Book Review Wednesday: Olivia Bean, Trivia Queen

OLIVIA BEAN, TRIVIA QUEEN
Delacorte Books for Young Readers
March 13, 2012, 288 Pages
ISBN: 978-0385740524

Donna Gephart won the 2009 SCBWI Sid Fleischman Humor award for her debut novel AS IF BEING 12-3/4 ISN’T BAD ENOUGH, MY MOTHER IS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT! In OLIVIA BEAN TRIVIA QUEEN, Gephart’s third novel, the author known for her humor does not disappoint.

Olivia Bean has some very clear cut goals. She wants to be better at geography. She wants her father’s approval. She wants a friend. Olivia is sure that the path to her goals is to be a contestant on kid’s week of the game show Jeopardy!. This course of action is not far fetched. All the Bean’s are trivia crazy from Olivia, to her kindergarten brother Charlie, to her absent father. In fact, the bits of trivia that pop up throughout Olivia’s day successfully develop her character and keep the story moving forward.

Gephart creates many true-to-life characters who are full of faults. Perhaps the most flawed is Olivia’s father. An obsessive card player and gambler, he left Olivia’s mother and moved West with Olivia’s best friend’s mother. Just this is enough to turn a reader’s stomach, but Gephart doesn’t stop there. This father schedules calls with his kids and doesn’t follow through. He brushes Olivia off when she needs his support, and he shames her about the challenges she has with geography. Still, Olivia loves him.

Charlie, a five year old who hardly remembers his father, is just as enamored of trivia as Olivia but he prefers the gross variety. If you want to know how many bacteria there are in a square inch of armpit, or why a flamingo pees on its own leg, Charlie Bean can tell you that. Charlie is a constant source of comic relief in this sometimes very serious story. Gephart writes kindergarteners well and the dialogue between Charlie and Olivia is authentic, funny, and often heart warming.

Olivia lives with her journalist mother and almost step-dad Neil. While both are supportive and attentive, Olivia misses her father. She also misses being her mother’s confidant– a relationship that often occurs between a single parent and the oldest child. As the family faces money issues, Olivia matures and comes to terms with the fact that Neil is Mom’s new main source of support.

The book is written in first person present tense. This point of view transmits a sense of urgency– not only the reader, but also the narrator, is unaware of what comes next. Sometimes, the present tense can seem self-conscious and jars the reader out of the story. This was the case in OLIVIA BEAN. The benefit of this technique is that neither readers nor Olivia know if she will make it onto or win Jeopardy!. However, a past tense telling would have been just as exciting and more in keeping with the middle grade genre.

There are subtle chuckles tucked throughout OLIVIA BEAN TRIVIA QUEEN as well as a few laugh out loud moments. In this fast paced story for middle graders, the humor is a successful vehicle for more serious and skillfully handled coming of age issues.

Book Review Wednesday: Wonder by R.J. Palacio

WONDER (Random House)
by R.J. Palacio

As with most good stories, WONDER, R.J. Palacio’s debut novel for middle grade readers, begins on a day when something different happens. August’s mother asks him to try going to school.

A genetic anomaly, August (Auggie) Pullman was born with a facial deformity that required endless surgeries and kept him out of mainstream education. Auggie has experienced the cruelty of others in his Northern New Jersey neighborhood first hand (on the playground, at the ice cream store). Never the less, he agrees to attend the private Beecher Prep middle school.

The wondrous story of Auggie’s 5th grade year first includes all the friendship angst, cafeteria jockeying, educator’s wisdom, school projects, and field trips you’d expect in an odd-man-out, middle-school novel with two interesting exceptions.

First, Auggie’s physical appearance is pretty startling. Of course, the reader can’t see Auggie but that doesn’t matter. As Auggie states at the onset of the novel, “I won’t describe what I look like. Whatever you’re thinking, it’s probably worse.” Despite this, the reader falls in love with and roots for Auggie from the start. R.J. Palacio writes Auggie as smart, funny, unendingly patient with his new friends, incredibly forgiving of his family. He is more mature than all around him because he has learned from the mistakes of others and is a product of his loving and supportive family. Perhaps Auggie is too-good-to-be-true and he’s not the only one.

Dad makes everyone laugh, Mom takes care of everyone, older sister Via feels jealous of all the attention Auggie has gotten but then knows enough to feel guilty about it. Via’s new boyfriend gets the lead in the school play. Even Via’s out-of-favor best friend gives up something very important to her just to be generous. In other words, with the characters in WONDER, even their flaws are perfect.

Second, R. J. Palacio tells the story in alternating first person. Not only Auggie, but also his sister Vi, his new friends Summer, and Jack, and his sister’s best friend each have a hand in telling the story. Instead of each narrator moving the story forward, they each retell a preceding portion of the story and then move on. The benefit of this structure is that the reader sees Auggie from the perspective of those around him. However, this two steps forward, one step back pacing can be frustrating, especially when the new point of view doesn’t add enough new information to the replayed scenes.

R.J. Palacio writes a happily refreshing family in the Pullmans. Loving and kind, playful and supportive, this family is one with which many readers will identify. Middle grade and Young Adult readers are all too used to reading about families with dead-mothers, substance-addicted or absent fathers, and snarky siblings. The Pullmans are a welcomed change.

In all, WONDER is a positive addition to the literature about the disability experience. F.J. Palacio’s story of acceptance, friendship, and kindness will carry the reader through laughter and tears and open their eyes to a life where something different happens.

Book Review Wednesday: How to Make a Golem and Terrify People

This week I’ll be discussing the middle grade novel, How to Make a Golem and Terrify People, by Alette J. Willis. This is not a negative review but does offer quite a bit of constructive criticism so if you’d rather skip it, fine. (See this post by Maggie Stiefvater about bloggers who give negative reviews.) I hope you’ll join me next week.

The book doesn’t seem to be available at IndieBound or at B&N and probably because it is published in Scotland by Floris Books.

From the Floris Books webpage:

Floris Books is a publishing company based in Edinburgh, Scotland. We publish books in two main areas: non-fiction for adults, and books for children… We’re also the largest children’s book publisher in Scotland. We publish board and picture books for 0-7 year olds, often international stories in translation and nostalgic classics; story books and anthologies for 6-10 year olds; and the Kelpies series of Scottish children’s fiction, a much-loved classic series into which we’re publishing brand new contemporary novels. We also publish a wide range of craft and activity books suitable for children of all ages.

As a Jewish mom with an interest in Jewish legend and folktale, the title of the book intrigued me. If you’ve seen the Caldecott winning book, Golem, by David Wisniewski…

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…you may already be familiar with the tale. In the 1500’s a Rabbi in Prague creates a giant man out of mud to protect the Jews. In many of the stories, the Golem is uncontrollable. In the picture book, the Rabbi who gave him life sends him back to the clay he came from. Anyway, it’s an interesting story and I was curious to see what a Scottish author would do with it.

This book is about a girl named Edda, who is as tiny and fearful as a mouse, which is what her mother calls her. When her home gets broken into, she is more fearful than ever. Her mother starts looking for new homes but Edda doesn’t want to move. Her family has moved around quite a bit and she is finally in a school where she’s found a friend. Of course she’s also found a bully. Enter Michael Scot– a somewhat magical, perhaps time-traveling boy version of a historical and alchemist Michael Scot– who helps Edda create a Golem to solve her problems. Needless to say, the Golem only causes more problems and it is up to Edda to save herself.

This is a very sweet story. However, I had a lot of problems with it. Perhaps it is cultural, but the author tells quite a bit of the story or shows and then tells. There seemed to be a lot of cold imagery that didn’t match the story. Cold that slips down Edda’s spine, fear that “filled my stomach with quaking ice cubes…” The author also names emotions instead of showing. Throughout the book Edda feels: “queasey, sick to her stomach, sorry for him, safe and secure, angry and helpless at the same time, an unexpected flood of gratitude…” The magic of Michael Scot is never wrapped up. The character disappears when things get rough and the reader never finds out if indeed he is a time traveling Michael Scot or not. Further, Edda never gets to settle her feelings with the amorphous boy. I think that my biggest disappointment was in the fact that Jewish tradition didn’t seem to matter to any of the characters in the book.

I could go on but I won’t. My purpose in pointing out these writing issues is not to be unkind to the author but to further my own craft. When we read critically, we write critically and we give our children something that we are proud to read as well.

Book Review Wednesday: Cold Cereal by Adam Rex- Magically Delicious

Happy New Year to those in the kidlitosphere! Thanks to NetGalley and generous publishers I am back in reviewing action with relevant and upcoming titles. Today, grab a spoon and dig into the new Adam Rex middle grade novel, Cold Cereal.

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Adam Rex, made the middle grade reader fall in love with poetry with the brilliant Frankenstein Makes A Sandwich. TheTrue Meaning of Smkeday was my go-to book for boys in my 5th and 6th grade classes who “didn’t like to read.” Now Rex has written Cold Cereal. This book may have started with Rex looking at his Lucky Charms™ and asking himself, “What if they really WERE magically delicious?”

Enter the fictional Goodco Cereal company in the fictional New Jersey town of Goodborough. (Yes anything can happen in New Jersey.) Scott Doe, has recently moved to Goodborough so his scientist Mom can have a job at the cereal factory. He’s a smart kid who is angry at his famous movie action hero father Sir Reginald Dwight (aka John Doe) for leaving the family. On his first day of school he meets the twins Emily and Erno. The three of them are in the class for gifted kids, “Project: Potential,” but it is obvious from the start that Emily is more gifted than Erno or Scott. Emily and Erno’s foster father pits them against each other to solve riddle and scavenger hunt style games. What starts as a simple game turns into a magical mystery.

While the book is heavy on action– there are motorcycles, cars, vans, guns, wands, magical voids, evil doctors, and a secret society, don’t tell the kids but this book is well-written too. (Tastes great and good for you?) Rex writes fabulous character description that goes beyond the physical and gets to the emotional heart. Here, Scott meets Emily for the first time. Every seat on the school bus is taken…“Except for a seat right up front, on which sat one very small and delicately pale eggshell of a girl.” Rex often uses humor to develop and expose the flaw’s in his characters. The gifted and talented class that Scott, Emily, and Erno are in… “was taught by Ms. Wyvern, a musty, clown-faced woman who spoke with an unplaceable accent that was thick with gurgling r’s and sneezy vowels.”

Is this book “magical realism?” I suppose so. There’s a lot of magic, and it happens in the real setting of a small New Jersey town. To help the reader, Rex introduces the magic slowly and makes the reader wonder if it is real. Does that human really have a rabbit’s head? Does that cat really have a unicorn-like horn? Or is it a hallucination brought on by Scotts migraines. This device, along with the portal-based magic that centers around the cereal factory gives the reader a reason to believe that this magic could logically happen in the book even if they don’t see it in their own town. By then the reader is fully hooked in the world and things get really absurd. Rex trusts his reader. From vocabulary and figurative language, to action and magic, he allows the reader to look between the lines.

The book is highly illustrated and Rex is a master artist. While the advanced copy I saw only included sketches, it was obvious that Cold Cereal is another wonderful example of the blending of written and graphic elements ala Brian Selznick, and Lynne Rae Perkins. Personally, I’m thrilled to see publishers embracing the visual for older kids instead of casting aside visual literacy at the expense of text.

Everything was not green clovers, and yellow horse-shoes for me with Cold Cereal. Rex has a lot going on in the structure of the story. Maybe too much. He manages the changes in focus from Scott to the Twins well, but he has more going on than that. Mick the Leprechaun has his own magical stories that get thrown in from time to time taking the reader out of the story action. Rex also includes long passages of back story, secret society and magical history at the expense of pacing and forward story movement. The baffoonery of the Freeman sometimes feels irrelevant to the story and comes across as Rex's personal commentary on secret societies in general. The age old device of having the bad-guy talk too long to expose her evil history and plot may work well in movies, but it seemed like another pause button violation to this reader.

A good middle grade novel needs to stand on its own, and Rex certainly ties up most of the loose ends, but he leaves the reader poised for a sequel. If you are a sequel lover, as are most middle grade readers, you’ll enjoy this but the whole sequel phenom is a recent pet peeve of mine.

The book launches on February 7th. Adam Rex has served up a slice of humor, and a glass of action, alongside the magical Cold Cereal for a nutritious reading experience.