Book Review: Maizy Chen’s Last Chance
Nov. 9th, 2023 07:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerOne 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.
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.
