Daniel Boone, Newbery Winner 1940

Where do I even begin with this one? I'd been dreading reading this book, because it was an old biography, in the world of children's literature that is not a good thing. Another out-of-print Newbery winner and with good reason. It is racially charged, gruesomely graphic, and sappy. But above all those, I think that the reason this one's no longer in print is that it's boring as tar.I know, perhaps I'm not fully enjoying the experience because I'm too old or too young; I'm too modern or I've seen my own wilderness; on and on and on...
Nope. This book is boring. There really isn't much else too say, I found everything in this book to be historically sound (race relations included) and even learned a lot about Daniel Boone, the man did some fascinating stuff. But this book makes a trek into unknown wilderness about as dry as uncooked oatmeal. I believe that if the book was more interesting it would still be published today; we all know that settlers didn't get along with Indians, it's okay to write that stuff into historical fiction (that's be the historical part).
Perhaps the worst part was that I found myself not caring about what Daniel Boone was doing most of the time. I wanted very much to follow along and hear the stories of several of the side characters though: George Washington, Tom Lincoln, Lewis and Clark, his wife, his daughter, James Audubon, anyone really.
In the end this book was just as big a bust as I expected.

Favorite Fictional Fathers

In honor of Fathers’ Day I thought I’d do a countdown of my ten favorite fictional fathers. These fathers are supportive and dedicated. Also they tend to crop up in my favorite works making this list totally biased. I haven’t limited these dads to literature though, I’ve included the greats from film.

10. Mr. Murray (A Wrinkle in Time)

I admit that this one is a bit of a gimme. The real reason he didn’t get to move higher up the list is because he is more of a catalyst than anything else. But his wife and children’s undying devotion to him prove that he is an amazing man.

He's so un-there I couldn't even turn up a picture of him on google.

9. Bert (The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica Series)

It’s very likely you’ve never heard of this guy. Unless I were to tell you that he is really H.G. Wells, but that might just blow your mind. His hands are full with his daughter Aven and the three newest caretakers, but Bert is someone that the entire Archipelago of Dreams can count on and look up to.

I couldn't find a picture of Bert either, so here's H.G. Wells.

8. Mr. Ping (Kung Fu Panda)

The greatest part of the Kung Fu Panda sequel was the development of the relationship between Po and Mr. Ping. We get insight into just how insanely much Mr. Ping loves his son. We also find how he came to adopt Po.

If you didn't know he was adopted you deserved to have that spoiler.

7. James Earl Jones (As the voice of Mufasa and Darth Vader)

So Mufasa is an obvious choice. He put himself in danger to save Simba, and we know that he must have been an amazing king because everyone in the Pride Lands loved him. Well except Scar…

Darth Vader is less your conventional great dad. Actually as far as great dads go he rates at the very bottom of the list until the last hour or so of his life. Then, like Mufasa, he lays down his life to save his son, destroy the emperor, and save the galaxy. So he gets bonus points.

No Simba! I am your father!

6. Penny Baxter (The Yearling)

Honestly I haven’t read this book since grade school, but Penny always comes to mind as a great father. And if I still think of him that way after all this time it must be true right?

Awww... Wait. There's a movie?

5. Gaius (Merlin)

He isn’t technically Merlin’s father, but he thinks of Merlin as a son and is the only magical mentor Merlin has ever known. What to press either of their berserk buttons? Just threaten the other one, watching their relationship is one of the greatest parts of the show.

The eyebrow is another matter all together.

4. Arthur Weasley (Harry Potter Series)

Probably the best dad in the wizarding world, he raises his own brood of seven despite the difficulties. He also cares deeply for Harry and Hermione and helps them in the world of wizards, when it comes to the muggle world though he is a bit lost. When push came to shove though he was at the forefront of the fight against evil.

Lovely day for a phone call, don't you think?

3. Cliff Huxtable (The Cosby Show)

The irresistible Bill Cosby starred as the wonderful family man Cliff. He was always available to dispense wisdom to his many children, sons-in-law, grandchildren, house guests, neighborhood kids… you get the idea. But he was also a great husband, sharing the duties of the household, cooking and cleaning when Claire worked late at the office. But don’t get the idea that this upstanding gent was straight-laced or no-nonsense.

Because, c'mon, he is still Bill Cosby.

2. Atticus Finch (To Kill A Mockingbird)

He tops almost every list of great fictional fathers. With good reason, he’s raising two kids to be upstanding citizens, instilling in them a high regard for morals. He demonstrates this in his job as a lawyer, by defending a man whom the whole town has already convicted. In addition to all this we learn that he is a crack shot! What a well-rounded individual.

We named one of our poodles after him. So the picture totally makes sense.

1. Pa Ingalls (Little House on the Prairie)

Pa protects his family as they move around the country. He also provides for them, plowing the land, building a house, working other jobs, and even advising other members of the community. The frontier was a hard place to live, but Pa did his best to help his children see the possibilities of this new land.

Sure, the book Pa is awesome with the ax and all, but tv Pa got to be played by Michael Landon.

Dobry, Newbery Winner 1935

Well... I guess it was okay. But let's just say that I wasn't completely surprised that this book is out of print. Publishers can't print every book indefinitely and sometimes books just become a bit dated. The prose doesn't reach out and grab you, take this sample:

Dobry stood without the slightest movement, watching the light.

"It's the color that an egg white is before you beat it up or cook it," Neda said. "Come on, let's hurry."

 And that was downright poetic for this book. However, the jarring, "come on, let's go," breaks it all apart. Ultimately, the word choice is too simplistic.

This is a concept I would really like to see tackled by a current author. While I might have really loved this story set in Eastern Europe (not a popular literary destination), it was far too dated. Another problem I had was the plot, or lack there-of. We spend 80 pages waiting for a gypsy-bear. Then it arrives, hurray! But you turn the page and, "For four summers now Dobry had looked after the village cows to earn the money to pay Semo for whatever charcoal pencils, brushes, paints, sketch books, and canvas the schoolmaster could get him from Sofia." Wait, we're four years down the road just like that? And Dobry is buying art supplies?

So is introduced the conflict in the story. But conflict is much too strong a word for, 'Dobry is an artist, his mother hopes he will be a farmer, until she sees his art, at which point money must be made so he can go to art school'. Simplistic exposition, just like the book; in fact, only a dozen or so pages are ever truly devoted to this conflict.

On the flip side I loved the descriptions of the Christmas and New Year's traditions, a whole book could have been developed just from those!
But I've been having a great time besides! My days have been filled with some of my great joys: reading, puzzling, thrifting, and fantasy.

First off:
Just finished A Hero for WondLa. It was amazing, a sequel that was well worth the wait. One minor flaw, now I need to wait for the conclusion because WondLa is a trilogy. I hate waiting for the 'next book'; at least with Harry Potter it seemed like 90% of the world was waiting with me. I'm all alone at this bus terminal.

Except you never know when the bus will arrive.

Puzzling:

One of my other great loves is the jigsaw puzzle. I'll admit that I've been dedicating my evenings to the puzzle and not the page. It's just so satisfying to finish a thousand pieces of nothing and turn it into a picture.

Thrifting:

How does a book lover with no disposable income build their collection? Thrift stores of course! I've been able to get 30 paperbacks under $10 before, unfortunately I don't know the best shops around here. I have found a Goodwill with 60 cent hardcovers and 50 cent paperbacks. It's a brutal place known as The Last Chance, with no organization and desperate shoppers, which makes walking out with choice books all the more satisfying. This week I found an old children's book by Sid Fleischman (The Whipping Boy), an old reading primer, some fun picture books, a Popples poetry book (I literally squealed when I found this), and, my personal favorite, a school geography book from 1883.

Fantasy:

It's hard to read and do a jigsaw puzzle at the same time. This gave me a chance to catch up on Merlin a fantastic BBC series. I'm on a bit of a King Arthur streak, watching shows, documentaries, and reading stray articles. Perhaps I'll go after L'morte de Arthur soon. (In addition to some other Arthur books I found down out thrifting.)

Upcoming!

Well, I've run through most of the award winners I have at college with me. Which means libraries! I have three usual libraries: Rapid City Public, Swanson Public, and CSM school library. What does this mean? Well, I need to carefully select books so that when I leave school next December the books I have left are ones sure to be found at the RCPL. Now Rapid City is a 'newer' city on the grand scale of things so its older children's literature is... non-existent. But here in Omaha there are several libraries I can roam the shelves of, however, it is one nondescript building that I chose to make my home location: the Swanson branch. Any of you out there in blog world who love children's literature and are in the neighborhood NEED to check out this library. They have a wonderful arrangement of children's literature! But on one shelf are the treasures, one look at these books tells you that they are older than any of the kids wandering the aisles, older even than many parents, the 'classics' shelf as it is called is filled with titles, and here classic is defined as old, out-of-print, and rare. They collected them from all the libraries in the city to display here.

In fact I just got three out-of-print Newberies from them this morning: Dobry, Tales from Silver Lands, and Waterless Mountain. There is one remaining out-of-print Newbery, Daniel Boone, but there was a waiting list for that one.

In addition, I checked out The Mummy Market by Nancy Brelis, on the recommendation of another blog: Collecting Children's Books. Go read it now, so addicting! Anyway, here was a book that runs fifty dollars on Amazon just sitting on a shelf for kids to pick up, only two words can describe this: crazy awesome.

Like this.

And last, but not least, I got A Hero for WondLa, a book I'd been waiting the better part of two years to come out. Its predecessor The Search for WondLa blew me away, and, as far as I'm concerned, earned its spot on bookshelves for generations to come. Go buy it, if you're lucky you might get the awesome original cover!

Only one can be the most awesome.

So anyway, I have a 500 page doorstop that I'm reading before I move onto the next Newbery. In the meantime I suggest you read the blog I mentioned earlier or, you know, a book.

Caddie Woodlawn, Newbery Winner 1936

I know that I've slowed down a bit this week. I apologize, I was busying myself with a short work that I've been writing. And I'm a very slow writer; I can spend nearly two hours on a page!
But today I read the delightful Caddie Woodlawn.
Many people compare it to the Little House series and rightfully so. The protagonist is a young girl who enjoys many of the activities that were considered un lady-like. Both are members of a pioneer family and both have plenty of adventures. It seems the whole world wishes to compare Caddie and Laura. I might as well jump on that boat.
However, I find them enjoyable on different levels. Caddie lived earlier than Laura and so we can hear a bit of the politics of the Civil War and how those people who lived on the frontier were affected by it. We also see a more 'civilized' frontier. There is a town and neighbors, they have each other but they are not part of the large population still living back east. And this book also has the nostalgic feel of listening to your older relatives gathering and telling stories of 'the grand old days'.
This is also a coming of age story. I feel that it has tremendous use for young girls today, I especially love when Caddie's father explains the difference between a lady and woman to her. Far from being a simple frontier tale, Caddie Woodlawn is a story about growing up independent. It demonstrates to young girls that it is possible to be wholly who they are and still be a woman. Caddie loved running and swimming with her brothers, but found that she enjoyed sewing too, those actions didn't have to be exclusive.
Not to say that Little House couldn't be these things as well, but I feel that Caddie Woodlawn is much better as a self-contained story. I would be willing to use it in a classroom quite readily, I feel that it would be a fun read for class when studying pioneers, and, as a bonus, I feel that it may appeal to boys due to Caddie's brothers playing a rather large role in the story.

Book Q an A

A friend sent me this list of book q and a's. I believe it is meant for facebook, but it seems far more relevant here! I'm sure some will be easier to answer than others and some I may have answered elsewhere on this blog. Off we go!

1-Your favorite Book - Perelandra by C.S. Lewis; This book completely entrances me, no matter how often I read it. It really is unlike any other book I've ever read, but if you thought the religious undertones of The Chronicles of Narnia was too much you'd best steer clear of this work.

2-Least Favorite Book - My Antonia by Willa Cather; This book is actually quite well written but we read it for school and a book I simply didn't like was drug out for months, thus turning my dislike into loathing.

3-A Book that completely surprised you - My Name Is Not Angelica by Scott O'Dell; Let's just say that I used this book to write a unit plan for one of my classes but would never use it in a real classroom. I chose the book before reading it and, by the time I finished it, didn't have the time to choose another book. The ending is... a bit of a downer, and not something I would recommend for the grade level it is written at.

Seriously? That ending made me want to call my mom and cry.

4- A Book that reminds you of home - None really come to mind.

5- A Non-fiction book that you actually enjoyed - The Road of Dreams by Bruce Junek; First off, I don't like what the question implies: are we not supposed to enjoy non-fiction? I enjoy lots of non-fiction, as do many people I know. Anyway this book is amazing because I met the authors a few times in my childhood, plus it is just an incredible book. I really need to read it again just to re-experience the world-view they present.
6- A Book that makes you cry - Zink by Cherie Bennet; Yeah, it won't be winning any awards that's for sure, but this story of one girl's fight with cancer is heartbreaking and will never fail to make me mope around the entire time I'm reading it.
7- A Book that’s hard to read - Left to Tell by Imaculee Ilabagiza; This story of survival during the Rwandan holocaust seems so unbelievable. It brings images of what we wish was a long forgotten past and reminds us that it has happened within our own lifetimes.
8- An unpopular book you believe should be a Best-Seller - Year of the Hangman by Gary Blackwood; I love this author and it's a pity he isn't more well known. But this book is one of his masterpieces, a work that really makes you examine our country's founding from a new angle. A great work of alternative history for any American Revolution buff.

There's a noose on the cover and it's still not as traumatizing as My Name is Not Angelica.

9- A Book you’ve read more than once - Really? If I like a book there is a pretty good chance I've read it more than once. In fact, this is like walking up to the average person and asking if there is a movie they've seen more than once.
10- The first novel you remember reading - Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder; I've mentioned it once before but this was certainly the first big book I ever tackled. I will always remember it fondly for that fact.
11- The Book that made you fall in love with reading - Too many to remember.
12- A book so emotionally draining you couldn’t complete it or had to set aside for a bit - Slumdog Millionaire by Vikas Swarup; While the book itself is emotional, I think that it was other emotions I was feeling at the time that made it hard to finish.
13- Favorite childhood book - Panda Cake by Rosalie Sandler
14- Book that should be on hs/college required reading list - Beowulf; Surprisingly few people I've met have read this epic. It was on my high school reading list and was one of the best books that we read for a class.
15- Favorite book dealing with foreign culture - The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling; This was a bit of a toughie, most of my favorite children's authors are Brits but the British way of life doesn't seem so foreign especially some of the older works. So I decided to run with a book I really like that happens to be set in a country very different from my own.
16- Favorite book turned movie - Bambi by Felix Salten; I took this question to mean a book that became a movie and the movie improved the book. And if ever there were a movie that I found ten times more enjoyable than the book it is Bambi.
17- Book turned movie and completely desecrated - A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle; It's a shame because this is a book that actually deserves a good movie but won't likely ever get one. After all Disney tried, does any other company care to see if they can get the rights and still have a film budget? Probably not.

But, for the love of all that is right in this world, avoid this movie too.

18- A Book You can’t find on shelves anymore that you love - Voyage of the Basset by James Christensen; This book is a conundrum. The professional reviewers hated it and said to skip it by; that children didn't deserve this overwrought, sentimental work. But everyone who read it seems to have enjoyed it. Sadly it is rare enough that the only copy on Amazon will often be more than fifty. I was lucky to stumble across this book and buy it on a whim while it was cheap.
19- A Book that changed your mind about a particular subject (non-fiction) - The Freedom Writers' Diary by Erin Gruwell; This is a book that shows just how difficult life can be even in the US and how important school is. Made me consider just how much of a difference a teacher can make.
20-A Book you would recommend to an ignorant/racist/closed minded person - Depends on their ignorance.
21-A guilty pleasure book - Guardians of Ga'Hoole Series by Kathryn Lasky; Yes, they are book series about a society of owls. Now, leave me alone so I can read.
22-Favorite Series - Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis; If I could name my kids Peter, Edmund, Susan, and Lucy without getting weird looks I probably would. Also, I think it would be fun to put a secret office behind a wardrobe for reading, writing, and painting.
23- Favorite Romance Novel - Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare; Not technically a novel but I really hate romance so this was a close as I was going to get.
24 - A Book you haven't read but feel that you should - Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank; I'm a twenty two year old bibliophile who wants to teach, I really ought to read this book.
25 - Favorite Autobiographical/Biographical book - Little House Series by Laura Ingalls Wilder; I know it's only loosely autobiographical but several of the books are set in my home state and it is fun to be able to go somewhere you read about.
26-A Book you wish would be written - A book about George Schuster for independent aged readers. I feel that there's a great story there.
27- A Book you would write if you had all the resources - See #26
28- A Book you wish you never read - Watership Down by Richard Adams
29- An Author that you completely avoid/hate wont read - Nicholas Sparks, Willa Cather, and Stephanie Meyer to name a few.
30 - An Author that you will read whatever they put out - Well, since most of the people on my favorites shelf are dead, I'm going to have to go with J.K. Rowling.

We all know it could be this and still top the bestsellers list.

Onion John, Newbery Winner 1960

Oh boy. This is one of those reviews that is going to twist back on itself several times. Much like my opinion of Onion John by Joseph Krumgold.
I didn't like this book, then I did. The book drug on too long, then it was over too quickly. I felt no connection to the characters, then I cried and rejoiced for them.
Onion John was a mere 250 pages yet took me the better part of a week to read. Why? Well, the first 150 pages or so are simply boring. Even by adult standards. There is excellent character development, the plot is well laid, and the setting is impeccably described. The book is quite good, I just didn't like it.
Then the story finally kicks it into high gear, you discover that you care about these characters, everything that has been told to you was laid out for a reason. The book wouldn't be the same without the tedious beginning.
Once Andy begins his growth from boy into adolescent, you really become invested in his plight and that of his friend, Onion John. This book explores something that few children's books ever do, the old proverb 'the road to Hell is paved with good intentions'. Generally in children's lit you find that goodness is rewarded either by happiness or intrinsically. But there are times in life when good intentions go horribly awry, a fact laid out clearly in this book by the town building Onion John a house to bring him up to date.
Onion John's plight mirrors that of Andy, Andy's father refuses to take his son's thoughts seriously and has planned a great future for him. It is only at the last desperate moment that his relationship with his father is restored, but at a cost.
The last 50 or so pages really raised the book into better standing with me. It was here that I hoped the author would spend just a little more time, especially the last chapter which is a touching father and son moment that could reach for the top ten.
I know some of my friends have had plans all laid out for their lives ever since we were young. Some even let their parents do the true planning. This book really drives home how lucky I was to not only make my own plans, but to not really be tied down by them at any one point. My parent's have always happily supported my ideas for the future and helped me along, but they were never too put off by a change in the plans either. The only thing they ever insisted was that I stick to my learning and get the best education possible; then, as the book says, 'you can go anywhere you choose'.
One last thought, this book contained so many layers, just like an onion. Did the author do that on purpose I wonder? Nothing in the book was accidental, even when it felt as though the author was just throwing it in for no reason. The characters were developed slowly and without much fanfare (til the end). And the final pages were sweet and savory, even though the beginning was hard and bitter. To paraphrase one of my most detested movies of all time:
Shrek: Layers. Onions have layers. Ogres have Onion John has layers. Onions have layers. You get it? They both have layers. 
Donkey: Oh, they both have LAYERS. Oh. You know, not everybody like onions. What about cake? Everybody loves cake!
Shrek: I don't care what everyone else likes! Ogres are Onion John is not like cake.

So there.