815 & 816. Two Newbery Winners

I’m sorry, but I HATED the 2004 Newbery winner, The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo. I’m not even going to bother with a picture. On the positive side, the story will introduce some readers to some new vocabulary. But I definitely think parents may want to read this for themselves before reading it with their children.

This story was too dark for me. I know some kids like such stories (like the Lemony Snicket books), and if yours is one, they might enjoy this. I was bothered by Despereaux’s father and brother turning him in (because he dared to talk to a human!), even though they knew it would mean certain death in a dungeon of rats for such a minor crime.

Even more disturbing to me was the treatment of the character Miggory Sow. She’s named for a pig; she’s ugly and gets fat; her father SELLS her for a hen, a red tablecloth, and some cigarettes; and the man who buys her BEATS her until her ears look like cauliflowers and she loses part of her hearing. She’s described as “not the sharpest knife in the drawer”—boy, doesn’t that reinforce stereotypes!

I do think Graeme Malcolm did a great job narrating the audiobook. His British accent was perfect for this medieval tale, and he created different voices for the various characters – Italian accents for the Italian-named (Botticelli was especially amusing) rats, French for Despereaux’s mother Antoinette, Scottish for the threadmaster Hovis. Some of the voices may sound evil, but it IS a dark tale. DiCamillo’s use of asides to the reader/listener comes across as very intrusive and irritating in the audiobook. I did like the lovely cover and and deckled paper of the hardbound version, but found the pencil illustrations by Timothy Basil Eving generally only added to the grimness of the story.

[Originally drafted 8/26/07, revised 5/27/18.  The audiobook, and a print copy for reference, were borrowed from and returned to my university library.]

A post comparing four different editions of the 1923 Newbery winner, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting, got so long that I set it up on its own website.

Bottom line: There are some editions out there that do not make it clear that they have been revised from the 1922 original. Even with those that are upfront about changes, it's good to know exactly what is different. Buyer beware!


© Amanda Pape - 2007

814. Out of the Dust

Although I have access to all the Newbery winners in print form, with the new semester starting and three more interlibrary loan books (that I haven’t started) to finish in the next 5 to 15 days, I’ve been listening to Newberys on my commute. I’ve finished all audiobooks available to me that had not been reviewed to date, so for a while I'll be posting on some that others have already reviewed.

Earlier this year, I read (and loved) Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. The day before my book club discussed it, on February 24, 2007, I experienced my first dust storm (this photo was taken about 40 miles south of me). It gave me a taste (literally) of what it was like for those portrayed in Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust, the 1998 Newbery Medalist.

The audiobook was performed by Marika Mashburn, an Oklahoma native who was then a theater student at SMU in Dallas. She has a convincing accent, and the slight lisp she has/used added the right touch of youth to the performance of Billie Jo. When read aloud, you can’t really tell the book was written in free verse, it sounds more like journal entries, which is how Hesse framed the narrative poetry.

A few other interesting tidbits I uncovered: In her Newbery acceptance speech, Hesse said, “I based the accident on a series of articles appearing in the 1934 Boise City News,” a daily paper published in the Oklahoma Panhandle during the time that Hesse obtained on microfilm from the Oklahoma Historical Society. That paper provided the view into day-to-day life in the Dust Bowl that Hesse used in her novel.

Hesse also said, “I began my literary life as a poet.” However, she found that raising her children made writing poetry difficult, and it wasn’t until they were grown that she began Out of the Dust. “I never attempted to write this book any other way than in free verse. The frugality of the life, the hypnotically hard work of farming, the grimness of conditions during the dust bowl demanded an economy of words. Daddy and Ma and Billie Jo's rawboned life translated into poetry…”

I feel this book is more appropriate for an older reader, age 11 /6th grade, and up. The book has a message that is still important today: “It was about forgiveness. The whole book. Every relationship. Not only the relationships between people, but the relationship between the people and the land itself.”

© Amanda Pape - 2007

[This audiobook and a print copy for reference were borrowed from and returned to my university library.]

813. Walk Two Moons

I didn’t realize until I’d finished the audiobook that I was listening to an abridged edition of Sharon Creech’s Walk Two Moons. Considering that Creech interweaves three stories in one – that of Sal, of her best friend Phoebe, and of Sal’s cross-country trip with her grandparents to find Sal’s mother, the abridgement made the storylines easier to follow. However, the abridgement also left out some details that hinted at the ending, and thus heightened the suspense of the novel for me.

According to Creech’s Newbery acceptance speech, the book’s title comes from an American Indian proverb, “Don't judge a man until you've walked two moons in his moccasins,” that she received in a fortune cookie about four years before finishing the book. The proverb plays a part in the story as well.

The main character, Salamanca Tree Hiddle, or Sal, is a 13-year-old of Native American heritage (her name is the name of a tribe), as is her missing mother (and Creech). Sal and her father move from Kentucky to Ohio shortly after her mother’s disappearance, where Sal meets Phoebe, whose mother also disappears temporarily. If this isn’t enough missing mothers, Sal’s budding love interest, Ben, also has a mom who’s gone. By the end of the book, you find out why they’re gone and what happened to each of them.

Sal’s (and her mother’s) and Phoebe’s stories are told in flashback, within the framework of the trip Sal takes with her paternal grandparents from Ohio to Lewiston, Idaho, where Sal’s mother was heading. Along the way, Sal tells her grandparents Phoebe’s story, and through it, begins to understand her own.

The six-day trip traces Sal’s mother’s route and takes them many places I’ve been – Chicago and Lake Michigan, Madison and the Wisconsin Dells, Minnesota, the Badlands and Black Hills and Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, Yellowstone and Old Faithful in Wyoming, Montana, and Lewiston. According to the Newbery acceptance speech, the trip also mirrors one Creech took with her parents when she was 12.

The characters are funny and fully-realized – especially the grandparents, whose love for each other is palpable. Their dialogue in particular is down-home (Gramps calls Gram his “gooseberry” and both call Sal their “chick-a-biddy”). In narrating the audiobook, actress Mary Stuart Masterson did a marvelous job with this as well as with portraying Phoebe’s prissiness, Sal’s sometimes-typical-teen reactions, the anguish of both girls, and the eccentricities of other characters.

[edited to add an interesting tidbit - The Finney family as well as some of Phoebe and Sal's classmates come from Creech's 1990 book, Absolutely Normal Chaos, which is built around the journal assignment that also appears in Walk Two Moons.]

This book was written at a 5th-6th grade reading level and is mainly recommended for grades 6-12, although some reviewers suggest ages as young as 8. I think it is more suited for at least age 10 and up, because all of the major characters are 13 and older, and because of the complexity of the multilayered plots. There is plenty of action to hold a reader’s interest, however, and the book deals with poignant themes of loss and acceptance. I found this book to be both expressive and gripping, and I believe it is a Newbery winner that will appeal to adults and older children.

© Amanda Pape - 2007

[The audiobook and a print copy for reference were borrowed from and returned to my university library.]

812. Number the Stars

Lois Lowry's Number the Stars is based upon the true story of the Danish resistance against the Nazi occupation in World War II. In her Newbery acceptance speech, Lowry noted that “The Danish people were the only entire nation of people in the world who … did not, in 1943 … turn away … from the disaster” of the Holocaust.

Annemarie, the 10-year-old main character, and her family bravely save her Jewish best friend and other Jews in late September and October, 1943. The title comes from Psalm 147:4a, “…he [God] determines the number of the stars…,” read in a scene in the story, and also refers to the Star of David, which is significant in the plot. An afterword tells what parts of the story are true, and that is even more fascinating – and moving.

One of Lowry’s good friends was a young girl in Copenhagen during the war. From her, from others who lived there at the time, and from the author’s own research in Denmark come a number of little details that make the book even more realistic – things like shoes made from fish skin because leather was scarce. The girls use paper dolls to pretend to be Scarlett, Melanie, and Bonnie from Gone with the Wind, then a recent and popular book (1936) and movie (1939).

Lowry also has many references to the high shiny boots of the Nazi soldiers. Again in her Newbery speech, she said, “I decided that if any reviewer should call attention to the overuse of that image -- none ever has -- I would simply tell them that those high shiny boots had trampled on several million childhoods and I was sorry I hadn't had several million more pages on which to mention that…”

The story is dramatic and suspenseful enough to hold the interest of all ages, boys and girls. The book is written at about a 4th or 5th grade reading level, but appeals to older students as well, and might be an easier novel to introduce the Holocaust than The Diary of Anne Frank, particularly for struggling readers. The book was recommended to me by a college student in the children’s literature class this past summer term.

Actress Blair Brown does a great job with the narration in the audiobook, using believable variations to distinguish between the young girls, adult women, and men, and gives an accent to the German soldiers. This is a Newbery winner that I believe will appeal to both children and adults.

© Amanda Pape - 2007

[This audiobook, and a print copy for reference, were borrowed from and returned to my university library.]

811. Sarah, Plain and Tall

I listened to the audiobook version read by Glenn Close. I enjoyed her efforts to give every character a different voice, although the young Caleb’s was a little too screechy for my taste. The audiobook also had two of the sequels to this book, Skylark (1993) and Caleb’s Story (2001). I’m sure you’re all familiar with them, thanks to the Glenn Close TV films (although the latter was originally called Winter’s End), but did you know there are two more? More Perfect Than the Moon (2004), and Grandfather's Dance (2006) complete the series, according to MacLachlan in an August 7, 2006 interview in Publishers Weekly.

In Caleb’s Story, there are references to World War I (1914-1918) and the influenza epidemic (1918-1919), therefore it is set in 1918. His younger sister Cassie is four years old in that book, therefore Skylark (which ends with Sarah pregnant with Cassie) is set around 1913. At least a whole year has passed between Skylark and Sarah, Plain and Tall, so the latter is set sometime around 1910-1912. MacLachlan was born in 1938, so it is likely that her mother, for whom she wrote the book, and who was also born on the prairie, would have been a young girl around the same time. (MacLachlan was born in Wyoming, and her father in North Dakota in a sod house).

In her Newbery acceptance speech, MacLachlan said that at the time she wrote the book, her mother was beginning to suffer from Alzheimer’s. MacLachlan said she “wished to write my mother’s story…and hand this small piece of my mother’s past to her in a package as perfect as Anna’s sea stone, as Sarah’s sea. But books, like children, grow and change, borrowing bits and pieces of the lives of others to help make them who and what they are. And in the end we are all there, my mother, my father, my husband, my children, and me. We gave my mother better than a piece of her past. We gave her the same that Anna and Caleb and Sarah and Jacob received – a family.”

The “borrowing bits and pieces of the lives of others” may refer to the real Sarah, who, according to an interview with MacLachlan at the end of the audiobook, was MacLachlan’s step-great-grandmother, who really was a mail-order bride from Maine. This character first appeared as Aunt Mag in MacLachlan’s Arthur, For the Very First Time (1980).

This is a Newbery winner that is more accessible to children. It’s only 56 pages and written at a 3rd-4th grade reading level. Older children might find it too easy or lacking in action (particularly boys). As an adult, I too loved the plain language, Anna’s honest feelings about the birth of Caleb, and the comparisons, implied and stated, of the prairie to the sea.

This would be a good book for children dealing with a new stepparent, or with an impending move. My favorite line in the book is from chapter 7, page 43, when Sarah says, “There is always something to miss, no matter where you are.” As someone who spent 21 years away from my home state and missing it, and who is now back in that home state and misses aspects of my 21-year home, this, like so much of the book, rang true.

 © Amanda Pape - 2007

[The audiobook, and a print copy for reference, were borrowed from and returned to my university library.]

810. Kira-Kira

Kira-Kira is the 2005 Newbery Medalist, written by Cynthia Kadohata.  This story reads a bit like a memoir, narrated by Japanese-American Katie Takeshima, who tells about life in her family from the time she was about five, around 1956, to age 12. The story begins with the family moving. Her parents’ Oriental food store in Iowa has failed, and they are joining another family in Georgia where her father will work in a hatchery, and her mother in a poultry processing plant.

Katie idolizes her sister Lynn, who is four years older, and always able to see the brighter side of life. Lynn teaches Katie her first word, kira-kira, which means “glittering” in Japanese, and they use it to describe everything they find beautiful. The word is in stark contrast to the family’s hardships. It is post-World War II, and the family encounters discrimination (as I think they would have anywhere, not just small-town Georgia). A motel clerk in Nashville is rude and sends them to the crummy “Indian” part of the building – and charges $2 extra. The owner of the non-unionized hatchery and plant has questionable labor practices (Katie’s mother is forced to wear pads because she is not allowed any unscheduled breaks in her 12-hour shifts, and her father often sleeps overnight at the hatchery). And, as in so many Newbery novels, there is death: Lynn dies from lymphoma at age 15, on New Year’s Day, in about 1962. This happens on page 200 of this 244-page novel.

Much of the story deals with Katie eventually becoming the caregiver as Lynn becomes more ill and her parents work more hours to pay the medical bills and the mortgage on the house they bought with hopes that Lynn would get better. After her sister dies, Katie and her parents deal with their grief. At the end, Lynn’s kira-kira reminds them that hard work, hope, and determination make the world sparkle with promise.

The most vivid passage in the book is first referred to by Katie on page 1: “I used kira-kira to describe everything I liked: the beautiful blue sky, puppies, kittens, butterflies, colored Kleenex.” The latter is explained in a tender, heart-wrenching essay Katie writes about her sister after her death. But you’ll have to read that yourself.

Like Katie, Kadohata was born in the Midwest to Japanese-American parents. She grew up in small-town Arkansas and Georgia, where her father, like Katie's, worked long hours as a chicken "sexer," separating male and female hatchlings. In an interview (USA Today, January 18, 2005), Kadohata states, "It was a horrible, backbreaking job, and for some reason, all the chicken sexers were Japanese, and all the Japanese-Americans in town worked at the poultry plant," and she remembered "the sense of standing out." In another interview for School Library Journal (May 2005), she adds, “There are also a few details [in the book] that are true. Everybody in the hospital did come to see my [younger] brother when he was born because they had never seen a Japanese baby before.” When asked if she has an older sister, she replied, “I do, and she is still alive. She took care of us a lot, even though she is only a year and a half older than me. She had a maternal quality about her even then. So I always looked up to her.”

While the author says the book is aimed at ages 9 to 12, a number of public libraries classify this as a teen/young adult novel, as would I. I think it could appeal to younger females as well. Readers who prefer more plot will be disappointed; there’s very little that happens in the first half of the story, and little suspense overall. I think this book won the Newbery because it speaks to adults of the losses (and fear of loss) they have experienced, as well as remembrances of what it’s like to be a child. That’s why I liked the book.  However, it is one of many winners that may not have a lot of appeal to most kids.

This was a wonderful audiobook, however. Elaina Erika Davis, the reader, has a lovely, lyrical, passionate voice that made me feel Katie was actually speaking. She did an excellent job with Southern drawls (which the author says she did have, by the way) for Katie and Lynne, as well as Japanese-accented English for the adults. Relectant readers assigned this Newbery book might find it livelier and more humorous in audiobook format.

© Amanda Pape - 2007

[The audiobook, and a print copy for reference, were borrowed from and returned to my university library.]