Love That Dog, by Sharon Creech

From the jacket: “This is the story of Jack/who finds his voice/with the help of/paper/pencil/teacher/and/dog.”

My take: In this spare, but evocative book we get a year’s worth of Jack’s weekly poetry assignments from his elementary school teacher, Miss Stretchberry. He starts out short, objecting to the assignment, claiming that a) as a boy, he doesn’t write poetry, and b) he has nothing to say. But by the end of September, he’s responding to the poems being read aloud and answering questions raised by his teacher about his previous work. By the end of October, he’s letting her post his poems on their class bulletin board, but only if she promises not to put his name on them.

As the year progresses, Jack’s comfort with expressing himself with his poetry grows, as does his willingness to allow others know he’s writing it. Miss Stretchberry forces him to dig deep and face fears and leave his comfort zone — and, in the process, gives him the tools to share universal truths.

Creech is a talented writer, because all we get are poems from Jack’s perspective. We aren’t getting his teacher’s comments or his classmates’ reactions. We’re just getting Jack — with comments to his teacher in poetic form or responses to the poetry read that week in class or with thoughts on his life. And yet, within that strict, constrained form, Jack (and Creech) manages to say so much and touch us so deeply. (Thinking about it that way reminds me of the sonnet scene between Meg and Mrs Whatsit in A Wrinkle in Time.)

This was another of the remaining books I had left to read from the 2010 list of top 100 children’s books from the School Library Journal.

Pages: 86 (plus ten or so pages of the published poetry Miss Stretchberry uses in class)

Spindle’s End, by Robin McKinley

From the jacket: “All the creatures of the forest and field and riverbank knew the infant was special. She was the princess, spirited away from the evil fairy Pernicia on her name-day. But the curse was cast: Some unknown time in the future Rosie would prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and fall into a poisoned sleep from which no one could rouse her.”

My take: In this feminist retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, author Robin McKinley takes the power away from the prince and puts it squarely in the hands of the cursed princess.

Rosie can remember no other life before coming to live with Aunt and Katriona, two fairies living in a remote corner of the kingdom. Aunt, she has been told, came and fetched her when her parents died suddenly just a week after Katriona returned home from an ill-fated naming ceremony of the year-old princess. She has lived with the two of them ever since, running in the forest, hanging out with the local iron monger, and conversing with the local animals — a rare gift, even among families with fairies in it as strong as her aunt and cousin.

What they have not told her is that she is not their kin, but the nation’s princess in hiding. Katriona, in fact, ran off with her in the minutes after a dark fairy capped off a list of useless fairy godparent gifts (following the trend of long eyelashes and extraordinary embroidery skill) with a death threat. Aided by the animals of the land, who assist her in finding milk, Katriona drags the baby across the kingdom, taking three months to lug Rosie home to her aunt.

Believing their princess to be in a secure location with her mother and aided by a bit of glamourizing magic, the townfolk have no reason to doubt Rosie is who the fairies say she is (although a few nastily suggest Katriona might be the girl’s mother, rather than her cousin). And neither does Rosie, who grows up independent, self-confident, and capable, generally unfettered by the gifts her godparents gave her so many years before.

That is until the final year before the princess and Rosie turn 21, the age by which Pernicia swears she will be killed. With the kingdom seemingly under attack by negative magic and its people desperate for the heir to the throne to appear, Rosie’s past is about to knock on her door and throw her life into disarray. And that’s provided she isn’t murdered by a magical curse first.

Spindle’s End is one of those stories where you’re glad to have read it nearly as soon as it begins. The core elements of the original story remain intact — princess, fairies, evil, spindle, ignorance, sleep, briars, a “prince” and his “kiss” to awaken the main character, and buckets of true love — but it is made real by a three-generation cast of kick-ass women, several pretty awesome guys, and communicative animals, as well as a quest to keep things lively.

If you have read any of McKinley’s other works, I highly suggest this one as their equal. If you have read and enjoyed other feminist retellings, such as Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon or The Firebrand, I think this is far less convoluted a retelling and gets its pro-girl message across without throwing out the contributions of men to society and the story. If you have a daughter or a granddaughter or a friend or a self in need of reminding just how capable and wonderful they can be solely by being who they are, then sit them down with a copy of this book right now. They’ll thank you for it.

Pages: 422

This book fills the fairy tale category of the Once upon a Time VI reading challenge.

Hatchet, by Gary Paulsen

From the jacket: “Thirteen-year-old Brian Robeson is on his way to visit his father when the single-engine plane in which he is flying crashes. Suddenly, Brian finds himself alone in the Canadian wilderness with nothing but a tattered Windbreaker and the hatchet his mother gave him as a present — and the dreadful secret that has been tearing him apart since his parents’ divorce. But now Brian has no time for anger, self-pity, or despair — it will take all his know-how and determination, and more courage than he knew he possessed, to survive.”

My take: When Mikaiya said that she was going to finish off the remaining children’s book readalong we started two summers ago, I figured it was time for me to dust off my unread portion of the list, too. I started with this one because it seemed like it was long enough to be worth taking with me for Metro reading.

Hatchet was an odd book for me. Let me start out by saying I liked it better than I thought I would. It was well-written and the main character of Brian was a realistic, nerdy kid who grew up in the city watching a lot of PBS programming. He’s devastated by his parents’ divorce and by a secret that he believes precipitated it — but that all slips to a level of secondary import when the pilot taking him to his father’s for the summer dies and the plane crashes, leaving him alone to survive in the wilderness.

In the beginning, he does not keep his cool. He does what any of us would do in that situation — he freaks out. But after he realizes that freaking out does not fix the situation, nor does it lessen the energy that will be required to address the situation when he again focuses on it, he starts to use logic and his primitive instincts to cope with the many problems before him — including finding shelter and food.

While I liked the book, it did feel oddly dated. Written in 1987, the book predates the internet and cell phones. That’s fine, because a cell phone would not have been much help to Brian after the plane crashed, and public television substitutes for Wikipedia in shaping his knowledge. However, what really made it seem dated to me were the parts of the novel dealing with his parents’ divorce. They felt very afterschool special-y to me, in a sotto voce “poor Brian … his parents split up” kind of way.

Now, it could just be that I have been a long time away from books that focus on this issue, and that they do, indeed, still deal with divorce in the way they would have when I was a kid (when the book was written, for what it’s worth). In which case the book will not phase modern kids at all. If, however, I’m right, and current authors have found a more accepting way of dealing with the subject, then modern readers may find that aspect a bit off-putting. I don’t think it will affect their general enjoyment of the book or their appreciation of the transformation Brian undergoes, but it’s probably something to keep in mind when recommending it to younger readers.

Pages: 186

Daughter of Smoke and Bone, by Laini Taylor

From the jacket: “Around the world, black handprints are appearing on doorways, scorched there by winged strangers who have crept through a slit in the sky. In a dark and dusty shop, a devil’s supply of human teeth grows dangerously low. And in the tangled lanes of Prague, a young art student is about to be caught up in a brutal otherworldly war. Meet Karou. She fills her sketchbooks with monsters that may or may not be real; she speaks many languages — not all of them human; and her bright blue hair actually grows out of her head that color. Who is she? That is the question that haunts her, and she’s about to find out.”

My take: Karou lives a double life. By day, she is an art student in Prague, hanging out with her best friend, Zuzana, at the Poison Kitchen, filling her sketchbook with pictures of fantastical creatures. But at night, she serves as the international courier for the real-life versions of the characters she draws — Brimstone, the Wishmonger, who trades wishes for teeth; chimaera Issa, Yasri, and Twiga; and tiny, bird-like Kishmish — the only family she has ever known.

It’s a stressful life for a young woman, but she’s trying to balance it all until an assignment in Marrakesh goes seriously wrong. An angel named Akiva, sent to destroy Brimstone and all those who help him, catches Karou doing business with a broken-down scholar and chases her back to Brimstone’s door, but not before seriously wounding her. She, in turn, discovers a terrible secret of Brimstone, who throws her out of his lair. But when Kishmish arrives at her apartment carrying the wishbone Brimstone has always worn, she knows something is seriously wrong.

Karou will travel the world and face all manner of evil to find out what has happened to her family. But when she finds out all of what has transpired and when Akiva tracks her to Prague, will she find the inner strength and hope to carry on?

This book got a lot of buzz last year when it came out, which I expect will be revived later this fall when the second novel in the series is released. Karou is a tough chick and an appealingly damaged heroine. She’s the sort of character you don’t actually want to be, but the kind you wouldn’t mind being the best friend of. It made me want to visit Prague, vividly described, as were all the settings in the book. It was original and compelling — and I found it hard to put it down — but I think in the end that the story was so dark that I liked it less than I had hoped I would. Not, of course, that that will keep me from giving the sequel a chance.

Pages: 418

This book fills the fantasy category of the Once upon a Time VI reading challenge.

The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green

From the jacket: “Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel’s story is about to be completely rewritten.”

My take: Hazel Lancaster, age 16, knows she’s dying. She’s come back from the edge before, from the moment when her parents held a vigil at her bedside believing each breath would be her last. And most days she’s, well, okay with it would be wrong, but as okay with it as you can be when you’re supposed to be counting the rest of your life in decades and when dating and college decisions are supposed to be the biggest hurdles in your immediate future. But she’d rather live out her life in the small circle she’s created — hanging out with her folks, taking classes at the local community college, and enduring the treacly support group sessions her mom makes her attend — than create new relationships that will only cause pain when they inevitably end.

So it’s highly ironic when the support group that her parents force her to go to — where the heretofore high point had been exchanging heavy sighs with half-blind Isaac at every excruciating moment of cheese — brings her into contact with hot ex-basketball player and cancer survivor Augustus Waters, who immediately begins a flirtatious relationship by comparing her to Natalie Portman in V for Vendetta.

They bond over their favorite books (his is a sci-fi series with a high body count featuring a hero who routinely escapes from near death adventures; hers is a high-art YA book about a girl with cancer that ends mid-sentence). They flirt. They play video games. They try to help Isaac deal with the loss of his sight and his girlfriend. They establish relationship boundaries and then attempt skirmishes at them to see how well they hold. (Augustus agrees to friendship, but no one has any doubt that he wants Hazel for a girlfriend. Hazel doesn’t want to cause him pain when she dies, so she insists that they can only be friends.) And then, “I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”

If the book, like life, is doomed to follow a single path that we, as readers, know it must take from shortly after the outset, it does so compassionately and with the knowledge that just because an ending has been pre-ordained does not mean that we can’t mark the milestones, enjoy the company, or find some answers along the way.

Pages: 318

Memorial Day weekend kicks off the beginning of the summer season, and the weather is clearly well-aware with high temperatures expected to be in the 90s.

In between trying to remain cool, I plan to:

• Finish the Mosaica socks. The last round of Sock Madness starts in the morning. I bought more white yarn, as it was clear I was going to run out in the home stretch.
• Read The Enchantress, which came out on Tuesday. I am so looking forward to this series finale. I may well take my signed copy of the book, a thermos of tea, and our camping hammock up to the park and read it beneath a tree. [As a side note, if Michael Scott does a reading anywhere near where you live, I suggest going. He is my favorite author to see in person — and it is not, as he suggested, because of the lilt. It’s because he really takes the time to listen to the questions the kids ask him and thoughtfully considers his answer to each one. And when he runs out of time to answer them publicly, he makes sure that kids know they’re welcome to come up and ask him while he signs books.]

• Have a picnic with John and Nicole, who arrived home from Albany too late tonight for our planned excursion to the Yards.
• Pick more strawberries and peas at the garden.
• Go swimming. The pools open for the year tomorrow.
• Make popsicles. I didn’t get around to my planned trial last weekend.
• Attend a barbecue. Megan has proposed one on Monday, and I hope to cross the Potomac in pursuit of fake meat cooked over a contained fire.
• Go to a movie. There are several to choose from.
• Do a few chores: laundry, change the sheets, put away the winter clothes (the summer ones got taken care of last weekend).
• Drink strawberry daiquiris. Because isn’t that what summer is all about?

What are you hoping to do this weekend?

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