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Gifts from the Garbage Truck by Andrew Larsen

Jan16

Gifts from the Garbage Truck: A True Story About the Things We (Don’t) Throw Away by Andrew Larsen. Foreword by Nelson Molina. Illustrated by Oriol Vidal. Sourcebooks, 2024.

I have mixed feelings about this picture book biography of sanitation worker, Nelson Molina, a collector of throwaway items. I liked the basic story of Mr. Molina and his Treasures in the Trash Museum. Stories about ordinary people who have extraordinary hobbies and adventures are the best. The letter at the beginning of the book, written by Nelson Molina himself, was great. In fact, that letter, in which Mr. Molina tells about how he came to be a collector, reuser, recycler, and up-cycler of other people’s trash, could have been a much better text for the picture book.

Instead, author Andrew Larson retells Nelson Molina’s story, and the text is rather pedestrian. In addition, the illustrations are flat and uninteresting.

“Nelson Molina collected things. He collected all kinds of things.”

“Nelson brought the objects he found back to the sanitation garage. He displayed them in the locker room so everyone at work could see them. There were toys and teapots. Yo-yos and photos. There were knick-knacks and thingamajigs and whatchamacallits. People throw away the most extraordinary things.”

Then, at the end of the story, someone decided to add a didactic and unnecessary information page that reiterates what the story has been telling us, in case we’re too dense to get it. The title is “The 4 R’s: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and Rethink”–with a definition and explanation for each “R” as well as ideas about how to up-cycle junk that’s headed for the garbage truck.

I was fascinated by Nelson Molina’s story of collecting, repairing, and recycling things from the New York City garbage. It reminded me a little bit of my work, rescuing books. But I wish Mr. Molina could have had a better picture book profile. And a few more photographs or pictures of the whatchamacallits and thingamajigs in the museum would have been nice. (There are a few photos in the back of the book.)

This picture book is worth checking out from the library just because of the story. But one time through the book should be enough for most kids and grownups, too.

Orris and Timble: The Beginning by Kate DiCamillo

Jan11

Kate diCamillo is one of my favorite contemporary authors, and she has had a great year. Ferris was probably my favorite middle grade novel of 2024, and now Orris and Timble:The Beginning is set to be my favorite new easy reader of 2024, and maybe my favorite series, if the other two books in the projected trilogy are as good as this first one.

“The old barn was abandoned. Only Orris lived there.” So the story begins. Orris is a rat, a solitary soul who has made a nest for himself and filled it with his favorite recycled treasures. He’s happy and seemingly self-satisfied.

But Orris is a rat with a conscience, personified in the picture of a king on a sardine can who looks Orris in the eye and reminds him to “make the good and noble choice.” And when a snowy owl, Timble, is caught in a trap and begs for help, Orris has a choice to make. Will he make the good and noble choice? Or will he stay safe in his own little nest and ignore the needs, and the danger, of the world outside?

This book, with short chapters, and very few words on each page, reminded me of the Frog and Toad books by Arnold Lobel. The story itself is simple and straightforward, a mirroring of the story of Androcles and the Lion, but there’s a subtext that speaks to adults as well as children. It’s a story and a subtext about friendship and adventure and choices and risk taking, but I won’t go much farther than that. You and your children can pull your own ideas and images from the book.

The illustrations by Carmen Mok are adequate, but not spectacular. The charm is in the story. The vocabulary in the book is not controlled, and the author uses some moderately difficult words. Early readers will gain confidence after sounding out words such as “windowsill” and “disappeared” and “butterscotch”. The story itself should carry readers who are beginning to enjoy chapter books right along to the ending, which is lovely in its “openendedness”.

“Orris?” says the owl.

“Yes?” says the rat.

“Are we friends?” says the owl.

“Yes, Timble,” says the rat after a long silence, “we’re friends.”

“But that’s not the end of the story,” says Timble.

“No,” says Orris, “it’s the beginning.”

The Contender by Robert Lipsyte

Jan10

Some bad ideas just keep coming back to haunt and hinder human flourishing all over again. In this book, published in 1967, Alfred Brooks, a black seventeen year old high school drop out who lives and works in Harlem, hears all the same taunts and race baiting remarks that are common on the internet nowadays.

“You just a slave,” sneered Major. “You was born a slave. You gonna die a slave.”

“You come on, Alfred,” said James softly. “Whitey been stealing from us for three hundred years. We just going to take some back.”

It’s the appeal to enslave oneself to bitterness and resentment that keeps coming back to capture impressionable young minds. Alfred, who lives with his aunt and her daughters in an apartment and works at a local Jewish-owned store, isn’t interested in the siren call of crime and drugs that his tormentors are offering and that his best friend James is yielding to. But Alfred doesn’t really know what he does want to pursue, what his true adventure might be, until he steps over the threshold of Donatelli’s Gym and commits himself to training to become a boxer.

The Contender is a book for older teens and adults, especially for those young men who are considering what it means to become a man. It’s about boxing and drug abuse and the temptations that come with racial hatred and poverty and aimlessness. But it’s mostly about coming of age through struggle and discipline and perseverance to find the person you want to become.

The novel is gritty for 1967. There’s the violence of the boxing ring and of the streets, and the desperation of heroin addiction (Alfred’s friend, James). The bullies, also black teens, who taunt and try to take revenge on Alfred for something he didn’t do, make use of the n-word twice to tell Alfred what a loser he is. But the words and the violence are there for a reason, and by today’s standards, they’re mild. No sexual content other than a few references to young men looking for Friday night girls to date.

Robert Lipsyte is a sports journalist as well as a writer of nonfiction sports biography and memoir and young adult fiction. He was awarded the American Library Association’s Margaret A. Edwards Award for his contribution to young adult literature in 2001. The citation for the award noted that, “The Contender and its sequels, The Brave and The Chief transformed the sports novel to authentic literature with their gritty depiction of the boxing world. An ongoing theme is the struggle of their protagonists to seek personal victory by their continuing efforts towards a better life despite defeats.”

I haven’t read The Brave or The Chief, but I did find The Contender to be thought-provoking. I know a young man who might get a lot out of the story if I could get him to read it.

Kadooboo by Shruthi Rao

Jan9

Kadooboo: A Silly South Indian Folktale by Shruthi Rao. Illustrated by Darshika Varma. Page Street Kids, 2024.

The word “silly” in the subtitle signals to the reader not to expect anything too profound from this adapted South Indian folktale, but the fact that it’s a folktale, passed down from grandmother to granddaughter, means that the story certainly has some significance and meaning. And it’s fun. Fun is not twaddle, and comedy is not useless. Therefore, classify this one as a humble living book.

Anya’s Appa (dad) is making kadooboo, “pouches of dough filled with sugar and grated coconut.” (Yes, there’s a recipe in the back of the book.) Anya’s friend Kabir is asked to take some home to his Amma (mom). As he runs home, hurrying to beat the impending rainstorm, Kabir collects other friends who come along to share the kadooboo and to get in out of the rain. But Kabir also becomes more and more confused about the name of the treat he is carrying. Is it bookoodoo? Dubookoo? Duckooboo?

This picture book just tells a sweet little story. Yes, silly, but the wordplay and the multiethnic cast of friends elevate the story into more than a simple misunderstanding or joke. The illustrations and the names of the children that Kabir meets show that this is set in South India where all kinds of ethnicities share the same Indian subcontinent, but there’s nothing in the story that preaches “diversity”. It’s just a show-and tell story with funny words that children will repeat and try to remember themselves. The pictured children remind me of Dora the Explorer, so it’s a colorful, 21st century sort of picture book.

This story would be perfect for reading aloud, but the read aloud-er might want to check the ending before attempting the final word in the story. And of course, the story cries out for some homemade kadooboo as an after-story time treat. The ingredients are not too exotic or hard to find, and the recipe instructions a fairly straightforward, although adult help and supervision is required (kadooboo pies are fried in oil).

“The story is a modern retelling of a South Indian folktale my grandmother used to tell me when I was a child. In the original story, a man eats kadooboo at a feast. He hurries home, excited to tell his wife about, and repeats the word over and over so as not to forget it. . . . The kadooboo in this story is a fried dumpling.” ~Author’s Note

I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger

Jan3

My eldest daughter saw this book on my bedside table and asked to take it home and read it. So she read Leif Enger’s newest novel before I even opened it. When she brought it back I asked her how it was, and she said, “Well, it’s good, but it’s rather dark.”

Dark indeed. I Cheerfully Refuse is the story of a man, Rainy, who becomes a fugitive, innocent of any crime, but pursued by a villainous lawman in a dystopian world that has traded law and order for despotism and chaos. It was unclear to me whether nuclear war or climate change or something else or a combination of things made the setting, in and around Lake Superior in Michigan and Canada, so degraded and oppressive. However, something happened to the country and then something else to Rainy in particular, and Rainy is caught in a hellish predicament, not of his own making. So he sets sail in a dilapidated old sailboat to escape the bad guys and find the good.

It is a doomed quest, but Rainy doesn’t give up. He meets with people and situations both good and evil in his journey. And (SPOILER ALERT), he does, after much suffering, win through to a semi-hopeful ending. There’s a bit of magical realism and some futuristic dystopian fantasy as the story winds through the islands and shores of Lake Superior. The plot, however, is not the best part of the book. It’s the words. Mr. Enger is a master at manipulating and communicating with words. He verbs a few of the nouns, and nouns some adjectives and verbs, and mixes up the syntax and casually drops in the metaphors and similes just enough to keep a reader on her toes, reading carefully and slowly, and going back to savor and make sure I didn’t miss something along the journey.

Enger in this book writes lovely sentences like these:

“You’re a man who stops and listens. If that’s not the definition of friendship, it’s close enough for now.”

“Words are one way we leave tracks in the world, Sol. Maybe one day you will write a book, like Olaus did, or Molly Thorn. And people will read it, like I’ve been reading to you. And they will know that you were here, and a little about what you were like.”

“. . . our job always and forever was to refuse Apocalypse in all its forms and work cheerfully against it.”

“[I]t began to resemble what I once imagined church might be like, a church you could bear, where people laughed and enjoyed each other and did not care if they were right all the time or if other people were wrong.”

“One shelf became two. Then a wall. Then eight-foot rolling racks from a shut library in Hayward, Wisconsin. Maudie suggested changing the shop name to reflect its inventory. Bread and Books. Loaves and Lit. Pulp and Provender. Lark laughed off the idea. She said all of it was bread.”

So, I Cheerfully Refuse is a good book, but dark. In times of chaos and uncertainty and change, it might be good to read a book about man living through similar (but much worse) times. Or it might not. I enjoyed the book, but your mileage and ability to stay cheerful may vary.

“I am always last to see the beauty I inhabit.”

The Best Nonfiction I Read in 2024

Jan2

I see that none of these nonfiction books is a biography, although a couple are memoirs and some are biographical, telling a part of the life of one or more persons. A couple of the books are rather controversial, but I found those to be readable and true to my own experience of life in these controversial and adversarial times. I recommend all of the above, but The Three Owls by New York City librarian Anne Carroll Moore was the most comforting and illuminating of the dozen books, taking me out of this time and place to a children’s literature culture of 100 years ago. If we can’t recapture or recreate those times and that culture, we can at least live in them for a little while by reading about the books of that era. The Three Owls: Third Book is a compilation of “contemporary criticism of children’s books, 1927-1930, written and edited by Anne Carroll Moore.” I would very much like to own books 1 and 2 as well.

Links are to reviews here at Semicolon or elsewhere. Starred books are available for library patrons to borrow from Meriadoc Homeschool Library.

The Best Middle Grade Fiction I read in 2024: A Baker’s Dozen

Jan1

My children’s fiction reading this year has been influenced a lot by two projects: my project to read and evaluate current day middle grade fiction published in 2024 and my other project to read and evaluate the middle grade fiction of 60 years ago, published in 1964. I found more gold in ’64 than I did in 2024, but there were a few good ones from this past year. I also spent a lot of time with one particular children’s author from the past who deserved all of the awards he received. Links are to reviews of the books here at Semicolon or at Plumfield and Paideia.

Indeed, it was the year of good books from 1964, and the year of Meindert DeJong. If you’ve not read any of DeJong’s award-winning books, and if you like animal stories, you should definitely try one of Mr. DeJong’s heart-warming tales.

Mystery in the Night Woods by John Peterson

Dec26

I went to a library book sale a couple of months ago, and I found eight or ten old Scholastic paperbacks for sale for fifty cents apiece. I grabbed them all with plans to read them and see if they would fit into my library. Mystery in the Night Woods definitely makes the grade.

However, let’s deal with the possibly offensive parts first. Flying Squirrel, aka F.S., and his friend Bat are introduced in the first chapter, and right away we can tell that F.S. is a proud and self-centered squirrel. He tells Bat, “When I do something, I want to do it the best!” and “that’s why I’m a success!” So, it’s no surprise that when F.S. falls for Miss Owl and asks her to marry him, he is not willing to take “no” for an answer.

It is a bit disconcerting to present-day sensitivities to discover what F.S. does about his unrequited love for Miss Owl. He kidnaps her and refuses to let her go until she promises to marry him. This abduction is the part that a couple of Amazon reviewers found offensive, but I didn’t read it that way. Of course, the kidnapping is wrong, indeed criminal, but Miss Owl is for the most part unharmed. F.S. is arrested, sentenced by the Night Court, and made to pay for his crime. And eventually he becomes a much more humble and helpful squirrel.

So, it’s a story of “pride goeth before a fall” and “crime doesn’t pay” and “all’s well that ends well.” I believe in repentance and forgiveness as well as justice, and that’s what the book models with anthropomorphic animal characters. I daresay had the characters been human adults doing the same things, my take would have been different. But really, a lovesick flying squirrel kidnaps an innocent Miss Owl, but then repents and helps solve a mystery and foil a major crime spree? It feels like something from the cartoons that entertained me on my childhood Saturday mornings.

“Weasel stuck his head out of the window and whistled. A dark cloud came out and floated past him. Bat looked on from his hiding place. He could hardly believe what he had seen. What was the dark cloud? Where did it go? Bat was sure of only one thing–Weasel was up to something crooked again.”

And there you have the teaser for the rest of the story. It’s a good mystery for the 8-10 year old crowd. Leave it at that. I wouldn’t pay a lot for the book, especially since it’s only available in a paperback edition published in 1969. MY copy happens to be in very good condition, but it won’t last forever. Still, if you come across it, pick it up and give to a child you know who is not too jaded to enjoy a simple animal story mystery.

John Peterson was a successful children’s author who published quite a few best-selling books including Terry’s Treasure Hunt, The Secret Hide-Out, Enemies of the Secret Hide-Out, and the series of books about The Littles, a tiny family who live in the walls of a human-size family’s house. Cyndy Szekeres, the illustrator for Mystery in the Night Woods, is well known for her tiny animal illustrations, and the ones in this book are charming.

Patron families can check this book out from Meriadoc Homeschool Library.

2024 Middle Grade Fiction–Not Recommended

Dec20

Here’s a list of 2024 middle grade fiction books that I’ve read or partially read and do NOT recommend, for various reasons, mostly because they contain gratuitous and unhelpful sexual references, lies about gender and sexuality, crude language and/or just bad writing:

  • Shark Teeth by Sherri Winston
  • The Secret Library by Kekla Magoon
  • A Game of Noctis by Deva Fagan
  • Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell
  • Unstuck by Barbara Dee
  • Keep It Like a Secret by John David Anderson
  • The Wrong Way Home by Kate O’Shaughnessy
  • The Misunderstandings of Charity Brown by Elizabeth Laird
  • Jamie by L.D. Lapinski
  • Just Shy of Ordinary by A.J. Sass
  • Gooseberry by Robin Gow
  • Linus and Etta Could Use a Win by Caroline Huntoon
  • Murray Out of Water by Taylor Tracy
  • Crushing It by Erin Becker
  • The Truth About Triangles by Michael Leali
  • Puzzleheart by Jenn Reese
  • The Flicker by H.E. Edgmon
  • Tig by Heather Smith
  • Max in the House of Spies by Adam Gidwitz
  • Splinter & Ash by Marieke Nijkamp

Faker by Gordon Korman

Dec18

What would it be like to grow up with a conman for a father? A conman who swindles your friends’ families out of large sums of money and convinces you that it’s all just part of “the family business”?

In Faker, Gordon Korman, a prolific middle-grade novelist, explores this intriguing premise through the eyes of Trey, a young boy who has been hustling people with his dad and younger sister for as long as he can remember. The family moves from town to town, conning wealthy people out of their money, and then disappearing when the heat gets too intense. As soon as things start to unravel, Trey’s dad calls a “Houdini”—a quick escape—and they vanish, only to reappear later in a new place with a new scheme.

Despite the fact that this is a story about a family of criminals, Korman does a good job of showing that Trey is more than just a product of his environment. As the story progresses, Trey begins to question the rationale his father has always fed him about their lifestyle, grappling with his maturing conscience. I also appreciated that Trey’s father, while clearly a thief, isn’t painted as entirely villainous. He’s a complex character: a criminal with a good heart. In fact, he might be a bit too good a dad to be entirely believable, but this adds to the book’s emotional appeal.

As I read, I found myself thinking, “This is not going to end well,” especially when Trey’s dad uses him and his sister to establish relationships with the wealthy parents of their schoolmates. But Korman manages to craft a surprisingly hopeful conclusion, one that, while somewhat improbable, avoids the darker turn the story might have taken. While the book offers some redemption and resolution, the narrative doesn’t shy away from difficult questions about right and wrong. Trey may come to understand the ethics of his actions, but his father’s repentance and reformation remain more ambiguous.

If you’re looking for a squeaky-clean story with no lying, stealing, or moral dilemmas, Faker is not the book for you. However, if you’re looking for a thought-provoking story that raises important questions about ethics, theft, and deception, this is a great choice. The book offers an opportunity to discuss complex topics like whether it’s okay to steal from the rich, the nature of heroes and villains, and whether criminals deceive themselves about their own motives. Pairing Faker with a version of the Robin Hood stories would make for some excellent discussions about the ethics of stealing from the rich and living outside the law.