The Problem with the Puddles by Kate Feiffer
Baby got in, she looked up at the sky and saw the dog-shaped cloud. It lifted its back leg. Sure enough, rain fell on the Puddles (p 3).
Feiffer’s debut novel is adorable, lovable, deplorable. No. Not deplorable, though there is a deplorable character.
Rain clouds stop for the Puddles. Could it be because Mr. and Mrs. cannot agree? They agree to disagree. They disagree so fervently that decision-making often frustrates their two children, Baby and Tom. When the Puddles leave for the city without their dogs (big Sally and Little Sally, they couldn’t agree on a dog), a chain of disagreements set in motion a chain of events that end in the reader falling in love with this quirky family and their dogs. A fantastic transitional reader I would give to those who enjoy Junie B. and Clementine.
I wish I lived next door to the Puddles. A strong contender for the Newbery. I wish there was a new author award for children’s literature, similar to the William C. Morris award.
All the Broken Pieces by Ann E. Burg
I have a now brother.
He doesn’t look like me.
I’m too much fall–
wet brown leaves
under a darkening sky.
Tommy is summer–
sunlight, peaches,
wide, grinning sky.
Even Tommy’s hair is summer.
Curls cling to his scalp like
the yellow-and-white sweet corn
at McGreavy’s Market.
Only one straight tuft sticks up,
like a clump of sun-scorched hay.
(p 8 )
When he was ten years old (but looked six) Matt was given to American soldiers by his Vietnamese mother so that he could escape the war. Adopted by a loving American family, Matt carries the heaviness of a past defined by war and a secret shame.
All the Broken Pieces is like a short story by Hemingway. Told in verse, the words are short and the sentences terse but packed with meaning. The descriptions are tied to nature and lovely in a straightforward way that reminded me of Hemingway.
The days are getting
really warm.
Summer is sitting
on spring
and squeezing out
all the wetness.
(p 218)
There isn’t an extraneous line in the novel. It will take about two hours to read but you’ll find yourself reflecting on it long after you finish. Just beautifully written, the story unravels with polished eloquence. A definite contender for the Printz, in my estimation.
The Prince of Fenway Park by Julianna Baggot
I thought the packaging for this book was very misleading. I did not anticipate a fantasy. It is the story of twelve-year-old Oscar, an adopted child of mixed racial parentage, whose adopted father turns out to be an elven descendant of the enraged Red Sox fan who originally cursed the team in 1919. There turns out to be many Cursed Creatures living under Fenway Park: a Banshee, Weasel-man, three odd aunts and even a Pooka. When Oscar arrives, he becomes tied to them, and must break the curse or it will forever endure.
I would not have stuck with this book if it wasn’t on OCL Mock Newbery list. As it is, I merely glanced over the last few chapters. It wasn’t the subject matter; I could see what Baggot was going for. I’m a baseball fan. I got it.
It wasn’t for lack of a few interesting characters. The potential was great.
It wasn’t the commentary on race, though it was a lot in your face in the beginning. Or race in professional baseball. I really like what she was saying about parents failing to address race with their kids. They think it doesn’t matter and so doesn’t warrant discussion. How wrong they are.
It was the writing.
It never drew me in. It was too long.
I thought the Door to the Past played its role when Oscar first visited Babe Ruth circa 1919… but no! When Oscar repeatedly tried to get the red thread from an even younger Babe, the concept was abused. I thought the Pooka ride was the climax. But no, there was a ridiculously drawn out conclusion involving a Field of Dreams baseball game.
I almost threw the book from my bed several times in frustration. This is the first book on the list I wanted to renig on.
SLOB by Ellen Potter
SLOB is the story of twelve-year-old Owen Birnbaum, the fattest kid in school. The reasons behind Owen’s eating disorder are revealed as Owen: attempts to build Nemesis (a device that will capture the events of the past), suffers through humiliation after humiliation at the hands of a cruel gym teacher, and as Owen tracks down a thief who takes his lunch time Oreo snack.
The prose often struck me as insightful. This passage, on page 29, jolted me:
Everyone thinks they know the fat kid. We’re so obvious. Our embarrassing secret is out there for everyone to see, spilling over our belts, flapping under our chins, stretching the seams of our jeans.
That doesn’t mean we don’t have other secrets that you can’t see.
I also enjoyed the occasional clever metaphor: “She may not be supersmart, but if you stick her in a crowd of people, she just pops, like a zebra-stripped jeep in a shopping mall parking lot” (p 80).
The ending kept me guessing. It’s not often you read about a boy with an eating disorder but this is an exception read. I’m sure it will be in the run for a Printz (though I’m pulling for The Devil’s Paintbox). I believe it also qualifies for the Newbery.
The Girl Who Threw Butterflies by Mick Cochrane
In the 1960s a guy named J.C. Martin made a living catching the great Hoyt Wilhelm’s knuckleball. Doug Mirabelli always caught Tim Wakefield and his knuckleball for the Red Sox. They were called “personal catchers.” Catching a knuckleball was so difficult and so unpleasant for most regular catchers that if you could do it reasonably well (nobody did it really well), that one skill could keep you on the team. The personal catcher would sit on the bench until the knuckleballer took the mound, and then he and his special floppy mitt would enter the game. It was an odd kind of intimacy, to be joined together like that, a weird baseball marriage (p 74-75).
How can I express how much I enjoyed this book? It blended many of the themes present in several of this year’s best children’s books (see OCL’s Mock Newbery List): death and abandonment, grief and alienation, discrimination and friendship. Yet none of these drowned the story and baseball tied it all together.
[SPOILER ALERT]
Baseball is what helps Molly hold herself together. It helps her come to terms with her father’s death and to discover herself. It is how she codified life:
Molly meanwhile was fantasizing about a scoring system not for baseball but for life. If she said something stupid, if she forgot to bring home her science book – those would be errors. If her mother came through for her and a third of the time – that sounded about right – her batting average would be .333. Back when her locked has been defaces and Lonnie came along and rescued her, he could have been credited with a save” (p 147).
The setting – Buffalo, NY – was a perfect choice. Like Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, whose wintry and bleak Syracuse, NY setting gave the perfect backdrop to Melinda’s troubles, the gloomy Buffalo is “like Siberia, a place you’d go to disappear, or to be punished” (p 115) to this story. It supports Molly’s suspicions that her father’s job was “taking the starch out of him” (p 37) and that her mother was like a flower withering in such grey desolation.
My father, like Molly’s, was a reporter for the local newspaper, covering equally mundane and repetitious stories. While scavenging to salvage some of her father’s memorabilia, Molly stumbles across one of her father’s notepads. At first hopefully it will contain some sort of explanation for his mysterious death, she finds it blank and instead stages a mock interview with her father (p 55). I thought this and all the other little steps Molly took toward forgiving her father was exceptionally well done.
[END SPOILERS]
If you enjoyed this book, I recommend No Cream Puffs by Karen Day and Playing the Field by Phil Bildner.
Love, Aubery by Suzanne LaFleur
“I had everything I needed to run a household: a house, food, and a new family. From now on it would just be me and Sammy–the two of us, and no one else.”
I couldn’t help but compare this book to Ann Dee Ellis’s Everything is Fine.
Both books feature a female protagonist whose physical well being has been abandoned by the adults in her life and her mental well being has been disrupted, both by family tragedy.
Love, Aubrey is an excellent first offering from new author Suzanne LaFleur but Ellis’s story is more concise, literary and ultimately more haunting. Both authors navigate their precious girls through the horror and confusion of one life-altering moment and the aftermath with elegance and poignancy. Both also do an excellent job building suspense.
I’ve seen this on some mock Newbery lists but decided to pass on it for our Library’s final list.
Ocean County Library’s Mock Newbery List
The date and time are yet to be determined (possibly January 3, 9 or 10), but we will be meeting to discuss possible Newbery winners! It has been a great year for children’s literature so don’t be daunted by the list. These books are excellent.
If you are in the Ocean County Area and want to join us, let me know! This is the first year we are including Non-Fiction picks 
Fiction
The Prince of Fenway Park by Julianna Baggot (review)
All the Broken Pieces by Ann Burg (review)
The Girl Who Threw Butterflies by Mick Cochrane (review)
The Magician’s Elephant by Kate DiCamillo (review)
The Problem with the Puddles by Kate Feiffer (review)
The Dream Stealer by Dis Fleishman (Pictures by Peter Sis)
Brooklyn Nine: a Novel in Nine Innings by Alan Gatz
Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin (review)
Neil Armstrong is my Uncle and Other Lies Muscle Man McGinty Told Me by Nan Marino (review)
The Day of the Pelican by Katherine Paterson
A Season of Gifts by Richard Peck
The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg by Rodman Philbrick (review)
When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead (review)
The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Tate (review)
Non-Fiction
The Great and Only Barnum by Candice Fleming
Traveling the Freedom Road by Linda Barrett Osborne
Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared to Dream by Tanya Lee Stone
Strawberry Hill by Mary Ann Hoberman
I was reluctant to pick this one up because of its Pollyanna cover art. It’s initial tone was as I suspected. Set in Connecticut during the Great Depression, it follows eleven-year-old Allie as her family moves from New Haven to Stamford when her father lands a job.
Much of the story is reminiscent of a simpler time when girls played hopscotch and boys played marbles, where mothers were homemakers and divorce was rare. But while these nostalgic images are pleasant, Hoberman reminds her readers that life was equally as difficult then as it is now; jobs were scarce, hobos weren’t bad people but rather men who could not find work, across the ocean anti-Semitism was growing.
As the story progressed, I grew more interested. Allie developed in so many lovely ways. Take this passage on page 160,
When we got home, I went into the dining room and stared at my grandmother’s cups and saucers. My mother has said that someday they would be mine. I wondered whether when I grew up I would let my little girl drink from them like Mrs. Minnick or be like my mother and keep them safe behind glass doors.
The supporting characters were also well developed and while Allie’s best friend and her family met with a happy ending, her other friends and their families had more ambiguous futures. Definitely a contender for the Newbery but it’s not my front runner.
The Magician’s Elephant by Kate DiCamillo
“Magic is always impossible,” said the Magician. “It begins with the impossible and ends with the impossible and is impossible in between. That is why it is magic” (p 154).
In true and excellent DiCamillo fashion, the reader is introduced to an array of interesting characters in short vignettes that clearly and subtly endear them to the reader. Then, the characters, like pieces of a mosaic, come together, compliment each other, and form a beautiful piece of art. Like Dickens for children, with all his depth and humor and observational elegance.
Take, for example, our introduction to the countess Quintet and her husband (who plays hardly any role at all and yet his character and their relationship is at once as familiar to me as any one of Jane Austen’s). The countess speaks on page 57:
“I truly feel, I am quite certain, I am absolutely convinced, that I will lose my mind if I hear the word elephant one more time.”
“Elephant,” muttered the count.
“What did you say?” said the countess. She whirled around and stared at her husband.”
“Nothing,” said the count.
“Something must be done,” said the countess.
Or our introduction to Leo Matienne, who plays a larger role, on page 34:
Leo Matienne had the soul of a poet, and because of this, he liked very much to consider questions that had no answer.
He liked to ask “What if?” and “Why not?” and “Could it possibly be?”
Definitely one of the most distinguished books of 2009, but the most distinguished… not sure. It will certainly be discussed in OCL’s mock Newbery.
Publisher: Candlewick (September 8, 2009)
