For I will consider my cat, Tater...

Man oh man, here's a good one. I have a small (4 x 4) paper pamplet version of Christopher Smart's "Jubilate Agno," with red woodcuts by Ben Shahn and published by Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard in 1957. it's a wonderful poem if you don't mind a little nature mysticism and some religious obsession and extreme wordplay and passion for nature -- a bit eccentric, in other words, but fun to read. (You can read it to your cat, and he will purr.)

Ah, sentences! Discovering Ian McEwen

It's always a joy to discover a "new" writer, especially one who was always just below the radar. I avoided McEwen for years, though he was praised as literate, smart, a good psychological plotter, etc. But I was afraid to read a book about an abducted child outside of the mystery genre. It didn't help that another of his books was titled The Cement Garden. But the extensive publicity about the new movie of Atonement sent me back to the book, which is as captivating as anything by Forster. And with prose as clean as Lively's, prose that the author reads aloud to himself to hear how it works. Here are a couple of passages that draw the reader into a spell:

The rains came at last in late September, delivered by gales that stripped most trees bare in leas than a week. Leaves clogged the drains certain streets became navigable rivers, old couples were helped out of basement flats by policemen in waders, and there was a general feeling of crisis and excitement, at least on television.

By a frozen brook they passed the slab of rock under whose covering of snow, deep in the fissures, were the ingredients of a miniature tropical forest. Even by moonlight it was possible to see fat and sticky buds and unassuming ground plants raising tiny spears through the snow. One season was piercing another. In the smoothed-out spaces between trees, profusion waited its turn. The track turned toward the center of the wood. They descended into the hollow towards the rotten oak, an unchanged feature from the summer before.

We can endure terrible events if -- if we are presented with sympathetic characters, some hope of love, and absorbing creations of specific places. I'm hooked.

"I can't like Ian McEwen!"

When my second son was a toddler he once said, on being asked to try some food, let's say spinach, "I can't like spinach!'

I wanted to like Ian McEwen, and I couldn’t. I thought I tried. But not really. I read the N.Y. Times review of The Child in Time and The Cement Garden, and I thought “Never!” No matter that he was said to be articulate, a fine writer even, and that he looked smart, well-aged, and handsome – when I read what he wrote about, I thought, Never. Too depressing. Then along came a novel that sounded amenable and interesting, so I read Atonement, and it wasn’t horrifying, but I never quite got it, though it buzzed about me.

So now that the movie is upon us, I thought it was time to read the book again, and to do it justice – listen to its prose, its voice, what’s going on and how it’s told, and see who among the characters might be engaging. And now I see – it’s Briony, and I’m sucked in and open to all the book’s charms.

And here’s a clue as to how to read it:

[Of Briony, years later, as a writer:] "She need not judge. There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive."
Atonement, p.38 (Doubleday/Nan A. Talese hc)

Well, isn’t this what fiction is all about? Yes, but I for one have to be able to identify with one or more characters, to sympathize. I guess after this it’ll be time to take a look at The Child in Time. Of which, more later.

With forty bottles of ring-bo-ree

SPOILER WARNING!!! for Sunday NY Times Acrostic

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"Edward Lear's nonsense is not vacuity of sense: it is parody oi sense, "The Jumblies" is a poem of adventure and nostalgia. The Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo and the Dong with a luminous nose are of unrequited passion -- blues, in fact."

from The Music of Poetry, Acrostic puzzle in N.Y. Times Magazine, 12/9/07

Punctuation uncertain, as is attribution.

My grandchildren are lucky that I read "The Jumblies" and "The Owl and the Pussycat" to them, and that I enjoy it so. It's in a British book with colorful illustrations rather than Lear's drawings.

Eulalia!!! Wiki on for Redwall!

According to my Old Farmer's Almanac , December hosts the feast day of St. Eulalia (you can look her up), December 10. To celebrate the publication of Eulalia!, here is an announcement of the Redwall Wiki! Have some fun and edit the pages. Add themes, character profiles, anything you like!

Yoga Adventures for Children

Yoga Adventures for Children: Playing, Dancing, Moving, Breathing, Relaxing by Helen Purperhart (Alameda, CA: Hunter House, 2007) is a terrific book for all ages. I received a free review copy by signing on to a publishers' review program through LibraryThing and am absolutely delighted with it. I will donate it to my daughter's school, where I'm sure they'll make much use of it. It's the approach to yoga that I enjoy, a playful yet serious introduction to exercises that are easy to remember through their connection to animals and nature. With lovely, simple illustrations by Barbara van Amelsfort, one can easily lead children through the basic postures of yoga, from simple neck stretches to the salute to the sun and cooperative games. Each exercise is presented with an illustration and easy-to-follow instructions. The approach makes it all fun and imaginative and still holds true to basic yoga postures and practices. There's an introduction, including "the Rules of Yoga" (such things as cleanliness, honesty, and other simple virtues), and then the exercises are divided into appealing sections: warmups, postures, games, breathing and on to stories and visualizations to help children internalize the practices. The illustrations clearly and playfully make the exercises easy to remember.
Now that yoga has become normal in mainstream American culture, guides like this are very welcome. A section near the end explains in simple, matter-of-fact terms some of the philosophy behind the practices, such as a simple introduction to the idea of chakras, with easy exercises for each one. A helpful last section groups the activities according to numbers of people needed or props which are useful
Highly recommended for anyone who works with children or any adults wishing a clear and easy introduction to yoga.

Female circumsc--- what??!?

I can't believe this. Yes, I can. The web which lets us all publish whatever we like (mostly), which allows me to natter on, also allows this example of non-thinking -- non-reading, really:

"If you decide that you do not want to support something like this, I suggest you boycott the movie and the books. I googled a synopsis of THE GOLDEN COMPASS. As I skimmed it I couldn't believe that in a children's book part of the story is about castration and female circumcision." A piece "collected from email" and quoted on Scopes.com.

Huh?? I can't even call this a misreading of the book -- the protester didn't even read the book! And as for the Amazon reviews, since they're usually halfway literate, I believe the "skimming" referred to was swift as a swallow bent on picking up the small insects.

Ooh, it's juicy -- and very misled.

Well, since this is a book blog, I have to show the book, in which the word "circumcision" DOES, in fact, appear, playing a very subtle, linguistically precise, and frightening role in the action of a quite different world. The horror, if that's what a reader experiences, is on a more spiritual plane than our physical lives.

Penelope Lively

It's time to catch up with a few books from the summer, all by the wonderful Penelope Lively, the English writer of novels for both children and adults and of memoir. Lively grew up in Cairo and then in England, and her adult novels have recurring themes and motifs which spring from her life. Her most famous novel is Moon Tiger, a Booker Prize winner. In it we experience the present and remembered life of Claudia Hampton, a historian and war correspondent, as she lies dying in a nursing home. As members of her family visit her, finding her sometimes alert and sometimes not, we enter into the mind of this passionate and brilliant woman as she recalls her life, and we also are given revealing glimpses of the thoughts of her misunderstood daughter and others near to her. As Claudia recalls her experiences in war-time North Africa, her brief and intense love affair with a soldier who died, and her subsequent life as wife, mother, and writer, we experience her life vividly and vicariously. Lively's prose is brilliant in its quiet way: sentences flow in artless variety, words are exactly right for their purpose. While not as elliptical as Michael Ondaatje's writing, Lively's novels are kin to his in their intelligence, excellent writing, and themes, especially the relationship of the individual to history and politics.

From Moon Tiger: She lies awake in the small hours. On the bedside table is a Moon Tiger. The Moon Tiger is a green coil that slowly burns all night, repelling mosquitoes, dropping away into lengths of grey ash, its glowing red eye a companion of the hot insect-rasping darkness. She lies there thinking of nothing,simply being, her whole body content. Another inch of the Moon Tiger feathers down into the saucer.

Tom stirs. Claudia murmurs, 'Are you awake?' (1987)

I'd previously read Moon Tiger and this summer enjoyed an excellent recorded version, which carried me easily down a few hundred miles of interstate highway.

Lively's 1977 novel, The Road to Litchfield, shows that even three decades ago she was a writer with perfect pitch for language, both dialogue and narrative. Themes of the role of history in our present day life and of marriage are operative in this early work. In addition, the thoughts and voice of the protagonist's father, dying in a nursing home, foreshadows the character of Claudia Hampton: in both we experience the frustration of a person who is incapacitated and sometimes speechless but whose intelligence is as sharp and fervent as ever.

It's also a very funny novel. Here is Anne, who's been teaching history to adolescents, taking with the headmaster of the comprehensive school:

'Do sit,' he said. Look, I'd better come straight to the point, I think. As you've heard, we're making quite a few changes in the school. To be frank, I've had to take a new broom to the curriculum. It just didn't stand up to inspection in this day and age. Far too much dead wood.'

He sat on the edge of the desk, looking past her and out of the window..... 'The fact is,' he said, ' that History's one of the things I've had to rethink.... [there's] a most interesting piece of research which proves fairly conclusively that children under fifteen just aren't ready for a chronological approach to history. And yet here we are teaching them history as narrative, one thing after another.'

'That's what it is. One thing does happen after another.'

'Yes, but that's a very sophisticated concept, Anne. They simply aren't ready for it at the O-level stage.'

Anne said, 'I entirely disagree.'

Cleopatra's Sister, a recent Lively novel, also plays on the theme of the entanglement of the personal and the historico-political in its story of two independent people, both unmarried, who meet and fall in love when their plane is forced to land in "Calimbia," an imaginary but very convincing country on the north shore of Africa, and the travellers are held hostage by a mad dictator who wants Britain to release some political prisoners. It's a tense thriller, a cautionary tale for the western world, and a terrific love story to boot.

Lively's 1994 memoir Oleander, Jacaranda tells of her childhood in Cairo and provides background for many of the themes and motifs in her fiction, including her fiction for children (see especially The House in Norham Gardens). She writes as well of the difference between the child's perception of the world and the adult reality:

[the child Penelope is observing a preying mantis] No thought at all here, just observation -- the young child's ability to focus entirely on the moment, to direct attention upon here and now, without the intrusion of reflection or of anticipation, It is also the Wordsworthian vision of the physical world: the splendour in the grass. And, especially, Virginia Woolf's creation of the child's-eye view. A way of seeing that is almost lost in adult life. You can stare, you can observe -- but within the head there is now the unstoppable obscuring onward rush of things. It is no longer possible simply to see, without the accompanying internal din of meditation. (Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived, HarperCollins, 1994)

A last note: My copy of Oleander... is the one with the dark cover, above. But the other cover, with the child jumping into the water, is so amazingly like that of this summer's other wonderful read: Jamie O'Neill's At Swim, Two Boys. Curious and curiouser....

"The Little White Horse" is alive and coming to the screen!

I'm passing along a post from the wonderful 5th grade teacher, blogger, and child_lit notable Monica Edinger's blog "Educating Alice," about a very favorite book of my childhood, Elizabeth Goudge's The Little White Horse, and the movie being made of it, due to be out in 2008. Dakota Blue Richards, who plays Lyra in the Golden Compass movie to be released later this year, has been cast as the heroine, Maria Merryweather. This was, in my life, the introduction to the magic and mystery of the Unicorn. Shel Silverstein's song came much later, and then in due time the tapestry in the Cloisters. Now unicorn images are ubiquitous, not least in the lead trinkets coming by the gross on container ships from the East to our discount outlets. But to be a child or pre-teen in the fifties, discovering the magic of Goudge's "little white horse," was to be truly enchanted by story,poetry,and legend.

One of the few poems I can still recite by heart is the title poem from the novel. Its magic still casts its spell as I walk down the street in my by the ravine at night and recite aloud to the air, "It was under the white moon that I saw him/ The little white horse,with neck arched high in pride...."

Don't miss Pullman interview!

Hot off the presses, or on cool cyberwaves, is a wonderful interview with Philip Pullman in the British journal, Literary Review. Read it now while it's available online, as you have to pay to subscribe online (but you can get a sample issue free). Pullman talks about education, religion, Blake and Milton, fantasy, and of course His Dark Materials, with a tantalizing mention of the book he's currently working on. Thanks to the wonderful Monica Edinger and the The Guardian blog for letting us know about this interview.

Tree is in park behind Silver Spring Elementary School, Riverside, RI

At Swim, Two Boys, by Jamie O'Neill

For one week while away this month I lived in Jamie O'Neill's At Swim, Two Boys, first published in 2001. My plunge into its world began with the cover image, and I dove into 1915 Dun Laoghaire and the telling of a story that began with words that cast a spell of language and narrative:

"At the corner of Adelaide Road, where the paving sparkled in the morning sun, Mr. Mack waited by the newspaper stand. A grand day it was, fair and fine. Puff-clouds sailed through a sky of blue. Fair-weather cumulus to give the correct designation, on account they cumulate, as Mr. Mack believed. High above the houses a seagull glided, gliding on a breeze that carried from the sea. Wait now, was it cumulate or accumulate he meant? The breeze sniffed of salt and tide. Make a donkey of yourself, inwardly he cautioned, using words you don't know their meaning. And where's this paper chappie after getting to?

In delicate clutch an Irish Times he held."

There's a lot here: a setting, a distinct character, and two distinctive voices, that of Mr. Mack and of the narrator. In time we meet Mr. Mack's teenage son, Jim, and another father-son pair integral to the plot, which interlocks romantic love, love of family, and love of country in a time of unrest.

Good fiction creates a world in which the reader lives for a spell. And a spell, an enchantment it is, one that deepens our knowledge of the world and the human heart and adds vicariously to our experience. In this book I have felt as a boy in the confessional, confessing he knows not what but that he is wicked. I've felt the mixed and unarticulated emotions of that boy as he prays on his knees beside a priest whose psychological power over vulnerable boys is almost unlimited. I feel the pride that enables another teenage boy to shovel dung and still dream and love the world. I enjoy the all male swims in the sea, and the boys' determination to swim out to the Muglins the next Easter. I've lived through the planning of an uprising among Irish citizens who are faced with involvement in a great war at the same time they want to wrest their independence from British rule.

A great writer puts us into the lives of other people while still allowing us the perspective of the writer/reader. In the dual vision we create meaning.

I emerged from this book, at p. 562, wanting to go back and start over. I know I'll go back.

For dessert there's O'Neill's website with links to a number of early reviews and a few pictures. The story of O'Neill's ten year process of writing the book is in itself a great struggling-young-writer story. The title was inspired by that of Flann O'Brien's At Swim--Two Birds. The American publisher of O'Neill's novel wanted to call it just At Swim (too vague, too dull). O'Neill added the comma, and literature was enriched once more. You can see very fine photographs of the bathing area at the Forty Foot at the website of the photographer Tom O'Doherty. You'll have to scroll down a few pages to the set of the baths at Dun Laoghaire.

I'm a Dog! And I love it!

Wow! What a book! Very unusual, and surprising! You'll never guess how it ends! Melvin Burgess is my hero this summer. Go to his website, and read what he says about teenagers, teenage boys in particular, and writing books they like to read. Mr. Burgess is married and a father of three children, and he writes books that offend some people. He dares to write about things that really happen in the lives of teenagers in Britain (and here), things some people would rather we just don't talk about. Is he a responsible writer? That is, one who cares about the effects his books have on young people? Yes. Because he shows life as it is and lets the consequences of kids' choices work themselves out realistically.

Lady: My Life as a Bitch is different from the other MB's I've read in not being entirely realistic. It's psychologically very true to life, but in actual life people don't ACTUALLY turn into dogs. But in a novel, a girl can very easily have in her head and heart the thoughts and feelings of a real girl AND those of a dog. (Insofar as we can imagine being inside a dog, but that's a digression..... )

I found it a bit long in the middle, but read it! Stick it out to the end, and you'll be surprised and maybe delighted. I think Ursula LeGuin would like this book. Maybe Zack can suggest it to her....

How I Live Now

My (public library) copy has the golden Michael Printz Award seal, the ALA's relatively new award for Young Adult literature. This novel for teens and up also won the Guardian Children's Fiction prize for 2004 and was shortlisted for the Whitbread in the same year. http://books.guardian.co.uk/childrensfictionprize2004/

On first reading, and with no reading of reviews yet, here's how it went. Daisy's voice grabbed me right away: here is a unique person yet identifiably a teenager speaking. The premise is terrific: she's off the England to stay with her cousins because her dad has a horrible new wife. She's fifteen, between child and adult. She falls in love with one of her cousins and has sex with him, and she bonds strongly with another, nine-year old Piper, a wise little girl. Then life really changes: terrorists occupy the country and keep it under siege. Army troops take over villages and people's houses, families are split up, the men and boys sent mysteriously away. Suddenly we're in a thriller, one with very strong characterization, great plot, and a genuine voice. And teenage sex. I have to say that because a lot of parents and librarians in the US would prefer that we not spotlight a book that includes this element of modern realism. But, like the novels of Melvin Burgess, another award-winning author of books for teenagers ("teen and up" is what I call it), Rosoff's novel is a gripping read and shouldn't be kept out of the hands of teens.

I recently read Penelope Lively's Cleopatra's Sister and am struck with the similarities in themes and situations in these two novels. The threat of terrorism is alive and present in our minds these days, and both of these books present scenarios which could happen, given the imperialist heritage of both the UK and the US, and the present neo-colonial mindset of some of our leaders.

The theme of love is strong in both: erotic love, familial love and its absence, the fierce protective love a person can discover when a child is threatened, the strong bond between people and animals (dogs, here). Teenage love that turns into a lasting relationship. The fortuitous meeting of two people. The energetic love that can get people through anything. (Cormac McCarthy's The Road is maybe the strongest example of this last motif since the setting is so bleak and stripped to the earth's bare bones.)

Recommended for teens and up.

Misspelling in a new book

I'll talk about Martha Grimes' Dust later but want to put it on the record that I've noted a copy editing mistake in the 1st edition, first printing of the HarperCollins 2007 edition. On p. 175, on the last line, the word given is, incorrectly "provenence." On the next page and several times thereafter it is correctly printed as "provenance." I'm sure Ms. Grimes' copy editor was at fault, and not she herself.

Two Tales of Suspense

It's time to catch up on recent reading. Now that school is out I have no excuse (except that I have to use the less-comfortable desktop computer for now and can't sit on my back porch, which is like a tree house hideaway). These will be brief notices, better than none. Maybe they will point one or two people to books they might not otherwise notice.
Geraldine Mccaughrean, the wonderful British author of Peter Pan in Scarlet, The Kite Rider, and lots more, has an Antarctic tale that will cool you off during hot summer days. The White Darkness is a fast paced tale of a teenage girl on a trip to Antarctica. Sym is fascinated by the story of a 19th century explorer Titus Oates and makes a trip to the Antarctic with her Uncle Victor. Her fascination with Oates, the growing psychological tension between the characters as Victor's obsession takes over the trip, and the stunning descriptions of the landscape make for a mesmerizing tale.

The late, great Jan Mark, another British writer somewhat neglected in the U.S., gave us an unusual story that falls into the science fiction slot but also has fine characterization and her always fine writing. The story is Useful Idiots and deals with an anthropological quest in a somewhat future England. Part of the mystery is the reader's, whose task is to figure out exactly what is going on.
Note: sometime this month the 2006 Carnegie Medal winners will be announced. I've been reading some of the books on the short list and can't wait to see which title wins. Visit the official site for back lists of nominations and winners.

Great Book Recs for Children and Teens

I discovered a truly fine resource for book recommendations for children's and teens' books. It's at the Guardian, http://books.guardian.co.uk. On the left are links to various departments, and you will find treasures there. There are old and new favorites, from P.L. Travers to Pullman, and several I didn't know about. And they're not stodgy lists, either, not the sort that assume twelve year olds will necessarily be enthralled and enriched by Silas Marner and Emerson's Essays. Some of the books are light hearted; all are sure to be well-written and unique.And the lists give a variety of types, too, for differing tastes, which young people have as pronouncedly as adult readers. there's suspense, domestic tales, science fiction, and lots of good realistic fiction )(NOT problem novels, just excellent stories, well told), from both sides of the Pond. there is a British slant, which is good to see from our side. Most of the current reviewing I see in the US slights UK books, unless they're major prize winners. Add to that the fact that the Carnegie awards include books by Americans, since it covers books written in English as long as they're published in the UK, where the Newbery winners are all American.

East and West of the Atlantic, Teens Have Restless Parents

This week I read two young adult novels, Jan Mark's Turbulence and Will Weaver's Claws. Both were completely enthralling, and both were about really nice teenagers with basically good parents who were going through mid-life madness. It's a real topic: my own children went through it as did those of my friends. It's a valid idea for a novel. And in the hands of such fine writers as Mark* and Weaver**, the results are fully realized portraits of young people in their families, with friends -- mostly educated and middle class people, all. Even the pink-haired punk girl isn't what you think at first.
In both books the teenage protagonist cooks a lot for the family and generally plays the part of a responsible adult, though one with teenage yearnings. Both have troublesome younger siblings. Parents are going crazy or withdrawing from their problems.
Both books end on a hopeful note. I wonder if Will Weaver has read Jan Mark, or vice versa, because the books are so similar in some elements. But both authors' voices are unique. And both stories are engrossing and believable, with admirable adolescents and hope for most of the rest of the characters.

* Will Weaver has written a trio of novels about a teenage farm boy in Minnesota who is a great baseball player. Striking Out, the first, gripped me from the start, with its evocation of an intense and committed teenager with a stubborn father. While I've not yet gotten into his adult novel Red Earth, White Earth, I have summer hopes for it.

** Jan Mark is a goddess, our late captain. Oh Captain, my Captain! She is gone but leaves a shelf of very fine fiction about young people. The first for me was Handles, about a girl who loves motorcycles and prefers hanging out with the guys at the shop to anything else besides riding. Jan Mark was my age when she died and was someone I would have liked knowing. That's why we write about books -- to keep them and their creators alive.

Tamar

Mal Peet's Tamar won the Carnegie Medal last year, for 2005.

When I put up a cover image earlier, the color was wrong. I didn't realize until now that the lettering too was wrong. This is the American edition , published by Candlewick Press is Cambridge, Massachusetts (2007). Mal Peet's named is not blazoned across the cover, I guess because he's not widely known here.

While promoted as a Young Adult novel (or, as they still consider it in England, children's fiction) the book centers around an older adult, Tamar, a grandfather and former World War II resistance fighter in Holland during the war, working undercover in dangerous territory. Another Tamar, his granddaughter, undertakes a present day journey of discovery into the past, providing the frame for the novel.

Throughout, the story is completely absorbing, combining suspense and intrigue, romance, memory and discovery, friendship and betrayal, anticipation and surprise. Peet's writing is deft and enchanting. The novel transcends age designations -- it's for teenage and above and demonstrates why people should pay more attention to "children's fiction."

Carnegie Medal Books

I'm reading Mal Peet's Tamar, and while not ready to write about it I'm engrossed in the world of British children's and young adult books. It seems to me, without having researched the topic, that the Carnegie Medal winners are, on the whole, much longer and meatier books than those chosen in the US for the Newbery Medal. What's behind this? One immediate answer is that maybe British young people are smarter, or more inclined to read, because, after all, the US is way ahead in wealth and therefore gizmos, so our kids are more likely to be playing the World of Warcraft than to be reading a hefty novel. But this seems too easy an explanation to be true. Maybe here we consciously choose books for the 8-12 year old range for the Newbery (they're all pretty "safe") and relegate the YA novels to another sphere, one formerly unvisited by award-givers but now recognized by the Michael Printz award. (The Coretta Scott King winners span a wide range and are, of course, self-limited.) If this is the case, then why have the teenagers been neglected for so long here, but not in Britain? I don't know but will look it up.

In the meantime, I've found a treasure trove of stuff at the Carnegie site at http://www.carnegiegreenaway.org.uk and have just spent an hour or more on a Sunday evening scanning the site and viewing interviews and other great stuff.

More to come. And as for tonight's bedtime reading, choosing between Aciman and Peet, I think I'll go with Peet and leave Aciman for tomorrow's sunny afternoon. Very different books they are, and both very fine.

I'm getting messages in my brain

In M. T. Anderson's Feed, people's brains are fitted with an implant that feeds pop and consumer culture to them all day long, and people shop just to be shopping. Sound familiar? It could almost be now but instead is an imagined future, where teens party on the moon for spring break, and all anyone cares about is what's new. For Titus, a thoughtful boy, meeting a girl, Violet, who has never had the feed causes him to question the conditions of his life. Violet cares about things that others don't even think about. Titus's efforts to be her friend and include her in his social group are encouraging but in the end frustrating. A quick read, with refreshing new slang, this novel should make people think hard about what influences us today, in our own consumer culture. Recommended for teens and up.

A Baseball Novel for all ages and both genders

I first read my school library's paperback copy of Striking Out by Will Weaver and was immediately engrossed and also surprised that a young adult sports novel could be so fine. The book had been well-reviewed, and it didn't look too long, so I picked it up. Now there are three "Billy Baggs" novels: Striking Out, then Farm Team, and then Hard Ball , which I've just read and want to comment on here.
Hard Ball is an immediately gripping novel of a freshman in high school, a farm boy, who happens to be a rising star as a pitcher. As the book opens, it's late summer, just before school opens, and a bunch of western Minnesota kids are on a bus, on their way to see the Twins in the big city. In the course of the game, our hero, Billy, will be hit in the mouth by a fast ball and will as a result come into possession of a signed major league glove and two partially silver front teeth. A good beginning for a year in which he will first endure and then face his rival, the other star pitcher in the school, a rich kid who wants the same girl as Billy. Add into the mix two problematic and controlling fathers (on opposite sides of the track socially, and one father a judge who has once sent the other to jail), and an insightful coach who could rival King Solomon, and you've got a great story that mixes together high school life, teenage romance, farm kids and rich suburban kids, plus two kids who hate each other but come to find some deep similarities , make it all revolve around baseball , and you've got a deep but fast-moving novel. As a female reader, I had a few tears in my eyes at a few points. But I don't think male readers would cry.

Suitable for junior high and up.
Now I've got to get hold of Farm Team.

Mistmantle, Part II

Two more observations I forgot to make about Mistmantle. Both are differences from Redwall, or new motifs. One is the use of alcohol as a tool of villainy by Husk and Aspen. What a wonderful inclusion in a book for children, to show the dimming power of wine on the old king's faculties and his strong recapturing of his mind and will when he begins to drink clear spring water. I have no problem at all with the animals' enjoyment of wine, beer, and cordials in Redwall, as they are shown as a good part of a healthful life. But the abuse of alcohol in Mistmantle is very vivid and dramatically instructive.
The other element is the somewhat more explicit religious beliefs in Mistmantle. The fact that the animals invoke a higher power shows the value in a community of spiritual belief. McAllister is brilliant in her use of "Heart" as a term of address to this power, thereby avoiding reference to any religion known today.. When I read the book, I thought this was her invention. But volume two, Urchin and the Heartstone, begins with a quotation from an eight century Irish hymn: Great Heart of my own heart, whatever befall/ Still be my vision, thou ruler of all. So this does come from a tradition, but one that is unfamiliar in our age. This use fits with the British setting and yet strikes the reader as new, unique to this world.

No pictures on this additional post.

Mistmantle Chronicles

Mistmantle Chronicles: Urchin of the Riding Stars

This caught my eye on the bookstore shelves, with its pleasing whiff of Redwall and its cover picture of a warrior squirrel on coastal rocks surrounded by sea urchins and starfish. I was half hopeful and half expecting to be disappointed by it, but the opening sentences passed the test, so I sprang for it. It turned out a lovely and satisfying story, which both male and female readers should enjoy, definitely and unabashedly inspired by Redwall, but like a welcome cousin. The similarities -- the peaceful animals of the English forests and waters, treacherous animal enemies, the agrarian setting, the utter nastiness of the villains, the triumph of good over evil -- are familiar. But after the book is finished, it's the differences that make the book memorable in its own right.

The differences come in subtle variations on the basic elements. In details, such as the magnificent swans. In Redwall birds are similarly exotic -- neither friend nor foe but other. But it's the particularity of Swans that shines in the memory. In motifs, like the classification of species. Redwall's creatures are sorted into good and bad by species. The only play on this is in Outcast of Redwall and Taggerung, where an infant of a good species is raised by the bad or vice versa. In Mistmantle, there are heroes and villains within species, most notable squirrels. In settings and ecology: Mistmantle coasts include starfish and sea urchins, and falling stars light up the sky. Original images like these and the swans' approach to Mistmantle burn into the memory.

In short, this first volume is highly recommended. I think I'll look for # 2 and #3 now. I have to learn Urchin's destiny and find out how Padra and Arran fare.