Documentaries: Take 1

Oct12

A member of a Facebook group that I’m in asked people to comment about their favorite documentary films. From all the comments that were posted, I made a list of documentaries that I would like to watch. And I’ve been watching some of them this week. So far, I have watched four films, and I have definitely thought that all four were worth the time and worth recommending.

Look and See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry. (2017, watched on Netflix)
This film was good, but misnamed, I think. It wasn’t about Wendell Berry, the author, as much as it was about farming and farm policy and the takeover of commercial methods and big business in agriculture, the death of the family farm. As I watched I felt I understood the problem better, but I didn’t see the solutions. Maybe there is no going back to the way agriculture was done in the past on small farms, on a small scale. Even though the film showed some farmers who were trying to scale back and form small local cooperatives, it was obvious that tobacco farming, at least, was never going to be profitable or even doable on a small scale again. And since that’s the kind of farming Wendell Berry is looking back to as his ideal, I’m not sure what to think about the film itself. I also wonder if tobacco farming itself is going to be a thing of the past, since the advent of vaping and e-cigarettes. Unless someone finds other uses for tobacco. Maybe someone needs to do for tobacco what George Washington Carver did for the peanut and for sweet potatoes. Anyway, watch this one to learn more about the farming crisis and to learn a little bit about Wendell Berry. The musical score for the film is fantastic.

13th. (2016, watched on Netflix)
I watched this film about the history of slavery and prisons and mass incarceration with one of my adult daughters, and it was quite provocative and thoughtful. The title is a reference to the thirteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It reminded me of the book Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, and sure enough, Mr. Stevenson was featured as one of the commentators on the film. Like I Am Not Your Negro, which I watched last year, this documentary helps explain some of the racial unrest in our nation and the Black Lives Matter movement in particular. I’m not at all sure I agree with all of the agenda that the film is trying push, but I do feel more informed and even empathetic. We do have a history of racism in this country, and that history does influence how black people and white people think about current events. It’s very difficult to think past one’s own presuppositions, especially when we don’t even realize that the underlying prejudices and presuppositions are there, in the first place.

Life, Animated. (2016, watched on Amazon Prime)
A 23 year old young man, Owen Suskind, uses his immersion in Disney films to make sense of the world and ameliorate and inform his understanding of himself and his place in the world as he deals with his autism. Of the four documentary films I’ve watched so far, this one was the best and most hopeful. I was delighted by this story of a boy who, at the age of three, suddenly became autistic and lost his ability to speak meaningfully or to communicate with family. Owen’s parents have a huge role in the film and in Owen’s life, but the film is really about Owen growing up and becoming independent as he deals with the knowledge that his parents won’t always be available and can’t live his life for him. It’s also about how the Disney movies helped and continue to help Owen to connect with other people and to understand the world he lives in. Again, I found this film fascinating.

AlphaGo. (2017, watched on Netflix)
The ancient Chinese game of “Go” is for some people, especially in Asia but really around the world, a metaphor for life and the struggle to live creatively and strategically. In this film, AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence neural network, competes against Lee Sedol, a top level world champion at the game of Go. Because, like chess, this game is for many people a life’s work, the competition between man and machine is particularly intense and consequential. Lee Se-dol, is a South Korean professional Go player of 9 dan rank. AlphaGo is a computer program that can adjust and “teach itself” to play Go and to win at Go, a very complicated game. Go is much more complicated than chess, for example. Anyway, the story of how Lee Sedol and AlphaGo played a three games out of five tournament and who won is a nail-biter. I’m not sure I understand all of the implications of this kind of “deep learning” network, but it feels significant and rather amazing.

So, those are the four documentaries I’ve watched so far. I’ll be back with more mini-reviews soon.

By the way, if you have any favorite documentaries to recommend, I’ll add them to my list. What are your favorite nonfiction films and documentaries?

The Stone Girl’s Story by Sarah Beth Durst

Oct11

The Stone Girl’s Story is such a good exploration of story-making and moral free agency and growth and change. I am blown away by the depth of thought embedded in the story and the simple, understandable way in which the story unfolds.

Mayka, a living girl carved of stone, and her stone family of rabbits and birds and other creatures, live on the mountain where they were first created by the stonemason whom they called Father. They are animated and given their own stories by the marks the stonemason carved into their bodies when he made them. But Father eventually died and left the stone creatures he made behind. And now their marks are eroding and becoming faded and smooth. As their marks fade, the stone creatures will slowly wind down and come to a stop—unless they can find a new stonemason to re-carve their features and their stories.

To save herself and her friends, Mayka goes on a journey to find a stonemason. Like all fantasy journeys Mayka’s quest to save her family brings growth and change to Mayka herself, even if she is made of unyielding stone. Her companions on the journey are the stone birds, Risa and Jacklo, and along the way they meet Siannasi Yondolada Quilasa, Si-si for short, a tiny dragon with a big heart. With these friends and supporters, Mayka travels to the big city where she hopes to find another ally, a stonemason.

C.S. Lewis said of his Narnia stories that they were not allegories but rather “suppositions.”

“I did not say to myself ‘Let us represent Jesus as He really is in our world by a Lion in Narnia’; I said, ‘Let us suppose that there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as he became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would happen.'”

The Stone Girl’s Story also reads like a supposition: “Let us suppose world in which stone creatures can come to life, and someone wants to enslave and control the stone creatures. Then imagine what might happen.” And it’s a very good supposition. Recommended.

Amazon Affiliate. If you click on a book cover here to go to Amazon and buy something, I receive a very small percentage of the purchase price.
This book also may be nominated for a Cybil Award, but the views expressed here are strictly my own and do not reflect or determine the judging panel’s opinions.

The Rose Legacy by Jessica Day George

Oct10

I never was one of those horse-loving girls when I was a kid of a girl growing up in West Texas. Most of my friends loved horses, wanted to ride horses, longed to own their own horse(s), aspired to become veterinarians or barrel racers when they grew up. Not me. I went horseback riding once or twice, but it wasn’t my thing. I didn’t read horse books or study horse breeds or talk about horses with my friends. I was just not horse-crazy.

And I’m not sure The Rose Legacy, a new book by Jessica Day George, would have appealed to me back then. Ms. George, author of The Castle series about a magical castle and its inhabitants, has crafted a lovely fantasy set in a world where the horses are supposed to be extinct and forbidden and dangerous. But they’re not any of those things, really.

Anthea Cross-Thornley has no parents and has been shunted about from one uncaring relative to another for all of her life as far as she can remember. But now she is being sent to the home of an uncle she never knew she had, her father’s brother, and what’s worse, her uncle’s home, called The Last Farm, is outside The Wall in the Exiled Lands where only outlaws and wild animals live. How can Anthea become a Rose Maiden to the queen of Coronam when she is being sent to hinterlands, and will she even survive if it’s true that diseases were spread by the exiles and the horses that used to live in the Exiled Lands?

So, of course, the Exiled Lands turn out to be much different from what Anthea has been led to believe, and The Rose Legacy turns out to be a book about magical horses and about magical communication between horses and humans and about bonding with animals and as most good fantasy is, about a quest to save the kingdom. If you like horses or quests or magical worlds, you should give this one a try. Even an old horse-indifferent reader like me enjoyed the story. It had some good, tense moments, an unexpected villain, and a nice resolution, although I read hints that The Rose Legacy may be the first book in a new series. If so, horse lovers everywhere will be delighted.

Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Rhodes

Oct9

Ghost Boys is the story of Jerome, a 12 year old black child in Chicago, who is shot and killed by a white policeman. For most of the story Jerome is a ghost who wanders around Chicago trying to figure out why he can’t move on to wherever he is supposed to go after death. The message is good: no black children (or adults) should die because someone with power and a weapon “made a mistake” or was racist in his or her judgments.

But the story was confusing, and many questions were unresolved. Are all of the “ghost boys” doomed to walk the earth for eternity, or until complete and perfect justice is achieved? If the ghost of Emmett Till was returned to earth to inspire Thurgood Marshall, then why is he still around after Thurgood Marshall has already passed on? Was the murder of Emmett Till really responsible for starting the entire civil rights movement? Are the “hundreds and hundreds” of black boys the only people who have been killed unjustly in the history of the world, or in the United States, or are they just the only ones who are doomed to wander seeking justice forever? If they are supposed to share their stories, why doesn’t Jerome tell Sarah his story instead of having her watch a video and ask her librarian questions?

I just don’t think this book is a great introduction to the subject of racial injustice, but maybe I’m wrong. I’d really like to hear the opinions of young people, black, brown or white, who have read the book. Maybe they would get more out of the reading than I did. I think I would have preferred a straightforward telling of Jerome’s story without all the confusing ghostly stuff, but maybe the ghost story aspect makes it more accessible and interesting to at least some middle grade readers.

Amazon Affiliate. If you click on a book cover here to go to Amazon and buy something, I receive a very small percentage of the purchase price.
This book may be nominated for a Cybils Award, but the views expressed here are strictly my own and do not reflect or determine the judging panel’s opinions.

Winterhouse by Ben Guterson

Oct8

Winterhouse is just the sort of fantasy mystery adventure story that I like. The setting is a luxurious hotel with lots of long, twisty halls and secret, locked rooms and exciting amenities, including, of course, a huge library full of old books. The plot is filled with coded messages and puzzles and late night adventures and unusual friendships. The protagonist is an orphan girl, Elizabeth Sommers, who loves to read, so lots of literary allusions. The cast of supporting characters includes the hotel proprietor, the mysterious Norbridge Falls, a friendly librarian named Leona Springer, Elizabeth’s new friend, Freddy Knox, and various other assorted villains, friends, and eccentric minor cast members.

In the story, the poor orphan girl, who lives with her unkind and neglectful aunt Purdy and Uncle Burlap, is unexpectedly whisked away by unknown benefactors to Winterhouse Hotel for the Christmas holidays. While Elizabeth is enjoying the hotel and all its charms—the library, ski slopes, an over-sized jigsaw puzzle, concerts, lectures, and more—she becomes aware that there is mystery and even danger lurking behind the happy facade of Winterhouse. With the reluctant help of the unadventurous but inventive Freddy, Elizabeth sets out to uncover the secrets of Winterhouse before those secrets overcome the goodness and cheer of the old hotel and its guests.

Yes, it’s a perfect set-up. But the execution wasn’t quite up to par. The dialogue and the actions of the main characters, Elizabeth and Freddy, were strained and sometimes unnatural. Norbridge Falls’s actions and particularly his speech patterns are mysterious and unpredictable, too, and I never understood why he was acting so secretive, eccentric, and strange. The author left a lot of loose ends and unanswered questions hanging, perhaps in view of a possible sequel to this debut novel, but it felt like a violation of the Chekov’s gun adage: “if in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act.” Why were the two jigsaw puzzlers, Mr. Wellington and Mr. Rajput (and their wives), included in the story? What was the significance of introducing them and their huge Himalayan temple puzzle into the plot? Who is Riley Sweth Granger, and where did The Book come from? What really happened to Elizabeth’s parents? Why are Freddy’s allegedly distant and hateful parents suddenly interested in spending time with him at Winterhouse? What is the significance of the Flurschen candy? Why do most of the women of the Falls family live to be exactly 100 years old?

Although some mysteries are resolved by the end of the book, these and many other questions that I had are left unanswered. I think the author may eventually hit his stride and give us some delightful middle grade fiction in the vein of The Westing Game and The Mysterious Benedict Society, but Winterhouse does read like a first attempt. It’s worth reading, though, if only for the allusions to Anne-with-an-e and Narnia and Westing Game and other similar classics. And the library. The library in Winterhouse is to swoon for!

Oh, and the illustrations in the book by Chloe Bristol are pitch-perfect, or pen-perfect. Enjoy the pictures and the puzzles and the bookishness. I’d say give it a chance, and perhaps look forward to the next book in a projected trilogy, The Secrets of Winterhouse, to be published in 2019. Perhaps I’ll get answers to some of my questions then.

Cybils Middle Grade Speculative Fiction Yet To Be Nominated

Oct6

Here’s a list of some middle grade speculative fiction books of 2018 that have yet to be nominated for a Cybils Award. Anyone can nominate, and it’s a simple process. If you’ve read any of the following and want to nominate your favorite or if you’ve read books from this year in other categories, go ye forth to the Cybils website and nominate. Nominations close after October 15th.

The Rose Legacy by Jessica Day George. The orphaned Anthea Thornley is sent north to her uncle’s farm where she meets horses, a breed of animal she has been taught were dangerous and are now extinct. But Anthea has much to learn about her own family history and the history of her country and about horses. NOMINATED.

The Griffin’s Feather by Cornelia Funke. Sequel to Dragon Rider.

A Perilous Journey of Danger and Mayhem: A Dastardly Plot by Christopher Healy. The first book in a new alternate history adventure by the author of The Hero’s Guide to Saving Your Kingdom. NOMINATED

The Problim Children by Natalie Lloyd. “When the Problim children’s ramshackle bungalow in the Swampy Woods goes kaboom, the seven siblings—each born on a different day of the week—have to move into their grandpa’s bizarre old mansion in Lost Cove.” NOMINATED

The Boy, the Boat, and the Beast by Samantha Clark. “A boy washes up on a mysterious, seemingly uninhabited beach. Who is he? How did he get there? The boy can’t remember.” NOMINATED

Outlaws of Time: The Last of the Lost Boys by N.D. Wilson. This third book in the series introduces Sam Miracle’s son and heir. NOMINATED

The Lost Books: The Scroll of Kings by Sarah Prineas.“The powerful Lost Books at the palace library are infecting the rest with an evil magic, and two unlikely friends must figure out who, or what, is controlling the books and their power. If they can’t, the entire kingdom could be at risk.” NOMINATED

The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place: Book VI: the Long-Lost Home by Maryrose Wood. The final book in the Ashton Place series?

Voyage of the Dogs by Greg van Eekhout. Dogs in space—called Barkonauts? NOMINATED

The Phantom Tower by Keir Graff. “Twin brothers discover their new home is also a portal–for an hour a day–to a parallel dimension.”

The Language of Spells by Garret Weyr. A dragon freed from a teapot meets a very special friend. NOMINATED

Pages and Co: Tilly and the Bookwanderers by Anna James.

Spindrift and the Orchid by Emma Trevayne.

The Road to Ever After by Moira Young. In this Christmas tale, orphan Davy Davidson meets the eccentric Miss Flint, and as they travel together, Miss Flint begins to age backwards.

The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge by M.T. Anderson and Eugene Yelchin. “An anarchic, outlandish, and deeply political saga of warring elf and goblin kingdoms.” Long-Listed for the 2018 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. NOMINATED

A Fever, a Flight, and a Fight for the World: The Rwendigo Tales Book Four by Jennifer Myhre. May be young adult. Set in East Africa. NOMINATED in YA.

Explorer Academy: The Nebula Secret by Trudy Trueit. From National Geographic, kids train to become the next generation of scientists to explore the galaxy.

Bravelands #3: Blood and Bone by Erin Hunter.

The Magic Misfits by Neil Patrick Harris. NOMINATED

2018 Cybils Nominations Categories:
Easy Readers and Early Chapter Books
Elementary/Middle-Grade Nonfiction
Elementary/Middle-Grade Speculative Fiction
Fiction Picture Books/Board Books
Graphic Novels
Junior/Senior High Nonfiction
Middle-Grade Fiction
Poetry
Young Adult Fiction
Young Adult Speculative Fiction

The Third Mushroom by Jennifer L. Holm

Oct6

The Third Mushroom is a sequel to Holm’s 2017 book, The Fourteenth Goldfish. Both books have the advantage of being short, sweet, and simple, easy to digest and productive of not a few chuckles at the very least. However, both books are also somewhat over-simplified, especially in the science department, and both have a kind of snarky, disrespectful edge that just stays within my boundaries for likability.

Ellie, a seventh grade only child of divorced parents, doesn’t like mushrooms at all. In both books, Ellie has to deal with a grandfather who has two PhDs, which he brags about, a grandfather who ends up disguised as a middle school student in Ellie’s school as he coerces her into his wild and crazy science experiments and plays havoc with Ellie’s life. Grandpa Melvin is not a very sympathetic character, but he does make the book fun. He very obviously needs to grow up, but he also is fixated on making Ellie into a scientist like him.

This science obsession is an excuse for the author to shoehorn in all kinds of science information and mini-biographies of famous scientists such as Alexander Fleming, William and Caroline Herschel, Carolus Linnaeus, and others. It felt forced to me, but maybe kids won’t notice. Also, the science experiments were a bit wacky and unconvincing, but again maybe for beginning scientists the details don’t matter so much.

Both books are fun and easy to read. Grandpa Melvin is a crank, but he has some funny moments. Ellie, a seventh grader, has a date with a boy, completely clean and almost platonic, but if you’re wanting to delay that particular discussion, I wouldn’t have my second grader reading this one, as one Amazon reviewer said hers did. Also, (SPOILER): Animal Trauma Alert (in The Third Mushroom).

And, by the way, I totally disagree with Ellie about mushrooms and Brussels sprouts. Mushrooms are great, very tasty; Brussels sprouts are Tiny Cabbages of Death. And if you’re not sure what the mushrooms have to do with the actual story, I’m not either.

Willa of the Wood by Robert Beatty

Oct5

Willa is a young night-spirit jaetter of the Dead Hollow clan of the Faeran, an orphan and a sort of New world fairy? She’s also a woodwitch with the ability to talk to trees and plants and some animals, and she can change skin color like a chameleon and blend so that she can hardly be seen among the flora of the forest. Jaetters are thieves who come at night and steal from the day-folk for the benefit of the ruler of Willa’s clan, the paderan. Faeran believe in the guideline that “there is no I, only we”, but Willa is an individual. She escapes from the confines of her dictatorial clan life, but she finds that life without the clan is lonely and purposeless. So, most of the book is about Willa’s search for home, community, and family.

Who’s editing the books these days, anyway? Willa of the Wood tells a good story, set in the Great Smoky Mountains, with atmosphere and suspense and compelling characters and a touch of Americana (Cherokee characters, the mountains, panthers and otters and other animals native to the area). BUT there are some obvious glitches that a good editor should have noticed. The first paragraph of chapter 33 repeats the action in the last few paragraphs of chapter 32, as if the reader is picking up on a serial installment of the story. Why? None of the other chapters have this repetition (that I noticed), and it was disconcerting.

Then, there were niggling little questions I had as I was reading. The miller, Nathaniel, says he earns his living from the mill, taking one bag of cornmeal for every ten that he grinds, but no one ever comes to the mill to have their grain milled. And most of the time Nathaniel is absent from home, anyway. How can he run a business when he’s gone half the time and has no customers? And how many children were there in the underground prison? It seemed as if there were lots, more than Willa could visit or free, on multiple levels. Then, the story said that she freed only 23 or 24 children. What happened to the rest of the children? And why did the Faeran let the girl stay with her baby brother?

There were more questions I had as I read. Some were resolved; others were not. I can see how this fantasy fiction would appeal especially to children who live in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee or South Carolina. Or those who like stories about communication with animals. The entire book is rather dark and melancholy, with themes of cultural annihilation, cruelty, power-grabbing, and greed. But, as I said, it may appeal to some readers. I thought it was OK, but I was kind of glad for the happy-ish ending. If it’s the first in a series, there wasn’t enough there to draw me back for a second go-round.

Hope in the Holler by Lisa Lewis Tyre

Oct4

When Wavie’s mother dies of cancer, Wavie ends up in the Appalachian trailer home of her long-lost and unknown Aunt Samantha Rose. Wavie’s father is dead, to (or is he?), and Wavie has only her own wits and a couple of new friends in Conley Hollow, her new home, to get her out of the predicament of living with an aunt who feeds her ketchup and spaghetti for meals and only wants to spend the government check for Wavie’s support on stuff for Aunt Samantha Rose.

Can Wavie do anything that will prevent Aunt Samantha Rose from becoming her legal guardian? Can Wavie find her real father or did he really die in an accident long ago? Why did Wavie’s mother leave Conley Hollow and never tell her about Samantha Rose or anyone else in the family? What else did Wavie’s mother fail to tell her before she died?

Adult fans of Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance will find this story familiar and believable. Those who dissed Vance’s story of his own rise from Appalachian poverty will probably think this children’s version of that escape is just as offensive as Vance’s true life story. I thought some of the stereotypical elements of the story were overdone: Aunt Samantha Rose buys a big-screen TV with the child support money, of course. The family lives in a trailer home, of course. Wavie’s friend comes over to her house to bathe because there’s no water or soap at his house.

Still, this book had a lot of heart and a lot of pathos. Wavie is a spunky, persistent protagonist, and her two sidekicks are believably flawed and somewhat antagonistic toward each other, and yet they support Wavie well in attempt to break free of her vulgar and uncaring aunt. I would recommend this one to readers who like a good overcoming-the-obstacles kind of story. It’s similar in some ways, themes and setting, to Louisiana’s Way Home by Kate DiCamillo. I thought Louisiana was the better book, but Hope in the Holler wasn’t bad at all.

The Last (Endling #1) by Katherine Applegate

Oct3

Byx is the youngest and most vulnerable member of the dairne pack in a world where dairnes are about to become extinct. There aren’t many of these dog-like but intelligent and communicating creatures left in the world, and Byx doesn’t know whether to believe the legends and rumor that other dairne packs exist in the far off north or not. When Byx loses her own family, she goes on a journey to find the other dairnes, the ones who will keep her from being the endling, the last of her kind. Will she find them, and will the humans and other creatures that have joined her on her quest be her new family or will they betray her to the evil dictator, Murdano, who wants to destroy the dairnes and any other creatures who will not obey him.

This book has a lot of newly coined words and newly imagined creatures: dairnes, wobbyks, raptidons, felivets, and others. It reminded me of the Warriors and Bravelands series of books by Erin Hunter and of The Guardians of Ga’hoole books by Kathryn Lasky. Anthropomorphized animals or animal-like characters and a quest to save the world or the species or both make for good plots to hang a story upon. And The Last is a good story.

I did face the never-ending frustration as I was reading of realizing that I was about twenty pages from the end of the book, and the loose ends were numerous and the miles to go on the quest that forms the impetus for the plot were barely begun. So, this story wasn’t going to end neatly or even at all. That said, the ending wasn’t too bad; no one was hanging from the edge of a cliff, literal or figurative, at the close of this first volume.

The tone was rather dark. Extinction looms for the dairnes and for other species. Humans are taking over the world and running roughshod over the other governing species. In fact, humans are portrayed as greedy and power-drunk and traitorous liars, most of the time. The dairnes, on the other hand, never lie and always know when others are not telling the truth, a useful and rather dangerous skill in a world where a murderous dictator is trying to consolidate his reign over the other species. But this devotion to the truth doesn’t keep Byx from telling herself that since she may be the endling, perhaps her death would be better than living in a world where she is the only dairne left.

I feel as if this series can only improve as it moves into future volumes, but of course, that remains to be seen. Could this series be another Animorphs?

Semicolon

Books we must have though we lack bread.