osprey_archer | Entries tagged with author: kate dicamillo

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

This has been a big week for Newbery Honor books. I finished Russell Freedman’s The Voice that Challenged a Nation: Marian Anderson and the Struggle for Equal Rights - the scenes where the president and first lady actually did something useful and morally upstanding made me feel rather wistful - and also Kate DiCamillo’s Because of Winn-Dixie, a cute dog book (the dog lives) about a young girl learning to feel at home in her new community with the held of a dog named Winn-Dixie.

However, my favorite of the pack was Jacqueline Woodson’s After Tupac and D Foster, which is the book that Woodson’s Another Brooklyn is often recommended as: a beautifully written story about black female friendship in a richly envisioned neighborhood in New York City. (Friendships also happen in Another Brooklyn, but I feel like if you’re going to rec a book as “a celebration of female friendship,” most of the characters should actually like each other at the end.)

In After Tupac and D Foster, the unnamed narrator and her best friend Neeka have grown up across the street from each other in Queens. D Foster roams into their life the summer that they’re all eleven, a foster child who has given herself the name Foster because she’s bounced around so many homes. Clearly D’s life has been difficult, and we get little glimpses of that, but the main focus of the book is on the friendship, on evoking the time and place, Queens in the early 1990s in the years before Tupac died.

What I’m Reading Now

The second Amelia Peabody book, Elizabeth Peters’ The Curse of the Pharaoh, which sadly but not unexpectedly does indeed have less Evelyn than the first book (Evelyn having settled down peaceful in England to have children and be rich), as indeed Amelia herself was doing (or at least, she had one child) before thankfully abandoning the domestic hearth to return to Egypt to investigate the murder of an amateur but enormously rich archaeologist. Was he killed by… the Curse of the Pharaoh??? Almost certainly not. My money is currently on “grave robbers who wanted to rob the grave he found,” but We Shall See.

I wish I’d gotten more of these before the library closed; mystery novels are very comforting to read in a time of uncertainty. Possibly the library will have more on overdrive?

Alternately: I know for a fact that the library has more Mrs. Pollifax books on overdrive. If/when I run out of library books (I borrowed MANY books on my last day), I should give that a go.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m keeping Eva Ibbotson’s The Reluctant Heiress in reserve for when things get real bad. I feel like I’ve been saving this book all these years specifically for this moment - without of course realizing that’s what I was doing - and I don’t want to expend it too early.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic, which is about the memory of the Civil War in the South. It’s interesting, particularly the parts about Civil War reenactors and the lengths to which they’ll go for the hardcore experience - Horwitz falls in with a group that likes to do ten-mile marches at least partially barefoot - but rather shallow; Horwitz covers a lot of ground but doesn’t get very in-depth with it.

Also Kate DiCamillo’s Floyd and Ulysses, which won the 2014 Newbery Medal. I find this baffling. It’s not a bad book, but it’s awfully slight, and most of the characters are so broadly drawn as to feel slightly unreal.

And why does DiCamillo keep writing books about rodents who fall in love with humans? First the mouse in The Tale of Despereaux and now the squirrel in Floyd and Ulysses. It’s such an odd and specific theme.

What I’m Reading Now

Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus. The plot by itself probably wouldn’t grab me, but such plot as there is exists mostly as a hanger for the Night Circus itself, and given that I would happily wander around the Night Circus for hours, that’s just as well. It’s almost painful to realize that this place, described in all this loving and dreamlike detail, doesn’t actually exist and can’t be visited.

The Narrator from Pushing Daisies narrates the audiobook of The Night Circus, which is pretty perfect. The Night Circus doesn’t have the same aesthetic as Pushing Daisies, but it is similar in that it’s a strongly aestheticized story, where the aesthetic is at times purposefully at odds with the underlying grimness.

(I’m contemplating having a Night Circus tea. The aesthetic would make it easy to decorate for: black table cloth, white table runner, crimson cookie tin as a centerpiece…)

I’ve also started Eva Rice’s The Misinterpretation of Tara Jupp as my new book to read a chapter a night. So far, we’ve been introduced to Tara’s large family and Tara’s late childhood habit of sneaking into the neighboring estate to ride horses in the pre-dawn light. This seems most promising.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m thinking about reading the rest of Pamela Dean’s books. She only wrote six, but getting my hands on them may be tricky. The local library has The Dubious Hills and Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary, but not the Secret Country trilogy…

I need to stop picking up new authors whose work is hard to get a hold of. This is getting a little ridiculous.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Flora’s Fury, the third (and most recent, although likely not the last) Flora Segunda book. This book is charming in much the way the first two books were charming, but I do feel that in a series books ought to build on each other, and that in this case, that’s not really happening. I’ll probably still read the fourth book when it comes out, though.

Also, Bianca Turetsky’s The Time-Traveling Fashionista on Board the Titanic and The Time-Traveling Fashionista at the Palace of Marie Antoinette, because the covers are lovely and eye-catching and the books are shot through with illustrations of the same style. These are immensely, immensely fluffy reads: our heroine, Louise, travels back in time through the power of vintage clothes and has brisk and amusing adventures. Sometimes you just need something totally fluffy to read.

What I’m Reading Now

Still Ben Hur. This book is infinitely long, you guys. The movie is four hours long, and they still cut out tons of stuff, like the part where Ben Hur trains an army in Galilee and then follows Jesus around with it in order to be on hand when Jesus starts revolting against the Romans. Ben Hur is clearly destined for disappointment.

Also Tam Lin. The end is nigh! I'm getting the impression that Thomas knows all about his impending sacrifice to the lords of fairy and is casting about for a girlfriend to accidentally-on-purpose impregnate, which seems like a skeevy plan. Although I guess he couldn't just explain about the "sacrifice to the lords of fairy" thing, because who would believe him?

What I Plan to Read Next

Kate diCamillo’s Flora and Ulysses, the 2014 Newbery award winner.

And probably The Time-Traveling Fashionista and Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile. If only to discover how Louise got her hands on one of Cleopatra’s dresses! (I’m hoping for museum heist.)

Newbery books! I have been reading them, and naturally I have thoughts about them which must be shared.

First, Eric P. Kelly’s The Trumpeter of Krakow, which I expected to like, as it is an adventure story in Poland in the 1400s. Doesn’t that sound interesting and unusual? But although there are a lot of exciting happenings in this book - robberies! hypnotism! alchemy! - it just never really grabbed me. The characters never seem quite alive.

Second, Cynthia Rylant’s Missing May. I didn’t read this back during my fifth-grade Newbery medalist binge, probably because I had already read Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia and been scarred for life and had learned from it an important life lesson: assiduously avoid all folksy rural books about artistic young people who learn important lessons about Death.

(I should have remembered this lesson before reading Kate diCamillo’s The Tiger Rising. It takes place in rural Florida and one of the characters is named Sistine: the combination should have warned me right off.)

But despite the fact that Missing May is surprisingly similar to Terabithia in its broad outlines, it’s ultimately a hopeful book, an effect diametrically opposed to grim Terabithian misery.

( Read more. )

And finally, Betsy Byars’ Summer of the Swans, which lacks an Important Lesson about Death, but is nonetheless very much in the “rural setting with a discontented protagonist surrounded by disappointing people” mold of Jacob Have I Loved. I am beginning to think I should keep a running tab of qualities that make a book Newbery-bait. Setting it in a small town in the middle of nowhere: clearly a plus!

I’m kind of bitter that Summer of the Swans beat out Enchantress from the Stars, which is simultaneously a space opera and a fairy tale and has likeable characters and meditations on the nature of good and evil and obligation to others.

At the end of the century before last, in the market square in the city of Baltese, there stood a boy with a hat on his head and a coin in his hand. The boy's name was Peter Augustus Duchene, and the coin that he held did not belong to him but was instead the property of his guardian, an old soldier named Vilna Lutz, who had sent the boy to the market for fish and bread.

Thus begins Kate DiCamillo's The Magician's Elephant, and thus it continues: the lilting cadence of the prose, that deceptive simplicity that lies like a thin coat of snow smoothing a craggy landscape, the fairy tale feel of a story set long ago and in a land so far away that one cannot pin it to a map.

Given my bitter loathing of DiCamillo's The Tiger Rising, in which she brutally slaughters the titular tiger, it is something of a miracle that I picked up another of her books - especially one with another defenseless animal in the title. But by mistake I read the first paragraph of The Magician's Elephant, and could not stop, and found that it was splendid.

It's like sitting by the window on a winter night, drinking hot chocolate and waiting for a loved one to get home through the snow storm: comfort and unease, and relief when the snow-rimed sojourner throws open the door.

They have nothing for me to do this week, but fortunately there’s plenty of reading material: right down the hall there’s a reading resource room, which has a reading corner with a big beanbag and two butterfly chairs and three overflowing bookcases, and more bookshelves marching around the perimeter of the room.

Given such abundance, it’s a bitter cruelty that I borrowed Kate DiCamillo’s The Tiger Rising. I picked it because the cover features a girl riding a tiger, and let this be a lesson to us all about choosing books by their covers because about five pages into the story it’s obvious nothing as awesome as tiger-riding is ever, ever going to happen. DiCamillo is gunning to write the most depressing book in the world this side of Bridge to Terabithia.

And, let me say this for her, she SUCCEEDS. When we meet our hero, Rob, he’s living a miserable stunted life at a rundown motel in an ever-raining Florida, going to a school where bullying is the only extracurricular activity. By the end he’s acquired a friend, but otherwise his life is headed downhill: school’s still awful, but it might not matter because his actions are probably going to get them kicked out of their miserable little motel by its vile owner, so maybe they’re going to have to move anyway.

She even contrives to make sunshine symbolic of sadness. Just in case you were hoping that it might be possible to wring some joy from the corners of the world.

And! As if that weren’t enough!

( Spoilers, just in case you care at this point. )

Yeah. Unless you’re looking for a read that will cast a grim gray pall over the world, I would steer clear of this book.