Well. WELL. Weeeeeelllllll. Well.
I can't think of much anything to say about this book. Easy read, check. Enjoyable, uh, check. But would I readily recommend it? Probably not.
There seems to be a large faction of people willing to decry this book for not denouncing the practice of bullfighting. It never really embraces it either, it simply relates the views of the characters. I would argue that we are encouraged to believe that Manolo makes the better choice in the end. This book isn't asking you to decide how you feel about bullfighting. (I'm pretty sure that most people will either already know how they feel or will quickly decide after reading a little bit.)
Is it gory? Heh, get it? Gory???
That joke was so bad that even Fozzie is ashamed of me.
Okay, lame joke. Anyway....
There isn't what I would consider an obnoxious amount of gore in this book, considering the subject. In fact, while it is mentioned that the bulls die at the end of a match, the bullfighters seem to get the brunt amount of written blood in this book.
In other news, how does the author with the longest name: Maia Wojciechowska(not even my pronunciation websites had any help to offer me with that one), manage to have one of the shortest and most boring Wikipedia entries? A moderate amount of internet digging only turns up one interesting story, but repeating it here would make me blush. I wasn't really interested enough to look more into it.
I did it. I read all the Newbery books from 2014 and the results are... mixed. Looking back at my Goodreads feed I gave the following number of stars to the honor winners:
5 Stars
4 Stars
4 Stars
4 Stars
...and the winner? Did it stack up? I gave Flora and Ulysses a very solid 3 stars. That's right, the winner was my least favorite from the crop. I saw Kate DiCamillo was the author an got very excited; I love everything else of hers that I've ever read. But this book? Meh.
You heard that right. Meh. The characters were overly quirky. Come on, I need someone to be non-quirky normal person. Before anyone gets up in arms about normal being an illusion, I understand and agree to a point. But these were not people with quirks... these were quirks with a body, it got real old. The idea of a super-powered squirrel that has a love for poetry might have worked really well if we didn't have to keep up with a veritable cast of cloud cuckoo-landers.
In the end I can see why it was chosen. The Association is trying to avoid the sentiment that they are out of touch and don't understand what kids will really read. They took the kid appeal road. I've always felt that the Newbery strives to award books that struck a balance between kid appeal and Literature-with-a-capital-L. Some years they do better than others, but I find that it is the books with a perfect mixture of these factors that best stand the test of time.
Which would I have selected as the winner? For me it is a toss-up. Not Paperboy (too much capital L), not Billy Miller (not enough capital L), so there is Doll Bones (which I enjoyed start to finish), and One Came Home (that ending...).
Personally Doll Bones more cohesive and very, very enjoyable it deserved a win. One Came Home probably has less kid appeal and an ending that made me tired, but if it had won I'd be okay with it because the journey was so much fun. Sorry committee, you got it wrong.
I stayed up until two in the morning finishing this book, also known as way too late on a work-night. But the plot was just that gripping. I was pulled along so quickly that I simply couldn't bear to put it down. The mystery in this historic fiction is gripping enough to keep one going. And baffling enough to keep one guessing and second-guessing all throughout.
BUT
But...
The book's flaws are all in the end. There was either too much or not enough depending on how one looks at it. First, we have the major plot concerning the two sisters, it was resolved in four pages. Umm... I just went through 200 pages showing the devotion Georgie felt towards her sister and struggling to come to terms with the part she played in the whole affair. You need to give me more than four pages, especially since there was so much more that needed saying. A side-relationship as our main character finds companionship in Billy is never really resolved at all. Maybe I'm just too forgiving, but I felt like the way that one wrapped up was horrible. Georgie went from begrudged friendship, to genuine care, then to absolute nothing.
A graph of the author's development of relationship between Georgie and Billy.
I will now give you the most superfluous advice ever: three alternatives places to stop reading... but no one will follow because who puts down a mystery unfinished?
Option 1: Page 218. Do you like cliffhangers a la The Giver? This is the ending for you. We know what has happened to several of our main characters and we can use the clues given to build our own conclusions.
Option 2: Page 234. There is an incredible amount of filler now as we are nearing the end. But four of these pages tie up the biggest plot in the story, albeit in a fairly unsatisfying way.
Option 3: Page 241. Less filler than the previous 16 pages, but still just barely necessary. While most of the resolutions didn't feel fleshed out in a proper way, the one that should have remained vague was given a tidy, very complete ending.
This book actually goes to page 245. Not that far beyond my last suggestion. But those last four pages seem almost completely out of context that I don't think they are worth the bother. The last couple of paragraphs, while a possible conclusion our heroine could reach, feel out of line with the necessary means of survival on the frontier. The biggest problem is that the ending falters. It should have either stopped and let us draw conclusions, or fleshed out what was happening in a way that felt realistic. I spent four pages reading about the smell of pigeon nesting grounds, I ought to get much more than that as a conclusion for the heroine.
Moving along. I thought pigeons would play a bigger role here... but really they didn't. They were, as in life, basically an infestation passing through rather quickly. I did however find some interesting things about passenger pigeons from my good friend Mr. Google. Foremost, they were apparently the size of a crow. Crazy, I always pictured them as being basically a prettier version of the rock dove that I see all over the place.
Pictured: Not the same size.
Also, scientists have thought about a breeding/ cloning program to revive the species. Naturalists have pointed out the problems, including: there are no known subspecies, so no living DNA is preserved; the species never bred in captivity; and apparently they weren't just social, they were ridiculously social, when flocks dropped in size to a mere thousand or so members they stopped breeding within the flock.
Overall decent read. It could have been a great read if it weren't for that awful conclusion. I was really driven by the mystery and enjoyed the young questions of life and love. Georgie was a great character, reminiscent of one of my favorite American celebrities, Annie Oakley. All the characters were believably fleshed out into real people, even ones with adjective names such as Bowler Hat and Pin Eyes. I think know I could have really loved this book if it hadn't been for the resolution of the primary plot, instead I ended up just liking it. Go ahead and give it a read, just remember that you'll need to bring some reader baggage with you to help get through the end.
An interesting book, and one I liked, to be sure... I'm just not sure that I have a whole lot to say about it. It was a great read into the thoughts of someone who stutters and it was set against the backdrop of the segregated South, which makes for some interesting moral discussions.
Our author is writing from the point of view of a boy who stutters, actually what we read is supposedly something that the main character is typing. Even though he finds talking difficult he still loves words, he thinks that perhaps he'll be a writer someday. But he hates commas and the book is accordingly sort on them; I also realized about a third of the way through that there were no quotation marks... Make of that what you will, but I didn't find that it affected readability in any way (then again, grammar/ punctuation has never been my strongest suit). He is in seventh grade but his thoughts read as though he were older, yet it still feels pretty natural.
As to the plot, it is centered around the fact that he is spending July filling in for his friends paper route. The collection happens on Friday, and each of the four Fridays is very eventful but things do happen on other days. Each person he meets working the paper route teaches him something: Mrs. Worthington, TV Boy, and, my personal favorite, Mr. Spiro.
I would say that the most noticeable downfall is the ending. This is one of those occasions where I wanted a teeny bit more closer... but I guess I'll have to live with it.
All right, in a desperate attempt to reboot for what, the millionth time? I'm back, and I've got another of the honors books. This one is one that I saw the cover for and read the description of before it won anything and said, "No thank you."
I've said it before and I'll say it again, kiddie horror ain't my cup of tea. But this book, this brilliant, brilliant book.
STOP.
Before we go any further, I'd like to give a slow clap for Holly Black. The kind that breaks into a wild frenzy at the end.
Yeah. That's what I'm talking 'bout.
She has done what many authors have tried, and few have succeeded in doing for middle grade fiction. (Others have probably succeeded, but I can't read everything.) She integrated modern technology into this book without making it stand out like a ridiculous welt. I'd of liked to see it go one step further, with maybe some internet usage. But that is explained away 90% by the speed with which this story proceeds once it gets rolling. Guys, there is a SMART Board in a classroom. I repeat, a SMART Board; and nobody gets excited, they just turn and look at it... because school, I guess. The SMART Board is such a familiar site to most kids in elementary schools nowadays that they look at it like any other writing surface thru the years. Moving on....
This is a pretty decent coming of age story. And a surprisingly realistic story, despite the kids following a quest they believe was set by a ghost girl. Yup, kiddie horror. This blew The Graveyard Book out of the water on the creepiness scale. I mean look at the doll in question:
What...
Creepy...
MAKE IT STOP!!!
So you spend most of the book wondering if Polly has perhaps gone off the deep end. Then you figure 'what the heck' and jump on the crazy train. But the longer you ride the crazy train, the less crazy it seems. You're Zach and you just don't know if you can ride any longer but you know that getting off will be the biggest disappointment of your life.
Someone needs to go over the moral compass of these kids to because running off, stealing a boat, and stealing bikes in the name of 'the quest' is a bad plan. I realize that heroes get away with this crap quite often in classic stories though so I'm letting it slide.
What I cannot let slide is the awesome father-son moment that totally blind-sided me on page 206. Way too short. It ranked up there with Onion John in the father-son moments of literature, but was only a few pages. Yet I had to put the book aside for a moment and just breathe a sigh of relief.
This story is written to make you identify with Zach, but you know who I really identify with? The questionably crazy Polly. When I worked with kids during my college courses there were children that really got under my skin. You know those ones that are basically mini-versions of yourself: as in, carbon-copies. No one wants someone that is exactly the same as them to hang out with. You probably have lots of similarities with your friends, but it is the different little quirks that endear them to you. (Example: My best friend in college was heartless, you know, in a good way, but I'm almost sickeningly sweet and expect the best of humanity. People even said we didn't match, we are that opposite.)
It is natural law that opposites attract. Otherwise you'd end up marrying you and having little you-babies. And ain't nobody in the relationship want that. Anyway, Polly has a map of Narnia in her room, shelves full of fantasy books, plays little make believe games, and watches Doctor Who... I'm considering a lawsuit for Holly Black stealing my life story, I'll keep you posted. The character that I should love because we are so much exactly alike, drives me a little insane. She is one of those dear, dear, fictional characters that I want to smack in the back of the head and tell off.
Grammar has occasionally been dumped in favor of saying it like it is.
Note: I somehow completely forgot to write this review. It has now been two months since I finished the book and... I had some brilliant ideas about what I was going to say in this post. But I've since forgotten most all but one of them.
Ahem. Young Fu's mother is a sass-master. (I'm fairly certain that is not a technical Chinese term)
I keep reading all these reviews about the women in this book being such flat characters, and obviously they were skipping over the parts where Young Fu's mother is absolutely brilliant. I wish I had a copy of the book here, but I'm telling you that most of her stuff was pure gold. Maybe I was just raised with the dry, subtle humor that she used. Because it wasn't in your face, rather it was the kind of thing that one says over a rice bowl, with one eyebrow raised and half a smirk being carefully concealed by chopsticks. She was hands-down my favorite character.
Looking back I also remember thinking that Young Fu is the luckiest fictional character of all time. He's basically King Midas without the unfortunate side-effects. Dude has a massive debt to pay off, runs away to the mountains and brings back snow. Sells snow as 'Dragon's Breath' and pays of his loans with enough left over for gifties.
I enjoyed the historical era that this was set in, gives a much different look at China than the 'Middle Kingdom' stuff one usually sees. This is a time of upheaval and transition, and the author shows that. Not only is the country in transition, but new peoples and customs are being introduced. Young Fu and his mother represent two sides of the conflict; neither being totally right, and neither being totally wrong.
