyn-Betty-Quindlen-Foreword/dp/898840436X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1293227517&sr=1-2.  Being me, I promptly put a library hold on this edition.

There are many lovely moments in the book describing Francie, the protagonist, taking joy in books and words and in the library itself, but the description of how Francie learns to read is simply perfect: 

"Oh, magic hour when a child first knows it can read printed words!

For quite a while, Francie had been spelling out letters, sounding them and then putting the sounds together to mean a word.  But one day, she look at a page and the word mouse had instantaneous meaning.  She looked at the word and the picture of a gray mouse scampered through her mind.  She looked farther and when she saw "horse," she heard him pawing the ground and saw the sun glint on his glossy coat.  The word "running" hit her suddenly and she breathed hard as though running herself....

From that time on, the world was hers for the reading.  She would never be lonely again..."

And there you go.