Code Word Courage by Kirby Larson

Aug16

First of all, if your middle grade reader wants to read a story about the Navajo code talkers of World War II, I would suggest Code Talker: A Novel About the Navajo Marines of World War Two by Joseph Bruchac. In that book, a Navajo boy, Ned Begay, hears about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, disguises his age, and joins the Marines. Because of his ethnic background and fluency in the Navajo language, Ned is given a special assignment that tests his commitment, patriotism, and endurance.

Not that this new book by Kirby Larson, in her Dogs of World War II series, is bad. I just liked the Bruchac book better. Code Word Courage links a young girl, Billie, whose brother Leo is in the Marines, with Leo’s friend, Denny, who is Navajo and becomes a code talker. The link is a stray dog that Denny finds and brings to Billie to take care of. The dog named Bear manages to save the lives of both Denny and Billie’s new friend, Tito, in an eerie sort of out-of-body or teleportation mechanism that I didn’t totally understand or buy.

It was the ghost dog part that I didn’t like. I’m not opposed to ghost stories, but there was something about this one that just didn’t grab me. I thought I was reading straightforward historical fiction, and then Ms. Larson threw me for a loop by having the dog be able to travel, in some spiritual or supernatural way, from Billie’s home to Iwo Jima and back again. I wanted realistic, and I got telepathic or teleporting dog connection.

However, if you know that up front and if you want a World War II middle grade novel about Navajo code talkers, Marines, Iwo Jima, the homefront, Mexican Americans, prejudice, a dog, and an eleven year old girl, Code Word Courage is well written (Kirby Larson is a great writer) and compelling. I just wasn’t a fan of the denouement.

Other books in the Dogs of World War II series are: Dash, Liberty and Duke. I haven’t read them, but for those who are fascinated by both dogs and World War II, they would seem to be quite enticing.

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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.

The Day the Cowboys Quit by Elmer Kelton

Aug15

Management versus labor in the Texas Panhandle ranching country, c.1883. Mr. Kelton’s novel is a fresh and fictionalized take on the story of the labor movement, but it is grounded in a real event, the Canadian River cowboy strike of 1883.

Hugh Hitchcock, the protagonist and viewpoint character of the novel, is a trail boss of sorts for a comparatively small rancher trying to move into the big leagues, Charlie Waide. Hugh is a man caught in the middle. He and Charlie are old friends, but Hitchcock is also a working man, friends with many of the cowboys who work under him and sympathetic to their troubles and aspirations. When the big ranchers insist that Charlie Waide join them in imposing order, their order, on the wild and loose customs and laws of the north Texas ranching country, Hugh Hitchcock can see their side. Ranchers can’t afford to let rustlers, even from among their own cowboys, steal and re-brand their cattle. The big ranchers, many of them from the East, are in it for the money, and they don’t intend to pay the cowboys any more than they must. The cowboys themselves are a feisty lot, and many of them are much more loyal to their own interests than to that of their employers.

However, Hugh himself is trying, like many of the other cowboys, to build up his own small herd of cattle. And he sees that the cowboys are only trying to better themselves as they brand mavericks, cows that are orphaned and belong to whatever man can burn a brand on them first. Hugh also believes that the cowboys and the ranch owners are in this business together and that they owe each other loyalty and trust, that they should share in whatever profits are made. When push comes to shove, Hitchcock must decide where his loyalties lie and what to do about his own inner conflicts and indecision.

Hugh Hitchcock is such a good character, a peacemaker with an inner core of ethics and responsibility. And as the Dallas Morning News reviewer Walter B. Moore wrote, “Texas cowboys think, act and talk like Texas cowboys in this novel.” (There is some cursing in the novel, but not that much, certainly not more than would be probable given the characters and setting.)I have read three or four novels by Kelton now, and I definitely plan to read more. His novels are my kind of Western, not at all formulaic or ridiculous in their portrayal of Texas and its history. Kelton’s cowboys have their own cowboy slang, but they are people just like people anywhere else in the world. I can’t say the same for another highly praised and best-selling Texas novel.

My next Elmer Kelton novel will be Good Old Boys, another story about dealing with change in the ranching country of West Texas. My favorite Kelton novel so far is The Time It Never Rained, but The Day the Cowboys Quit is a close second.

Coot Club by Arthur Ransome

Aug14

This book is Swallows and Amazons, Book #5, but it contains none of the original Swallows or the Amazons. So, if you’re looking for Swallows John, Susan, Titty, and Roger or for Amazons Nancy and Peggy Blackett, you’ll have to skip this book. But don’t.

In Coot Club, The D’s, Dick and Dot learn to sail. In Winter Holiday the D’s were introduced, and they were able to have some grand adventures on the ice, but no sailing. In this book, Dick and Dot go to visit a family friend, Mrs. Barrable, on her boat in the north of England, downriver from Wroxham on the River Bure.

“Arthur Ransome visited Wroxham in the 1930s. In his book Coot Club (1934) he describes the busy scene on the river at Wroxham Bridge with numerous boats – a wherry, punts, motor cruisers and sailing yachts – jostling for a mooring.” ~Wikipedia, Wroxham.

When they arrive at Mrs. Barrable’s boat, the Teasel, the D’s, who were expecting to spend their visit sailing up and down the river, find out that Mrs. Barrable has invited them strictly to keep her company, not enough crew for sailing a boat the size of the Teasel. The disappointment is crushing, especially since Dorothy and Dick were hoping to return to the Lake District and the Swallows and Amazons as seasoned sailors. Nevertheless, Dick and Dot determine to make the best of their visit, and DIck is particularly interested in bird-watching. At the beginning of the story, on the train, they meet a local boy, Tom Dudgeon, and they soon find that he is the key to all sorts of adventures. Tom has a small boat of his own, the Titmouse, and even more importantly, Tom is a member of the Bird Protection Society aka the Coot Club, and he and his friends Port and Starboard, along with three boys nicknamed “The Death and Glories”, are particularly concerned with the birds called coots who are nesting along the river.

When Tom and the twins Port and Starboard and the Death and Glories all get together with Dick and Dot and Mrs. Barrable, sailing becomes not only possible but absolutely necessary since Tom has gotten into trouble while protecting the coots nest from a bunch of Hullabaloos, rude and careless holiday boaters, reminiscent of characters out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. The Hullabaloos are searching for the boy who cast their boat adrift in the night. Tom is in hiding from the Hullabloos and their noisy boat with its incessant phonograph playing pop hits of the 1930’s. Dick and Dot simply want to learn to sail. And Mrs. Barrable turns out to have an adventurous spirit, too, despite her age.

If you’ve read other Swallows and Amazons adventures and if what appeals is the sailing and the “simply messing about in boats”, then Coot Club has that aspect in spades. It’s also got Port and Starboard to stand in for the Blackett girls, Dick with his knack for coming up with inventive ideas, Dot and her stories, and a new hero, Tom, who’s the classic plucky English schoolboy adventurer.

I’ve already read number six in this series of books, Pigeon Post, which features Dick and Dot together again with the Swallows and Amazons, but again no sailing. So, my next book is #7, We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea.

The Summer of Broken Things by Margaret Peterson Haddix

Aug13

I can’t really talk about this book without spoilers, so be warned. This review will reveal at least some of the secrets that the book itself reveals slowly and carefully.

I also don’t believe in surrogacy, which is what the book is about in the final analysis. Surrogate mothers, hired wombs, remind me of Hagar, Abraham’s concubine, and of Rachel’s and Leah’s maidservants having children for Rachel and Leah and Jacob. It was a bad idea then, and it remains a procedure fraught with pitfalls and possible physical and psychological harm to both the surrogate mother and to the “recipients’ of the fruit of her womb. I think The Summer of Broken Things is meant to paint a sympathetic picture of both the woman who chooses to become a surrogate and the parents, father and mother, who benefit from or take advantage of the surrogate mother’s ability to carry a pregnancy to term. However, coming from my own place of conviction about this practice, I found myself reading the book as a cautionary tale. Finding out about one’s birth story as a teenager and finding that that birth story includes surrogacy is a difficult and perhaps mind-shattering discovery.

So, to return to the beginning of the book, Avery’s father is taking her to Spain for the summer. Many things about this trip of a lifetime seem a little off: Avery doesn’t want to go. She would rather spend the summer at soccer camp. Avery’s mother is acting strangely about the trip. Avery’s dad hires a paid companion for Avery, a girl named Kayla whom Avery knows, but not well. Kayla and Avery have very little in common. Avery is rich; Kayla is poor. Avery is a city girl and well-traveled; Kayla is from a small town, and she’s never travelled. Avery is spoiled and entitled; Kayla is altruistic and self-effacing.

Margaret Peterson Haddix’s books are a bit hit or miss with me. I read her Shadow Children series several years ago, and although it became somewhat repetitious around about the third or fourth book in the series, I liked the premise very much. I enjoyed The Shadow Children series, The Missing series, and her stand alone novels such as Leaving Fishers or Double Identity. However, her Under Their Skin series about robots and artificial intelligence was poorly written, unbelievable, and ridiculous. Even in the books that I liked, her characters tend to edge towards the borders of stock and predictable. Avery and Kayla are interesting characters, and there is some growth in each of them as they confront the secrets from their shared past.

I would recommend the book for teens who like to think about current ethical issues and family dynamics. It’s a decent story, but not great or enduring.

Hardscrabble by Sandra Dallas

Aug11

Hardscrabble takes place in 1910 in Colorado, and it would be an excellent book for Colorado/New Mexico/Kansas children to read when they are learning about their state’s history. This story of a family who leave their home in Iowa to prove up a homestead in Colorado has a Little House on the Prairie feel to it, but it’s about dry land farming and the “hardscrabble” of making a home in the barren but beautiful western prairie.

The Martin family move to Mingo, Colorado after losing their farm in Iowa. Since the only thing that twelve year old Belle’s father know how to do is farm, their options are limited. Belle’s mother wants her to get an education, and Belle’s sister, Carrie, is determined to finish her education and become a teacher someday. Belle herself isn’t much interested in school, but she does like to tell, write, and listen to stories. In the book, Belle tells the story of what happened to her large family as they came to Colorado and tried to tame the land and make a go of farming.

For those who are sensitive to such things, there are themes of death and courtship in the book. Both are handled tastefully but honestly. Death was a reality on the frontier, and there were not so many ways to avoid and paper over the subject as there are nowadays. Remarriage and the difficulty of finding a mate in a sparsely settled territory were also real issues. I especially liked the idea of a single woman homesteader who is a major character in the book. I hope this really happened as much as the book indicates that it did.

Saturday Review of Books: August 11, 2018

Aug10

“Better than flowers are they, these books of mine! For what are the seasons to them? Neither can the drought of summer nor the asperity of winter wither or change them. At all times and under all circumstances they are the same—radiant, fragrant, hopeful, helpful! There is no charm which they do not possess, no beauty that is not theirs.” ~~Eugene Field

Walking to Listen by Andrew Forsthoefel

Aug10

Walking to Listen: 4000 Miles Across America, One Story at a Time by Andrew Forsthoefel.

I’m a sucker for books like this one: reading projects, walking projects, Humans of New York, year-long projects. In fact, I once wrote a post about projects and “project books” that I have read and would like to read. It seems to me as if a BIG PROJECT like Mr. Forsthoefel’s must bring with it wisdom and clarity in some way.

And I guess Andrew Forsthoefel felt the same way. After graduating from Middlebury College, he didn’t know what to do with the rest of his life. So he sought counsel by walking across the country, carrying a sign that said “Walking to Listen.”

“Life is fast, and I’ve found it’s easy to confuse the miraculous for the mundane, so I’m slowing down, way down, in order to give my full presence to the extraordinary that infuses each moment and resides in every one of us.”

Mr. Forsthoefel’s literary gurus were Walt Whitman and Rainer Maria Rilke, not the ones I would have chosen, but not all bad either. His counselors along the way across the country include a cattle farmer, a family of Navaho women, artists, and lots of just regular people. He thinks a lot about death and life, mostly death, and he never does come to any kind of unifying theory of life that ties his journey together. I guess I wanted some kind of epiphany or conversion or eureka! moment, and that never happened.

My favorite walk-across-america books are Peter Jenkins’ A Walk Across America and The Walk West. I’ve never read William Least Heat-Moon’s best-selling Blue Highways, partly because I thought the New Age-y-ness of it would annoy me. The meandering existentialism of Walking to Listen was sometimes a little too much for me, too, but I would recommend this book for anyone who enjoys the project story genre. It’s as much about pushing through, endurance, and completing the project as it is about the people he meets along the way, which is to say it’s a lot more about the author than it is about the people he supposedly listens to. A Walk Across America is a much better story.

Eloquent Crusader: Ernestine Rose by Yuri Suhl

Jul31

I’ve heard of Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cody Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and even Reverend Antoinette Brown, but Ernestine Rose, Polish Jewish American crusader for women’s rights and for the abolition of slavery, was a new name in my personal pantheon of suffragettes and women’s rights pioneers. The story of her life is amazing, but rather sad in the end, because she died alone, without God, without her beloved husband of many years, and without many friends or followers about her.

“One after the other her friends were passing away—Garrison, Lucretia Mott, Wendell Phillips, editor Horace Seaver. And in her saddened state she would say to her friends, ‘It is no longer necessary for me to live. I can do nothing now. But I have lived,’ she would add thoughtfully, ‘I have lived.'”

At age sixteen, Ernestine Potowska went to a Polish court to secure the return of her inheritance money. The money had been given as dowry to a suitor to whom her rabbi father promised Ernestine’s hand in marriage. When Ernestine refused to marry the man, he refused to return her property. So Ernestine went to court, acted as her own lawyer, and won the case. It was the first time in the history of the Polish court that a sixteen year old Jewish girl brought suit before Polish judges.

Then, in 1827, when she was seventeen, Ernestine left her village and home in Poland to go to Germany. She spent a couple of years in Berlin, then to Holland, to Belgium, to Paris, and to London. She supported herself by giving language lessons and by selling “perfumed papers” (a kind of air freshener, Ernestine’s own invention). All of this traveling and supporting oneself while doing so sounds almost unbelievable; the nineteenth century was not a time when independent, self-supporting women were a commonplace thing.

In England, Ernestine met her husband, William Rose, she also became a disciple of social reformer and philanthropist, Robert Owen. The Owenites were what came to be called utopian socialists; they believed that man’s environment was to blame for all the social ills in the world and that evil could be defeated by social reforms and good education. Robert Owen was a deist who broke with orthodox Christianity and developed a belief system of his own. At some point in her journeying and her intellectual pilgrimage, Ernestine, too, became a “free thinker” and remained so until her death, as far as anyone knows. Others called her an atheist and an infidel, and she never denied, but rather appropriated, the appellations.

Ernestine and William Rose were married in England and then emigrated to New York. As an American citizen, abolitionist, and women’s rights crusader, she did do many other courageous and outrageous things:

She made an anti-slavery speech in Charleston, West Virginia and almost didn’t make it out of town safely.

In support of a bill in the New York legislature, she produced the first petition ever introduced in favor of rights for women. The petition had only five signatures on it, in spite of many weeks of hard work by Ernestine, and the bill to secure the property rights of married women failed.

She spoke at the First National Convention of Infidels, and she was a frequent attendee at the annual Thomas Paine birthday celebration, a gathering for freethinkers and atheists and social reformers.

She also gave public lectures all over New England, New York, and the rest of the Eastern seacoast on the subjects of the abolition of slavery, women’s rights, women’s suffrage, and any other subject that grabbed her attention. She spoke without notes.

She said, “It is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are atheists and were religion not inculcated into their minds, they would remain so.”

And, “Do you tell me that the Bible is against our rights? Then I say that our claims do not rest upon a book written no one knows when, or by whom. Do you tell me what Paul or Peter says on the subject? Then again I reply that our claims do not rest on the opinions of any one, not even on those of Paul and Peter, . . . Books and opinions, no matter from whom they came, if they are in opposition to human rights, are nothing but dead letters.”

In short, she was eloquent, outspoken, persevering, unbelieving, and highly influential in the women’s suffrage movement, and I enjoyed reading and marveling at the story of her life, written by fellow Jewish Pole Yuri Suhl for the series of biographies for young people published by Julian Messner publishers.

The Dragon of Lonely Island by Rebecca Rupp

Jul30

Hannah, Zachary, and Sarah Emily are spending the summer at Great-Aunt Mehitabel’s house on Lonely Island. Only Great-Aunt Mehitabel is not home. She does send a note, however, encouraging the children to enjoy their stay and to explore Drake’s Hill when they have the opportunity. She also sends them a key to the mysterious Tower Room. Where is the Tower Room, and why is it locked? What will the children find when they hike to Drake’s Hill? And what could they learn by seeing the world’s through someone else’s eyes and someone else’s stories?

So the eponymous dragon is a three-headed dragon, one body with three separate personalities. And all three dragons have a story to tell, one for each of the children that suits his or her need for growth and wisdom for the summer. It’s not overtly preachy, but it is well-written with suitable lessons in character development for each of the children. The book reminded me of Grace Lin’s Where the Mountain Meets the Moon and Starry River of the Sky, except that I liked Rupp’s dragons-that-tell-stories better than I did Lin’s folklorish stories interspersed with a realistic narrative. I found Lin’s books confusing, even though they are award-winning and favorites with many readers. Maybe Rupp’s book appeals to a younger audience, say third and fourth grades, and maybe my mind is stuck there, too.

Anyway, there’s a sequel, The Return of the Dragon, and I’m looking forward to reading it as soon as I can get my hands on a copy. I looked up the author, Rebecca Rupp, and she has a PhD in cell biology. How does a person with a doctorate in cell biology end up writing children’s fantasy? Now, that would be an interesting story. Oh, she’s also a homeschooler and has written some books about homeschooling. From a National Geographic contributors bio:

Rebecca Rupp: “I prefer Mac to PC, fountain pens to ballpoints, vanilla to chocolate, and almost anything to lima beans. When not writing, I garden, bicycle, kayak, volunteer at the library, and sit on the back porch of our house in far northern Vermont and gaze longingly at Canada, particularly after listening to the evening news.”

The Six by K.B. Hoyle

Jul26

This first book in the Gateway Chronicles, a fantasy adventure series by author K.B. Hoyle, The Six definitely contains echoes of Narnia and Tolkien: a gateway to another world, gnomes, fairies, elves, talking animals (sort of), and war against The Shadow, to name just a few. But it’s a good story in its own right, not overly derivative and full of world-building detail and creativity that make the novel a delight to read.

Some of the more creative aspects and characters of the land of Alitheia:

A god-like being, Pateros, who incarnates as a huge bear or sometimes an eagle or sometimes a stag.

Narks, creatures with double personalities, one person in the daytime and another during the night.

A magical teacher whose cottage stays in one place while the door is able to be moved about to provide access wherever the bearer might go.

Silent, telepathic communication with animals.

Gifts of discernment, camouflage, and musical finding of lost things for the teenagers who travel to Alitheia. Oh, and a quill that prophesies.

Actually, there’s rather a motif of camouflage and hiding and keeping secrets and how that “gift” can be used for good or for evil. Also, the importance of honesty and trust and how trust can be broken is another theme that runs through the story. The Six are a group of six thirteen year olds who find themselves thrown together at a family summer camp. Their difficulties and successes in initiating and maintaining friendships among the group are another theme that weaves through the action in the novel.

Don’t be worried, however, that this book is all heavy philosophical themes and sermons. The action and plot elements are certainly adequate and intriguing enough to carry the reader along to the end. And I wanted more by the time I came to that end, so I’m looking forward to reading Ms. HOyle’s second book in the Gateway Chronicles series, The Oracle.

Semicolon

Books we must have though we lack bread.