Kidliterate

GIVEAWAY: THE ONE AND ONLY IVAN, signed by Katherine Applegate!

Giveaway extended through Thursday, March 1st!

Thanks to the incredible generosity of the author, I have a signed first edition copy of THE ONE AND ONLY IVAN to give away to a lucky reader! I am absolutely crazy for this amazing, moving book, and I know you will be too.

If you'd like a beautiful signed copy of the awesomeness of Ivan for your very own bookshelf, simply comment here or over at the Kidliterate Facebook page. I'll draw the winner this coming Wednesday, February 29th. If you're commenting here, please make sure you check back - I had a couple of winners last time I was never able to reach, and ended up having to give those books away to someone else.

(Everyone will be relieved to know that we have just had FedEx pickups arranged at work, and shipping of winnings should now not take...er...a few months, in some cases. If you are still waiting on a prize from the year-end giveaway, everything should be mailed out by the middle of next week.)

THE ONE AND ONLY IVAN by Katherine Applegate

(this isn't out yet, but because it comes out Tuesday (January 17th 2012) I decided to skip the "looking ahead" part of the title. just in case you were wondering. you probably weren't. carry on.)

Let me begin this review by saying: this is the first book to land on my 2013 Newbery shortlist. 

THE ONE AND ONLY IVAN is based on the true story of a gorilla named Ivan who lived in a mall in Washington State and was a tourist attraction, along with some other animals. IVAN is narrated by Ivan himself, mostly as a series of thoughts - the only dialogue comes in when Ivan either hears humans speaking or speaks to another animal himself. And while this is not my favorite way for an author to write a book, it works perfectly for this one and I wouldn't have it changed for anything in the world.

At the beginning of the story, Ivan is bored but mostly content with the world of the mall, where he is a star attraction. He has friends (Bob the stray dog; Stella the elephant) and frequent visitors (his keeper/owner, Mack, and Julia, daughter of the mall's custodian). He eats; he sleeps; he draws though what comes out of his pencils and crayons never matches what's in his head. Things are a little up and a little down but mostly status quo at the mall...until Ruby arrives. 

Ruby's a baby elephant, purchased from a terrible circus, who grew up in the wild. Humans killed her family and sold her to the circus, who chained her to the floor most of the day, until finally she ended up at the mall. Stella looks after her like a mother, but Ruby cannot settle, cannot fully adjust to everything that's been taken from her. And then Stella gets sick. And one night, Stella extracts a promise from Ivan - that after she's gone, Ivan will find Ruby a safe place. A "life different than mine." 

It will take everything Ivan is, every ounce of will he has, to keep his promise to Stella.

I've said before that I don't really love animal stories, and I don't. It takes something really special for me to love an animal story, and this book has spades of special. The language is exquisite. I read it to myself but I found myself wishing Molly were just a little older so I could read it aloud to her. I wanted a classful of kids to read it aloud to. Sometimes I just read a line or two aloud to myself so I could hear the words ring in my ears. 

This is a book of love and hope and promises; of pain and fear and sorrow; of found family. This is a book that will gently turn your heart inside out and back again. This is a book that you may feel compelled to hug when you have finished it. 

This is a book I want you to know about, and I want you to read it, and I hope that you love it as much as I did.

 

TUESDAYS AT THE CASTLE by Jessica Day George

First, a bit of business: Kidliterate now has a Facebook page, and I am giving away books every time we get a hundred new followers. When we got to 100, I gave away a complete set of Emily Jenkins' TOYS series in hardcover! So go here to like us on Facebook. Don't worry - we don't post often, so we won't be clogging up your feed!

Longtime readers of this blog (or shoppers at my former employer, The Bookstore That Shall Not Be Named) will most likely remember how unhappy I was when I learned that DRAGON SPEAR would be the last of Jessica Day George's books about the superlatively awesome Creel. And you may also remember that said book made my 2009 Favorites list (and that I again expressed my unhappiness about said series ending). Now, Ms. George has a good sense of humor, as her comment on that entry shows, and she did produce an awesome sequel to the gorgeous PRINCESS OF THE MIDNIGHT BALL (called PRINCESS OF GLASS), and is writing a third in that series.

So even though I still want more Creel (MORE!), I can't possibly stay mad at someone who writes these books I love so much. Because, my friends, she went and did it again - and not in a Britney type of way. This time, she's gone and created Princess Celie, and darned if I'm not head over heels again. 

Celie lives in Castle Glower, where Tuesdays are amazing. Why, you ask? Because on Tuesdays, the castle gets bored and changes itself. It might rearrange some corridors, or add a new room or two, or stick an entire wing on one end, or pop on some new towers. That door you take to get where you go? Might not be there on Tuesday. It was certainly frustrating to some visitors, but "Celie truly loved Castle Glower. She never minded being late for lessons because the corridor outside her room had become twice as long, and she certainly didn't mind the new room in the south wing that had a bouncy floor. Even if you could only get to it by climbing through the fireplace of the Winter Dining Hall." And Celie felt like the Castle loved her, too. Whenever she urgently needed to be somewhere, she could usually get there quickly. When she was sick, the Castle filled her room with flowers. It left her snacks when she was hungry and led her to fun places when she needed something to do.

Not only does the Castle change itself when bored, it also changes itself to alter circumstances or to help a situation along. The current King, Celie's father, was chosen by the Castle. If the Castle furnished a visitor's room poorly, the guards knew to keep a close eye on them. It seemed like the Castle truly knew everyone and exactly what was going on, all the time. 

So when Celie's parents and older brother disappear and she and her sister and younger brother are left alone with a Council that doesn't seem all that broken up about the vanished royals, it is to the Castle that the prince and princesses turn for help. But when the situation turns ever more dangerous and even the Castle seems unable to help, will Celie be able to save her family?

This is a GREAT read-aloud. It's also perfect for kids who love Gail Carson Levine or Jean Ferris or E.D. Baker. This is younger than Ms. George's other books, though fans of DRAGON SLIPPERS will find much to love here. I love feisty, whipsmart Celie and the motley band of allies she assembles under the watchful eyes of the Council scoundrels. I love how she learns and grows during the book but the learning and growing is all wrapped in rollicking adventure and secret passageways and spying and the most awesome Castle in kids' books. I love her relationship with her siblings, especially Rolf, the king's heir. I love how when you read this book, you can go from heart-pounding excitement to loud laughter on the same page.

AND it's the first book of three, so we've got two to go, and then you can all be mad with me at the end. At least until Jessica Day George pulls another awesome heroine out of her seemingly endless bag of tricks. **Correction - Ms. George tells me that she doesn't know how many books there will be about Castle Glower, and that it's not intended to be a trilogy. Sad face. Well, I love this one, and will be hopeful of more!**

An Ode To Laurel Snyder

I searched Kidliterate to find all of the other times I've reviewed Laurel Snyder's work here, and was horrified to find...none. I mentioned her awesome ANY WHICH WALL in my PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING WAIT FOR HARRY POTTER post, but other than that, no love for Laurel.

What is the matter with me??

Laurel Snyder writes like the child of Zilpha Keatley Snyder and Edward Eager, with a generous side of Judy Blume. Her books exist in worlds both real and unreal, and she is at her best when she is dabbling in a little magical realism. When I was nine or so, I would have wanted to live inside her books. I would have written her a letter about how much I loved her and I wouldn't have cared if I ever heard back. If her books had been published when I was nine, I probably would have read them in Dell Yearling editions, because she's a Random House novelist. They would have had the little horse on the top of the cover and that distinctive frame around the cover picture. I would have dog-eared them and read them over and over and never, ever loaned them to friends, because I didn't have a lot of money for books and I never wanted to risk losing them.

But I didn't have Laurel when I was nine, because Wikipedia tells me that when I was nine, Laurel was seven. So instead we were reading the same books around the same time, and we were growing up on the same coast and eating the same TastyKakes. And I grew up to be someone who puts books in the hands of kids, and Laurel grew up to be someone who writes the stories that fill some of those books.

Laurel's books sneak up on you. I don't think I realized how much I loved UP AND DOWN THE SCRATCHY MOUNTAINS (the story of Lucy the milkmaid, best friend of the prince, who's told she's "unsuitable" and goes up the mountains to find her vanished mother and her future) until I found myself talking about it almost every day in the bookstore. "Have I given you UP AND DOWN THE SCRATCHY MOUNTAINS?" I would ask young girl after young girl. If the answer was "no!" I would become appalled with myself. I WAS DEPRIVING A GIRL OF LUCY. With each subsequent handsell I found myself talking about it more and more. (Did I sell it to YOU? If not, I am sorry. I was depriving you of Lucy.)

In the summer I found myself frequently turning to the absolutely delightful ANY WHICH WALL, which is such a charming homage to Edward Eager that I find myself smiling just typing about it. The premise is simple: four bored kids find a magical wall in the middle of a cornfield; the wall transports them to other times and places. So simple. It would be so easy for a book with a plot this basically simple to be...trite. Derivative. Dull. But in Laurel's hands it turns into a perfect summer book, one that begs to be read aloud from the backseat as Mom or Dad or Adult Of Your Choice drives you down a long, long highway to the home of a relative or to a far-off campsite. I like to sell AWW with GONE-AWAY LAKE or THE SATURDAYS (assuming the reader has already plowed through Mr. Eager's books), because nothing's better than a little pile of books filled with the magic of summer, and I love selling new books alongside classic stories so that the reader can make the connections between the past and the present of storytelling. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't; either way, I find it delightful.

(I have to confess here that I have not actually read PENNY DREADFUL. I have been feeling guilty about this for about a year and a half. It is in my pile. I don't know what happened there.)

This month Laurel gave us BIGGER THAN A BREAD BOX. I needed this book when I was nine. I wish I could go back in time and give it to myself. When I was nine, I knew things were not good in my house. They never got any better. And there weren't really any books about kids like me, kids with a little brother whose parents weren't doing well; whose families were splitting apart. My friends didn't seem to be going through the same thing, either. It was a pretty lonely time, and books that helped...well, they were few and far between.

In BIGGER THAN A BREAD BOX, we meet 12 year old Rebecca. Rebecca's parents are going through a really bad patch, and her mom packs Rebecca and her brother Lew into the car and takes them from Baltimore to Atlanta to temporarily live with their grandmother. She gives Rebecca no warning about this, and suddenly, the whole world is different. But early in the trip Rebecca finds a mysterious bread box in the attic, and discovers that she can wish for anything she wants and as long as it fits in the bread box, it will appear. The wishing is amazing, but of course what Rebecca really wants can't fit in the box. She'll need to figure out other ways to cope with the changes in her world.

I wanted to hug this book, and I wanted it to hug nine-year-old me. And then I just became so, so glad that this book was in the world, and that kids who were like me back then have this kind of story to turn to. This book makes you feel like you're not alone in your suffering. I think it can help a kid make sense of their own broken world, and to see that families can break apart and still stay together in other ways. Family separation and divorce are things that are still hard to talk about, 28 years after my parents divorced. I think it's hard for kids to talk to their parents about things like this, and that makes books that deal with the subject even more important.

In the hands of another writer, this could have been a depressing, heavy-handed book. But Laurel comes along and sprinkles it with just enough magic and hope to keep it from being so, but not enough to make it sickly sweet or unrealistic. Rebecca feels so much like a real person to me, and because of that, I find making wishes and opening a bread box to find they've come true to be...believable. That's so hard. Magical realism is so hard to do right, but Laurel hits the right tone every time.

It's also so much harder to be a quiet writer than it is to be a loud one. I love the big, brassy, fantastical books that crowd the NYT bestseller list as much as the next girl, but the books that worm their way into my heart and stay there forever are always the quieter ones. The ones I know the author agonized over; the books that might have started as tiny seeds years ago and finally blossomed after long, long hours of work. The books that sneak up on me are the ones that stay with me the longest.

And more and more often, I find that they're by Laurel Snyder.

WITH A NAME LIKE LOVE by Tess Hilmo

Before I start writing the actual review, I feel compelled to make something clear: OKAY FOR NOW by Gary Schmidt is my Newbery pick, and has been since the moment I read it. Months ago. In manuscript. On my iPhone. Three times in a row. 

But this book is going to give it a run for its money, and justifiably so. 

Ollie Love's daddy is a traveling preacher, the kind who moves his family around the country, setting up a revival tent and bringing the Word to the far-flung masses. Ollie knows the drill by now - they'll be there three days at the most; the townspeople will come and listen; her daddy will do his best to bring the people what he thinks they need; and then the family will move on. And it used to be exciting, the life on the open road, a new town at least once a week - but Ollie's a little older now, and times are changing, and she's thinking it would be mighty nice to settle down in one place with her daddy installed in his own church and the family installed in their own house. With plumbing, and electricity, and a town school Ollie and her siblings could go to every day. Ollie believes in what her daddy does, in what her family does, but she longs for more - she just doesn't know how to say it, because the idea of disappointing her beloved father is not one she can fully contemplate.

But on their first day in BInder, Ollie meets Luke, whose mom is in jail for killing his dad. Luke tells Ollie his mom is innocent, and Ollie believes him. She also believes that the only person who could convince the town that Luke's mom is innocent is her daddy - if only she can get him to stay around long enough to do it. This 1957 Arkansas town is filled with people who believe Luke's mama was as no-good as his daddy, and that Luke is destined to follow in their footsteps. A little investigation by Ollie, however, reveals a sad story of abuse and a house where all love has been strangled into nonexistence. Her kind heart and the sense of justice her family's instilled in her will not allow her to leave Luke's story alone, and with the help of her family and a kindhearted woman in town, Mrs. Mahoney, she sets out to make things right.

Some at Goodreads have described this as "To Kill A Mockingbird for the middle-grade set." I am often reluctant to compare anything to a classic, especially such an iconic, universally beloved one as TKAM, but I don't think the comparison hurts WANLL one bit. Ollie's a marvelous, Scout-like character with a strong sense of family and a sudden devotion to social justice that is breathtaking in the way it grabs hold of her. Her view of the world changes so many times during the course of this novel, and she grows up quickly in some very important ways. You know she is going to grow up to be an extraordinary woman outside the pages of her story, and you are lucky for every moment you spend in her company within it.

I am actually tearing up all over again just thinking about this marvelous debut novel from Tess Hilmo. I was on the ABA New Voices committee this year (which will get its own post, as it happened entirely during the many months this site sat near-dormant), and when we were readying our personal picks for finalists, this book came up during the discussion. For some reason, most of us hadn't gotten a copy, and the committee members who had felt so strongly about it that they rushed us out an email version of the manuscript. By the time we all quickly finished it, I think we all knew it would make the list handily. And to think we nearly missed it!

This one will have a long, long, incredibly deserved life, and I can only say the same for Tess Hilmo's career.  

ALANNA - THE FIRST ADVENTURE, SONG OF THE LIONESS - BOOK ONE by Tamora Pierce

note from Melissa: I love Kymm's reviews of stuff from ages ago. I've actually never read Alanna, despite meaning to for...well...ever. Now I REALLY want to read it. And I think reviews of old stuff really help a new crowd discover it!

   When I picked this one out of the library, I did so because it was the first of a series that looked interesting, not realizing that Tamora Pierce is She of Many Many Series and if I end up enjoying this one I'll just be chasing my tail desperately trying to quiet my OCD by reading them all, but then she'll just keep writing new ones and I'll never enver finish!  

That said, I plucked this one out of the pile and started on it anyway.

Alanna and her twin, Thom, are being sent off to precicely the opposite futures that they long for, Thom to become a knight and Alanna to go to the convent to become a lady (where they also teach sorcery, which is what Thom wants, not to beome a lady), so they decide to switch places.  Alanna chops off her hair and pretends to be Alan, and Thom just goes off to the convent because they train boys, too.  How fortunate that he doesn't have to pretend to be a girl.

When Alanna, now pretending to be Alan, gets to the palace, she makes friends with the prince and an enemy of a bully, she works hard because she is stubborn, she uses the magic that she fears to save a life, she learns to fight, she binds her chest, she is liked and admired by all, though she neither knows nor understands why.  Exciting things happen, and more exciting things will happen in three more books as Alanna grows up to become the warrior maiden that she wants to be.

This is an enjoyable book and I look forward to reading the other three, but it is clearly the work of a very young writer.  I was surprised when I did the math and found that Tamora Pierce was almost 30 when this was published, but it says on Wikipedia that she wrote these books in college, which makes perfect sense, because this is the character that you write when you are in high school.

Alanna has red hair and purple eyes (how many purple-eyed heroines did I come up with as a child?  As many as Anne Shirley did, I'm sure), she has an amazing amount of magical ability, more than anyone else, she beats up the bully even though she is smaller and a girl, she is admired by everyone, everyone who is nice likes her the best, but because she doesn't know it, she's not stuck up, and nobody is jealous that she gets special attention because they see that she is special and deserves it.  This is the person that we all pretended to be in grade school, the special, magical heroine worknig against great odds.  With purple eyes.

LOOKING AHEAD: Ignatius MacFarland: Frequenaut! by Paul Feig

This is one of my four (so far) favorite fall books, and definitely my favorite fall middle-grade release. (No, I haven't told you about my other three yet; patience, dear readers.)

My love for Paul Feig already knew no bounds. I am a huge fan of the late, lamented TV show Freaks and Geeks (seriously huge - I own the $140 super DVD set that came in a replica yearbook with ninety bazillion hours of extras), and I also think his two memoirs of earlier life as a supergeek (Kick Me: Adventures in Adolescence and Superstud)  are hilarious. So when I found out that Paul (I can call you Paul, right?) was writing a kids' novel I was pretty excited. And then the galley came and I was even more excited. So excited that I slipped the only copy off the galley shelf at the bookstore where I used to work and moved it with me to St. Louis. I finally unpacked that box last week, and there was Ignatius MacFarland: Frequenaut! staring up at me. Read me, read me, it implored. And so I did.

Dude. This is one funny book. This is one thrilling book. This is one fine middle-grade novel. It's sci-fi! It's comedy! It's freaking fantastic. Ignatius (Iggy) is one of those kids who is destined to be bullied in school, and he is. He has two friends who are equally bully-able, and they are walking targets for the school's population of buttheads. Iggy has grown weary of it all and continually wishes that an alien might spot him one day and whisk him off to another planet. When this doesn't happen, he decides that maybe he could build a rocket and blast himself into space, where of course an alien civilization will take him in and change his life. So the kids build this hilariously incompetent rocket out of a garbage can and license plates and a lot of other crap, and then one of them swipes his brother's illegal fireworks stash and they clean the gunpowder out of the fireworks and fill a coffee can with it (Uh...guys? Bad idea, okay?). They light the can on fire, and Iggy decides at the last minute that maybe this is a bad idea, but his backpack gets stuck on something and he can't get out of the garbage can rocket and then...BOOM.

When he comes to, he seems to be in the middle of the same field. Except the only thing that's the same is the basic terrain. What he doesn't yet know is that the explosion shifted him into another Frequency - like an alternate universe. He's technically in the same place, just slightly sideways. He meets a 16 year old girl named Karen who had a chemistry lab accident a year ago, which is how she ended up in this other Frequency, which is otherwise populated by a variety of bizarre alien creatures. Even more bizarre: five years back, a teacher at the high school in Iggy's neighborhood was supposedly killed when his house exploded. The teacher's in this Frequency, too, except he's reinvented himself as the President of the aliens and taken over the world. Karen is trying to stop him, and she wants Iggy to help her. Iggy just wants to get back to his own Frequency. However, it seems that once you become a Frequenaut, getting out of your current Frequency isn't as easy as it seems - especially not when your only friend is a one-woman revolutionary band and is being hunted by the President's army.

The plot is like nothing I've ever read before, and the book is what we'd been wishing for at the bookstore for years - not just sci-fi, but funny sci-fi. This is going to be a great book for kids who like stuff like The Mysterious Benedict Society - smart kids who like their adventure mixed up with a little comedy and a whole lot of brain activity. I love this book and I hope Paul Feig comes to St. Louis so I can tell him how much I love it in person.

Publisher: Little, Brown Publication Date: September 1, 2008