Preposterous!

Dear Annie,

Such a pleasure to hear from an editor/illustrator!   Jackie Morris mentioned in her comment that she's working on illustrating nursery rhymes: yesterday she posted some of those pictures.

I've been trying to catch up on books that might win the Newbery and Caldecott medals this year: always impossible to predict, but I keep trying...  They'll be announced on January 10. 

I find myself with very mixed feelings about
As Easy as Falling Off the Face of the Earth, a middle-grade novel by Lynne Rae Perkins, who won a Newbery a few years ago for Criss Cross, a quiet but good novel.  I read so many novels written for kids that I sometimes don't register bad or mediocre writing -- I'm just charging along for plot, feeling mildly dissatisfied.  Then a book will come along which is qualitatively different, and my brain will scream, "Wow, good writing!"  That's how I felt getting into this one.  It's about Ry, a 15 year-old boy who gets off a broken-down train in the middle of nowhere in Montana to try for cell phone reception, and gets left behind when it unexpectedly starts up.  The book is full of eccentric adult characters, and ties several subplots together well.

With the help of a benign but opinionated man Ry meets in a small Montana town, he travels to his home in Wisconsin, then cross-country to Florida, flies in a homemade private plane to Puerto Rico, and sails from there to a remote Caribbean island where his parents (whose phone and credit cards have been stolen) are vacationing.  In the meantime, his grandfather (who has fallen on his head and lost his short-term memory) and dogs in Wisconsin have disappeared.  The dogs are a lovely, although occasionally confusing subplot: Perkins (who is also an illustrator) does them as an occasional page of graphic novel.  My scanner is still busted, but here's what the dogs look like:

and here's part of their conversation when they realize they have no humans at their new home:

"Hey, do you remember that movie?"
"What movie?"
"Where the dogs and the cat find their way back to the old house?"
"I love that movie.  That's a really good movie.  Except for the cat."
"I think that's what happened to us.  I think we need to find our people.  We need to go back to the old house."
"How can we do that?"
"We're dogs.  We have 'instinct.'"
"Well...okay."

In the last panel they are heading down a long straight road.  They are, unsurprisingly, completely clueless, but end up being found and flown back home by the end of the book.

There's lots of riveting action: a charmingly hair-raising ride with a crazy old guy who can't see out of the stolen Oldsmobile he's speeding down a highway, the 15 year-old with a learner's permit driving through large freeway interchanges getting lost in the middle of the night, a ride in a plane that logically shouldn't be able to fly -- it goes on and on. 

My problem is that the plot is, well, preposterous.  Somehow this 15 year-old kid and the adults around him don't think to go to the police to get help contacting his parents.  When police finally do show up when it becomes clear that Grandpa is missing, they don't question why this kid is traveling thousands of miles with an unrelated adult. The whole plot could have evaporated with one phone call.  It all hangs on such an unlikely premise.

I feel grinch-like grousing about this.  But there's so much likable in this book that I find myself more bothered by its big flaw than if it had just been an average book.  I keep thinking yes, I've had this sensation before: what other book was it?  and not coming up with it.  But you know what I mean?

Love,

Deborah

A gorgeous treasury of poems

Dear Aunt Debbie,

We are well-fed, well-loved, and well-gifted here in the midwest.  Not so bad to be here while a blizzard rages back home, too.

Christmas brought us some excellent books.  I took the opportunity to buy Eleanor several library favorites: In Our Mothers' House and The Keeping Quilt; Tell Me a Mitzi and Tell Me A Trudy; and Flotsam.  On your recommendation, I also tracked down a copy of Young Guinevere, which is an immediate hit with Eleanor.  I love the depiction of Guinevere in the crazy enchanted forest near her father's castle fighting and then teaming up with a wolf who turns out to be a shape-shifting child, and then doing battle with a giant beast with the head of a serpent, the body of a leopard, and the tail of a lion.  Quite unlike other Arthurian legends I've seen.  Eleanor is, of course, impressed by Guinevere's long auburn hair and silk dresses.  I was nice to talk to Lizzie on Christmas day and hear that those were major details she retained as well....

As for me, I'm two-thirds of the way through The Knife of Never Letting Go, and devouring it in great gulps.  What a book!

One of the surprise gifts of the season came for Eleanor from a family friend.  The Barefoot Book of Classic Poems is a gorgeous anthology of poetry, beautifully chosen and illustrated by Jackie Morris (do you know her?  I'd never heard of her, and now I want to find out more).  It is a rich and varied collection, combining poets and poems you might expect in a children's collection (A.A. Milne, Ogden Nash, Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson) and poets who come as a surprise in this setting (Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Sylvia Plath, Rainer Maria Rilke).  The book is organized roughly by the idea of a journey from birth to death, with childhood, nature, animals, love, and war along the way.  Each poem is sumptuously illustrated with landscapes and figures.  Morris's choices are excellent, as is her ordering.  The poems talk to each other: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "How Do I Love Thee?" faces Shakespeare's "Sonnet 18" ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"), as lovers clasp hands across the page break.  She's a gifted editor, and artist.  I want to read a poem every night, and give this book to all kinds of people now.  How often do you get to watch your father-in-law read your almost-4-year old "Jabberwocky" on one night and "The Tyger" on the next?

Love, Annie