“A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.” ~Jackie Robinson

Another baseball book, also somewhat philosophical, but definitely all-boy. Earl Grubb’s Pool Supplies plays Northeast Gas & Electric in the Little League championship game, six innings of tension, hope, disappointment, and fun. Sam, the announcer for the game, has his best friend, Mike, on the Earl Grubb team, but Sam, in addition to trying to maintain his neutrality as he calls the play-by-play, is dealing with his own disappointment about not being out on the field playing in the game himself.

We get a glimpse into the lives and motivations of each of the boys on the Earl Grubb team, as well as Sam, as the author takes us through six innings of action-packed, pressure-filled Little League baseball. This story is even more baseball-intensive than Keeping Score, but if you like baseball and fiction, 2008 looks like a very good year for you. (Mike Lupica also published a baseball book this year, The Big Field, that looks good, too.) Six Innings is a little heavy on the sports details for me, and I started to skim at times only to go back and make sure I hadn’t missed any details of the boys’ thoughts and emotions and backgrounds.

I was impressed by how well Mr. Preller was able to get me involved in the six innings of a game I’m not particularly interested in and have me rooting for the Pool Supplies team while at the same time understanding how important such a game can be for all the boys and coaches involved. If you know any Little Leaguers, especially boys, Six Innings might be just the thing to get them interested in reading.

No scandals or even bad sportsmanship. A little bit of boylike crudity (slapping someone’s butt, jokes about earwax, that sort of thing), lots of baseball jargon and baseball platitudes, and mostly good clean fun.

Other reviews of Six Innings:

Ed Goldberg at Young Adult (and Kids) Books Central: “Six Innings isn’t just about baseball, although the pages are filled with the tension, action, fears and thoughts of the game and its players. There are amazing catches, exciting plays, powerful hits and strong pitching. Preller also delves into the hearts and minds of Little League players.”

Betsy’s Blog: “Along with a pretty exciting play-by-play of the game, the book lets you peek into the worries and joys of the boys playing, revealing their feelings for baseball and the off-field struggles that are on their minds.”

It’s set in the Big Thicket and the piney woods of East Texas. It has snake-women, a bird-man, a hundred foot long alligator, kittens, trees that witness history, Caddo Indians, a villain, and an old hound dog. The writing is both lyrical and engaging. The sense of place and the atmosphere are palpable. What more could one ask for in a debut children’s novel?

I’ve been reading lots of buzz around the blogosphere for Ms. Appelt’s novel, and I must say that whatever praise anyone has written is well-deserved. Ms. Appelt has a voice that is unmistakably unique. Just listen:

“After Hawk Man and Night Song slipped away, Grandmother Moccasin wrapped herself in a cloak of hatred, wrapped it so tightly around herself that eventually that was all she knew.

Anger and hatred, wound together, have only one recourse. Poison. Poison filled Grandmother’s mouth, her cotton mouth.”

Can’t you feel the poisonous hatred of a cottonmouth snake, betrayed by the one thing she loved?

Or try this description of the love of a father for his daughter:

“When a young man becomes a father, the sky above him, the ground beneath him, the rising and setting sun, all become something new, as if he’s never seen them before as if this little daughter has turned everything all at once into a huge and wonderful Hello. When Hawk Man held his baby girl against his chest and looked into her tiny round face, he felt a love so deep he thought he might drown. It scared him a little, this new kind of love.”

The only complaint I had about the book probably isn’t terribly significant. The chapters, or scenes, were very short, two to four pages each, and the focus and point of view are constantly switching from the kittens, Puck and Sabine, to Grandmother Moccasin, to Gar Face, the hunter, to the shape-shifting couple, Night Song and Hawk Man, to their daughter, to the hound dog Ranger. It takes some fancy reading to keep up, and attention must be paid to each character and each change of venue. Some children won’t be up for it, but those who can keep up are in for a treat.

If you like animal stories, The Underneath is a fantastic animal story about a cat, two kittens, and an old hound dog who sings the blues. If you enjoy Native American legends, The Underneath draws on the stories of the Caddo Indians and the mythology of other Native American peoples and even ancient Egypt and India. If you’re a nature lover, The Underneath has nature in spades. And for the Aggies among us, Kathi Appelt occasionally teaches writing at Texas A & M University. Again, what more could one ask?

Lots of favorable reviews and not much negative:

Fuse 8: “I’ve been describing to people as (and this is true) Watership Down meets The Incredible Journey meets Holes meets The Mouse And His Child. If that doesn’t make any sense to you it is because you have never read a book quite like this.”

Jen Robinson: “I think The Underneath would make an excellent read-aloud title for later elementary school kids (despite some sad parts). It is sure to come up in award discussions later in the year. David Small’s detailed illustrations are delightful, too.”

Franki at A Year of Reading: “I am pretty sure that these characters will stay with me forever and that I will read this book again sometime soon. I think there are layers of meaning that I missed the first time through. I kind of thought about them quickly but was too invested in the plot to focus too much on the depth that Appelt has created with this story.”

The Reading Zone: “This novel is an inspiration to anyone who writes. Appelt’s debut novel is haunting, lyrical, and poetic. While the stories seem separate at first, they come together in a stunning conclusion that wraps up all loose ends.”

The Underneath has already (on the first day) been nominated for a Cybil Award in the Middle Grade Fiction category, but I’m thinking it really belongs in the Science Fiction/Fantasy category because of all the mythological and magical elements. It’s a likely candidate for both a Cybil Award and for a Newbery.

Elective mutes are people who choose not to talk, usually as a result of some traumatic event. Lily is an elective mute. She hasn’t spoken for two years. She feels invisible. And everyone in the small town of Olena thinks Lily is brain-damaged.

But when Tinny Bridges comes to town, Lily is in trouble. Somehow Tinny knows things, knows that Lily isn’t brain-damaged, knows that Lily has other secrets. And Tinny is mean enough to threaten Lily’s hard-won bargain with the past and her precarious hold on silence.

Wow! This story is both intriguing and well-written. Ms. Beaty’s descriptions sparkle. Here’s an example:

“Sometimes, when the store is crowded, there are four or five stories going at the same time, and the women’s voices swirl around in the air and bubble up and splash like water on rocks. The sound is smooth and sweet.

If we had a real creek in Olena, I think it would sound like Fern’s store on Saturday mornings.”

The story moves back and forth from the present to the past with the material from the past in italics. For the most part, this technique works, but it could be confusing for some kids. The story is worth a little confusion, though. It’s about honesty and forgiveness and getting past people’s defenses to know the real person inside. It’s a book about friendship and patience and letting go of bad experiences and forgiving oneself.

“The cicadas are everywhere. They came back to Olena two days ago, after seventeen years of hiding in the ground and waiting. Waiting to climb into the sunlight. Waiting to climb the bushes and trees. Waiting to sing.
They waited so long. Then, thousands of them crawled out of the ground and up into the trees and bushes in just one night. Their song sounds like electricity buzzing on a power line, getting higher and higher and louder and louder until the air nearly explodes from the noise.”

I’m going to give this book to Brown Bear Daughter to see what she thinks of it. As far as I’m concerned it’s a triumph.

Andrea Beaty blogs at Three Silly Chicks where she and two other authors of children’s books review funny children’s books.

Other reviews of Cicada Summer:

Stacy at Welcome to my Tweendom says “Beaty has captured the sultry feel of summer as well as the world of children that seems so insular next to that of the adults in their lives.”

Jules at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast: “Beaty expertly paces this reveal throughout the narrative in such a way that is hardly intrusive (which could have easily happened in the hands of a clumsier author) and in such a way that builds tension and makes the novel a whopper of a page-turner.”

Jen Robinson’s Book Page: “I’m just going to go ahead and say it. This book has that Newbery award feel to me. Deep characters, beautiful writing with pockets of humor, and a touching story.”

Cicada Summer has already (on the first day) been nominated for a Cybil Award in the Middle Grade Fiction category. Nominate your favorite children’s and YA books of 2008 in nine categories at the Cybils blog.

It hasn’t been much of a reading week. Instead we’ve had lots of after-Ike fun and several family crises and issues.

I did read an ARC that I got a couple of weeks ago called The Youngest Templar: Keeper of the Grail by Michael P. Spradlin. It’s an adventure story for kids/YA in the same vein as the movie adventures Raiders of the Lost Ark or Star Wars. However, this adventure is set during the Third Crusade with Richard the Lion-Hearted and a Robin Hood-ish character making major appearances. Our young hero, Tristan, is an orphan of mysterious parentage, raised in St. Alban’s Abbey, and at the age of fifteen asked to become the squire of Sir Thomas Leux, a member of the Order of Knights Templar. In quick succession, events unfold: Tristan acquires a powerful enemy, meets the King of England, travels to the Holy Land, participates in a battle, and is given a very important mission.

I enjoyed the book very much, and I think any boy (or girl) with an interest in knights and castles and battles will like it, too. However, there is a huge problem with the book. You’ll notice that the small print on the cover of the book says “Book 1”. The book ends with what can only be called a cliffhanger, completely unresolved, and the next book is due to be published in Fall 2009. If you can live with the cliffhanger that is LOST, and the many other unresolved story lines that we get in book series and TV series nowadays, stories that are “to be continued” a whole year from their initiation, then go ahead and read The Youngest Templar: Keeper of the Grail. If not, you could wait until next year to start the series, but since I’m betting that there will be a third book, or maybe even more, you may not want to hold your breath until the adventure ends.

This one is all about movement and plot, thrills and spills, and as Mr. Spradlin’s website advises, “Action. Drama. Humor. And stuff BLOWS UP.” I don’t exactly remember where anything blew up in this book. I think it’s setting is pre-gunpowder. But there are swords, slicing and dicing, and assassins. What more could you ask for?

By the way, I think I’ll try this: I See What You’re Saying., if I can manage to upload a video. I’ve never put a picture of myself on the blog for the same reason I don’t look in the mirror too often. This way, I don’t have to stare at myself, and I can pretend I still look the same way I did when I was twenty-something. I don’t mind being fifty-one, but I don’t like the way I look as much as I used to. Nevertheless, this will be a one-time thing, and I hope some of you will participate, too. I’d enjoy seeing (and hearing) some of you whose voices I have only seen in print.

Strange things had happened at Innisfree before. In fact, strange was usually normal at Innisfree. But what had happened the night before was a new sort of strange. A frightening, unsettling sort of strange, the sort of strange that nags at you when you try not to think about it, flickers behind your eyelids when you try to go to bed at night and won’t let the sleep come.

Sadie hadn’t come home.”

The setting is the backwoods of Mississippi during the Great Depression, and Sadie is the wannabe poet and writer mother of our heroine, Tennyson. She disappears during a game of hide-and-seek, at dusk, when Tennyson, her little sister Hattie, and their father Emery come home but Sadie doesn’t. Emery is so besotted with his Sadie that he goes to look for her and leaves the girls at his childhood home, a decaying hulk of a Louisiana plantation home called Aigredoux. There the two girls make the acquaintance of their long estranged family members:

Aunt Henrietta Fontaine, a faded Southern matriarch who writes dozens of letters on thin blue paper to the U.S. government each week, asking them to return her family’s fortune, lost in the Civil War, so that Aigredoux can be restored to its former glory.

Uncle Twigs, the President of the Louisiana Society for the Strict Enforcement of the Proper Use of the English Language.

Zulma, the black servant, cook, and confidante, descendant of slaves, who stays at Aigredoux because “there’s more of my family’s bones buried out back than there are Fontaine bones. Aigredoux belongs just as much to me as it does to you–more so, maybe.”

While reading this hauntingly strange Southern novel, I felt as if Blume were channeling Faulkner—for children. Then again, I’ve never actually read Faulkner, so how would I know? The atmosphere of faded and rotting gentility built on a foundation of slavery and brutality was so strong and was just what I would imagine would be found in Faulkner’s novels. Aigredoux “pushed its way into Tennyson’s dreams and made her see funerals and spiders.”

I must say that I liked this novel, but I’m not sure children or even most teens would “get it.” It’s not very realistic, but then I’m not sure it’s meant to be. (SPOILERS) Tennyson dreams things that actually happened. Then, she writes stories that are accepted by a New York magazine and published to universal acclaim. No explanation is given for these events. No ghosts. No clairvoyance. No magic. No precocious genius. Zulma does call Tennyson a “voodoo girl.”

Still, there was certain something about the story that has me still thinking about it days after reading it. Tennyson might be for the poet and the dreamer and the quirky, individualistic wild child in all of us.

Other reviews:

The Reading Zone: In many ways, Tennyson reminded me of Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting. Both books treat children as intelligent human beings by handling realistic situations and stories. Yet they both embrace the magical realism that is all too often missing in children’s fiction.

Book #4 for Mother Reader’s 48 Hour Book Challenge.

Wow! This first book in a new series by best-selling author Margaret Peterson Haddix is a page-turner. If you’re a fan of Haddix’s other books, either the Shadow children series or her stand alone novels such as Leaving Fishers or Double Identity, you’ll love this new book and be longing for the others in the series to hurry up and get published. If you like Caroline Cooney’s Janie series or her Time series, as I did, you should also enjoy Found and, eventually, its sequels. Ms. Haddix has written another imaginative and compelling novel that combines realistic YA fiction with elements of supernatural sci-fi.

And that’s all you need to know if you haven’t yet read the book. WARNING: Hereafter there be spoilers. Do not enter if you want to read the book without preconceptions and fore-knowledge.

The Missing: Found starts out like a book about adoption. Jonah is adopted, but to him it’s no big deal. His parents have been excruciatingly honest with him, retelling his adoption story ad nauseum until Jonah is so comfortable with his origins that he’s a bit embarrassed about how very open and psychologically correct his parents have been. However, almost before the reader realizes the book has changed from a book about adoption to a book about time travel and the danger that lie therein. Or maybe it’s a book about trust and about whom you can trust and about betrayal of trust.

I liked way Ms. Haddix put a twist to time travel and the inherent problems that such travel entails. I liked Ms. Haddix’s characters, typical adolescents thrown into a very atypical situation. I liked the fact that although I saw some plot developments coming, others were a complete surprise. In fact, I had only two minor problems with The Missing: Found: the title, combined as it is with the series title, is awkward, and the sequels aren’t due out until ???

I seriously can’t wait.

Book #3 for Mother Reader’s 48 Hour Book Challenge.
Recommended by Becky at Becky’s Book Reviews.

I thought while reading it that this book was reminiscent of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl or last year’s Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Stewart. It turns out that there’s a reason for that deja vu feeling. In the acknowledgments, Ms. Feldman thanks “the student who returned Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to the school library on day when I was volunteering. He asked the librarian for another story like it, but neither she nor his teacher could find a title to satisfy him. It was at that moment that I decided to write a book for that ten-year-old boy.”

So The Gollywhopper Games was born. Gil Goodson, a good son indeed, has made it his ambition to restore his family’s fortunes and vindicate his dad’s reputation by winning the Golly Toy and Game Company’s Gollywhopper Games, a huge publicity stunt in which several thousand kids compete for the grand prize: a college scholarship, a cash prize of several thousand dollars, a set of all the toys and games ever made by Golly Toy and Game Company, and other unnamed prizes. Gil wants to win because his father was fired by the company over a year before for allegedly embezzling money from the company. Gil’s father is, of course, innocent.

Ms Feldman doesn’t quite have Dahl’s almost macabre and earthy sense of humor, but she does have a great story, intriguing puzzles, and caricatured characters that still seem somehow real and approachable. And if the puzzles are not as multi-layered and tricky as those in Mysterious Benedict Society, the kids are more normal, not geniuses or super-heroes, but rather just regular kids. That ten-year-old boy Ms. Feldman was writing for would be able to picture himself participating in the Gollywhopper Games and maybe even winning.

The Gollywhopper Games is Jody Feldman’s first book for children. May she write many more. My eleven year old Karate Kid loved The Gollywhopper Games. I daresay the kid in your life will, too.

The Gollywhopper Games has already (on the first day) been nominated for a Cybil Award in the Middle Grade Fiction category. Nominate your favorite children’s and YA books of 2008 in nine categories at the Cybils blog.

Book #2 for Mother Reader’s 48 Hour Book Challenge.

100 Cupboards is the story of Henry who finds 99 cupboards behind the plaster in his attic bedroom in his Uncle Frank’s and Aunt Dottie’s house in Kansas. Each cupboard has its own secrets to reveal, but the most exciting, magical cupboard is behind the locked door of of an ancient bedroom belonging to Henry’s grandfather, dead for the last two years. Grandfather, however, left a legacy of secret journals and magical cupboards and mysterious messages. Henry and his three girl cousins are the beneficiaries of that legacy.

I don’t know if most kids are passionately fond of metaphors and descriptive language in general, but I am. And Mr. Wilson has some great language fun, as in:

She was diligently eye-wrestling him.

The paint was scum-brown, the sort that normally hides at the bottom of a pond, attractive only to leeches and easily pleased frogs.

There is no known protocol for how young girls ought to behave when discovering small older men puttering around in an already mysterious bedroom. Henrietta did her best.

Dottie . . . was looking past years, sorting summers in her mind.

Those are few of many examples. The story itself reminded me of Narnia, especially The Magician’s Nephew with its multiple entrances into other worlds and the terrible Jadis. It also felt a bit like the game Myst that our family spent a great deal of time decoding a few years ago. There are locks and keys and combinations and again portals into Other Places. 100 Cupboards is bloodier and scarier than either Narnia or Myst however.

Some of the action was a bit confusing, and although I kept most of the characters and worlds straight, I kept confusing the protagonist Henry’s two younger cousins, Henrietta and Anastasia. I’m trying to remember that Henrietta is the one who actually helps Henry, and Anastasia is the one who only wants to be part of the action. And Penelope is the mature older cousin who’s too old to do much.

I must say that I liked Leepike Ridge much better than this second novel by N.D. Wilson, and I found the epilogue at the end totally incomprehensible. Nevertheless, it’s a good magical adventure story in the tradition of the Narnia stories or Edward Eager’s magic stories or Ende’s The Neverending Story. If you’re fond of any of those, you might want to try 100 Cupboards. And if you like this one, Mr. Wilson has left plenty of room, and several unanswered questions, for sequels.

Ah, yes, I see in looking at Amazon that 100 Cupboards is Book 1, and there is a Book 2 called Dandelion Fire due out in February 2009. Of course.