Monday, November 21, 2011

Water, Water, Anywhere?

Except for times of drought when we’re asked to water our lawns before and after 10 o’clock on set days of the week, we take water for granted.

In the mid-1800’s our ancestors didn’t have that luxury. They couldn’t pretend they were opera stars singing in daily hot showers or gulp a glass of cool water from the kitchen sink. If they wanted water to keep their cattle, crops, and themselves alive, they had to hire a dowser, a person with the gift of finding water.

Not everyone had this gift. It seems to me that a dowser must have been as necessary to his community as a doctor. A dowser would have his future planned and his security assured. Wouldn’t he? But what if the dowser was determined to escape the reach of his gift and do something else?

THE WATER SEEKER by Kimberly Willis Holt, Christy Ottaviano Books, 2010

Dowser and trapper Jake Kinkaid uses a forked branch to make his living. He’s saving his money so he can stop dowsing and do what he wants. The plan is simple. Jake’s life gets complicated.

A wild, red-headed woman named Delilah runs to Jake’s cabin to escape her abusive father. In very short order, they marry, produce a son, and Delilah dies, leaving Jake to raise his son, Amos, alone. Amos inherits his mother’s artistic talents and his father’s gift of dowsing, but, as the reader learns, Amos is not entirely alone. Other women who love and care for Delilah’s boy, sometimes see a wild, red-haired apparition who seems more approving than threatening.

Jake’s gift of dowsing doesn’t make him happy. He longs to spend all his time hunting and trapping. As a scout for a wagon train going west, he is injured trying to rescue another man on a treacherous river crossing and his leg must be amputated. By now Amos is 14. He knows that he, too, has the gift of dowsing, but he keeps it to himself because he knows how unhappy his father is about his own gift. Instead, he tries to help his disabled father dowse and struggles to keep him from falling into a deep depression.

Amos’s life parallels the expansion of our country during the middle part of the 18th century. This is historical fiction at its best. As the author follows Amos from his birth in 1833 to the birth of Amos’s son in 1859, the reader absorbs how the early pioneers learned to work together, take care of each other, share, grow, settle, and branch out with their own families.

Author Holt won the National Book Award for When Zachary Beaver Came To Town, and her book My Louisiana Sky was made into a movie. She was launched on her quest for information for The Water Seeker when her own husband mentioned that his father was a dowser. Mentioned? What a happy discovery! There is more on her website: www.kimberlywillisholt.com

This book should travel well in the days ahead. Tuck it into your tween’s carry-on. A book can stay open after the captain orders all electronic devices shut down.

Saturday, November 12, 2011

Firestorm!

Today’s tweens and teens might think the word firestorm refers to political rhetoric. No one who is of interest to the media can say much or tweet much without drawing a barrage of withering comments—a firestorm. When I looked up the word in a dictionary, it wasn’t there. Another dictionary, same year as the first, defined it as a fire driven by a violent wind. Yes, lots of hot air. I like the middle grade novel by the same name much better than the storms raging on radio and tv talk shows.

FIRESTORM! by Joan Hiatt Harlow, Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2010

Poppy’s mother leaves her in a Chicago alley where the little girl is picked up by Ma Brennan, a female Fagin, who teaches girls to steal. Ma has 2 biological daughters whom she favors, but Poppy becomes a skilled pick pocket, and this is what keeps her alive and gives her a place to sleep.

Justin Butterworth is 13 and privileged. His father is Chicago’s most important jeweler. Poppy and Justin meet, and thanks to a pet goat named Tick Tock, they begin to see each other as people, not stereotypes. They become friends. Poppy meets Justin’s sister Claire who tells her she is like a geode. Inside is a sparkly crystal of goodness. This reaches deep inside Poppy, getting underneath all the hurt she has suffered. Poppy doesn’t want to steal anymore. She wants to belong to a real family.

Ma is not willing to give up her star thief, however. She manipulates Poppy by threatening to turn Tick Tock into goat stew, and the plot thickens.

The characters interact, grow, and deepen against the historical background of the Chicago fire which was NOT started by Mrs. O’Leary’s cow. Only the Butterworth family, Poppy, and the girls and Ma Brennan are fictional, although there was a Mary Brennan who taught girls to steal. Other famous people are mentioned but they are in place historically and accurately portrayed. Author Harlow skillfully weaves in bits of history to enlarge the reader’s knowledge of this tragic event. Publication of this novel was timely, during the 150th year observation of the fire.

This is definitely a middle grade novel which girls especially will enjoy. Sensory details are so engaging one can taste the smoke, hear the fire alarms and trucks rushing to respond, feel grit in eyes and nose. A dramatic arc swings wide from tangled relationships to a frantic escape from the raging fire to the resolution of the characters’ complicated problems. In spite of a burned and blackened landscape, this ends well.

Kudos to the author. She’s written other books for this age group and you can find them at www.joanhiattharlow.com her website.

Saturday, October 29, 2011

Covered in Cobwebs

It’s that time again. Carve the pumpkin, or purchase one that has a permanent grin. I still have the coated cardboard jack-o-lantern (my guess as to what it’s made of) I carried as a child, thanks to my mother and an attic with magical stretching powers. That space above the pull down stairs always had room for one more box of treasures. Even creepy ones with eerie smiles.

THE GARGOYLE ON THE ROOF by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Peter Sis, Greenwillow Books, 1999.

If this book is in your attic or buried in the stacks on your bookshelves, drag it out and dust it off. Poetry and pictures in the hands of these talented legends is never out of style.

This book of clever poems has longevity. Moms and dads can read it to their younger kids and dramatize as much as the youngest listener can handle. Older kids will enjoy doing their own dramatizing. One can almost hear the illustrator chuckling to himself as he creates the gruesome characters soaring, diving, and gliding across the pages. Other characters react in fright, shock, surprise, and a few smiles, but these are not the smiles one trusts.

My favorites: the plight of the Vampire who can’t see his image in the mirror,and the social problems of the Headless Horseman and the lonely Troll. It isn’t too difficult to see middle school students identifying with some of these characters.

Without any magic at all, today’s young readers will be tomorrow’s older kids. Here are two Halloween books reviewed on Book Log last year. The links either won't work on reviews that far back or the gremlins are haunting my computer. You can, however, find them by going to the archives
at left and clicking on 2010.

Trick or Treat, Old Armadillo by Larry Dane Brimner, featured October 26, 2010.

On a Windy Night by Nancy Raines Day, reviewed October 22, 2010.

They are still scary good fun!

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Reader—A.K.A. Writer

I’ve been away from my blog, but not away from my books. Time to share.

THE CASE OF THE CASE OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY by Mac Barnett, with illustrations by Adam Rex, Simon & Schuster BFYR, 2009

If you’ve been searching for a book for a reluctant reader boy, here’s one that just might grab his interest. Does he like playing detective and solving crimes? Being a hero? How about his ego? Can it stand a good natured tumble or two?

He’d relate well to 12 year old Steve Brixton, the main character of this fun to read adventure. Steve is a fan of the Bailey Brothers detective novels and he is so good at solving crimes that he’s mistaken for a real detective. The chase is on. While he searches for a missing quilt containing coded information, he must elude librarians, police, and the mysterious Mr. E. Along the way, he learns to laugh at himself when his ego is trounced and keep his focus on the crime at hand.

Girls will enjoy this book, too, even though there are no girls in it, just two chums. That word is an inside joke. Read the book to get it. However, this is not one of those books you need read first to understand why your reader is chuckling. Just be glad he’s reading.

References to the Bailey Brothers detective novels does not slow the action. If the Bailey Brothers series is real, this book builds on them. If the idea of such a series was created only for this stand alone title, someone should write it. A readership awaits.

This was a finalist in the juvenile division of the Edgar awards given by the Mystery Writers of America.

I have a hunch the author’s website is fun.

Monday, September 5, 2011

Good-Bye, Irene

The rains fell, the winds blew. An introduction to Hurricane Irene thundered on the tin roof of my cabin in the Poconos where I recently spent a week in the company of other writers. Nothing like a good book to take one’s mind off a threatening storm. While Irene tossed her wet and shaggy locks like a quick-tempered drama queen, I sailed the Polar Sea with Captain Mac.

CAPTAIN MAC: The Life of Donald Baxter MacMillan, Arctic Explorer, by Mary Morton Cowan, Calkins Creek, 2010

The son of a seaman, Donald Baxter MacMillan was an orphan by the time he was twelve. He faced and overcame many hardships, but at the end of a long and adventurous life, he could look back on a career of Arctic exploration that lasted almost 50 years.

Author Mary Morton Cowan combed notebooks, diaries, and ship’s logs to craft this fully researched text that reads like a novel. She takes the reader out to sea with Captain Mac to endure homesickness, cold, isolation, and darkness for months at a time. 5 of Captain Mac’s 25 sailing expeditions, the last in 1954, lasted longer than a year. On some expeditions, the crew was forced to subsist on seal, walrus, polar bear meat -- or starve. Excellent maps and photos are well-placed to expand the reader’s understanding of the action in the Polar North.

Bowdoin College figures prominently in Captain Mac’s life. He worked diligently to pay his way and graduate with a degree in geology in spite of financial and health problems. His schooner, which he captained for 18 expeditions, was named the Bowdoin. In 1918 Bowdoin College awarded him an Honorary Doctor of Science degree. The Peary-Macmillan Arctic Museum at Bowdoin College, dedicated in June 1967, houses stuffed, mounted polar bears, Mac’s camera, the watch Commander Robert Peary gave Mac that he took every time he sailed north and the letter he took on every expedition: “To be opened when everything’s gone dead wrong.”

There is so much more to know about Captain Mac. His sense of fairness. His sense of humor. Cowan lightens dark moments with anecdotes about the man himself.

The bear cub he rescues and names Bowdoin causes mayhem, becomes playful and somewhat trainable, but eventually leaves. It’s a bittersweet good-bye.

Mac learns to choose his crew with these criteria: to sign on, a scientist must be or become a sailor and a hunter. He must also be personable. Who would want to be stuck in the dark and cold for months with a man who complains all the time? Cranky men need not apply! (Interpretation mine.)

And then there are the college students, “Mac’s boys,” that Mac and his wife Miriam treat like family. Additionally, their care and concern for the Inuit children and the Inughuit culture becomes a legacy.

The author provides a time line of expeditions, a list of awards and major recognitions, chapter notes, an index, and a selected bibliography as well as suggestions for further reading. For more, see the author’s website.

Author Cowan weaves a tantalizing tale. Readers ten and up and their parents will find this information packed adventure story accessible and enjoyable.

Irene may have turned off the lights, shut off the water, and closed down all the airports offering me a ride home, but I was equipped with a small clip-on book light, a Christmas present from my son. That book light goes where I go. Take note, you East and Gulf Coast weather watchers. Another hurricane or two is spinning toward us. Along with fresh batteries and a supply of bottled water, you might want to have a copy of Captain Mac on hand.

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

40 Years of SCBWI

Fatigue has faded. Euphoria has not. Last week I was among the 1,342 lucky writers, illustrators, and other publishing professionals who journeyed to Los Angeles to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. The founders, Lin Oliver and Stephen Mooser, are still young. Writing for children creates one’s own private Fountain of Youth. Most of us are the age of the main character in our WIP (work in progress.)

Judy Blume, Gary Paulsen, Ben Small, Bruce Coville, Henry Winker (“The Fonz”), Ellen Hopkins, Jerry Pinkney, and Richard Peck were just a few of the many mesmerizing speakers. I will focus on three: Jo S. Kittinger, Rukhsana Kahn, and Laurie Halse Anderson.

Jo S. Kittinger, author of 22 books, led a workshop titled, “Digging for Gold: Nuggets That Make Your Nonfiction Books Shine.” Shine is something Jo knows about. Her most recent nonfiction book, Rosa’s Bus, blogged here, won a Crystal Kite, an SCBWI peer award given for the first time this year. Jo is also the Co-Regional Advisor of Southern Breeze,a region of SCBWI composed of Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi. In October Lin Oliver will travel to Birmingham to present the Crystal Kite award to Jo at the Southern Breeze Writing and Illustrating for Kids annual conference.

Rukhsana Kahn won a Golden Kite for her book The Big Red Lollipop blogged here. Her acceptance speech showcased her storytelling talents. A flutter of hands, a sly gleam, and a mischievous smile transported us to those moments in her life that inspired this award winning tale about sisters. Sibling rivalry is universal. Rukhsana admitted the real life ending and the ending in her book are different. Wouldn’t we all like to relive a part of our lives and write a different ending?

Laurie Halse Anderson was the final speaker. She spoke as though she had been perched on the front row, listening to each speaker, soaking up every word. Her summary, quoting speakers, emphasizing concepts and challenges, reminded us of the extraordinary task we have as creators of materials for children. For her body of work which includes the well known novels Speak, Chains, and Forge, blogged here. Laurie received the 2009 Margaret A. Edwards Award given by YALSA, a division of the American Library Association for “significant and lasting contribution to young adult literature.“

While Laurie quoted others in her stirring summary, I raced to take notes in order to share her her quotes:
“The job of the artist is to disturb the universe.”
“We are dreamers who dare to create.”
“To write is to terrorize yourself.”
“Our children need us to tell the truth.”
“In children’s literature, we are not competitors, we are co-conspirators.”

And, finally, “Go forth and disturb the universe.”

Monday, August 1, 2011

Too Little, Too Much

Weather is a news maker. Floods. Droughts. These are the calm sisters of the bullies, tornadoes and hurricanes. Yet, they are just as damaging, maybe more so. Too much water and people lose their homes in overwhelming floods. Too little water and drought kills crops. People suffer from famine or prices so high in the supermarket that dinner tables are often bare. We know the role water plays in the way we live. Do our children? Do they know how water works? Do they know where it comes from and where it goes?

ALL THE WATER IN THE WORLD by George Ella Lyon and Katherine Tillotson, Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2011

Where does water come from and where does it go? Did you know it goes on a round trip?

An acclaimed poet and a skilled artist combine talents to take us around the world while our growing understanding of the importance of water hitch hikes on a drop, slides down a gutter, bounces on a sidewalk, or just dries up. We can see it, hear it, taste it, and wake up in the middle of the night hoping someone will bring us a glass of it.

The author is also a novelist and an activist wielding a pen. She won the Jane Addams Award given to books that further the cause of peace and justice for You and Me and Home Sweet Home. . Visit her online here

Illustrator Tillotson loves jumping in puddles and pours her energy into a number of books. See her webpagehere.

Do you hear the rumble of thunder in the distance? Time to make a lap and hold your toddler in place with a book that will make the storm a memory. A good memory.

All the Water in the World ties generations,cultures,and countries together.

Hillview School Library