Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson

Another Newbery winner, an odd one. I was a little apprehensive about this, because my good friend and fellow book blogger Amanda really disliked it (you can read her review here); but a Sherrie, a librarian friend where I volunteer, just loves it.  And I had loved one of Katherine Paterson's earlier books, Of Nightingales that Weep. I read it when I was a youngster and I looooooved it, read it over and over, but by the time Katherine Paterson won the Newbery for this one I had moved on to trashy books like Flowers in the Attic. (Please forgive me -- I did read good stuff too, like Animal Farm and 1984 and Gone with the Wind.).

Anyway, this book sort of intrigued me, because it's all about sibling rivalry (hence, the title): Sara Louise is the older of a pair of 14-year-old twins, and is far outshone by the beautiful, fragile, talented Caroline, who sings like a bird and makes everyone else swoon.  It's about 1940 and they live with their parents and crazy grandmother on a tiny little island off Chesapeake Bay, Maryland, where their father ekes out a living crabbing and fishing and catching oysters and all sorts of Deadliest Catch sorts of stuff.  They are barely scraping by and it seems like every extra cent is spent on paying for music lessons and cab rides and ferry rides to develop Caroline's musical talent.  Even the extra money that Sarah Louise earns goes to Caroline!!!  The fact that she is smart and good and works hard seems lost on everyone.  So, the war starts, a mysterious old gentleman moves back to the island, there are natural disasters, and since they are teens, there are coming-of-age issues and jealousy regarding various males.

This book really intrigued me because growing up I always felt kinda overshadowed by my older sister, who . . . guess what?  Sang like a bird and was the Most Talented Girl in the Whole Wide World.  Or so it seemed. (Talented! Really smart! Lots of friends!)  However -- we were not a) poor fisherfolk on Chesapeake Bay, just middle class people living in a boring Detroit suburb; b) my parents didn't spend every last cent on her; and c) my sister is actually a very nice person and we have always gotten along really well.  So, the parallels end there, though oddly enough, my sister moved to Maryland. To go to music school.  I am not making this up.

Okay, back to the book.  I did really like parts of it -- I thought Paterson did a fantastic job describing life on Chesapeake bay.  I have no desire to go fishing, but I've always liked boats and water -- probably because I grew up trapped in the Midwest.  When I read it, I could practically smell the salt air and the fishiness and hear the sound of the water and all that.  Living on a tiny island sounded sort of interesting compared to my childhood. 

I really felt like most of the characters seemed kind of one dimensional. Caroline didn't seem to have a single redeeming quaility -- didn't anyone notice she just took and took from everyone else because of her "gift???" She didn't seem to contribute one whit while everyone else was slaving away, and just took it all for granted. I wanted Sarah Louise to say hey, what about me? How about a scholarship for ME? She was pretty passive agressive. Her crazy grandmother had all these great lines, like a Greek chorus screeching out what was really going on, but Sarah Louise did nothing. So maybe she deserved to get walked all over.

My biggest issue is that the book seemed really unresolved -- nothing ever happened with her sister, the vague love interest, or her parents -- I was waiting for some kind of confrontation, or for some huge irony, like Caroline dying in a ferry accident on the way to her first performance, or something.   But a lot of plot lines seemed unfinished or thrown together at the end, and in fact, the last five pages or so zip through the rest of her life. And that's the end.  I guess I just I didn't understand the point of the book.  A disappointment.

(Oh, and isn't the cover kind of creepy?  Of course Sarah Louise is the dark-haired twin, and she looks kind of bitter and nasty.  Caroline almost looks like a ghost -- could this be foreshadowing?  Nah.)

Newbery Count: 37/89

A Long Way from Chicago and A Year Down Yonder by Richard Peck

Newbery Count 36/89

A couple of winners, in every sense of the word. A Year Down Yonder, the 2001 Newbery Medal winner, is the sequel to the 1999 Newbery Honor book, A Long Way from Chicago.  Each book is distinct enough to stand on its own, but together, they're even better.  Both of them made laugh out loud, and the second made me a little misty-eyed in parts.

I was mildly irked when I realized A Year Down Yonder is the second in a series, since I truly dislike starting a series in the middle -- sometimes there are spoilers, and I'm always wondering if I'm missing something important.  But I saw that the first book is pretty short, and it came highly recommended from a library employee.  It's worth every minute, and it grabs you from the first chapter. 

The setup:  A Long Way from Chicago is a first-person narrative from nine-year-old Joey Dowdel and his little sister, Mary Alice, are sent to visit their eccentric grandmother in a little town in downstate Illinois. The book is subtitled "a novel in stories," and each chapter is a funny story from a different summer in his childhood, beginning in 1929.  Joey and Mary Alice are from Chicago, which is rife with the antics of John Dillinger, so they figure a visit to Grandma will be pretty dull.  Not so -- there's always something entertaining going on.  Grandma Dowdel is cantankerous character, a bit of a trickster, so every summer is a bit of an education for Joey and Mary Alice, like the second summer, when Grandma gets even with some pranksters who think it's funny to explode her mailbox and knock down Mrs. Wilcox's privy.  There's a lot of privy humor in these books, and shotguns, and even some poaching.  Oh, and lest I forget, a little moonshine, a phantom brakeman, and a mouse in a bottle of milk.  Sometimes Grandma's actions are legally suspect, but her motives are ultimately unselfish.

Grandma Dowdel is one of the funniest characters in children's literature.  She's tough, but with a great heart, and I didn't find her quirkiness overly contrived or stereotyped, like in some other children's books I've read lately.  I think sometimes authors try too hard with the quirky factor, and it can just seem fake and annoying.  All of the characters in these books seem believable to me.  This book was so good I couldn't figure out why in the heck it didn't win the Newbery that year.  Well, that was 2001, and the winner was Holes by Louis Sacher, one of the best children's books ever, in my opinion. 

The second book, A Year Down Yonder, is a year in the life of Mary Alice.  She's about 15 and is sent to live with her grandmother during the Depression. There are more stories of Grandma Dowdel getting the best of pranksters, snobby DAR ladies, and nasty high school girls.  Again, it's really funny, but some of the content might actually be appropriate for older children or even YAs -- there are some hints about illegitimate children and a nude artist's model, so you might want to save this one for the 10 and up set. But I still really enjoyed it, and I've been reading chapters (slightly edited) to my third grader. 

Here's a quote from A Year Down Yonder that pretty much sums up Grandma's character:

"Mrs. Dowdel," said Mrs. Sheets, "I'm here to tell you that you're twice as bald-faced and brazen, and yes, I have to say shameless as the rest of us girls put together.  In the presence of these witnesses I'm on record for saying you outdo the most two-faced, two fisted shortchanger, flimflam artist, and full-time extortionist anybody ever saw working this part of the country. And all I have to say is, God bless you for your hard work.

"Mrs. Dowdel. . . . you're not everybody's cup of tea. Well, it's common knowledge, isn't it? But we girls would be proud as Punch to have you join our Auxiliary if you're a veteran's wife.  Did your late husband go to war?"

"Only with me, " Grandma said. "And he lost every time."   This book made me wish I'd had a Grandma like her.

The View From Saturday by E. L. Konigsberg

Newbery Count: 34/89

Now, this is a Newbery-worthy book.  Wow. And why did it take me so long to read it?

I was a little apprehensive reading this book.  To be honest, some of the Newberys I've been reading lately were not as impressive.  And E. L. Konigsberg is the author of one of my absolutely favorite children's books of all time, From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. I wanted to be just like Claudia, and run away from home and live in a museum. (I hope this isn't a spoiler, I decided it was fair because it's on the back of the book).  Anyway, there's a   gap of nearly 30 years between the publication of that book and The View from Saturday, and I was a little worried -- what if it didn't live up to my beloved favorite?

I was not disappointed.  Konigsberg created an amazingly well-crafted story about four sixth graders and their homeroom teacher, who coaches them in the academic bowl team.  Each of these characters is well developed (OK, the teacher not as much as the students).  It's told mostly in flashback, centered around the state's academic bowl championship, and various questions trigger explanations of events in the four children's lives, and how they were all chosen to be on the team.

I think Konigsberg's greatest strength in this book is creating memorable, realistic characters.  Each of the stories of the four children were so interesting and well written, I wished I could read an entire book about them.  (Seriously -- E. L., if you're reading this, please consider making this a whole series).  These kids are smart and clever and nice.  I wish all them were real so they could be friends with my children.   I loved how this book celebrates academic achievement and friendship.  It might be a tiny bit heavy-handed with the message, but it's so good I'm ignoring that.

There is one thing I did want to make note of -- three of these four children are connected, not just because they are all in the same homeroom in a school in upstate New York, but because their grandparents all live in the same retirement community in Florida.  Now, to some people, that might sound extremely unlikely and contrived, and if I'd read this years ago I would have thought the same thing.  However, my in-laws did retire to Florida about 12 years ago, to the same town where several of their friends live, and now that I think about it, it makes sense.  It's really hard to pick up and move to a new state where you don't known anyone, so it's quite possible that they all did move down there, purposely.  So, not really that unlikely and contrived.

Anyway, I highly recommend this book. This is what the Newberys are all about.

A Gathering of Days: A New England Girl's Journal, 1830-1832 by Joan W. Blos

I don't know what I expected from this book.  I like historical fiction, and some of my most beloved Newbery winners are historicals-- I suppose I thought, based on the description, that it would be sort of a cross of  The Witch of Blackbird Pond and one of the Little House books.  It wasn't.  This book is well written and has lots of great historical details, but somehow, it just didn't grab me.  Maybe I didn't get enough of the heroine's personality -- in fact, when I sat down to write this I'd already forgotten her name!  [I looked it up.  It's Catherine.]  Basically, this is the diary of a teenaged girl living in New Hampshire, as the title says, from 1830-1832.  She lives with her father and younger sister on a little farm in a small town -- no mother, who died in childbirth years ago -- and it's just what happens in her everyday life.  It starts out when she's 13 and ends when she's 15.

I just couldn't figure out where this book was going.  Of course, it's a diary, and real diaries aren't novels, they're just bits and pieces, like tiny written snapshots of a person's life.  If it was a real diary there wouldn't be any connectedness.  But I have read excellent books for both adults and children in diary form -- The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian was one that I could not put down and read in one sitting.  I think the best epistolary novels have some kind of overarching plot or theme, some kind of natural progression.  In this book, there were little bits that were introduced and hinted at, but not much follow up, like the possibility of a fugitive slave, maybe a teen love story with her best friend's brother, a new stepmother -- it all sort of seemed disjointed, and somehow I was disappointed.  There's nothing wrong with it, I just never really got excited about reading it. 

Some of the descriptive passages were interesting, and the details of life in the 1830s.  Life was really hard back then, people died left and right, though it doesn't sound like anyone was in danger of starving.  I think one of the strongest points is Blos' descriptions.  Winters in New Hampshire sound extremely harsh, and I felt really cold when I read this passage:

Father had made his way to the barn, re-digging the path as he must each day against the sweillling drifts.  There he'd readied the oxen up and brougtht them out to wait in the yard -- the yard itself reduced by snow with only as much of it cleared each day as we might need to use.

This morning the team breathed out great clouds.  Father, to benefit by their warmth, placed himself between their bodies, but even so kept moving -- it was that cold.

I immediately went looking for my fuzzy socks. And a hot cup of tea. And I thanked my lucky stars once again for being born in the 20th century, with the benefits of central heating and indoor plumbing.

I liked this book, but I can't see myself recommending it left and right like I have with other Newbery winners; when I think of the Newberys, I imagine a book that's somehow really special.  Maybe 1980 was just a tough year in children's publishing.  I checked the Newbery list for the 1980 Honor books to see what were the runners-up, since sometimes the Honor books are more memorable than the actual winner (like Charlotte's Web  -- honestly, how could  that have lost to Secret of the Andes?  Seriously!).  I suppose it's worth noting that the Newbery committee only found one book  in 1980 worthy of mentioning as an Honor book -- The Road From Home: The Story of an Armenian Girl, by David Kherdian.  I looked it up in my library's OPAC, and it's actually nonfiction.  It actually sounds really interesting -- a biography of the author's mother, specifically about her childhood in Turkey before the Turks deported all the Armenians. Now that sounds like a compelling story.

Newbery Count: 32/89