Newbery & Chai

A journey through all 104 Newbery Award-winning books. Currently reading: Out of the Dust (1998)

[newberyandchai]

Welcome!

i.e., it's about time for an intro post to pin:

My name is Abby, and I'm on a quest to read every single winner of the Newbery Medal since the award's inception in 1921. Follow along as I revisit childhood favorites and discover new ones (as well as the occasional disappointment; it happens) and share my takeaways and thoughts on each book.

You can find the Google Doc that's tracking my progress (as well as rating information at a glance) here, and you can view this blog's entire post archive here. You can also find plot info on each award winner here.

Happy reading!~

[newberyandchai]

It's Like This, Cat (1964)

It’s Like This, Cat had all the beats I generally adore in a kids’ book: a slice-of-life story from a different time period in which nothing really happens, but the main character grows or changes in some significant, possibly unspoken way by the end of it. I would put this book in the same category as Dead End in Norvelt and When You Reach Me, both of which I loved and gave full 10/10s. This one didn’t leave quite the same impression in terms of telling a story with funny quirks or unique characters, but I get the feeling this book walked so those stories from the early 2010s could run.

There’s just something exciting about a young person navigating mid-20th century New York City at a time when life didn’t revolve around a series of rectangles (no Netflix, no smartphones, no PS5, no GPS, no other mysterious acronyms…). You’d make plans in person with someone months in advance and be unable to receive a texted guarantee that they’d still be showing up, or you’d find yourself unable to let anyone know where you were because you were out of change (“Pop! … There’s this girl I know in a phone booth in Macy’s and her dime is going to run out and she hasn’t anymore money. What’ll I do?”). From this book, I gathered that there was a kind of freedom to explore your surroundings and an implicit trust in others that doesn’t seem to exist these days, or at least not in the same way it once did. (Maybe the same effect could be recreated just by leaving our phones at home for short periods of time, like during a simple trip to the grocery store — but who in their right mind would willingly do that in 2025?)

Luckily, the story is pretty straightforward. The book’s first sentence sums up the entire premise: 

My father is always talking about how a dog can be very educational for a boy. This is one reason why I got a cat.

Dave Mitchell is a fairly normal kid who adopts a tomcat hanging around the apartment of his neighbor, a crazy cat lady he calls Aunt Kate. He names him Cat (of course), and throughout the book, Cat is the underlying factor (or cat-alyst, if you will) that brings a few important people into Dave’s life: Tom, whom he meets when Cat gets trapped in the cellar of a building in Gramercy Park; and Mary, a girl he struck up a conversation with at Coney Island when Dave brought Cat to the beach one day.

The most central side story involves Tom, who was accused of a robbery after (sort of) being in the wrong place at the wrong time: Someone he ran into said they’d give him $10 (~$100 today) to steal a suitcase from an apartment building’s cellar, but after retrieving it and opening the case to find a lot of important-looking legal papers, he gets spooked and tries to return the case to where he stole it from, which is when he gets caught by the police. Tom’s backstory is examined in more detail throughout the book, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

Some other things (those slices of life) also take place:

Aunt Kate, normally a bit of a shut-in, suddenly inherits her estranged brother’s fortune after he dies and the press swarm her apartment, with one of them ultimately stepping on one of her home’s ever-present kittens and killing it. (That part wasn’t quite the point of that chapter, but that detail made me sick to my stomach.)

Dave has a bad time hanging out with some girls his childhood friend Nick introduces him to and discovers that Nick is much more interested in relationships with any attractive girl, regardless of their personality.

Tom introduces Dave to Hilda (his kind-of girlfriend), who gives Dave some insight into Tom’s past and difficult family relationships.

Dave hangs out with Mary a few times and notices that she’s not like the other girls (heh).

At the end of the book, Tom visits Dave’s family and shares his plan to marry Hilda and go into the Army to get his life on track. Dave’s father makes a toast to the happy couple, but Dave toasts to Cat as well, saying, “Tom wouldn’t even be standing here if it wasn’t for Cat.”

The dynamic between Dave and his father (whom he calls “Pop”) was what I noticed most throughout the book. It seems to represent the same kind of generational woes Gen Xers seem to have with millennials (and vice versa). The book is set in the early 60s when Dave is 14, which means Dave’s father’s formative years were likely in the late 1930s or early 1940s. These two eras encompass vastly different times in America (think wartime patriotism and rationing vs. the emergence of hippies leading up to the Summer of Love). As a result, Dave’s father seems to think that Dave is wasting his life by not doing everything he can to get a job and be useful to society instead of just enjoying being a kid. Near the beginning of the book, Dave is enjoying a Harry Belafonte record, which his father doesn’t appreciate:

“You’re not going to play that stuff in this house!” he roars. “Why aren’t you outdoors, anyway? Baby-sitting! Baby-talk records! When I was your age, I made money on a newspaper-delivery route, and my dog Jeff and I used to go ten miles chasing rabbits on a good Sunday.” “Pops,” I say patiently, “there are no rabbits out on Third Avenue. Honest, there aren’t.” “Don’t get fresh!” Pop jerks the plug out of the record player so hard the needle skips, which probably wrecks my record. So I get mad and start yelling too.

There are other indicators that the kids in Dave’s generation aren’t living up to their parents’ expectations or choosing the same paths. At the beginning of Dave’s first year of high school, a kid he knew from his middle school says he didn’t make it into the “genius factory” high school his father wanted him to go to and even calls himself “Biggest Failure of the Year.” He also mentions later on that his father is “practically telling [him] how to breathe better every minute.”

On the opposite end of the parenting spectrum is Tom’s father, who essentially abandoned his son and gave Tom some lasting trauma that he's is preoccupied with throughout the book. Hilda explains to Dave that while Tom was in his first semester at NYU, his father wrote him a letter telling him not to come home for Christmas. While he was staying in his dorm over the holidays, he got into some horseplay with the other boys there and caused some water damage to the dorm. The other boys’ parents stuck by their sons and paid for the damages, but Tom’s father didn’t help him out financially at all. This left Tom unable to pay his tuition, so he dropped out, started living at the YMCA, and took on a few different jobs.

In some ways, Dave’s father (let’s just call him Pop for simplicity’s sake) steps in and lightly parents Tom, who is just a few years older than Dave at 18. Dave initially put Tom in touch with Pop after the theft situation near the beginning of the book because Pop is a lawyer, but Pop takes a vested interest in providing guidance to Tom even after that incident. Eventually, Pop tells Tom that he thinks it would be a good idea for Tom to write his father fessing up to everything and apologizing, but the letter ends up being returned to sender:

We’re sitting around the living room one evening, sorting stuff out, when the doorbell rings. I go answer it, and Tom walks in. He nods at me like he hardly sees me and comes into the living room. … He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a letter. … He throws it down on Dad’s table.

It turns out that Tom’s father and his new wife have left town and not even given Tom their forwarding address. Dave comments on the fact that after Pop hears this, his foot starts to twitch like he’s “about to blow,” but surprisingly he responds calmly to Tom and even apologizes: “Well, I steered you wrong. I’m sorry. But maybe it’s just as well to have it settled.”

This is very different from how Pop reacts to Dave doing something innocuous like just listening to a record, in which irritation seems to be the default emotion. But I guess it would make sense that Pop, seeing an older kid in dire straits, would be more supportive and helpful with getting him out of a bad situation while treating his son, who has little to no problems to speak of, with annoyance and even anger (like the “You think you have it rough? I’ll give you something to cry about” type of parent).

The book never explicitly makes this connection, but if we assume Pop grew up in a time of global uncertainty around WWII, he would likely be sympathetic to others in similar unstable life situations while viewing his own son as lazy and irresponsible due to his relatively stress-free, luxurious childhood in NYC. But I don’t think that hostility is necessarily deserved — when people improve their life circumstances to provide for their families and give them opportunities they likely didn’t have as young adults, the same strong work ethic and tolerance for discomfort the parents developed won't be present in their offspring because those children were never in situations in which they would be forced to cultivate those things (this article mentions this phenomenon in more detail, specifically between first- vs. second-generation immigrants).

And outside of work ethic, it just seems unreasonable to expect your children to be intrinstically grateful for things they've never had to go without before because you made sure that never happened in the first place. Gratitude can be imparted in other ways, but "you should be grateful for X because I went without it when I was your age" never seems to be an effective strategy and just leads to frustration on both sides.

But it’s also possible that the specific generational aspect is entirely irrelevant and the book is just commenting on the fact that some adults treat kids who aren’t their children differently than how they treat their own — like showing a sympathetic and more compassionate side to kids who didn’t have the same relatively cushy upbringing as what they feel they gave their own child. Though Dave and his father fight often, Dave is provided for by his parents in ways that Tom never was. I doubt that Dave’s father, despite how frequently they argued, would have left him on his own to pay for the same thing that ultimately cost Tom his chance at a world-class education.

From another totally different perspective, Mary’s family treats her almost like an adult roommate who is already completely independent, and they’re much more concerned with her intellectual development (like her thinking “poetic thoughts”) while Mary is more interested in science. Her parents are both heavily cerebral, and Dave is surprised to see that her mom is a real “beatnik mother” wearing jeans and a black shirt at a time when most women weren’t yet wearing pants in public. Mary calls her mother by her first name, Nina, and says she “probably never read a kids’ book in her life” while growing up in Paris. Dave notices that Nina “doesn’t seem to pay any attention to who Mary brings home,” and she even offers a cigarette to him (at 14!), which he declines. 

All of the characters seem to desire qualities in their parents that the others bemoan. Tom remarks at one point that he wishes his parents cared about him in the way Dave’s care about him (despite that care usually manifesting in the form of arguments), but Dave also seems to wish that his parents were as laid-back and hands-off as Mary’s. Still, he thinks, “Funny, though, [Pop] worrying about me getting Mary home safe when her own mother doesn’t worry any.”

The book doesn’t really have a lot happening plot-wise, but I think it ultimately serves as a snapshot of a time period in which great social and political change was just around the corner. Suddenly the future doesn’t seem so straightforward, and kids are being left to figure out their own lives and ask questions their parents may not have had to ask themselves:

“So here we are. What do we do next?” [Hilda] looks at me—me, age fourteen, as if I might actually know—and it’s unnerving. Everyone I know, their life goes along in set periods: grade school, junior high, high school, college, and maybe getting married. They don’t really have to think about what comes next.

And ~60 years later, we’re out here asking ourselves the same questions, except it’s in the form of a viral BlueSky or Tumblr post attempting to make a joke about the the dismal future millennials and Gen Z have in front of them (us) and the meaningless of existence... or it's just something a bit like this.

Ultimately, I enjoyed this book quite a bit, and an 8/10 (Recommendable) feels solidly deserved.

[newberyandchai]

Bud, Not Buddy (2000)

I read Bud, Not Buddy multiple times in school (I think at least twice in 4th grade, maybe once more in 5th) and loved it. This was during my “carrying around small objects” phase, when I was reading a lot of books about magic spellbooks and haunted jewels and other magic items, so Bud (not Buddy) carrying around his only worldly possessions in an old suitcase piqued my interest. Bud’s voice is also very unique; the story is told in first person, and he uses all the fun language you would expect from a precocious child. (My favorite phrases he uses repeatedly are “he could kiss my wrist” and “woop, zoop, sloop.”)

This was a book that was not only entertaining as a kid, but even more meaningful when reading it again as an adult. Bud has more self-preservation and determination than most adults (myself included) at 10 years old. He describes his emotions and how he makes sense of them in ways that are both innocent and wise at the same time. It really made me feel as though I was listening to a story told by a real 10-year-old, not an adult pretending to be someone that age.

As an example, Bud maintains a list of rules called “Bud Caldwell’s Rules and Things for Having a Funner Life and Making a Better Liar Out of Yourself.” These include specific tidbits of wisdom such as:

“If you’ve got to tell a lie, make sure it’s simple and easy to remember” (Rules and Things #3)

“When you make up your mind to do something, hurry up and do it, if you wait you might talk yourself out of what you wanted in the first place” (Rules and Things #328)

“When you wake up and don’t know for sure where you’re at and there’s a bunch of people standing around you, it’s best to pretend you’re still asleep until you can figure out what’s going on and what you should do” (Rules and Things #29)

You get the sense that Bud could get himself out of any bad situation he may find himself in — and there are many.

A brief summary (with spoilers)!

It’s 1936 in Michigan, and Bud is a 10-year-old Black orphan who has been sent to live with several foster families after his mother’s death. However, he is always returned to the orphanage after just a few days. When the story starts, Bud's latest foster family takes him home to live with them, but their biological son torments him by (among other things) sticking a Ticonderoga pencil up his nose while he’s sleeping. Bud finally punches the boy, but when the son plays the victim to his parents, they decide to take Bud back to the orphanage the next day. They lock him in their garden shed for the night, but after he disturbs a hornet nest, he escapes and decides to run away (but not without first getting even on the boy by making him wet the bed with the age-old warm water trick). Bud decides to set out to find who he believes is his real father — the musician Herman E. Calloway — which he deduced after seeing a flyer his mother brought home one day:

The paper was starting to wear out from me looking at it so much but I liked checking to see if there was anything I hadn’t noticed before. It was like something was telling me there was a message for me on this flyer but I didn’t have the decoder ring to read what it was. Across the top of the flyer writ in big black letters were the words Limited Engagement … Underneath that in big letters again it said, “HERMAN E. CALLOWAY and the Dusky Devastators of the Depression!!!!!! … then in the middle of the flyer was a blurry picture of the man I have a real good suspicion about. I’ve never met him, but I have a pretty good feeling that this guy must be my father. … I remember Momma bringing this flyer with her when she came from working one day, I remember because she got very upset when she put it on the supper table and kept looking at it and picking it up and putting it back and moving it around. I was only six then and couldn’t understand why this one got her so upset, she kept four others like it in her dressing table, but this one really got her jumpy.

Along the way, Bud ends up in a series of what I would call purposeful misadventures: He spends some time at a library he used to visit with his mother, attempts to train-hop after spending a night in a Hooverville, becomes the temporary “son” of a family in order to receive a free meal at the city mission, and even hitchhikes across the state with a stranger. He finally reaches Herman E. Calloway, but the man turns out to be grumpy, mean, and much older than he expected.

Despite Herman's cold demeanor, the other band members Bud meets are kind to him while figuring out what to do about his sudden appearance and unbelievable claim. He becomes enamored with music after hearing the band play and finally feels at home with them — especially with Miss Thomas, the group's singer, who acts especially maternal toward Bud. After staying with them for a few days, Herman comes across some of Bud's belongings from his treasured suitcase and angrily claims he stole them. After the misunderstanding is cleared up, everyone soon realizes that Bud is actually Herman's grandson, but it’s news to everyone in the group that Bud's mother has died.

Bud attempts to comfort Herman while he grieves, which is a turning point in their relationship with each other. However, Bud wonders why Herman never visited or made the effort to see him and his mother before now:

“Bud,” [Miss Thomas] said, “Mr. C–excuse me, your granddad didn’t know anything about you. No one knew where your mother had gone.” Mr. Jimmy said, “That’s right, son, she just up and run off one day. I mean we all knew Herman was hard on her, but it wasn’t like it was nothing personal, he was hard on everybody. I used to tell him all the time to slack off some on the girl, to go easy, but I can remember his exact words, he said ‘Easy-go don’t make the mare run. This is a hard world, especially for a Negro woman, there’s a hundred million folks out there of every shade and hue, both male and female, who are just dying to be harder on her than I ever could be. She’s got to be ready.’”

Miss Thomas explains that Herman was extremely proud of his daughter (“He used to crow about how his mother and father had been born slaves and how now it was only two generations later and the Calloways had come so far and worked so hard that [his daughter] was going to be a teacher”), but eventually the pressure from him was too much and she left. After some of the shock of her passing has worn off, the other band members gift Bud his own alto sax and give him a jazzy nickname, Sleepy LaBone. Near the end of the book, he realizes that he doesn’t need his special suitcase or the objects inside to remember his mother:

“I didn’t need those other things with me all of the time. I didn’t need them to remind me of Momma, I couldn’t think about her any more if there were a hundred hours in every day and a thousand days in every week. I couldn’t think of my momma any better than I already do.”

Something I noticed during this read was that the adults in the story sometimes tossed in commentary about the current times that Bud didn’t understand or concern himself with as a 10-year-old, but the reader could use that information to pick up on some historical context. For example, the man who picks Bud up from the side of the road mentions that being out after dark in this part of the country is dangerous, specifically for Black people:

“...Bud-not-Buddy, you don’t know how lucky you are I came through here, some of those Owosso folks used to have a sign hanging along here that said, and I’m going to clean up the language for you, it said, ‘To Our Negro Friends Who Are Passing Through, Kindly Don’t Let the Sun Set on Your Rear End in Owosso!’”

Bud doesn’t react to this information and is much more concerned about securing the safety of his suitcase, but the reader would know this was in reference to sundown towns. But even when reading this at Bud's age, this detail wasn't lost on me, and I remember this scene coming to mind when learning more about the Jim Crow era in high school. Thinking now as an adult, this was a good way to introduce larger concepts like racial inequality to children without it being too intense or uncomfortable. It's not what the book is about, but it's not totally absent from it, either.

In fact, the entire story could be seen as a commentary on the aftermath of slavery in the early 20th century. Herman, understanding that the world was still going to treat his daughter unfairly because of both her gender and race, tried to give her a leg up on fighting discrimination when she became an adult, which included an education and a career path already decided for her. However, because it wasn’t what she wanted for herself as an individual, she went off on her own and raised Bud instead — maybe even choosing to be the parent to Bud that she didn’t have in Herman instead of carrying the full weight of her race’s legacy on her shoulders.

What I gleaned from their relationship was this: True freedom on an individual level is giving others you care about the permission to make their own choices, whether they’re shooting for the stars or just want to be someone who provides a loving, supportive home for their child.

All in all, the author really knocked it out of the park with making Bud feel like a very real child trying to figure out how the world works, a little at a time, and his distinctive voice was by far my favorite aspect of the book. 10/10, absolutely Recommendable.

[newberyandchai]

We interrupt this regularly scheduled programming to bring you...

... another project I've found myself working on (🎶)

But there are a lot of books that still need talked about (at least 10, maybe more), so know that reviews are coming! I'm determined to finish this project before 2030 — hopefully well before then, but as they say, life happens wherever we are.

Current book: Shadow of a Bull (1965)

Today's album: Dire Straits' self-titled (1978)

[newberyandchai]

The Last Cuentista (2022)

Two stinker reviews in a row!

The Last Cuentista was a disappointing read, especially because the cover art was so beautiful. It tried to blend the coziness of Mexican folklore with the clumsy hand-waviness of poorly written sci-fi, and in my opinion, it failed at what it was trying to do. The biggest sin was how many plot holes were easily missed and never explained. I feel more sad than offended that this was chosen as a more recent winner.

The plot is a little (a lot) confusing at times, so bear with me:

Petra is the daughter of two scientists who are slated to be put into cryosleep on one of a few giant spaceships. A comet is on a collision course with Earth, and only experts who can contribute to rebuilding life on a new planet were selected to help rebuild society. The “important” people will remain in stasis and be watched over by a separate group of people who will live out the rest of their natural lives on the ship (called Monitors). The Monitors will have children and raise them to take on the roles of their parents for generations until they reach the new planet (which sounds kind of messed up to me, but I guess you gotta do what you gotta do when Earth is about to blow up).

The ship needs to launch early due to riots breaking out near the ship, so Petra and her brother are quickly placed into pods by their family’s caretaker, Ben. There's a mechanism called a Cog that will feed Petra knowledge while she sleeps so she will wake up as an expert in her chosen field, but her choice — mythology — is mysteriously absent from the set curriculum. When Petra begins her cryosleep, something malfunctions and she isn't fully unconscious for a bit (which brought back serious middle school fears about Billy from the Remnants book series). She hears a struggle break out near her pod and talk of a new world order where no memories of Earth exist, and Ben is killed when he tries to stop them. Unable to move her body to intervene, though, she soon drifts off into real sleep.

When Petra wakes up hundreds of years in the future with a few other kids her age, she is immediately questioned about what she remembers of Earth by a member of “the Collective,” a new regime of sorts on the ship that requires absolute obedience and putting the group before the individual. Remembering what she heard before slipping fully into cryosleep, Petra lies and pretends to be a full member of the Collective with no memories of her previous life. The Monitors have evolved in the ~400 years of travel into having translucent skin and purple lips (alas, I can't find any accurate images of what this would look like, although I did find a troubling number of horrible AI fanart images — the last one is my favorite). After roaming the ship and not finding her parents, Petra learns that they were killed for still harboring memories of Earth. Her brother, Javier, is also assumed dead because his pod is empty.

Still, Petra makes friends with the other members of her group (despite their brainwashing), called the Zetas, along with a mutated kid named Voxy by telling them all cuentas, or Mexican folktales, at night. As their first mission, the Zetas go to the planet’s surface to retrieve plant samples along with Len, one of the mutated humans. However, he breaks out in blisters and later dies, as something related to their mutation prevents them from being protected from some kind of radiation(?). After his death, the leader of the group, Chancellor Nyla, hosts a kind of party for the ship’s inhabitants and announces they’ll all be leaving to find a planet more hospitable to the mutated humans. After this, Petra realizes she needs to make an escape attempt sooner rather than later.

Before Len’s death set the Collective’s plan to leave in motion, though, Petra had received orders to create a deforesting agent to make exploring the planet easier. In the lab, she works with an old man from a previous group, called Epsilon-5, and forged a friendship with him. But (of course) Epsilon-5 is actually Javier, and he just happened to be brought out of cryosleep much earlier than her. Javier doesn’t remember Petra at all, but she (with Voxy’s help) conveniently discovers a secret room in Nyla’s quarters that contains all of the personal belongings of everyone who originally boarded the ship. She shows Javier an important book that used to belong to him, and he begins to regain his memories. Around this time, Petra also attempts to neutralize an airborne toxin Nyla had created using one of the planet samples to kill all life on the planet.

However, Petra is found out and is forced to undergo reprogramming, as (I guess) she’s too valuable to just kill outright at this point. However, Javier, now remembering who Petra is, has altered the Cog this time to not erase her memories. She has a kind of prophetic dream where an image of Ben (I think?) tells her that he tried to keep Earth’s stories alive in her subconscious, but they’re now damaged and mostly lost. She wakes up in the middle of an escape attempt led by Javier, the other Zetas, and Voxy, but it turns out that Javier has to be left behind. Once on the planet, the group realizes Nyla has released the toxin, but Petra’s sabotage worked and it’s completely harmless. They wander around a bit and then begin to hear music — signs that the other group of humans have not only survived, but are thriving.

Some lazy things I took umbrage with:

** Everything Petra wanted to do that might have aroused suspicion was justified by “this is for the Collective" to anyone who asked. I think this happened six or seven times, maybe more. In this sense, she had no real obstacles to completing her goals; everyone around her was so brainwashed that they accepted her lies without question. I get that this was probably to make a point that those who obey orders without question become stupid to a fault, but it was to the detriment of the plot that Petra could essentially get away with every action she took to disrupt the Collective's plans with no threat. It felt like a lazy way to allow her to do everything she needed to in service of the plot.

** One of the major plot holes centers around the personal items everyone originally brought onto the ship. Given that the idea for the Collective and erasing all memories of Earth was conceived within days of the ship launching, it makes absolutely zero sense that all those items would be kept and preserved for hundreds of years – they'd just be a liability, right? When Petra shows Javier the book he brought with him all those years ago, he almost magically regains memories of who he really is, which makes the situation even more confusing. If that's all it takes to completely erode decades of brainwashing, why in the world would those items not have been destroyed almost immediately? This doesn’t work with just Javier, too; Petra shows another one of the Zetas a purple sweatshirt she was wearing while initially boarding the ship, and that girl regains all her Earth memories in the same way.

** Petra needed to neutralize the toxin Nyla created so it would thwart the Collective’s plans to kill everyone who had already landed (along with all other life, I guess), but this was all very hand-wavy in its resolution and not really part of the story. It would have been more interesting story-wise to have Petra actively discover some kind of way to prevent the toxin from being harmful instead of just writing that she used the abstract knowledge of chemistry/biology/botany she gained from the Cog, which all happened while she was asleep. I think it also would have made more sense for the deforesting agent to be the main threat to human life on the planet instead of Nyla creating a separate airborne toxin that Petra needed to separately neutralize.

My idea: Have Petra discover Epsilon-5’s real identity as her brother before the first trip to the planet’s surface, then have her find a plant during the trip that she hides from the Collective because she thinks she could use it to help recover his memories. Then, after learning about the plan to release the toxin, she would have to make a choice: use the plant to get her brother back, or use it to save all life on the planet — while losing the only chance of getting her brother to recognize her again. I think that would have made Petra seem way more like a protector of humanity's future because she made a real sacrifice. (And at the end, we could have a flash-forward of someone in the far future telling a cuenta to their child of a mythologized version of Petra’s sacrifice, having it all come full circle and showing that she successfully protected humanity and became a real hero, despite losing both her entire home planet and her last tie to that world in her brother.)

** The way the cuentas tied into the plot was a little hard to follow. When Petra tells them as bedtime stories to the other Zetas, the storise she chooses all relate to the current situation or inspire some kind of emotion in the group. But much later, there’s this whole thing about Ben storing the stories of humanity inside Petra’s head, and in a dream-state while undergoing reprogramming, she sees all of them as corrupted or incomplete. I think it was supposed to be this book’s version of the “hero’s darkest moment,” where Petra realizes that knowledge of Earth’s original history and culture is truly lost. But because we only learn that Ben had hardwired Petra’s brain (or some equivalent) to host all of this knowledge moments before — *poof* — it’s all gone now, the impact just isn’t there. I might have misunderstood this entire sequence, but I certainly did not expect a subconscious Deathly Hallows-esque dream state where Petra converses with a dead character inside her head and finds out her brain is host to a decaying library to be part of what has been (until now) a hard sci-fi book.

** Voxy is one of the mutated humans, which means that because he joined the group in their escape attempt, he can never, ever leave the escape pod once they’re on the planet’s surface or risk dying horribly like Len. I get Voxy is kind of like the team mascot kid and serves as proof that even people obeying the Collective of their own volition (without brainwashing) can want something different than the life they’ve always known, but this honestly sounds like the worst possible outcome for him, I think he should have stayed behind with Javier and worked to slowly erode the Collective’s influence from the inside, maybe attempting help others regain their memories as well.

I read this over the course of a day or two on vacation almost a year ago, so my mind is a little fuzzy on the details and what I was thinking at the time. (But maybe if pull a Javier and stare at the cover of the book again for a while, I’ll magically recall everything I thought about it, down to the last detail? Who knows.)

Boooooo. 4/10, Not Recommendable.

[newberyandchai]

A Year Down Yonder (2001)

At just 130 pages, this little book was pretty bland. I finished it months and months ago but never got around to writing a review because there wasn’t much to say. The grandmother in A Year Down Yonder is a harsh, stubborn woman who is physically huge (which is very funny to me, as grandmothers are normally waif characters and my own was certainly no exception), and she isn’t afraid to take action to get results. The book feels like Great Gatsby in the sense that it’s told through first-person point of view, but it’s really about the personality of this other larger-than-life character and how the members of the town interact with her — not so much the life of the narrator herself.

The book’s narrator is a 15-year-old girl named Mary Alice, who is sent to live with her grandmother in a small backwoods town in Illinois after her parents lose their apartment near the end of the Great Depression. Grandma is a sturdy, terrifying presence to both Mary Alice and the whole community, and the book largely focuses on detailing some of the misadventures Grandma gets both herself and Mary Alice into during her year-long stay.

The first incident gives the reader an idea of exactly who Grandma is. Mildred Burdick is Mary Alice’s seat partner at her new school, and she claims Mary Alice owes her a dollar after getting off on the wrong foot with her. When Mary Alice says she doesn’t have the money, Mildred follows Mary Alice home on her horse (which she rides to school every day) and demands the money from Grandma. Instead of getting angry, Grandma gives her food and a jar of jam to take back to her family as a way to defuse the situation. However, she also uses the opportunity to toss out some light insults about Mildred’s family in front of Mary Alice while she eats, which Mildred has no choice but to sit and take because Grandma commands some respect in the community: 

“And is your paw still in the penitentiary?” she asked Mildred. “He was framed,” Mildred mumbled, sulkily.

Despite initially seeming somewhat welcoming toward Mary Alice’s aggressor, Grandma secretly unties Mildred’s horse and steals Mildred’s shoes while she’s distracted with the food. Mildred has no choice but to walk the five miles back home in socks, believing that she only has herself to blame for not tying up her horse properly.

"Grandma,” I said, “you’ll get me killed. She wants a dollar off me. Instead, you untied her horse and slung her boots around its neck and she has to walk home.” “Barefoot,” Grandma said. “Grandma, tomorrow at school she’ll take it out of my hide.” “She won’t be in school tomorrow,” Grandma said. “I don’t see why not. She’ll ride to school tomorrow just to skin me alive.” “No, she won’t,” Grandma said. “That horse went home. I know that horse. It belongs to the Sensenbaughs. They live seven miles in the other direction, way over there past Milmine. A horse’ll go home if it gets the chance.” “You mean — ” “Mildred’s paw stole every horse he ever had. And he won’t steal another till he gets out of the penitentiary. I don’t picture Mildred walkin’ five miles both ways for an education. … I can’t fight all your battles for you, but I can give you a level start.” … Then I said, “And you acted real nice to her too, Grandma. You gave her buttermilk and that big slab of corn bread.” “Oh well.” Grandma waved herself away. “Didn’t want to send her off hungry. I knew she had a long walk ahead of her.”

This first scene sets the tone for Grandma’s general attitude toward life and the townsfolk. Her large physical stature mirrors what people think of her (or perhaps influenced it to begin with? I’m not sure which would have come first):

As big as the cobhouse doorway, she surged through it. Moonlight struck her snow-white hair, and she looked eight feet tall. She’d have given a coroner a coronary.

If it wasn’t obvious by now, Grandma is almost the opposite of every trait we typically ascribe to grandmothers. She always seems to know what she’s doing and never doubts or regrets her actions, no matter how extreme they might be. For example, when a neighbor deceives Grandma and says she can have “any pecan that has fallen” into his yard, despite there being hardly any on the ground, she starts up his tractor and rams it into his pecan tree in the dead of night, causing more to fall so she can get the most out of their agreement. Mary Alice is mortified, but Grandma seems to embody the “better to ask for forgiveness than permission” mindset:

“Grandma, did Old Man Nyquist sleep through that?” “Who knows?” she said. “Work fast.”

Grandma also knows how to handle people to get the outcome she wants. (This is a skill I will never have.) Around the same time as the pecan incident, she gets back at some teenage pranksters who are destroying everyone’s outhouses as Halloween approaches by setting up a tripwire and dumping glue on them. At a town function in the following days, she serves a slice of pie to one of the (now bald and scabbed) pranksters with his own knife that he’d left behind during the failed vandalism attempt, knowing both he and his father — the school principal — would recognize it. The father only says, “Boy, you took on the wrong privy” in response, and Grandma keeps the knife as a trophy of sorts. She didn’t have to say a single word to anyone; instead, she took matters into her own hands to solve a problem swiftly and decisively.

The book was just okay. It was entertaining, but I don’t think anyone would say this is their favorite book (unless they, too, have a giantess for a grandmother). It seems like reviews at the time offered much of the same opinion, saying it didn't have much of a plot and worked more like a series of short stories strung together. Normally I'm all for these kinds of vignette collections that don't really lead to anything plot-wise, but this just wasn't it.

However, to end on a good note, I did get a sense of how people helped each other out during the Depression and took care of each other, as well as how much everyone was preoccupied with food (pies, canned fruits, stews, baked apples, turkeys, biscuits, you name it). It seemed like Grandma was always cooking or had something prepared for when company called, and the food people ate was mentioned offhand many times in the book when it wasn’t relevant to anything — although I suppose that with money being tight nationwide at the time, eating something good or substantial would be more noteworthy than usual anyway. Preparing food in advance is usually a chore these days, but I imagine that if you didn't have much else to entertain yourself with, making desserts on the off chance someone visits or planning how to get the ingredients you need for cheap would feel like a productive way to pass the time.

Because it didn’t really stand out but wasn’t actively unpleasant, either, I’ll rate it 6/10 and say Recommendable.

[newberyandchai]

The Giver (1994)

The Giver. What an incredible book with so many messages tucked inside its pages. It makes you want to cry, scream, jump for joy, and sit in silence for a little while after you finish it. I happened to have a cat on my lap at the end of my reread — the one who rarely settles and relaxes — and I wanted to pet her for a long time and feel her soft fur underneath my hands while I processed everything I had just read.

This is also the first reread I’ve done for this blog. This book was assigned to my small English (just called Reading, in those days) class of six kids in 7th grade — or maybe it was a book another class was assigned that I could have stolen off an empty desk, read, and returned (which happened more than once). I remember the blue plastic seats that gave some nasty static shocks in the winter, and I remember the dusty row of computers we never used. I remember sitting on that side of the classroom while everyone else, who had all come from the same elementary school and already knew each other well, sat together near the windows on the left. Reading was our first period of the day, and we alternated between going to that classroom on Mondays, Wednesdays, and every other Friday. On Tuesday and Thursday mornings, we lined up outside the back entrance to the school to wait for the teacher to walk us to the chilly Spanish annex. She had a pair of eyes tattooed on the back of her neck because she was “always watching,” she told us.

And I mention these vivid memories because…

[This is a book in which any spoilers might compromise its emotional impact (if you care about that sort of thing). You can read the whole thing here for free if you can handle minimizing some banner ads, or you can support a local bookstore and buy a copy here.]

I don’t really know how to even begin to talk about it without just going through each part of the story, so here is my (lightly abridged, kind of rambling, kind of something else, yet still far too bloated) version of a review (discussion? examination? You choose).

The book begins in a utopian future in which every aspect of society is strictly controlled. No one breaks any rules (the biggest infraction anyone commits is riding a bicycle before they’re assigned one), there is no crime, and everyone takes pills that suppress their sexual desire as soon as puberty begins. Everyone primarily uses bikes to get around starting at the age of 9, and interactions with other communities are few and far between. Asking questions is strongly discouraged, and lying — even an innocent lie like using exaggerations in figures of speech or mixing up one word for another — is a punishable offense. Punishment is never severe, but corporal punishment is used even for these small infractions to discourage any disobedience at a very young age. This way of life is referred to as Sameness.

Everyone’s lifelong occupation is assigned to them at the age of 12, and parents apply to raise children who are birthed by women who were assigned the role of childbearer. In a similar fashion, there are no natural deaths in the community; the elderly apply for “release,” which is a very abstract concept among the residents that is treated more like venturing to another location, called Elsewhere. We also learn a little later that virtually no one can see any amount of color – things are described simply as “light” or “dark.”

The main character, Jonas, has been experiencing flashes of seeing color for the first time when the book starts: “But suddenly Jonas had noticed, following the path of the apple through the air with his eyes, that the piece of fruit had — well, this was the part he couldn’t adequately understand — the apple had changed. Just for an instant.” He is assigned to be a Receiver, in which he will complete training to become the community’s next Giver — the person who preserves the memories of the times before Sameness.

Receivers are assigned very rarely, and the community’s Giver is getting older and needs a successor. Before Jonas was born, another Receiver was chosen but did not complete her training for reasons no one talks about. Upon being assigned, Jonas learns that he is now exempt from some of the community’s rules, with some new ones in place: he is allowed to lie, he can receive answers to any question he asks, but he is not allowed to apply for release.

Jonas’ training sessions involve the Giver “giving” Jonas memories through touch. The first memory he receives is of snow, as if he is living that moment himself in his mind; in it, he rides a sled down a snowy hill, which is at first exhilarating and like nothing he has experienced before. But the memories he receives aren’t always full of joy. Jonas soon receives a memory of pain, which involves breaking his leg as a sled from a different memory crashes:

“Sideways, spinning, the sled hit a bump in the hill and Jonas was jarred loose and thrown violently into the air. He fell with his leg twisted under him, and could hear the crack of bone. His face scraped along jagged edges of ice and when he came, at last, to a stop, he lay shocked and still, feeling nothing at first but fear. Then, the first wave of pain. He gasped. It was as if a hatchet lay lodged in his leg, slicing through each nerve with a hot blade. In his agony he perceived the word ‘fire’ and felt flames licking at the torn bone and flesh. He tried to move, and could not. The pain grew. He screamed. There was no answer.”

During his training, Jonas receives memories of war, grief, and devastation, as well as every other emotion and experience that no one else in the community has ever felt before. He begins to understand the deep isolation and depression the Giver feels: how do you describe a beautiful color to someone who has never seen any of them before? How do you go back to your home and have dinner with your family after living through the memory of a mother grieving the death of her three sons during wartime? Jonas describes it as if the moments of contentment and peace that come from living in a state of Sameness “[have] been taken from him now.”

Jonas tries at different times to make his friends and family understand what he has received from the Giver, but he realizes they’re all living in a bubble that he himself will eventually be responsible for keeping intact through his role as the next Giver. With his knowledge of the world through the memories, he has the capacity to feel curiosity and wonder at what lies beyond the confines of the community: "...He saw the familiar wide river beside the path differently ... He knew that there was an Elsewhere from which it came, and an Elsewhere to which it was going."

But by feeling more deeply, he becomes increasingly aware of the shallowness in which his peers will live out their entire lives, which further separates him from them. His sister Lily complains of being angry when someone breaks the rules on the playground one day, yet Jonas knows that she isn't truly feeling anger, just "impatience and exasperation. He knew that with certainty because now he knew what anger was. Now he had, in the memories, experienced injustice and cruelty ... He knew there was no quick comfort for emotions like [anger and sadness]."

This disconnect is made most apparent when Jonas watches a video of his own father “releasing” the weaker of two twins who had just been born:

“To his surprise, his father began very carefully to direct the needle into the top of the newchild’s forehead, puncturing the place where the fragile skin pulsed. The newborn squirmed, and wailed faintly. ‘Why’s he–’ ‘Shhh,’ the Giver said sharply. His father was talking … ‘I know, I know. It hurts, little guy. But I have to use a vein, and the veins in your arms are still too teeny-weeny. … All done. That wasn’t so hard, was it?’ Jonas heard his father say cheerfully. As he continued to watch, the newchild, no longer crying, moved his arms and legs in a jerking motion. Then he went limp. His head fell to the side, his eyes half open. Then he was still. With an odd, shocked feeling, Jonas recognized the gestures and posture and expression. They were familiar. He had seen them before. But he couldn’t remember where. … He killed it! My father killed it! Jonas said to himself, stunned at what he was realizing. [His father] picked up a small carton that lay waiting on the floor, set it on the bed, and lifted the limp body into it. … [His father] picked up the carton and carried it to a small door in the wall; Jonas could see darkness behind the door. It seemed to be some sort of chute into which trash was deposited at school. His father loaded the carton containing the body into the chute and gave it a shove. ‘Bye-bye, little guy,’ Jonas heard his father say before he left the room. Then the screen went blank.”

Jonas is horrified because he now knows what death really is through the memories he’s received, but his father remains completely unbothered and unaware of what he’s just done. Similarly, the concept of love has no real value in the community, either, and Jonas is even gently chastised for his choice of words when he asks his parents if they love him. They say they enjoy him and are proud of his accomplishments, but they assert that the word love is “so meaningless it’s become almost obsolete” and ask him to use more precise language next time. Jonas is shocked and can't fathom ever using that word for the kind of love he's received in the memories.

The previous Receiver, before completing her training, applied for release because the Giver — her own father — had to give her painful memories that she couldn’t bear. When she died, the memories she had received were transferred back to the community, in which everyone felt all the memories and feelings she had been given. The Giver describes it as a dark time, but Jonas and the Giver come up with a plan to break the cycle and return feelings and memory — the essence of living — to everyone. Jonas will leave in the middle of the night, and because he’s received so many memories already, the Giver will be able to help the community move forward once they are returned and guide everyone away from living in Sameness. Jonas’ goal is to “find the Elsewhere that they were both sure existed."

Throughout the book, Jonas’ family has been caring for an infant who was struggling to thrive in the nursery. Having a third child is usually not allowed, but Jonas’ dad believes the baby may get stronger in a home environment before he is assigned to his permanent family. Jonas is rubbing the baby’s back one night to get him to settle while recalling a memory he had received earlier, and he realizes he has accidentally transferred the memory from himself to Gabriel. Later, Jonas learns that Gabriel has not met growth expectations and is scheduled for release the following day (“‘It’s bye-bye to you, Gabe, in the morning,’ Father had said, in his sweet, sing-song voice”). Because of this, Jonas’ escape plan is moved up. He leaves with Gabriel on his father’s bike:

“Jonas reached the opposite side of the river, stopped briefly, and looked back. The community where his entire life had been lived lay behind him now, sleeping. At dawn, the orderly, disciplined life he had always known would continue again, without him. … The life without color, pain, or past.”

As he continues forward, sleeping during the day and traveling only by night, he hears the sounds of planes and other aircraft close by, likely looking for him. As he continues on, he runs out of food and has to feed both himself and Gabriel with raw fish and berries he finds alongside the road. To comfort Gabriel, Jonas frequently transfers happy memories to him, as if the emotions they bring forward are literally sustaining both of them on this journey. 

I think this section essentially gets at the essence of the book. Jonas has just been remembering all the food he’d received in the community and how no one had ever gone hungry:

“But when the memory glimpses subsided, he was left with the gnawing, painful emptiness. Jonas remembered, suddenly and grimly, the time in his childhood when he had been chastised for misusing a word. The word had been ‘starving.’ You have never been starving, he had been told. You will never be starving. Now he was. If he had stayed in the community, he would not be. It was as simple as that. Once he had yearned for choice. Then, when he had had a choice, he had made the wrong one: the choice to leave. And now he was starving. But if he had stayed . . . His thoughts continued. If he had stayed, he would have starved in other ways. He would have lived a life hungry for feelings, for color, for love. And Gabriel? For Gabriel there would have been no life at all. So there had not really been a choice.”

The ending is pretty ambiguous. As the two grow weaker from hunger and exhaustion, Jonas somehow feels that his destination is close, but he still doesn’t know exactly where he’s going. He reaches a hill during a snowstorm and doesn’t have the strength to pedal anymore, so he takes Gabriel into his arms and tries to warm them both with memories of fire and sunlight as he begins the climb:

“…He felt his face begin to glow and the tense, cold skin of his arms and hands relax. For a fleeting second he felt that he wanted to keep [the memory] for himself, to let himself bathe in sunlight, unburdened by anything or anyone else. But the moment passed and was followed by an urge, a need, a passionate yearning to share the warmth with the one person left for him to love. Aching from the effort, he forced the memory of warmth into the thin, shivering body in his arms. Gabriel stirred. For a moment they both were bathed in warmth and renewed strength as they stood hugging each other in the blinding snow.”

Using “his final strength, and a special knowledge that was deep inside him,” Jonas reaches the top of the hill to find the same sled that he saw from the very first memory the Giver transferred to him. He gets on and both he and Gabriel start to go down the hill. 

“He forced his eyes to open as they went downward … and all at once he could see lights, and he recognized them now. He knew they were shining through the windows of rooms, that they were the red, blue, and yellow lights that twinkled from trees in places where families created and kept memories, where they celebrated love. Suddenly he was aware with certainty and joy that below, ahead, they were waiting for him, and that they were waiting, too, for the baby.”

And two or three more ambiguous sentences later, the book ends.

I think this story is about the importance of feeling everything fully and how emotions (especially love) are such a vital part of the human experience. Even the terrible feelings we typically seek to avoid at all costs, like physical pain, heartbreak, and grief, are worth living through, and sharing those negative emotions with others to find comfort is equally important in fostering positive ones like joy and love. I also think the book is about the isolation that comes from having no one you can truly relate to — it’s about the community you either find or lose depending on which collective memories people share.1

There are other books in this series that may debunk my theory, but I’m completely convinced that both Jonas and Gabriel ended up dying in the snowstorm and that the memory of the sled is just Jonas’ hallucination as they both slowly succumb to hyperthermia. Even if the true ending isn’t as bleak, it’s clear that the author believes that sharing feelings and memories with others is worth risking death in pursuit of — that “[Jonas’] life [would be] no longer worth living” if he stayed. And since this is told from Jonas’ perspective, the fact that he is recalling times in which those memories and emotions were shared with others at the very end indicates how dearly he holds them.

I’m not so sure I would have the courage to do what Jonas did in his situation, but I hope that if I was presented with the choice to either maintain the status quo like those before me or risk everything for the good of everyone, despite having no idea if would succeed, I would do it — not necessarily to make others happy or because it was a duty I couldn’t run away from, but because I truly believed my actions could change things. Too often I feel powerless in the direction my life leads, letting my days wash over me like a warm, comfortable wave instead of trying to swim against the current… and thus is the repeated sentiment of my 30th year.

Albus Dumbledore says, “...There will be a time when we must choose between what is right and what is easy,” and though I don’t necessarily have any community-changing crises I can run out and vanquish at the moment, I’m trying (maybe not my best, but increasingly) to make a little bit bigger of a ripple in the world’s pond. (Lots of water metaphors today.)

I’d give it an 11 if I could, but obvious 10 and obvious Recommendable.

1 I feel like this is especially true with the millennial generation, as nostalgia for a time before the internet and smartphones is a sentiment most of my peers seem to share. Tamogatchis and Pokemon are cool again and we’re all still watching the TV shows we grew up with, just now on streaming services (at least I am; nothing beats a Spongebob season 1 episode). It seems like my generation is collectively yearning for the things we used to love and share with each other — maybe because the things that replaced them haven’t been able to offer the same kind of connection. 

You could say this is just a capitalism-fueled marketing trend that we’ve all been gullible enough to buy into at different points, but there seems to be growing number of people around my age feeling both underwhelmed and jaded with technology, especially with the rise of AI seeking to cheapen our connections with others (and those connections have already taken a huge hit from the pandemic to begin with).

[newberyandchai]

The Whipping Boy (1987)

I read this in one sitting at a Barnes & Noble without purchasing it, and now I’m at a different Barnes & Noble using the store copy to write this post. (My thriftiness knows no bounds.) But it was only 89 pages in fairly large text, so there was no real reason to purchase it, in my eyes; 45 minutes with it was enough.

And because of that, I think some ~analysis~ mixed with a longer plot summary is probably enough to close the book, as it were, on this read. Despite the length, it did hold some interesting points that I now see merited it being the winner for 1987, though I didn’t quite see it while reading it the first time.

The Whipping Boy is a short tale about a young prince and a poor boy who are being brought up together in the king’s castle. Jemmy, the poor orphan, was formerly living on the streets before he was chosen to be the “whipping boy” of the badly behaved prince, who can’t receive corporal punishment because of his royal status. Instead, Jemmy is whipped in his place every time the prince misbehaves, which is frequently. Despite this, Jemmy never makes a sound during the whippings to deprive “Prince Brat” the satisfaction of hearing him in pain.

Because Jemmy is always around the prince, he learns how to read, write, and do math from the royal tutor while the prince doesn’t pay attention to any of the lessons. When the prince decides to run away one night (“Boy! Tumble out of bed. I need a manservant”), he takes Jemmy with him. Three pages later, they’re caught by two robbers, Hold-Your-Nose Billy and Cutwater. The duo realize they have the runaway prince based on his clothing, but the prince won’t keep his mouth shut and thinks that by ordering the thieves to let them go, they will obey. However, they soon come to the conclusion that Jemmy is the real prince who is just wearing rags to trick them because he’s the only one out of the two who can actually read and write.

The robbers’ plan is to hold “the prince” for ransom, so they get Jemmy to write a ransom letter to “the King’s Most Sacred Majesty,” his “papa.” Jemmy knows those in the castle will know something is amiss once they see that “your most obedient son, Prince Horace” wrote the note, as everyone knows the prince has no education. However, the actual prince basically foils every smart attempt Jemmy uses to either get the robbers to let them go because of his pride and selfishness. For example, Jemmy gets the robbers to consider sending the ransom message with “his whipping boy” back to the castle as a way to let the real prince run free, but the prince, “without showing the slightest concern for Jemmy’s fate,” is so stubborn that he says he won’t go back unless it’s on his own terms.

Jemmy suspects that he himself is now also a target by the king, as it’s possible others could believe he’s in on the scheme. He seems to accept without question that no one would believe his side of the story on how the kidnapping really happened: “It’s me that’s in the soup. I’ll catch it for your mischief in running away. And I’ll catch it again when the tutor claps eyes on the handwriting. He’ll say, ‘Jemmy! This is Jemmy trying to line his own pockets.’ Your pa’ll scrag me with his bare hands!’” The prince, used to getting his way in everything, immediately says he’ll protect Jemmy from any royal punishment with “sudden generosity,” but Jemmy doesn’t believe it.

I think this is a really great example of the difference between the two loci of control: the prince believes he has the power to control both the world around him and his fate (an internal locus of control), but Jemmy is already accepting that regardless of the truth, he has no control over what happens to him (an external locus of control). We normally associate an internal locus of control as being healthier (“be the change you wish to see in the world,” etc.), but it’s Jemmy’s consideration of all the different ways this situation could be interpreted by others that allows him to outwit the robbers while also saving his own skin.

After quickly ratting out Jemmy’s second escape attempt, Jemmy gets so fed up with trying to stick his neck out for the prince with no reward that he dismisses himself as whipping boy and says the prince can find his way back himself. The prince, however, seemingly has no concept of real consequences and sees what’s happened so far with the kidnapping as wildly entertaining (“This is the best time I ever had!”). Jemmy learns that the prince acts up so much because he wants attention from his father. The prince also seems envious when Jemmy talks about the friends he used to have when living on the streets, as he has no one his age aside from Jemmy in the castle.

I don’t quite buy this as redeeming qualities or factors that make the prince out to be a redeemable character. He has no idea of the true nature of the world, full of unfairness and pain (at least in medieval times). However, when the prince is finally whipped, Jemmy begs him to cry out. He’d “dreamed” of seeing the prince get whipped, but when it actually happens in these circumstances, Jemmy doesn’t find any satisfaction in it. (Maybe it’s Jemmy’s own treatment of the prince changing throughout the book that really sells the prince character as being redeemable — not the prince’s actual actions.)

Another scene struck me as I was going through this short read. The two children run into one of Jemmy’s street friends, who reaches out to shake the prince’s hand:

Smudge put out his hand to shake. Jemmy caught Prince Brat's momentary confusion. "He never shakes hands." "Of course I do," said the prince with a quick grin. He took Smudge's hand. "Glad to shake your hand, Smudge." "Likewise." And Jemmy dragged the prince away. Smudge had committed a terrible offense: no one was allowed to shake hands with the prince. "Why did you do that?" "Because I've never shaken hands before." "He could be hung for less!" The prince was staring at his hand. "It felt friendly... trusting. I may introduce the practice at court when I become king."

If we look at the two boys as being representative of the two loci of control, the prince is both a positive and negative example of the internal version. His ignorance of consequences and belief that he has more power than he actually does out in the real world causes the two boys much strife in the beginning, but upon experiencing something that goes against the way he was brought up (like receiving a friendly handshake instead of being treated as untouchable and feeling lonely or ignored as a result), he immediately thinks to exert his power and implement that practice among other royals, thereby disrupting the circumstances that allowed him to become so spoiled in the first place. The prince’s character may be irredeemable in a lot of ways, but it’s not hard to see him as an unwitting victim of the very things that have made him so unlikeable in the first place.

…and, of course, the boys get their revenge on the two robbers and avoid being kidnapped and return to the castle as changed, more mature people — the prince much more so than Jemmy, as you may have suspected, despite not being the main character of this story.

…aaaaaaand now this review has taken longer to type than it did to read the entire book in the first place. I approached this read wondering about the quality of the other contenders if this tiny book was the one that actually won, but it had surprising depth and made me think about things in different ways (which is more than I can say for some of the other Newbery winners so far).

Let’s give this an 8/10, Recommendable.

[newberyandchai]

The Witch of Blackbird Pond (1959)

This book presented a rare circumstance: I disliked the main character for 60% of it, then I completely changed my opinion in the last third of the story and would venture at calling this a 10/10. (Funny how that works sometimes, huh?)

First, a bloated plot summary (that I have broken up into multiple shorter sections for ease of reading):

The Witch of Blackbird Pond is set in the late 1600s. Katherine Tyler, who goes by Kit, is a teenage girl sailing to Connecticut from her home of Barbados to live with her aunt Rachel, uncle Matthew, and cousins Judith and Mercy after her grandfather’s death. She arrives completely unannounced and expects them to take her in, which we later learn was out of necessity and a letter explaining her situation to her aunt would not have reached the U.S. in time.

Kit is immediately met with the hard labor and strict piety of the American household during this time period. She’s impatient, ungrateful, and completely out of touch, as enslaved people largely took care of her home in Barbados while she lived in luxury. Her flashy wardrobe draws the attention of William Ashby, a slightly boring young man who begins to court Kit with intentions to marry her. Kit, seeing a marriage to a wealthy man as a way to get out of all the responsibilities she hates at her aunt’s house, goes along with it.

After a series of mishaps that end in getting her cousin Mercy in trouble, Kit runs out of the house to a nearby meadow in tears and meets an old woman named Hannah Tupper. Hannah is a Quaker and is largely avoided by the townspeople, as she doesn’t attend “Meeting” (basically church), and some people even claim she’s a witch because of her solitary nature. However, Hannah is kind to Kit and gives her advice that makes her feel better about her life in the colonies.

Kit soon discovers that Nat — the son of the captain of the Dolphin, the boat that took her to Connecticut — is a longtime friend of Hannah's and often brings her supplies and helps maintain her house. Despite being forbidden by Matthew to visit Hannah, Kit continues her visits in secret. She also begins to teach Prudence, a small girl with whom she traveled on the ship, how to read and write at Hannah’s house.

As tensions surrounding the autonomy of the colonies grows, a sickness spreads through the town. Kit overhears some townspeople begin to blame Hannah’s “witchcraft” for the affliction, so she beats the angry mob headed to Hannah’s home and hides with her in the dark while the rioters set fire to the house. Nat is able to rescue Hannah and take her to live with his grandmother in a nearby town, but the townspeople all assume she’s vanished using magic.

Immediately after, Kit herself is also suspected of witchcraft because of her friendship with Hannah and goes to trial. The bit of birch bark on which Kit was teaching Prudence to write her name is used as evidence of spellcasting, but Kit doesn’t reveal the truth because she knows that it will get Prudence into trouble. Despite this, Prudence bravely comes forward at the trial (with Nat's encouragement) and demonstrates that she can actually read and write because of Kit’s help, so the charges against Kit are dropped. William is absent from the trial, and she ends up confronting him and ends their relationship.

Despite developing a bond with her cousins during her time in America and losing her spoiled nature, Kit still misses Barbados and decides to return and seek work as a governess there. However, she sees Nat again before leaving on her own and discovers she’s had romantic feelings for him from the start. She accepts his proposal and they begin their seafaring lives together.

I suppose the way I felt about Kit is more complicated than just “she’s awful.” On the one hand, the things she did that were considered out of the ordinary were always in service of others and would probably be considered the right thing to do today. For example, before Kit even makes it to land, she notices that Prudence has dropped her wooden doll into the ocean and that no one is making any effort to retrieve it, even though Prudence is very upset. Kit dives into the water fully clothed to get the doll, but she’s immediately treated with suspicion instead of heroism because most people during this time can’t swim, and “floating” instead of sinking in water is one sign that someone is a witch.

Yet Kit’s vanity and inability to read the room is hard to look past. As just one example of her Kit arrives with seven trunks full of fancy clothes that came with her from Barbados, and she tries to give some of them to her cousins upon her arrival. However, the way she goes about it is almost insulting to the family:

“Do you mean to say that every one of those trunks is full of dresses like the one you have on?” “Well, dresses and petticoats, and slippers, and such. You have the same things yourselves, don’t you?” Mercy’s laugh was a ripple of silver. “But we don’t! We can’t even imagine.” …  [Kit’s] own eagerness rose at the sight of the two eager faces so close to hers. How amazing that a few clothes could cause such excitement. Kit felt a surge of generosity that was new and exhilarating.

When Rachel walks in, she’s shocked by all the clothes, yet instead of apologizing, Kit tries to get her aunt to remember her own childhood that was also spent in luxury in Barbados:

“Judith — you look — I scarcely know you!” “You should, Aunt Rachel,” Kit spoke up boldly. “Because you must have looked just exactly like that yourself. I know because Grandfather has told me how beautiful you were.” … Rachel looked dazed. “I had a dress just that color once,” she said slowly.

Kit convinces her aunt to try on one of the bonnets she has brought with her and notes how it makes her look so much younger, like “the years had dropped away from her face.” But Matthew returns and is very angry upon hearing Kit has given some of the dresses to his daughters, saying:

“No one in my family has any use for such frippery … nor are we beholden on anyone’s charity for our clothing. …This will be your home, since you have no other, but you will fit yourself to our ways and do no more to interrupt the work of the household or to turn the heads of my daughters with your vanity.”

At first, I felt like Kit wasn’t necessarily in the wrong for trying to get her aunt and cousins to enjoy themselves a bit and feel beautiful, and I thought Matthew was being unnecessarily harsh. But the way Kit carries herself in general is just a little too self-centered to be likeable. It’s clear she’s not wanting to give her clothes away out of true kindness; she’s just excited that her cousins are impressed by her previous exorbitant lifestyle, which seems completely normal to her but is rapturous to them.

As another example, when William sees her for the first time, she “rewards” his “unmistakably dazzled gaze” at her fancy clothes with a smile, fully knowing that it will captivate him and give her the positive recognition that she hasn’t received from others since moving to the colonies. She feels proud that her dress shows her status to the deacons’ wives she’s introduced to, who regard her with “suspicion and downright hostility … from feathered hat to slippered toe,” and she’s happy to have the opportunity to show off to the town that she’s not an orphan pauper.

And finally, even though some of the Puritan rules and customs seem objectively unnecessary and ascetic, Kit treats her family with shocking disrespect. It’s just so hard to feel bad for her after this outburst:

“Didn’t you know there’s a second service in the afternoon?” Kit was appalled. “Do you mean we have to go?” “Of course we go,” snapped Judith. “That is what the Sabbath is for.” Kit came to a halt, and suddenly she stamped her foot in the dusty road. “I won’t do it!” she declared. “I absolutely won’t endure that all over again!” But one look ahead at her uncle’s shoulders, rigid in their Sunday black, and she knew that she would. Almost choking with helpless rage she stumbled after Judith, who had moved ahead too absorbed to even notice. Oh, why had she ever come to this hateful place?

Despite all of this, Kit changes over time, largely because of the sickness that overcomes both her family and the entire town. Mercy, who is already in ill health to begin with and permanently needs crutches, gets very sick and nearly dies. Kit prepares meals and takes care of the household during this time, when everyone else is either still recovering or too worried to be of help:

“The meals fell to Kit, and she did the best she could with them … cursing the clumsiness that she had never taken the pains to overcome. She built up the fire, heated kettles of water for washing, so that Mercy might have fresh linen under her restless body. …At night she dozed off, exhausted, and woke with a start that something was left undone.”

The way the Puritans regarded witchcraft was also very interesting. I think everyone tends to assume that the Puritanical belief in Satanic magic or witches casting spells was as real as the belief in God, but I think it was more like a belief in ghosts today: people usually say they don’t believe in the paranormal when asked, but the average person still likely wouldn’t spend a night in an old asylum or a place that’s said to be haunted. Instead, the witchcraft accusations reflected the discord that the Puritans felt in the religious, economic, and political aspects of their life.

The testimonies against Kit all come from individual stories told one after the other, and they all (conveniently) have no witnesses other than the accuser:

One man’s child had cried aloud all night that someone was sticking pins into him. Another child had seen a dark creature with horns at the foot of her bed. A woman who lived along South Road testified that one morning Kit had stopped and spoken to her child and that within ten minutes the child had fallen into a fit and lain ill for five days. … A man swore he had seen Kit and Goody Tupper dance round a fire in the meadow one moonlit night, and that a great black man, taller than an Indian, had suddenly appeared from nowhere and joined in the dance.

But it seems like real witch accusations or “testimonies” like this weren’t really made in seriousness, in the sense that someone believes they are telling the absolute truth and that they actually saw those things happen. This source even states that calling someone a witch was more akin to calling someone an “s.o.b.” during that time.

It seems to claim that any kind of actual persecution that came from “witchcraft” was just from the need to quash ideas that went against Puritan values in a way that “served justice” and appeased the community, and I guess testimonies with magical elements wasn’t out of the question if it led to getting to express collective fears — almost as though a “witch” was a stand-in or scapegoat.

(As we all must know by now, people are awful.)

But this book made me think a lot and evaluate the meaning of hard work; my life is very soft by comparison. Similar to how I felt about When You Trap a Tiger, I feel like I could talk about other aspects of this book for hours (the love triangle and inadvertent marriage commitment to the wrong sister between Mercy, Judith, and a man named John Holworth; the disingenuous relationship between Kit and William; how Kit’s relationship with Nat changed throughout the book…).

Let’s just leave it at 10/10, definitely Recommendable.

[newberyandchai]

The View From Saturday (1997)

This was a short book, so I’ll (hopefully) keep this a short review. I enjoyed it a lot (much, much more than the author’s previous book, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler) but you’ll have to skip to the end for my rating. (Fun fact: E. L. Konigsburg is one of only a handful of authors to win the Newbery Medal twice.)

What I especially liked about this book was that it did a good job communicating that the decisions you might think are relatively unimportant can be very nuanced and meaningful to others in the smallest ways. The story begins with a pretty long explanation of how a teacher came to choose four particular sixth graders to be on the school’s academic team. It then explores the backgrounds of the students in question and how they’re all connected to one another while they’re participating in an important Academic Bowl.

It’s a Breakfast Club-type story in that kids who wouldn’t normally be close are brought together and maintain a bond that extends beyond their social lives at school:

The fact was that Mrs. Olinski did not know how she had chosen her team, and the further fact was that she didn’t know that she didn’t know until she did know. Of course, that is true of most things: you do not know up to and including the very last second before you do. … They called themselves The Souls. They told Mrs. Olinski that they were The Souls long before they were a team, but she told them that they were a team as soon as they became The Souls.

It also had a bit of a Slumdog Millionaire-esque feel because as each question is asked at the competition, the book breaks into personal stories told in first person that explain why each character knows the answer to the question — Noah answers a question about calligraphy, Nadia answers a question about seaweed, and so on. One of the stories introduces the new (weird) kid at school, Julian, who is responsible for starting The Souls: he slips secret notes to the three other kids and invites them to a tea party at his new house, where his father is starting a bed and breakfast. They begin to meet regularly:

Something in Sillington House gave me permission to do things I had never done before. Never even thought of doing. Something there triggered the unfolding of those parts that had been incubating. … I told jokes I had never told before. I asked questions I had never asked before.

Outside of the tea parties, no one speaks to or acts like they’re friends with one another. However, the only part of the book I didn’t like involved them coming together at the end to prevent Nadia’s dog, Ginger, from being drugged during a school stage production of Annie so some other kid’s dog could take her place. It was pretty gross: “…laxatives and tranquilizers and those four little legs will buckle, and those little bowels won’t hold…”

… Did they really need the laxatives? On top of the sedatives? (Really?)

But I’ll end on a bit of a less gross, more bittersweet note: I resonated with this small passage after rereading it for this blog post in ways I didn’t when encountering it for the first time just a few months ago. The team has [spoiler, as you may have guessed] just won the Academic Bowl:

Mrs. Olinski felt a strange sense of loss. … She drove for miles worrying about it. Finally, almost involuntarily, she said out loud, “Win some, lose some.” She glanced at Mr. Singh and laughed. “Why did I say that?” Mr. Singh replied, “Because it is how you feel at this moment, Mrs. Olinski.” “I am happy that we won, Mr. Singh, But I don’t understand why I feel a sense of loss. This is not like my accident when my loss was overwhelming. Why, after this wonderful victory, do I feel that something is missing?” “Because something is.” Miles hummed past before his voice floated back to her. “For many months now, you have been in a state of perpetual preparation and excitement. Each victory was a preparation for the next. You are missing future victories. … Now you must put down anchor, look around, enjoy this port of call. Your stay will be brief. You must do it, Mrs. Olinski.”

Something-something about aging, the ephemeral nature of existence, the danger of losing yourself to the past, recognizing the present as always transient, each moment is fleeting, something-something… I already have too many gray hairs for this.

“Victories” isn’t exactly the word I would use when talking about this scene in a wider context, but comparing different points of your life to a ship coming in, staying a while, and inevitably setting sail once again for a different destination is a lovely, tranquil thought. The focus isn’t on the end of the stay, but always on each new beginning — on that first step off the gangplank, onto the sands of an unfamiliar shore...

This feels like a true 7, but because that number is still banned, I’ll go with 8/10, Recommendable.

[newberyandchai]

Crispin: The Cross of Lead (2003)

I'll tell you how much I enjoyed this book: Despite having left my copy at home during a recent trip, I was so invested in the story that I found a free PDF online (don't try this at home, kids) and finished reading it on my phone across several coffee shop visits, completely ignoring the books I had actually planned to read.

I had intended to write about Moon Over Manifest first, but I think it's important that I talk about Crispin: The Cross of Lead before I get into that — they have somewhat similar plots in the sense that both main characters are concerned with finding out new things about their parents, but I really enjoyed one story and really disliked the other. So, join me as I try to explain why that might be through some long-winded explanations.

First, a four-paragraph summary (with spoilers, as usual):

The year is 1377, and a boy called only "Asta's son" just recently lost his mother due to illness. The two lived as very poor serfs who worked the land of the nobleman Lord Furnival, which is under the control of a steward while Furnival is off pillaging or whatever he's up to. One night, Asta's son is caught overhearing a conversation that he doesn't understand between the steward and another man, and for reasons he doesn't know, he is immediately declared a "wolf's head" by the steward, which means he could be killed on sight by anyone. He briefly finds refuge with the local priest, Father Quinel, who tells him that his real name is Crispin and gives him a lead cross with writing on it that belonged to Crispin's mother. The priest says he'll tell Crispin more about his father soon, but he is killed before Crispin can find out this information.

Crispin spends some time hiding and scavenging in the woods and avoiding the numerous people now looking for him, still unaware of what he's done to deserve this. He comes across a large man who goes by the name Bear one night, who declares himself Crispin's new master. Crispin unwillingly obeys, but he soon grows to love Bear, who is a traveling musician. He teaches Crispin how to play the flute and imparts some wisdom on abandoning the master/servant dogma that Crispin has lived his whole life by. Bear can read the writing on Crispin's cross but doesn't tell him what it says.

The pair travel to a town where Bear has some business to attend to, and Crispin overhears from the townspeople that Lord Furnival has died. The men looking for Crispin discover him there, but after he hides from them, they kidnap and torture Bear to try and get Crispin to reveal himself. Crispin finally finds out that the words on the cross say that he is Lord Furnival's son, and he deduces that the reason the steward sent everyone after him is because he's worried Crispin will try to now claim himself as heir to the lordship.

Crispin confronts the steward and says he doesn't want anything to do with being part of the nobility and just wants to leave the town with Bear in peace, which the steward initially agrees to. However, as they're leaving, he goes back on his word and tries to kill Crispin. The steward and Bear fight, which ends in the steward's death. Crispin leaves the cross, the only evidence he has of his birthright, on the body of the steward before they both leave the town to live out the rest of their lives.

There's something endlessly fascinating about the 14th century and even earlier times to me, which feels almost like prehistory in that we can only speculate what life was like for the average person. We have so much art and literature from the Renaissance, yet very little from before then (I remember only covering parts of Canterbury Tales and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which were both penned in the 1400s, before moving on to later time periods in my early British literature class). Exploring the Dark and Middle Ages — when religion dominated almost every aspect of someone's life to the point of cultural stagnation — feels as foreign and exciting as taking a peek at the bottom of the ocean.

I think that the most interesting aspect of the book was how religion colored every aspect of Crispin’s thoughts and interactions with others in a way that is so unlike modern times. Every single internal thought or sentence he spoke had some kind of religious flavor to it, with lots of “God willing” and “His will be done.” It’s hard to imagine a time in which life truly was like this, when religion was something you participated in every day and were constantly living as opposed to something you could practice on your own or just visit a building once a week to affirm, like 1/3 of all American Christian adults:

“Thus our lives never changed, but went round the rolling years beneath the starry vault of distant Heaven. Time was the great millstone, which ground us to dust like kernelled wheat. The Holy Church told us when we were in the alterations of the day, the year and in our daily toil. Birth and death alone gave distinction to our lives, as we made the journey between the darkness whence we had come to the darkness where we were fated to await Judgement Day. Then God's terrible gaze would fall on us and lift us to Heaven's bliss or throw us down to the everlasting flames of Hell.”

One professor I had for a religious studies course my junior year (may that department rest in peace as it no longer exists, thanks to WVU and E. Gordon Gee’s terrible financial management) was always emphasizing the idea that the fundamentals of eastern religion aren't so much about belief as they are what actions someone takes. And I don’t mean “action” as in making the conscious choice to treat thy neighbor as thyself or turn the other cheek; I don’t mean religious principles guiding actions in the real world, but rather that not every world religion emphasizes such a divide between the sacred (Heaven) and the worldly or profane (Earth). It's a world where "worship" can take any number of forms (e.g., the Kama Sutra). Conversely, separation between Heaven and Earth is a central tenet in western religions, in which God is perceived as residing somewhere else and not living among people in this world (to put it more simply, “God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life,” as Jeff Mangum sings).

When hundreds of deities are understood to be on Earth among us and “everything is sacred” in eastern religions, what someone believes in and their lived experiences are tied together in inseparable ways. You wouldn’t ask someone whether they believe in gravity or not because someone’s personal relationship with contemplating and accepting gravity has no bearing on whether it’s actually experienced by them; gravity is a force that is central to the fabric of our universe and doesn’t hinge on the belief that it’s real, and every action you take is impacted by it. The concept of “having faith” in gravity is almost entirely irrelevant, whereas having faith is considered a central part of Christianity and has deeply influenced its history and practices.

This ties into Crispin’s belief about some people being destined to always be a servant to a “master.” His worldview was likely influenced by something called the “great chain of being,” which was a popular idea during the Middle Ages that provided a hierarchy for everything on Earth, down to minerals and plants. But though it’s never mentioned by name in the book, Bear is involved in the very beginnings of what would be the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, which was a rebellion against that very way of thinking. In fact, it’s why the two travel to the city where the men are looking for Crispin in the first place, and one character briefly mentioned, John Ball, was actually a real organizer of the revolt.

Bear, though proclaiming himself Crispin’s new "master" and playing into his view of the world to keep him from running away, actually tries to get him out of that mindset in a few different ways when they first begin traveling together.

“... Will you join me? I give you the freedom to choose.” “You’re my master,” I said. “I have no choice.” “Crispin, decide,” he barked. I shook my head, “It’s not for me to do so.” “Should not every man be a master of himself?” he asked. “You made me call you master.” His face grew redder than it normally was. “You’re a willful fool,” he bellowed. … “Crispin, as Jesus is my witness, churches, priests — they’re all unneeded. The only cross you need is the one in your heart.” Greatly shocked, I didn’t know what to say.  “But,” he added, with a hard edge of anger, “if you so much as spoke my words in public, do you know what would happen to you? … You’d be burned alive.” … what vexed me most was his saying that every man should be master of himself. If I knew anything it was that all men belonged to someone. Surely God Himself put us all in our places. Lord to rule and fight. Clergy to pray. All the rest — like me — were on earth to labor, to serve our masters and our God. Otherwise, it was as much to say stars could go their own way instead of being fixed to turn around our world.

Very clever. In short, this book was extremely interesting and I could probably talk about other parts of it for much longer and do a few more Wikipedia deep dives — Bear's tried-and-true "formula" for visiting a town and earning money from his singing and dancing by appealing to the local priest, the role of stewards versus lords in the Middle Ages, and even the small detail that Crispin had only tried meat once or twice in his entire life before meeting Bear — can you even imagine?

I’m going to be a bit more liberal in my rating today and give it a 10/10, Recommendable. Be prepared for a scathing (or rather, annoyed) Moon Over Manifest review coming soon.

[newberyandchai]

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (1972)

I was unfamiliar with this book, but not the gist of the story (although I’d often wondered what “nim” was when seeing the title on the shelf of the elementary school library at a very early age). I remember watching the movie version at some point in my childhood — maybe over several rainy days during recess? — and remembered it to be a much more fantastical, magical tale than what the text told.

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH was less action-packed and more straightforward than the movie, but because of that, I ended up liking it all the more. They’re almost entirely different stories (even Mrs. Frisby underwent a name change to avoid copyright infringement with a certain flying disc sport, and the movie is called The Secret of NIMH instead), but I’m okay with that because of just how much was changed. I see why they made certain creative decisions for the movie, and the animation is quite good for the early 80s.

(P.S. The full movie is available online for free.)

The movie feels almost like an alternate universe fanfic — or AU, for us fanfiction fiends — in a unique reimagining of the plot, but that doesn’t mean the source material is boring by any means. The next three paragraphs are a brief summary of the entire thing (which certainly includes spoilers, so… close your eyes):

Mrs. Frisby is a widowed mouse with three children who lives inside a cinderblock on a farm. The family usually moves to their winter home before the harvest begins, but Mrs. Frisby’s youngest son gets sick and can’t be moved in time. With the help of a crow, she visits an old owl to ask for help in what she should do. She is surprised to find out that the owl used to know her late husband, and he tells her to visit the rat colony that lives near the farm. The plan is to ask the rats to move her house out of the path of the farming equipment that will be coming through the area in just a few days’ time.

Mrs. Frisby goes to see them and learns about the story of the rats from their leader, a very old rat named Nicodemus. An original small group of rodents had been experimented on at the National Institute of Mental Health many years ago, and both rats and mice had received doses of a drug that increased their intelligence, strength, and lifespan. The group of rats and mice — which included Mrs. Frisby’s late husband, Jonathan — ended up using their new thinking skills to plan an escape. The rat colony, which has expanded and now contains multiple generations after the escape, is now literate and scientifically advanced.

Mrs. Frisby learns that the rats have been working on a plan to grow their own food and generate their own electricity so they no longer have to scavenge and steal from humans. They move her house out of the path of the plow through some simple engineering, but humans from NIMH are alerted to the presence of the super-intelligent rats after a grisly incident involving one dissenting rat and his followers trying to steal a motor from a local shop. The colony then has to stage an evacuation of their home when some exterminators come, but they must simultaneously pretend to be unintelligent rats and make their escape look chaotic and unplanned (as it would with normal rats) to mislead the humans. Some main characters perish, but the colony survives and ultimately leaves the area to rebuild while Mrs. Frisby goes back to a normal life with her family.

So: In the movie, it’s implied the rats got some kind of magical powers during their time at NIMH, and Nicodemus is depicted as a wizard figure with glowing eyes. There’s a magical amulet that glows red when worn by someone “with a courageous heart,” and the dissenting rat who breaks away from the main group (Jenner) is much more of an antagonist who is actively seeking to wrest control of the colony from Nicodemus. (There’s also some murdering, a sword fight or two, and some interesting medieval-style clothing choices for the rodents.) The climax of the book is changed from the extermination to the house-moving scene, in which the cinderblock starts sinking into the mud as they try to move it, but Mrs. Frisby uses the amulet as an Infinity Gauntlet (kind of) and moves it to safety with the Force (more or less).

Surprisingly, I still enjoyed the less-dramatic version of events in the book. It posed some thoughtful questions about being an intelligent being in a world that sees you only as a pest or a lab experiment, and Mrs. Frisby was almost a Frodo-like character in that she was only associated with the larger conflict secondhand; she really only wanted the rats’ help to move her house, just as Frodo ultimately only wanted to return to the Shire but had no choice but to be the bearer of the Ring. They were both swept up and involved in in the larger plots of their respective books (somewhat unwillingly, at least in Frodo's case).

Despite this, Mrs. Frisby does make the heroic choice on her own to volunteer to drug the farm cat, Dragon, so the rats are able to move her house without any threat of danger — even after finding out her husband had died trying to complete the same task. She's only a passive observer of the rats' plan to avoid the exterminators and watches everything unfold from a tree branch ("Mrs. Frisby could not bear to watch; and yet, even more, she could not bear to not watch"), even though she could do nothing to help.

Another difference is that the book spends much more time explaining the origin of the rats and their time at NIMH, including how they were taught by the researchers, how they formulated their escape plan, and why they started working toward the goal of building a self-sufficient colony — which held my interest from beginning to end. One passage sticks out in my mind: While the rats and mice are moving through the building's airducts during their escape, the air kicks on and all but two of the mice, who weigh much less than the rats, are blown back and left to wander the endless maze of ductwork seemingly forever:

We were approaching the lighted square of the opening when the roar began. The blast of air came like a sudden whistling gale; it took my breath and flattened my ears against my head … when I opened my eyes again I saw one of the mice sliding past me, clawing uselessly with his small nails at the smooth metal beneath him. Another followed him, and still another, as one by one they were blown backward into the dark maze of tunnels we had just left. … But the rest were lost, six in all. They were simply too light; they blew away like dead leaves, and we never saw them again.

Chilling.

Lest this become more of a movie review/comparison than book, let’s just say I liked it a lot and think anyone would enjoy it — 8/10, certified Recommendable.

[newberyandchai]

An update

I've had a Google Sheet going for a while now to track my progress -- and boy, do I have a lot of posts to make.

Books I've completed but have yet to write thoughts about:

A Year Down Yonder (2001)

The Last Cuentista (2022)

The Whipping Boy (1987)

Crispin: The Cross of Lead (2003)

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (1972)

Moon Over Manifest (2011)

The View from Saturday (1997)

Books I'm looking forward to reading:

M.C. Higgins, The Great (1975)

Freewater (2023)

The Eyes and the Impossible (2024)

Out of the Dust (1998)

So: sit tight, dear reader! I'll get caught up eventually.

[newberyandchai]

Caddie Woodlawn (1936)

It's been one year since Newbery & Chai "debuted," and... 0 views over the last seven days, and I'm also woefully behind on reviews. (Nevertheless, I persist.)

Caddie Woodlawn was a delightful little book I finished across two or three days. I grew up with the Little House on the Prairie books, so it was like getting to experience reading those stories again for the first time. I’m happy to say it breaks the streak of books I didn’t enjoy very much.

The book is based on the author’s grandmother’s life in Wisconsin at the end of the 19th century. While reading it, I was reminded (in pleasant ways) of Anne of Green Gables, which is the de facto book about a spirited young girl who gets into some tricky situations as she grows up. Caddie’s father chose to bring her up her alongside her brothers instead of letting her mother raise her as a typical girl in the household, so Caddie's not afraid to get dirty or take risks.

Most notably in terms of plot, she single-handedly prevents bloodshed between the nearby Native American tribe and the white settlers in the area. (I don’t quite buy this as the true account of what happened to the author’s grandmother, but it was an exciting part nonetheless.)

I’d say that the overarching plot thread is that Caddie learns some new information about her father’s past in England (no spoilers here) that could lead to the family uprooting their cozy life in the U.S., but that's only expanded upon in one chapter in the beginning and maybe two near the end. (On an unrelated note, the family dog also somehow makes his way from Boston all the way back to Wisconsin ((!!!)) on foot after being taken by one of Caddie’s uncles for a season.)

Regardless of believability — because I don’t want to act like an old man for two posts in a row, plus whether it's a true account or not isn't really the point — it was an easy, entertaining read. I’m noticing a trend in some books written in the earlier part of the 20th century: They are much more likely to have chapters that are relatively self-contained and don’t contribute much to an overall plot thread. I’m guessing the authors that wrote those types of books came up with the setting and characters first and then put them in a handful of tricky situations to write about, not the other way around.

As an example of what I mean, I'm thinking of the Hunger Games series, in which it feels like many facets of Katniss' personality are just reactions to direct plot-related events. For example, she's resourceful and is able to survive during the Games because she lives in a poor District, she discovers she needs comfort from Peeta and gets closer to him only as a result of participating in the first Games, and she feels so strongly for her sister that she volunteers as tribute in her place because she's taken on the role of a mother to her because her mom was unable to care for them after her husband's death. There seems to be a direct event mentioned in the book that explains or relates to every individual aspect of her personality.

Instead, with Anne Shirley, her personality is the force that influences the plot. She accidentally dyes her hair green because she hates her red hair; she doesn't falsely admit to losing Marilla's special brooch just to get out of punishment because she is strong-willed, etc. If Anne weren't already these things, the actions in the chapter wouldn't have taken place.

In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and our previously reviewed Thimble Summer (published in 1938), chapters were more or less just giving information on the characters and their families or contributing to a one-off plot line, similar to someone telling a story from their life during a long car ride or right before bedtime. I really like this style of storytelling because it feels lighter and more whimsical. It’s the YouTube short or Instagram reel of early to mid-1900s children’s literature, yet neither vapid nor pointless — its length caters to developing attention spans; it's usually filled with lovable characters who always have good intentions, even if their actions backfire; and serves as a vessel for morality and life lessons (because those are always good, right?).

There’s just something comforting and relaxing about reading a story that is more a like a collection of cozy anecdotes than a fast-paced Hunger Games-style book that gives you whiplash from the plot’s urgency. Think Chicken Soup for the Soul, but with children riding horses and raising turkeys.

The author based the book entirely on stories her grandmother told her about her youth, which would have been self-contained by nature. This makes sense, as the contents of our lives don't have easily identifiable rising action or neatly packaged exposition. In a storytelling class I'm currently taking, I'm finding it difficult to even construct a real narrative around something as vague as “I had a horrible first date once” or “I went on a strange camping trip." Even so, just describing one thing after the other (in this case, Caddie taking apart a clock) is enticing enough to make us want to hear more, just like putting one foot in front of the other:

“It was more of a task than she had supposed. But Father's tools were there on the shelf, and she found a screwdriver of just the right size she needed. The back came off, revealing the wheels and springs. Caddie knew enough about clocks to see what was the matter. The circuit rider had wound his clock too tightly, and in some way the spring had caught so that it could not unwind as it should have done. Caddie looked it over carefully. Then she began to loosen the screws which held it in place. She had to loosen several before she found the right ones. Time slipped away unheeded, she was so deeply absorbed in her work. Her cheeks were flushed and her face, bent low over her works, was contained by her dangling curls.”

As an example from a similar book, Anne of Green Gables had the chapter about the missing brooch, the chapter about breaking her chalkboard over Gilbert’s head, and the chapter about Diana accidentally getting drunk on raspberry cordial, but all of those were isolated incidents that felt more like a serialized story that came out piece by piece in a magazine than a cohesive novel. The events in the chapters all give insight into the kind of character Anne is (honest, hotheaded, and a little foolish in each of those tales, respectively), but taking one out or mixing up the order wouldn’t change much of anything about the book itself. It's just pleasant to learn more about someone, and isn't that a big part of why we read fiction in the first place?

...I spent a lovely August afternoon a few weeks ago writing a very different type of blog, but the iPad Tumblr app decided it wouldn't save the hundreds of words I'd added after this point. Still, I think my ~thesis~ has come to an end.

Rated 8/10, certified Recommendable.

[newberyandchai]

The One and Only Ivan (2013)

I’ll be honest — I’ve been on a bad luck streak with the Newbery books I’ve chosen to read lately. I finished The One and Only Ivan in Florida over Christmas, but I was so uninspired by it that Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry steamrolled to the front of the line in February. After that, A Single Shard was more recently on the brain.

The course of Ivan’s story is predictable, the solution to the book’s main problem is deceptively simple, and I just wasn’t impressed with the characters. I felt this one was a miss for me even before finishing the first half.

The main character is based on a real gorilla who spent 27 years in an enclosure in a shopping center in Tacoma, Washington. He became the subject of several animal welfare protests in 1987, and locals started boycotting the mall as a result. They raised a significant amount of money to have him moved to a zoo in Seattle, and… that’s the story. Gorilla used as roadside attraction finds new home.

In the book, Ivan has several animal friends that live in the same cramped conditions inside the shopping center. The book opens with the center’s owner acquiring a young elephant to replace Stella, an older elephant with an injured foot who can’t perform for visitors anymore. As her condition worsens, Stella makes Ivan promise that he will do everything in his power to help the new elephant, Ruby, live a happier life. In the end, Ivan comes up with a plan and manages to finger-paint a message that the custodian’s daughter sees and displays on a billboard by the road. People protest, and Ivan is found a new home so he can live with his own kind. The book ends with him moving to a zoo, meeting other gorillas for the first time since his childhood, and beginning to live with them, with Ruby at home in a nearby enclosure with her fellow elephants.

I think the main thing I didn’t like was that the book’s premise felt like a clickbait web article respun into a children’s book — and that’s not the fault of the book, but more my approach to it. I think it made me become more aware of how jaded my attitude is toward the plethora of “heartwarming” stories that are shoved in my face each time I log onto Facebook or Instagram. These kinds of stories, in my (admittedly cynical) opinion, prey upon people’s emotions to get pageviews for the advertisements they run on their sites; they tend to draw out the story much longer than needed with pointless text (“You won’t believe what happens next!”) and spread it across multiple pages that you have to click through, which just increases the ad space they have available to sell and profit from.1

The industry of emotion p*rn (can we still say that word on Tumblr?) might be well-intentioned in some aspects, but to me, I think it is always destined to become exploitative and play people for suckers as it becomes larger and more commercialized. Look at the monstrosities Hallmark (and its anti-LGBT counterpart Great American Family) put out each year, yet moms and grandmas hungry for happy endings in an unrealistic, overly simple fantasy world continue to eat it up year-round. (…Okay, maybe that was a little harsh.)

I get that Ivan’s entire real-life situation and how people teamed up to rescue him from the shopping center was noteworthy at the time because crowdsourcing donations wasn't much of a thing before the Internet. It was probably a real feat to get the word out to others and persuade even a small percentage of those people to give money — there were newspaper ads taken out and many signatures gathered to raise the $30,000 needed to buy him from the shopping center. However, people ask for double what it took to move Ivan to a new home every day for their dog with a broken leg or cat with cancer on sites like GoFundMe, sometimes even after accounting for inflation. Today, it doesn’t have the same “wow” factor when it comes to seeing what people are capable of when they toss in a few bucks for a good cause (“Especially when that kind of crowdfunding becomes so commonplace that it becomes easily exploitable,” Jaded Abby adds).

Additionally, I knew this book had been made into a movie before reading it. After finishing it, it felt like it was the ideal story to be adopted for a visual medium. I could see a young kid gushing about reading this book in class to their Disney exec parent, only for the idea to immediately be taken to a higher-up while other staff begins to assemble a makeshift team to write a script, make a wishlist for voice actors, create a budget, etc. “Poor/sad animal movie” (with or without a happy ending for the animal) is a whole blockbusting genre across multiple forms of media; Marley and Me, War Horse, Hachi, Old Yeller, Water for Elephants, Free Willy, Where the Red Fern Grows.

The trailer is exactly what I expected, too. In the book, barely any time is spent on what Ivan remembers of his time in the jungle with his sister, yet it appears to be a focal point of the movie as part of contrasting how sad his life is at the mall with how great it was in the wild. The movie also offered the perfect opportunity for an all-star cast (Danny DeVito, Angelina Jolie, Bryan Cranston, Helen Mirren) to hook parents and establish credibility for the film — surely such esteemed actors wouldn’t work on a movie that wasn’t worth seeing, right?

It was also an opportunity (Jaded Abby is calling it an “excuse”) for Disney to show off their skills in the area of computer generation and motion capture and maybe seek some redemption. People have praised the animation style and contrasted it with the Lion King’s recent remake, in which the CG removed all ability for the animals to emote and diminished the emotional impact of the story, but I’ll have to actually watch the movie to assess it on that (and many other) fronts.

At this point, with my limited knowledge of the actual film, I have trouble distinguishing what’s a successful visual storytelling tactic and what’s a marketing ploy meant to capture our unsuspecting attention spans and stand out above the constant noise of other entertainment platforms. Maybe if a story is big enough and enough hands get thrown into the mix, it can no longer be something where the intention of sharing an inspiring tale excuses the cheap shots taken to make that story more appealing to the widest number of people. There’s a reason movie plots in major franchises (at least those without preexisting source material to draw from) are more general in plot and follow predictable tropes, often leading to lower audience satisfaction: global box office numbers are often over half of what a movie made in the U.S. makes, so plot nuances — the things that make movies special and memorable, at least in my opinion — that might not translate well in other languages or cultures are usually left out or cut. Record-breaking box office numbers just don't equal good filmmaking anymore; people will see big-budget movies regardless, even if they receive horrible reviews (just look at the Transformers franchise).

…Or I’m just an old man when it comes to feeling excited about new films, especially those meant for kids. Children’s books can have incredible depth and meaning,3 but children’s films and other visual media that stand the test of time and remain enjoyable for all ages are few and far between (looking at you, Illumination Studios — and what was Peacock even thinking with the blatant cash grab that was Megamind 2?).

In short, I’ll leave with some lyrics that half-relate to the personal dilemma I discovered in myself after reading this book: “Something kind of sad about/The way that things have come to be/Desensitized to everything/What’s become of subtlety?”

Rated 6/10, neither Recommendable nor Unrecommendable.

————————

1 Not entirely relevant, but: I worked briefly with paid advertisements at a previous job and got to see the scummy backend of that necessary evil. All the ad reps I worked with wanted to know the CTR, or clickthrough rate, of their ads, which was just the number of actual clicks on their banner ad divided by the number of views. A "good" CTR is only around 1-5%, meaning that a $5,000 ad spot worth a guaranteed 100,000 views may only result in a couple hundred people clicking on the banner, and an even smaller percentage of those people making a purchase. So: every ad you see is scrambling for your attention in hopes that you will be the one person who both clicks and makes a purchase.2 They have a vested interest in using everything in their wheelhouse to stand out from the crowd and make you buy something, from ridiculous emotional appeals to outright lying and rage-baiting.

2 …And if you’re the website wanting to show off how valuable your ad space is to get more money out of an ad purchase, you’ll want to show off how through the roof your CTR is, so you might place ads in spots where a user might mistake them for something else or have them pop up in places where they can be accidentally clicked on. Don’t be a sucker, friends.

3 Incidentally, the author, Katherine Applegate, is the same “K.A. Applegate” who authored the Animorphs books, which are near and dear to my heart — and contain a lot more nuance that makes you think (…but also lots and lots of violence).

[newberyandchai]

A Single Shard (2002)

I must admit that my absence from this blog has been partly influenced by how much I did not enjoy this book in particular. It was predictable, the relationships didn't develop in interesting ways, and the plot was unimaginative. The tropes were so obvious that if I didn't know better, I would have assumed the plot was made up by a gaggle of fifth graders for a creative writing assignment.

(Spoilers ahead... if you care.)

A Single Shard begins with the orphan Tree-ear and his older companion Crane-man, who both live under a bridge in a village in what is now South Korea. Tree-ear is curious about the potters for whom the village is known and wants to learn more about the art, but he accidentally breaks a bowl that was crafted by Min, the most skilled worker in the village. Tree-ear makes a deal with Min to work off his debt by helping Min make a replacement piece. (If this were a movie, the days in which Tree-ear performs hard manual labor for Min might be portrayed by a fun montage, a la "I'll Make a Man Out of You" from Mulan...)

One day, an imperial emissary comes to the village to look for a potter to commission for royal pottery pieces, and he's impressed by both Min's work and that of another potter in town. The second potter had figured out a cool technique (that's about as specific as I can get; I'm no expert) that the imperial guy was interested in, but the pot Min had created in the same technique had been fired incorrectly and came out flawed due to no fault of his own. The imperial guy likes Min's attention to detail, so he gives Min another chance to impress him and asks him to bring his best sample of pottery using the new technique to the palace. However, Min is old and won't be able to make the trek, so Tree-ear volunteers to do it instead.

...And this is about where I started to lose interest. The rest was completely predictable: my thought was that Tree-ear would meet an obstacle that would end up in all but one of the pottery pieces getting broken, but he would still deliver it to the palace somehow, Min would get the commission, and everyone would clap. And that's more or less what happened, but there was a slightly disturbing su*cide (can we say that on Tumblr without getting banned?) reference that seemed intended to be... inspirational(?) in a weird way.

Tree-ear climbs the Rock of Falling Flowers at Crane-man's request during his journey to the palace, which is named for what took place there during an important military battle centuries before Tree-ear's time. The book focuses on the part of the legend where the lovers and servants of the king throw themselves to their deaths to avoid being captured by the enemy:

"All of the king's concubines and ladies-in-waiting crowded around him, determined to protect him until the last. The women knew well that the T'ang would not kill them; no, they would be taken prisoner, probably to be tortured. Their terror can hardly be imagined ... The T'ang army charged up the hill. All at once, as if all their minds had become one, the women began jumping off the cliff. Every one of them preferred death to becoming a prisoner.

"Can you see it, my friend? The women jumping one after the other from the cliff, their beautiful silk dresses billowing in the air — pink, red, green blue... indeed, like flowers falling."

Tree-ear gasped, his eyes round. What courage it must have taken!

"The T'ang were victorious that day, but the women's efforts were not in vain, for they have since been an inspiration to all who have need of courage. Their memory will live for a thousand years, I am sure of it."

... "Go to the Rock of Falling Flowers when you reach Puyo, my friend," Crane-man had said. "But remember that leaping into death is not the only way to show true courage."

I hope I'm not the only one who finds that horrendous loss of life somewhat hard to regard as brave or courageous, at least from a western point of view. Whereas su*cide was viewed as a sin as far back as the 1200s in medieval Europe and is ingrained in the west as being objectively capital-B Bad, there is a centuries-long history of eastern cultures using the act of taking one's life as a way to preserve a family's honor or take responsibility for causing shame. When people from Asian countries immigrated to the U.S., that idea may have persisted, however subtly: su*cide is the second leading cause of death in Asian-Americans from ages 15-24.

I don't think this concept — the idea of su*cide being acceptable, even venerated, in the context of medieval Korea as opposed to what it's regarded as today — was communicated very well in the book, if that was what the author was intending. There are several old superstitions mentioned that are portrayed as simply being the products of a less scientifically advanced age: for example, Crane-man mentions that the reason he lives under the bridge in the first place is because a fox scared him off the main road one night, as they were believed at the time to be trickster animals who would feed you to their young. We're told he was so scared that by the time he was ready to get back on his journey, he'd stayed under the bridge for so long that the spot already felt like home.

In short, I think the fox story serves the purpose of juxtaposing medieval Korean beliefs with modern day and illustrating just how different the conventions of the time period differ from modern life: Tree-ear is slightly afraid when he hears the story ("Even to say the word [fox] made a trickle of fear run down his spine"), but I believe that's meant to be educational for the reader, not instructional. A kid would probably read that passage and think, "Wow, people were afraid of some weird things back then," not "Man, Crane-man says foxes are really scary, so I should watch out." Crane-man even delivers a line that reflects what we know today at the end of the story, which I think indicates what a young reader should ultimately come away with: "I have come to believe foxes could not possibly be as clever as we think them."

The purpose of that story being included is fairly straightforward, but I still can't tell how the author wanted to frame the idea of thousands of women jumping to their deaths. Were readers supposed to understand that this, too, is just meant to provide context into the (slightly extreme) beliefs and worldviews of medieval Koreans and understand how different they are from today? Or could a kid read this book and actually come away with the idea that taking their own life is the right thing to do in some circumstances?

The characters never say anything that doesn't glamorize su*cide — we don't get a line like "It's a shame so many lives were lost" or anything that recasts it in a negative light. We don't get a line that serves the same purpose as Crane-man telling us that foxes aren't actually scary. Instead, we hear both Tree-ear and Crane-man commend the women to engage in mass su*cide on multiple occasions ("Crane-man's words came to life ... [the women's] terror and their sudden act of bravery, their colored dresses like the petals of thousands of flowers").

As I've mentioned before, though, I'm reading this as an adult with a less imaginative brain than in years past (sad) and often forget about all the violent or disturbing books I was reading while in the target age group for this book. For example, the plot of Animorphs #19 centers around Cassie's reaction to ripping the throat out of an alien while in wolf morph... which I remember reading during health class in 6th grade. But that didn't mean I or other fans of the series developed a desire to kill or consume increasingly violent media.

(However, being surrounded by media that depicts violence against oneself may be a different story... which is an issue for another time.)

The rest of the book was what I'd like to call "Chekhov's everything": you can't reveal that two married characters have lost a child and not have them adopt the orphan character; you can't have the mentor character not die at the end (which, I might add, conveniently takes away the only possible reason Tree-ear has to not become the couple's new son); you can't have important pieces of pottery undergo a long journey by foot and not have them break...

The books I've truly enjoyed lately have made a point to ignore this principle and led me on completely unexpected journeys, so I just find myself getting tired of predictable storytelling. I'm holding out hope that future Newbery books will offer greater surprises.

Lest this gets any longer, 5/10, Not Recommendable.

[newberyandchai]

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1977)

Roll of thunder Hear my cry Over the water Bye and bye Ole man comin’ Down the line Whip in hand to Beat me down But I ain’t Gonna let him Turn me around.

[Spoilers ahead]

What an important book — just as tense as The Slave Dancer in parts, but less horrifying and more insightful and entertaining... which I have some (not-so-groundbreaking) thoughts about. (These posts keep getting longer and longer, but forgive me; I was excited about this one.)

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry was always on the shelves in my elementary classrooms, but I was never interested enough to pick it up. I remember thinking that the book must be written in something like Shakespearean English, given the title. And I suppose this is kind of true, although not with ye olde English. The dialog spoken by the Logan family is written in African American Vernacular English while the narrative portion is in more traditional written English.

I appreciate this because it both gave insight into how Cassie and her family communicated with each other without code-switching and illustrated the idea that speaking "properly" is not indicative whatsoever of actual intelligence. Even today, in which it seems like any non-white person is automatically dismissed if they can't speak perfect English without a thick accent, I appreciated seeing phrases like, "You care what a lot of useless people say 'bout you you'll never get anywhere, 'cause there's a lotta folks don't want you to make it” spoken aloud by characters. The Logan family felt much, much more real than the Black characters in Slave Dancer, who were almost always talked about collectively as "the blacks" and as though they didn't have the mental capacity to communicate at all.

But before Analysis Brain takes over the rest of this post, let's go into the plot a bit:

The story is about the Logans, a Black family in the American South during the Jim Crow era. There has just been a lynching in the community, which leads Cassie on a roundabout journey during the school year to figure out the role she is supposed to hold in society as a Black girl. A lot of different relationships between the Black and white people in the community take place:

TJ, a friend of Cassie's brother Stacey, thinks he's a hotshot for hanging out with some older white boys and feels like this has elevated his social status, even though they're just toying with him as a joke. They end up getting him to commit a crime with them and pin it on him because they're aware of their privilege; it's ultimately their word against his.

Cassie's teacher embodies the "don't bite the hand that feeds" mentality. When Cassie is outraged after finding out that her class's textbooks used to belonged to white children and were only given to the Black school once they were torn up and worn out, her teacher punishes her and her younger brother for having a problem with it.

Jeremy, a boy from a prominent white family, likes to hang out with Stacey and walks in the mornings with the Logan family before they part ways to go to their separate schools, but Stacey rejects his friendship several times because he's suspicious of Jeremy's motives. In this case, a genuine offer of friendship is confused for being transactional, just from what he's seen of other interactions between Black and white folks.

In the end, tensions between Cassie's family and the Wallaces, the white family that orchestrated the first lynching, come to a head. TJ, who participated in a robbery with two of the Wallace sons that led to a white man's accidental death, is about to be lynched, but a sudden fire in the Logans' cotton fields leads to everyone helping to put out the flames. TJ escapes the situation with his life, but he still ends up going to jail for the crime. At the very end, Cassie realizes her father had set fire to his own field to cause a distraction that would end up affecting everyone in the community if they didn't all work together to stop it.

But my favorite part by far was the long con that Cassie pulls on a rude white girl, Lillian Jean. In short, LJ disrespects Cassie and asks her to call her "Miss" as a show of subservience, and when Cassie protests, Cassie's grandmother makes her apologize to both LJ and her father to avoid an even worse conflict, even though she's done nothing wrong. Cassie decides to take this apology to the extreme and pretends to be LJ's friend and "know her place": she carries her books for her, compliments her, brushes her hair, etc., as though she was LJ's personal servant. During this time, she learns all of LJ's most important schoolgirl secrets, including which boys she likes. After some time passes, Cassie suddenly drops the act and pushes LJ into the mud one morning, making her promise to not bother her again and threatening to reveal her secrets if she tells anyone what Cassie did.

The chapter ends with Lillian Jean seeming completely shocked, saying she truly thought Cassie was her friend during the entire act. I think this shows the true ignorance in the white perspective at the time: many religious leaders in the Bible-thumpin' South preached that whites were God's chosen people and Black people were always intended to serve others, so I doubt Lillian Jean even thought to view Cassie as a real person. To her, Cassie could only ever be an uneducated, opinionless servant — a background character without her own personality who only has value when serving white people. For Lillian Jean to confuse Cassie's act with true friendship shows how many assumptions she's making about Cassie's very personhood.

In this case, I don't think the book was trying to portray LJ as a serious aggressor; if anything, it shows that she's not really at fault at all by way of sheer ignorance. From what the rest of the book shows, Lillian Jean was just parroting her family's views when she saw Cassie acting as though she had value beyond what was socially expected of Black members of their community, so she belittled Cassie to put her back into the role she was "supposed" to fill. Of course, this mindset is still around today in different ways (e.g., the more modern "I don't care if you're gay, but don't shove it down my throat" mentality if a same-sex couple dares to hold hands or essentially do anything a straight couple would do in public), and maybe it always will be.

This is nothing new (High School Musical illustrated roughly the same thing through teen romance and dance numbers nearly 20 years ago), but: There's such a deep-seated need to show others where we feel they belong in relation to ourselves, and I think this largely reflects what we were shown and taught by others in our childhoods. Our egos are too fragile to be able to let go of the things that other people do and not feel a desire to "put them in their place" if we were shown all our lives that our own place is higher on the totem pole — but acting rudely because of ignorance isn't an acceptable excuse in the Internet Age.

One of the quotes I try to live by goes something like, "Your first thought is what society has told you to think; your second thought determines your character." We have more opportunities than ever before in history to inform and shape that second thought into something kind, respectful, and productive.

With The Slave Dancer, I felt nothing but disgust and a strong desire to put the book down (or even throw it in the trash) while reading Jesse's perspective of being an unwilling white participant in the transatlantic slave trade. The idea that the slaves in Slave Dancer did not have any dialog forced the focus onto the despicable actions of characters like Ben Stout, who tormented slaves for fun, and it was just tragedy after tragedy until the slaves all perished at the end of the book.

But when given only the perspective of the Black characters in Roll of Thunder, I couldn't put it down and read the whole thing across two days. Both stories depicted race-related violence and gave a good picture of what people are truly capable of when driven by a hatred of the "other," but I was much more willing and eager to root for the Logan family and read about their lives in their own words than play the part of the powerless observer like Jesse.

This is long enough: 9/10, Recommendable.