1. Mennyms Under Siege by Sylvia Waugh. Greenwillow, 1996. This doll story is not a new book, and it won’t appeal to all readers, even those who like stories of dolls and the creatures living hidden lives alongside human beings (The Borrowers? The Doll People series by Ann Martin?). Mennyms Under Siege is much darker and more philosophical than most doll books, and its concern with the themes of death and thwarted love and over-protection feels almost young adult rather than middle grade. Anyway, it’s a good book, and I look forward to reading the first two books in the series and the last two.

2. I Don’t Know How the Story Ends by J.B. Cheaney. (2015)

3. Lost in the Sun by Lisa Graff. (2015)

4. Down Ryton Water by Eva Roe Gaggin. Another oldie, published in 1941, and winner of a Newbery honor in 1942.

5. Circus Mirandus by Cassie Beasley. (2015)

6. Twelve Bright Trumpets by Margaret Leighton.

7. The Cottage in the Woods by Katherine Coville. (2015)

8. The Penderwicks in Spring by Jeanne Birdsall. (2015)

9. The Green Ember by S.D. Smith. (2015) Rabbits with swords, and very popular in my library and among homeschoolers that I know.

10. Master Cornhill by Eloise Jarvis McGraw.

11. Mikis and the Donkey by Bib Dumon Tak. (2015)

12. Walking Home by Eric Walters. (2015)

13. Take Wing by Jean Little.

On her thirteenth birthday, Reesie Boone finds herself stranded in the home of her elderly neighbor, Miss Martine, as Hurricane Katrina turns Reesie’s home, New Orleans, and her neighborhood, into a disaster zone. Will Reesie and Miss Martine escape the floods, and will they find Reesie’s family?

I’ve read couple of other middle grade fiction books set in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina:

Upside Down in the Middle of Nowhere by Julie T. Lamana and
Zane and the Hurricane by Rodman Philbrick.

Honestly, none of the three stood out or seemed really special. Maybe I’m jaded. Reesie’s story is fine, and it does deal more with the aftermath of of the hurricane and the long process of recovery and finding a “new normal.” Nevertheless, I felt as if I’d read it all before.

However, that doesn’t mean that middle grade readers who are just now wanting to find out about Katrina and its effects in the lives of the people of NOLA would be as dulled to the subject as I am. Any of these three would do the job adequately, even if none of the three is what I would call memorable.

Maybe reading this nonfiction book about Memorial Medical Center and the events that happened there during Katrina was so disturbing that I was spoiled for anything else.

I said in my review of the first book in British author Hilary McKay’s new series about a girl named Binny and her family that these books were for people who were not averse to quirky and and slightly dysfunctional families. Then, in this next book, Binny in Secret, while Binny and her little brother remain quite endearingly odd, Binny’s mother steps in and becomes involved and responsible. It’s a good thing she does, I suppose, for the fictional Binny’s sake, but it spoils my thesis about Hilary McKay and dysfunctional, uninvolved, or absent parents. Oh, well.

Binny in Secret takes Binny and her little family—Mother, sensible older sister Clem, Binny (age 12), and sweet baby James (age 6)—to the country to live while their house is being repaired. (The roof fell in during a storm.) Benny hates life in the country, hates her new school, and really hates the new neighbors who are also the landlords. Unfortunately, Binny expresses her feelings about all of the above quite freely and gets herself into trouble with not only the neighbors but also just about everyone else.

The book has an anti-gun vibe, which is interesting because I didn’t know guns were an issue “across the pond”, but it’s nothing too propagandistic. And there’s a tiny bit of magical realism or fantasy mixed in with the realistic story about a girl who learns to temper her judgments and accept differences while she saves a wild animal friend from being hunted and killed.

Then, there’s the timeslip or time connection between Binny’s life and the children who lived in the country house back in the early twentieth century. Benny doesn’t ever travel in time. Nor do the other children—Clarry, Peter, and Rupert–travel to the future. But there is a connection as Binny finds relics from the past in the attic of her new home, and she works both literally and imaginatively to put together a story that will reveal the lives of long-ago children and what happened to them as they grew up.

In short, if you like Hilary McKay’s Casson family, you will probably like Binny Cornwallis and her family, too. I can see the Cornwallises and the Cassons becoming friends, marrying each other eventually, and raising little free-spirited Cornwallis-Cassons. Or Casson-Cornwallises.

I’m thankful today for the idiosyncrasies and eccentricities of all of our families, especially mine. Lord, help us to give grace, laugh a lot, and enjoy each other’s peculiar strengths, habits, and even weaknesses.

Fuzzy Mud is a well-written and engaging look at biochemistry, math, bullying, bravery, cowardice, and making moral choices. Those disparate subject areas and themes in the lives of fifth grader Tamaya Dhilwaddi and seventh graders Marshal Walsh and Chad Hillegas form the glue that holds this novel together and make for a satisfying near-apocalypse story for middle grade readers.

It’s the “fuzzy mud” that’s the problem. The self-replicating microorganisms that are supposed to be a new fuel that will revolutionize the energy and fuel businesses may be out of control. And Tamaya, Marshall, and Chad are about to step into —literally—a big mess that makes their small problems with bullying and being bullied look really small.

Louis Sachar, the talented author of the Newbery Award winning Holes, as well as many other favorite middle grade and young adult novels, has written a great book. And it’s short, only 180 pages, a plus for reluctant readers who want a book that doesn’t take them a year to finish reading. The only issue I had with the book was the population scare statistics that are used to show the importance of developing a new, inexpensive biofuel. I have a thing about population alarmists: I don’t believe them. When I was in high school, back in the dark ages of the nineteen seventies, I was told that we were running out fuel and food and every other resource and that if people didn’t quit having so many babies the world was going to DIE OF STARVATION!

I read Paul Erlich’s The Population Bomb. I believed that the world was in crisis, and that children were the enemy.

“Dr. Ehrlich’s opening statement was the verbal equivalent of a punch to the gut: ‘The battle to feed all of humanity is over.’ He later went on to forecast that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970s, that 65 million of them would be Americans, that crowded India was essentially doomed, that odds were fair ‘England will not exist in the year 2000.’ Dr. Ehrlich was so sure of himself that he warned in 1970 that ‘sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come.’ By ‘the end,’ he meant ‘an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.'” NY Times Special Report

Anyone who is reading this post knows that Ehrlich’s dire predictions didn’t come true. I learned more and read more and went on to have eight children. And I resent reading a new, updated version of the old scare stats in a children’s book. I really think the “overpopulation” propaganda could have been left out of the book.

Otherwise, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? Well, the book was enjoyable, and I would recommend that you read it for the story and just ignore the over-population junk science.

I picked this book up because I really liked Ms. Baskin’s book Anything But Typical, about a boy with autism. Ruby on the Outside sounded as if it had a good premise: “Eleven year old Ruby Danes is about to start middle school, yet no one in her life, other than her aunt, knows her deepest, darkest secret—her mother is in prison.” (inside cover blurb)

But, big but, the story itself is rather slight. Lots of emotions are packed into the book’s 163 pages, but not much actually happens. Ruby goes to visit her mom at the prison. Ruby remembers visiting her mom at the prison. Ruby makes a new friend, Margalit. Ruby is afraid Margalit will find out that Ruby’s mom is in prison. Ruby and Margalit write a story and draw pictures together.

If that had been the only problem with the book, I might have just given it an “E” for effort and gone on to the next book. But I’m about to go on a campaign, a picky little “Bring Back the Copyeditors” campaign. This book is the third one I’ve read in the past month, all published by major publishers for Pete’s sake, with multiple misprints and errors. If I were Ms. Baskin, I’d be angry and upset. Isn’t it the publisher’s responsibility to hire a decent copyeditor and make sure the book goes to press as error-free as possible? I stumbled over several places in this novel where a word had obviously been omitted or repeated erroneously. These are common mistakes that will be found in any manuscript, but the novel should never, never be published with the mistakes and typos uncorrected. Are the copyeditors on strike? Is is considered sufficient these days just to spell check a manuscript with the computer and then publish it?

If someone in publishing can tell me why I am finding so many children’s books lately with multiple printing errors, I would appreciate being educated. Can the publishers not afford to hire copyeditors? In the meantime, if you are a children’s author, I would suggest that you hire your own copyeditor before even a major publisher publishes your book. It’s a shame, but someone needs to do the job.