Goblin Secrets

Out of Reach
by Carrie Arcos
High School    Simon Pulse    251 pp.
10/12    978-1-4424-4053-1    $16.99
reviewed in the spring 2013 Horn Book Guide
Almost-seventeen-year-old Rachel travels to San Diego to search for her missing brother, a meth addict; as the day unfolds, she confronts the dangers and destructiveness of drug abuse. The glacial pace allows for flashbacks, detailed descriptions, and musings on relationships, family, choice, God, etc., but will challenge readers to stay engaged; the anti-drug message is delivered with a heavy and rather naïve hand. MARTHA V. PARRAVANO

Never Fall Down
by Patricia McCormick
High School    Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins    222 pp.
5/12    978-0-06-173093-1    $17.99
Library ed. 978-0-06-173094-8    $18.89    g
Reviewed 5/12
Arn knows that if he ever falls down, he will be killed — shot, bayoneted, struck with an ax, or taken “someplace [he] can rest” by the Khmer Rouge. He’s watched soldiers lead away countless others in the work camp, and they never return. “But the dirt pile, it get bigger all the time. Bigger and worse smell. Like rot…That pile, now it’s like mountain.” Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews with Arn  Chorn-Pond, who was eleven in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge gained control of Cambodia, McCormick creates an unflinching, riveting portrait of genocide as seen through a boy’s eyes. Written in realistically halting English, the narrative might be unreadable if not for Arn’s brash, resilient personality. Even before the regime change, he is scrappy, cutting school to sell ice cream on the streets and then using his earnings to gamble. His cheekiness and shrewd survival skills keep him from succumbing to despair in the camps. What’s more, he becomes a motivating force for fellow prisoners such as Mek, the music teacher enlisted to teach the boys how to play patriotic songs on traditional instruments. Having watched his wife and children die, Mek wants to die, too, but Arn won’t let him. “I hit this guy with my fist. ‘Okay if you die!’ I say. ‘But what about us? You don’t teach us to play, we die too. Us kid. Like your kid die, we will die also.’” The “happy  ending” — adoption by an American family after the war — is compromised until he can figure out how to deal with the hate in his heart: “Hate for the people who kill my family, hate for the people who kill my friend, hate for myself.” And so he tells his story. And so McCormick’s novel is one that needs to be read. CHRISTINE M. HEPPERMANN

Endangered
by Eliot Schrefer
Middle School, High School    Scholastic    264 pp.
11/12    978-0-545-47001-8    $17.99
e-book ed.  978-0-545-47001-8    $17.99
Reviewed 1/13
Schrefer packs a wealth of incident — too much, perhaps — into a compelling survival story set in contemporary conflict-ridden Congo. When narrator Sophie, fourteen, arrives for her yearly visit to her Congolese mother’s animal sanctuary, she becomes attached to a rescued baby bonobo she names Otto — so much so that when the political situation destabilizes dangerously and she’s scheduled to be airlifted back to Miami, she can’t leave him behind. In one of the novel’s early dramatic moments, she jumps out of the armored United Nations airport van and flees into the sanctuary’s thirty-acre bonobo enclosure with Otto, thereby escaping the fate of all the other humans (Sophie’s mother is conveniently away at a wildlife preserve on a remote island), who are at that moment massacred by rebel soldiers. But before readers can settle in to this story line — can Sophie survive in the jungle amongst sometimes-hostile adult bonobos? — the author hustles her out of the sanctuary, and she and Otto embark on a harrowing journey through the war-torn countryside to find her mother. Sophie fights off illness, leeches, a drunken boy warlord, and yet another UN evacuation threat to get to her mother, all the while putting Otto’s welfare before her own. What pulls the reader through the shifts in plot and focus are the strength and immediacy of Sophie’s voice and the palpable connection between her and Otto; as well, the novel may provoke readers to think about a wide range of issues, from the value of human versus animal lives, to the causes and effects of war, to the nature of love. MARTHA V. PARRAVANO

Bomb: The Race to Build ― and Steal ― the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon
by Steve Sheinkin
Middle School, High School    Flash Point/Roaring Brook 
   266 pp.
9/12    978-1-59643-487-5    $19.99
Reviewed 11/12
While comprehensive in his synthesis of the political, historical, and scientific aspects of the creation of the first nuclear weapon, Sheinkin focuses his account with an extremely alluring angle: the spies. The book opens in 1950 with the confession of Harry Gold — but to what? And thus we flash back to Robert Oppenheimer in the dark 1930s, as he and readers are handed another question by the author: “But how was a theoretical physicist supposed to save the world?” Oppenheimer’s realization that an atomic bomb could be created to use against Nazi Germany is coupled with the knowledge that the Germans must be working from the same premise, and the Soviets are close behind. We periodically return to Gold’s ever-deepening betrayals as well as other acts of espionage, most excitingly the two stealth attacks on occupied Norway’s Vemork power plant, where the Germans were manufacturing heavy water to use in their own nuclear program. As he did in the 2011 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award winner The Notorious Benedict Arnold (rev. 1/11), Sheinkin here maintains the pace of a thriller without betraying history (source notes and an annotated bibliography are exemplary) or skipping over the science; photo galleries introducing each section help readers organize the events and players. Writing with journalistic immediacy, the author eschews editorializing up through the chilling last lines: “It’s a story with no end in sight. And, like it or not, you’re in it.” Index. ROGER SUTTON

The judges were: Judith Ortiz Cofer, Susan Cooper, Daniel Ehrenhaft, Gary D. Schmidt (chair), Marly Youmans. The National Book Awards will be presented on November 14, 2012.

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Inside Out and Back Again has won the 2011 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. The prize was presented on November 16, 2011, at the National Book Foundation’s annual dinner and ceremony in New York City. Marc Aronson chaired the judging committee, which also included Ann Brashares, Matt de la Peña, Nikki Grimes, Will Weaver.

Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai (Harper/HarperCollins) review

2011 National Book Award Finalists

Chime by Franny Billingsley (Dial) review

My Name Is Not Easy by Debby Dahl Edwardson (Cavendish) review to come

Flesh and Blood So Cheap: The Triangle Fire and Its Legacy by Albert Marrin (Knopf) review

Okay for Now by Gary D. Schmidt (Clarion) review

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Chime
by Franny Billingsley
Middle School, High School   Dial   358 pp.
3/11   978-0-8037-3552-1   $17.99
Reviewed 3/11
“Ooze and muck and the clean muddy smell of life” suffuse Billingsley’s long-awaited third work of fiction, which mingles “Tam Lin,” “Lord Randall,” and its own swampy folklore into an entirely original concoction — and which confirms, yet again, how aptly fairy tale expresses the emotional landscape of adolescence. And more: how exceptionally well Billingsley uses it to do so. Narrator Briony Larkin is a self-proclaimed witch. She believes that out of childish jealousy of the attention Stepmother lavished on her twin sister, Rose, she called up the Old Ones, and Rose was brain-damaged in a violent windstorm. She avers that she is also responsible for Stepmother’s injuries in a tidal wave. “We mustn’t ever tell your father,” Stepmother said. Now Stepmother’s dead, and Briony hates herself, has sacrificed her future to care for Rose, forbids herself the joys of her beloved swamp, and fears her outing (and subsequent hanging) as a witch. But when Eldric comes to board at the family parsonage, bringing a young man’s energy and his “busy London blood pumping just inches away,” she begins to dig up suppressed memories. Tart, sad, funny, passionate, sensuous — Briony is all of these. As complex and tightly woven as her protagonist, Billingsley’s plot involves mystery, murder, romance, ancient lore, family drama, and sisterly love. Her Swampsea setting is earthy, visceral, and alive, and for all the adolescent self-hatred depicted here, there’s also a welcome hyperawareness of the physical world that Billingsley articulates with impressive poetic vigor. DEIRDRE F. BAKER

My Name Is Not Easy
by Debby Dahl Edwardson
Middle School   Cavendish   249 pp.
10/11   978-0-7614-5980-4   $17.99
Review to come 1/12

Inside Out and Back Again
by Thanhha Lai
Intermediate, Middle School   Harper/HarperCollins   260 pp.
3/11   978-0-06-196278-3   $15.99
Reviewed 3/11
Recounting events that resemble her own family’s 1975 flight from Saigon and first months in the United States, Lai pens a novel in vividly imagined verse. Each brief poem encapsulates a mood and experience of that year. As the Vietnam War nears its end in April, ten-year-old Ha’s “Birthday Wishes” include “Wish Mother would stop / chiding me to stay calm / which makes it worse” and that “Father [who’s missing in action] would come home.” Registering for school in Alabama in August, Ha encounters “a woman who / pats my head / while shaking her own. / I step back, / hating pity, /…the pity giver / feels better, / never the pity receiver.” Such condescension is new to Ha and her brothers, all excellent students, as is being daunted by challenges like the urgent need to master idiosyncratic English. Meanwhile, Brother Vu takes odd jobs; Quang (who once said, “One cannot justify war / unless each side / fl aunts its own / blind conviction”) repairs cars. Many neighbors and classmates, with their own blind convictions, are cruelly antagonistic, but Ha soon finds allies at school and in English-tutor Ms. Washington. Lai’s spare language captures the sensory disorientation of changing cultures as well as a refugee’s complex emotions and kaleidoscopic loyalties. Th at Ms. Washington’s son died in Vietnam underlines the disparity between nations’ quarrels and their citizens’ humanity, suggesting this as a provocative companion to Katherine Paterson’s Park’s Quest (rev. 7/88). JOANNA RUDGE LONG

Flesh and Blood So Cheap: The Triangle Fire and Its Legacy
by Albert Marrin
High School   Knopf   192 pp.
2/11    978-0-375-86889-4   $19.99
reviewed in the fall 2011 Horn Book Guide
Marrin details the social, political, and economic forces surrounding the catastrophic Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911. The book isn’t just about the disaster; copious historical context is presented with a high level of detail about various aspects of life for poor working immigrants. Archival photographs also help provide a sense of the times while putting faces to the tragedy. Websites. Bib., ind. BETTY CARTER

Okay for Now
by Gary D. Schmidt
Middle School   Clarion   360 pp.
4/11   978-0-547-15260-8   $16.99
Reviewed 5/11
Bad-boy Doug Swieteck from The Wednesday Wars (rev. 7/07) — grudgingly respected for his bravado (he knew 410 ways to get a teacher to hate you) but feared because of his bullying older brother—is back in a stand-alone story. Readers meet Doug’s mean-spirited father, a man Doug dislikes but unconsciously emulates. When the family moves upstate after Mr. Swieteck’s temper gets him fi red, Doug’s discontent mirrors his father’s. They live in a “stupid” town, in a house Doug christens “The Dump,” and people sit on stoops because there isn’t “any boring thing else to do in boring Marysville.” But what “boring” Marysville, New York, offers Doug is something unexpected: kindness and a future. He gets a part-time job; meets Lil, a sweet love interest; has teachers willing to teach him (as Schmidt gradually reveals, his need is dire); and, above all, is captivated by a book of Audubon bird prints when a caring librarian helps Doug discover a talent for composition and art appreciation. Schmidt incorporates a myriad of historical events from the 1968 setting (the moon landing, a broken brother returning from Vietnam, the My Lai massacre) that make some of the improbable plot turns (the father’s sudden redemption, for example) all the more unconvincing. Still, Doug’s story emerges through a distinctive voice that reflects how one beat-up kid can become a young man who knows that the future holds “so much for him to find.” BETTY CARTER

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And the 2011 NBA Un-finalist:

Shine
by Lauren Myracle
High School   Abrams/Amulet    361 pp.
4/11    978-0-8109-8417-2   $16.95
reviewed in the fall 2011 Horn Book Guide
Sixteen-year-old Cat’s gay friend is in a coma, the victim of a hate crime. Her search for the perpetrator leads to disturbing revelations about her friends in their rural impoverished North Carolina town. Cat’s authentically Southern, lyrical narration captures tough realities like prejudice, drug use, and abuse (emotional, sexual, and physical) but ends on an optimistic note. RACHEL L. SMITH

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