Sunday Salon: Books Read in February, 2014

Mar2

Children’s and YA Fiction:
Under the Never Sky by Veronica Rossi, reviewed at Semicolon.
Jinx by Sage Blackwood, reviewed at Semicolon.
The Rithmatist by Brandon Sanderson, reviewed at Semicolon.
Sidekicked by John David Anderson, reviewed at Semicolon.
Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Aâ€“– by Meg Medina, Cybil Award winner reviewed at Semicolon.
Out of the Easy by Ruta Sepetys, reviewed at Semicolon.
Merlin’s Blade by Robert Treskillard, reviewed at Semicolon with a list of other recommended Arthurian novels and poems.
Impossible Knife of Memory by Laurie Halse Anderson, review coming soon.

Adult Fiction
Me Before You by Jojo Moyes, reviewed at Semicolon.
Edenbrooke by Julianne Donaldson, reviewed at Semicolon.
Queen’s Play by Dorothy Dunnett.

Nonfiction
The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Chid by Donalyn Miller.
The Last Lion 2: Winston Spencer Churchill Alone, 1932-40 by William R. Manchester. Strangely, alarmingly reminiscent of today’s news from Ukraine, Crimea, and Russia.

Did Not Finish:
A Guide for the Perplexed by Dara Horn. Dare I say I was perplexed and not at all guided or entranced? And I didn’t like any of the characters.
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena: A Novel by Anthony Marra. I got tired of the f-word and the dreariness and despair of post-communist Chechnya.

Saturday Review of Books: March 1, 2014

Feb28

“Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.” ~Hazel Rochman

Dangerous by Shannon Hale

Feb27

“Shannon Hale as you’ve never read her before!” screams the back cover of my ARC. I would concur. If you’re a fan of Shannon Hale’s Goose Girl and its sequels or her other fairytale-ish stories for middle graders or her take-off on Jane Austen for adult readers, Dangerous might feel a little, well, like new and dangerous territory for Ms. Hale and her readers.

Dangerous is very sci-fi and it’s very much a super-hero story, like Superman(Girl) or Batman or (fill-in-the-blank). The author makes use of lots of common super-hero tropes: a team of superheroes with different powers that work together, hero who dies but is not really dead, the love triangle, big business is evil, superhero needs to save the world from evil aliens. However, and this is where it gets interesting, some of the cliches Ms. Hale turns inside out. Our protagonist, Maisie Danger Brown, who ends up being the only one who can save the world, is a girl. She has loving parents who play a large role in the story. She quotes poetry to express her emotions; however, she’s really into science and math, but not geometry. The team turns out to be not very team-like, with traitors and brokenness abounding.

I read the ARC back in November of 2013, and I’ve found that the outlines of the story stuck with me. Ms. Hale is a skilled writer, with some solidly good ideas. I highly recommend her latest.

Publication date: March 4, 2014.

The Daphne Awards

Feb25

This idea is genius! Jessica Crispin at Bookslut has come up with the idea of a book award that goes back in time to correct and adjust the mistakes of past years of book awards. As a beloved literature professor once told us, the definition of a classic (or a book that should be “award-winning”) is a book that stands the test of time. So, starting with 1963, fifty years ago, the Daphne Awards will be given to those books that have lasted and still speak to today’s readers.

If you look back at the books that won the Pulitzer or the National Book Award, it is always the wrong book. Book awards, for the most part, celebrate mediocrity. It takes decades for the reader to catch up to a genius book, it takes years away from hype, publicity teams, and favoritism to see that some books just aren’t that good.
Which is why we are starting a new book award, the Daphnes, that will celebrate the best books of 50 years ago. We will right the wrongs of the 1964 National Book Awards.

The Daphne awards have four categories: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and children’s literature. Of course, I’m most interested in the last category. First, I thought I’d look to see what children’s books, published in 1963, won awards:

Caldecott Award: Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak.
Caldecott Honor Books: Swimmy by Leo Lionni.
All in the Morning Early by Evaline Ness.
Mother Goose and Nursery Rhymes by Phillip Reed.
It must be remembered that the Caldecott Medal is given for “most distinguished picture book,” majoring on the excellence of the illustrations in the book. I’m assuming that the Daphne Awards are more literary in nature.

Newbery Medal: It’s Like This, Cat by Emily Cheney Neville
Newbery Honor Books: Rascal by Sterling North and The Loner by Ester Wier.

Carnegie Medal: Time of Trial by Hester Burton. (Never heard of it or her)

Kate Greenaway Medal: Borka: The Adventures of a Goose With No Feathers by John Burningham. I have heard of Mr. Burningham and read some of his picture books, but not this one. Wikipedia says Borka was his debut book, and from the description, quoting Kirkus Reviews, it doesn’t hold up to the American offerings for the year 1963. “Borka is an ugly duckling who does not undergo a transformation; she is as bald as a goose as she was when a gosling. … The freely stylized illustrations in bold lines and appropriate, vivid colors are many and strong.”

The National Book Awards didn’t have a children’s literature category until 1969.

Other popular and distinguished children’s books published in 1963:
Amelia Bedelia by Peggy Parish. Excellent beginning reader that has stood the test of time.
Hop on Pop by Dr. Seuss. Not my favorite Dr. Seuss, but a popular entry.
Stormy, Misty’s Foal by marguerite Henry. Another book that is still popular among the horse-lovers.
I Am David by Ann Holm. A twelve year old boy escapes from prison camp in Eastern Europe. Cold War literature that I’d like to go back and re-read to see if it stands the test of time.
Time Cat by Lloyd Alexander. I’ve read this one, but I don’t remember it.
Curious George Learns the Alphabet by H.A. Rey.
Sister of the Bride by Beverly Cleary. What we would call YA romance nowadays without all the angst and sex.
The Winged Watchman by Hilda von Stockum. Excellent WW2 adventure fiction, written by a Dutch-American author and published by Farrar Strauss and Giroux in English in January, 1963.
The Bat-Poet by Randall Jarrell. I had forgotten about this one, a lovely little story with illustrations by Maurice Sendak. Mr. Sendak was rather busy in 1963 (see below).

Now the Daphne shortlist for Young People’s Literature published in 1963:

Children’s Literature

The Dot and the Line by Norton Juster
Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
Mr. Rabbit (and the Lovely Present) by Charlotte Zolotow. I don’t know why they left off the last four words in the title.
Haroldâ€™s ABC by Crockett Johnson
Lafcadio, the Lion Who Shot Back by Shel Silverstein
The Moon by Night by Madeline Lâ€™Engle
Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective by Donald J. Sobol
Gashlycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey

If I were choosing from that list, I’d have to go with Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present or with Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective. Where the Wild Things Are is a wonderful story, but Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present (illustrated by who else but Maurice Sendak?) should have been at least honored, and Encyclopedia Brown still lives! I love Madeleine L’Engle’s books, all of them, but I’m not sure The Moon By Night was her best, just as Lafcadio wasn’t Shel Silverstein’s finest either. The two others are by authors I know, Edward Gorey and Norton Juster (The Phantom Tollbooth), but I don’t know the books.

WINNER (if I’m choosing): Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present by Charlotte Zolotow.

30 Bits of Wisdom and Advice from Mostly Cybils Sources

Feb24

Last year when I was reading Middle Grade Science Fiction and Fantasy for the Cybils, I made a collection of wise sayings and proverbs from the books I was reading so that you could choose your own “philosophy”, a la Charlie Brown’s sister Sally, for the new year. This year I made another from the Cybils nominees I read.

1. “Do not expect to find all your answers in the first asking.” ~The Mouse with the Question Mark Tail by Richard Peck.

2. “Economy is a poor man’s revenue, and extravagance a rich man’s ruin.” ~Nobody’s Secret by Michaela MacColl.

3. “Be the cockroach.” ~A Matter of Days by Amber Kizer. (Meaning: survive like a cockroach.)

4. “There are no coincidences. Just miracles by the boatload.” ~Navigating Early by Clare Vanderpool.

5. “Sometimes it’s best not to see your whole path laid out before you. Let life surprise you.” ~Navigating Early by Clare Vanderpool.

6. “The reward for working hard is getting to do more work. And better work.” ~Andrew Jenks: My Adventures as a Young Filmmaker.

7. “These days may not be the best days of your life, but like it or not, these days will define you. Live them.” Katherine Longshore in Dear Teen Me: Authors Write Letters to Their Teen Selves.

8. “One failure often sparks another success.” ~The Incredible Charlotte Sycamore by Kate Maddison.

9. “Always be truthful to yourself and your beliefs.” ~The Incredible Charlotte Sycamore by Kate Maddison.

10. “Leading a very public life can be injurious to your health.” ~Bad Girls by Heidi E.Y. Stemple and Jane Yolen.

11. “Just because you make it up doesn’t mean it isn’t true.” Bad Girls by Heidi E.Y. Stemple and Jane Yolen.

12. “It’s wrong to believe a thing till your mind has examined it.” ~Home Front Girl by Joan Wehlen Morrison.

13. “Life always goes on . . . even in Troy.” ~Home Front Girl by Joan Wehlen Morrison.

14. “Unexpected things could even be good.” ~Listening for Lucca bySuzanne LaFleur.

15. “Words matter . . . What we say about ourselves matter[s]. The words we use to represent ourselves matter. We have only so many ways we can express ourselves, and words are the most powerful.” ~Lena Roy in the essay “Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll”, Breakfast on Mars, edited by Rebecca Stern and Brad Wolfe.

16. “A single story can change many lives.” Craig Kielburger in the essay of the same name, Breakfast on Mars, edited by Rebecca Stern and Brad Wolfe.

17. “When no one knows you’re there, they say all kinds of things, and you can learn from what they say.” ~Maile Meloy in the essay “Invisibility”, Breakfast on Mars, edited by Rebecca Stern and Brad Wolfe.

18. “Sometimes you have to dig deep.” ~Alane Ferguson in the essay “Death Is Only a Horizon”, Breakfast on Mars, edited by Rebecca Stern and Brad Wolfe.

19. “It’s always worth making new friends in new places.” ~Casey Scieszka and Steven Weinberg in the essay “Death by Host Family”, Breakfast on Mars, edited by Rebecca Stern and Brad Wolfe.

20. “We need our imaginations. There’s a part of us that hungers to be creative.” ~Joshua Mohr in the essay “Creative Boot Camp”, Breakfast on Mars, edited by Rebecca Stern and Brad Wolfe.

21. “Sometimes . . . [you] just gotta break the rules. And I mean BRAKE the rules. No, I mean BRAKE. I put my foot on the brakes. NO MORE RULES.” ~Ellen Sussman in the essay “Break the Rules”, Breakfast on Mars, edited by Rebecca Stern and Brad Wolfe.

22. “Words are free and plentiful. They’re for choosing, admiring, keeping, giving. They are treasures of inestimable value.” ~Hold Fast by Blue Balliet

23. “Hold fast to dreams. You can do this. Not as hard as it seems.” ~Hold Fast by Blue Balliet

24. “Secrets can be lovely. They give you a chance to surprise people you love.” ~Hold Fast by Blue Balliet

25. “Always go to the funeral.” Cindy Rollins at Ordo Amoris.

26. “Waste nothing. Be always employed in something useful. Imitate Jesus and Socrates.” ~Benjamin Franklin in Becoming Ben Franklin by Russell Freedman. (originally from Franklin’s Autobiography)

27. “She who hates, hates herself.” ~South African proverb from A Girl Called Problem by Katie Quirk.

28. “Children are the reward of life.” ~Congolese proverb from A Girl Called Problem by Katie Quirk.

29. “[E]veryone has some evil inside them, and the first step to loving anyone is to recognize the same evil in ourselves, so we’re able to forgive them.” Allegiant by Veronica Roth.

30. “Life damages us, every one. We can’t escape that damage. . . . But, we can be mended. We mend each other.” Allegiant by Veronica Roth.

Saturday Review of Books: February 22, 2014

Feb22

“A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.” ~Robertson Davies

Welcome to the Saturday Review of Books at Semicolon. Hereâ€™s how it usually works. Find a book review on your blog posted sometime during the previous week. The review doesnâ€™t have to be a formal sort of thing. You can link to your thoughts on a particular book, a few ideas inspired by reading the book, your evaluation, quotations, whatever.

Then on Friday night/Saturday, you post a link here at Semicolon in Mr. Linky to the specific post where youâ€™ve written your book review. Donâ€™t link to your main blog page because this kind of link makes it hard to find the book review, especially when people drop in later after youâ€™ve added new content to your blog. In parentheses after your name, add the title of the book youâ€™re reviewing. This addition will help people to find the reviews theyâ€™re most interested in reading.

After linking to your own reviews, you can spend as long as you want reading the reviews of other bloggers for the week and adding to your wishlist of books to read. That’s how my own TBR list has become completely unmanageable and the reason I can’t join any reading challenges. I have my own personal challenge that never ends.

1. Hope (Son by Lois Lowry)
2. Barbara H. (The Woman in White)
3. Yvann@Readingwithtea (The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who…)
4. Glynn (Gwendolyn Brooks’ Selected Poems)
5. Glynn (The Adam Quest)
6. Glynn (The Sands of Ethryn)
7. Jama’s Alphabet Soup (Thomas Jefferson by Maira Kalman)
8. Beckie @ ByTheBook (Scraps of Evidence)
9. Beckie @ ByTheBook (Princess Ever After)

10. Beckie @ ByTheBook (The A-Z of C S Lewis)
11. Beckie @ ByTheBook (The Spirit of Sweetgrass)
12. Katy @ BooksYALove (Flygirl by Sherri L Smith)
13. Becky (Where Courage Calls)
14. Becky (Knowledge of the Holy)
15. Becky (The Long Winter)
16. Becky (The Grimm Conclusion)
17. Becky (Bubble World)
18. Becky (Hideous Love)

19. Becky (A Home for Mr. Emerson)
20. Becky (Eustace Diamonds)
21. JD@The Literary Atlas (The Heavens Rise)
22. Guiltless Reading (Silk Armor by Claire Sydenham)
23. Guiltless Reading (Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs)
24. dawn (Howard’s End is on the Landing)
25. Vicki (guest review: Divergent)
26. Anna @ Diary of an Eccentric (Sophia’s War)
27. Kimi Beryl and Auds @ Geeky Chiquitas (Skin and Bones)

Merlin’s Blade by Robert Treskillard

Feb20

Blurb from back cover: “When a meteorite crashes near a small village in fifth century Britain, it brings with it a mysterious black stone that bewitches anyone who comes in contact with its glow—a power the druids hope to use to destroy King Uther’s kingdom. The only person who seems immune is a young, shy, half-blind swordmith’s son named Merlin.”

This YA title in Zondervan’s new teen fiction imprint Blink joins my shortlist of favorite fantasy novels and series that play off the Arthurian legend of Merlin, King Arthur, and the Knights of the Round Table. Tereskillard’s Merlin is likable and easy to root for, and the minor characters are also well-realized and interesting. The fight between good and evil is engaging, and the ending is not a foregone conclusion. Even though Christ is greater than the old gods and the new magical stone of the druids, God’s ways are not always our ways and man’s sin and weakness are ever-present, making the story both suspenseful and satisfying.

I’ve read L’Morte d’Arthur, the long and sometimes repetitive compilation by Sir Thomas Mallory of fifteenth century stories about Arthur and his knights, and despite the repetition and the archaic language, I enjoyed Malory’s version of Arthur very much. I’ve also read several other novels, poems, and series that use these legends as a starting place. Here are some of my favorites:

The Once and Future King by T.H. White. White’s version of the Arthur legend is the source, in its turn, for Disney’s Sword in the Stone and for the musical Camelot. It’s light-hearted and rather fun.

Idylls of the King by Sir Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Arthurian legend in poetic form. Victorian Arthur.

The old order changeth, yielding place to new;
And we that fight for our fair father Christ,
Seeing that ye be grown too weak and old
To drive the heathen from your Roman wall,
No tribute will we pay: so those great lords
Drew back in wrath, and Arthur strove with Rome.

And Arthur and his knighthood for a space
Were all one will, and through that strength the King
Drew in the petty princedoms under him,
Fought, and in twelve great battles overcame
The heathen hordes, and made a realm and reigned.

*************
If thou shouldst never see my face again,
Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer
Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice
Rise like a fountain for me night and day.
For what are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer
Both for themselves and those who call them friend?

The Pendragon Cycle by Stephen R. Lawhead consists of six novels:
Taliesin (1987)
Merlin (1988)
Arthur (1989)
Pendragon (1994)
Grail (1997)
Avalon (1999)

Lawhead’s druids, as I remember it, were good guys, for the most part, worshipping the One True God, whereas Treskillard takes the opposite approach with the druidow, as he calls them, being the definite bad guys in the story, evil and pagan through and through. Nevertheless, Treskillard, in the author’s note at the end of Merlin’s Blade, thanks Lawhead for his “unique and expert critique” and for inspiring him. There’s apparently room for more than one vision of Arthur and Merlin and druids.

King Arthur and His Knights of The Round Table by Howard Pyle is a summary/re-telling of Mallory without much extraneous material or re-interpretation. Pyle does organize the story and leave out a lot of the repetition to condense it down to a more manageable length.

Rosemary Sutcliff wrote several books related to Arthurian legend and early medieval/Roman Britain: The Lantern Bearers (1959), Sword at Sunset (1963), Tristan and Iseult (1971), The Light Beyond the Forest (1979), The Sword and the Circle (1981), and The Road to Camlann (1981). Excellent stuff.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain is mostly ridiculous, but not a bad read.

The last book in C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy, That Hideous Strength, is set in post-modern Britain, but it features the “return of the king” (Arthur) and of Merlin.

The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills and The Last Enchantment, all by Mary Stewart, are called together her Merlin Trilogy. Sh later wrote two more books based on Arthurian legend, The Wicked Day and The Prince and the Pilgrim but I have not read those.

Here There Be Dragons by James Owen, reviewed at Semicolon, has allusions to Arthurian legend: one of the islands in the story is Avalon, and King Arthur has some influence on events in the book.

The Sword in the Tree by Clyde Robert Bulla. Shan, son of Lord Weldon, hides a sword in the hollow of a tree. The events of this book take place during the time of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table, and Shan eventually ends up in Camelot. This easy chapter book was a favorite of one of my daughters when she was younger.

The Defence of Guenevere by William Morris, with Semicolon commentary.

Of course, when talking about Arthurian farce and legend, one can’t forget the film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. My friend in high school had the “hand grenade” monologue, and several other parts of the movie, memorized:

Cleric: And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, “O Lord, bless this thy hand grenade, that with it thou mayst blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.” And the Lord did grin. And the people did feast upon the lambs and sloths, and carp and anchovies, and orangutans and breakfast cereals, and fruit-bats and large chu…
Brother Maynard: Skip a bit, Brother…
Cleric: And the Lord spake, saying, “First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin. Then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it.

I liked Merlin’s Blade well enough that I have the second book in the planned Merlin Spiral trilogy, Merlin’s Shadow, on hold at the library. What’s your favorite version of or allusion to Arthurian legend?

Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Aâ€“– by Meg Medina

Feb19

When you have to delete a word from the title because you’re a middle-aged (old) lady who can’t bring herself to even type words that her mother taught her never to use, it’s probably a sign that this book is not for you (me). Yaqui Delgado, as I will dub this YA Cybils winner for the rest of this post, wasn’t written with old lady readers in mind. However, since I sometimes enjoy YA fiction, and since it’s a Cybils book and Ms. Medina is winner of the 2014 Pura BelprÃ© Author Award, I struggled through.

Yaqui Delgado is a book about bullying. Along with gender identity confusion, bullying seems to be the topic du jour in middle grade and young adult fiction these days. Piddy Sanchez is new at her high school, and she gets a message that someone named Yaqui Delgado wants to beat her up. Why? Piddy (an unfortunate and distracting nickname for Piedad) never really knows, and she doesn’t even know know who Yaqui is at first. Various schoolmates speculate that the source of the enmity is because Yaqui’s boyfriend looks at Piedad’s rear end too much or because Piddy swings her hips and bottom when she walks. Whatever the reason Yaqui and her gang are out to get Piddy, and the harassment escalates as Piddy tries to figure out how to pacify her enemies without reporting them to the school authorities.

The school authorities are fairly helpless even when they do get wind of the bullying that’s going on, and the book ends with a resolution that doesn’t seem to me to be much of a solution to Piddy’s problem. At the very least, the solution is non-transferable to readers who may be dealing with the same issue; not everyone can move themselves to a magnet school and never see their tormentor again.

I wanted Piedad to fight back, tell Yaqui Delgado and her minions to take a flying leap, tell everybody, yell, scream, and generally make havoc until she got some real protection and help from the adults in her life who are supposed to be able to do something about such problems. Perhaps such character development would be unrealistic, but the plot as it was frustrated me. I’m an old lady, and I don’t believe in tolerating bullying or crude language. Zero tolerance for bullying takes more than a few signs to that effect posted around the school. It takes adults who will make sure the bullies don’t win.

The Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller

Feb18

The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child by Donalyn Miller, sixth grade language arts and social studies teacher at Trinity Meadows Intermediate School in Keller, Texas.

Ms. Keller’s thesis can be summarized in two sentences: To make children into lifelong readers, surround them with books and let them read whatever they want to read. Treat them like readers, and they will become readers.

I’ve been following this plan in our homeschool for about twenty-five years now, with mixed results. Most of my eight children are readers. Several of them are voracious readers, the kind I am and the sort Ms. Miller describes herself as:

“I am a reader, a flashlight-under-the-covers, carries-a-book-everywhere-I-go, don’t-look-at-my-Amazon-bill reader. I choose purses based on whether I can cram a paperback into them, and my books are the first items I pack into a suitcase. I am the person whom family and friends call when they need a book recommendation or cannot remember who wrote Heidi. (It was Johanna Spyri.)”

However, even with all this reading environment and encouragement and, yes, pressure, I have one child who does not see herself as a reader (she reads, just says she hates to read) and another who has quit reading for pleasure for the last two or three years at least. Unfortunately, Ms. Miller’s book gave me very few ideas about how to re-awaken the love of reading in my son or how to instill a love for reading in my daughter. I already let them read pretty much anything they want to read. I already suggest books for them, buy books for them, borrow books for them, encourage them to read about subjects they love, and show them daily how much reading means to me by reading as much as I can, anywhere I can. Our house is full of good books.

The Book Whisperer is a very public school, teacher-ish, kind of book, but it is a good resource for teachers of reading in school settings. It did spark a couple of ideas in this homeschool mom mind of mine: I could have a time (half an hour? an hour?) each day when we participate in ye olde public school D.E.A.R (Drop Everything and READ). I could require them to read 40 books for the school year (a requirement Ms. Miller has for her sixth graders) and see what happens. I could keep giving my daughter piles of books that I think she might like until she finds one she loves. It hasn’t worked yet, but it might still click one day.

Out of the Easy by Ruta Sepetys

Feb17

My motherâ€™s a prostitute. Not the filthy, streetwalking kind. Sheâ€™s actually quite pretty, fairly well-spoken, and has lovely clothes. But she sleeps with men for money or gifts, and according to the dictionary, that makes her a prostitute.

That’s how Ruta Sepetys’ second YA novel starts out, and that intro pretty much tells you whether or not this coming-of-age novel set in the 1950’s about a girl who’s desperate to get out of NOLA is the right kind of book for you. I liked it—with reservations.

Let’s get the reservations out of the way first. The obligatory homosexual subplot and gay minor character are forced and awkward. I’m tired of authors notching their figurative diversity belts by shoehorning in a gay character or an episode in which their authorial lack of homophobia is displayed. But I expect to see more and more of this sort of thing in books just as I’m seeing it in TV series and movies. Skim time.

Some of the other characters are rather stereotypical, too. Our protagonist, seventeen year old Josie, has a mother-substitute, since her own mother is a witch. Of course, the maternal figure is a brusque, sharp-tongued madam with a heart of gold. Maybe madams with hearts of gold exist in all “respectable” brothels, I wouldn’t know, but they are a little too cliche to be believed. Then, there’s the old quadroon servant/chauffeur, Cokie, who knows his place but turns out to be the the most intelligent and dependable person around. Again, possible but hackneyed.

Nevertheless, these drawbacks can be overlooked because Josie herself is such a wonderful character. She lives and works in a bookstore in the lower class part of New Orleans. She loves to read. She also cleans the cathouse every morning, and she knows she wants to do and be more than her mother, more than her friends in the NOLA underworld, and more than New Orleans can ever give her. When Josie gets the bright idea that she could apply to go to the prestigious Smith College in far-off Massachusetts, she gives the application and the preparations her best effort, even when her mother’s cruelty and criminal connections threaten Josie’s dream.

Out of the Easy was one of the books nominated for the 2013 YA Fiction Cybils Award, and I liked it a lot more than I liked the winning book, Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your A–. Rose Under Fire was the best of the shortlisted books, by the way. What all three books have in common is the rough, filled with evil, poverty and hardship, settings. There’s not a whole lot to choose between the barrio, the New Orleans underworld, and Ravensbruck. OK, Ravensbruck is much worse, but on the other hand, Rose Under Fire is a much more tragic, and ultimately redemptive, story than either Out of the Easy or Yaqui Delgado. Anyway, I would recommend Out of the Easy with the above caveats, and if you’re able to stomach another book with a truly horrific mother.