Category: Uncategorized

Subnivean

I’ve learned a new word…and fly it like a new kite.

                    ~Ralph Fletcher, Ordinary Things

“Look,” she whispered, pointing to a tiny trail in the snow. It looked as if someone might have dragged a slender stick from one tree trunk to the next, about six feet away.  “This is very rare.  Someone from the subnivean zone surfaced this morning.”

Eight seventh graders and I hovered in a circle as Camille, our naturalist guide for a field trip to the Paul Smiths Visitors Interpretive Center, went on to describe the mouse tracks that stretched from tree to tree.  The kids loved how tiny the tracks were.  They loved the story of the mouse disappearing again after just a few feet.  They fell in love with the little guy, even though they never actually saw him. 

I fell in love with the word.  Subnivean.  It just sounds sneaky, doesn’t it?  The subnivean zone.  Who knew that there was a whole network of tunnels and rooms and caves under our snowshoes?  It’s a world inhabited by mice and shrews, moles and voles, and insects hiding out in our sub-zero North Country winters.  I imagine them all hatching conspiracies down there.  Subnivean. 

Of course, I immediately went home and googled it.  And look what I found.

An entire BOOK about the subnivean zone!  The author, Bernd Heinrich, teaches at the University of Vermont, too.

I bought Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival yesterday. I go back and and forth between devouring it — with its amazing outdoor stories and gorgeous sketches — and rationing it, stopping after each chapter so I don’t run out too soon.  I love great nature writing, and this book is one of the best I’ve read in this genre.

If you’re looking for me, I’ll be hanging out in the subnivean zone.

A Home Run!

Linda Sue Park just hit another one out of the ballpark.

Watch for this book.  It’s due out from Clarion in March, and I predict It’s going to win awards.

Keeping Score is the very best kind of historical novel – one that first introduces kids to funny, dynamic characters they’ll love and then brings in historical elements that are so much more meaningful as they affect the lives of those characters.

Ten-year-old Maggie Fortini loves the Brooklyn Dodgers.  Loves them with a big, fat capital L.  When Jim, a pal at her dad’s firehouse, teaches her how to keep score, she finds a way to be an even better fan and believes she’s helping the team when she keeps track of every play.  But as Maggie cheers the Dodgers in the early 1950s, the Korean conflict rages overseas. The war that isn’t called a war comes crashing into Maggie’s life when her friend Jim is drafted and suddenly stops communicating with her.

Knowing Park’s work, knowing that she’s a Newbery Medalist, I expected this book to be fantastic. Still, there were some passages that took my breath away, some that made me cry, and some that made me feel like I’m missing out on something spiritual because I’m not much of a baseball fan.  Readers will feel like they’ve moved right into 1950s Brooklyn, especially when Park describes Maggie’s walk through her neighborhood on game day:

She would walk past the row of houses that looked just like hers, all built of dull brownish-yellow brick, one window downstairs, two windows up – to Pinky the butcher, or Mr. And Mrs. Floyd at the bakery, or the drugstore, and she wouldn’t miss a single pitch.  Everyone would have their radios on, the sound of the game trailing in and out of each doorway like a long thread that tied the whole neighborhood together.
 
Keeping Score does for the Korean War what Gary Schmidt’s The Wednesday Wars does for Vietnam – contextualizes it through a funny, poignant story of life on the home front, told from a young person’s point of view.

This is a perfect book for baseball fans, so Clarion’s plans to roll it out in time for the first pitch make perfect sense.  But you don’t have to be a baseball fan to love this one.  Like so many great kids’ books, baseball may be the hook, but there’s so much more here.  

Keeping Score is full of colorful characters, like George at the firehouse, who shares his roast beef sandwiches with Maggie, her dad, who worries about crowd control, and her mom, who prays for the Dodgers while she knits.  It’s about baseball, but it’s also about family and friends and war.  Most, though, Keeping Score is about holding on to hope – something that old-time Dodgers fans knew all about.

PS – Thanks,

[info]cynthialord

!  I loved this book almost as much as Maggie loves the Dodgers!

Educator Resources from LCMM

Thanks to the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum for featuring Spitfire in its January newsletter for educators!  

Click here if you’d like to sign up to receive the museum’s newsletter. It’s always full of great teaching ideas and resources for the classroom.

If you’re interested in Lake Champlain history or boat-building, LCMM is a fantastic resource.  The museum offers both field trips and outreach programs for kids in Vermont and New York, and the educators do a phenomenal job presenting the stories of the lake through active, hands-on activities.

The mother of all book-signings!

Meet  43 children’s authors & illustrators!

Kindling Words Caravan
Thursday, January 24, 2008
4:00-5:00
Phoenix Books
Essex, VT

I’ll be there signing copies of Spitfire, and I’m bursting at the seams over the company I’ll be keeping. 
Here are some hints…

Kindling Words Caravan 2008
Laure Halse  Anderson
Sarah  Aronson
Nora Raleigh Baskin
Jeannie Brett
Robin Brickman
Elise  Broach
Janet  Buell
Laurie Calkhoven
Cinda Williams Chima
Jane  Cowen-Fletcher
Katie Davis
Sarah Dillard
Elizabeth O. Dulemba
Michelle  Edwards
Barbara  Garrison
Jamie  Harper
Amy  Huntington
Marthe Jocelyn
Michelle Knudsen
Judy Irvin Kuns
Martha Peaslee Levine
Sarah Darer Littman
Gregory Maguire
Wendy  Mass
Kate  Messner
Carol  Murray
Denise Ortakales
Susanna Reich
Anita Riggio
Leda Schubert
Barbara  Seuling
Janni Lee Simner
Rebecca  Stead
Tanya Lee  Stone
Melissa  Sweet
Kyra Teis
Patricia  Thomas
Amy  Timberlake
Andrea Tompa
Nancy  Werlin
Vera  Williams
Ellen Wittlinger
Jane Yolen
 

Now do you want to come?  Stop by and say hello if you can!

Edited to add:  This is the participant list I received a couple weeks ago. If you are an author or illustrator attending the KW Caravan and you’re not on the list, please drop me a comment and I’d love to add you! 

Book Brawl

I love it when I book-talk a new selection for my classroom library and end up with a near-battle over who gets to sign it out first.  I know, I know, chaos is generally frowned upon in school, but I love to see kids ravenous about reading.  Here’s the book that caused the commotion this week…

Dee got there first, so she’s enjoying Lisa Schroeder’s debut novel in verse tonight, probably up late with a flashlight under the covers even as I type this review. 

I read I HEART YOU, YOU HAUNT ME in one weepy sitting over the weekend and savored

[info]lisa_schroeder

‘s free verse poems that come together to tell a touching story of love, loss, and healing.  The book opens with the funeral of Ava’s boyfriend Jackson — a funeral for which she can’t help but feel a sense of responsibility, given what happened.  This isn’t a traditional tear-jerker, though — because Jackson comes back.  As a ghost.  And Ava finds herself pulled in two directions, forced to choose between the love she lost and the life she still has.

Lisa Schroeder’s poems are spare and beautiful — the kind of poems that paint an amazing picture and then hit hard in the last lines.  This book will have huge appeal for fans of other verse novels.  Kids who love Sonya Sones, especially, are in for a treat.  Like Sones, Schroeder takes a realistic look at teenagers. Simon & Schuster recommends this title for grades 9 and up. There are some very mild references to sex, but nothing, in my opinion, that would make the book inappropriate for a 7th or 8th grade reader who has read Sones’ work or other books that  deal with teen romance.

Ava and Jackson were so real to me during the hour I spent in their world,  I couldn’t help being swept up in their drama.  Part of me was glad I read this one at home, so I didn’t end up sobbing through sustained silent reading in front of twenty seventh graders.  But part of me thinks that would have been just fine, too.  Sometimes, an old-fashioned cry is a perfect reminder of  how transporting a great story can be.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Sherman Alexie is  brilliant.  But you probably already knew that.

This week, I finally got to read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Wow.  Just wow.

I won’t write a traditional review here, because plenty of other people have praised this book up and down, and there was that whole award thing, too….  What I do want to talk about is how this book impressed me by nailing some aspects of poverty that are rarely addressed in YA novels.

As a teacher in a small city school district, I know that about a third of my students are living in poverty, carrying with them each day the baggage that goes along with it.  We have breakfast programs and free lunch and a good library, and that helps.  Some.  What we can’t always do, no matter how hard we try, is provide that new way of thinking that Junior figured out in Alexie’s book – that moment when living in poverty becomes so unbearable that a person has to make the painful choice to leave.  In Junior’s case, it’s the decision to leave his reservation school to attend a more privileged white school in a nearby town.

There’s a scene in Part-Time Indian where Junior gives a lengthy and funny-but-true list of rules for fighting.  His rules.  The rules of the reservation.  Among them…

  • If somebody insults you, then you have to fight him.
  • If you think somebody is thinking about insulting you, then you have to fight him.
  • If somebody beats up your father or your mother, then you have to fight the son and/or daughter of the person who beat up your mother or father.

When Junior starts at the white school, one of the big guys insults him, and sure enough, Junior punches him.  He’s stunned when the guy doesn’t fight back but walks off with his posse, all of them staring at Junior as if he were a monster…

I was absolutely confused.

I had followed the rules of fighting.  I had behaved exactly the way I was supposed to behave.  But these white boys had ignored the rules.  In fact, they had followed a whole other set of mysterious rules where people apparently DID NOT GET INTO FISTFIGHTS.

“Wait,” I called after Roger.

“What do you want?” Roger asked.

“What are the rules?”

“What rules?”

I didn’t know what to say, so I just stood there red and mute like a stop sign.  Roger and his friends disappeared.

I felt like somebody had shoved me into a rocket ship and blasted me to a new planet.  I was a freaky alien and there was absolutely no way to get home.

The whole concept of different sets of rules is inherent to any study of the impact of poverty on learning.  Some of my middle school colleagues and I participated in a study group focused on that topic last year, using Ruby Payne’s book A Framework for Understanding Poverty.   It’s a fantastic book – one that should be required reading for anyone who works with kids in poverty, and especially for those of us who enjoyed more privileged middle class upbringings.  The rules are different.  Payne, like Sherman Alexie, does a great job demystifying this aspect of poverty and helping us to understand why it’s not so easy for Junior – or anyone – to just walk away.

Sweethearts by Sara Zarr

Jennifer Harris used to be that poor, chubby kid who sat alone in the cafeteria. Well, almost alone. There was Cameron Quick, another social outcast. Another kid living in poverty and living on the fringe of third grade society. He was her only friend and the only person who ever understood Jennifer Harris. And then he disappeared.

Years pass. Jennifer gets a new stepfather, a new house, a new school, a new name, a new life. She reinvents herself as Jenna Vaughn. Jenna Vaughn is one of the pretty, thin popular girls. She has friends and a hot boyfriend. But she also has a secret – a dark memory that ties her forever to Cameron Quick and to the old Jennifer Harris, who never really left. SWEETHEARTS is the story of Cameron’s return to Jennifer’s life and what happens when her two worlds meet.

As a National Book Award Finalist, Sara Zarr has a lot riding on this next novel, scheduled for release in February 2008. There will be inevitable comparisons to STORY OF A GIRL. Can this second book live up to that standard? Truth be told, I liked SWEETHEARTS even better. The characters in this novel absolutely shine, from the insecure third grade Jennifer and the third grade Cameron whose generosity and fierce loyalty made me want him for a friend, to the high school version of these kids, still haunted by their grade school selves. The minor characters shine, too. One of my favorites was Jenna’s stepfather, whose quiet support helps Jenna and her mother rebuild what was broken so many years ago.

Some character-driven novels sacrifice pace and tension, but that’s not the case with SWEETHEARTS. From the very first chapter, readers sense there’s a story from Jennifer’s childhood that’s not being told in its entirety. Zarr reveals that story in bits and pieces, snippets of memory and elegantly woven flashbacks throughout the book. All the while, the parts of the story left unspoken create powerful tension.

I read SWEETHEARTS in just a few sittings. When I was away from the book, I spent half my time thinking about the characters and hoping things would go well for them. They grow on you like that. Sara Zarr has written another fantastic novel –- one that celebrates the power of childhood friendships, loyalty, and inner strength. Like STORY OF A GIRL, Zarr’s new release is loaded with realistic characters, hope, and heart. The fabulous cookie cover art delivers on its promise – SWEETHEARTS an absolutely delicious read. 

Why I’m not a brain surgeon

The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.     ~ Robert Cormier

I’m revising this month, together in spirit  with jbknowles and her enthusiastic January Revision Club: cfaughnan, eluper, thunderchikin, d_michiko_f, castellucci, ebenstone, dlanthomas, rj_anderson, lisaalbert, resurrection, jmprince, whiskersink, and beeleigh312.

I’m on my first revision pass on a chapter book currently titled PRINCESS MARTY FROG SLIME AND THE NUTCRACKER BALLET.  It’s too long in some places, too short in others.  The characters talk too much in some places, not enough in others.  It’s random and messy in some places, and there are two minor characters that I introduced in the second chapter and then left to rot. (I have a bad habit of doing that.  You never want to be one of my minor characters…) 

But you know what?  Parts of it are funny and true and almost wonderful.  I keep reminding myself of that while I revise.  I bet parts of your WIP are like that, too.  Revision is sort of like mining for precious minerals.  You have to hang out in the dusty dark hacking away at a lot of junk to find the good stuff.  Not a great strategy for brain surgeons, but perfect for those of us who write for kids.

screen resolution stats

I love librarians!

I spent the evening with a fantastic group of public, school, and college librarians in NALA, the Northern Area Library Association.  Have I mentioned that I love librarians?  Not only did I get to have dinner with them and talk about books all night, but they were a terrific audience for my after dinner presentation and book talk on SPITFIRE.  Here we all are, happy and well fed.

They were also extraordinarily sympathetic when I arrived for the presentation,unpacked my laptop case, and failed to find the adapter that connects my Mac to my projector.  I was sure it was in there.  I never take it out.  Except for two months ago, when I presented at the NYS English Council in Manhattan and didn’t want to schlep that big laptop case all over and put it in a smaller bag instead.  I’ve seen the adapter in that smaller bag at least six times since then and thought, “Gee, you really ought to put that back in your laptop case or you’re going to forget it some day.”  Did I?  No.

The librarians were very understanding when I went tearing out of the restaurant, leaped into my car, and sped home to get the adapter.  I made it back in time for my salad, too.

Seeing Sky-Blue Pink

Most of the Cybils finalists for the middle grade fiction category were skewed toward the higher end of middle grade, more appropriate for the 10-12 crew than for kids who are 8-9 years old.  That said, those of us who served on the nominating panel read — and loved — some wonderful books for the younger set.  Candice Ransom’s Seeing Sky-Blue Pink is one of them.

This isn’t an action-packed book. There’s nothing nerve-wracking or edgy about it.  But it’s a book that I would have read and loved with a passion when I was eight years old.  I would have kept it on a special place on my shelf and wanted to do all the things that Maddie got to do.

Maddie is eight years old herself, and she’s got a lot to deal with when the book opens.  She’s just moved to a new house in the country from her old house in town, and she has a brand new stepfather.  He’s not the stereotypical evil step-parent.  He’s loving and funny and kind, and he introduces Maddie to a delicious summer of new experiences in her new home that almost make up for the special sundaes she used to eat with her mother on their shopping days in town.

The characters in Seeing Sky-Blue Pink are likable and memorable.  The language is simple and lovely.  If you long for the days when kids enjoyed old-fashioned pleasures like staring at sunset skies, treasure-hunting in creeks, and building tree houses, you’ll feel right at home in these pages.