The Horn Book » HBMJan13

Review of Ask the Passengers

Jennifer M. Brabander — Wed, 01 May 2013 14:00:17 +0000

Ask the Passengers
by A. S. King
High School Little, Brown 295 pp.
10/12 978-0-316-19468-6 $17.99
Astrid would be the quintessential Q-for-Questioning girl in her high school’s LGBTQ support group if her small-town, small-minded school had such a thing — and the gay question is only one of many weighing her down. When her humanities teacher explains that learning the Socratic method “will be a time of asking questions and not rushing to answer them…a time of thinking and not knowing,” Astrid muses, “Perfect for me…I am the not knowing queen.” Socrates himself starts making periodic appearances, visible only to Astrid (who calls him Frank). Frequently driven outside by her nuthouse of a family, Astrid reclines on a picnic table and watches airplanes. She sends her questions and her love (because “it feels good to love a thing and not expect anything back”) to the passengers; each time, readers get a glimpse of a passenger’s own struggle with the question Astrid has asked — plus his or her satisfying epiphany, reached after experiencing a sudden sensation of love. As in Printz Honor recipient King’s previous novels, including Everybody Sees the Ants (rev. 1/12), these moments not only add humor to the book’s societal critique but also provide vivid images that heighten the story’s emotion. Astrid ultimately decides not to live a lie, as her closeted best friend Kristina has done for years, but wonders whether she can handle people’s reactions; she can (evident when she introduces girlfriend Dee to her family), and the book ends with Astrid’s skyward message to a young lesbian being flown to “gay conversion camp”: “Stay strong.” It’s a fine conclusion to a furiously smart and funny coming-out-and-of-age novel.

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Review of Follow Follow: A Book of Reverso Poems

Roger Sutton — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 14:00:04 +0000

Follow Follow:
A Book of Reverso Poems
by Marilyn Singer;  illus. by Josée Masse
Primary Dial 32 pp.
2/13 978-0-8037-3769-3 $16.99 g
“It’s not easy,” warns Singer in a note about the “reverso,” a verse form she created and first used in Mirror Mirror (rev. 3/10); and the first poem (“Fairy Tales”) in this companion collection gently alludes to the craft involved, “how hard it was to write.” The poems here again subvert traditional tales by offering two points of view on the story: what goes down on the left-hand of the page goes up on the right, with line breaks and punctuation revised for strategic effect. Thus the dilemma of the Little Mermaid: “For love, / give up your voice. / Don’t / think twice” advises the first verse, while the second ends with a warning, “Think twice! / Don’t / give up your voice / for love.” The poems require (and reward) close attention; the twelve referenced tales also include “Puss in Boots,” “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” and “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” with notes on each appended. Once again, the acrylic illustrations mirror the poems’ structure. On the left, a princess sleeps on a gentle cloud-leafed bed; on the right, a sensible girl massages her back wrought achy by that pesky pea tucked far below.

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Review of My Brother’s Book

Joanna Rudge Long — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 15:00:28 +0000

My Brother’s Book
by Maurice Sendak;  illus. by the author
di Capua/HarperCollins 32 pp.
2/13 978-0-06-223489-6 $18.95 g
If, as Wordsworth wrote, “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity,” Sendak’s vision of a Dante-esque search for his beloved brother Jack (1924–1995) is poetry in both word and art—though tranquility is only achieved with reunion in the sleep of death. In an eloquent introduction, Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt links this posthumous book to A Winter’s Tale, “absorbed, redistributed, and transformed into something rich and strange” and also notes the familiar Sendakian relationship between love and menace. Indeed. “Guy’s” dreamlike quest is riddled with such opposites: light and dark, heaven and the underworld, fire and ice, winter and spring. The visual imagery in the postcard-sized art is haunting, with nude adult figures recalling William Blake’s ardent seekers after truth; the sleeping babes in the wood; and multiple moons (now faceless, unlike in We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy, rev. 1/94) plus stars and suns. Some of Sendak’s most poignant themes take on even more resonance and universality. Holocaust references, while still present, are not explicit. Eating, or being eaten by, a powerful figure now involves a bear—not Shakespeare’s, exactly, but a polar bear that is intrinsic to the brothers’ transfiguration. As the ultimate not-for-little-children Sendak, this profoundly personal book about loss and healing should find its audience among thoughtful adults (and perhaps some teenagers).

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Review of Courage Has No Color, the True Story of the Triple Nickles

Dean Schneider — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 15:30:15 +0000

Courage Has No Color, the True Story of the Triple Nickles:
America’s First Black Paratroopers
by Tanya Lee Stone
Middle School, High School    Candlewick    148 pp.
1/13    978-0-7636-5117-6    $24.99
e-book ed. 978-0-7636-6405-3    $24.99
“How does one survive and outlast the racism that was our daily fare at that time?” asks artist Ashley Bryan in the foreword to this fine work about the treatment of black soldiers during World War II. With the spectacular success of the Air Force’s Tuskegee Airmen, President Roosevelt ordered the formation of an all-black Army paratrooper unit, the 555th Parachute Infantry Company, nicknamed the Triple Nickles. But the Triple Nickles didn’t actually fight anywhere, as white soldiers didn’t want to fight alongside black soldiers. They weren’t allowed into restaurants and movie theaters, their housing was substandard, and they weren’t even given access to ammunition. Eventually, they put their training to use as smokejumpers in the forests of the western United States. Though they did help to pave the way for a more integrated military in later wars, their story in World War II was one of frustration. The book’s focus is wide: there are excellent sections on segregation and stereotypes in American history, Japanese American internment camps, Japanese balloon bombs, the Battle of the Bulge, and Operation Firefly, brought to life with archival photographs and Stone’s always clear prose. Readers may not find an exciting tale of wartime heroics here, but they will find a story of subtle forms of courage and unexpected ways soldiers can serve their country. Backmatter includes a timeline, chapter-by-chapter source notes, a bibliography, and an index.

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Review of Etched in Clay

Dean Schneider — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 16:08:42 +0000

Etched in Clay:
The Life of Dave, Enslaved Potter and Poet
by Andrea Cheng; illus. by the author
Intermediate, Middle School Lee & Low 143 pp.
1/13 978-1-60060-451-5 $17.95 g
Readers familiar with Laban Carrick Hill and Bryan Collier’s 2011 Caldecott Honor–winning picture book Dave the Potter will appreciate Cheng’s interpretation of the man’s life story. Historical record leaves much unknown about this real person, a slave living in South Carolina who learned how to mold clay and became a fine potter. Through alternating perspectives (Dave; partners in the pottery business; the slave master; a woman who may have been Dave’s wife; children he’s teaching) and in spare free verse, Cheng sets the stage for Dave’s personal stand against injustice. After learning how to read and write, he saw clay as a “wet mound / of potential” and began inscribing small poems in the pottery — at the risk of his life, since it was illegal for slaves to know how to write. This inspirational historical fiction novel in verse portrays one man’s capacity to live a creative life within the confines of slavery, a man who (in Cheng’s words) hoped that “someday the world will read / my word etched in clay / on the side of this jar / and know about the shackles / around our legs / and the whips / upon our backs.” Silhouette-like woodcuts enhance the presentation. A selection of Dave’s writings is appended, and source notes are included.

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Review of Days of Blood & Starlight

Jonathan Hunt — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 15:30:24 +0000

Days of Blood & Starlight
by Laini Taylor
High School Little, Brown 517 pp.
11/12 978-0-316-13397-5 $18.99
Star-crossed lovers Karou and Akiva, torn apart by unforgivable betrayal at the end of Daughter of Smoke & Bone (rev. 11/11), are now engaged in the renewed war between the chimaera and the seraphim. Both are repulsed by the escalating brutality and the callous disregard for the sanctity of life but feel powerless to effect change. Karou has taken over the position of resurrectionist from her fallen mentor Brimstone, almost singlehandedly repopulating the chimaera army under the direction of Thiago, the ruthless White Wolf. Akiva, believing Karou to be lost to him forever, reluctantly takes a lead role in the fight against the chimaera. As one of the Misbegotten, the emperor’s bastard children bred solely to fight and die, nothing less is expected of him. The first half of the novel is full of rage and anger, carnage and destruction; the second half is dominated by surprises and revelations that ratchet up the suspense and forge an uneasy alliance between the chimaera and the Misbegotten for the battle against the seraphim that looms on the horizon. If Karou’s journey in the first book was characterized by coming of age and falling in love, here it has taken a turn toward personal sacrifice and emerging leadership. The future of Karou, her ill-fated romance with Akiva, and the survival of both of their races await readers in the concluding volume; it promises to be a doozy.

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Andrea Davis Pinkney on Hand in Hand: Ten Black Men Who Changed America

Jonathan Hunt — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 15:53:16 +0000

In the January/February 2013 Horn Book Magazine, reviewer Jonathan Hunt asks Andrea Davis Pinkney about selecting subjects for Hand in Hand: Ten Black Men Who Changed America. Read the review of Hand in Hand here.

Jonathan Hunt: How did you approach the difficult task of narrowing your list? Can you tell us who almost made it?

Andrea Davis Pinkney: Narrowing the list was daunting! One man I really wanted to include, but felt was too self-serving, was my own father, the late Philip J. Davis. Dad was one of the first African Americans to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives, and was later appointed by the White House to help draft affirmative action legislation. Of the ten men featured in the book, my dad had a direct connection to six of them. A few years ago, Brian painted a stunning portrait of my father, so that aspect of Dad’s story was already complete.

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Review of Hand in Hand: Ten Black Men Who Changed America

Jonathan Hunt — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 15:40:00 +0000

Hand in Hand:
Ten Black Men Who Changed America
by Andrea Davis Pinkney;  illus. by Brian Pinkney
Intermediate, Middle School Disney-Jump at the Sun 243 pp.
10/12 978-1-4231-4257-7 $19.99
Presenting ten biographical vignettes in chronological order — Benjamin Banneker, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, A. Philip Randolph, Thurgood Marshall, Jackie Robinson, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Barack H. Obama II — the Pinkneys create a testament to African American males that, taken together, tells one big story of triumph (a story that, incidentally, spans American history). Each profile, fifteen to thirty pages long, includes an introductory poem, a watercolor portrait, and spot illustrations. Brian Pinkney’s illustrations are a perfect marriage of line, color, and medium and complement Andrea Pinkney’s colloquial and ebullient text. “Benjamin Banneker was born under a lucky star. Came into this world a freeborn child, a blessing bestowed on few of his hue.” Each profile is compact yet comprehensive, but since virtually all of these men were eloquent writers and speakers, it’s mildly disappointing that more of their own words didn’t find their way into the text. Still, this is an impressive accomplishment, and a worthy companion to Kadir Nelson’s Heart and Soul (rev. 11/11). Sources, further reading, a timeline, and an index are appended.

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Review of The Archived

Deirdre Baker — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 16:24:00 +0000

The Archived
by Victoria Schwab
Middle School, High School Hyperion 324 pp.
1/13 978-1-4231-5731-1 $16.99 g
Mackenzie is a “Keeper”; her job is to return the wakeful dead (or “Histories”) to the Archive, a repository of all human memory. Persuading the dead to return to their rightful resting place often involves kick-ass combat, but never so much as when Mac’s family moves to an apartment in an old hotel. Suddenly, the Archive experiences a rush of escaped Histories, and it’s no longer the silent domain it should be — nor is Mac, grieving the loss of her younger brother, as dispassionate as she once was about the dead. This is no common policing-the-supernatural romantic thriller: Schwab’s image of the Archive and  its Librarians is both poignant and intellectually piquant, a suggestion that the repository of human memory goes beyond personal loss and is central to human culture. She writes of death, sorrow, and family love with a light, intelligent touch and inventive vigor, and provides romance with a pleasing edge of unpredictability. It isn’t often that lines from Dante’s Inferno make their way into supernatural thrillers for teens, but they do here — and to good effect.

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Beyond The Friends

Yolanda Hare — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 17:05:29 +0000

In 1973 Rosa Guy’s YA novel The Friends [read the original Horn Book review here] electrified the world  of African American children’s books. The Friends was one of the  first novels for teens to tell a distinctly African American story,  highlighting issues of race, class, and identity that black children deal with on a daily basis. The protagonist, Phyllisia, navigates an urban landscape and its dangers, from violence to racism and beyond. In her New York Times review, Alice Walker called The Friends an “important book,” and to support this designation, she drew readers’ attention to the state of the world of literature, in which it was possible for a black girl to go the first twenty years of her life without reading a story with a “person like herself” as the protagonist.

Fast-forward forty years, and novels for black teens now claim their share of the market. Comedy. Drama. Romance. Poetry. Historical. Literary. Popular. From Monster by Walter Dean Myers to Coe Booth’s Kendra to the Drama High books by L. Divine to the lyrical novels of Jacqueline Woodson and Angela Johnson, there is a wide spectrum of books written for, or about, black teens. And yet as a teenager growing up in this era of increased visibility, I had the same experience as the young black girl Walker described — the one who never saw herself in books.

When I was a teenager in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was into Sailor Moon, the Spice Girls, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but most of all I loved to read. I didn’t normally read African American children’s or young adult novels. I found those too gloomy. Instead I primarily read romance novels from Harlequin’s black romance imprint, Kimani Arabesque.

The reason I chose to read these books was not for the plots, which, let’s face it, were in most cases convoluted and predictable. Nor did I choose to read them for the sex, although that was a bonus. I read these books because they were the only ones I could find with regular middle-class black people leading lives to which I could relate and aspire.

I had a relatively typical middle-class upbringing. I lived in urban Minneapolis in a Tudor home that needed a lot of work but had potential. Sometimes I rode my bike to visit my best friend two blocks up, but I spent the majority of my days with my nose in a book. I went to a college preparatory school for middle and upper school, which I appreciated because all of the other kids there were as energized about learning as I was. In other words, I was a geek.

I spent a lot of time in the library, where I found plenty of novels about black teen girls — black teen girls getting abused, black teen girls getting pregnant, black teen girls getting exploited. (The best-known example of the books I was finding is probably Sapphire’s 1996 novel Push, made into the film Precious.) Like The Friends, each of these books tells an authentically African American story. But though I was supposed to be able to relate to these books because the characters looked like me, they did not tell my story.

With a few exceptions, the existing body of African American young adult literature focuses on the urban poor and the issues they face. In All the Right Stuff by Walter Dean Myers, a drug lord attempts to recruit the protagonist into a life of crime. I can’t relate to that. The title character in Coe Booth’s Kendra is a fourteen-year-old girl who fears teenage pregnancy so instead has oral sex around school with her best friend’s love interest — a guy she does not particularly like or care about. I can’t relate to that. In Broken China by Lori Aurelia Williams, the title character is a thirteen-year-old single mother who loses her baby to a fluke infection and is pressured by a predatory funeral home owner into beginning a career as a  stripper. I can’t relate to that, either.

My aim is not to suggest that these types of books should not exist. Many of these books are beautiful and sensitively written, and they tell stories that need to be told. I also don’t want to suggest there are not books that break this pattern. One of my favorite books of all time, The Road to Memphis by Mildred Taylor, concerns a landowning black family in the 1950s. More recently 37 Things I Love (in no particular order) by Kekla Magoon tells the story of middle-class Ellis, whose major conflict is coming to terms with the idea that her father is in a coma and may never wake up, but also deals with more universal issues such as friendship and identity.

Still, it seems as if books written for black teenagers disproportionately feature poor families and their struggles to achieve fundamental needs. So even forty years after Walker’s review of The Friends, there are still black girls and boys who have spent the first twenty years of their lives without reading novels featuring characters like themselves.

The conflation of blackness with urban poverty is not something that occurs only in literature. In Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America, John L. Jackson Jr. discusses the “performative” nature of blackness. Jackson argues that though black Americans are from a variety of different backgrounds, they perform the culture of “Harlemworld,” which ascribes blackness overall to the culture of impoverished urban blacks. This conception of homogenous blackness has worked itself into depictions of African Americans to the point that it’s hard to find images that don’t conform to this idea. As a teenager I searched for books that dealt with the isolation I felt as one of the only black students at my school. What I found instead were stories about teenage mothers who could barely read. My inability to relate to the black protagonists in the books made me feel like I wasn’t black enough, and in the deepest parts of me I even wondered if this image was all I was expected to be. Now I know there is not just one way to be black.

So…

Can we please see more black geeks in African American young adult literature? More protagonists who are so worried they’ll never date that pregnancy isn’t even an issue? More black teens living mundane middle-class lives? Just because urban ghetto life is one black story, it doesn’t mean that it’s the only story. As groundbreaking a novel as it was, can we move beyond The Friends?

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