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Wednesday Reading Meme
Apr. 30th, 2025 08:17 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
A very Newbery week! I read Ruth Behar’s 2025 Honor book, Across So Many Seas, which is a family saga about a Sephardic Jewish family told through the eyes of four daughters of the family through the ages. After the Edict of Expulsion in 1492, Benvenida’s family flees from Toledo to Constantinople. Centuries later, in disgrace after sneaking out to a party with BOYS celebrating Turkish independence, Reina is sent to Cuba for an arranged marriage… where her daughter Alegra becomes a brigadista, traveling to rural Cuba to teach people how to read, before the family flees to Miami. And at last in 2003, Reina and Alegra and Alegra’s daughter Paloma visit Toledo, where, of course, in a museum they see the poem on a parchment that Benvenida shoved in a wall so long ago…
(“This parchment is reappearing,” I said wisely, after Benvenida mentioned once again her hope that one day! someone would find it! and read her words!)
These are all corners of history that don’t get a lot of attention in American historical fiction, so it was interesting to explore them. I particularly enjoyed the food descriptions. Not 100% convinced that the decision to have four different first-person narrators was the right one, but as their narratives are sequential rather than intermingled, it’s not like there’s much chance to get confused about who is talking.
I disliked both of Erin Entrada Kelly’s previous Newbery books, Hello Universe and We Dream of Space, so it is with great irritation that I report that The First State of Being, the 2025 Newbery Medal winner, is actually kind of fun. In 1999, young Michael worries obsessively about the looming threats of Y2K, middle school, and life in general, until he learns about living in the moment and enjoying what’s here now through the medium of a time traveler from 2199 who yearns for nothing more than to visit a mall and bury his nose in a real live physical magazine with a photograph of a not-yet-extinct tiger.
I am also trundling along in 1930s Newbery books, this week finishing Phyllis Crawford’s ”Hello, the Boat!”, which is about a family traveling by storeboat down the Ohio River in the early 19th century. What is a storeboat, you ask? It’s a boat that’s also a store, in this case a drygoods store, stopping along the river at the villages and farms that dot its shores. Loved the detail about daily life on the boat.
What I’m Reading Now
In Our Mutual Friend, Eugene Wrayburn just haughtily refused to tell Lizzie Hexam’s little brother his intentions towards Lizzie. Eugene, I realize you are constitutionally incapable of being serious, but being unable to reassure Lizzie’s brother “I promise I am not going to ruin your sister” is not a good look on you.
What I Plan to Read Next
Two more 2025 Newberies! One Big Open Sky, which I have, and Chooch Helped, which also won the Caldecott so there’s quite a waiting list.
A very Newbery week! I read Ruth Behar’s 2025 Honor book, Across So Many Seas, which is a family saga about a Sephardic Jewish family told through the eyes of four daughters of the family through the ages. After the Edict of Expulsion in 1492, Benvenida’s family flees from Toledo to Constantinople. Centuries later, in disgrace after sneaking out to a party with BOYS celebrating Turkish independence, Reina is sent to Cuba for an arranged marriage… where her daughter Alegra becomes a brigadista, traveling to rural Cuba to teach people how to read, before the family flees to Miami. And at last in 2003, Reina and Alegra and Alegra’s daughter Paloma visit Toledo, where, of course, in a museum they see the poem on a parchment that Benvenida shoved in a wall so long ago…
(“This parchment is reappearing,” I said wisely, after Benvenida mentioned once again her hope that one day! someone would find it! and read her words!)
These are all corners of history that don’t get a lot of attention in American historical fiction, so it was interesting to explore them. I particularly enjoyed the food descriptions. Not 100% convinced that the decision to have four different first-person narrators was the right one, but as their narratives are sequential rather than intermingled, it’s not like there’s much chance to get confused about who is talking.
I disliked both of Erin Entrada Kelly’s previous Newbery books, Hello Universe and We Dream of Space, so it is with great irritation that I report that The First State of Being, the 2025 Newbery Medal winner, is actually kind of fun. In 1999, young Michael worries obsessively about the looming threats of Y2K, middle school, and life in general, until he learns about living in the moment and enjoying what’s here now through the medium of a time traveler from 2199 who yearns for nothing more than to visit a mall and bury his nose in a real live physical magazine with a photograph of a not-yet-extinct tiger.
I am also trundling along in 1930s Newbery books, this week finishing Phyllis Crawford’s ”Hello, the Boat!”, which is about a family traveling by storeboat down the Ohio River in the early 19th century. What is a storeboat, you ask? It’s a boat that’s also a store, in this case a drygoods store, stopping along the river at the villages and farms that dot its shores. Loved the detail about daily life on the boat.
What I’m Reading Now
In Our Mutual Friend, Eugene Wrayburn just haughtily refused to tell Lizzie Hexam’s little brother his intentions towards Lizzie. Eugene, I realize you are constitutionally incapable of being serious, but being unable to reassure Lizzie’s brother “I promise I am not going to ruin your sister” is not a good look on you.
What I Plan to Read Next
Two more 2025 Newberies! One Big Open Sky, which I have, and Chooch Helped, which also won the Caldecott so there’s quite a waiting list.
