A Certain Slant of Light

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!”

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.