Michael L. Printz Award 2009 Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta (HarperTeen) review

Printz Honor Books

• The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves by M. T. Anderson (Candlewick) review
• Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan (Knopf) review
• The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart (Hyperion) review
• Nation by Terry Pratchett (HarperCollins) review

How the Horn Book reviewed the winners

Melina Marchetta  Jellicoe Road
     HarperTeen
     Reviewed 11/08
Two tragic stories — one past, one present — come together in this carefully constructed novel set in the Australian bush. Seventeen-year-old Taylor Markham has just been made leader of the Jellicoe School’s “Underground” during the annual territory wars with the townies and the cadets. Taylor arrived at the school at age eleven when her mother dumped her at the local 7-11 and she was taken in by Hannah, voluntary caretaker of the school’s neediest students. Interspersed with war maneuvers, negotiations, and Taylor’s hotly charged meetings with cadet leader Jonah Griggs are excerpts from Hannah’s unfinished novel about three teenaged survivors of a horrific car wreck on Jellicoe Road years earlier. The three survivors, and the lifelong bonds they formed with the townie who rescued them and the cadet who befriended them, have everything to do with Taylor; together with broken memories of life with her drug-addicted mother and dream visits from a mysterious boy, Hannah’s story helps Taylor piece together the truth about her past and determine who she will become. Despite grief piled on grief in the personal histories of the characters, they are all firmly bound by friendship and love. Suspenseful plotting, slowly unraveling mysteries, and generations of romance shape the absorbing novel. L.A.

M. T. Anderson  The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves
    Candlewick
    Reviewed 9/08
In eighteen sentences, displayed with the aesthetics of a broadside, Anderson sums up the action of the first volume of Octavian Nothing (rev. 9/06), quickly moving readers into the events of the second, in which Octavian and his tutor, Dr. Trefusis, escape from the College of Lucidity. Their flight takes them through the mudflats, across a dismal, featureless plain, and through the surrounding waters to Boston. This heroic journey begins to define the epic quality of the novel, one that is strengthened by Octavian’s observations, thoughts heightened by his philosophical training but impaired by his limited personal experiences. Their journey is as surreal as it is heroic: almost drowned by the incoming tide, Octavian and Dr. Trefusis are picked up by a mysterious ferryman whose face they never see; the Boston they arrive in, now occupied by the British, is equally surreal, with streets piled high with ruined furniture and soldiers farcically dressed as milkmaids. Thus readers are kept continually off-balance, while simultaneously grappling with the eighteenth-century vocabulary and complex sentence structure. But by the time Octavian and Dr. Trefusis make their way to Virginia — where Octavian enlists with other slaves in Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment in exchange for freedom — the book’s momentum has become inexorable. As new recruits (including Pro Bono) join the regiment, each tells his heart-wrenching narrative of the middle passage, servitude, or freedom lost and yearned for. These themes volley around Octavian’s journals like cannon fire: those fighting for the rights of man summarily exclude an entire race from their ideals, while those promising freedom do so for military expediency only. As Octavian concludes, “I saw that everything hath its price, and all are in fluctuation, no value solid, but all cost as they are appraised for use. How much . . . is a man’s life worth?” A thoughtful author’s note fills in historical background but also reiterates the concept of Liberty, “a quality so abstract as to be insubstantial — and yet so real in its manifestations that it was worth dying for.” B.C.

Margo Lanagan  Tender Morsels
     Knopf
     Reviewed 9/08
Raped repeatedly by her father and, after his death, brutally gang-raped by village youths, fifteen-year-old Liga determines to kill herself and her baby. Instead of dying, the two enter a parallel world; a place without aggression, fear, or pain. There Liga raises her two daughters, Branza and Urdda. As the girls grow, strangers visit Liga’s heaven — a “stumpety” little man intent on magical riches; two bear-men who have wandered in from Liga’s former village’s seasonal fertility festival. They pique young Urdda’s curiosity, and she finds her way back to the real world. Her discovery ruptures Liga’s safe but stagnant heaven forever but results in a fuller life for all three women. Lanagan’s poetic style and her masterful employment of mythic imagery give this story of transformation and healing extraordinary depth and beauty. The characters’ earthy folk dialect tethers Lanagan’s fantasy firmly to very real physical and psychic experience even as the lyrical narrative voice (“Morning came, sweet as new milk spilling up the sky, all dew and birdsong and bee-buzz”) intensifies its fairy-tale atmosphere. At the same time, Lanagan offers up difficult truths — and complicated, human characters — that are as sobering as they are triumphant. DEIRDRE F. BAKER

E. Lockhart  The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
     Hyperion
     Reviewed 5/08
Alabaster Preparatory Academy sophomore Frankie Landau-Banks is cute, clever, and dating one of the most popular boys in school — who also happens to be the co-leader of an all-male secret society on campus called the Loyal Order of the Basset Hounds. At first Frankie is content just to be Matthew Livingston’s arm candy, but the more he keeps secrets from her — seriously underestimating her intelligence — the more restless she becomes. By impersonating Matthew’s co-leader over e-mail, Frankie takes control of the Bassets, secretly engineering campus-wide pranks such as fastening bras on paintings of the school’s founding fathers. Over the course of the story, Frankie transforms from being her family’s “Bunny Rabbit” into “a person who liked to be notorious” — a change that comes as a shock to her friends, family, school administration, and, most of all, to Frankie herself. Throughout the story, a clinical-sounding narrator addresses readers directly, giving the book a case-study vibe and presenting Frankie’s struggles in a dispassionate way (“How does a person become the person she is?”; “she might, in fact, go crazy, as has happened to a lot of people who break rules”). Readers are left to make up their own minds about this unique, multifaceted individual while giving her the space — and the attention — she so craves. ELISSA GERSHOWITZ

Terry Pratchett  Nation
    HarperCollins
     Reviewed 9/08
Two civilizations meet when a tsunami shipwrecks an English vessel on a small tropical island. Representing the empire is the sole survivor of the wreck, the young girl Ermintrude. She meets Mau, a boy on the brink of manhood, and the only survivor of the island’s “nation.” All the attractions of a castaway story are here — including an ingenious use of found materials, exotic plants and animals, nature’s violence, really bad bad guys, and a single footprint in the sand — but this story holds far more. The historical setting is an alternative nineteenth century in which the Russian Plague has killed off the English monarch, and the monarch-in-waiting, King Henry IX, is marooned on the other side of the world. This cheeky premise releases Pratchett into an exploration of the impulse to empire and an examination of a world in which all assumptions — about society, law, science, gender, religion, and justice — are up for questioning. As Mau says, “The wave came. These are new days. Who knows what we are?” The unique pleasure of this story is that all the serious subjects and juicy ethical questions, such as the dilemma of the compassionate lie, are fully woven into action and character. Satirical portraits of upper-class twits, slapstick buffoonery, bad puns, and that particular brand of English wit buoy this story at every turn. Add a romance of gentle sweetness, encounters with ghosts, and lots of gunfire, and it is hard to imagine a reader who won’t feel welcomed into this nation. S.E.

2009 ALA awards