Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Ellen Kindt McKenzie’s Drujienna’s Harp, which I hoped I would love but did not, sadly. I guess sometimes books just don’t click for whatever reason.

What I’m Reading Now

Mary Downing Hahn’s Stepping on the Cracks, which is set on the American home front during World War II and is about two girls, Margaret and Elizabeth, who live next door to each other and are best friends, which all in all ought to be crack for me but in fact I just can’t get over how mean Elizabeth is. She’s always teasing Margaret for being a ‘fraidy-cat to make Margaret do whatever Elizabeth wants, and when she and Margaret discover that the bullying neighbor boy is hiding his brother the deserter in a cabin in the woods, her first impulse is to blackmail the neighbor - and then she’s like, “Nah, maybe we should tell on the deserter.”

And, okay, the bullying neighbor boy totally brought that blackmail on himself - he destroyed their tree house! It’s only just he should built them a new one! - but tattling on the deserter just seems… ehhhhhh. (Admittedly she backs off on the idea two chapters later, but still.) It would get him sent to jail or shot; it’s just a really mean interfering kind of thing to do to a guy who’s just living in the woods not hurting anybody.

So right now I’m team “new friends for Margaret.” Unfortunately there don’t seem to be any new friends in the wings, unless I suppose she befriends the mean neighbor boy. But frankly it seems more likely that Elizabeth will befriend him, in that “not dating because they’re too young but you can totally tell they’re going to get together once they grow up” way which is an actual relationship category in children’s books. They have so much in common! They’re both so mean.

I’m also keeping on with Kathleen Norris’s The Cloister Walk, which has settled into a discussion about the Psalms, which I find far less aggravating than Norris’s musings about The Poet’s Calling. In fact some of it is quite interesting! I’m at the part where she’s talking about the anger of the Psalms, which is making me want to read the Psalms themselves.

What I Plan to Read Next

THE ALA JUST ANNOUNCED THE 2018 NEWBERY & CALDECOTT WINNERS. Awww, the Caldecott winner looks super adorable: just look at this cover. It’s called Wolf in the Snow and it’s about a wolf cub and a girl who rescue each other and it has strengthened my long-held belief that the Caldecott people are obsessed with snow. There are five Caldecott books that reference snow directly in the title and two others with illustrations all about snow (The Polar Express and Owl Moon).

The Newbery Winner doesn’t ring my chimes the same way, largely because the description is so vague (what do they mean when they say “the characters are the definition of creative agency”? That could mean anything), but we’ll see how I feel about it once I’ve read it.

Comments

[asakiyume]

That's all right--there's a lot that's offputting about Drujienna's Harp; I can recognize that even though I did end up loving it. rachelmanija read it too and was similarly disappointed. (Though the particulars of the disappointment may have differed.)

Tell me more about your reactions? It's been ages since I read it..

Re: Caldecotts and snow, I'm now imagining that to get on the committee, you have to pass through the snow initiation...

[osprey_archer]

Petty complaint first: I couldn't get over the fact that the main character was named Tha, and it didn't seem to be short for anything, she was just Tha even though all her relations had normal earth names. Every time it was at the beginning of a sentence I misread it as "The" and got confused.

Otherwise, the world-building just didn't work for me. I didn't buy the existence of a human society where no one had committed a murder for a thousand years - ten years would have been a stretch! - and I especially didn't buy the existence of an intensely oppressive regime that nonetheless adhered to this ban on fatal violence. That background threat of death is necessary to keep oppressive structures in place.

Basically I guess McKenzie and I have different basic understandings of how human beings work - she seems to think all you have to do is forbid something and people will obey, never mind the experience to the contrary offered by every major world religion - and I don't find her take believable and that undermines everything else in the book.

[asakiyume]

I thought Tha was a weird choice of names too--how to pronounce? And why have it?

Your second point--Yeah! I agree! It's strange, because I had completely forgotten that as an element of the story, and yet--reading this now--I realize/half-remember that it *was* there and *was* important.

What was nearly fatal for me was the cutsieness. I don't like different tones, and this story combined whimsy with seriousness in a way I didn't like. And yet other things made me really love it!

[osprey_archer]

Yeah, the cutesieness got me a bit too - particularly with the Know-Nothings. I'm pretty sure their way of speaking was an affectation on their part to keep them out of trouble: they clearly knew plenty, and Tha figured out how to get them to tell what they knew without breaking their own language rules - I actually did like that bit, the way that she figures out how to decode what they're saying, if you will - but even so it remained aggravating.

What won you over? I had the feeling while I was reading that I was walking around and around a round house looking for a door or a window or anything, but aside from Tha's cleverness figuring out how to interpret the Know-Nothings (which is a pretty minor part of the book), I just couldn't find something that would let me into the story.

[asakiyume]

Well my big preamble is that I read it when I was like 16. I liked a lot of things at 16 that I like much less now. And I haven't reread it in a while. However, I did reread it once as an adult --I read it to my kids--and I still did love it a lot at that point.

I think the world set-up--the different zones, the times of day and the way the light worked, the relationship of this with the bottles and the bottles to the goblets--all that appealed to me. And some of what I recognize to be didactic elements--like in the Shophosian (sp? I'm doing this from memory) Mists--appealed to me in the way that some of the didacticism in Narnia does. And I guess I liked the overall prophecy, and I was interested how the prophecy-conflicts were going to resolve in the current generation. And I liked the end-of-the-world place. And I think I liked the weirdness of it? And some of the details, like the harp strings seeming to extend up through the ceiling of the curiosity shop.

[the_rck]

I haven't reread the book in many years, but my memory was that the ban wasn't actually on killing but rather on 'shedding blood.' It's still impossible to believe, but I think that the figleaf for the regime was the idea that death that didn't spill blood didn't count.

But at the end of the book, bloodshed that hadn't yet become (and possibly might not be) lethal counted. If that counted, shouldn't a fist fight that resulted in a bloody nose also count?

The book worked really spectacularly well when I was eight and had no concept of how very, very long a thousand years was.

[sovay]

So right now I’m team “new friends for Margaret.” Unfortunately there don’t seem to be any new friends in the wings, unless I suppose she befriends the mean neighbor boy.

She could befriend the deserter.

[osprey_archer]

This is true, but it also would not solve her "but who do I sit with for lunch at school?" problem.

But then she's young enough that neither would befriending a ~boy~ help with this, so really she's sunk either way.

[sovay]

Off-topically, I found some fanart from the Panem AU where President Snow actually understands propaganda.

(After some research: they were movie posters! I'm very impressed. Based on your reviews of the movies, though, still from an AU.)

[osprey_archer]

Maybe some earlier leader of Panem created the poster initiative, and President Snow let it fall by the wayside in favor of frank talk about the Hunger Games as punishment. He's already shown that he has a fatal weakness for honesty; it would be like him to get tired of pretending he cares about the districts and scrap the morale-boostering program.

[thisbluespirit]

Aw, the Caldecott does look good! (And if there is an obsession about snow, it must have been passed down from team to team across the years. Looking at the judges suggests that it's done in the same way as the CKG medals (which were, after all, based on the Newbery and Caldecott), so you'd have a pretty quick turnover. A secret handed down from librarian to librarian...?)

You're right about the Newbery description, though. That is a lovely literary bit of completely meaningless gobbledegook. All I can tell is that there is Filippino folklore and possibly a well, but maybe a metaphorical well; you couldn't commit to anything going by that info.

[osprey_archer]

asakiyume suggested a snow initiation for new members of the Caldecott committee, which sounds about right. I'm envisioning candles and snow storms and chanting.

Or maybe there's just some mystical connection between librarians and snow, and no initiation is necessary to awaken it. Who can say?

If it's a metaphorical well I'm going to be very sadface. That was the only bit of actual plot information in the description!

[thisbluespirit]

If it's a metaphorical well I'm going to be very sadface. That was the only bit of actual plot information in the description!

You will have to find out. It probably is, but with that vague a description, I don't think a person could swear to anything other than the certain true OTP of Caldecott Judges/Snow. (I don't think Kate Greenaway Judges have the same problem, so maybe it is secret snow initiation ceremonies. We didn't have those. *nods*)

[missroserose]

Oh dang. I actually read Stepping on the Cracks when I was in elementary school, and although I don't remember much about it, I do recall not liking Elizabeth much. Weirdly, my most vivid memory is of the title scene at the opening; the rest is mostly pretty vague (although I do recall a conversation between the deserter and Margaret that was surprisingly touching, though the content has long since fled my brain). Honestly I'm not sure if I even finished it - I have no memory at all of the ending.

[osprey_archer]

It's always weird what sticks from childhood reading. There have been a couple of times where I've reread books that I had completely forgotten that I'd read - only to suddenly discover an uncanny knowledge of what was about to happen, sometimes down to exact quotes, and then remember that I had in fact read it before.