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.
It was as if some people believed there was a divide between the books that you were permitted to enjoy and the books that were good for you, and I was expected to choose sides. We were all expected to choose sides. And I didn't believe it, and I still don't. I was, and still am, on the side of books you love.
Neil Gaiman, Newbery Medal Acceptance Speech for The Graveyard Book
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.
I wanted books and made no distinction between good books or bad, only between the ones I loved, the ones that spoke to my soul, and the ones I merely liked. I did not care how a story was written. There were no bad stories: every story was new and glorious.
Neil Gaiman, Newbery Medal Acceptance Speech for The Graveyard Book
You are on a speakerphone with at least fifteen teachers and librarians and suchlike great, wise, and good people, I thought. Do not start swearing like you did when you got the Hugo Award. This was a wise thing to think because otherwise huge, mighty, and four-letter swears were gathering. I mean, that's what they're for.
Neil Gaiman, Newbery Medal Acceptance Speech for The Graveyard Book
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.
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).
I have quite a backlog of books to catch up on, so let's get the ones I didn't particularly care for out of the way. (I know; it's surprising me, too.)
The Girl Who Drank the Moon redeemed itself in the end, but as someone who doesn't consume much fantasy, this book suffered from some dialog problems I couldn't get past. Like the perfect hair day with one strand out of place, or the most beautiful painting with one barely noticeable smudge in the corner... as disappointed as I am to admit, what I brought to this reading experience hindered my own enjoyment of the story until the last third or quarter of the book.
A brief plot summary: A town at the edge of a forest "sacrifices" a baby every year to a witch. However, the witch in question has no idea why the townspeople leave a baby in the woods every year at the same time, so she takes the children and delivers them to other towns past the forest so they can be raised in loving families.
In the process of traveling with one particular baby, the witch accidentally feeds her pure moonlight, which gives her uncontrollable magical powers. The witch raises the girl herself and locks away her magic so she can't accidentally hurt anyone, but the girl's magic slowly reveals itself in confusing ways as she approaches her 13th birthday (hello, puberty metaphor!).
Eventually some of the townsfolk discover the reason behind the child sacrifices and learn they're being manipulated by the upper class. Without spoiling anything, a character called the Sorrow Eater is shown over time to be the true villain by maintaining and feeding off the townsfolk's constant despair. In the end, the girl is reunited with her real family, comes into her magical powers, and says goodbye to people (and creatures) she loves to begin a new life.
It's important to note that I read a book by this author a few years ago that I also felt lukewarm about. The best way to describe the author's writing style is fairytale-esque:
“Once upon a time, something terrifying lived in the woods. Or perhaps the woods were terrifying. Or perhaps the whole world is poisoned with wickedness and lies, and it's best to learn that now."
But the main literary sin is — in my unprofessional, unwarranted opinion — the unnatural dialog, namely (pardon the pun) the repetition of character names and terms of endearment.
"Yes, child."
"Hush, boy!"
"I didn’t mean to, darling."
"You will surely forget, Xan."
"Where are we running, uncle?"
"You don't despise anyone, Fyrian."
I've found that fantasy novels tend to do this frequently out of necessity just to remind the audience of everyone's complicated names. In this case, it just feels like shoving in exposition where it isn't needed. Hear me out: repeating a character's name can be an endearing quality that makes them memorable, like Sam Gamgee's "Mr. Frodo," but when done poorly, it's distracting and breaks the reader's immersion.
(Bad movies do a better job of showing how unnatural exposition in dialog can be, I think.)
With that complaint out of the way, I enjoyed how all of the characters' story arcs were brought together in the end and tied in with one another. Everyone's fate was connected, and I felt a strong sense of love at the end that made the path to getting there feel mostly worth it.
I think this is a book I would have loved maybe 20 years ago in 3rd or 4th grade (has it really been that long?), but for now, let's go with a 6/10 and a tentative Recommendable rating.
