A Certain Slant of Light

I found Lauren Wolk’s Wolf Hollow such a page turner that I took it to work with me so I could finish reading it on my breaks (and then stretched my lunch just a bit for that purpose), but now that I’ve finished and gotten a bit more distance from it, I’m starting to see more flaws, which I cannot discuss without spoilers so… ( behind the spoiler cut we go )

On the bright side, finishing this book means that I have finished all my reading challenges for 2017! I read a book for each of the twelve challenges in the 2017 Reading Challenge, and I finished all the unread books that were sitting on my shelves (...and acquired some new ones; the cycle is endless), and now I’ve finished reading the 2017 Newbery Honor books. Hurrah for me!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Tracy Porter’s Treasures in the Dust, a novel about two girls who are friends during the Dust Bowl, which is told with alternating first person narrators. Now, my standards for books with multiple first person narrators were set by Sarah Monette’s Melusine, which is perhaps unfair - it would be impossible to mistake a paragraph of Mildmay’s narration for a paragraph of Felix’s and that’s an awfully high bar to clear - but nonetheless I did not feel that the narrators here were as well differentiated as they should have been.

I’ve also finished the sequel to The Friendship Matchmaker, The Friendship Matchmaker Goes Undercover, and I’m sorry that there aren’t more in the series, which is a little odd given that I always end up arguing with the morals of the story. At the end of the last book, Lara Zany gave up friendship matchmaking in order to focus on her own budding friendship with Tanya. In this book, she is drawn back to her beloved old hobby, which she takes up again on the sly because she promised not to do it anymore.

And then the book ends with her giving it up again and - I don’t see why she has to give it up. It would be one thing if she were bad at it, or interfering when people didn’t want it, but in fact she’s very good at helping people with friendship problems and her fellow students come to her begging for her aid. And she loves helping! Yes, she clearly needs to work out a better work-life (hobby-life?) balance, so she has time for her own friends too, but I see no reason why she has to give up her friendship work entirely. She has a gift! Let her use it!

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve almost finished The Enchanted Wood! The children have just been turned into toys, and then turned back into children again by Santa Claus, and now goblins have invaded the Faraway Tree, as they do. It’s quite a picaresque novel, isn’t it? There’s not really any kind of overarching plot or even character arcs - just lots of little adventures.

And I’ve just started Lauren Wolk’s Wolf Hollow, which I was rather dreading in a vague way because I was reading it because it won a Newbery Honor, not because I had chosen it for myself - but actually I’ve really liked it so far; I was hard pressed to put it down last night, even though it was late and I really only meant to read the first chapter before I went to bed. In the event I read six, in the vain hope that our heroine Annabelle might vanquish Betty Glengarry, a bully with an unfairly euphonious name - but clearly Betty Glengarry is going to remain a problem throughout the book.

What I Plan to Read Next

2018 is approaching! And with it, the beginning of my next reading challenge! I have decided to save The Brothers Karamazov for “a book in translation” and The Woman in White for “a book that’s more than 500 pages” (both are very long and I think I’ll have more luck with that when the weather is brighter), which still leaves me to decide what to read for “a classic you’ve been meaning to read” in January.

Maybe Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Black Arrow? Or I’ve been meaning to read Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. Does that count? But upon investigation the library only has it in gigantic omnibus editions, and I hate giant omnibuses, so perhaps it had better be The Black Arrow after all.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Randa Abdel-Fattah’s The Friendship Matchmaker. Lara Zany is the benevolent dictator of Potts County Middle School. She finds friends for new kids, settles disputes between old friends, and writes down her rules in her Friendship Matchmaker Manual (which she’ll be selling to Harry Potter’s publishers any day now). But her undisputed reign over the school is interrupted by a new girl, Emily Wong, who is all about things like “being yourself.”

You can probably guess the plot of the entire story from this description, but it’s nonetheless a charming and breezy read, largely because of Lara’s voice. In fact I picked it up in the first place mostly to scoff at the obviousness of the plot - a conflict between “crushing your individuality in order to follow strict social guidelines” and “freeing yourself from cruel social restraints in order to be yourself” in a modern middle grade novel, hmmm! WHICH ONE COULD POSSIBLY WIN? - but then I read the first few pages and Lara won me over with her strange cynical brand of compassion. School is a bloodthirsty jungle but she really, really wants to help everyone succeed and be happy there!

Seriously, though, I’m so tired of be yourself novels. I was so much happier when I stopped being myself all the damn time and made an effort to be pleasant instead. Maybe some people are blessed with warm and generous natures from birth and really can just stand around radiating the glorious light of their own natural selves, but the rest of us are going to have to put a bit more work into it.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun The Summer Before the War, which is shaping up to be more of a romance than I was really hoping for - but I’ve only just begun, so I might be quite wrong about where it’s heading.

I was definitely wrong about which war it’s referring to. It’s set before World War I, not II.

I have also continued on in The Enchanted Wood, and now that I have ratched my expectations way, way down, I can see the charm. Definitely the idea of climbing a tree and finding a different world at the top every single time is going to appeal to a lot of kids: it’s absolutely the perfect premise for a game, isn’t it?

What I Plan to Read Next

2017 is almost over and I still haven’t read one of the Newbery Honor books! Lauren Wolk’s Wolf Hollow. (I believe there are no literal wolves, which is too bad. Most novels would be improved by literal wolves.) So that’s next on my list.

Now, the Caldecott award goes to the illustrator, not the author, so in a sense this is beside the point - but the author of The Hello, Goodbye Window is Norton Juster, the man who wrote The Phantom Tollbooth. These books are nothing alike and The Hello, Goodbye Window will not scratch your Phantom Tollbooth itch, but nonetheless, I felt that I should note this fact.

Anyway, this is a bright and colorful book in an illustration style that I do not particularly care for - it’s like a particular bright version of Quentin Blake illustrations, big blotches of color that splodge out from the strong black outlines. I always felt it rather unfair that Matilda got stuck with illustrations like that, although by now I’m so used to them I’d probably miss them if I read an edition without them.

However, if that is the sort of thing you like, then probably you’ll like the illustrations in The Hello, Goodbye Window too. The grandparents (possessors of the Hello, Goodbye window, from which one waves Hello and/or Goodbye) are a mixed race couple, which is nice.

I really liked Victoria Jamieson's Roller Girl, so of course when I saw she'd written a new graphic novel (All's Faire in Middle School), of course I had to read it. And I enjoyed it just as much if not more than Roller Girl! It would be hard to say which. I wasn't shouting at the heroine for questionable life choices at the end of this one, so it probably edges out ahead. 

Jamieson has a real talent for writing heroines who are genuinely quite flawed and make some horrible choices, but are still basically good people who are trying to be their best selves - only it's hard to tell what that is when you're twelve. 

Our heroine, Imogene, has grown up in the Renaissance Faire. Literally: her parents both work there, and she's been homeschooled all her life. Until now! This year, she is going to prove her knightly courage by... going to middle school! 

This is actually not the complete disaster that you might expect from the premise - she doesn't start spouting off "prithees" on her first day and instantly become the least popular kid in school - but it's also a hard transition. Imogene is used to being one of the few kids surrounded by a cast of generally kind and supportive grown-ups (and one of the things I really liked about the book is this cast: it's unusual to see child characters with so many supportive adults in their lives!), and it's weird for her to suddenly have all these other kids around - and to have to navigate which ones are genuinely good friend material, and which ones aren't even though they seem nice. When they feel like it. No one is a good friend if they're only nice when they feel like it. 

I also liked the complexity of the middle school social situation. There's one girl who turns out to be pretty bad news, but you can totally understand why Imogene doesn't realize that at first. The girl asks Imogene to sit with her at lunch on Imogene’s first day! Right as Imogene is beginning to wish she could sink into the linoleum, because she doesn’t know anyone in the cafeteria and there’s nowhere she could possibly sit! Of course Imogene loves her. 

And she's also lots of fun - when she’s feeling nice. And even when she’s feeling mean - well, Imogene is so relieved to have a place to sit at lunch that it’s easy not to worry about that too much, as long as she’s not the one in the crosshairs. 

And the mean girl has a friend who is nice, and is maybe beginning to reevaluate her friend choices now that she’s in middle school, and is realizing that her elementary school friends are kind of mean. (I like to imagine that as time passes, she and Imogene form their own little splinter group, and perhaps gather some other friends too.)

And then there's the dorky girl who also turns out to be a big Renaissance Faire fan - but might be sometimes-friend rather than best friend material for Imogene, because the Faire may be the only thing they have in common. 

I liked that there wasn't a clear binary contrast between Popular Mean Girls with no redeeming features and Dorky Girl who is actually a 100% perfect friend. The popular girls aren’t all mean; the dorky girl has her drawbacks too. It makes sense that Imogene has difficulty figuring out which friendships she wants to pursue, because all the candidates have pros and cons (and are quite aware Imogene has good and bad points, too!) - and they’re all still very young and still figuring out who they want to be. 

Also, one of Imogene's RenFaire mentors speaks fluent Shakespearian insult. That alone makes the book worth the price of admission.

Kevin Henkes must work some kind of magic on awards committees, because he won the 2004 Caldecott Medal with a book that is, admittedly, adorable – Kitten’s Fire Full Moon is about a kitten who believes that the moon is a saucer full of milk and goes to increasingly cute lengths to get it – but somehow I expect something more of Caldecott book than “adorable.”

Maybe they were won over by the black and white illustrations. Everything looks more serious and important in black and white.

He also won a Newbery Honor medal for Olive’s Ocean, which, again, is a perfectly fine book, but also basically the book equivalent of Oscar bait. It’s about death! But in a hopeful, uplifting, live-life-to-the-fullest kind of way! And there’s some pretty nature, although not to the extent that anyone would gush “The ocean is practically another character!” as movie reviewers are sometimes wont to do. (I’m not sure if anyone says that about the ocean, actually. I’ve seen it about cities and about mountains. I recall quite a few Brokeback Mountain reviewers flinging themselves onto the mountain shots with glad cries, presumably because mountains have no sexualities to speak of.)

Anyway: a cute book about a kitten. Possibly trying a little too hard to make you go “Awwwwwww,” but still cute.

Mordicai Gerstein’s The Man Who Walked Between the Towers won the Caldecott Medal in 2003, and I gotta confess, I think that right-after-9/11 timing has a lot to do with that win. The illustrations are perfectly serviceable, if somewhat Schoolhouse-Rockish - which fits with the 1970s setting of the story - but still, it’s a book about the World Trade Center.

Specifically, it’s a book about Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the two towers in 1974, and it is possibly the most 1970s story in the world. Petit and his friends sneak the tightrope into the towers, string it up under cover of night (with the help of a bow and arrow!), and finish just in time for Petit to begin his tightrope walk at dawn.

The police of course are unedified, but no one is going out on that tightrope after him, so he stays up there dancing on his tightrope as long as he feels like it (to the delight of all New Yorkers below, one presumes), until he steps off and graciously holds out his wrists for the cuffs. The judge (portrayed in the book as a kindly bald man) sentences him to perform in the park for the children of the city.

I think today the police and the judge and for that matter building security would all take a dimmer view of this sort of thing, although who knows really. Maybe they would all be so pleased to have some good news for once that they too would be inclined to blink at whatever 150 rules Petit must have broken with this sneak high-wire act.

It's been a dispiriting week so I'm behind in The Three Musketeers, but I can at least report that the characters have been suffering a week even more dispiriting than mine. D'Artagnan is dispirited because Milady is trying to kill him! Milady is dispirited because her stupid assassins just keep failing! The musketeers themselves are downcast because, as a result of their efforts to help d'Artagnan, they too are now in Milady's crosshairs.

We have not seen Anne d'Autriche or Constance Bonacieux for quite a few chapters, but Queen Anne is still married to Louis XIII and Constance is hidden away in a convent to save her from Milady's vengeance so I think we can take it as read that they are suffering too. They are my favorites and I hope we will get more chapters about them (and by that I mean that I hope we get another scene where Constance flings herself to her knees to swear allegiance to Queen Anne, I HAVE SIMPLE NEEDS), but sadly I think it will be some time before they show up again. WOE.

Also, I've got to say. For the most part I am really into Athos's "strong and silent noble lord who is fleeing from his opulent yet dark past, yet cannot fully conceal his innate superiority, and also has suffered so much that he's just totally zen about death because after everything else that happens to him that's small potatoes" -

But goddamn is he an asshole to his lackey. Let the poor man speak, Athos! And for God's sake don't drag him into a picnic in an abandoned bastion in the middle of a battlefield! (The musketeers are picnicking in this unlikely place so they can discuss their future plans without eavesdroppers.) I guess probably it's beneath a musketeer's dignity to carry his own picnic basket - but dude, try it just this once.

Eric Rohmann’s My Friend Rabbit is a bit like one of those songs where you’ve got a flea on a feather on a bird in a nest in a tree in the hollow down in the bog (each new iteration getting added lyric by lyric), except instead you have Rabbit piling a squirrel on a duck on a bear on an alligator on a stag on a hippo on a rhino on an elephant in order to retrieve a small plane that flew into a tree after his friend Mouse fell out of it.

You will I am sure be shocked beyond measure to hear that this sterling plans falls apart - literally. I suspect that this book is popular with small children: who doesn’t like a tall tower of animals coming down in a dramatic but ultimately harmless collapse? At which point the disgruntled animals turn on Rabbit, only for him to be saved in the nick of time by Mouse, who managed to grab hold of the airplane and flies to the rescue?

The illustrations are charming, although not obviously ground-breaking in the way that Caldecott illustrations sometimes are. I did quite like the bit where you have to turn the book sideways to see the taaaaaall tower of animals marching up the page.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I don’t think I’ve finished anything this week! Well, the Krakauer book earlier this week, but nothing since then.

What I’m Reading Now

I’m still working on William Dean Howells’ Venetian Life, which is growing on me in a mild sort of way. It is reminding me yet again how fervently anti-monarchy many nineteenth-century Americans were, and how very proud of their republican form of government, and I think that pride is giving Howells a certain sense of fellow-feeling for the Venetian Republic even if it often fell short of its republican ideals. But then what country does not? The US was having a civil war when Howells served in Venice, and that’s a failure of representative government if I ever heard of one.

And I started reading Tom Reiss’s The Black Count! The book kicks off with Reiss cracking into a safe to get access to papers about Alexandre Dumas’s father, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, which seems like an appropriately dramatic way to learn about the Dumas family honestly. (Although he did have government permission for this spot of safecracking, which perhaps makes it slightly less Dumasian.)

What I Plan to Read Next

I don’t usually read the Big Idea pieces on John Scalzi’s blog, but the art for Above the Timberline caught my eye, as did the author’s reference to Dinotopia - anyone who lists Dinotopia as an influence has to be good, am I right? - and now I super want to read it. Bring it to meeee, library!