When You Reach Me – Rebecca Stead

The 1978-1979 school year is perfectly normal for Miranda. Except that her best friend stopped speaking to her, there’s an apparently crazy man who sleeps with his head under the mailbox on her corner, a naked man is seen running by her school on several occasions, and weird things keep happening. Like her spare house key goes missing and three days later she finds a note asking her to write a letter in which she mentions the location of her spare house key.

When You Reach Me is very good. The writing is excellent and the eye for detail is amazing. The mystery aspects, mysterious and mundane—what’s the deal with the strange notes Mira gets? Why did Marcus punch Sal? What’s up with Annemarie and Julia?—are dealt with well, with excellent pacing and delicacy. It doesn’t just balance the ordinary life and the time travel elements; it melds them. I found the discourse on time-travel a bit tedious, especially as Mira was stubbornly not getting it, though it did serve to establish how time travel works in this narrative.

This was almost a one-sitting book for me. It wasn’t, partly because airplane turbulence plus fasting (it was Yom Kippur) does not equal happy reading time, and partly because I was enjoying it so much I didn’t want to be done with it. That said, had there not been jostling to disrupt my reading, I probably wouldn’t have been able to pull myself out of the book and pace myself.

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When You Reach Me ~ Rebecca Stead ~ Rebecca Stead’s Blog

 

A Northern Light – Jennifer Donnelly

One day in 1906, a guest staying at the hotel where Mattie works asks Mattie to burn a stack of letters. Then the young lady goes off boating, turning up twelve hours, dead. Mattie is left with the stack of letters, her promise to burn them, and many questions. Mattie pieces together what happened to the dead woman amidst her own indecision about the future: whether to follow her love of books and writing to Barnard College in New York City or whether to stay in the sleepy upstate New York farm community with her family, the neighbors she’s known all her life, and the boy she’s sweet on.

That boy, Royal, happens to be a royal ass. A pretty ass, and one who pays unprecedented attention to plain Mattie; it’s no mystery why she goes around with him. As an adult-type reading it, I didn’t have much patience for the elevated position Royal gets in Mattie’s indecision. You feel like you’d be betraying your dead mother by leaving your father and sisters to go to college? I still think you should go to college, but I can respect your inner conflict. You like snogging the jerk who doesn’t listen to you, doesn’t respect you, and is really mean to people you care about it? Dump him and go to college. You’ll find someone else to snog. Maybe someone you can have an actual conversation with, hm? Mattie’s desire to be happy with Royal is understandable and realistic, but it’s frustrating.

Despite the frustration, it’s a very good, and enjoyable book. Mattie has a nice balance of spunkiness and nervousness, intelligence and a hint of naivete. and the book is filled with rich detail on early twentieth century Adirondak life, complete with troublesome tourists, cattle disease, hard childbirth, hunger, small-town gossip, racism, and casual domestic violence. At times, Mattie’s earnest complaints that the lives of her neighbors are more interesting than the civil, stiff lives portrayed in Austen and Dickens, and that books don’t tell the truth, become tedious; firstly, we got the point the first time she said it, and secondly, we must agree with her to some extent or we would have picked up a different book. These small faults aside, it’s an absorbing book with a heroine it’s easy to root for, even when she’s being a bit daft.

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A Northern Light ~ Jennifer Donnelly

 

The Luxe – Anna Godbersen

The Luxe is Gossip Girl set in 1899, right down to the commentary from the newspapers’ society columns.

It’s actually well enough written to be an enjoyable read, spiced up by descriptions of pretty dresses (I will admit it: I’m a sucker for a good ballgown) and some hot scenes. Moreover, I was surprised by the end to discover that I actually cared about some of the characters. This was a long time coming; at the beginning, they’re all pretty despicable. While they’re still deeply, deeply flawed, for the most part the heroes and heroines spend the book developing a better balance between their needs and wants and the needs and wants of other people – which sometimes means paying less attention to their own immediate wants, and sometimes more. The villainesses, however, remain one-dimensional throughout, and I’m really hoping they get their comeuppance in the sequels. Because yes, there are sequels, and yes, I totally have to read them.

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The Luxe ~ Official Site

 

Hush – Donna Jo Napoli

In a Norse saga, there’s a mention of an Irishwoman captured and sold as a slave, Melorka. In Hush, Donna Jo Napoli takes Melkorka and gives her a book of her own.

Melkorka’s a spoiled teenager, firmly convinced of her royal superiority over the ordinary people and slaves, firm in her hatred of Vikings, and not very good at thinking before she speaks. Then comes her kidnapping, and her enslavement. Remembering her sister and her mother, she refuses to speak to her captors; listening to a fellow slave, she resolves to not speak to anyone. Her silence, flimsy though it is, becomes the only power she has.

It’s told in a first-person, present-tense narrative that works. Melkorka’s inner monologue reveals what she doesn’t say and lets us watch her adjust to her situation – and adjust again when it changes again. We see the helplessness of slaver, but also how the slave comes to have more strength than the princess ever did. It’s surprisingly gentle for a slave narrative, I think in part because it’s present-tense, but that gentleness is actually quite revealing. When Melkorka is experiencing something she can’t deal with, she thinks about it only obliquely, and that sideways experience is what we’re given.

The end is rushed and trite. Looking back on it, the beginning seems tacked-on, not really part of the story. But in many ways that’s part of Melkorka’s story; the experiences she has make her no longer the person she was. It’s a powerful book, which makes no excuses for the cruelties of the world but gives us a woman who can’t escape them, but can survive them.

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Hush ~ Donna Jo Napoli

 

A Drowned Maiden’s Hair – Laura Amy Schlitz

Maud grew up in an orphanage. Now eleven, she’s thrilled to be adopted by three sisters, bought new clothing and books of her own, and brought to their house to live. She does find it a little weird that she’s brought there under cover of darkness and is told to stay in the house or walled-in garden, away from windows, and to sneak up the back stairs when visitors knock on the front door. And then she’s asked to help with the sisters’ fake seances, knowlingly defrauding people who’ve lost loved ones. It’s okay, though – she’s loved and wanted, and isn’t that enough?

Last year, Laura Amy Schlitz won the Newbery, and I was unhappy. You’d think a Canterbury Tales-esque book winning the Newbery would make me happy (just like you’d think that Neil Gaiman winning the Newberry would make me ecstatic), but no. The book was boring and had no overarching narrative. Hardly any underarching narrative, for that matter.

Now that I’ve read two of Schlitz’s three other books, I’m starting to wonder if last year was a case of “Laura Amy Schlitz is good, why haven’t we given her anything yet?” (Just like I wonder if Gaiman won this year partly because he hadn’t won for Coraline. Which is a better book than The Graveyard Book. Which also has only sketched connection between chapters; maybe Newberry committees just care less about narrative than I do.)

Because A Drowned Maiden’s Hair is good. (If I was going to continue my Newbery-committee snarking, I’d mention that it’s a better book than The Higher Power of Lucky, which won the Newbery that year, and deals with some of the same issues. But The Higher Power of Lucky throws in some extra issues which deserve discussion, and I don’t actually think A Drowned Maiden’s Hair is Newbery-worth, so I won’t snark. Except I just did. Oops.)

It’s good because it’s not oversimple; Maud’s negotiation of trust, ethics, love, and even truth are difficult. Every character is deeply and realistically flawed. Maud’s task is figuring out who can be trusted anyway.

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A Drowned Maiden’s Hair