I hold writers with roots in Mississippi to the same standards as the rest of the world – or maybe higher like MY children or MY students. Therefore, I was really glad to see that Margaret McMullan got her skillet right in her book In My Mother’s House. “Charlie Mae was probably in the kitchen, making fried apple pies in a skillet that she never washed but wiped clean.” You might remember that how to clean a black skillet was a sore spot on my otherwise positive review of Whistling Past the Graveyard. I expected accuracy from Margaret as well as good writing since I had enjoyed her How I Found the Strong when it first came out in 2004.
My expectations were different from those reported in the Evansville Living article about her that I found on the Internet. After her older sister gave a rousing speech in her campaign for school president, Margaret’s junior high teacher told her she would never write as well as her older sister. Little did she know that Margaret had written the speech. [Shame! Shame! Shame! on the teacher]
I was looking for a good book for a birthday present for my daughter-in-law who has adapted well to being in the strange Butler family. At her first Christmas with us, we were rolling merrily along in our usual manner with present distribution. Well into the celebration, she suddenly burst out, “Finally, a present that is not a book!”
I asked, “Don’t you read books?”
Steph said, “Evidently not as much as this family.”
Let me say that Steph really is a voracious reader – just of a different variety. She leads the pack in reading and producing the contents of cookbooks, and I have given her many. However, I thought it was time for a change of pace with a well-written good story.
In My Mother’s House qualifies as the narration switches back and forth from mother to daughter. The mother [Genevieve or Jenny] seeks to forget and keep silent about the dark days of World War II Vienna while the daughter [Elizabeth] wants to know her roots. Jenny wants to leave her faith, her Jewishness, behind while Elizabeth moves back toward it as she dates a Jewish man. Woven through this narrative are the spoons from the family silver that arrive along with notes from Elizabeth’s great-grandmother, tying the generations one to the other.
I liked the scene where Margaret quotes Elie Wiesel – “Elie Wiesel wrote that God is in exile – He’s everywhere so He’s never at home.” The quote brings Elizabeth comfort that her great-grandmother, displaced from her homeland has not been alone.
This is a story of finding place and home. Margaret uses a New Orleans landmark as a metaphor for reaching for home with the story of the man whose wife missed the Midwest and built her an iron fence whose top posts are shaped like corn. “She missed her first home. Her husband wanted to surround her with what she knew. And what she knew was corn.”
If your interest is piqued about Margaret, check her out on Google. There are other intriguing tidbits about her there. If you like a story well written, get one of her books. It think it will not disappoint you or Steph even though it has no recipes.
The Mighty Pen
Trailing through my mind for several months now, with about as much direction as the snail trails crossing my garden, have been numerous allusions to the old cliché “The pen is mightier than the sword.” The saying has been around since English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton put it into a play in 1839.
The cliché could serve as the theme of some of the books I’ve reviewed. Jennifer Lanthier created her fictional character in The Stamp Collector based on two men jailed by corrupt governments because of fear of their words. Her writer protagonist represents many captives imprisoned for fear their pens will bring freedom from oppression.
Margarita Engle’s The Lightning Dreamer brings alive Cuba’s poet Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda (Tula) whose poems stirred her people toward human rights. In her historical notes, Margarita notes that Tula became influential throughout Europe and the Americas with her words. Tula’s simple love story led people to think of an ideal when there would be equality, dignity, freedom, and equal rights for both men and women of all races. Margarita notes pen power in one line of her book,
“We risk everything,
all for the crime of listening
to poems.”
In recent days, the powerful pen trail through my mind has been heightened by Jason Low’s article about the disproportional lack of multicultural books in comparison to their ethnic representation in the population as a whole. The ensuing discussion among writers, librarians, and readers has majored on the importance to children of all ethnicities of finding people like themselves in books. I affirm that idea but would like to address another that I believe to be almost as essential – the importance of reading from diverse traditions by children belonging to the majority. When children read stories featuring people from cultures other than their own, they develop a kinship far greater than will be produced from any number of lectures.
While the Lincoln quote to Harriet Beecher Stowe about being the little woman who influenced the great war is questioned by historians, there is no doubt that Uncle Tom’s Cabin stirred people to look at the slavery question in a way that all the political pronouncements did not. In my own experience, reading Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry aloud to classes of junior high students from multiple ethnicities brought every one of them to connect with the Logan children. Every year without exception, every student cheered for what they saw as justice when the white children’s bus mired up in the mud brought on by the rain. The importance of Story cannot be overstated as it brings, not just students but all of us, beyond tolerance to understanding, appreciation, empathy, and genuine friendship.
The quote on the Children’s Literature Network Facebook cover photo for July 16 pulled this trail together for me.
“Let us pick up our books and our pens.
They are our most powerful weapons.
One teacher, one book, one pen
Can change the world.”
Malala Yousafzai
I think we need to march forth, well armed with our pens, and make this a world where we celebrate the outward variety in our many cultures and value our inner common humanity.
Unchanging?
The North Carolinian quickly advised us that we should not miss Salem when he found out we were staying over an extra day after our meeting. There was a bit of pride in his voice when he said it was like Williamsburg except instead of a reconstruction, this was a restoration of a real community. We took his advice and had a great day exploring this Moravian village and learning its history. It did, indeed, stack up nicely against Williamsburg.
My favorite spot was the Home Moravian Church. A gentleman greeted us at the door and told us to hurry on in where his wife was giving a lecture on the church’s history. She would tell us later that she and her husband took turns giving the talk and being the greeter. I can’t imagine that he would be any more interesting than she was. Her recurring theme was that Moravians never throw anything away even if it might never be used again. Illustrating her point, she told of the original chandelier that held candles and was relegated to the basement when they installed electricity. Years later in a renovation, someone decided the old chandeliers could be brought up and fitted for light bulbs. They added enough new chandeliers made to match the old to complete the number they needed for the new building. We looked up and saw the old and new chandeliers but could not tell which were which.
She also told us the beautiful organ pipes in front of us were not hooked up. She said when the first organ pipes were put in, they looked pretty but sounded terrible. Not wanting to throw good-looking pipes away, they put better-sounding pipes in the space behind them. Wasting nothing, they have a beautiful view from the ones up front and a beautiful sound from the pipes behind.
About the time she began telling about the building of the church in 1800, I spotted their visitor’s card in the pew in front of me. It read “Please have a minister contact me,” and had spaces for name, phone, and email. The irony of a 200 + year-old church asking for a phone number and an email address tickled my funny bone and triggered a recall of Hebrews 13:8, “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today, and forever.” Maybe He is the only thing that does not change.
I looked up their website when I got home [www.homemoravian.org] and found some of the same irony there. Their doctrine includes the Apostles’ Creed [developed between the second and ninth centuries of the Christian Era] and the Nicene Creed [from the fourth century] even as they move to an email newsletter and live-streaming of their services on the Internet. The church even offers the opportunity of “liking” it on Facebook.
I think we could learn something from the Moravians who enthusiastically recall their past while taking advantage of what the modern world has to offer.
Seen That Face Before
I can’t think when I’ve seen a more appropriate title for a book – Mary Wickes: I Know I’ve Seen That Face Before. I requested an advance reading copy because I had seen that face bring a light touch to so many things I had watched on a movie or TV screen – and sometimes saved the film or program from large doses of either saccharine or boredom. I concur with author Steve Taravella’s comment in the preface about reading of her death, “I had never met this character actress and had no relationship with her, yet I immediately felt a sense of loss.”
Immersing himself in the archives of Washington University in St. Louis, her alma mater to whom Mary left her papers in their Special Collections for safe-keeping, and talking to those who had known her, he met her posthumously through the mementos she hoarded and the people she knew. In the book, he introduces her to the reader and paints a picture of a complicated person quite different from the one on the screen – or is she really?
The book is partly a walk through nostalgia for classic films and bygone days of television. Icons keep popping up in her life as real people with whom she got along – or didn’t. In her heyday, viewers knew her face if they had trouble with her name, which would have been even harder if she had kept her original – Wickenhauser. While one may have to think a minute to put her face and name together, immediate recognition comes for her long-time best friend Lucille Ball who used Mary many times on her shows.
The meat of the book is Mary’s life with its struggles to keep that face before an audience whether on the radio or stage, or in movies and sitcoms. An only child, her close relationship with her parents and her mother after her father’s death seems to either save her from or preclude too much closeness with others – including some family members she conveniently forgets. I found surprising the passion she had for volunteer work with her All Saints Episcopal Church and her relentless pursuit of acting jobs for six decades all the way to her death at the real age of eighty-five. [She had shaved several years off for her job pursuits.] While she appeared both before and after these, my own bookends for her include the perennial showing of White Christmas from 1954 to Sister Act of 1992 with many fun times between as she showed up on one sitcom or another – MASH, the Lucille Ball shows, or Dennis the Menace or as a frequent guest on The Match Game.
The book portrays honestly a real human being and keeps its readers engaged in her back-story even if they remember a lot of what is happening in her public persona. Kindle percentages demonstrate the careful research in this well-told biography with the list of Mary’s roles beginning at 82% and the footnotes at 86%. With a bit of pride, I also note that the publisher is University Press of Mississippi. I recommend a read if you liked Mary Wickes or if you just like an enjoyable biography.
Missed Me!
Eudora (Welty) knew, and I know that gardening and literature support each other. An early morning effort to get ahead of this Mississippi summer heat wound up bringing to mind the first poem I ever memorized – because I loved it, not because somebody made me. I headed out to weed the flowers just as a new turtle made its way across the yard. If you remember the jingles of young children, you’re probably way ahead of me.
I learned the poem about the time I started to school, when 
Mama had given up on my straight hair and was beginning to let it grow into braids.
I had a little turtle.
He lived in a box.
He swam in a puddle,
And he climbed on the rocks.
He snapped at a mosquito.
He snapped at a flea.
He snapped at a minnow,
And he snapped at me.
He caught the mosquito.
He caught the flea.
He caught the minnow,
But he didn’t catch me.
[traditional – author unknown]
In this case, I was not concerned that the turtle would catch me. I just wanted to be sure not to frighten him back into the shell so I could get a good picture. The turtle, as best I could translate, only peered at me to figure out who was invading his yard, before deciding to pose for his portrait.
I put up my camera and went back to pulling weeds, smiling all the while remembering the turtle from my childhood who caught the mosquito, the flea, and the minnow, but couldn’t catch me!
The Silver Star
“Write what you know” may be the most often repeated chestnut in the writing business. Jeannette Walls does it well. The first time I read one of her books, it was her memoir, The Glass Castle. Naturally, that was what she knew since she experienced it. The story pulled me in from the first paragraph when she frets, as a professional woman in a New York taxi, over whether she will be overdressed for the event she is attending only to have her reverie interrupted by the sight out the taxi window of her mother “rooting through a dumpster.” I was sucked in before the first page was finished and not released until the last page was complete.
Half Broke Horses, her second book, is on my list but not yet read. A hybrid that she calls a “true-life novel,” it is based on her grandmother’s life. She had intended it to be biographical but too many gaps existed in what she could learn to make a whole book. She filled in the holes with believable fiction.
When I saw that Jeannette had a novel out this year, I talked to our very cooperative church librarian who got a copy of The Silver Star and saved it for me to read first. [I generally don’t push ahead to get in the front of the line, but I make an exception for books.] Once again a dysfunctional artistic mother forms the impetus for her story – something Jeannette knew well.
She lured me in again with her first line. “My sister saved my life when I was just a baby.” Twelve-year-old Bean and fifteen-year-old Liz survive against all odds – also something she knew. As they deal with an uncle living on past glory who has not expected them to turn up and with the bullying foreman of the mill where they find work, I felt the danger and wanted to call out a warning of where the girls’ situation is leading. She held me in her grasp until the last sentence, “Every now and then a car passed and the driver slowed and the kids inside rolled down the windows and waved wildly at the sight of Liz and me bringing those big crazy birds back home.”
Now I’m itching to get sucked in to the Half Broke Horses which begins "Those old cows knew trouble was coming before we did" and I’m watching for the next Jeanette Walls book to come out so I can have another chat with our church librarian. Or should I take turns and talk to my friendly public librarian who granted me the same favor with The Help long before it became a best-seller?
Sister Aunt
According to family lore, Aunt Ruth and I ganged up on the adults in our life from the time I was born when she was eleven years old. Her mother had died the previous year leaving my grandfather with a couple of teenagers, a ten-year-old, and an eight-year-old still at home. He didn’t know his way around a kitchen or a washpot and even if he had, his dawn to dark hours on the farm left him no time for housekeeping. My parents, in the interest of giving Papaw some help with the house and children and themselves some help with food and rent, had moved back out to the home place.
The story goes that this worked out well until I was about a year old. By that time, I needed some correction from time to time. Aunt Ruth reacted by tattling in horror to Mama about Daddy’s corrections. If Papaw saw the need to scold Aunt Ruth, I returned the favor and cried. In the interest of establishing some discipline, Mama and Daddy rented a small place in the village of Sturgis, near enough to help with housework but far enough away to foil our attempts to intervene with discipline.
My memories of Aunt Ruth include many things:
• Readings that were more like performances of “The Elephant’s Child” and “Little Orphant Annie”
• Her beautiful curly hair and wanting to look like her, which was never going to happen since mine was bone straight [It took a while, but now that we are both gray-headed, her brother told someone when I was visiting him in Arizona, “If you want to know what my baby sister looks like, this is it.”]
• Her beauty hint when I was about six that I should keep my cuticles pushed back so I could have good-looking nails when I was her age [You can check if you like. I have nice nails with barely visible cuticles.]
• Her taking me to see Showboat, still one of my favorite movies, when I visited her and Uncle Leo as a young teenager after she married. She swore me to secrecy about the movie, “Don’t tell Virginia” because she thought Mama might not approve. [I don’t think Mama would have cared, but I never told.]
My sisters and I have had many good times with Aunt Ruth as adults. If there has been a sister event to shop, see a museum, or take a trip, she has claimed a spot with the justification that she was closer to our ages than to Mama’s, which made her more like a sister than an aunt. However, when there were hard decisions with Mama’s aging and Alzheimer’s Disease, she said, “Oh, I can’t get into that. I’m only an aunt.” Sister or aunt seems to depend on the one that appeals to her at the time.
Aunt Ruth was at our house when she turned sixteen. She told me several days before that her birthday would be on July 1, but that I would never remember. I did then and I do, today. Happy birthday, Sister/Aunt Ruth.
Whistling Past the Graveyard
First I had to get by my mistake, and then I had to get by Susan Crandall’s before I could enjoy Whistling Past the Graveyard. Since the protagonist was nine, I assumed this was a children’s book. Not so. My mistake.
Rewrapping my head around an adult book, I returned to reading. Shortly, I ran into the maid Eula scrubbing the iron skillet used to make cornbread. Any Southern cook knows you never scrub an iron skillet. You only wipe out the excess grease since the more times one cooks cornbread, the better the seasoning of the skillet becomes. A new Southern bride would swap her new iron skillet for her grandmother’s old one in a heartbeat. Susan’s mistake.
Fortunately, I’m not known for putting a book aside without finishing it. The skillet is important to the story. Whether it has been scrubbed, not so much. Eula becomes both mentor and accomplice to nine-year-old Starla as she makes her way from Cayuga Springs through the length of Mississippi and on to Nashville where she expects to find refuge with her mother, the famous musician. (I would also have chosen a Native American name for the town from the tribes associated with Mississippi rather than one from New York, but this is not a deal breaker.)
The story starts with a Starla, a white child running away from home, being picked up along the road by a black maid who has a white baby with her – about as many complications as one could have in 1963. Then it gets worse, and Eula needs to run away herself. Difficult under any circumstances, the Jim Crow laws keep Eula and Starla finagling themselves out of one problem only to run into another that seems bigger. As the try to make sense of what life has dumped on them, each of them at times imparts wisdom to the other as they deal with their personal demons.
Susan Crandall’s characters are well-drawn and make you care – at least about the ones you don’t want to hit in the head with that skillet. The complications of the journey are believably set in a historic time. The reader can suspect the end in Nashville that Starla does not see, but that suspicion only adds to the tension of knowing that she is not heading to her all-problems-solved expectations. Where the baby came from is a puzzle from the start and not so easily guessed.
Cayuga Springs and scrubbed skillet aside, I kept coming back to read one more chapter before I put it down. I found an engaging story laced with complications brought on by the time and place and found myself helping them whistle past the graveyard.
Skipping Ahead in the Queue
I could nobly claim that I skipped ahead in my reading queue in honor of the eighth June observance of Caribbean-American Heritage month. The truth is the celebration gave me an excuse to skip ahead to two books I’d been saving to savor like pecans in a can of mixed nuts.
I’d been conscripted to read books and share my opinions with a friend who was on ALA’s Newbery Awards Committee. You can guess what a burden that was! I met Margarita Engle’s work in The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba's Struggle for Freedom. It made my short list, and then the Newbery Committee’s selection as an Honor Book. Okay, okay. So the committee didn’t see or care about my short list. You may also guess which list actually mattered.
This was part of my critique: “This book will rid myself of any prejudice against a novel in verse! This is a beautifully written, gripping account of the Cuban wars for independence as seen through the eyes of Rosa and others who were the healers or the hunters. There are no flaws.”
Afterwards I read The Poet Slave of Cuba: A Biography of Juan Francisco Manzano and became a dyed-in-the-wool fan of Margarita Engle. When I read about this month’s observance, I pulled out The Firefly Letters: A Suffragette’s Journey and The Lightning Dreamer: Cuba’s Greatest Abolitionist from my reading queue. 
Based on solid research of a true story, The Firefly Letters has three females, each bound by slavery or society’s expectations into roles that rob them of freedom. Fredricka, the Swedish suffragette, and Elena, the rich Cuban’s daughter are born into roles with expectations established by wealth and position. Cecelia, sold by her father in exchange for a stolen cow and shipped to Cuba, has even fewer choices as a slave. Symbolically flitting through the story are the cocuyos, Cuban fireflies who move freely until caught and imprisoned in jars by children. Fredricka and Cecelia foreshadow the book’s satisfying ending when they buy freedom for the cocuyos.
The Lightning Dreamer: Cuba’s Greatest Abolitionist, also based on a true story, follows Tula who defies her mother’s belief that girls who read too much are unladylike and ugly. Befriended and encouraged by the nuns in the orphanage where she volunteers
and inspired by the rebel poet Heredia, she writes her own poems that eventually embolden her family’s long-time freed servant Caridad to leave and seek a better life. The winding poetic tale traces her life until her novel’s words transform her into Cuba’s Greatest Abolitionist. A sample quote from the book:
“So many people
have not learned
that souls have no color
and can never
be owned.”
Now Hurricane Dancers: the First Caribbean Pirate Shipwreck goes into my queue.
You’ll enjoy Margarita Engle’s work if you like any of the following: a really good story, a setting that takes you to another time and place, fine wordsmithing, poetry, justice, or cultural diversity. It will take you to places and times outside your comfort zone [otherwise known as a rut].
Happy reading and Happy Caribbean-American Heritage month!
Promises, Promises
You just can’t trust a pyracantha. I first discovered this the year our daughter got married. Like her father, she plans things way ahead of time. By the time my pyracantha bloomed in the spring of 1991, I knew she was planning a Christmas wedding. To be honest, I had known since 1988 that she was planning the wedding for December 21, 1991 – three years to the day from receiving her engagement ring. Didn’t I tell you she planned way ahead?
This bush carried brilliant red berries, just right for decorating the church. A spring infestation of worms reminiscent of the plagues in Egypt descended and ate all the blossoms. As you might have guessed, 1991 was the one and only year that happened. I thought surely healthy plants would try again – but no. The church was beautiful with poinsettias and candles. Perhaps I was the only one who missed my vision of red pyracantha berries trailing in between.
Twelve years ago when we moved to Hattiesburg, I brought a small bush with me to transplant. I wanted the red berries instead of the more commonplace orange ones. [You may remember from a previous blog that orange is not my favorite color.] The plant rooted quickly in a place with the same light
and atmosphere as the home from which it came. The first year or two in the spring, it bore its white flowers, which dropped off almost immediately with no berries at all behind them. “Okay,” I thought, “Give the bush a little time.” I assumed that in a few years, it would bear fruit.
For the next couple of years, green berries made a short appearance before dropping off. Patient as I am, I let that go as well. However, there comes a time to put up or shut up. The berries for the rest of that time have produced, grown big, and then dropped off just before time to turn red. I have asked every garden expert I have come across what in the world this plant is thinking. Every expert has given me the same answer. “I don’t know.” Really, if Felder Rushing doesn’t know, who would?
My conclusion is that pyracantha bushes make lots of promises they have no intention of keeping. As you can see from the picture, it promised well this spring. Today on June 21, it has lots of green berries. To tell the truth, I’m still hoping this is the year it makes good on its promise.
The View from Saturday
I first met E. L. Konigsburg, figuratively speaking, when I substituted in my daughter’s fifth grade class so her teacher could return to the states for her daughter’s wedding. We’d just moved to Kaiserslautern, West Germany. Her school, unimaginatively named Kaiserslautern Elementary Number 2, had a marvelous librarian who read voraciously and recommended books that matched their classes to teachers who read aloud. Anna’s teacher was one of those and had started From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler when I began substituting. The class begged for “one more chapter” which I conceded to do if they kept up with their work so they were not behind when their teacher returned. I did and they did, and we all became Konigsburg fans. Mrs. San Filipo was a bit chagrined that we finished the book before her return. She finished reading it in private and started another book with the class, also recommended by that wonderful librarian. I would benefit the next year from that librarian when I joined the faculty to teach second grade.
Fast forward ten or fifteen years, and I would find my personal favorite Konigsburg, The View from Saturday, for a read-aloud with my junior high students. We paused to reread and relish phrases like, “a huge old farmhouse that has had so many add-ons it looks like a cluster of second thoughts,” and, “His smile was as genuine as a Xeroxed signature.”
Ezra Jack Keats said every child should be able to find himself in a book, referring to his groundbreaking Black child, the protagonist in The Snowy Day. Sometimes children need to see differences in addition to culture or ethnicity to place themselves in a book. My students and I found ourselves in this book. Mrs. Olinski, like me, was the team quiz bowl sponsor. Like my students, half from the nearby military base, Mrs. Olinski’s “Souls” were smart and diverse in both personality and ethnicity. How often does an Indian student, not the Native American kind, like my own Indian student show up in a book? Mrs. Olinski’s disability confines her to a wheelchair. My disability – a drawl and continuing tendency to use “fixing” as a verb – rated accusations of hypocrisy from my students since I demanded standard English from them. Finding ourselves in this book made it a favorite read-aloud.
In 1968, E. L. Konigsberg won both the Newbery Medal for From the Mixed up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Newbery Honor book for Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth, the only person to win both in one year. Twenty-nine years later, she won her second Newbery Medal for The View from Saturday.
E. L. Konigsberg died on April 19, 2013. I felt like I had lost a friend.
Like Dad's
Four-year-old Murray stood on the step stool his dad had made for him to reach the bathroom sink and concentrated on the mirror above it. I dipped the comb in water to part his hair and tame a cowlick. Knitting his brow, he asked, “Mom, why don’t you part it like Dad’s?” Tremendous self-control kept me from bursting into gales of laughter. His father had gone bald in his early twenties before Murray was born.
In other ways, that little boy did follow his dad. Catsup was a favorite vegetable. He “helped” his dad with home repairs, handing him tools as needed. Since I was always in the choir, his father taught him to sit quietly in church, primarily by modeling the behavior he expected. By the time he was in second grade, Murray wanted to take piano lessons and was soon making music like his dad.
As he has become a father, the similarities have multiplied. There’s the winter command to his children, “Close the door, we’re not heating the whole outside,” and its summer counterpart that refers to air-conditioning and cooling. He grills a tasty hamburger and has a well-stocked toolbox. My favorite reflection of his dad is his pride in his children’s accomplishments – Lauren’s track and photography, Brittany’s art and culinary
skills, and Jack’s Lego constructions and BMX racing success. And yes, he now also parts his hair “like Dad’s”!
A happy Father’s Day to Murray, to his role model, to the two Marks, and to all the other fathers who are setting an example in life and hairstyles.
A Thunderous Whisper
What qualifies as a historical novel is among the great issues of the world – at least among reader/writer nerds. In a recent email conversation with a writer friend, we agreed that a book had to have more than a long ago diary date and an absence of technology to qualify. The time and place needs to be essential to the story. I would add that the book gets a big bonus from me if it makes me want to know more about that time and place.
A Thunderous Whisper by Christina Diaz Gonzales qualifies. In a story set in Guernica, Spain in the late 1930s, Ani is introduced as “Invisible. Irrelevant. Just an insignificant twelve-year-old girl living in a war-torn country.” Ostracized by her peers because her father is away at war and her mother works as a sardinera, she is called “Sardine Girl” and worries that she carries with her the smell of fish. Her teamwork with Matthias, another outcast because he is Jewish, to help his father’s spy operation becomes a central issue of the story. Matthias uses a different name for her – “Princess,” but she is not sure she likes it much better than “Sardine Girl.”
As they use the sardine business to cover carrying spy messages, she runs a dangerous course even as her differences with her mother escalate. She hears her mother’s words, “We are all insignificant. Just a whisper in a loud world.” She knows her mother is wrong and determines not to be insignificant.
True to this time and place, Christina does not tie all the ends in a “happily ever after” bow. I would like to have known more about what happened to Matthias, although I loved the way she left her readers with an intriguing hint in the epilogue. Perhaps a sequel is in order.
The book makes my list of historical novels since the story could only have happened in this time and place. It also gets my bonus since it left me wanting to know more about the Basque people of Spain and their response to the encroaching Nazi army.
Orange - Not My Favorite Color
As a classroom teacher, papers with no names on them were one of my pet peeves. My junior high students quickly understood the place to find a nameless paper – in the folder with my detested orange color. They understood the logic connecting the hated nameless papers with my least favorite color. I graded all papers when they came in. There would be a number on the paper, but my grade book showed a zero.
After moans of, “But I turned that paper in,” I would suggest, “Then perhaps you should look in the orange folder.” More moans. My ears were deaf to suggestions that I should have recognized the handwriting. My job description did not include recognizing handwriting.
The price of getting the number to replace the zero in my grade book was to write one’s name twenty-five times on the paper. The quantity of papers in the orange folder decreased as the year wore on, but never went away entirely.
Jarred, who sometimes found his papers in the orange folder, was one of those kids who made every day a challenge – and fun. He pushed the boundaries periodically just to see if they were still there. They were. I think he enjoyed testing, and I enjoyed assuring him that no rules had changed.
The day before school was out, Jarred began investigating every time he changed classes to see if anything had been delivered to my room. Nothing had. When his class with me met in the afternoon, he asked if he could run to the office to see if anything had come in for me. I assured him that he could not, that we could trust the office to send anything that came with my name on it to my room. By now, my curiosity was piqued, but I tried not to let on.
Early on the last day of school, the florist delivered a bouquet from Jarred that contained only orange flowers.
I began my thank you note, “Orange you glad you were in my class?” Naturally, I wrote it with an orange ink pen.
Wendell Who?
I confess this title was my response when I heard that Wendell Minor would be the de Grummond lecturer for USM’s 2013 Children’s Book Festival. You might have the same question, but I’d be very surprised if you haven’t seen his work. Wendell illustrated children’s books for writers like Eve Bunting, Charlotte Zolotow, and Jean Craighead George. If you aren’t into children’s books, you have surely seen his book jackets for Mary Higgins Clark, David McCullough, Garrison Keiller, Pat Conroy, Toni Morrison . . . I will stop here or this entire blog will be filled with a list. I did a bit of googling and before long, anticipation of his visit substituted for my question. He did not disappoint.
I met Wendell on a tour of the exhibit room that Ellen Ruffin, curator of the de Grummond Collection, gave for visiting celebrities. (One of the perks of being a escort for festival guests is getting to take part in the “extras” and meet them in small groups.) I loved that he had “little kid” interest in the archives of children’s writers and illustrators, especially those of Ezra Jack Keats.
During his lecture, I enjoyed his trip through his lifetime illustration journey and couldn’t fail to notice how much he shared with Keats. When he mentioned a book showing twenty-five years of his art, I 
wanted it for my artist grandson. Later when I asked about it, he said it was out of print. But I googled again, found it, and enjoyed a pre-reading before sending it to Hayden.
Wendell Minor: Art for the Written Word collects color renditions of his book jackets with short narratives or letters by the authors. Since authors usually get little input about the artist or the illustration of their books or the jackets, they may or may not be happy with them. They want jackets to give a hint of the story and help sell the book. In these authors’ reactions is a recurring theme that Wendell captures the essence of their books because he read the book before he began illustrating. About the time I thought only rave reviews were included, I came across Larry McMurtry who liked one cover but didn’t care much for another. A few other authors had covers that they liked only after they “grew on them.”
Pat Conroy says Wendell’s illustrations help him understand his own work better, “Throughout our career together, Wendell Minor has not only given me clues and passwords to my own books, he has often handed me the key to the front door. I build the church; he puts in the stained glass windows.”
I loved the stories from the authors about the works, but even more I loved the beautiful illustrations. I’ve snapped pictures of a couple of my favorites – the Harper Lee reprint edition of To Kill a Mocking Bird
and Garrison Keiller’s We Are Still Married.
This book should be read a bit at a time to really enjoy the art. My take-away lesson is that I will never again pick up an attractive book without looking at the inside back cover to see who painted the cover. If Hayden should decide he doesn’t like the book, I’ll be glad to take it back.
For Better or Worse
He has changed. He was twenty, legally requiring a signature from his mother for a marriage license. I was 18 ½ and did not. [Powers that be in Mississippi must have known that girls mature more quickly than boys.] We did receive permission from my parents for our June 1 wedding the year I graduated from the local community college – even a “blessing” like Hodel and Perchik in Fiddler on the Roof .
Little did we know what “for better or for worse” would entail, but we meant the words when we said them. He was a shy country boy whose life had been confined pretty much to Pontotoc and Lee Counties in North Mississippi. The most exotic food he ate was his mother’s “scrambled salmon” – canned pink salmon scrambled into eggs. Everybody that he knew spoke English, not necessarily in standard form, and anybody without a drawl “had an accent.”
He’d grown up with the Ozzie and Harriet existence of a father who made the living and a mother who put good meals on the table. My expectation was to share Mississippi rural life with him. I knew how to cook.
Four years into the marriage, he got a letter from Uncle Sam on his birthday. “Greetings,” it began, before it turned into something that was obviously not a birthday card. The draft notice would trigger the change. The Army put that very square peg in a very square hole. He organizes things that don’t need organization, and the Army loves organization. The Army took the country boy far from his roots to assignments in six states and five foreign countries. He tasted quite a few foods not under the heading of “Southern Cooking” and heard several languages that were not part of his North Mississippi comfort 
Artist grandson Hayden's rendition of his choice of the focal point of our wedding picturezone.
Somewhere along the way, the country boy became a take-charge Sergeant Major in the Army. He encouraged me to change as well, asking each time I received a diploma when I planned to start on the next one. He learned to cook and shares the kitchen. He’s taken over the grocery shopping, maybe because he can make his own grocery list organized by aisles and check things off as he goes. And he’s my number one encourager as I write, reading everything to be sure it doesn’t go out unpolished and castigating any editor who deems it necessary to send a rejection letter.
A couple of questions come up when I tell this story, and I have answers.
• Question: Would I advise other young people to get married at that age? Answer: Never. There are too many uncertainties in that “for better or for worse.”
• Question: If I had it all to do over, would I do it again? Answer: In a heartbeat.
Twerp
Julian Twerski lets the reader know up front that what happened to Danley was not 100% his fault, nor even a lot his fault. He happened to be there and may or may not have been able to stop it. He tantalizes from this point, hinting at the offense, and leaving the reader wondering whether the punishment will fit the crime.
Julian, caught between the demands of his sixth grade English teacher Mr. Selkirk and a father who backs the teacher up, embarks on his assignment of writing “something long” in atonement. I read an advance reader copy of Twerp. The novel, to be published on May 28, is by Mark Goldblatt who says he is a lot like Julian Twerski only not as interesting.
A book is always partly what the reader brings to it. I’ve enjoyed teaching quite a few twerps in my day although mine were in seventh and eighth grade and mostly either Protestant or Catholic instead of Jewish, but that matters little. A twerp is a twerp. And a written essay was my preferred punishment method for either children born to me or those in my classroom. I can’t say I ever got one that was book length, but some amused me like Julian’s entertained Mr. Selkirk.
One is not far into the book before realizing that Julian’s best friend Lonnie will lead him straight into trouble. Julian’s story voice rings true as he follows Lonnie into various sixth grade antics, as he decides to take Mr. Selkirk’s offer to continue his narrative to get out of doing a book report on Julius Caesar, and as he follows the crowd in ostracizing Danley Dimmel whose real name is Stanley Stimmel. He dismisses his own behavior by noting that in a perfect world Danley would not have been born “hard of hearing or soft in the head.”
Twerp, written by an adult who’s channeled his sixth-grade boy for other sixth-grade boys, is an entertaining read with occasional reminders that atonement is due for what was done to Danley Dimmel. He saves it for the end, and it’s worth waiting for.
I’ll not spoil the ending, but it brought to mind a time when I was one-on-one with a student who had indulged in the deep hurt that words can bring. Mentioning his target, I demanded, “How do you think he felt?”
“How would I know?” he answered. “I’m not him.”
I was dumbfounded and speechless at his dismissal of his victim’s feelings. His words returned to mind when I saw students deliberately being cruel to each other. I pondered on how to give students the gift of empathy. I think one answer may be in story, in reading books like Twerp where the reader becomes one with the character and actually feels his pain.
Say It Isn't So
“Trees,” the century-old poem by Joyce Kilmer, is probably headed into oblivion according to USA Today. The writer blames it on changes in poetry that see rhyme as insipid and sentimentality as stupid. Rick Hampson, who wrote the article calls it the most famous, most beloved, and most parodied poem of the 20th century. While I’m not positive about his superlatives, I have my own reasons for wanting to rescue the poem.
As you might guess if you have frequented this blog often, it was in Mama’s repertoire. I didn’t hear the sing-song that critics of the poem abhor in her voice. Instead, I visualized the imagery, inserting my own favorite tree into the picture. As for the sentiment, what point is there in a poem that fails to evoke feeling, even blatant feeling, as you find in “Trees”?
Who would have known that my husband’s first official duty assignment would be to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, named for the state’s famous poet? Once the largest processing center for troops heading overseas and returning from World War II, the camp was in the process of closing as an active duty station. We were there for its last six months and lived just outside the Rutgers University campus with its centuries-old oak tree said to have inspired the poem. As might be expected, there are other claims for different trees!
Perhaps the greatest factor in my wanting to rescue the poem is many years of seeing wonderful trees and sharing Kilmer’s emotions in the wonder of it all – leafy arms lifting to pray, wearing of robins in the hair, and living intimately with rain. My current favorite tree, the oak pictured in our back yard, seems to do all of these. We’ve been told for the twelve years we’ve lived here that it is flawed and will die soon or topple in the next bad storm. The tree missed this word and stood strong during Katrina when others were falling all around it and never noticed the tornado that made a track of destruction less than half a mile away. The squirrels running along its branches seemed to have missed the news as well.
Thinking to myself, it seems that one should not have to make a poetry choice. There’s room in this world for the old standards of Kipling, Longfellow, Coleridge, and “Trees” as well as some of the new poets who make words sing without rhyme. (Sharon Gerald with her volume Thin Is the Kingdom comes to mind.) Their words call up empathetic feelings much like those rhymers of old. Other new poets seem to have thrown a bunch of words in the air just to see where they land when they come down. I would even make room for them.
When assigned to memorize a poem, children have frequently chosen “Trees.” Perhaps it’s because they looked forward to that fun and easy last line, “Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree.” I advocate enjoying both beautiful trees and poems by “fools” like Joyce Kilmer.
Wacky Minds
Wacky minds, like great ones, run in the same channel, as evidenced by the Mother’s Day cards from my two oldest children. Ironically, the Wednesday before Mother’s Day, we had discussed the American customs surrounding the occasion with the Internationals Friends group that I help lead weekly at the University of Southern Mississippi. The Asian contingent had a similar holiday either for mothers or for both parents and said they gave their parents vitamins and medical supplements as gifts. They wanted to know what our children considered appropriate gifts.
I assured them that I would not get any medical supplements. I also assured them that I was not likely to get a sentimental card. I think maybe I’ve gotten one of those about twice. My children look for appropriate funny cards instead. I have no idea where they get this.
My prediction turned out to be more correct than I knew. On Friday, I pulled a card out of the mailbox from my oldest son. The front read, “Good moms let their children lick the beaters.” The inside added, 
“Great moms turn the mixer off first.” On Saturday, I pulled a card out of the mailbox from my daughter. The front read, “Good moms let their children lick the beaters.” The inside added, “Great moms turn the mixer off first.”
Of course, there’s a back-story. I did let them lick the beaters after turning off the mixer when they were growing up until I heard the warnings about salmonella in uncooked eggs. After that, they only got to lick the beaters for items with no raw eggs. To put it mildly, this restriction did not go over well. They hold a grudge that shows up even on Mother’s Day.
The unreasonable restrictions I placed on their lives have often been the topic of family discussions. The oldest son thinks he holds the clincher for these conversations. I did not allow him to have a banana seat bike because I had read they were much more dangerous than the standard seat. As he nears the end of his fifth decade, you would think he would grant me amnesty.
In the end, I’m having the last laugh. My children now have children who are making their own lists of unreasonable restrictions and demands their parents are making. I love it!
Children's Book Week - Part II [Including a Helpful Hint]
I give an old Ivory soap guarantee of 99 44/100% for selecting a really good children’s book – or adult book for that matter. My students used to pick books by looking at covers, checking the number of pages, or glancing through illustrations. Adults sometimes use the same methods, along with reading the inside flap or the blurbs on the back, or checking reviews. None of these work as often as reading the first line. I seriously can’t remember a time when an outstanding first line failed to precede a book worth reading. Today’s blog has first lines from books that live up to the guarantee.
• There is nothing lonelier than a cat who has been loved, at least for a while, and then abandoned by the side of the road. [The Underneath by Kathi Apelt]
• My name is India Opal Buloni, and last summer my daddy, the preacher, sent me to the store for a box of macaroni-and-cheese, some white rice, and two tomatoes, and I came back with a dog. [Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo]
• When Jeff Greene was in second grade, seven and a half years old, he came home one Tuesday afternoon in early March, and found a note from his mother, saying she had gone away and would not be coming back. [A Solitary Blue by Cynthia Voigt]
• My mother died praying on her knees. [Keeper of the Night by Kimberly Willis Holt]
• I am running. That’s the first thing I remember. [Milkweed by Jerry Spinnelli]
• Gramps says I am a country girl at heart, and that is true. [Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech]
• “Eh, Tree-ear! Have you hungered well today?” [A Single Shard by Linda Sue Parks]
• “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” grumbled Jo lying on the rug. [Little Women by Louisa Mae Alcott]
• It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened. [The Giver by Lois Lowry]
• “Gilly,” said Miss Ellis with a shake of her long blonde hair toward the passenger in the back seat. “I need to feel that you are willing to make some effort.” [The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson]
• It all started the day Grampa Joji decided to wash his precious flag of Japan and hang it out on the clothesline for the whole world to see. [Under the Blood Red Sun by Graham Salisbury]
• Books are door shaped portals carrying me across oceans and centuries, helping me feel less alone. [The Lightning Dreamer by Margarita Engel]
• When the carriage turned onto Stone Street, it looked as though the house was watching. [Jade Green by Phyllis Naylor]
• 12th of September
I am commanded to write an account of my days: I am bit by fleas and plagued by family. That’s all there is to say. [Catherine Called Birdy by Karen Cushman]
I finish with my all-time favorite first line by the master of writing first lines:
• If your teacher has to die, August isn’t a bad time of year for it. [The Teacher’s Funeral by Richard Peck]
Celebrate Children’s Book Week by reading a children’s book or buying one for a child – or both. You can’t go wrong if you select one with an engaging first line.