Book Review: Maizy Chen’s Last Chance

[osprey_archer]

One of my theories about children’s literature is that children’s book authors are, almost inevitably, writing about their own childhoods. Not necessarily in the sense that they are writing autobiography, like Maud Hart Lovelace or Laura Ingalls Wilder, but in the sense that even if their book is technically contemporary, it’s actually about their own childhood era.

I really do think this is inevitable, and IMO, it mostly bothers kids less than adults might imagine. As a kid, I never minded books where none of the characters had home computers, whereas I did very much mind books where, say, the author attempted to write characters using instant messenger and got it, to my judgmental little eyes, wrong. The fact that the book felt authentic to something was more important than whether it was authentic to my own personal experience as a child of the nineties. (And anyway, who reads for a plain old mirror of everyday life!)

All of this is a long preamble to say that authors of contemporary children’s books have a Cell Phone Problem. On the one hand, the characters supposedly live in the 2020s, so probably they should have cell phones. On the other hand, they actually live in the author’s childhood, so they absolutely can’t have cell phones. Therefore the author has to come up with some excuse to get rid of them, like grounding the character or shunting them so deep in the country that they have no cell phone service.

In Lisa Yee’s Maizy Chen’s Last Chance, Yee deals with this question by having Maizy accidentally drop her phone in a wishing well about twenty pages in. Problem solved! I admire the aplomb.

I read a couple of Yee’s books years ago, and I remember them as resoundingly mediocre, so I was quite curious when I saw that Yee had snagged a Newbery Honor this year. Had she leveled way up?

The answer is yes! Maizy Chen’s Last Chance is an absorbing book, and I had such a good time that I didn’t even mind (much) that it is, among other things, one of my least favorite Newbery genres: Your Relative Is Slowly Dying.

Because I’m familiar with contemporary Newberys, I knew that Maizy’s grandfather was going to croak the moment Maizy mentioned he was ill, but the man’s just so gosh darn charming that I ended up falling in love with him anyway. He teaches Maizy to play poker and tells her the family history in charming bite-size pieces that he doles out over the summer! How could I not?

In fact, I fell in love with Maizy’s whole goshdarn family, and the entire sleepy little town of Last Chance, Minnesota, where Maizy’s grandparents run the Golden Palace restaurant. It has a giant wooden bear statue in front! Maizy finds her mom’s old typewriter (because, again, although this book is technically contemporary, it’s also kind of 1985) and starts typing up special fortunes to put in the fortune cookies to liven up business. Apparently if you warm fortune cookies up, you can unfold them enough to put a new fortune in? I love it. This would be perfect for a cute little party favor.

Comments

[ethelmay]

Typewriter characters are big enough that those would have to be either quite short fortunes or on much bigger slips of paper than usual, wouldn't they?

[osprey_archer]

To be honest I didn't think too deeply about the logistics of typewritten fortunes. I'm assuming that Yee experimented a bit herself to see if it was actually possible to extract a fortune from a cookie and replace it with a new one.

[msilverstar]

Cellphones also kill so many plots where the characters can't find each other, or communicate in real time. The gyrations they have to go through to miss each other are quite amusing, like dropping phones down wells. I suspect we'll get books that are basically set in the 1990s or earlier for a long time. Though less as younger people write more of the novels.

[osprey_archer]

If all else fails, you can always have a character's cell phone run out of battery! And of course they don't have anybody's number memorized, so as long as the phone is out of juice they can't contact anyone even if they do manage to get a hold of someone else's phone...

[msilverstar]

oooo nice! (I have printed out my contacts just in case)

[asakiyume]

I'm sure I've seen a do-it-yourself for-kids book on making fortune cookies. I think I might have tried it? Or else I only thought about doing it so intensely that now I think I've done it.

Family history in bite-sized pieces sounds like good fun. Too bad about the dying part! (Like does it never occur to writers that they could have a **perfectly healthy** grandparent share some family history?)

Although exposé journalism says that many Chinese restaurants are horrible places that exploit new immigrants, the one in my town seems a lot like Maizy's: family run, and with the kids growing up in it. The kids were more or less my kids' age, and we went from little-kid drawing on the wall to more advanced art as they grew. And I remember them working on homework at the tables (almost no one ate in; everyone ordered pickup, so there was plenty of space for that).

[osprey_archer]

You *could* have a perfectly healthy grandparent share some family history, but would you get a Newbery Honor for it? A powerful incentive for an editor and/or agent to learn over a writer's shoulder and whisper, "Hey, kill off the grandparent."

When I was in college, there was a Chinese restaurant just off campus where you'd often see the owner's children playing in the windows. When I visited Appleton this year, it had closed; I hope it's because they've moved on to bigger and better things.

[silverusagi]

On the one hand, the characters supposedly live in the 2020s, so probably they should have cell phones. On the other hand, they actually live in the author’s childhood, so they absolutely can’t have cell phones.

I can definitely see how this would be a Thing.