Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson

2009 Scott O'Dell Award
2008 National Book Award Finalist

Some authors are one-hit-wonders. You know the type. They write something brilliant for their first novel and then, sadly, they just keep getting worse with each novel. It's like being in a train wreck on a blind date.

Thankfully, Laurie Halse Anderson is not one of these writers. She started out with Fever 1793 and now, six books later, has written the epic Chains. Anderson has crossed all boundries in her writing; time, gender, taboo, and now race. Many times I will enjoy a book. I'll smile and it will give me warm fuzzies. A great book will blow me away and stay with me for weeks, months, and I can't wait to put it into the hands of the nearest student, because I know that they will love it as much as I did. Chains is a great book.

Thirteen-year-old Isabel and her sister Ruth are cheated out of their promised freedom when their master dies and are unscrupulously sold upriver to the Locktons, a loyalist New York City couple. Isabel's thoughts are consumed with keeping Mrs. Lockton happy as she runs errands for her new masters and tries to conceal Ruth's frightening illness, that if discovered, would have her sister sold elsewhere. Freedom for her and Ruth is at the forefront of her mind, and when she is given an offer by a young rebel slave Curzon, Isabel starts to spy on the Locktons. This sets off a chain of events right as the Revolution is headed to New York.

The first book in a trilogy, Chains is a mesmerizing read, full of intrigue and passion. You feel for Isabel and Ruth, their loss of freedom when they are sold like cattle, Isabel's fierce protection of her sister, and her harrowing mistery and pain when she is publicly branded. She holds no loyalty to either Tory or Patriot, she simply wants to be free.

But what side will break her chains?

Around the World in 80 Books (give or take a few)

Travel around the world with childrens books! Click on the above map and it will lead you to a larger version of this world map. Each region and that will lead you to a middle school book list for that region.

I will update this as often as I can.

Enjoy!

Between Us Baxters by Bethany Hegedus

On Tuesday I got to watch in awe and tears as the first African-American President was sworn into office. I can only hope our children understand what a great moment in our country's history this was.

In my parents' history, black children and white children could not go to school together.

When I was one-year-old, a lawyer was speared with a American flag during the violent bussing protests.

I don't remember this Pulitzer Prize photograph moment, but I know about it, and I hope the children I teach know that this history is not so long ago and far away.

It was in my lifetime, and in my hometown.

And it is not lost on me that in the very week when President Obama was sworn in and I read Between Us Baxters, a local disturbed madman killed two innocent people and was on a rampage to kill many more, all in the name to "save his race". Two steps forward, one step back.

In Between Us Baxters, Hegedus puts a twist on the tale of a Southern friendship between two girls, one black one white. One girl is poor, and her family is considered the trash of the town. The other is bright and has plans for going to college, and her family owns a prosperous store in town. Both girls are at the age where it is an unspoken rule in 1959 Jim Crow South that they should have "outgrown" such a friendship. But Polly is a poor white girl who has to wear friend Timber Ann's cast-offs, and she needs all the friends she can get. And Timber Ann is a good friend, and her Aunt Henri is a good friend to her mother, so while these friendships bring shame upon the Baxter family name in town, and scorn from Polly's grandmother and Aunt Clara, they are her and her mother's daily lifeline to keep moving and living.

But when fires start blazing through town, deliberately set to thriving African-American establishments, Polly and Timber Ann's friendship is tested beyond endurement. Families and lives are destroyed as the Civil Rights movement takes hold of this fiercely divided town that resists change at all costs.

As I have witnessed this week in Boston, stories like this need to be told, over and over again. History and hate will continue to cycle through the generations only until the message dissipates, and we can finally see our way through the smoke.

Masterpiece by Elise Broach

A boy, a beetle, and an art heist make for an entertaining read in this fast-paced mystery.

Marvin the beetle has a talent for painting, and he lives under 11-year-old James's kitchen sink. His family does not understand his need to interact with humans.

James lives in New York City and on a birthday trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Marvin's miniture drawing is discovered, and now Marvin and James are involved with helping to solve an art theft. But can James help the museum without his new beetle friend being discovered? And how long can he keep up the lie that he drew Marvin's marvelous painting?

I am not normally a fan of talking animal books. Watership Down? Never read it--bunnies talk. Redwall? Nope--warring mice. But I loved Masterpiece, it has a talking animal, well insect, but there are plenty of humans to keep me interested. You fear for their survival in the human world. This is a finely crafted emotional story. You feel for James as he struggles to please his parents, but who don't really see him until they think he has a newfound talent for art. You feel for Marvin, you is just a bit different in his passions than the other beetles, a little bit more adventurous, and who wants more than the average beetle life.

This book is a wonderful follow-up to Shakespeare's Secret. I look forward to more of Broach's offerings.

The Traitor's Gate by Avi

Fourteen-year-old John Huffam, the "last male in the Huffam line" is pulled out of school one day by his servant, only to be informed that his father is in debt of 300 pounds for gambling and is going to debtor's prison. His distraught mother and sister have no other means of supporting themselves and must live in prison with him until the money can be raised.

But is the debt real? And who is the mysterious inspector that keeps watching his father? And why does his great-aunt refuse to help his family but offers him a job?

With twists and turns, and a cast of characters that could have been transplanted straight from a Dickens' novel, Avi's Victorian-era mystery is a delight. Black and white illustrations decorate the story and characters. Descriptions of seedy undergound London are to be savored, the smells and sounds are sure to tickle any imagination.

John must seperate lies from the truth, and untangle the web of treason his father and others has created if he is ever to release his family from prison. But first he must learn that no one is to be trusted.

The Great Newbery Debate

Every January I am glued to my computer. I wait for the announcement. What titles will win this year? What did they decide? Will I agree? Will my picks be honored or ignored?

I must admit, many a time in the recent years the winners have left me scratching my head, and now I know I am not the only one.

In the October 2008 SLJ opinion article by Anita Silvey , many feathers were ruffled with her suggestion that the latest winners were not up to children’s' likability snuff. I quite agree. Maybe I am old fashioned, but I believe the Newbery Award and Honor books should stand for excellence in a book that will grab a child's imagination and get them to read. According to the Terms and Criteria of the Newbery Award, the award is given to a "distinguished" piece of work. One that is supposed to "consider excellence of presentation for a child audience". Plot, characters, and setting are all to be considered. Nowhere in the in the official terms and criteria did it say that they have to pick "a good book". And what a shame. This is what children ask for. The good books, the good stories.

The books that engage children to read, that have them coming back and asking for more. These are the books to celebrate. There are thousands of books published for children a year, why is the committee trying so hard to go out of their way to find books that children rebel against reading? The one that not only would they never pick up off of a shelf, but librarians and booksellers cannot honestly recommend because they are not likeable or sometimes readable books.

The honor books from the past several years have been better contenders for the winners. These are the books I can recommend, enjoy, and I think are deserving of a seal on the cover. They are distinguished, they are excellence, and they are good stories.

Feathers by Jacqueline Woodson

2008 Newbery Honor

"Hope is the thing with feathers/that perches in the soul" so says Emily Dickinson in a poem that is in the mind of sixth-grade Frannie, trying to figure things out in 1971 when a white boy enters her all-black school.

Feathers is a rare gem. When a new student, dubbed "Jesus Boy" brings with him a sense of calm and peace into a rowdy classroom, Frannie and her classmates begin to question if he really is Jesus and their own faith. Because, as her friend Samantha says, "If there was a world for Jesus to need to walk back into, wouldn't this one be it?"

Frannie questions all that surrounds her at school and at home as she watches her beloved older brother, who is hearing impaired, struggle to be accepted by the hearing world. And she watches her mother be full of hope and worry with her new pregnancy. Frannie feels the worry in her family surround her, but carries the poem in her heart while she searches for the thing with feathers.

When Trevor, the classroom bully, rages against Jesus Boy, truth is shone on both children. And Frannie asks herself, was he God's child? Aren't we all?

Woodson was smart to set this quick novel in 1971, during the rising tide of the Vietnam War, and the racial tension of desegregation. For the questions asked then still mirror the questions children growing up today ask themselves.