Review of Revolver by Marcus Sedgwick

Sedgwick, Marcus. Revolver. Roaring Brook Press, 2010.

The corpse of 14-year-old Sig's father Einar, enigmatic and secretive in death, lies on the table. Sig's stepmother and sister have gone to town to get help. And then a dangerous man named Wolff shows up, demanding that Sig tell him where Einar has hidden a cache of gold supposedly stolen ten years ago. When Sig's pretty sister Anna returns home without her stepmother or anyone else, she too is threatened with death - and other horrors as well.

Wolff has a revolver that he keeps trained on Sig and Anna. But Sig and Anna have a revolver, as well. If they can just get to it, they will come a little closer to evening the odds.

This short and intense story takes place in Nome, Alaska in 1899 and in Giron 100 miles above the Arctic circle in 1910, places so cold and hostile that it takes all one's resources and luck just to survive. To actually flourish is next to impossible. Why a man with a wife and two young children would choose to stay in this kind of intemperate and decided family-unfriendly environment is one of the mysteries of the story.

Whether it is 1899 and the very last ship of the season has left Nome, abandoning Einar, his sick wife, and two children behind to try to survive 7 months in a wild and completely isolated town where no one has enough food, or whether it is 1910 and Sig's whole world has shrunk down to one tiny cabin, one violent and desperate man, and two revolvers, this is a tale that induces stomach clenching stress and claustrophobia. Death is always patiently waiting right outside the door in the killing cold even if all is well indoors - and all is not well indoors. Almost every page crackles with tension and danger, if not outright violence.

Both Sig's father and his long-dead mother have had a profound impact on Sig's psyche, and both parents influence his actions in the end, as does a game Sig and his sister used to play. His father taught him the intricacies of the workings of Colt revolvers, while his mother taught him to turn the other cheek and, most of all, to have faith. Even Sig's intimate knowledge of the strange and snowy world he has lived in all his life plays a crucial role. The outcome of the stand-off is just right, although the epilogue, taking place in 1967, detracts a bit from the nail-biting suspense of everything that came before.

Highly recommended for ages 12 to 15.

Gory stories

There are always two kinds of people, right? Those who like Winnie-the-Pooh and those who don't. Those who like broccoli and those who don't.

When it comes to children's stories, there are those who like them sweet and mild - and those who like them grim!

I come by my own predilection for grim stories naturally. My mom told me The Hobyahs over and over again when I was a wee lass, and while it does end happily for one character, it's pretty much death by dismemberment or ingestion for all the rest of the characters, especially the canine hero of the tale. It's not that I relish violence (no, really) - it's more an appreciation of the story, even those uncomfortable bits.

Should two of the three pigs get eaten and the big bad wolf get boiled? Yes! Forget about those pigs getting away (as a librarian friend of mine told a library school class last week, "those pigs made bad choices.") and forget about the big bad wolf learning to repent. Let's let the fur and bristles fly.

I must admit that I have never told The Hobyahs to kids at the library (although my own kids have heard it - and so our penchant for peculiar tales gets passed on), but I stand by the Bloody Version of the Three Little Pigs. Parents look faintly shocked sometimes, but then, I've had parents express dismay about the Gingerbread Man getting eaten. Hey, that Gingerbread Man is one of the most obnoxious characters around! I have no qualms with him being eaten by pigs or foxes or whoever manages to trick him.

And what about the wolf who gobbles up Little Red Riding Hood? He's a baddie, so it never bothered me as a child when his stomach was filled with rocks and he was tossed in the river (or was it a well?). It was so vivid an idea that I could almost hear the rocks scraping and clattering against each other and see their lumpy outlines through the wolf's stomach.

Sometimes it's teachers who are the sensitive ones. I was recently told of a preschool teacher who curtailed her class's trip to the library after the librarian read The Super Hungry Dinosaur by Martin Waddell, in which a boy talks a dinosaur out of eaten him and his family. Apparently it was too violent and taught poor values, according to the note the teacher left for the librarian. Oh dear.

I could go on and on, quoting Bruno Bettelheim and mentioning red hot shoes and poked-out eyes. But I will never convince tender-hearted folks who don't like that stuff. We wolf-boilers and gingerbread eaters will just have to carry on, telling stories the Intense Way.

Not a casserole...

In fact, barely an appetizer.  I haven't had time to write a juicy, nourishing, and tasty post for several days now.  Clearly I should take Lee's advice and start writing blogs ahead of time for just these sorts of doldrums.

Or could the trouble be with my blog brand - or lack of it?  Charlotte has some good things to say about that.  In my head, my brand is "anything and everything, as long as it relates to children's or YA literature and/or library services."  Hopefully that's what comes across to readers!

Or maybe the problem is that I'm feeling inadequate and even a bit distraught that I didn't take part in Travis' non-traditional nonfiction reviews contest.  Dang, we've got some creative bloggers out there!  I was going to do something with Glogster but then forgot.  D'oh.

Next time I'll get straight to the dessert...

Bits 'n' Pieces

When my mom felt too busy to cook or hadn't been shopping in a while, she'd serve my sister and me "bits 'n' pieces," which consisted of whatever food - usually uncooked - that we had in the fridge and cupboards. A typical bits 'n' pieces meal might consist of apple slices, triscuits, cheddar cheese, apples, and maybe a couple of Vienna sausages. We always loved bits 'n' pieces meals.

So this is a bits 'n' pieces blog post. I haven't had time or energy to conjure up a warm, freshly cooked post, and in fact I can't even offer bits 'n' pieces on a single theme (as I managed a few days ago). Hopefully you'll be patient with this mismatched quickie meal, and even enjoy its picnic-y style, knowing that a hot, nourishing dinner will come your way soon.

I've been thinking a lot about the audiobooks my sister and I used to listen to back in the early 70s. They were very abridged (just one or two cassette tapes each) versions of Queenie Peavy, Caddie Woodlawn, Strawberry Girl, Thimble Summer, A Wrinkle in Time, Jacob Two-Two and the Hooded Fang, and more. Some had a single narrator but most had a cast that included children. I think they were published by Viking Recorded Books. And man, they were GREAT!!! Do any of you 40-somethings remember these?

My sister and I would listen to a tape every night, and we must have listened to each book dozens and dozens of times. I still remember the exact intonation of many lines - "There IS such a thing as a tesseract."
"Oh Caddie - You spilled the milk all over the floor!"
"I'd like two pounds of firm red tomahtoes. I'd like two pounds of firm red tomahtoes."
It would be wonderful to hear these tapes again; too bad they're long gone. I found the 1972 audiobook version of Queenie Peavy on Amazon for $20 - pretty tempting.

Speaking of audiobooks... disc 2 of my library copy of Numbers by Rachel Ward (narrated with verve by Sarah Coomes) is defective and won't play in my car disc player. ARGH! Now I have to wait until I can get another copy. Darn it. Good thing I've got Lord Sunday by Garth Nix to listen to in the meantime.

And leaping to an entirely different subject (hence the bits 'n' pieces motif)...
I visited two families with babies this past Friday, one of them a round-headed and joyful 10-month-old girl and the other a tiny-featured 3-week-old boy with a toddler big sister whose greatest pleasure currently is to water the lawn, the plants, and most of all herself. I got to hold both babies - ah, the bliss!

And then the next day I saw the movie Babies, featuring 4 babies in very different cultures. I had heard that the San Francisco couple, white older parents, come off badly (the scary "the earth is our mother" baby yoga session being mentioned a lot) but they just seemed as loving and affectionate in their West Coast way as all the other parents were (well, the dads of the African and Mongolian babies were absent, being off doing their manly duties, one assumes). And though a baby storytime might look mighty artificial when compared to a baby boy sitting naked on a metal pail and contemplating the vast gorgeous steppes in front of him, empty but for a bunch of cows and sheep, that baby storytime is important in our own culture.

I have to say, though, that those Namibian moms, who spent a lot of time chatting in the shade of a tree nursing or doing each other's hair and chatting away while babies, kids, and dogs tumbled over each other, looked to have a pretty great life. Certainly, they seemed to stress over the whole baby thing a LOT less than I did as a new young mother!

And that's all the bits 'n' pieces I've got today. Perhaps I'll serve a steaming hot casserole tomorrow...

Can a whale zeppelin be steampunk?

I just listened to the audiobook of Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld, and though it was an interesting bit of alternative historical fiction and a fine adventure, I don't know if I'd call it steampunk. It's 1914, and the Germans and Austrians (what the British call "clankers") have created big, noisy, awkward, and powerful machines that run on things like kerosene. Because Darwin managed to figure out how to splice DNA back in the 19th century, the British can fabricate strange creatures that they use as vehicles, weapons, and communications devices.

Alan Cummings' narration was fine - he did a German accent for Alek and his companions, while Deryn had an appropriately urchin-y Scottish accent. I often find male narrators' female voices to be a little off-putting, as they can sound so much like female impersonators - sort of plummy and annoying - but it kind of worked with Dr. Barlow, the posh female boffin.

Still, I really wish I had read this, because I didn't get to see the absolutely awesome illustrations by Keith Thompson which which the book is liberally sprinkled. While listening to the audiobook, I couldn't quite understand how the whale zeppelin and the medusa air balloon were supposed to look (usually I'm good at this, but my imagination kept showing me stuff that just didn't work). But now that I've seen the illustrations, I get it. And I have to say that these creatures, all coils and tentacles and with gondolas hanging off them, do look pretty steampunkish, even if they do run on biological energy, not steam energy.

Check out Thompson's Leviathan artwork here to see what I mean.

Must be hungry...

...or maybe I have some kind of vitamin deficiency, because food-related blog items keep popping out at me.

First, there are these delicious children's book-themed cakes from Cake Wrecks.

And then there are these wonderfully obsessive posts from Anna the Red, in which she re-creates meals from various Miyazaki films. I've always been fascinated by the fish casserole from Kiki's Delivery Service, and apparently I'm not alone. For all the photos, check out Anna's Flickr page.

And finally we have the Book Chook, who is creating a digital cookbook called (are you ready for this?) - the "Book Chook Cook Book!" Is that not the best book title ever? We all get to contribute, and this post tells you how.

Now it's time to eat a cookie.

Review of One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia

Williams-Garcia, Rita. One Crazy Summer. Amistad/HarperCollins, 2010.

There's something so refreshing to me about books in which the parents aren't perfect, earnest, cookie-cutter, or generic. Often in children's books, the parents are by far the least interesting characters, which is just not right considering the huge importance parents have in a child's life. And even though children may often take their parents for granted, that doesn't mean the reader must.

In One Crazy Summer, 11-year-old Delphine sure doesn't take her mom for granted. Cecile left Delphine, her 9-year-old sister Vonetta, and her 7-year-old sister Fern when Fern was just a baby - and now their father has decided it's time for the three girls to fly out from New York to Oakland for the summer of 1968 to get to know their long-lost mother Cecile.

Cecile - or Nzilla as she calls herself now - is formidable. Tall and given to wearing pants, hats, scarves, and sunglasses, she exudes an exciting menace and intensity - which is absolutely not for show, as she is so focused on her poetry that she has little attention left over to share with her 3 daughters or anyone else. There is no softness or give to her and she doesn't care what anyone thinks. She won't even waste a kind word on her own kids, much less give them breakfast or lunch, but at least she is always true to her own nature. If it wasn't for her extreme selfishness, especially where her daughters are concerned, I'd find her quite admirable.

Delphine, a pragmatic and "plain" child (as in plain-spoken, plain-thinking), thinks her mom is crazy, pure and simple, and isn't thrilled to have to be spending all day every day at a day camp run by the Black Panthers, where she has to watch Vonetta make lots of friends instantly and defend Fern from people who make fun of her for loving her little white baby doll Miss Patty Cake. It's surely difficult being the sensible big sister when you're thrust into a bizarre situation.

Throughout the next few weeks, Delphine figures out how to make the visit work, making delicate arrangements with her mom (such as being allowed in the kitchen - where Nzilla's printing press is - to make dinner), making a few friends, observing the goings-on of the Black Panthers with a wary eye, and even managing to take her sisters on a great trip to San Francisco. When her mother is arrested and later released, she and her mother have a showdown that is both painful and cathartic, and for me the most powerful part of the whole book.

Throughout this novel are many moments that illustrate the often uncomfortable and awkward rubbing together of the old Black culture (Delphine's grandma Big Ma, for example, who refers to herself as Negro or Colored) and the new (the Black Panthers, modern career women who don't automatically identify with Big Ma just because they share the same race). Delphine observes and judges it all, but refrains from forming her own hard and fast opinion - or perhaps it's just that she would rather try to get through each day. Delphine takes so much on her shoulders - finally her own mother (rather ironically) advises her to just let go, have fun, and be eleven years old.

The part of this book that touched me most is the way Delphine keeps thinking and worrying about Fern and her white baby doll Miss Patty Cake. Fern has loved that doll since she was an infant - but when Vonetta ruins Miss Patty Cake in a fit of rage, Fern seems to forget all about the doll. What does it mean? How can Fern forget all about something she has loved so long and so deeply? Is she mourning her on the inside? What is going on? It makes us wonder, too, which brings us back to the mystery of Cecile and how she could leave her family. There aren't any real answers, but lots to ponder.

The climax at the protest, with the girls' reciting of Nzilla's poem and Fern's own bombshell of a poem, felt inauthentic to me - it was too much a Book Moment, especially Fern's part. Could a 7-year-old really understand what the scene she witnessed meant, and articulate it so forcefully? Nah. It was effective - but at the price of the realism that pervades the rest of the book.

As the third generation to be born in Oakland, after my dad and my dad's mom (broke the chain with my own kids, darn it), I'm thrilled to see a slice of Oakland history, and of Black history, brought to such vivid life. Now a part of me will always see Oakland through Delphine's eyes.

Highly recommended for grades 4 - 7.