Why hello, Middle Grade Month of August. I’ve been prepping for the 6/7 grade Family Book Group I will be running in the autumn. Thus, a lot of middle-grade reading.
Picture books: none read this month.
Middle grade: A lot of good choices, but I’ll go with Save Me a Seat
Young Adult: I am Princess X
Young Nonfiction: none read this month
Adult Nonfiction: no recommendation
Smart Smut: no recommendation
Adult Fiction: none read this month
The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle
Fox
Read for Librarian Book Group
Delightfully creepy in that safe, middle-grade way. It was good enough I didn’t even mind so much that it was yet another book that took place in Europe during WWII. Children are sent away to a castle in Scotland so they can remain safe for the duration. Unfortunately, Rookskill Castle seems to not be the safe place they were hoping for.
Ms. Bixby’s Last Day
John David Anderson
Read for Librarian Book Group
Follow three boys as they attempt to give their favorite teacher a party. This book is funny, with true emotion and deeply felt relationships between the boys themselves and the boys and the teacher.
There are a couple of iffy teacher moments here–things that I think really good teachers would not do. However, the various scenes are so vivid (it turns out you can pick your friend’s nose) I’m going to let them slide.
Save Me A Seat
Weeks/Varadarajan
Read for Librarian Book Group
The alternating perspectives of two fifth grade boys: Joe, suddenly solitary after his friends move; Ravi, newly arrived with his family from India. Ravi was quite popular in India, partially because of how smart he is. He assumes that he will be just as popular in his new school.
Ravi is wrong. Sarah Weeks and Gita Varadarajan get so much right: the difficulties of not being able to learn like everyone else does; the difficulties of making new friends; the problems with pre-judging people; supportive families and how they both help and harm; parents not getting it.
This was a well-written book, but it left me with a bad taste in my mouth as to what we value in U.S. culture.
Maybe a Fox
Appelt/McGhee
Read for Librarian Book Group
This is the second book I’ve read this year from the perspective of a fox. Like Sara Pennypacker’s Pax, this was engrossing, heartfelt reading. I could have done with a little more development of fox culture (what is is this Kennan thing?) but overall, it’s a good meditation on grief and people’s roles in others lives.
Full Cicada Moon
Marilyn Hilton
Yet another story told through poems. I did not find the poems particularly powerful as poems, but they did a good job of telling Mimi’s story of moving to a small Vermont town in 1969. She’s half black and half Japanese. Also she wants to be an astronaut. You can see how there might be problems.
My Lady Jane
Hand/Ashton/Meadows
Let’s first discuss what I didn’t like about this book:
The cover. In the acknowledgments section the authors write of their delight at the cover and I’m glad they are happy. But it does nothing to depict what is on the inside of this book. In fact, the two people I asked, both said they thought it had something to with the 1960s. Something about the center part and freckles says flower children, not pseudo-pre-Elizabethan England.
Moving past our cover judgement, my other dislike is that this book doggedly follows the classic chaste romance plot arc, so much so that I knew what was going to happen before it did.
Now that we’ve gotten past those things, I must say that this book was weird in such a wonderful way. It begins on the acknowledgements page, where the three authors (again: weird) dedicate the book to everyone who knows there was room for Leonardo DiCaprio on that door. Inside Titanic reference! They also dedicate it to the people of England and apologize for ruining their history.
The authors create a historic fictional fantasy world in which Lady Jane Grey (she of the nine days rule and subsequent execution by Queen Mary) is hastily married off to the younger son of Lord Dudly (just like in real life) but Lord Dudly’s son in the book spends his nights in human form, reciting poetry and his days as a horse.
Yes, as a horse! In the world of this book, some of the people assume animal forms! Nothing on the cover or the plot synopsis indicates anything about this interesting wrinkle in made-up history.
I found this aspect delightful and enjoyed reading, despite the conventional chaste-romance plot. And so I recommend this book for you!
I am Princess X
Cherie Priest
Resistance was high, namely due to the title and the mix of graphic novel/traditional narrative. For some reason I can deal better with all graphic novel or all traditional narrative, but when combined there is some sort of anti-synergy that happens.
But all that resistance dissipated by the end of the first chapter. This book has a great setup: two girls create Princess X in fifth grade and spend all of middle school writing and illustrating adventures. Then one girl dies and all the Princess X stories are lost. Flash forward three years to when the surviving friend is walking around town and to her surprise, finds a Princess X sticker.
How did the sticker get there and who else knows about Princess X? Follow along to find out.
Tattoos on the Heart
Gregory Boyle
Father Boyle is executive director of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles and has spent his life working in the projects and with gang members. This is a collection of stories about his experiences. The stories are short, more like vignettes, and they are collected together in several themes.
I enjoyed this book, but I think Father Gregory is a probably a better in-person storyteller than an on-the-page writer.
The Fifteenth Minute
Sarina Bowen
We continue on in the Ivy series, this time with Lianne, an actress famous for being a sort of female Harry Potter, and DJ, whose on a weird kind of probation and isn’t sure how long he will last at Harkness College. This is a run-of-the-mill M/F love story. That also deals with rape accusation. While I think Bowen threads the needle somewhat well, it’s worth pointing out that rapes that go unreported are much more common than false accusations.
