Skellig

Author: David Almond
Year: 1998
Genre: Children's fantasy

This is a dreamy, mystical story about a young man named Michael who is trying to deal with life crises that are bigger than he is: a new home, an unwell infant sister, and his parents' being distracted by all that, leaving him to work things out for himself. Plus, there's a man with wings living in the garage, suffering from arthritis, living on aspirin, Chinese takeout, and beer, and waiting to die.

It's a story about balancing the spiritual and the material, two tendencies that are symbolized by our young hero's friends. With his school buddies, Coot and Leakey, he stars at soccer and clowns around. His companion in his personal struggles, however, is his next-door neighbor Mina. She does not go to school, but is receiving an education at home that involves birding, sculpture, and William Blake. Michael stays at home for some time exploring an old abandoned house with Mina and meeting the mysterious Skellig in the middle of the night, while he builds the inner resources to deal with his life's problems. There's a difficult scene, drawing on the story's symbolism as well as the trials of friendship among 12-year-olds, in which Michael's school friends come to visit him at home, and he joins in their mockery of Mina. It's clear that Michael's place is in the world, but he hasn't truly come to terms with things until he can return to school, to be friends with Leakey and Coot, and also with Mina.

Names are of great importance in this story. Both Michael and Skellig come from the island Skellig Michael, and Michael is also the name of a winged angel. Mina is short for Wilhelmina, which echoes William Blake. Coot is simply a nutty character, while Leakey, a character who expresses skepticism about the evolution of human beings from the great apes, refers to the family of paleontologists. Perhaps most important, the baby sister is nameless throughout most of the story, and the family's act of naming her at the book's conclusion definitively recognizes her as one of the living.

Evolution, Me & Other Freaks of Nature

Author: Robin Brande
Year: 2007
Genre: YA fiction

Mena begins her ninth grade year in a bit of an awkward situation: she comes from an evangelical family, but all the kids from her church are ostracizing her. ... Freaks of Nature is her diary, and as we follow the story, we learn what all the trouble is. It's the story of a girl who's learning to think for herself, and beginning to create an adult relationship with her parents.

I don't read a lot of this kind of book, so there's not much for me to compare it to. I do know that Brande is a bit misleading on the science. Of course, the evolution unit in Mena's biology class becomes a battleground for the fundamentalist kids, and evolution itself is treated as a metaphor for personal change. BUT! That means there's a lot of equivocation between character development and actual biological evolution, which does not happen in one individual's lifetime! I feel like the science teacher needs to come out at one point and say "Yes, that's very good, you feel like you're evolving, but that's not what I mean when I talk about natural selection."

Meaghan and I talked a lot about who the target audience must be for a book like this. It's certainly not addressed to the hard-core fundamentalists, who would probably take exception to their being portrayed as snotty teenagers. In the end, we decided that it might be intended for kids like Mena, who come from a religious background but are starting to question. On the other hand, it might be meant for kids like her boyfriend Casey, who know that most religious belief is ridiculous, but haven't had much to do with believers before.

Frindle

Author: Andrew Clements
Year: 2004
Genre: YA fiction

This book isn't just a well-written story about a bright fifth-grader who learns to question authority. It's also a children's introduction to prescriptive and descriptive linguistics. Both linguistics and irreverence are dear to my heart, so of course I love this book. In fact, on rereading (and Meaghan didn't believe me when I told her this) the scene in the end, where an adult Nick goes back to meet his fifth grade teacher, actually made me tear up.

Squids Will Be Squids: Fresh morals, beastly fables

Author: Jon Scieszka
Year: 1998
Genre: Children's

Another delightfully offbeat Scieszka-Smith collaboration. These guys have got to be the They Might Be Giants of picture books. (Sadly, They Might Be Giants have released a picture book, and shown that they are not, in fact, the They Might Be Giants of picture books.)

Meaghan showed me this book ages ago, but I forgot about it until the other day, when I was reading an article about books with simple language and sophisticated concepts, suitable for use in teaching English and/or literacy to teenagers. Squids Will Be Squids is such a book -- its fables satirize a lot of common foibles in such a way that my students would recognize themselves and their friends -- but it succeeds because it's not designed to be this kind of book. Textbooks read like textbooks; no matter how "fun" they are, they're never really fun. Squids can be funny for kids and parents, something like Sesame Street. It can make you laugh, it can make you think, and it won't make you worry too much about vocabulary.

The Hungry Coat

Author: Demi
Year: 2004
Genre: Folklore

I was already familiar with this story, one of the better-known of the Turkish stories of Nasreddin Hodja. (It's also one of the more moralistic, reading almost like an Aesop fable where other Hodja stories are whimsical fantasies or even jokes.) What was new to me, though, was Demi's beautiful artwork. Her illustrations are a tribute to the decorative arts of Turkey, from miniature painting to Anatolian rugs and Iznik tiles.

The incorporation of real Turkish art into the illustration shows Demi's respect for the culture that she takes her story from. Unfortunately, the text itself isn't quite so authentic; this version of the story is more moralistic than any other I've encountered. Whether she felt it was necessary for American audiences, for her own aesthetic, or to fill out pages 31-32 of the picture-book format, Demi concludes the story with a two-page spread that restates the moral about three more times. Without the last two pages, it's a beautiful book; with them, it's a beautiful book that teaches you a lesson.

La grammaire est une chanson douce

Author: Erik Orsenna
Year: 2001
Genre: Kids' fantasy

What is the purpose of the Académie française in the 21st century? How can it rejuvenate its image to make it seem like a positive force for the French language, rather than a reactionary, prescriptivist, anti-American relic? This book, which has been translated into English as Grammar is a Sweet, Gentle Song, shows how one Académie member would answer the question: Language needs people to care for it, not in the way that museum curators preserve holy relics, but as nurses love and protect their delicate patients.

The plot is an airy fantasy: a brother and sister are shipwrecked on a desert island and lose their ability to speak, and must learn to "respeak" with the help of a kindly old man called Monsieur Henri. On their adventure, they meet an old woman who revives dying words in the dictionary; visit the village of words, where adjectives and nouns get married; and tour the sentence factory, whose machinery transforms meaning into grammar. There's also a villain whose laboratory takes the souls out of words through cold scientific analysis and brutal pedagogy (shades of The Golden Compass's "Gobblers"), but Orsenna cannot stand to look at such cruelty, so our heroine is promptly rescued.

It's clearly kid stuff; and when Monsieur Henri says, "If you don't love grammar by the end of the week, I'll smash my guitar," it's obviously Orsenna addressing his readers. Despite his saccharine Little Prince allegories, you can see that his heart is in the right place - and he speaks to an issue that is of clear professional importance and personal interest to me. (Just last week, I was complaining that I want language teaching to be treated as an art, while heartless bureaucrats are trying to make a science of it.)

As I was reading, I amused myself by considering the challenges of an English-language translation. Like any book on language, this book includes a few scenes that would really have to be re-envisioned to make the same impact on an English-speaking audience. In the village of words, for instance, the article's job is to announce the grammatical gender of the noun that employs it. In the evil lab, teachers are forced to read from publications of the French Ministry of Education (Orsenna's foray into politics). The secret back room in the factory hides the workshop where Saint-Exupery, Proust, and La Fontaine are secretly still writing. What would be the English and/or American equivalents? I'm curious to look at the existing translation; I suspect that the translator may have left it more or less French.

The Library Card

Author: Jerry Spinelli
Year: 1997
Genre: Children's fiction

Meaghan always talks about the tremendous potentiality in giving the right book to the right child at the right time. Jerry Spinelli has taken this important truth and put it through the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle machine: books are the magic potion that can cure naughty children of their naughtiness.

Spinelli reminds me a lot of Stephen King. They both put a lot of energy into creating individual, well-rounded characters with distinct identities and a history of personal tragedy, and then throw those characters into ridiculously contrived plots so that they can get an emotional response from the reader. There's a difference, though: I expect horror novels to be manipulative because that creepie-crawlie feeling is escapist, not authentic. (I expect fans of romantic comedies feel the same way.) Spinelli, on the other hand, has delusions of significance. He seems to think that if he can force you to feel sympathetic for his desperate runaways and preteen misfits, then they must be deserving of genuine sympathy.

The sad thing is that if he just told stories about these kids without trying to push you so hard (as he did, more or less, in Maniac Magee), you could feel for them. As it is, you just feel cheated.