Kidliterate

PLEASE IGNORE VERA DIETZ by A.S. King

When we live through a thing, no matter how hard it is, we still have what matters most -- our life.

A few weeks ago, I heard A.S. King deliver a speech at the Printz Award ceremony in New Orleans. This is something she said in her speech. For fifteen minutes I laughed, wiped away tears, decided I loved her, and asked myself repeatedly why I had not yet read Please Ignore Vera Dietz, a 2010 Printz Honor Book. In her speech, King spoke of life and death, of mothers and fathers, of lies and truth, of daughters and of soulmates. All of these were relative to her own life, but it occurs to me now that these are really what this book is all about, too.

This is the story of Vera Dietz, a motherless girl who dutifully learns her vocabulary words and delivers her pizzas and drinks her vodka and tries to blend in. "Please ignore Vera Dietz" is the message she silently tries to transmit to the world.

Vera's best friend Charlie is dead. Her mother left when Vera was young, and her father stuck around. As we move through the book with Vera, her dad, and Charlie, we slowly learn the truth of what happened with Charlie and how Vera and her dad survive all of this life and loss.

I don't want to tell you too much about this book because it unfolds so slowly and carefully and perfectly, and I want you to uncover its secrets for yourself.

One of the things I will take away from this book is a reminder of the lesson I first learned from The Sound of Music as a tiny girl, what the Mother Superior told Maria: "These walls were not meant to shut out problems. You have to face them. You have to live the life you were born to live." No matter how horrible or uncomfortable or wretched, we have to face the truth of our lives. No matter how crazy and crooked things become, for as long as we're alive, we all have the power to right our own courses. This is one of the many lessons of Vera Dietz.

There were moments in this book where I had to stop reading, close it, and hold the book for my chest and just breathe for a minute. Here is one:

Here's me using the word tandem in a sentence.

We will learn to forgive ourselves in tandem.

--Vera Dietz

I'm doing a lousy job of capturing how funny this book is and how heartbreaking and how really, truly real. Every little detail of what it feels like and is like to be a teenage girl was so vivid and painfully and wonderfully authentic -- I could taste and smell and touch those memories, both Vera's and my own. I'm not even beginning to capture how very much I loved it.

The thing you don't see while you're still there on Earth is how easy it is to change your mind. When you're in it and you're mixed up with feelings, assumptions, influences, and misconceptions, things seem completely impossible to change. From here you see that change is as easy as flicking a light switch in your brain.

--Charlie Kahn

It's so good! It's so good. A.S. King said this in her speech, too:

Our time on earth is far too short to distract ourselves from reality no matter how ugly it is ... something important stayed with me from those few moments I had no mother ... part of me stayed in that immature zone where dreams can come true if you work hard enough, and where reality is exactly as it seems, and where cynicism has little power, and where soulmates can really happen. I am very proud to say I still live in that zone, and I'd like to invite you all over ... you don't have to RSVP ... just drop in when you feel like talking about the truth ... be prepared to laugh. And bring your library card.

She is awesome, and so is her book. Please Ignore Vera Dietz is the best young adult book I've read this year. I will remember it for a long time. And I probably will bug you to read it until you do.

(Special thanks to Sophie Brookover, author of Pop Goes the Library and Printz committee member, for inviting me to the ceremony and for extolling the virtues of this book. I am grateful.)

(Here is King's Printz speech. The video isn't great, but the audio is fine, and that's what matters. I think you will like it. If you hear someone sniffling uncontrollably in the background, it is possibly me.)

MOCKINGBIRD by Kathryn Erskine

Now that I have finished wiping away my tears, I can write about Mockingbird. Kathryn Erskine's Mockingbird is this year's National Book Award winner for Young People's Literature, and even though I've only read one other finalist book so far, I can't imagine a more deserving winner than this.

Mockingbird is about a girl named Caitlin whose brother Devon calls her Scout because he loves the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird. (As one does.) Atticus tells his children, of course, what his father told him, that it's a sin to kill a mockingbird, and his daughter Scout comes to understand that mockingbirds “don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird." 

Readers see early on that Caitlin isn't quite like other children, and it's not just because something has happened to her brother. Her brain doesn't work quite the same way that other people's do, and this book is the story of how Caitlin tries to learn how to live in the world and of how the world learns to let her.

Caitlin's brother Devon is gone. Before he dies, he explains this to her about To Kill a Mockingbird: "It's about people. You shouldn't hurt innocent people, Scout. That's what it means." He explains a lot of things to her, and now that he's not around, she is a bit more lost than usual.

There are many lessons that Caitlin's dad and her teachers try to impart to her. How to Look At The Person. How not to have a Tantrum Rage Meltdown. How to understand the emotions on the Facial Expressions Chart, to respect Personal Space, to Get It, to Deal With It, to Talk About It, to Work At It. To understand The Day Our Life Fell Apart.

Caitlin is an artist who prefers black and white to color. She gets along better with books than with people. "Books are not like people. Books are safe." She counts her dictionary, her TV, and her computer among her friends, but no one else. Her counselor, in the effort to help her make friends, sends her on an extra recess, the one with the younger kids, and she meets Michael, with whom it turns out she has something in common.

As part of Let's Make Friends, her counselor also teaches her about making eye contact with people, and how it's all about "finesse," explaining that it means "doing something tactfully and skillfully while dealing with a difficult situation." Caitlin thinks, "I'm surprised I'm only learning this word now. This word is all about me! It's what I'm trying to do every day to Deal With this difficult situation called life." 

This is the little dedication line at the beginning of this book:

In hopes that we may all

understand each other better

There are many things that Caitlin doesn't innately understand. Empathy. Emotions. Figures of speech. Metaphor. But there are things she sees that maybe other people can't sometimes. Like when she looks at someone's face and can tell that his eyes and his mouth don't match. And when she knows to tell her dad what Devon would have told him: "You have to Work At It Dad. You have to try even if it's hard and you think you can never do it and you just want to scream and hide and shake your hands over and over and over."

One of the main things Caitlin tries to understand is Closure, which she looks up in her dictionary, of course: "the state of experiencing an emotional conclusion to a difficult life event." And she sets about looking for her own way to Closure. She and Michael talk about it on the playground.

"What's Closure anyway?"

"It helps you feel better after someone dies."

"Oh. Can I have some?"

"No because I don't have any and I don't know how to get it."

His head droops down. I think this means sad.

"But I'm going to find it."

"Will you share it with me?"

"Okay."

It might be a sin to kill a mockingbird and to kill a brother, but that doesn't mean that mockingbirds and brothers aren't killed. And of the many things Caitlin struggles to understand, that might be the hardest of all.  But somehow people learn to stand what they'll never understand. Caitlin learns this, and she does it with humor and tears, wonderfully, heartbreakingly, and magnificently.

It doesn't come as a surprise to the reader when Caitlin figures out a way to try and get Closure, but it's still totally moving and cool when she does, and it's handled in a way that is totally real. You can work towards Closure. You will still be sad. That is just death, and that is just life. 

And Caitlin starts to realize that “after the hurt I think maybe something good and strong and beautiful will come out of it." And maybe most importantly, she takes steps toward accepting that sometimes it's okay to draw and live in color.

This little book that I love knows that for Caitlin and her dad and their community -- and for each of us, no matter what that day is — nothing can change The Day Our Life Fell Apart. It also knows that, beautifully and mercifully and little by little, they -- and we all -- can work on Putting Our Life Back Together.

I love this book for reminding us of that.

THE ASTONISHING LIFE OF OCTAVIAN NOTHING: TRAITOR TO THE NATION, VOLUMES 1 and 2 by M.T. Anderson

So of course I'd heard of Octavian Nothing. But it was just one of those books (two volumes, actually, but really one book, in my mind) that I'd never gotten around to reading. But I've been catching up on John Green's archives after going crazy for his Looking for Alaska, and I took what he wrote about it to heart, and I checked out both volumes to take with me over Thanksgiving. Many hours in airplanes and the backs of cars and some 900 pages later, I am done.

It is hard to know where to begin when talking about Octavian Nothing. I guess the first thing I'd like to say is that the less you read about it in advance, the better. (I won't be giving away anything here, not even the most basic summary.) I've started to avoid reviews and even book jacket blurbs of books before reading them. I can't tell you how much it's enriched my reading experiences lately. Even a one-line summary often gives away too much.

So ... Octavian Nothing. It carried me away. It just took me out of my body and mind and placed me squarely on Octavian's journey with him. It was a sucker punch to my gut and my heart. People would ask me what the book was about, from family members around the fireplace to strangers standing nearby at baggage claim, and I felt at a loss. The first volume takes its sweet time in letting the story unfold, and before I was really sure what was going on, I said, "I'm not really sure. But it feels -- sinister." And it did feel sinister, a lot of the time. It felt shocking and horrifying and terrifying and sad. But it also felt hopeful and moving and ultimately profound. This book is profound. It just -- is.

It's not only a thoroughly engrossing and gripping and epic story with characters who spring to life with an insane degree of vividness, it's a book about ideas. About science and faith. About the nature of humanity. About good and evil. About revolution. About freedom. I don't even know how to explain it. I will never be able to do it justice. This book just crushed me, and it took my breath away. I don't say that lightly.

It also made me laugh out loud sometimes, even though you'd never describe it as "funny." But there is humor -- not often, certainly, but every now and then, and lightness. There has to be, otherwise you might pull the covers over your head while reading and never come out again.

But you see -- that's the thing. You will come out, because you will want to keep reading. You probably won't be able to put this book down. It's not a page turner in the sense that the words fly by you -- the words are hard, and strange, and there's a rhythm/syntax to them that feels unfamiliar and takes some getting used to when you first start reading. (At least it did for me.) But it definitely became a page turner for me -- at first just so I could figure out what in the hell was going on, and ultimately so I could find out what would be Octavian's fate. And everyone else's in the story that I soon fell in love with. (Or hated passionately.) 

Volume two definitely moves at a faster clip than volume one, but just be patient. It is all worth the wait. God, this book -- what a book. I found myself wondering time and again how this book was ever marketed for teens. Obviously it has been, and successfully -- bestseller, multiple prestigious awards, and so forth. The author himself has said he intended it for older teens, and I definitely think that's the perfect audience for this book. It's dark and frightening and violent, but it's also totally a coming of age story -- and it is, at its heart, so much about the questions older teens sometimes ask themselves as they find their ways in the world:

• What does it mean to be brave?
• What does it mean to be free?
• What are my special gifts?
• How will I ever become my own person?
• Why are we here?
• Does God exist?
• Does good exist?
• How can human beings treat other human beings like this?
• How will I survive this loss?
• Is war the answer?
• What is the value of a single life?

I also ask myself if I would have picked it up and read it as a teen. I think I might have, but I think it would have only been at someone's urging. The urging that we hear that so often rocks our worlds: "Read this book. Don't give up, even if it's tough at first. You will love it. It will change you." I guess that's what I'm trying to say right now.

LOOKING FOR ALASKA by John Green

I bought Looking for Alaska by John Green at a recent book festival because it had a nice shiny round gold Printz Award sticker on the cover that gleamed up at me invitingly from the rows of books on the table. At the cash register, two college-aged cashiers, a boy and a girl, gasped in unison, "We love this book!" They sighed, they clutched their hearts. The girl said, "I get so jealous when someone gets to read a really great book for the first time." I thought to myself, "Self, these are your people," and I instantly trusted their judgment.

(If you're one of the few people left on earth who hasn't read this book, I encourage you to pick it up without reading about it first. This is one where being spoiler-free is key. Trust me. Don't read reviews, don't read about the book on the author's website, don't Google anything about the book. Just read it.)

I won't spoil this book for you. What I can tell you about it is this: It's about an 11th grader who leaves home to attend boarding school, by choice. In his words: "I came here looking for a Great Perhaps, for real friends and a more-than-minor life."

He finds the Great Perhaps he is seeking in many forms -- in a roommate named The Colonel, who quickly becomes his first Real Friend, and who nicknames him "Pudge" because he's so skinny. In taking up covert sessions of smoking cigarettes and drinking Strawberry Hill. In thinking deeply for the first time about world religions and what happens to us when we die. In eating fried burritos and being the victim and mastermind of complicated pranks. In seeking to identify what is the most important question humans beings must answer, and in trying to figure out how to answer it. In wondering how we get through life's labyrinth of suffering. And in meeting a girl named Alaska, who changes everything.

I spent a lot of time when reading this book trying to picture Alaska in my mind. It felt important somehow. The only image I could settle on was an intellectual version of Kim Kelly on Freaks and Geeks. She smokes too much and drinks too much and sometimes seems to be filled with sorrow and rage.

I was bothered by the fact that I wasn't sure if I really liked Alaska, and it's hard when you think you might dislike the person your hero loves the most. But then I realized that maybe I wasn't supposed to like Alaska all the time ... she can be obnoxious and mean, after all. But she is also brilliant and loyal and wildly adventurous and fun. She's a real person, wounded and angry and wonderful and lost, and of course Pudge loves her. As he explains, "She taught me everything I knew about crawfish and kissing and pink wine and poetry. She made me different."

When I look back on this book, I see moments and images in my mind. I see the Colonel climbing into Pudge's bottom bunk with him when he returns, freezing, from a very long walk. (Not in a seductive way, in a "I just need to be next to my friend who can help warm me up" kind of way.) I see firecrackers being set off in the night and a group of friends making a ritual out of throwing cigarettes into a stream. I see blue hair and a boy in a fox hat and a vase of white tulips and the tears of a strict dean of students and the wheezing breaths of an ancient teacher talking about how what different religions share are messages of radical hope.

Above all, this is a story of friendship. What really got me in the heart was the relationship between Pudge and the Colonel. They just love each other, and they have each other's backs, and they're not afraid to admit this and always come back to this truth no matter how profound their struggles. This portrayal of male adolescent friendship was so moving to me.

It's also about how drastically your life can change in the course of a single year and how opening yourself to new experiences and people can rock your world in the most wonderful and terrible ways. In reading a little more about it, I've learned that along with its many accolades, the book has been challenged as "pornographic," which I dismiss as patently ridiculous. 

So there's drinking, smoking, and sexuality ... welcome to high school. This book is so much more than that. I'd happily slap this book into the hand of any teenager, or even any tween, because in addition to being a great read, it teaches what I think are some invaluable lessons: that the most important questions are the hardest to answer, that some mysteries can't be solved, and that life is beautiful and ugly and always infinitely worth living.

MAKE LEMONADE and TRUE BELIEVER by Virginia Euwer Wolff

Make Lemonade tells the story of 14-year-old LaVaughn, who takes a babysitting job to earn extra cash. LaVaughn has a single mom and is also babysitting for one -- her client, Jolly, is not much older than LaVaughn, and she has two small children, each with a different deadbeat dad. Jolly is like a living example of everything LaVaughn is striving not to be -- LaVaughn WILL go to college, even if it kills her, and even though she doesn't have much, she has an engaged and formidable mother who loves her more than life and demands excellence from her. Jolly is what LaVaughn might be in a parallel universe without that mother as her life's backbone, and this never escapes LaVaughn as she tends to those precious kids, Jilly and Jeremy, and cleans Jolly's squalid apartment over and over again.

Jolly's situation is so unimaginably difficult and seems so impossible, but there it is, staring LaVaughn in the face every day. LaVaughn becomes much more than Jilly and Jeremy's babysitter -- she becomes like another parent, even like Jolly's parent -- like the responsible adult in the family, even though she's still a child herself. There is so much passion between LaVaughn and Jolly -- so much anger and resentment and sometimes even hate.

In her excitement to say it all she's starting to yell

and her hair is shaking at me

and she says, "You come here just to make me feel like a

cockroach. LaVaaawwwnnnn. You come in here with your

homework, you got your Goals--" she says it sneering.

"You got your Cay-pa-bulls--" she says it to ridicule me.

"You're Miss Perfect and my kitchen floor is too DIR-tee

for you to walk on and you tell me how cuuuute Jeremy rides the bus,

 and you stole his toilet training,

you stole it from his own mother,

and you have your little Jeremy-songs

you can make up out of your head,

you're such a good little mama I could PUKE."

But sometimes, every now and then, there are laughs between LaVaughn and Jolly. And moments of understanding:

And I want to put my arms all the way around Jolly

in congratulation

and I'm happy she's so angry

and I'm proud of her ...

But I don't go hugging Jolly.

She's too angry to hug.

And that's the day Jilly chooses --

it's like she just lay on the floor and chose --

she ups and walks.

Jolly and me we're being mad together in the kitchen

and Jolly's picking up the mess of banana

that Mr. Jeremy left on a chair.

and up comes Jilly

on her two feet

looking like somebody on a boat deck,

with her surprised face

not knowing whether she's gonna fall down

or fly.

What LaVaughn is able to cope with under the circumstances while loving and teaching these kids is astounding, and you realize quickly that LaVaughn is one fiercely tough and smart cookie.

There are moments of real sadness and desperation and fear in this book that will leave you with your heart in your throat. It's written sort of in verse, which could be annoying but isn't. I underlined so many passages in this book that it almost looks like I underlined the entire thing. Because I keep everything, I went back and found my assigned reflection on the book in my graduate school papers. I wrote this in 1997: "I LOVE THIS BOOK, I really do. I feel I should cut myself off before I sit here about talk about every part I love, because I'd write myself armless." (My professor's comment: "When I chose this book, I wasn't sure how everyone would respond; I just knew I had to include it! I'm glad others had profound responses!" God bless Flo Durway, that magnificent professor who gave me this book and so many wonderful other ones!)

In short: this book cracked my heart wide open.

In book two, True Believer, which was a Printz Honor Book and won the National Freaking Book Award, LaVaughn is a little older (15) and a little wiser. (Jolly & co., so prominent in Make Lemonade, are not central figures in the sequel -- which made me really sad at first after becoming so attached to them -- but they're still present in LaVaughn's life to some degree and thankfully do make a few key appearances here.)

The sequel's story (told in the same verselike form) mainly centers on major changes in LaVaughn's life in terms of her friendships, her coursework, and her first love. There's a growing rift between LaVaughn and her two oldest and closest friends, Myrtle and Annie. While they fervently embrace church activities, LaVaughn isn't so sure how she feels about God, and it divides them in a way that deeply wounds and confuses LaVaughn.

I want to say, "Yes! I'll be in your club!"

But I don't do it,

it doesn't feel right.

I don't think that it is the job of Jesus, to keep me pure.

And I don't mean to be mean to Jesus in my thoughts

that little baby born in a manger...

I spend hours in my room

going over it all ...

going over it all again.

There was too much of it.

Besides everything else,

all those people in Hell

if Myrtle & Annie's church is right:

All those people I love.

I keep trying to think it through.

LaVaughn enrolls in more challenging classes at school and is a bit overwhelmed by the head-spinningly exciting new knowledge she's absorbing, especially in terms of grammar and the wonders and mysteries of science. Patrick is her lab partner.

If I do well in the new class like he says,

will that make me have a good life? ...

I'm thinking: Poor Myrtle & Annie.

Lucky Patrick, Lucky me.

But they have Jesus.

But I have my new class.

Insects evolved wings 350 million years ago.

Bird bones have a honeycomb structure.

We have 98% the same genes as chimps and gorillas.

The synapses of that little Jeremy,

my sweet little baby-sitting boy from last year,

his synapses are already formed. He is 3.

Science is amazing. Patrick even says it's beautiful.

One thing for sure: It's so quiet in this room.

You can hear the teacher whenever you want to.

I think they even have more watts in the bulbs.

Her childhood playmate, Jody, returns to her building and her school, and her world is rocked to the core by her powerful romantic feelings for this boy who is now a gorgeous young man who swims every day and smells like a swimming pool.

A mature person

would not pretend her pillow

was Jody and kiss it

all crying wet tears all over it

even with stuff coming out her nose.

Somebody logical would not wake

in the middle of the night

and get up and go over to the chair

where the beautiful dress was draped over

and put her face down in it

to try to smell the delicious chlorine

and cry so confused

about everything being so spoiled.

LaVaughn is so completely and utterly 15. The big things and the small things are all catastrophic in some way ... don't you remember what that felt like? When you really started understanding how tiny you were in the scope of the universe, when you felt so raw and so lost and so alive? This book is so painfully realistic in its portrayal of those crucial moments in mid-adolescence that it makes you feel everything LaVaughn feels with the same intensity -- when her heart soars, so does yours, and when she is mortified or hurt, you want to die a thousand deaths right along with her.

And when you come to the part which explains the book's title -- oh, Lordy. There will be tears. (At least there were for me.)

I am beside myself with anticipation about the arrival of book three, This Full House, which I immediately ordered, of course, from my friendly neighborhood independent bookseller. I'm trying to carefully avoid spoilers, but from what I gather, it brings Jolly back into focus, which definitely feels right, as it was LaVaughn's relationship with her and her children that started this journey. I cannot wait to see how the story turns out.

THE BOOK THIEF by Markus Zusak

The first time I finished The Book Thief, I was on a plane riding home from a visit to see my sister for her law school graduation. I cried on page after page, my tears falling faster than I could wipe them away, sliding down my face then my chin then my neck to my shirt. I held it to my chest after closing it after the final page and cried some more, unable to stop. So you'd think I'd be all cried out over The Book Thief.

The second time I finished The Book Thief, it was two years later, just last week, and I was again on a plane, this time riding on the way to see my sister in a different city, in her new home. Again I cried. And cried and cried. And drenched my airplane cocktail napkin to the point where I held my hoodie to my face to absorb my tears and cover my face to hide my weeping. Again, I kept crying after turning the final page.

I mention the tears because I am a person who sometimes measures love for a book by the tears cried over it. And over this book I have cried many, many tears.

Here's what I know about The Book Thief: it's 550 pages long. It was a 2007 Printz Honor Book. It is one of the most beautiful books I've ever read.

It's the story of a girl who has a pretty rough start in life but who finds shelter with an unlikely pair of foster parents on Himmel Street. "Himmel" means "heaven," and this place is certainly not, but at the same time, it sort of is.

Liesel has lost her mother and brother and basically all hope in a world at war, but in her new home she finds shelter, true friends -- the kind of friends you'd live and die for -- and words. Words that blow her world wide open.

Liesel's childhood is like many childhoods -- soccer games in the street and school -- but also not. Not every child has a papa who plays the accordion and teaches her how to read in the middle of the night. Not every child has a best friend who wants to run like Jesse Owens but wants to kiss her most of all. Not every child has a Jew hiding in her freezing basement. Not every child has a mama who curses but feeds her and feeds the hidden Jew. Not every child steals books from the mayor's library, gravediggers, and fires.

This is a story narrated by death, which might annoy some readers, but it works for me. It doesn't make or break the book for me at all.

This is the story of World War II boiled down to its most basic essence: innocent people suffering and dying because of a man and people filled with hate. In a way, this book changed the entire way I think about that war. In this story, my country is the enemy because these people are on the other side because they are German.

But these people are not filled with hate. They are good. They are cold and hungry but find ways to be kind in tiny ways -- a tiny snowman carried downstairs to a basement, handmade books and drawings, sips of champagne. They love each other. And I love them, and I carry them with me always in my heart.

First Newbery Pick

For a variety of reasons (including some truly great conversations with my former coworkers and beloved friends at Children's Book World) I cannot stop thinking this, so I am writing it down here: I think WHEN YOU REACH ME by Rebecca Stead is a serious Newbery contender, and is my first true pick of the year. Also, a vacation update: I DID read THE RULES OF SURVIVAL by Nancy Werlin and BLOOM by Elizabeth Scott, but neither was in galley and both have been on my shelf for a long time and will be reviewed eventually. BUT I have also read an entire adult book, the title of which escapes me for some reason despite the fact that I enjoyed it, and am about a third of the way through THE THIRTEENTH TALE, which is SO FREAKING GREAT. I bought it in November 2007 (yes, the receipt was still tucked inside) and I can't believe it took me this long to read it.

THE WEDNESDAY WARS by Gary D. Schmidt

I was vaguely aware of The Wednesday Wars by Gary Schmidt for a while. As in, I'd heard of it and seen its cover in stores and knew it was a 2008 Newbery Honor Book and was always mildly curious about it, but not curious enough to ever pick it up until recently, when I was browsing casually in a bookstore and decided to buy the paperback.

I read it very leisurely, in the evenings for a few minutes at bedtime, and it was a really happy experience. This is one of those books that unfolded really quietly and sweetly for me -- spreading it out over many nights helped me to really savor and appreciate the way it sort of snuck its way into being wonderful.

The set up of this book is simple: a boy named Holling Hoodhood is left behind when his classmates go off to their various religious educations one afternoon a week with a teacher he think hates him. Mrs. Baker is not an easy teacher. She pushes Holling. Relentlessly. What starts with rat cage cleaning and eraser banging leads to reading Shakespeare. To Holling's surprise, but probably not to Mrs. Baker's, he really takes to it.

One thing I love about this book is how seemingly chance encounters or moments end up changing life forever. Holling's trip to the bakery in an attempt to salvage a cream puff disaster leads him to wearing feathers on his butt while playing a fairy in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Escaped classroom rats lead him into an unexpected star track career. Being assigned to read Shakespeare alters his viewpoint on pretty much everything and helps him to understand comedy and tragedy in both fiction and real life.

The thing about Holling is that people see greatness in him. He doesn't see it in himself. He doesn't hate himself or anything like that, he just sees himself as a normal kid living a normal life who has ridiculous and unfortunate things happen to him a lot of time; such is the fate of a seventh grader. But he is inspirational to me because he is open to exploring whatever it is that other people think he can do. Mr. Goldman, the baker, knows he can act. His sister knows he can stand up to his dad, even though he doesn't know it, and even though she'd never come out and say that. And Mrs. Baker -- Mrs. Baker knows that Holling can do anything. Mrs. Baker is the kind of teacher I wish I had been.

Somehow Schmidt sets this all against the backdrop of Vietnam and reveals to a modern generation of young readers all of the ways the conflict there affected and changed America. Through the death of the cafeteria lady's husband. Through the presence and alienation of Mai Thi, a Vietnamese student at school. Through the ever-present but rarely spoken about knowledge that Mrs. Baker's husband is lost somewhere in a jungle. Through the huge divide between Holling's dad, who cares mostly about prestige in the business community and making money and is totally oblivious to what it means to find yourself, and Holling's sister, who resists the war and craves peace and loves the Beatles and Bobby Kennedy and is constantly searching.

This book doesn't try to be anything but what it is. It isn't flashy, and there are no vampires or wizards or dragons, but I think it is magical. In the way that ordinary things sometimes are. It is the story of real life in 1967-68, of simple people in a simple place.

I thought it would be a story about a boy learning Shakespeare on Wednesday afternoons. Which it is. But it is so much more. I didn't expect it to be a story of the sounds people make when they hear the worst news or best news of their lives, of love and loss, war and peace, sisters and brothers, students and teachers, and friends and first loves.  I didn't know it would make me cry. I didn't know I would love it it so much. I think you will love it, too.

The WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE trailer

Can the movie POSSIBLY be as good as the trailer? (Please?)

Cybils Winners Announced!

The Cybils are the annual awards given out by kidlit bloggers for the best kidlit of the previous year. I am ashamed to say that I am not remotely involved in this yet - I didn't even vote - but I think that the awards are an awesome idea and I hope to be involved in some way in the future. In any event, some truly terrific books were honored this year, and you can see the complete list of winners here.