Dead End in Norvelt, by Jack Gantos

From the jacket: “Being grounded has never been so deadly! Melding the entirely true and the wildly fictional, Dead End in Norvelt portrays an incredible two months for a kid named Jack Gantos, whose plans for vacation excitement are shot down when he is ‘grounded for life’ by his feuding parents. But plenty of adventure is coming Jack’s way once his mother loans him out to help a feisty old neighbor with an unusual activity involving the newly dead and the long departed … a motorcycle gang and a man on a trike … as well as twisted promises and possibly murder.”

My take: This middle-grade book was a quick, but enjoyable summer read that I polished off on in a single evening en route to Salt Lake City (accompanied by two cds of music my dad put together highlighting the hits of 1962, the year the book takes place). While the fictionalized Jack Gantos is figuring out who he is and what he wants to over the course of the book, author Jack Gantos is schooling us in the history of Norvelt, Pennsylvania, a town commissioned by the federal government as part of the New Deal. The town consisted of 250 homesteads (sold to families based on an application system) intended to offer subsistence farming to miners who’d been laid off during the Depression. The first lady insisted that each house be outfitted with electricity, interior plumbing, and even laundry facilities, making her the patron saint of the village and inspiring its name.

But 30 years later, when the story is set, Norvelt is hurting. Jobs are scarce. Homes stand abandoned and residents have died off or fled in search of work.

At the outset of the summer Jack Gantos turns 12, he “borrows” the unloaded Japanese rifle his father brought home from the war, pretends to take aim at the enemies on the screen of the drive-in across the valley, and pulls the trigger. When the gun fires, both Jack and his mother are shocked and Jack finds himself grounded for the summer. His only parole? Helping his elderly neighbor, Miss Voelker, whose hands are so arthritic that she needs to soak them in a hot paraffin bath to get any use out of them.

Miss Voelker has retired as town nurse, but remains Norvelt’s medical examiner and obituary writer, jobs she was tasked with by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt herself at town’s founding. Her recollection for local lore is unparalleled and her ability to tie local lives to world history (in those obituaries) impressive, if somewhat … elastic.

No longer able to type the obituaries herself, she first enlists Jack, who suffers from chronic nosebleeds and timidity, to do them for her, then later asks him to chauffeur her around town to the homes of the recently departed, who seem to be dropping with alarming frequency this year.

Jack, though hesitant, is glad to escape home whenever he can, as his parents seem perpetually angry at each other and at him and at the stresses of living in a down-on-its-luck town that’s fading away (literally: the houses are being towed elsewhere). His best friend, Bunny, daughter of the town mortician, is annoyed with his inability to do things with her (including playing on their already several-players-short baseball team). Summertime when you’re a kid lasts forever after all.

Dead End in Norvelt won the Newbery Medal and the Scott O’Dell Award in 2012, which surprised me, because at first the book seems awfully light for such prestigious honors. But upon reflection, its narrator’s casual style and humor mask exactly how much history is packed between its covers, making it an excellent hook for getting kids interested in American history without making it obvious; rest assured they (and you) will be entertained and effortlessly educated by this book.

Pages: 384 (including appendices)

My energies have been devoted elsewhere recently, which ought to mean that I’ve been getting lots of writing done, but what that really means is that I’ve been watching a lot of tv with nothing in my hands. That’s not usually a good sign, although I’m willing to cut myself a little slack due to the combination of finishing two projects last week and allergies running unabated until today (when we switched allergy medications from what was effective during the spring to what we used last year, allowing us to breathe again without huge bouts of coughing, sneezing, and other cold-mimicking symptoms). Nonetheless, this weekend will see me finish off this sock I was supposed to work on in August:

I have 24 more rows of pattern (two repeats) and then an inch or so of ribbing before it’s time to bind off. While I am perfectly capable of knitting my socks up or down, I really prefer how speedy the post-heel knitting of top-down socks generally are with patterning on at most half the stitches and a decrease in overall quantity at the end. It just feels faster to get the leg out of the way first. This leg feels like it’s been in progress forever.

Once I’m done with this, it’s back to my shawl and my years-on-the-needles Hey Teach! sweater. I’m also going to cast on a new sock project or two. That will be exciting.

Reading has been a bit slow all summer long, much to my disappointment. But I’m meandering my way through Kathy Reichs’ Virals (the first in the series that focuses on the niece of forensic anthropologist Temperence Brennan) and I began the first Harry Potter again this week, with all the hoopla about the arrival of September 1, the day every year when the Hogwarts Express whisked young witches and wizards away for the beginning of term.

Waiting in the wings is Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior and A.S. King’s Ask the Passengers, which made its way off my to-read list and onto my request-from-the-library list when author Eliot Schrefer raved about it on Twitter.

(Yarning along with Ginny)

Designed by Emily of Emily’s Reading Room

Back in June, when I was participating in the Armchair BEA, a number of events and blogs had giveaways associated with them. I am a sucker for a contest, and so I entered some of them. And I won a few of them!

Books have been rolling in for the last six weeks and wanted to pull them all together (a little belatedly) and share the bounty with you:

First, were the prizes from the Armchair BEA folks themselves:

From them, I won Dead End in Norvelt by Jack Gantos (donated by Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group) and ebooks of J.B. Lynn’s The Hitwoman Gets Lucky and The Hitwoman and The Family Jewels (donated by the author).

I also won a couple contests from book bloggers:

From Caribou’s Mom, I won a Beth Kephart prize package. I was allowed to pick any of Beth’s books up to $30 in value, and I greedily chose three of them: Small Damages, Undercover, and Dr. Radway’s Sarsaparilla Resolvent. (How can you not opt for a book with “sarsaparilla” in the title?)

And from Always with a Book, I won Alison Atlee’s The Typewriter Girl.

Thank you to all of the prize donors and book bloggers who generously offered giveaways and picked me. I am truly grateful and am looking forward to reading all these exciting books.

I’m still reading and knitting the same things I was two weeks ago, although I’m further along with all of them.

Here’s my Éclair Shawl:

(Did you know, by the way, that éclair is the French word for lightning and that the pastry is so named because the filling resembles it when piped in?)

I’m working the second panel of six or seven, now. It’s slow going, but isn’t too difficult, except for making sure that I don’t shortchange myself rows.

I’m still reading Just One Day and A Monstrous Regiment of Women, although I’m now 2/3 and 1/3 through them, respectively. I’m enjoying both books, although they share little in common thus far, except maybe a desire for self-determination on the part of the main characters. I’m also listening to Penny Marshall read her memoir, My Mother Was Nuts. The beginning was a little confusing, but became less so when I took my iPod off of its shuffle songs setting. I was having such a hard time understanding why her friend was doing heroin in middle school… When listened to in correct chapter order, the narrative is laugh-out-loud funny, and Marshall’s delivery is done in her trademark deadpan. The book needed a stronger editor (there’s a lot of unnecessary repetition), but so far that’s my only complaint.

Now that I’m not watching hours of Tour coverage every night, I expect my reading will pick back up again.

Check out what others are knitting and reading at Ginny’s blog.

Every Wednesday, Ginny at Small Things hosts a Yarn Along:

Two of my favorite things are knitting and reading, and the evidence of this often shows up in my photographs. I love seeing what other people are knitting and reading as well. So, what are you knitting or crocheting right now? What are you reading?

This is an appalling picture of my current knitting project in low-light, low-battery (and thus flash-less) conditions:

The zigzaggy thing is the start of a shawl. Specifically, Frankie Brown’s Lightning Shawl. The yarn is Crazy Zauberball and is much brighter than this picture would suggest. The needles are US5 straights, although I continue to second-guess the size choice. The project is my Tour de France knit. I started yesterday. The Tour ends in ten days. Yes, I know the odds are stacked against me. However, what this really means is that a new shawl is on the needles because the last one is off them! Stop back on Friday for pictures.

The books I’m currently reading are Gayle Forman’s Just One Day, the story of a recent high school grad on a European tour who randomly decides to visit Paris with a guy she barely knows. It got lots of good reviews over the winter, and I’m taking part in a French-themed blog event (Hey! I’m taking part in a French-themed blog event. I’ll tell you more about it later in the week!) throughout July, so this seemed a good fit.

The other book is The Monstrous Regiment of Women, the second novel in the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes mystery series by Laurie King. It’s one of the ten books I hope to read this summer, and one I’m considering taking to the beach this weekend.

What are you reading? And what are on your needles?

The Once upon a Time VII reading challenge concluded last week and I’m pleased to say I exceeded my goals of five books. Here’s the first of the reviews:

The Grimm Legacy by Polly Shulman

From the jacket: “Lonely at her new school, Elizabeth takes a job at the New-York Circulating Material Repository, hoping to make new friends as well as some cash. The repository is no ordinary library. It lends out objects rather than books — everything from tea sets and hockey sticks to Marie Antoinette’s everyday wig. It’s also home to the Grimm Collection, a secret room in the basement. That’s where powerful items straight out of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales are locked away: seven-league boots, a table that produces a feast at the blink of an eye, Snow White’s stepmother’s sinister mirror that talks in riddles and has a will of its own. When the magical objects start to disappear, Elizabeth and her new friends embark on a dangerous quest to catch the thief before they’re accused of the crime themselves — or the thief captures them.”

My take: Elizabeth is lonely. Her mother has been dead for several years. Her father has remarried and has little time to spend with Elizabeth, since he’s working hard to pay for home renovations for her new step-mother and college tuition for her two step-sisters. She’s had to transfer to a new school, where defending an outcast gets her blacklisted, and she’s been forced to drop her beloved dance lessons. So when her history teacher recommends her for a job as a library page, she moves quickly to secure the position — only to find out this isn’t your standard book-lending facility. Instead, it’s a repository of items, where people can borrow items as random as fondue pots or doublets.

Joining the staff of pages (who include Anjali, Aaron, and fellow schoolmate Marc) retrieving objects from the stacks, Elizabeth soon learns that the library also includes a collection of objects that inspired the Grimm fairy tales. And that a giant bird may or may not be stalking those with access.

When Elizabeth encounters suspicious behavior, she will have to decide where her allegiances lie and whether she can be the hero of her own story.

Aside from the irksomely placed hyphen in the repository’s name and some glossing over of inconvenient details in the conclusion, this was a cute middle grade read. The concept of an object lending library (even one without fantastical holdings) is something this city-dweller can get behind wholeheartedly. In addition to the Grimm Collection, the repository is also home to the Wells Bequest, the Gibson Chrestomathy, the Lovecraft Corpus, and the Garden of Seasons, offering plenty of inspiration for additional novels. (The second one is now out and its plot summary suggests they’re companion stories, rather than a straightforward series.) But unlike some initial books, this one will stand alone nicely if you don’t feel like continuing on. The characters aren’t drawn especially deep (although I admit I’d like to know more about Elizabeth’s teacher, Mr. Mauskopf, and his giant dog), but it’s not hugely bothersome. I’d recommend checking this out of the library if you enjoy fairy tales and retellings.

Pages: 325