osprey_archer: (books)
I have finished reading the 2021 Newbery Honor books! There were FIVE of them this year, so I feel quite accomplished, especially as one of them was a pretty demanding read.

That one was Kimberly Brubaker Bradley’s Fighting Words, which is about child sexual abuse. The blurb implies this without actually stating it; it does at least mention that the main character’s sister attempts suicide partway through the book, but still, I feel that this is a case where the blurb should also act as a content warning.

It is very well written; in fact, I think it’s probably the best written of the Newbery books this year, including the actual winner. Bradley is a fantastic writer, and the protagonist’s voice is amazing, so sharp and snappy and individual. Well worth reading if you are up for the subject matter, but be warned, it is a grueling book.

Erin Entrada Kelly won the Newbery a couple of years ago with Hello Universe, which I found singularly unimpressive, so I groaned when I saw that another one of her books won an honor this year. However, I found We Dream of Space a definite improvement over Hello Universe, although probably still not a book I would read off my own bat: it’s a book about a dysfunctional family with two parents who are just really contemptuous and mean to each other, and also the whole book is building up to the Challenger launch and then, of course, you’ve got the Challenger explosion. Just overall kind of a bummer. The subject matter isn’t as rough as Fighting Words, but unlike Fighting Words it doesn’t achieve the kind of depth or individuality of voice that makes the roughness it does have worthwhile.

There are also TWO books by Christina Soontornvat, A Wish in the Dark and All Thirteen: The Incredible Cave Rescue of the Thai Boys’ Soccer Team. I must confess I had Doubts about the necessity of giving the same person two Newbery Honors in the same year, but actually I really loved both books and I would have been hard pressed to choose between them had I been on the committee.

A Wish in the Dark is set in the city of Chattana, lit by magical glowing orbs created by the wise, benevolent, all-powerful… “evil dictator,” I said, with a sigh, settling in for another garden variety dystopia. But Chattana feels real and complicated and alive - slightly dystopian, yes, but then what place is not these days? And the characters feel just as real and complicated, too, and even the best of them sometimes make mistakes (even Pong’s wise mentor, Father Cham - I found this sequence very moving), and yet they keep trying to look after each other.

All Thirteen is just what it says on the tin. If you followed the news in 2018 (or simply know how to extrapolate from a title) you know that all thirteen members of the soccer team DO get out of the cave in one piece, but even so the book builds up a genuine sense of tension and drama, and it’s so heart-warming to read about people from all over the world pulling together to help rescue these kids.

And finally, Carole Boston Weatherford’s Box: Henry Brown Mails Himself to Freedom is a picture book in poetry about an enslaved man who escaped slavery by, well, mailing himself through the post office. This is one of those books where it’s perfectly fine… but lots of books are fine, and I don’t quite get what made the Newbery committee go, “That one!”
osprey_archer: (books)
What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Lorna Barrett’s cozy mystery Murder Is Binding, which I had doubts about last week - but in the end I quite liked it! It had a reasonable explanation for why our heroine the mild-mannered mystery bookshop keeper is forced to turn detective (the sheriff has taken a dislike to her, which will presumably force our heroine to keep investigating things for the rest of the series), and I liked the plotline about the heroine and her semi-estranged sister trying to reconnect.

I also finished Kimberly Brubaker Bradley’s The President’s Daughter, a children’s novel about Theodore Roosevelt’s younger daughter Ethel, which was okay. The pacing’s a bit off - it spends too much time on Ethel’s dislike of her new school and difficulty making friends there and resolves it quite suddenly in a chapter at the end.

And honestly, much as I love boarding school stories, it seems like missing the point to write a book about Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter and then spend most of it at boarding school instead of with the Roosevelt family. Any character could go to a boarding school. I want more Roosevelts!

What I’m Reading Now

Sheila Burnford’s The Incredible Journey, the book that the movie Homeward Bound is based on, although the feel of the two stories is very different for me - probably because the dogs & cat in Homeward Bound can talk (to each other/the viewer, at least), whereas the ones in The Incredible Journey don’t.

So it’s sort of like we’re watching them do everything from above, rather than inside their heads, which is distancing for me: I’m finding it hard to get attached to any of the characters.

What I Plan to Read Next

I decided to read Elizabeth Warren’s new book for my next reading challenge (“a book that addresses current events”), but I am currently 27th on the hold list at the library so that may not arrive in May. So for May, I’m going to skip ahead to the next challenge on the list: an immigrant story.

I loved immigrant stories when I was a child - The Secret Voice of Gina Zhang; Yang the Youngest and His Terrible Ear; that one book Lynne Reid Banks wrote about a Canadian family emigrating to Israel, although I never quite forgave the father for uprooting his unenthusiastic wife and daughter from their happy lives in Canada to drag them to a war-torn country for the sake his dream. Follow your dream yourself, dude.

Oh hey. I was going to say “But I don’t have any on my to-read list right now,” but then I stopped to look up the title of the Banks book (One More River), and it turns out that Banks recently wrote a novel about a family immigrating to Canada from the UK during World War II. So perhaps that should be my immigrant story!

Well, it’s a possibility. Does anyone have a recommendation? (I’ve already read Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out and Back Again and An Na’s A Step from Heaven.)
osprey_archer: (books)
What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Kimberly Brubaker Bradley’s The War That Saved My Life, a 2016 Newbery Honor book which I sort of wish had won the medal itself, although it certainly might have added to the Newbery’s reputation for grimness. (Although it’s not even in the same misery league as Out of the Dust. I don’t think anything can touch Out of the Dust for sheer despair.)

When World War II begins, Ada and her little brother Jamie are evacuated to the countryside from their abusive home in London. And this is not abusive in the Roald Dahl sort of way where the child abuse is a sort of slapstick background: when Matilda’s father tells her she’s an idiot, Matilda never actually believes him. Ada, on the other hand, is pretty well convinced that her clubfoot makes her worthless and unlovable, because her mother has been telling her so for her entire life.

(What makes this even worse is that even in the forties a clubfoot was a totally treatable condition, so if Ada’s mother had it treated when Ada was a baby then - well, okay, she probably would have come up with a different excuse to tell Ada she was worthless and unlovable. But at least Ada could have run away without bleeding all over the ground!)

Anyway, they’re sent to the countryside where they are boarded with an old lady who is still super depressed over her lover Becky’s death two years before (the book doesn’t 100% spell out that they were lovers, but it’s pretty obvious), and the rest of the book is about Ada learning how to cope with being treated decently and also how to ride a pony, because why not, everything is better with ponies.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve almost finished Melanie Wallace’s The Girl in the Garden, which is well-written but bleak: the story of a lot of lonely people, living side by side, and almost all too damaged by their lives to reach out of that loneliness and connect with each other. One of them lives in a literal compound surrounded by a high concrete wall. This is a pretty good metaphor for everyone in this book.

This is another NetGalley book, and probably one I wouldn’t have read if it hadn’t been free on NetGalley. On the one hand I am glad I read it, because it is very well-written - the descriptions of the New England landscape, the ocean, the desolate winters, are very evocative - but on the other hand it reminds me why I don’t read this sort of book very often.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m still waiting for the library to get me the new American Girl book. I am beginning to suspect that some power in the universe doesn’t want me to read this book.

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