Perfect by Kiri Jorgensen

Sep15

Finding the perfect snowflake could solve the perfect crime.

“Saloma Hammond is not your typical twelve year old. Sal counts her steps between classes, wears a school uniform that isn’t required, and prefers to stay locked inside her tightly controlled OCD world. But when the lure of the perfect snowflake entices her to join the Weather Club, her anti-social shell begins to crack. At the same time, dozens of phones have gone missing, and her classmates are getting suspicious. If Sal can unlock her pattern-driven mind to identify the workings of the real thief, and then set an irresistible trap at the Science Fair, she may just learn how powerful friendship can be.”

This middle grade novel about a girl with OCD who learns to make friends and analyze snowflakes and solve crimes is the first of several middle grade books released by a new small press, Chicken Scratch Books. The mission of Chicken Scratch is “to be a company whose focus is quality literature for kids.” You can read more about that mission here. Suffice it to say, the publisher has made a good start with Kiri Jorgensen’s book, Perfect.

Saloma is a great protagonist, sweet, kind, a rule-follower, and someone who lives inside her own tightly drawn boxes, but thinks outside the boxes of others. It’s fun to read about how she manages to shift and change over the course of a school semester and all because of snowflakes and the Weather Club. The book references lots of meteorological science, and my very nonscientific brain was intrigued. It made me want to go back and reread Snowflake Bentley by Jacqueline Briggs Martin, a biography of the scientist Wilson Bentley who first developed a way to photograph individual snowflakes.

Chicken Scratch Books has only been in existence for about a year, and they have already published several middle grade fiction novels. I’ve only read Perfect, but if it’s an example of the kind of work this publisher is putting out, I’m all in, so to speak. I will be reading more books from this start-up publishing company.

A Bit of Earth by Karina Riazi

Sep11

The Secret Garden, with a bit of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, some neurodiversity, and Middle Eastern/Bengali culture thrown in—for middle grade readers. If that sounds like a strange mix, it is, but it works pretty well. The author is a “diversity advocate and an educator” with an “MFA in writing for children and young adults from Hamline University.” That resume doesn’t exactly appeal to my instincts for choosing a good story, but I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed the book.

There is one basic problem: the main character, Maria (pronounced MAH-ria, not ma-RI-a) is distinctly unsympathetic. Like Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden, Maria is an orphan with a bad attitude. Unlike Mary Lennox, Maria seems to have been born with, or at least believes she was born with, her grumpy, oppositional defiant personality, and she doesn’t so much change over the course of the story. Instead, Maria just persuades everyone else to accommodate her difficult and rude demeanor. She’s described as “grumpy”, “prickly”, “unpleasant” and many more such adjectives, and her words and actions certainly bear that description out.

And yet . . . I grew to rather like Maria. Maybe I’m a sucker. I’m not sure I could be as loving and forgiving and patient as the adults in the story are if I had a Maria to deal with in real life. But I wanted to be patient with this child who had lost her parents and been wounded by life in many ways. I wanted the secret garden in the story to redeem and renew first Maria, then Colin who is the second grumpy, unlikeable character in the story. And it does . . . to a certain extent.

All that to say, I had mixed feelings about A Bit of Earth. It’s an intriguing retelling of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic story, and Maria did worm her way into my heart despite her angry and sullen appearance (which is not reflected in the cover picture of a beautiful and pleasant-looking Maria). Nevertheless, I did want her to see that she could be more than just a grumpy old Oscar the Grouch, that she could let her guard down and be vulnerable and still survive and even thrive.

If you read A Bit of Earth, let me know what you think about the story and the characters. One mark of a good story is that it gives you ideas to think about. And this middle grade fiction story did indeed make me think.

Captain Cook Explores the South Seas by Armstrong Sperry

Sep9

Captain Cook Explores the South Seas by Armstrong Sperry. World Landmark #19.

The book’s title is a bit of a misnomer: James Cook didn’t explore just the South Seas. He went almost everywhere: starting in England, then Canada, the Arctic, the Antarctic, the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), Tahiti, Cape Horn, the Cape of Good Hope, Alaska, Melanesia, Micronesia, New Zealand, Australia, and all points in between. He went on three voyages of exploration, and boy, did he explore. And he started out as a farmer’s son and ended up as captain of his own ship and leader of the three afore-mentioned expeditions, gaining fame and glory and all sorts of scientific information, maps, charts, botanic specimens, paintings, and other discoveries on behalf of the Royal Society and the British Admiralty.

All of the Landmark books that I have read are well written, but I think this one is one of the best in terms of excellent writing and storytelling. Cook’s adventurous life and rags to riches story lends itself to the creation of an adventure story, and Sperry’s telling of the story does not disappoint. He begins the tale as thirteen year old James Cook leaves his home to take up an apprenticeship that will bring him near the sea:

“That August morning in the year 1741, the early sun was as bright as a promise of good fortune. It cast a light of gold over the rolling moors of Yorkshire, on fat sheep grazing in the fields. It lay warm as a blessing on the shoulders of the boy who followed so eagerly an empty road that stretched forever away from Great Ayton.

Mark that boy well, Reader! For young James Cook–tall for his thirteen summers, and with all his belongings swinging in a bundle at the end of a stick–had set forth on a great adventure. Although in years to come he was to travel farther over the earth’s surface than any man before him, perhaps this first youthful journey was the most momentous of all. It set the pattern of his future.”

Armstrong Sperry, author of the Newbery award story, Call It Courage, traveled in the South Seas himself, and learned both French and Tahitian. Sperry was also a Navy veteran and interested in all things nautical, and he was a talented artist whose illustrations for this book about Captain Cook are exquisite and fully supportive of the lively narrative text. Sperry wrote two other books for the Landmark series, The Voyages of Christopher Columbus and John Paul Jones, Fighting Sailor as well as several other nautical-themed fiction books for children. I am eager to read some of his other books since the writing in this one is so very good.

A couple of content considerations: Sperry describes the “savages”, both of North America (Canada) and of the Pacific islands, in mostly unflattering terms. Cook described the islanders in particular as primitive, thieving, and unhygienic, reserving the term “handsome” for the Tahitians and the Hawaiians only. So that’s how Sperry describes them. And the life and travels of Captain James Cook do not end well. He gets into a dispute, perhaps a misunderstanding, with the king and people of the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), and he is killed on the beach by a Hawaiian war club wielded by one of the king’s warriors.

Despite the content considerations, I highly recommend Captain Cook Explores the South Seas, maybe along with a book told more from the perspective of the native islanders. The Last Princess, The Story of Princess Ka’iulani of Hawaii by Fay Stanley is one possibility. Another Landmark about Hawaii (which I haven’t read) is Hawaii, Gem of the Pacific by Oscar Lewis.

The Ride of Her Life by Elizabeth Letts

Sep4

The Ride of Her Life: The True Story of a Woman, Her Horse, and Their Last-Chance Journey Across America by Elizabeth Letts

One of my fascinations is journey stories: Peter Jenkins’ A Walk Across America and The Walk West, Robin Graham’s The Boy Who Sailed ‘Round the World (aka Dove), Walking to Listen by Andrew Forsthoefel, Bold Spirit by Linda Lawrence Hunt, just to name a few that I’ve read and enjoyed. The Ride of Her Life is another entry in the “journey across America” genre, this time by horse.

Annie was 62 years old in 1954 when she decided to leave her Maine hometown of Minot and travel by horseback to California. She didn’t know where she was going in California; nor did she have a route picked out for getting there. She didn’t have a roadmap. She didn’t have a plan for what she would do when she got to California either. She had very little money, and her horse, a Maine trotter gelding named Tarzan, was at least as old (as horses age) as Annie herself. Annie Wilkins also had no family, no children, and no real ties to the town of Minot where she spent most of her life up until the age of 62. Her farm had just been taken from her in lieu of back taxes.

So she decided to ride Tarzan across the country to California and figured that by the time she reached the Pacific she would be almost old enough to draw from that new government program, Social Security, if she didn’t die on the way. Her Maine doctor had found a spot on her lungs that might have been cancer or tuberculosis, and he figured she had only a couple years to live. What better way to spend those years than as a tramp, which is what Annie decided to call herself, “The Last of the Saddle Tramps” or “The Tramp of Fate.”

I liked this book partly because Annie was about my age when she set out on her journey. I could never ride or walk across the country. I can barely walk around the block without stumbling or breathing hard, and I’ve never ridden a horse. But I do admire Annie’s tenacious spirit, and I would like to emulate her in some ways.

I also enjoyed all the extra information added by the author, Elizabeth Letts. Ms. Letts did a phenomenal amount of research writing this book. A lot of the book is based on Annie’s memoir, written with co-author Mina Titus Sawyer, called Last of the Saddle Tramps. However, Ms. Letts also traveled to all of the places where Annie stopped, found the newspaper articles that were written about her ride in local and national newspapers, and interviewed the few people who are still living and remember Annie coming through or staying in their neighborhoods and homes.

The book is just fascinating. Annie travelled through snow and ice and heat and desert and mountains and over rivers. And she found plenty of friendly strangers who cared for her along the way. She met Andrew Wyeth, Governor Robert Smylie of Idaho, Art Linkletter, and countless less famous folks who were all treated with the same friendly, unassuming, appreciative air by Annie, The Last of the Saddle Tramps.

The Voyages of Henry Hudson by Eugene Rachlis

Aug16

The Voyages of Henry Hudson, World Landmark #54, is all about the quest “to discover a passage by the North Pole to Japan and China.” The first attempts to find a way to Asia via the North Pole were not directed at finding the Northwest Passage but rather a number of dangerous and ultimately fruitless journeys north up the coast of Greenland and then east to find a way north of Norway and Russia to get to China and Japan. Hudson’s first two voyages were unsuccessful as he was following this route.

But Henry Hudson, encouraged by the stories of his friend Captain John Smith, thought that the passage to the East lay to the west in the New World. So in his third and fourth voyages, Hudson wanted to go west, but most people still thought that he should try going east again—or that the whole idea of a passage to the to Asia in the northern seas was hopeless. And so it was. The fourth and last voyage was a total failure: the ship was trapped in the ice, food ran low, the crew mutinied, and Hudson was abandoned in the ship’s boat in icy waters never to be heard from again.

So why is Hudson remembered, and why are a major river and and a bay named for him? Well, he didn’t discover the Northwest Passage because there is no Northwest Passage, but he did pave the way for Europeans, Dutch, French, Swedish, and English, to map the New World and to begin to settle it and eventually build two nations, Canada and the United States.

Henry Hudson was one of the earliest ship’s captains to keep a meticulous ship’s log. There’s a note on sources in the back of this Landmark book, and author Eugene Rachlis tells readers:

“All the known documents pertaining to Hudson are available. Some are scarce and can be found only in the reference rooms of major libraries. Others, or at least parts of them, are more readily obtainable. Those in Dutch and Latin have been translated into English. The Hudson documents are the major sources for the facts in this book, along with a dozen or so other books which provided material on the items in which Hudson lived, the places he visited and the people he saw.”

For those who are studying Canada and Canadian history, this book, along with World Landmark #8, Royal Canadian Mounted Police by Richard Neuberger and #24 The Hudson’s Bay Company by Richard Morenus would provide a good introduction to the Canadian story. Other Landmarks that impinge upon Canadian history are Evangeline and the Acadians by Robert Tallant, Rogers’ Rangers and the French and Indian War by Bradford Smith, General Brock and Niagara Falls by Samuel Hopkins Adams, and The Alaska Gold Rush by May McNeer.

The Hudson’s Bay Company by Richard Morenus

Aug14

This Landmark history book is really about the French voyageurs and the men of the Hudson’s Bay Company: Pierre Radisson, Medart Chouart des Groseilliers, Le Moyne d’Iberville, Henry Kelsey, Alexander MacKenzie, James Knight, Louis Riel.. And it’s about the fur trade and the ongoing centuries-long dispute between the French, the British, and the Native Americans over who would control that fur trade and reap the riches to be gained from it.

The focus of the book is Canadian history, although events do dip down south of the Canadian American border from time to time. This spotlight on Canada only makes sense since The Hudson’s Boy Company is World Landmark #24, not American. The story features a lot of fightin’ and cheatin’ and thievin’ between 1649 when the book opens and the first half of the twentieth century when it ends. Mr. Morenus chronicles all the ups and downs of the the fur trade and the men who were engaged in it, and he uses language that was appropriate for 1956 when the book was published but may sound jarring to twenty-first century ears (words such as Indian, half-breed, Eskimo, savages).

No one, except for the Royal Canadian Mounties who “brought law to the West and kept it”, is a complete hero in this story. The voyageurs are hardworking, brave, skilled, thieves, poachers, and cutthroats. The Native Americans (in Canada nowadays the correct term is First Nations peoples) are cunning, sometimes friendly, sometimes violent, victimized and drugged with alcohol by the white men. The British and French military and governing authorities are mostly greedy, power hungry, and willing to do almost anything to maintain control of the fur trade. Maybe the fifth Earl of Selkirk who brought a large number of Scots to colonize various parts of Canada, could be considered a “good guy”, but he didn’t have a happy ending. And Alexander MacKenzie seems to have been an intrepid explorer. But the rest of these guys are not anyone you would want to meet in a dark alley.

Anyway, the Hudson’s Bay Company ruled a great portion of Canada for many years. In fact, Hudson’s Bay Company was thought by some to be more powerful and certainly richer than the British government of Canada itself. Now they are a department store conglomerate, also in the real estate and investments business. Their history is integral to the history of Canada and of the northern United States.

Read more about Canada and Canadian history:

  • The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, a World Landmark book by Richard Neuberger, tells more about the Mounties who brought law and order to Rupert’s Land, the territory of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
  • The Canadian Story by May McNeer gives a brief introduction to the sweep of Canadian history, with short chapters for elementary age children.
  • Alexander MacKenzie: Canadian Explorer by Ronald Syme tells of the explorer who made the first journey across Canada to the Pacific coast.
  • The Real Book about Canada by Lyn Harrington is another accessible history/geography narrative about the Canadian story.

All Aboard for Freedom! by Marie McSwigan

Aug11

The author of this book, Marie McSwigan, also wrote the popular World War 2 story, Snow Treasure, which is based on a true story of children outwitting the Nazis to rescue the country’s gold reserves. All Aboard for Freedom! is also based on a true story of a group of children outwitting oppressive authorities, this time in Czechoslovakia in 1951. And the oppressors are not Nazis but rather their own countrymen who have bought into the Communist regime aided by the Russians.

Ludmila Novak is foster mother to five children, orphaned by the war. The oldest, age thirteen, is Franta Kristufek. When the Communist authorities threaten to separate the children and their beloved foster mother from each other and send the children to state run institutions, Fran comes up with a plan to keep them all together. However, the plan involves a train, the help of adults, and a very dangerous, time-critical strategy for escape. Who can Fran trust to help him escape Czechoslovakia to freedom in Germany? How can he keep his plan a secret with four other children involved, the youngest only four years old? What if “they” (the Communists) come for the children before they can put their plan into action?

This book, published in 1954, is very 1950’s, very anti-communist and pro-American, and very exciting. The children, especially Fran, are believable but also intrepid and imaginative. The story reminds me of one of Helen MacInnes’ Cold War spy novels, but it’s written for children, not adults. And it pictures characters, a time, and a situation that we in the West are in danger of forgetting—the people of Czechoslovakia who suffered under communist rule and yearned for the freedom we now take for granted. One more plus to this book: Fran stops to pray for God’s guidance and protection several times during the story. And that resort to prayer seems quite believable and wise, too.

All Aboard for Freedom is a book for train lovers, patriots, and adventurers. Pair it with Snow Treasure for a double dose of good reading.

The Dot & the Line by Norton Juster

Aug10

The Dot and the Line, A Romance in Lower Mathematics by Norton Juster, author of The Phantom Tollbooth.

Once upon a time there was a sensible straight line who was hopelessly in love . . . with a dot.

Is it geometry or is it a love story? Or both? Or is it a philosophical tale about the line between freedom and anarchy and which is more attractive? Norton Juster’s little book, The Dot & the Line tells the story of a love triangle in which the Dot is torn between the sensible Line and the free-spirited Squiggle. Which suitor will win out may be foreshadowed in the title of the book, but how the Line wins the Dot’s heart is an engaging tale of adventure and imagination.

Fans of the extended wordplay in The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster’s most famous children’s book, will delight in the wordplay and “mathplay” in this little book. And the Dot comes up with one of the best insults I’ve ever read: “You are as meaningless as a melon. . . . Undisciplined, unkempt and unaccountable, insignificant, indeterminate, and inadvertent, out of shape, our of order, out of place and out of luck.”

It’s a bit of a parable or a fable, even with a moral tacked onto to the end. But I think readers will find this book to be quite “clever, mysterious, dazzling, complex, erudite, profound, eloquent, versatile, enigmatic, and compelling.” Just like a line and the geometry it encompasses.

About the author:

“Norton Juster is a dedicated mathematician whose efforts have been focused primarily on the verification of supermarket register receipts and the calculation of restaurant gratuities in a number of foreign currencies. He has also done pioneering work on the psychological effect of mathematical melancholia. . . . The author lives with his wife in western Massachusetts, where he conducts a support group for negative numbers.”

Based on the book by Norton Juster from 1963, this 1965 short film won the Academy Award for Animated Short Film.

The White Isle by Caroline Snedeker

Aug2

The White Isle is the island of Britain. And Lavinia’s family is traveling there because her father, Favonius, has fallen out of favor with the Emperor Hadrian. Hadrian sends Favonius and his family to far off Britain where Favonius is to become legatus iuridicus, a judicial legate or trained lawyer for the Roman government there. But thirteen year old Lavinia is to be married to the son of a family friend and stay in Rome to try to recover the family’s fortunes there.

What happens next is unexpected, both for Lavinia and for the reader, and the novel has even more surprises in store. The book paints a fascinating picture of second century Roman life and customs, and the story is compelling and lovely. I don’t want to spoil anything by telling what happens, but I agree with the blurb on the back of the book:

“The White Isle was one of the first books to bring young people a spirited picture of Roman Life in Gaul and Britain and is one of Caroline Dale Snedeker’s finest books.”

I would recommend this book for middle school and high school readers–and adults. There is romance and danger, but it’s quite chaste, in accordance with Roman standards of the time. The book acknowledges slavery as a common part of life in the Roman Empire and in patrician households, but it shows how that slavery was not only taken for granted and accepted but also degrading and brutal for both slave and master.

The story also shows how a young girl, Lavinia, who is “plain-featured” and something of an adventurous tomboy, pushes against the strictures of her society and its expectations but also learns to find her place as a young woman in that society. The Roman culture in this book is a true patriarchy, unlike the fake patriarchy that some people think they are living in today, but Lavinia is able to be true to herself and also live up to her family’s expectations, maybe partly because they are in wild Britain where the rules are not quite so strict.

Finally, there is a Christian conversion story. I won’t tell you whose conversion it is, but I am always a sucker for a good conversion story. The White Isle is just a great novel for teens age 13 and up.

Elf Dog and Owl Head by M.T. Anderson

Jul31

M.T. Anderson took his dreams and his nightmares mixed with a goodly helping of imagination and fairy tales and wrote this story about a twelve year old boy named Clay who finds a mysterious dog in the woods. Clay also makes a friend, Amos the Owl-Head Boy, and he and Amos and Elphinore the Elf Dog have an exciting and perilous adventure.

This story is weird, so if you’re not into weird imaginings, it won’t be the best choice for you. But if you can go with the story and let your imagination run wild, so to speak, you just might enjoy this sometimes meandering, sometimes fast and furious, tale of boy and his dog. I had to tell myself to let go of my expectations and just enjoy the story for what it is: a fun romp about how reality and faery might meet and become intertwined.

The only negative thing I have to say about this middle grade fiction book is that the children–Clay has two sisters, one older and one younger–in the story are very much the nasty and insulting siblings that many expect siblings to be. Clay’s older teenage sister, DiRossi, is a brat whose stereotypical adolescent anger and ugliness is exacerbated by the “worldwide sickness” that has trapped Clay’s family at home together for weeks. Clay’s younger sister Juniper is better, but Clay and DIRossi treat Juniper with disdain and unpleasantness. I wish Mr. Anderson had left out the insulting banter and the teen angst.

I still would recommend this story if you think you can overlook the sibling infighting. The children do come together in the end, and all’s well that ends well. But it’s only after Clay has learned about friendship and adventures and the price that must be paid to make wishes come true.

“Amos and Clay stared out into the heart of an underground palace. The castle towers were so high that several went right into the roof of the cavern. The whole cavern was lit softly by some kind of artificial sun–a gemstone stuck in the ceiling. . . . Clay felt weird, being so far beneath Mount Norumbega. He had been living all his life above this secret city. His little house and his quiet, boring days all went on like normal, and own here, there were miracles.”