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Almost Super by Marion Jensen

May20

“It’s not your power that makes you super. It’s what you do with that power.”

All of the Baileys receive their very own superpower on February 29th at 4:23 in the afternoon in the first leap year after their twelfth birthday. So now it’s time for Rafter Bailey, age thirteen, and his brother, Benny, age twelve to get their powers. It should be the best day of their young lives, but superpowers are unpredictable and Rafter and Benny are in for a big surprise.

This humorous look at a family of superheroes has great dialog, and is kid-friendly and funny, without descending to the stupid and crude boy-humor that some authors attempt (at least not much, just a little bit of burping and barfing). It made me laugh, and it had a good superhero moral: “Iron resolve. Ferocious courage. And a healthy dose of insanity. That’s what makes a superhero. Not some amazing power.”

Rafter and Benny act like kids, but they’re kids who are out to save the world. They mess up, but their hearts are in the right place. And as kids are apt to do, they sometimes see things more clearly than the grown-ups do. When some doubt arises as to whether the Baileys’ arch-rivals, the Johnsons, are really super-villains, Rafter and Benny decide to find out the truth once and for all.

As I wrote in my review of another middle grade superhero novel (Sidekicked by John David Anderson), superheroes, from Gilgamesh and Enkidu to Samson and Gideon to Hercules to Beowulf to Superman and The Incredible Hulk—–we weak mortals have always been fascinated with the adventures and exploits of men (sometimes women) with incredible talents, beyond human strength, and extraordinary intelligence. Superheroes are the stuff of legend and comic book—and nowadays middle grade speculative fiction. The superhero novel is in style, and as far as I’m concerned, Almost Super is one “super” entry in the genre.

Wanderville by Wendy McClure

May19

Inspired by The Boxcar Children books, Wanderville is a story of unwanted children making a place for themselves in spite of uncaring and inattentive adults. The believability factor in this story for younger middle grade readers is low, but it is a good adventure.

A group of orphans are sent west to Kansas on the Orphan Train. They escape before they are sent to a sugar beet farm to work as practical slaves, and they create their own (partly imaginary) town of Wanderville, a town that is “open to any child in need of freedom. No matter who they are.” It’s historical fiction with some near-fantasy elements. All of the events in the book could happen, but some of them are highly unlikely.

The story is very anti-adult, but it is the adults who unwittingly provide the food that the children “liberate” and who clumsily participate in the successful rescue effort toward the end of the book. Perhaps the author was taking a polite jab at the oft-repeated convention in children’s book that has children taking care of themselves without any adult intervention or help. Or maybe she was trying to “empower” children to take control of their own destinies. Whatever the author’s intentions, the adults in the story range from incompetent to slow-witted to downright cruel, with not a helpful adult in sight. Maybe that aspect will improve over the course of the series.

For fans of The Boxcar Children series, Joan Lowery Nixon’s Orphan Train Adventures, or even the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Wanderville might be a welcome follow-up. A series of Wanderville books is in the works. Book 2 is Wanderville: On Track for Treasure, due out in October 2014.

Tesla’s Attic by Neal Shusterman and Eric Elfman

May17

A very promising first book in The Accelerati Trilogy, this science fiction adventure follows the escapades of Nick Slate, the new guy in town, and his friends in Colorado Springs where they find that the legacy of genius and inventor Nikola Tesla, a bunch of weird old electrical and mechanical devices and appliances found in Nick’s attic, is more than a little dangerous. What’s more The Accelerati, whoever they are, are competing with Nick and his friends to gain control of the power of Tesla’s mad inventions.

The tone and style of this adventure were pitch perfect, with a little more adolescent boy/girl stuff than I would have liked, but still the clues were dropped and then picked up and tied together neatly with room left for the sequel(s). I really enjoyed the way these two authors worked together to foreshadow the coming action and warn the reader about what would or could happen while at the same surprising me with a few twists and turns I wasn’t expecting.

Oh, the book begins with a great first line: “Nick was hit by a flying toaster.” Doesn’t that make you curious?

QOTD: Some people think Nikola Tesla was one of the most fascinating geniuses who ever lived. Who fascinates you? What person or persons in history would you like to invite to your dinner party, just to hear what they had to say?

The Riverman by Aaron Starmer

May14

The Riverman, by master storyteller Aaron Starmer, will leave you questioning the responsibilities of friendship, the boundaries of imagination, and the true origin –and ownership– of the stories we tell. ~inside front cover blurb for The Riverman

The book did leave me questioning, but my questions are not so philosophical. My first question is: what in blue blazes is this story about? Alistair Cleary keeps secrets. When his not-so-typical neighbor, Fiona Loomis, tells him her secrets about a land called Aquavania where everything she imagines becomes real, Alistair keeps her secret, too. But he’s not sure whether Fiona is telling the literal truth about Aquavania and about The Riverman who is stealing the souls of the children there, or whether Fiona’s stories are a way for her to tell him about what’s going on in the Real World. Are children being kidnapped or abused or even murdered? Or is Fiona just crazy? Or is Aquavania real?

I never got answers to any of Alistair’s and my questions. Here are some review quotes lifted from Amazon:

“This blend of magical realism and mystery blurs the line between reality and fantasy, setting up a creepy unease that both disturbs and propels the reader forward.” ~BCCB

“In this dark, twisting tale, readers are never sure if Fiona’s story is true or not, and they won’t want to stop reading until they find out.” ~Booklist

“The novel’s strength is in the pervasive aura of unknowing that Starmer creates and sustains.” ~Publisher’s Weekly

The problem I have is that I’m not sure that the ambiguity and creepiness and darkness are strengths. The lack of even semi-definitive answers frustrated me, and the final twist of revelation about who The Riverman really was made no sense at all to me. The violence at the end of the story was also unexpected and unwelcome and rather mystifying. In fact, the ending was not so much ambiguous as it was baffling.

It’s not that I am completely opposed to ambiguous endings. Sometimes I have enjoyed making up my own ending to a novel or deciding for myself how the story continues. But The Riverman is too incomprehensible. I don’t even have a working theory about what was going on with Fiona and Alistair and especially Alistair’s friends, Charlie and Kyle.

Yet another odd book. At least I think I understood Nightingale’s Nest by Nikki Loftin and some of the other oddities I’ve read lately. This one has me stumped. Maybe I skimmed something I should have read more carefully. Maybe the book itself is at fault. If you’ve read this particular book, would you please, please enlighten me?

QOTD: Do you like stories with ambiguous endings? Can you name a novel or story that you have read that ends ambiguously? Did you make up a happy ending or a sad one in your mind?

Nightingale’s Nest by Nikki Loftin

May13

‘Tis the season of odd little children’s books–or else my brain is responding to everything I read lately with the one word assessment, “Odd.”

Take, for instance, The Boy on the Porch by Sharon Creech, in which a mute boy shows up one day asleep on the front porch of a childless couple named John and Mary, and then the boy just as mysteriously disappears a few months later, after having opened the couple’s home and hearts to needy children. He also paints on the side of the barn and rides a cow.

Or there’s the odd INSPY nominee, Doon by Carey Corp and Laurie Langdon, a young adult novel that tries to be “Christian” or “spiritual” and feminist and hip and happily-ever-after fairy tale all at the same time–in Brigadoon, Scotland. The combination was disjointed and not entirely successful.

Then, there’s Lemony Snicket’s latest series, All the Wrong Questions. But Mr Snicket’s weirdness is not really a recent phenomenon, and it’s kind of fun to get lost in for a season.

Anyway, Nikki Loftin’s new children’s novel, Nightingale’s Nest, is odd, or at least it felt odd to me. It’s sort of magical realism, I guess. Inspired by a Hans Christian Andersen story (according to the blurb)? Well, Mr. Andersen certainly had his moments of eccentricity.

Twelve year old “Little John” Fischer, Jr. has a lot of problems. His little sister died when she fell from a tree, so now Little John hates trees, all trees. Little John’s dad is working for the meanest, richest man in town, Mr. King, and Little John is his assistant. Their is cutting down and trimming pecan trees. And Little John’s mom is only sane on her good days; on her bad days she talks as if Raelynn, the little sister, is still alive. The family is out of money, and when Little John’s dad gets paid, he spends most of his pay of booze.

But if Little John’s problems are huge, they pale in comparison to the issues that Gayle (short for nightingale), the bird girl with the beautiful voice, is facing. Her parents are dead or missing. She’s stuck in an abusive foster home. She believes she can heal people with her songs. And Mr. King wants to take her voice away from her. When Little John and Gayle become friends and when Little John makes promises to protect and support her, promises he knows he can’t keep, the stage is set for disaster and tragedy.

I don’t know what else to say about this one, except that it is really odd, maybe even intriguing. There’s a situation in the book that is analogous to secret sexual abuse, but it’s not that–at least I don’t think it is. It’s never really spelled out, and it was uncomfortable. I was never quite sure whether Mr. King was a sexual predator, or just a maniacal opera fan. At any rate the ambiguity allows the reader to read into the story what he wills, and I’m not sure what kids will read into it–or not. Nor do I know whether that’s good or not, but it is definitely . . . odd.

QOTD: What is the oddest, most ambiguous and peculiar, story or novel you’ve ever read? Think Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, the afore-mentioned Lemony Snicket.

The Port Chicago 50 by Steve Sheinkin

May12

The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights by Sheve Sheinkin, National Book Award Finalist and Newbery Honor Winner for Bomb: The Race to Build–and Steal–the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon.

I’ve never heard of Port Chicago or the Port Chicago 50. So Mr. Sheinkin’s tale of 50 black seamen who defied orders to load dangerous munitions onto ships during World War II and who were subsequently tried and convicted of mutiny was a revelation to me. It’s a story of the civil rights movement before there really was a civil rights movement, or at least before the part I knew about.

I knew about Truman’s order to integrate the U.S. armed forces. I knew about Dr. Martin Luther King and the civil rights struggles of the 1960’s. But way back in 1944, at the height of World War II, when the outcome of the war was still in question, a massive explosion on the docks at Port Chicago in San Francisco killed 320 servicemen, many of them black Navy men who were segregated and assigned the dangerous job of loading bombs and ammunition onto ships for the war effort in the Pacific. These men, both the ones who died and the ones who escaped, were never trained to handle explosives. They were ordered to load and load fast, and their white officers made bets on which division or work group could load the most cargo in a day. Almost all of the stevedores who were handling this ammunition under very unsafe conditions were black.

A few weeks after the explosion, the men were ordered to go back to the very same work of loading ammunition under the very same conditions. When they refused the order, they were tried for mutiny, a crime which in the naval code carried a possible death sentence. Most of the men who were “on strike” backed down when they were threatened with the firing squad, but fifty of them did not.

The author’s sympathies are completely on the side of the alleged mutineers, with good reason. They do seem have been mistreated and subjected to unnecessarily dangerous working conditions. Their crime, disobeying a direct order, didn’t really rise to the level of mutiny. (Mutiny: “an unlawful opposition or resistance to or defiance of superior military authority, with a deliberate purpose to usurp, subvert, or override such authority.”) The defense argument when the men came to trial was that there was no plan to subvert or override authority, just a refusal by a bunch of traumatized men to return to loading ammunition under the very same conditions that caused the original explosion.

I found myself in sympathy with the Port Chicago 50, too, even as I could see the reasons that impelled the Navy authorities to bring the men to trial. The United States was at war. The military was a segregated force, wrong but true. Even though the black seamen who were loading the ammunition were treated abominably and the working conditions were hazardous, their work was a necessary part of the war effort. No member of the armed forces can be allowed to disobey orders from a superior officer with impunity. However, the Port Chicago 50 were right about the stand they took, and they were brave to take it. So, I stand conflicted and confused as to what I think about the entire episode.

Joe Small, unofficial leader of the group called the Port Chicago 50: “I realized that I had to work. I wasn’t trying to shirk work. But to go back to work under the same conditions with no improvements, no changes, the same group of officers that we had. . . . Improve working conditions this is what I, personally, was after. And desegregation of the base.”

Steve Sheinkin also wrote Lincoln’s Grave Robbers, a book I reviewed last year when I was reading and reviewing Cybils nominees for YA nonfiction.

QOTD: Who is a person from history that you respect? Why? Is there any historical figure that you admire while at the same time you acknowledge the person’s faults?

The Ghosts of Tupelo Landing by Sheila Turnage

May7

The author of 2013 Newbery Honor winner Three Times Lucky, Sheila Turnage, has a new book set in Tupelo Landing and featuring the world famous Desperado Detective Agency, run by detective Moses (Mo) LoBeau and her sidekick Dale Earnhardt Johnson III.

Mo is a high-powered, rush in where angels fear to tread, dynamo of a sixth grade detective, and her partner Dale, who must be told when not to answer rhetorical questions, “has a flair for the obvious.” Together, they bait a bona-fide ghost girl, search for a still-working still, and talk straight to some very crooked crooks. While Miss Lana and Grandmother Miss Lacy accidentally purchase a haunted and dilapidated inn, Mo and Dale try to interview the ghost for extra credit on their history project. And somehow the new boy in town, Harm Crenshaw, becomes a friend and ally in their interview and detective endeavors.

I’m now anxious to go back and read the first novel featuring Mo and Dale, Three Times Lucky, so I guess that’s as good a recommendation for this one as there could be. The ghost in the novel is a real ghost, so if you don’t believe in ghosts or if you just don’t want them in your children’s books, this one would be a skip. However, I’d recommend swallowing the ghostly visitor, not to mention the ghost cars that I hadn’t mentioned yet, whole, for the sake of the characters and the descriptions.

Here’s a few samples of Mo’s take on life, and love, and detecting, exerpted from the text nearly at random:

“Anna Celeste liked Dale for a few days this summer and then dumped him like a truckload of bad meat. She about broke his heart.”

“‘Rat Face,’ I muttered. I would have said more, but Miss Lana don’t allow cursing. She does allow the creative use of animal names.”

“Friday evening, as I sat in my room contemplating the evils of fractions in general and common denominators in particular, my vintage bedside phone jangled. ‘Mo’s flat, Mo speaking,’ I said. I possess killer telephone skills.”

“When it coms to homework, the only excuse Miss Retzyl takes is Precise Death–death that happens to the Precise Student and not to a relative. If they have known relatives.”

“When the lunch bell finally jangled, I cut Dale from the stampede and edged him toward the hall. I didn’t ask about the test. Dale is to word problems as ship is to the Bermuda Triangle.”

“Usually I have a river of words flowing in me. Now my river ran dry.”

“Before long, we all got good. Lavender looked like a movie star, dancing with Miss Retzyl’s sister, and then with every woman and pre-woman there—including me. ‘You look beautiful, Mo,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘Dance with me?’
Even the stars smiled.”

Like the samples? You’ll like the book. It’s got what Mo would call “voices smooth as butter and moves sweet as Miss Lana’s blackberry jam.” You won’t want to miss it.

QOTD: Do you like ghost stories? What’s your favorite ghost story?

The Chapel Wars by Lindsey Leavitt

May6

Setting: The Las Vegas strip, Rose of Sharon Wedding Chapel
Characters:
Grandpa Jim Nolan, owner and proprietor of Rose of Sharon Wedding Chapel, deceased.
Holly Evelyn Nolan, sixteen year old math whiz, counter of everything, inheritor of Rose of Sharon Wedding Chapel.
Sam, Holly’s best friend.
Camille, Sam’s homeschooled secret girlfriend.
Victor Cranston, Grandpa Jim’s rival and enemy, proprietor of Cupid’s Dream Wedding Chapel.
Dax Cranston, Victor’s grandson and Holly’s possible new love interest.
Plot: Romeo and Juliet, without the marriage or the suicides, transposed to Las Vegas, with the addition of a family business to save from bankruptcy.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a children’s or YA novel set in Las Vegas. In fact, maybe I’ve never read any novel set in Las Vegas. (Have you?) The Chapel Wars has a promising premise: Holly has inherited her grandfather’s Las Vegas wedding chapel, along with all of its quirky employees and money problems. For Holly Rose of Sharon is home, the only home she’s ever known. She has to do whatever it takes to keep the chapel in business, even if it means going against Grandpa Jim’s business model, dressing her friends up as Elvis or even Cupid, and trying to keep her love life and her business life separated.

Unfortunately, there were several aspects of the novel that kept this old fogey from enjoying it wholeheartedly. The comedic possibilities of the plot are obvious, and they were exploited to the full. However, the sarcasm got a little heavy at times. And the heavy, heavy disdain for any character who took romance and long term relationship (marriage) seriously (Sam, in particular, who proposes to Camille and is shot down with great scorn) was uncomfortable. This derision for marriage or a serious consideration of long term commitment for teens, even those who are old enough to get married, is a given element in a lot of YA literature these days. Teens can “suck face”, a crude and vile term used in the novel as a euphemism for the display of physical affection, or they can even have sexual relations, but heaven forbid that they should consider the even long term possibility of commitment and marriage at the age of seventeen or eighteen or nineteen. It’s the new taboo.

The novel also sported a prejudice against any serious life decision that might be made by a sixteen or seventeen year old. Holly is told, “You can’t let someone else’s dead dream keep you from finding your own.” True, as far as it goes. However, Holly believes that her own dream is to keep the chapel open, but she’s not allowed to have that dream because she’s only sixteen or seventeen. Long-term commitment, to a a person or to a goal, is reserved for old people who have nothing better to do with their time and energy. The advice for Holly: “Go hang out with your friends or make out with that boy across the street.”

The underestimation of young adults and the crude pandering to their supposed taste in terms of language and pastimes is rampant in our culture, and I felt that disrespect for teens was particularly egregious in The Chapel Wars. Romeo and Juliet were old enough at thirteen and maybe fourteen or fifteen to get married, make really poor decisions, and take responsibility for their own actions. Why aren’t sixteen, seventeen and eighteen year olds in our culture old enough to pursue a dream or a marriage commitment or even use the English language with some sophistication?

Anyway, The Chapel Wars is funny and cute, if you ignore the implications of treating young adults like overgrown children who should spend their time sucking face and sowing wild oats.

QOTD: If you were offered a free trip to Las Vegas (free plane ticket, free accommodations), would you go? Why or why not? If you did go, what would you do while you were in Las Vegas?

I Kill the Mockingbird by Paul Acampora

May5

“The very first spark for I Kill the Mockingbird began with a conversation about summer reading lists that started on blogs including Pam Coughlan’s Mother Reader, Colleen Mondor’s Chasing Ray, Leila Roy’s Bookshelves of Doom, and Elizabeth Bird’s A Fuse #8 Production among others. Barely a day goes by that I don’t learn something new and also laugh out loud because of these fantastic writers and their peers in the incredible community of kid lit bloggers.” ~Acknowledgments by Paul Acampora.

Set during the summer between eighth grade and high school, this middle grade on the cusp of YA novel was absolutely a great read, but you have to know going in that it’s very meta-book-lovers with lots of inside jokes about first lines of novels and interpretations of To Kill a Mockingbird and nominations for the Great American Novel. Mr. Acampora must love kid lit and adult literature and books in general, and his characters do, too.

Those characters are a trio of friends, Lucy, Elena, and Michael, who have attended school together at St. Brigid’s Catholic School since kindergarten. Lucy’s mom has just miraculously recovered from a bout with a “rare, aggressive, and generally fatal” cancer (“sometimes it just happens”). Her dad is the principal at St. Brigid’s. Michael is a neighbor, a friend, and Lucy’s newly discovered crush. Elena is “certain that high school is going to swallow us up, spit, us out, and crush us like bugs.” Elena lives above a bookstore with her Uncle Mort since her parents died in car crash when she was a baby. I Kill the Mockingbird tells the story of how these three created a conspiracy to make Harper Lee’s famous novel into the hottest property on the shelves of all of the libraries, bookstores, and other book distributors in the state of Connecticut, maybe the whole U.S.

“Even in kindergarten, Michael, Elena, and I obsessed about books. Not only that, the three of us believed that characters like Winnie the Pooh and Ramona Quimby and Despereaux Tilling actually existed. We fully expected to meet all our favorite characters in person one day. Books carried us away.”

As I said, it’s a very bookish book, a fact which made the story twice as endearing to me because I, too, am carried away by books. In fact, I had a couple of good friends in junior high who planned a date and a time to go through the wardrobe to Narnia. They were serious, and although I was skeptical, I did call them that night to make sure they were still in Middle Earth, rather, on our Earth.

The book is, by the way, also very Catholic, in a cultural sort of way. The teens who are the main characters pray to saints and to Jesus, discuss books and religion, and generally behave themselves like good Catholic kids. They aren’t perfect, and they aren’t overly pious, but they are definitely Catholic. THey also discuss theology and the after-life with parents who are also very Catholic, but who hold their Christian beliefs rather loosely. The general attitude in the book is that religious devotion can’t hurt and Christianity may even be true.

The three friends in I Kill the Mockingbird get themselves into some trouble when their conspiracy/project grows beyond their ability to control it due to the power of the worldwide web. But everything ends well, and the summer ends well, the trio head into high school with the courage that a huge summer adventure can give to three friends who are willing to try Something Big. There are worse ways to spend a summer than obsessing over books and bonding through shared adventures.

I read an ARC of this novel, obtained from NetGalley for the purposes of review. The release date for I Kill the Mockingbird is May 20, 2014.

Q(uestion)O(f)T(he)D(ay): Have you read To Kill a Mockingbird? Have you seen the movie version with Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch? (Atticus Finch is my Hero. I want a T-shirt that says that.)

The Battle of Darcy Lane by Tara Altebrando

Apr28

Taylor and I were sitting on my front porch pretending to be millionaires as the afternoon sun turned into evening. It was only the second week of summer vacation and already boredom was like a pesky mosquito that we were swatting away.
“Only boring people get bored,” my mom had already said like a hundred times. “Life’s what you make it.”

Now that’s a good beginning for a middle grade summer read. I’m seeing comparisons to Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume, and although the latter is probably a good readalike author, The Battle of Darcy Lane is definitely pitched to the twelve and up crowd who have probably outgrown Ramona Quimby. Our narrator, Julia, is not sure what she’s “outgrown” (dolls? unicorns?) and what pseudo-sophisticated games and paraphernalia she thinks are just nonsense, courtesy of the new girl across the street, Alyssa (lipstick? women’s magazines?).

The summer devolves into a series of games and contests. Whose best friend is Taylor, Julia’s or Alyssa’s? Who’s the best player of the complicated ball game, Russia? And does it really matter? Does Peter, Julia’s crush/neighbor/fellow band geek, like Julia or Alyssa best? Why is Taylor acting so weird? Why is Alyssa so mean? Will the cicadas, the ones that only come out every seventeen years, ever really emerge?

My twelve year old, Z-baby, might really like this book if I could get her to read it. It’s a realistic but sweet look at girls becoming teens and trying to fit in and be individuals and stand up to peer pressure and understand friendship—all over the course of one boring, eventful summer. Yes, it’s a series of contradictions and ups and downs. Isn’t adolescence rather like that?

(And yes, I am reminded of Judy Blume, but I like Ms. Altebrando’s “budding adolescence” novel better than I ever liked Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret.)