A Certain Slant of Light

Once again it’s been a week of MANY Newbery Honor books, so I decided to make a separate post because otherwise the Wednesday Reading Meme would be VERY LONG. I’ve almost finished the Newbery Honor books of the 2000s that the library has available on ebook! (Just one left: Penny from Heaven.) Looking forward to diving in the 1990s.

My favorite - somehow whenever my enthusiasm for this project lags, I always find a book I really love - my favorite, as I was saying, was Kirby Larson’s Hattie Big Sky, a novel inspired by her own great-grandmother’s experience homesteading in eastern Montana during World War I.

There should be fireworks, at least, when a dream dies. But no, this one had blown apart as easily as a dandelion gone to seed.

I offer this quote an example of the writing style - simple, but evocative - rather than a reflection of the mood of the book, which overall is about finding friendship and home, even though there are certainly hardships too.

If you want a book that is sad, look no further than Gary D. Schmidt’s Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy. ( spoilers )

I also finished Ingrid Law’s Savvy, which was fine. A story about a family where most of the members develop a magic power (a “savvy”) when they turn thirteen sounds like it ought to be right up my alley, but somehow this one never caught fire for me. I suppose sometimes books are like that.

And finally, I zoomed through Jacqueline Woodson’s Show Way, a family-history picture book in the tradition of Robert Lawson’s They Were Strong and Good and Allen Say’s Grandfather’s Journey, which both won Caldecott Awards rather than Newberys, but nonetheless. I must confess I rarely have strong feelings about picture books that I didn’t read as a child - I think maybe you have to read them fifty times for the books to really make an impression, as they are so short? However, I did feel that this was a book that would make an impression if you read it fifty times, and the illustrations are beautiful.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

For whatever reason, my favorite pastime right now is reading novels on ebook while simultaneously playing my favorite silly Facebook game, so I have been knocking out many of the Newbery Honor books of the 2000s.

- Joan Bauer’s Hope Was Here, which was depressing, not because of the leukemia or the absentee parents (both surprisingly less depressing than you’d expect!) or any factor under the author’s control, really, because the part that I found depressing was the part where the town got together to elect a candidate to fight political corruption and won and he actually got the local corrupt company to pay its back taxes. From the vantage point of 2020 it felt almost unreal.

However, the food descriptions are quite good, and I liked Hope’s musings on her job as a waitress, and in general the fact that the book focused so thoughtfully on her work.

- Jennifer L. Holm’s Our Only May Amelia, which I can’t believe I didn’t read as a child, because it was everywhere with its cover of a scowling tomboy girl in overalls with a fishing rod and I loved tomboy books and I remember considering it at many book fairs and yet for whatever reason I never read it. Anyway, perfectly cromulent nineties tomboy book, not sure my younger self would have gotten on with Holm’s inexplicable decision not to use quotation marks when the characters are talking, nonetheless wish I had read it when I was younger because I devoured so many tomboy books at the time that I eventually got sick of them and even now when I see one I sigh inside and go “Not another.”

- Sharon Creech’s The Wanderer, which I dreaded because I read Creech’s Bloomability and Walk Two Moons as a child and I found them confusing and sad and just didn’t get them or enjoy them at all.

As it turns out, I loved The Wanderer! But I strongly suspect that I wouldn’t have understood it when I was a child, anymore than I understood Bloomability or Walk Two Moons; I think Creech writes adult books about children, rather than children’s books, and they get marketed as children’s books because the publishing industry has forgotten that adult books with child main characters are a thing that you can do. And then these books keep winning children’s book awards because the writing is beautiful and adult judges love it.

And still the sea called, come out, come out, and in boats I went - in rowboats and dinghies and motorboats, and after I learned to sail, I flew over the water, with only the sounds of the wind and the water and the birds, all of them calling, Sail on, sail on.

AND FINALLY (deep breath), Alan Armstrong’s Whittington, which tells the story of Dick Whittington; the story of a cat named Whittington, the many-greats descendent of Dick Whittington’s cat, who is telling Dick Whittington’s story as he adjusts to life in the Barn of Misfit Animals; and the story of a boy named Ben, who is inspired by Whittington’s retelling of Dick Whittington’s story to accept help for his reading difficulties instead of throwing the book across the room whenever anyone tries to help him.

I also finished a non-Newbery-Honor book, Jaclyn Moriarty’s Gravity Is the Thing, which may end up getting its own post, because this post has gotten quite long.

What I’m Reading Now

Continuing the Newbery Honor theme, I’ve just begun Gary D. Schmidt’s Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy. It is a children’s historical fiction book about the evils of racism written during the early 2000s, and to tell you the truth I feel that I already served my time with that genre, but perhaps it will surprise me.

What I Plan to Read Next

Back when I first started the Newbery Honor project, evelyn_b and I had a chat about how far back I would be able to go before I hit a book the library didn’t have. The answer turns out to be the year 1999... sort of. The library itself doesn’t own a copy of Audrey Couloumbis’s Getting Near to Baby, but some of the schools in the library consortium do.

However, the books in those school libraries won’t be available till the schools reopen. (Of course, the physical library books won’t be available till the library reopens either, but the library will almost certainly reopen long before the schools.) Normally I would wait patiently for the school reopening (even in normal times, these shared system books aren’t available over the summer), but this time I went ahead and bought a copy. I figure that if I don’t patronize independent bookstores now, they won’t be there to patronize later.