ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE- Anthony Doerr

ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE is my latest adult read.
Historical Fiction.
Holocaust.
Good and evil.
Amazingly crafted.
Beautiful writing.
I loved it.

ALL THE LIGHT is the story of two characters, a little French girl, Marie Laure, and a German boy, Werner. Marie Laure lives with her father, who is a locksmith at the Museum of Natural History in France. Marie-Laure is blind, and her father has built a tiny village, totally to scale, so that she can memorize, then traverse her neighborhood. When Paris is occupied by the Nazis, Marie-Laure and her father travel to the seaside town of Saint Malo to live with an uncle, whose own WWI experiences have left him an agoraphobic. Marie-Laure's father carries a valuable gem, a treasure given to him by the museum to protect.

Far away, Werner is an orphan, growing up with a younger sister in Nazi Germany. Their father was killed in a mining accident, and the two siblings live in a kind of foster home. Werner is fascinated by electronic devices and becomes an expert at repairing and transmitting messages by radios. These skills lead him to a place in the Hitler Youth. Werner's job is to use the radio to ferret out nationalists who are transmitting messages for their countries, a job which he likes less and less.

Doerr's crafting of the book is pretty much genius. When the story opens, both Marie-Laure and Werner are in the war-torn town of Saint Malo in France. Doerr then takes the reader back in time, alternating chapters of Marie-Laure and Werner. Throughout the book, the reader knows that somehow the two characters paths are going to cross, but it's hard to imagine when or where that intersection might occur.

I devoured the book the first time for the story, which I totally loved. It's probably geeky, but this weekend I'm planning on reading the book again, this time to pay more attention to how Doerr crafted the book, because his use of time, and his back and forth between the characters is pretty much amazing. I'm going to be taking lots of notes because we have book club next weekend and I want to be prepared. This is also one of the those books with lots of really powerful lines, the kind you copy down and think about for a long, long time.

ALL THE LIGHT is a long one (544 pages!) but it's well worth the read!

MIGHTY MISS MALONE- CHRISTOPHER PAUL CURTIS

For the past couple of weeks, everyone on Twitter has been "talking" about Christopher Paul Curtis' new book, THE MIGHTY MISS MALONE. I've been trying to resist buying books, but last weekend, I couldn't stand it anymore. I broke down and bought THE MIGHTY MISS MALONE. It was definitely a good purchase!

Deza Malone is a sixth grader, living with her family in Gary, Indiana at the height of the Great Depression. Deza's father, who she adores, is unable to find work, and eventually leaves the family and heads for Flint, Michigan, where he believes that jobs will be more plentiful. He promises he will write and send for the family, but when Deza, Jimmy, and their mom don't hear for him for several months, they decide to hit the road to try to find him. They end up in a homeless camp outside of Flint.

There's lots to love about this book. Historical fiction is one of my favorite genre, and this book is terrific. It's rich with details from that time period-- e.g. Deza's family doesn't have money to send her to the dentist, so she holds cotton with camphor in her mouth to dull the pain. I love the character of Deza-- she's smart, and spunky, and tough, and resourceful. Just the kind of gal I would want for a friend!

A terrific read. I didn't want to put it down!

THE FRIENDSHIP DOLL by Kirby Larson

Our Christmas vacation has been relatively quiet. I've read and reread and reread the CYBILS poetry nominees, and finally picked my five. We went to Colorado Springs and spent Christmas day with my family. I've spent time with my book club buddies and seen a couple of movies. I've done a little cleaning… What I haven't done, at least as much as I usually do, is read, at least not in the voluminous way I usually do during vacations.

Yesterday, I did pick up THE FRIENDSHIP DOLL, a historical fiction novel by Kirby Larson. THE FRIENDSHIP DOLL follows Miss Tanagawa, one of 58 "ambassador dolls" sent to the United States by Japanese schoolchildren (this actually happened), in 1927. The historical fiction/fantasy line is blurred occasionally, as Miss Tanagawa interjects her voice into the lives of five different characters in five short, novella-like episodes. The first four episodes are set against the backdrop of the Great Depression era, and there is a lot of history embedded.

When Miss Tanagawa arrives in New York, she is greeted by a group of children, including Bunny, a wealthy, high society child, who is disappointed that a Roosevelt heir has been chosen over her to give the speech welcoming the dolls to the United States. Next, Miss Tanagawa travels to Chicago, where we meet Lois, a child who has dreams of flying like Amelia Earhart. After that, Miss Tanagawa is sold at an auction and ends up in the closet of a crochety old lady, whose heart is finally awakened by Willie Mae, a poor young girl whose father has been killed in a coal mining accident in the Appalachian mountains. From there, Miss Tanagawa travels to a museum in Oregon, where she encounters Lucille, who is traveling cross country with her widowed father, following the crops during the Great Depression. Miss Tanagawa plays the role of conscience or comforter.

I really enjoyed how Kirby Larson structured this novel to capture the lives of several characters during the era from 1927-1941. I was fascinated by how she used Miss Tanagawa as the common thread tying the stories together. I can't wait to share this book with some of my girls next week…

RUTH AND THE GREEN BOOK- CALVIN ALEXANDER RAMSEY

Ruth is excited when her father buys a new car. It's supposed to be for his job, but first the family is going to use it to travel from their home in Chicago to Alabama to see Ruth's grandma.

The trip starts out as a grand adventure, but soon the reality of life in the south in the 1950's sets in. No one will let Ruth and her mother use their restroom, so they have to go into the woods. They can't eat at restaurants or stay in a motel.

The second day of their trip, Ruth and her family stay with a friend of her father's who tells the family to look for Esso stations, because that company is friendly to blacks. At one of the Esso stations, a clerk shows them THE NEGRO MOTORIST GREEN BOOK, a publication that tells Blacks about places they can eat and stay. Ruth's family relies on the book to help them for the rest of their journey.

RUTH AND THE GREEN BOOK is fiction, but THE NEGRO MOTORIST GREEN BOOK was actually published from 1936-1964. Pair this book with SIT-IN, another terrific read about life in the segregated South.

ONE CRAZY SUMMER- RITA WILLIAMS-GARCIA

OK, so I really do know that almost everyone in the Kidlitosphere world has already read ONE CRAZY SUMMER. People already know it's the story of Delphine, Vonetta, and Fern, three girls who were abandoned by their mother when they were very young. Now, seven years later, the girls are being sent cross country, from New Jersey, where they live with their father and grandmother, to California, to become reacquainted with their mother. Their mother, Cecile, however, is less than pleased about the trip. She is a poet, deeply involved with the Black Panthers, and doesn't really want to be disturbed by her daughters. Each morning, she sends the girls out the door to a day camp run by the Black Panthers.

This is a great piece of historical fiction. Kids will learn a lot about Huey Newton and the Black Panthers. More important to me, however, it's a terrific story about abandonment, and forgiveness, and people doing the best that they can, given their life circumstances. This year, for whatever reason, we have a ton of kids who are not living with their moms. And that deep grief is always at the surface, bubbling over and impacting their learning on a daily basis.. I can't wait to share this book with some of them, then, so that they know they are not alone…

A really great read for upper intermediate or middle schoolers…

P.S. I also know that almost everyone else in the world has had a Kindle, or a Nook, or some other e-reader for a while. BUT, I didn't have one, and my mom bought me a Kindle for an early Valentine's present, and I love it. Way, way fun!

COUNTDOWN- Deborah Wiles

I remember three things about sixth grade:

1) Mr. Meyers read aloud to us every day after lunch. I remember HUCKLEBERRY FINN and WHERE THE RED FERN GROWS.

2) We sat in order from best reader in the class to worst. Bill O. and I dueled every week for chairs #1 and #2. Joe R. sat in Chair #31 all year long.

3) Every day, Mr. Meyer regaled us with stories of nuclear destruction- how many pounds of uranium it would take to destroy the world, how many were actually in existence, etc.

I identified, then, with Frannie Chapman, the main character in COUNTDOWN by Deborah Wiles. Frannie and her family, which consists of her Air Force pilot father, her mother, a college age sister, a third grade brother, and an uncle who fought in WWII, live at Andrews Air Force Base outside of Washington D.C. The book is set at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, so besides the typical sibling rivalry and best friend quarrels, Frannie and her classmates and family are sure they are about to be annihilated in a nuclear war.

COUNTDOWN goes beyond the typical historical fiction novel, however. Deborah Wiles calls the book a "documentary novel." Interspersed throughout the text are all kinds of different documents-- black and white photos of world leaders like Kruschev and John F. Kennedy, song artists and lyrics, covers and pages from Civil Defense manuals, etc. The book is a plethora of images that contribute enormously to the "flavor" of the book.

As I read this book, I couldn't help but think of all the recent discussions of books as a dying genre. COUNTDOWN, with its combination of words and images, felt a lot like surfing the web. I think Deborah Wiles has set a new standard for historical fiction (and I can't wait to read the next two novels in this series).

MOON OVER MANIFEST- Claire Vanderpool

Wrapping up the CYBILS nonfiction picture book nominees, and trying to participate in #bookaday with some of my Twitter friends. Spent a good chunk of yesterday (who needs to Christmas shop or wrap presents or clean house!) reading MOON OVER MANIFEST, a debut novel that I found at the library last week.

Twelve-year-old Abilene Tucker, abandoned by her mother at the age of two, is more than a little confused when her father puts her on a train to Manifest, the small town in Kansas where he spent his adolescent years. Her first night in Manifest, Abilene finds a cigar box which contains a variety of seemingly unrelated trinkets- some letters between two friends named Jinx and Ned, a fishing lure, a nesting doll, a skeleton key, and several others. Later that week, she loses a compass given to her by her father, then sees it dangling from the porch of Miss Sadie, Manifest's gypsy/fortune teller. Miss Sadie will not give Abilene her precious compass until she "pays" for a pot broken during Abilene's attempts to reach her keepsake. As Abilene works, the gypsy tells her the stories of Jinx and Ned, the treasures from the cigar box, and the secrets of Manifest, which ultimately lead Abilene to some huge understandings of her father, Gideon.

This is a terrific read with lots of great characters to love. Abilene is a smart and plucky teenager, but she is also really missing her father, and wondering whether he will ever come back for her (she reminded me of many of the kids I know). Shady, the town pastor/bartender appears to battle his own alcohol demons, but takes in anyone who needs a friend. Miss Sadie first appears as kind of an evil old woman, but then actually ends up as, well, I'll let you read and figure that out for yourself.

Vanderpool is a masterful storyteller-- MOON was one of those books where I read it once for story, then went back again and tried to figure out how Vanderpool had crafted the novel. Half of the story, the part set in 1936, is told with Abilene at the center, but then the stories from Manifest's history (1918) are contained in chapters told by Miss Sadie. Vanderpol also uses newspaper clippings and medicine bottle labels, letters, and journals to complete the story. There is a little World War I history, information about the influenza epidemic of 1918, and a whole lot of big truths about the role story plays in our lives, and I found myself jotting notes throughout the book (I originally intended to use those as the basis of the review but then my computer crashed).

A great kickoff to #bookaday!

FAMILY REMINDERS- JULIE DANNEBERG

CALLING ALL COLORADO TEACHERS,
ESPECIALLY THOSE WHO TEACH COLORADO HISTORY.
HERE'S A BOOK YOU'LL WANT TO OWN!

Ten-year-old Mary McHugh lives with her father and mother in Cripple Creek, Colorado in the late 1800's. Mary is at school one day when a siren goes off, indicating that there has been an accident at the mine. After school, Mary discovers that her own father has been injured. He survives, but is no longer the happy, wood-carving, piano-playing daddy that Mary knew before the accident, and Mary and her mother must find a way to help him work out of his deep depression, and also help the family survive without its previous income.

FAMILY REMINDERS would be a terrific read aloud for anyone doing a unit on life in the mining towns. I can also see myself handing the book to some of our second, third, and fourth grade readers, think LITTLE HOUSE books, but a little easier. And I love Mary and her mom, plucky heroines who make lemonade when life hands them lemons. They're great models for today's tough economic times.

THE MOSTLY TRUE ADVENTURES OF HOMER P. FIGG- RODMAN PHILBRICK

Last weekend, my blogging friend Mary Lee (Year of Reading) was in town. I asked her about novels she had read recently, and she recommended THE MOSTLY TRUE ADVENTURES OF HOMER P. FIGG. On Monday, when I was at the library (notice I did not say bookstore!), I picked it up. I have to agree with Mary Lee, it's a good one.

Homer P. Figg is an orphan. He lives with his brother Harold Figg and a wicked step uncle, Squint, on a farm in Pine Swamp, Maine. After an unforunate incident involving pig slop, Squint becomes angry with the boys and finagles a deal so that Harold is conscripted into the Union Army, even though he is seventeen and not technically old enough to serve. Homer sets out to find his brother and bring him home. And so begin the adventures (or perhaps the misadventures) of Homer P. Figg…

In his hunt for his brother, Homer is captured by evil bounty hunters Smelt and Stink, meets Jebediah Brewster, a Quaker whose home is a station on the Underground Railroad, and travels as the "Pig Boy" with Professor Fenton Fleabottom, an elixir salesman with a few secrets of his own. His adventures (or misadventures) with these characters are funny and fun to read, but also include a great deal of information about life during the Civil War era.

A couple of parts toward the end felt a little forced and were a little hard to believe. Mostly, though, it's a really good read. I'd use HOMER P. FIGG in a unit on the Civil War, maybe in a text set with ELIJAH OF BUXTON. 

A FRIENDSHIP FOR TODAY- Patricia McKissack

The year is 1955. The Supreme Court has ruled against segregation and twelve-year-old Rosemary Patterson is about to start sixth grade at T. Thomas Robertson Elementary School. Rosemary's best friend, James Jonson Stenson (or JJ for short) is supposed to attend with her, but then he gets polio, and ends up spending the year in a rehab hospital instead. Rosemary is the only black girl in her class, and she must face the stares and unkindesses  of many of her peers. 

Things are not so great at home either- Rosemary's mom and dad are fighting a lot, eventually, her father moves out, and her parents divorce. Rosemary's main source of solace is a Rags, a half-dead stray cat she finds run over on the railroad tracks and nurses back to health. 

Gradually, Rosemary becomes friends with Grace, a white girl whose very southern father is not at all in favor of integration. It is an unlikely friendship, formed by two girls who desperately need someone to hang onto. 

In a note at the end of the book, McKissack tells readers that although the book fiction, it is loosely based on events from her own life. She really was the only African American girl in her elementary school. Her mom and dad break up. And the book is dedicated to her cat, Rags, that kept her going through this very difficult time.

This is not the best book I have read on this time period, but it's definitely a good story and a relatively fast read. I could see putting it in a text set with books like YANKEE GIRL, NEW BOY, and WATSONS GO TO BIRMINGHAM. 

CHAINS- Laurie Halse Anderson

Twelve-year-old Isabel is a slave in Rhode Island in 1776. Her father has been sold, her mother has died, and Isabel is responsible not only for herself, but also for her five-year-old sister, Ruth, who is "simple" and suffers from epilepsy. Isabel's owner, Miss Mary Finch, is not the typical slave owner; she has taught Isabel to read, and has even written her will to grant freedom to Isabel and Ruth when she dies.

Unfortunately, when Miss Mary dies, an unscrupulous cousin takes custody of the girls. Instead of being freed, they are sold to the Mr. and Mrs. Lockton, a wealthy but cruel Loyalist couple in New York City. Isabel's only "friends" in the city are Master Lockton's wealthy aunt, Lady Seymour, and Curzon, a slave she meets the day the girls arrive in the city. Curzon encourages Isabel to act as a spy for the Patriots. Isabel is neither for nor against the Patriots' cause, she just wants to obtain freedom for herself and her little sister, and is willing to do whatever she has to do to make that happen…

Madame Lockton is cruel beyond belief. She works Isabel day and night, and tries to train Ruth to be her personal attendant. Because of her seizures, Ruth is unable to do the job, so Madame Lockton determines that she is no longer of value to the household. Isabel, totally grief stricken, runs into the city looking for her sister. When she is caught, she is severely punished. I wept as I read those chapters…

Prior to CHAINS,  I didn't know very much about New York City during the Revolutionary War. Like most Americans, I hadn't spent too much time thinking about the Loyalists. I'd never wondered about what happened to all of the families who lived in New York  City during that time.  I never knew there was a huge fire that destroyed a large part of the city in 1776. And although I knew that the Patriot soldiers had hard lives, I was shocked to learn that the prisoners of war were "stuffed" into jails, churches, warehouses, and even old ships, with no heat, no coats or blankets, no medical treatment, and very little food or water. Laurie Halse Anderson does a masterful job of embedding layers and layers of research into this powerful story, and I come away not only having read a great story, but also knowing a lot more about the Revolutionary War. 

This is an amazing read, by one of the finest authors writing today. I loved Halse Anderson's picture book, INDEPENDENT DAMES. I couldn't wait to share the ARC of her newest YA novel, WINTERGIRLS with my niece. And now CHAINS. Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow!

Maybe the best thing is that there will be a sequel to CHAINS within the next year! I'd like to read it tomorrow! I want to know what happens to Isabel and Curzon!

SHOOTING THE MOON- Frances O'Roark Dowell

Twelve-year-old Jamie is an army brat. Jamie's father, the Colonel, is a career military man, currently Chief of Staff at Fort Hood, Texas. He loves the Army:

(The Colonel) loved the starch and stiff uniforms and boots polished to a high shine. He was crazy about military parades, and had dragged me and TJ to parade grounds from Fort Benning to Fort Ord. I'd even seen him get teary-eyed when the troops passing in front of the inspection stand turned right-face to salute whatever bigwig officer was sitting in the catbird seat. It got to him every time. 

"The Army way is the right way," he'd say, as to us whenever we piled into the blue Ford station wagon to start out for a new destination

Having grown up in this culture, Jamie and her older brother TJ, also love all things military. They answer the phone, "Colonel Dexter's quarters." They spend after school hours enacting fierce battles with their green plastic army men. Once, after a particularly fierce battle, TJ makes Jamie a medal of honor out of a silver gum wrapper.

When TJ enlists in the Army and is sent to Vietnam, Jamie is absolutely thrilled. She is confused by the Colonel's less than enthusiastic response to the fact that his only son has enlisted. Jamie can't wait to start getting letters about her brother's experiences. She is surprised, then, when he sends he canisters of film, which she learns to develop in the dark room at the rec center on base. 

TJ's first pictures are fairly innocuous- pictures of soldiers, nurses, and dogs he has seen on base. The pictures become increasingly more graphic, however, and more troubling to Jamie, who finds herself struggling with conflicting feelings about the war and the people she loves most dearly…

I loved this book. I'd love to use it in a middle grade study of the Vietnam War or war in general. I'd love to use it to show kids how a writer embeds history into a work of fiction. I grew up in the sixties, during the height of the Vietnam War, and this book helped me understand this conflict in ways I never had before. 

I also loved Dowell's development of characters, even some of the more minor characters in the book. My favorite might be Cindy Lorenzo, an "eleven-year-old girl with a first grade brain." The way Dowell uses details to reveal this character is simply amazing

A thoroughly satisfying read!