Brown Girl Dreaming: my Newbery hope

Dear Annie,

I sell a lovely little board book, called
My Face Book, with photographs of babies' faces, one to a page.  There are several books like that, but what I particularly like about this one is that the faces are majority non-white.  It's one of those happy baby books.  I showed it to a customer the other day (Caucasian) who was looking for a book of faces for a baby gift.  Thanks, she said, but this one is “too diverse,” and she added a sentence I've heard more times than you'd expect over the years: "I want him to see faces that look like him."  One can point out that a 3 month-old has no idea what he looks like, or that they’re all human babies, or that the bunnies in Goodnight Moon don't look like him either, but it won't change anything.

I bring this up to say that there's a section of the white buying public -- no matter what their political beliefs may be -- who aren't comfortable mixing books about children of color with their own children.  It's a minority, but I'm frequently reminded that it's there.  When kids get up to the chapter book age, it's really noticeable: it's hard to sell novels about African Americans to some white parents.

A year ago, when I was selecting yet-to-be-published books to carry in our store, 
Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson was one of the offerings from Penguin.  My sometimes cynical self, I confess, heaved a sigh.  It’s a memoir written in poetry – poetry! not a big seller either – focusing on an African American girl growing up in South Carolina and New York in the 1960s and 70s.  I was skeptical about being able to sell it.  But when I got around to reading it, I knew I had to try: it’s an amazing book.

We won't have a girl named Jack, my mother said.

And my father's sisters whispered,
A boy named Jack was bad enough.
But only so my mother could hear.
Name a girl Jack, my father said,
and she can't help but 
grow up strong.
Raise her right, my father said,
and she'll make that name her own.

Name a girl Jack
and people will look at her twice, my father said. 

For no good reason but to ask if her parents
were crazy, my mother said.

So how was I going to sell the book?  A review in the New York Times raved about the universal nature of the story: how it would resonate with any girl growing up.  “The title seems to confine the book in too narrow a box,” wrote the reviewer.  “Will girls who aren’t brown know, without prompting, that they too are invited to the party?”

Because we have a right, my grandfather tells us –

we are sitting at his feet and the story tonight is

why people are marching all over the South –

to walk and sit and dream wherever we want.

First they brought us here.

Then we worked for free.  Then it was 1863,

and we were supposed to be free but we weren’t.

And that’s why people are so mad.

The reality of a black family’s life in the South during the civil rights movement is here.  There are sit-ins and marches, back-of-the-bus moments, anger, pride, a school burned.  To dismiss the title and sell it as an Everygirl memoir denies who Woodson is. She is a brown girl, first in the South, then in Brooklyn.  The book shows us a loving and very religious family, a marriage that has ended, joy in nature, friendship, and how it feels to discover the amazing power of words. The poetry, the language, is what plaits all the elements together. 

How amazing these words are that slowly come to me.
How wonderfully on and on they go.

Will the words end, I ask
whenever I remember to.

Nope, my sister says, all of five years old now,
and promising me

infinity.

 Brown Girl Dreaming was released at the end of August, and despite my enthusiasm, sold not as well in the store as I’d hoped, but not horrendously either.  I wrote a blurb that tried to say how much the book encompassed, and even listed page numbers of four poems which would give a browser a sense of the many elements of the book. Then in November, it won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. 

The awards ceremony had a horrifying incident in which Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket), MC of the event and a friend of Woodson’s, commented as she left the podium, “Jackie’s allergic to watermelon.  Just let that sink in your mind.”  Woodson wrote an incredibly eloquent response in the New York Times.  

That Handler remark – of a white man flamingly uncomfortable with the blackness of a friend and colleague – brings me back to the rejection of the baby book.  Would Handler shop for a board book with not too much diversity?

The National Book Award had many happier outcomes also.  My pile of Brown Girl Dreaming started to sell a lot faster: that gold circle on the cover said “read me” better than I had been able to.  It's on the bestseller list now.  But the National Book Award for children is an odd duck: it doesn’t guarantee that a book will stay in the public eye over the years.

The award which makes a massive difference in kids’ literature, of course, is the Newbery Medal, which will be announced this coming Monday, February 2.  The last time a book with an African American protagonist won the prize was 2000, my first year selling books.  Before that, one has to go back to the years of Woodson’s childhood: the 1970s. 

So I am hoping – and we know my record on Newbery predictions is abysmal – that Brown Girl Dreaming will pick up another gold circle for its cover on Monday, and that it will enter the canon of classics which all kids will be reading for decades to come.  I’ll be tuning in for the webcast,at 9 a.m.

Love,

Deborah

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The empathy and the darkness of Kate DiCamillo

Dear Aunt Debbie,

You talk a good game about your picks not winning the Newbery or Caldecott Awards, but I'd like to point out that today's winners are both books we own because you sent them to Eleanor and Isabel earlier this year -- not so shabby!

As you learned early this morning, and I caught up with tonight, the Newbery went to Kate DiCamillo for Flora and Ulysses, and the Caldecott to Brian Floca for Locomotive, a gorgeous train book.

I've only recently become aware of Kate DiCamillo, who is suddenly everywhere, including serving as the current National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. She is one of those authors who, like Paul Fleischman, seems to be able to do anything: she writes picture books, early readers, and novels, in multiple genres and multiple tones.

We're big fans of Bink and Gollie, the series she writes with Allison McGhee, and Eleanor has recently devoured the Mercy Watson series of early chapter books, which focus on a family with a friendly, adventurous, none-too-smart pig as a member (though Mercy doesn't talk and seems in some ways truly pig-like, she also sleeps in a four-poster bed). Eleanor read and loved Flora and Ulysses, so much so that she recommended we buy it for a friend's birthday. I haven't read it yet, but last week Eleanor and I read DiCamillo's previous Newbery Winner, the 2003 novel The Tale of Desperaux.

The Tale of Desperaux shares some of the humor of these other books, but is far more complex and challenging in content. Reading it aloud, I kept finding myself questioning what kind of book it was, and who it was aimed at: the language in it is clear and straightforward, but the concepts and moral ambiguities it raises feel fairly adult. It's a little like a fairy tale fleshed out psychologically to the point where there can't quite be a perfect happy ending, because you've had to grapple with the actual cost of pain. I'm not sure how much of this Eleanor felt -- she reacted to the suspenseful parts, but didn't seem disturbed by the story itself. I find, though, that it's sticking with me.

The novel focuses on four characters living in the same castle: two rodents and two human girls. Each of them wants something he or she cannot have. Desperaux Tilling is a small mouse with large ears who is born wanting to interact with humans, which is against the code of mice. He loves music and stories -- when he's taken by his siblings to learn to nibble pages of books in the library, he instead discovers that the markings on the pages have meaning. Miraculously, he can read, and stories make him brave. Chiaroscuro (Roscuro) is a rat who craves light, and feels condemned to live in the castle dungeon, where the other rats are perfectly happy. Miggery Sow (Mig) is a poor girl whose father sells her as a servant after her mother's death. Her dream is to become a princess, but her reality includes a master who has given her a clout on the ear so many times that she loses her hearing. And then there's the real princess, Princess Pea, who is sweet and empathetic and has everything material she could want, but has lost her mother as well.

The dungeon plays a large part in the ways in which these four are interconnected, sometimes sweetly, sometimes violently. There is yearning, revenge, forgiveness, redemption, often in unexpected ways -- several times while reading aloud, I wasn't at all sure which way the story was going to go. Both Roscuro and Mig are twisted in unpleasant ways by their mistreatment. But DiCamillo is an empathetic writer: even her revenge-filled rat comes across as understandable and ultimately forgivable.

There's a strong narrative voice at work in the novel. Multiple times, DiCamillo addresses the reader directly, sometimes pointing out words to pay attention to or defining them for us:

As our story continues, reader, we must go backward in time to the birth of a rat, a rat named Chiaroscuro and called Roscuro, a rat born into the filth and darkness of the dungeon, several years before the mouse Desperaux was born upstairs, in the light.

Reader, do you know the definition of the word "chiaroscuro"? If you look in your dictionary, you will find that it means the arrangement of light and dark, darkness and light together. Rats do not care for light. Roscuro's parents were having a bit of fun when they named their son. Rats have a sense of humor. Rats, in fact, think that life is very funny. And they are right, reader. They are right.

This aspect of the writing, as well as the nice short chapters, make the book a good and interesting read-aloud. Eleanor loved the vocabulary (and we did pull out the dictionary when DiCamillo asked us to look up "perfidy"), and we had a number of conversations about why the characters did what they did. I'll be interested to know what she retains of it this time through, and when and whether she's moved to reread it for herself in a few years.

So I'm feeling pretty good about these wins. What did you think?

Love, Annie

Two books to take seriously

Dear Annie,

I love the reading reports from your house -- your latest one gives such a strong sense of A Day in the Family's Reading Life.  I found Eleanor's Magic Tree House criticism intriguing.  It's been years since I've read one of them, but the line on them is that Annie is the adventurous one and Jack's the more timid one.  So it's interesting to hear that she thinks Jack's the more central character.  Not necessarily contradictions, those two elements...

This Monday (January 27) will bring the announcements of Newbery, Caldecott and other ALA children's book awards.  As you know, in past years I've never managed to predict the winners.  For the Newbery at least, this year the field is wide but not all that deep.  A lot of likable books came out in 2013, but nothing that makes me stand up and say, "Yes, definitely!" 

I gathered a pile of six books to put in today's blog entry, weighing each one's chances for the Newbery.  Even though I like those books, it feels more like handicapping a race rather than celebrating something special.   

Looking at this pile, though, there are two books -- both non-fiction -- that rise above the others for me.  I doubt they'll be considered medal-winning material, but they're books I've loved reading and feel very good about recommending.  I hope they'll be in print for years to come.  So I'm setting aside the rest of the pile and writing about the ones that have stayed with me.


Back in March, I wrote about Lincoln's Grave Robbers, by Steve Sheinkin.   It's the fascinating account of an 1876 attempt by a gang of counterfeiters to steal Lincoln's body from his tomb and ransom it for the release of one of their members from prison.  They almost succeeded.  The book reads like fiction, full of plotting, planning, hilarious mix-ups, and Keystone Cop-like action.  And Sheinkin does a lovely job of putting it all in historical context.  I've sold dozens and dozens of copies of Lincoln's Grave Robbers.  When I describe it to customers, the response -- from both adults and kids -- is, "Is this real?"  It's a great yarn -- made all the more interesting for being true.


The other non-fiction is The Boy on the Wooden Box, a serious and moving memoir of the Holocaust and the years since by Leon Leyson, the youngest person on Schindler's List.  He was 15 when the war ended, a small child who had to stand on a wooden box to reach the machinery in Schindler's factory -- a ruse to convince the Nazis that he was actually working.   Leyson died last year after the book was written; his wife Elisabeth Leyson and Marilyn Harran, the director of a Holocaust education organization, are credited with helping to write it.  There's something about the way he tells his family's terrifying story -- Schindler helped five of them survive the war -- that's quiet and direct and very moving. Throughout the book, Leyson keeps his focus on human dignity.

Leyson describes one awful incident when Gestapo soldiers break into his family's apartment in Krakow, beat his father, and drag him away.  After weeks when the family thinks he is dead, the father returns:

The moment he came through our door was one of overwhelming relief and joy.  At the same time, it brought an unexpected sadness.  It was easy to see that what he had gone through had changed him.  It wasn't just that he was weak and gaunt; he was changed in a more fundamental way.  The Nazis had not only stripped him of his strength -- although he would find a great reserve of it in the years ahead -- but also of the confidence and self-esteem that had put a spring in his step.  Now he spoke little and walked with downcast eyes.  He had lost his job at the glass factory, and he had lost something even more precious: his dignity as a human being.  It shook me to the core to see my father defeated.   If he couldn't stand up to the Nazis, how could I?

Somehow the father connects with Schindler, and slowly family members get work in Schindler's forced labor factory.  Conditions are bad, but Leyson keeps coming back to the impact on him of small personal gestures Schindler made for his workers: a kind word, a pack of cigarettes, a little extra food.

Such acts may seem insignificant given the scale of the evil in those years, but, in fact, they were anything but.  Schindler dared to rebel against the law of the land, which was to torture and exterminate Jews, not to treat us as fellow human beings.  

The workers are shipped to a concentration camp, then rescued by Schindler to work in a new munitions factory.  When the war ends, Leyson describes the wave of hostility in Poland against the returning Jews.  His family ultimately makes it to the U.S., to southern California, where he becomes a high school teacher, never mentioning his past in Poland.  After the movie Schindler's List came out in 1994, he started talking about it, eventually writing the book.

The book is about a horrific experience, but also about a boy who survived with his own dignity and strength.  It speaks to the children it was written for with a clear voice.

As I said, these two books have stayed with me more than almost any others I've read in the past year, but I'd be surprised if they were chosen by awards committees above the competition.  But I did check on one thing: it's possible to win a Newbery medal posthumously.

Love,

Deborah

Newbery nerves

Dear Annie,

Thanks to Kim for her Llama Llama entry.  I'm fond of the cover of Llama Llama Mad at Mama: if only we could all flatten our ears when we're mad -- so expressive!

There's a rhythm to the year in bookselling: the slow build-up in the fall to the tidal wave of holiday shopping, then coming up for air at the end of December, followed by scrambling to re-order to fill the shelves.  And in the middle of this stage: aack! Newbery nerves!

On January 23 -- a week from tomorrow -- the American Library Association announces its many awards for children's books published during 2011.  The announcements create instantaneous and prolonged demand for the winners of the two big medals: the Newbery for literature and the Caldecott for illustration.  As I mentioned last year at this time, it's the hope of every bookseller that the winners are books which we already have in stock.  No finalists are announced, so there's intense speculation about dozens of books which may or may not be in the running.  This year I've been fascinated by School Library Journal's awards blog, Heavy Medal.

Every year I tell myself I won't get panicky and bring in five or ten books I haven't read and don't know much about because they're on someone's list of what might win.  I confess that I just ordered a few copies of The Freedom Maze by Delia Sherman -- a book, author and publisher I've never heard of -- based on this entry in the Heavy Medal blog.  It sounds interesting, and if it does win, its little publisher will take months to get it reprinted.  Ten days from now I'll be kicking myself for having done that.

Over the course of any year, a handful of the many many books I read strike me as special.  I'll think, this is it: here's next year's winner.  And I have yet to guess right.  I was close with Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin, which seemed like a clear winner.  It won a Newbery honor, and still got a good deal of the attention that it deserved.  So here are my guesses this year:


Jefferson's Sons by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley.  It's a novel imagining the lives of Thomas Jefferson's slave children.  I wrote about it here.


Okay for Now by Gary Schmidt has stayed with me since I read it and wrote this back in February.  It's set in 1968: the story of a struggling kid dealing with abuse from his father and his brother.  He finds redemption and growth through the caring actions of several adults in his small town, and with his discovery of the prints of John James Audobon.  One really cares about the people in this book.

And then there's
Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick, about which I wrote in May even before I had finished reading it.  It tells parallel stories of two young people -- one in 1927, the other in 1977 -- who run away from home and end up at the Museum of Natural History in New York.  The 1927 girl is deaf: her story is told entirely in pictures, in Selznick's totally absorbing style.  The 1977 boy's story is entirely in words.  At the end their paths intertwine. 

Wonderstruck has been the subject of speculation about its eligibility for the Newbery.  The Medal is for "the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children," but the rules refer specifically to the text of a book.  So is a book which is told half in pictures and half in words eligible?  Selznick's previous amazing book told in pictures and words, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, was the subject of this kind of speculation the year it came out too.  It ended up winning the Caldecott Medal, for best illustration.  We shall see what, if anything, happens with Selznick's work this year.

In the meantime, I'm off to bite my nails and order more books which I probably shouldn't.  But just maybe one will be the right one...

Love,

Deborah

Hearing from Medal-Winners

Dear Annie,

Ah, I remember those days of hauling home armloads of picture books from the library.  We bonded totally with the people who work at our local library.  Even now when I go into the library, two of the the check-out  women will ask me about Lizzie and Mona.

I've just returned this evening from  the American Library Association convention, where the Newbery and Caldecott Medal winners gave speeches tonight.  Two good books, two interesting and very different people:

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead won the Newbery for best children's literature.
The Lion and the Mouse by Jerry Pinkney is a wordless book which won the Caldecott for best illustration.

Two snippets:

Pinkney spoke first.  He's 70 years old, has won Caldecott Honors five times, and was genuinely pleased to get the top prize at last (so overdue, in my opinion!).  He was so clearly sure of himself and of his art, and spoke of the support he got from his family to be an artist when a young man.  He said he didn't originally think of The Lion and the Mouse as a wordless book: he planned to do the illustrations, then write the text to the pictures.  But he realized the pictures made words unnecessary.  Then he told an anecdote a friend had told him: "She had given The Lion and the Mouse to a nephew and she described with great excitement how he had read it by creating his own narrative.  Then, when he read it a second time, he had a completely different interpretation of what he saw in the pictures.  This is exactly what I had hoped for: a child claiming ownership of this much beloved fable."   What a good way to think of wordless books!  Not only a vehicle for a child to tell a story, but a way for the story to belong to the child.

Rebecca Stead was such a contrast. When You Reach Me is a wonderful, carefully-constructed book with mystery and lots of good characters with real feelings and a surprise ending that ties things up perfectly and took my breath away.  She's 42, says she always wanted to write but became a lawyer instead.  Has two children, lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and describes many of her self-doubts in very articulate ways. She talked about realizing, when she was six "that I was completely alone in my own consciousness."  She would ask herself, "How am I me?" over and over.  "I think that like someone alone in a dark room, I was feeling around for a door because I really really did not want to be alone in there.  And I did find a door, eventually.  The door was books.  When I read books I wasn't alone in the rooms of my own mind.  I was running up and down other people's stairs and finding secret places behind their closets.  The people on the other side of the door had things I couldn't have, like sisters or dragons, and they shared those things with me. And they also had things I did have, like feelings of self-doubt and longing and they named those things for me."  The story she told of becoming a writer was the story of overcoming the obstacles her own self-doubts created.

I had a lovely serendipitous moment at the dinner, too.  I ended up sitting next to a woman named Libby Koponen, who in 2006 published a wonderful novel for kids called Blow Out the MoonBlow Out the Moon.  It's autobiographical, set in the late '50s, about a girl from the New York suburbs who moves to England with her family for a year and ends up going to a British girls' boarding school.  It's a lovely gentle book about being in new places and learning to grow up on your own.  It's one of those books that a second grader or a sixth grader can connect with.  I was very fond of it, then it went unceremoniously out of print.  Well, it's not available for sale at most independent bookstores, but it's possible to get a print-on-demand copy, and Libby pointed out it's also for sale as a download.  And I confirmed with Libby what her book didn't quite say: that the suburb she lived in was Pleasantville, NY, where your mother and I grew up. She was a year behind me in elementary school, then moved away after fifth grade.

Love,

Deborah