Book Review: Sweeping Up the Heart by Kevin Henkes (2019)

Amelia and her new friend Casey are both struggling to enjoy their spring vacations due to family strife. For Casey, who is visiting his aunt, the problem is his parents' impending divorce, to which he vehemently objects with a variety of tactics, including homemade anti-divorce tee shirts. For Amelia, the superficial problem is that her father, the Professor, wouldn't take her to Florida for Spring Break, but this complaint masks Amelia's overall unhappiness with her father's standoffish demeanor, and her wish for a more permanent mother figure than her babysitter, Mrs. O'Brien. One day, Casey sees a woman on the street and creates an imaginary backstory in which this stranger is Amelia's mother. Though Amelia knows her mother died when she was young, she still entertains the idea that perhaps there is a connection to this unknown woman. When the woman's identity is revealed, however, Amelia is not sure she is prepared to handle this new knowledge.

Like most novels by Kevin Henkes, this one is very quiet, with a melancholy and introspective mood. This story is very heavy with feelings of longing and disappointment, and though it is a short book, it doesn't seem to go by very quickly because it so laden down with these issues. The writing is quite nice, with simple turns of phrase that read a bit like poetry, but at the same time, very little actually happens which will certainly turn off more action-oriented middle grade readers.

I'm really puzzled as to why this book has to be set in 1999. Aside from a few brief references to Y2K, there is nothing about the time period that really impacts the story. It is true that the characters don't have smart phones, which would certainly have changed the way Amelia researches her mother, but I'm not sure that is enough of a reason to set the story 20 years in the past.  

I liked this book well enough, but it's clearly not the most memorable middle grade novel I'll read in 2019. Personally, if I'm going to recommend a book about a father and daughter dealing with the loss of a wife and mother, it's going to be Remembering Mrs. Rossi by Amy Hest, and its sequel, Letters to Leo, which deal with many of the same issues as Sweeping Up the Heart, but with a slightly brighter outlook overall.  

Fumbling Through Fantasy: Miss Hickory by Carolyn Sherwin Bailey (1946)

Miss Hickory is a small doll, made of twigs and a strong hickory nut. She has lived, up until now, in a corncob house near the Old Place, the house in New Hampshire where Ann, the little girl who made her, lives. When Ann goes away to school, however, it becomes clear that Miss Hickory will not be spending the winter inside on the windowsill as she has done in years past, and she sets out to find a new home. With the help of such friends as Crow and a cat named Mr T. Willard-Brown, she begins to explore new lodgings, and by extension, the larger world around her, resulting in a variety of adventures.

In a word, I would describe this 1947 Newbery Medal winner as charming. I read it aloud to my five-year-old and three-year-old together, and they loved the animal characters and the involvement of the natural world in the story. They were captivated by the beautiful description of the way the animals commemorate Christmas and they enjoyed the different personalities of the animals Miss Hickory meets.

There is some death and sadness in the book, but my girls were completely fine with it. (I'm about to vaguely spoil a couple of things, so skip the rest of this paragraph if you don't want to know!) A deer loses his mother to hunters at one point, but the death is handled subtly, and none of us shed any tears. (It was not a dramatic Disney parent death a la Bambi or The Lion King.) The deer also gets an immediate happy ending, so the sadness only lasts for one chapter. My daughters were equally unbothered by Miss Hickory's "death" near the end of the book, which is clearly more of a transition than a true loss of life, since Miss Hickory is always understood to be a toy, not a human being. I have read some Goodreads reviews that really condemn this book because of the ending, but personally, I found it refreshing that the author didn't shy away from what strikes me as a very logical ending for one whose head is a nut.

This read-aloud was also noteworthy because I experimented with doing voices for some of the characters. I did voices for Crow, Hen-Pheasant, and Squirrel, and used my own "story time voice" from my library days as the voice of Miss Hickory. The girls seemed a little taken aback at first because I typically don't do voices, but they seemed to enjoy the change of pace.

I did wish some of the chapters had clearer transitions between them, as the narrative does jump around quite a bit between different animals and sometimes it took almost an entire chapter to figure out how an episode connected to the overall novel. I also found myself wishing for more references to the human beings in Ann's family, but that is probably because of my own preference for stories set in the real world, and not necessarily because the book needed more of such scenes.

I'm not sure every preschooler would react as casually as mine did to some of the events in this book, but if you have kids who have been exposed to a wide variety of stories, including fairy tales where deaths occur, and they're not especially sensitive to sad topics, I wouldn't assume this book is too much for them. It's a fantasy story set in what could very well be any child's backyard and it feeds the imagination with ideas of what might be happening while we humans are going about our mundane daily activities.

I'll be curious to see how this compares to Hitty: Her First Hundred Years by Rachel Field, another Newbery winning doll story which I've just started reading to my five-year-old.

5 Reasons I Listen to Audiobooks at Double Speed

Photo by Findaway Voices on Unsplash

I have listened to audiobooks on and off over the past several years, but it has only been since last spring that I have become a truly avid listener. What really got me hooked was the discovery that I could speed up the narration of the books I listen to. I know listening at double speed sounds like a crazy thing to do, but here, for Top Ten Tuesday's audio freebie topic, are some of the reasons why it works for me:

I'm a fast reader. Because I read quickly, I don't have the patience to listen to a narrator read slowly. For me to feel like listening to an audiobook is worthwhile, I generally don't want it to take much more time than reading the physical book would take. While most narrators still read more slowly at double speed than I do on my own, the gap in speed is a lot smaller when I accelerate the narration.

My mind doesn't get a chance to wander. When audiobooks play at normal speed, I have a tendency to tune out what I'm hearing and let my mind drift to other things. When I play a book at double speed, however, there are no real pauses or gaps where I have the opportunity to get distracted by my to-do list, or by a random memory from high school, or by whatever wants to pop into my head. The words go by so quickly that I have to listen closely to be able to follow the story.

The books go by faster. The apps I use to listen to audiobooks show either how much time is left in the book or how much time is left in the current chapter. When I listen at double speed, the full time is still displayed, but the seconds tick by twice as fast. Being able to mentally cut that time remaining in half really makes it feel like the story is flying by, and I'm accomplishing a lot of reading, which is especially helpful when a book is really long or otherwise intimidating.

The narration sounds more normal. Audiobook narrators tend to speak very slowly, to the point that the pace sounds unnatural. Most of the time, at double speed, the narration is maybe just a little bit quicker than normal speech. Occasionally, if a narrator is a bit of a faster talker, I'll have to scale it back to 1.75 or 1.5 to keep the speech from becoming garbles, but most of the time 2x is the sweet spot for me. 

I can listen to a lot in limited time. Most of the audiobooks I listen to are not appropriate for my kids to hear (murder mysteries, romances, etc.) so I have to squeeze those books into my daily walk and times when the girls are asleep. If I have an hour to listen, speeding up the narration to 2x makes it possible to get two hours of a book done in that time. This is especially nice when my library only has an audiobook edition of a title and I can't just switch over to an ebook or paperback when the kids are around.

I know lots of readers have strong opinions about speeding up audiobooks. Where do you stand? What speed do you prefer?

#YearOfHarryPotter: Prisoner of Azkaban, Chapters 8-11

Once again, this week it was difficult to tear myself away from this book after I'd finished reading the week's assignment, which was chapters 8 to 11: "Flight of the Fat Lady," "Grim Defeat," "The Marauder's Map," and "The Firebolt." (Lots of spoilers in this post, for this book and later ones.)

One of my favorite things about this book is that it begins to introduce all of the backstory leading up to the death of Harry's parents and the key figures in Harry's life who are later revealed to be members of the Order of the Phoenix. I think the relationship between past and present is one of the strongest elements in this series, and this book feels like the beginning of the real story Rowling wants to tell.

I was especially drawn into the relationship between Lupin and Snape. Having read to the end of the series, I have such love and empathy for Snape, but his behavior when he must cover Lupin's class due to "illness" is pretty cruel. Even if he disapproves of a werewolf teaching at Hogwarts, it seems really over-the-top to discuss werewolves with Lupin's class, almost as though he is encouraging them to figure out the truth about their teacher's illness. I guess some of this is due to the fact that Snape suspects Lupin of helping Sirius Black, who Snape believes betrayed his beloved Lily, but sometimes it is just hard to reconcile the Snape of book 7 with the Snape of the earlier books.

As for Harry's overhearing that Sirius Black is his godfather, I found that whole scene kind of far-fetched this time around. Knowing that that bombshell was coming allowed me to focus my attention on how the information is delivered, and it didn't quite ring true. It doesn't seem consistent that McGonagall would be discussing sensitive information like that in public on a day when she knows the students are in Hogsmeade. Even if Harry himself is not meant to be present, Ron and Hermione and plenty of other Gryffindors (not to mention nosy Slytherins!) are around to overhear. This is the only time in the series so far, where I feel like Rowling inserted a scene solely for the opportunity to give us a bunch of exposition at one time.

The other thing of which I took special note is Hermione's reporting to McGonagall that Harry received a Firebolt from an anonymous benefactor on Christmas. I've really been on the lookout for instances when these characters do dangerous things and get away with it, but Hermione really does the right thing in this situation, even though Harry is very annoyed with her. As Dumbledore says in the first book, "It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.” Hermione's willingness to go against Harry's wishes in order to protect him is admirable, and her good instincts are the kind of thing I won't mind seeing my kids emulate.

Reading Through History: The Porcupine Year by Louise Erdrich (2008)

In the year during which Omakayas is twelve winters old, she and her family leave their home near Lake Superior and head west, looking for a new place to settle. As they make the difficult journey, Omakayas and her younger brother, Pinch, both begin to come of age, taking on new names and identities as adulthood comes ever closer. The year is marked by many emotional ups and downs, including the loss of a beloved family member and the revelation that another is perhaps not what he had first seemed.

I was really annoyed by the representation of Father Baraga in the second book of this series, Game of Silence, and it took me a while to want to read another book for fear there would be more blatant inaccuracies requiring research and emails to Catholic Answers apologists. Happily, there are no egregiously anti-Catholic representations in this book, and indeed, priests, when mentioned, are shown to be helpful and merciful. Without having to dissect scenes involving Catholic clergy, I was able to enjoy this novel for what it is: an exciting but emotional adventure story about Ojibwe life in 1852.

There is a lot of memorable description in this book, and while not all of it is pleasant to read about, it is all handled very tastefully and almost poetically. Though there are some definite scary moments, and some that could even be considered gruesome, I did not find them so troubling that I lost sleep or had nightmares or anything like that. Even the scenes about Omakayas beginning her "moon" and gaining the ability to bear children were written in a way that didn't feel embarrassing or awkward. Erdrich describes this experience as such a positive and meaningful transition from girlhood to womanhood, and though it is very specific to Omakayas's culture, I think her description could be comforting to a girl from any time and place.

While the plot in this book is pretty action-packed, for some reason, I just didn't connect with it as strongly as with the first book of the series. Still, I enjoyed the story and plan to read the next book, Chickadee, sometime this spring, at which point I'll need to get myself a copy of Makoons, the only one of the series I don't yet own, and the final book.

Book Review: Hello, Universe by Erin Entrada Kelly (2017)

Shy Virgil, age eleven, is having trouble learning his multiplication tables, so he goes to the resource room at his school every Thursday. Every week, he sees Valencia, a fellow student who is deaf and wears hearing aids. He is interested in getting to know Valencia better, but he's not sure how to approach her. He decides to enlist his friend Kaori Tanaka, who claims to be a psychic, to help him figure out what to do. Before he can fully take advantage of her services, however, a bully attacks him, and he and his guinea pig, Gulliver, end up trapped in a well. Now Virgil is convinced that not only will he never speak to Valencia, but he might never even be found.

After being let down by the 2019 Newbery winner, Merci Suarez Changes Gears, I became curious about the 2018 medal winner. Sadly, Hello, Universe seems to suffer from the same strains of mediocrity that made Merci Suarez Changes Gears such a disappointment. As I read, I imagined a diversity checklist, and with the introduction of each new character, I checked another box. It feels as though the author tried to ensure that her book would be as inclusive as possible by including as much diversity as possible, whether it contributed to the story or not. Because there are so many main characters, none of them are as well-developed as they could be, and they all feel like token representations of their minority groups rather than three-dimensional characters.

These characters are also presented as victims - of clueless parents, unbelievably stereotypical bullies, and general misunderstanding about their identities. The portrayal of bullies is especially bothersome, as both Virgil's bully, Chet, and Valencia's former best friend, Roberta sound like stock characters from a 1990s teen drama. Chet uses the words "retardo" and "pansy" which I don't think I've ever heard in real life. Every bully I've ever encountered has had subtler material. This book also perpetuates the stereotype that kids like Chet get their attitudes from their fathers. The story needs a villain, but Chet and his dad are both too cartoonish to feel like real threats. Roberta and the group of girls who ask Valencia not to hang out with them anymore are also not believable tormentors; their dialogue sounds like it was lifted from an after-school special. Any kid who has been bullied will recognize that this book does not understand how it feels.

Additionally, this book presents some problematic religious practices that would prevent me from recommending it to a Catholic family. Kaori relies on crystals and horoscopes to supposedly predict the future. Virgil talks to a mythical character when he is trapped in the well who talks about writing letters to the universe. Valencia prays to a saint, not for intercession, but seemingly as a form of worship. In that sense the book shares the same relativistic point of view as the 2017 Newbery Honor book, The Inquisitor's Tale, but at least it doesn't pretend to do anything else.

Each time I read a recent Newbery book, either a medal winner or an honor book, I become more convinced that this award can no longer be trusted to recognize books for their literary merit. This book is not distinctive, nor do I see what it might contribute to the canon of children's literature over a period of more than five years. All it does well is that it includes diversity, and that's a quality that serves a political agenda, not a literary one. From the start, the book feels laden down by all the pandering it does to the so-called "diversity Jedi," and even at its best moments, it still feels like it's trying too hard. Valencia is the strongest character, and I think telling just her story would have made for a better and more cohesive novel. The attempt to be all things to everyone really impacts the overall quality of the story in a negative way.

Hello, Universe is eminently forgettable. Newbery winner or not, no one is missing anything by not reading this book. If you're looking for a book about the interconnectedness of different people, and the uncanny ways in which important friendships sometimes form, Criss Cross by Lynne Rae Perkins, the 2006 Newbery Medal winner, is a much better choice. Goodbye, Stranger by Rebecca Stead (2015) is another good alternative. And if you really want to read about what it's like to be trapped in a well, there's a better book for that too: The Girl in the Well is Me by Karen Rivers, published in 2016.

Fumbling Through Fantasy: The Night Watchmen by Helen Cresswell (1969)

Henry, who has recently been bedridden with an illness, is finally allowed to get out of bed and spend time outdoors while he waits to be cleared to return to school. As he wanders the city on his first day of freedom, he encounters two unusual men - Josh and Caleb. At first glance, they appear to be mere tramps, but after spending time with them, hearing them talk about "There" and "Them" and a mysterious night train that can take them away if necessary, Henry begins to realize there is something unusual, and possibly otherworldly, about them.

This was a strange little book, and I'm not sure whether I enjoyed it. It was certainly intriguing, but it was so short, that by the time I felt invested in what was happening, the story was over. While I usually like compact middle grade novels, this one felt like the beginning of a larger story that never came to fruition. What is here is well-written, and it blurs the lines between reality and fantasy beautifully, but I didn't finish the book with the sense of satisfaction I was expecting.

This book could be a good choice for a reader who is wary of fantasy books, as the magical elements are ambiguous, and the setting is the real world. It might also make a good read-alike for a book like Skellig, which also involves a mysterious otherworldly visitor, or even The Dark is Rising, where fantastical events occur within the context of regular daily life.