West of the Moon by Margi Preus

West of the Moon is historical fiction that weaves in so much folklore it sometimes feels like a folk tale itself.

Astri and her little sister live with their aunt, uncle, and cousins on a small farm in Norway. Astri’s mother is dead, and her father has gone to America. At the very beginning of the book, Astri’s aunt and uncle sell her to a hunchback goat herder as a servant girl, which sets in motion a sweeping almost-fantasy story as Astri plots her escape and tries to reunite with the rest of her family in America.

What follows is a complicated weaving of retellings of Scandinavian folk tales as reimagined and relived by Astri. Nothing that actually happens in the book is unrealistic, but because every step of Astri’s journey mirrors an event from a folk tale, it feels fantastic.

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Newbery Project #12: 2002’s A Single Shard

Oh, cool, another book that takes place over 800 years ago.

I kid, mostly, but have you realized that virtually NONE of these books take place in the present day? I counted FOUR in the project so far that could conceivably take place in the present day. Two of those are a stretch, and one of them is this year’s Flora & Ulysses, which I read but have not written about yet. The One and Only Ivan basically takes place in the present day, but is based on a real story from 1962. The Graveyard Book is not set in a specific time, but is so far into fantasy as to barely count as present-day. So we’re left with just The Higher Power of Lucky, which kind of feels like it takes place in the past because it takes place in a town so small, time basically doesn’t matter to it. MY KINGDOM FOR SOME CONTEMPORARY REALISTIC (or semi-realistic) FICTION.

BUT! To the task at hand: A Single Shard is the story of an orphan named Tree-Ear who lives under a bridge with his differently-abled friend Crane-Man, where they try to scrape by an existence. He lives in Ch’ulp’o, a village in Korea famous for its beautiful celadon pottery. You know, that pottery all the kids are into these days!

Tree-Ear deeply admires the potters, especially one named Min, who is clearly superior to all other potters. He manages to talk Min into allowing him to be his helper, and over the course of the book learns a lot about craft and discipline and all that good stuff.

All-in-all, it’s an interesting, well-paced, thoughtful little book!

Newbery Project #11: 2003’s Crispin: The Cross of Lead

There was a giant gap in this blog between February and June and this book is the main culprit.

My goal was to read a Newbery a week. For a while I was ahead of schedule. Then it took me over a week to finish Moon Over Manifest, but that was okay, I was still on track. Because I was ahead of my reading schedule, I was writing posts for books I’d read a few weeks ago. I let myself get a little lazier, but I chugged along. And then we got to Crispin: The Cross of Lead.

I was actually plenty excited to read this. Before the project I never would have dreamed of picking it up, but Good Masters, Sweet Ladies! had convinced me to be interested in the Middle Ages. I was looking forward to reading another story from the time period.

Crispin is the story of a poor (in every sense of the word), nameless boy whose mother dies in the first page or so of the book, Bambi style. He understandably does not know what to do. There’s a priest that can sort of help, but not really. Dude is pretty useless. And for some reason a bunch of guys seem to want him dead, too. So, naturally, the only thing he can do is run. The boy takes off for anywhere carrying nothing but a couple of scraps of food and a lead cross from the priest, supposedly made my his mother. So here we are, in for a traveling story.

A story I found, sadly, really not-interesting.

Newbery Project #10: 2004’s The Tale of Despereaux

We’ve reached what I consider to be the first (in reverse chronological order, of course) of the modern classics of Newbery. There are a couple Newbery’s after this one that I dearly, dearly love (namely, When You Reach Me), but I don’t think any of them are as widely-read and referenced as Despereaux. It’s also the first of the project to be made into a movie. We all know Despereaux.

So it’s really hard to write about a book like this! I’ll keep it to my favorite thing about this book: it was clearly written to be read aloud.

Newbery Project #9: 2005’s Kira Kira

This was not the first time I read Cynthia Kadohata’s Kira-Kira. I first read it back in 2008. I hadn’t read a Newbery winner in a while. I honestly could not tell you what made me pick up a random Newbery winner from 3 years before that. I think I was trying to be a little more up-to-date on middle grade books, as I was just starting work at the bookstore. And while I certainly wasn’t that excited about Good Masters, Sweet Ladies! (but boy was I wrong about that) I don’t know what made me skip over The Higher Power of Lucky  and Criss-Cross, and, frankly, all the other middle grade novels published around that time and pick this up. It looks like a quiet little book about Japanese-American girls, which is exactly what it is. That is not usually my bag.

When I read it 5+ years ago, though, I remember really liking it. The characters and setting are unique. Katie, the narrator, is the child of Japanese immigrants who live in the midwest in the 1960s. It’s a perspective you don’t get much in children’s literature. The pacing is leisurely, but not too slow. Katie is a thoughtful and interesting narrator. She has a distinctly young voice for middle grade, and she is flawed by the usual small child flaws, such ignorant carelessness and lack of perspective, but she grows and changes a lot with respect to these flaws. The way she talks about her family is uniquely gentle and reverent and thoughtful. Her voice about these relationships is really what makes this book so special. I think I was the most affected by it when I read it the first time, though, because I (somehow) didn’t expect the ending. And so after the jump, if you’ve read the book before, or if you’re not so dense as I am and are perfectly able to anticipate, frankly, quite-predictable endings, read on. If you haven’t read it, though, stop now, because knowing the ending definitely took some of the joy out of it for me.

Newbery Project #7: 2007’s The Higher Power of Lucky

The most a lot of people had to say about this book when it won in 2007 was “But it has the word ‘scrotum’ on the first page!”

And honestly, there might not be much more to say about this book.

Lucky lives in a very small town with her father’s ex-wife (not her mother). Lucky’s mother was killed by a fallen power line after a rainstorm. Lucky’s father is just not the fathering type. But apparently Lucky’s father’s first wife is the mothering type, despite never being a mother herself and being from France and never having lived in the United States before coming to take care of Lucky and live in a trailer. She is apparently totally fine with all of this.

Lucky spends the book coming to terms with her mother’s death and herself and her separation anxiety, and that’s pretty much the story.

Newbery Project #6: 2008’s Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!

Well that was a surprise!

Good Masters, Sweet Ladies!, but Laura Amy Schiltz, is a collection of 15 monologues and two 2-person plays, all set in one imaginary town in England in the Middle Ages. The author is a librarian in a lovely school that lets classes go gang-busters with interdisciplinary units, who wrote these monologues specifically for one class of kids who was studying the time period, because she is the world’s most ambitious librarian.

I never ever would have picked up this book were it not for this project. I have never given the slightest crap about the Middle Ages. And a bunch of plays about the Middle Ages? A bunch of soliloquies meant to be delivered by middle school students? Are you kidding?

But I LOVED this!

Newbery Project #5: 2009’s The Graveyard Book

I wonder if the selection committee was trying to pick something more public-friendly for the award in 2009, after 2008 when they picked one of the weirder books to ever grace the list. (More on Good Masters, Sweet Ladies! next week, obviously.) Neil Gaiman is one of the most famous and beloved authors working today, and in 2009 the Newbery committee decided he should get to add their medal to his long list of accolades.

I wish I’d read The Jungle Book. Gaiman is forthcoming in explaining that this book is directly inspired by Kipling’s classic. BUT, my only knowledge of The Jungle Book is a vague memory of the Disney movie and that Ashlee Simpson and Pete Wentz gave their kid the middle name Mowgli. I would probably be better able to evaluate this book if I knew more about it’s source material. But here we are.

So, a purely stand-along run-down of the book: A boy (Nobody Owens, or Bod for short) is raised by ghosts after his family is brutally murdered and he escapes to a graveyard. The book collects a serious of episodes from Bod’s life growing up in the graveyard and periodically checks in with a more over-arching plot that follows the man who killed Bod’s family and who is still hunting him down.

It’s good! 

Newbery Project Addition!

This morning it was announced that at some point I will have to add Flora & Ulysses to my Newbery Project reading list. (That’s exactly how they did it, the ALA called me up to tell me to rearrange my reading schedule. Then I assume they called Kate DiCamillo. Then the rest of you learned about it. It was all very official.)

I love Kate DiCamillo (except for Magician’s Elephant, I thought that was a snooze-fest) so I’m looking forward to tackling this one. It also looks like it’s definitely not one of your quiet, cry-inducing, serious-fests I always worry is going to be the front-runner. If I can fit it in soon, I will, rather than waiting until the very end.

I have to admit I’m a little bummed they didn’t pick something a little more obscure this time around, though! Kate DiCamillo is already the Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. She’s pretty much royalty of Middle Grade. She hardly needs the Newbery push. I was kind of hoping for a reason to read something I wouldn’t otherwise pick up. I definitely would have gotten around to reading Flora & Ulysses eventually no matter what. I might have to dig into the Honor books this year. I was especially surprised to see Doll Bones on so many Newbery prediction lists this year (and then on the Honor’s list) because it looks so very un-Newbery. I might have to start an off-shoot of the project where I insert Newbery Honor books here and there, because I am dying to read that one.

Newbery Project #4: 2010’s When You Reach Me

This whole venture was in danger of becoming one big “meh” fest. I have not been super wild about any of the winners the past 4 years. 2010, though, oh man, 2010 brought it.

This is not the first time I’ve read Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me. It’s not even the second time. I’ve actually lost count of the number of times I’ve read this book in just the last four years.

The plot is sparse. Miranda lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the late ’70s. She’s just trying to have a nice life with her friends and her single mom (who is about to be a contestant on $20,000 Pyramid) and read A Wrinkle in Time as many times as is humanly possible. The only things getting in her way are that her friends might not be her friends anymore and also she is getting some seriously creepy notes that either make no sense at all or appear to predict the future.

But that little story packs so much punch and oh my I love it so.