fiction

“The Day You Begin” by Jacqueline Woodson and Rafael López

December 30, 2023 by Sonia Connolly 1 Comment

Spanish title: El Día En Que Descubres Quién Eres! (The Day You Discover Who You Are!)

Recommended to me by: the Little Free Library down the street

What a gorgeous, loving picture book. “There will be times when you walk into a room, and no one there is quite like you.” Full of colorful flowers and multi-cultural children, the illustrations contrast their inner liveliness with their feelings of disconnection at school.

On the cover, a brown-skinned girl with tightly curled hair emerges through a partly opened door that is marked like a ruler. Later, a Korean girl protects her “too strange” lunch from the other children’s stares at a cafeteria table that is also a ruler. A boy excluded from playground games leans against a tree drawn with ruler markings. When two of the children make friends, they swing from a tree drawn with bark.

Highly recommended for children who might not quite fit in, and for adults who remember that experience. It made me cry, both times I read through it, and I’m taking it right back to the Little Free Library for someone else to find.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Wizards at War” by Diane Duane

September 5, 2023 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: Young Wizards series #8

Recommended to me by: a friend

I saw a recommendation for this book right before a trip, and found an ebook at the library to download and take with me for airplane reading. It was enjoyable in that context. I had read the first few books in the series a long time ago.

The more I thought about it after finishing it, the more dubious I got. It is a Christian allegory that ends up being (perhaps unintentionally?) anti-Semitic in the parallels it draws. Over the years, I have lost my taste for personified powers and angsty teens, but I am far older than the target audience.

Available at bookshop.org.

“The Boxcar Children” by Gertrude Chandler Warner

August 12, 2023 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Recommended to me by: Finding it in a Little Free Library

I look in all the little free libraries I pass, but I’m only drawn to take books home if I recognize them. I don’t remember if I read this series as a child, but I certainly recognized it.

I started reading with some trepidation, but despite being written in the 1920s, this book has largely escaped being visited by the Suck Fairy. The children seem to be in the most danger while running away at the beginning of the book, but then settle into creating a home for themselves in an abandoned boxcar in the woods. The oldest boy walks into town and finds work helping a kindly family. The older girl and younger girl and boy have adventures like damming a small nearby creek without mishaps. There are some divisions of work by gender roles, but both the boys and the girls are confident, capable, and active.

The book avoids being overtly racist or homophobic by not having any Black or LGBTQ characters, which makes sense in the small town context. Of course a family of four Black kids running away would have had a much harder time and less help from the adults they encounter.

Recommended for kids, or adults taking a walk down memory lane. I enjoyed sitting on the back step and reading it, and then returned it to the Little Free Library where I found it so someone else can enjoy it.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Kingfisher” by Patricia A. McKillip

June 28, 2023 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

I am a longtime McKillip fan. I remember finding “Riddle-Master of Hed” on a used book rack as a young teen. When I finished reading it, I held the closed book in my hands, turned it over, and started reading it again to see all the connections I had missed the first time. Her “Forgotten Beasts of Eld” was my favorite book for many years.

Over the years I wandered away from automatically reading everything she published. The same themes and characters seemed remixed in each book, and the stories floated along vaguely without making sense.

I picked up Kingfisher when it popped up in a library search for “T.Kingfisher”. It’s a more recent book, from 2016. The King Arthur underpinnings give the book a strong structure, and the way she fixes the fore-doomed parts of the story is very satisfying.

Like with “Riddle-Master of Hed,” I turned the book over and started again when I finished it. It rewarded re-reading with more connections with the King Arthur story, and more details that I skimmed over the first time.

There is a strong theme of missing parents, and repairing broken connections. Some of the familiar themes were missing – no musicians! Some were there – cauldrons and castle kitchens cooking feasts. Shape changing. Learning magical skills quickly and easily. I liked that perceptiveness was a valued magical skill.

On the positive side, there are strong, competent women knights. On the negative side, all the important women characters are tall, willowy, and have light hair and eyes. A couple of incidental characters without speaking parts are described as plump. All the relationships are heterosexual. Everyone seems to be white. Even the man described as having “lamb’s wool” hair is also described as having pale colored hair. I would have hoped for better from a book written in 2016.

Recommended with those caveats.

Available at bookshop.org.

“The English Understand Wool” by Helen DeWitt

May 3, 2023 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Recommended to me by: Andy

A story in brief chapters of a child raised by very wealthy very upperclass very international parents, and how she copes with a sudden change in her circumstances.

The story seems light, superficial, until it comes to its sudden, satisfying end and it becomes clearer how the apparently superficial details fit together.

It is written in a distancing style. Recommended if you like that, and/or if you like reading about how people behave when they have really a lot of money and are trying to meet their own standard for good behavior.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Katarína” by Kathryn Winter

April 16, 2023 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Recommended to me by: Folk dancing with the author

I was chatting with Kathryn at a folk dance party, and explained how my grandparents had to leave Germany because of the Holocaust. She brightened in recognition and said, “I was a hidden child during the Holocaust.” Like Anne Frank, but she lived. I said, “That must have been hard!” She said no, at the time she thought the work camps were like summer camps.

Her lightly fictionalized memoir is beautifully written, a series of child’s-eye vignettes full of details about life in Slovakia at the time. It is also harrowing to read. Kathryn shows difficult events and physical and emotional pain in response, but doesn’t dwell on it. The child Katarína feels both joy and sorrow strongly, and keeps moving forward with fierce resilience. She survived through both inner strength and luck, through care from others and a loving response to care.

Highly recommended. In this time of rising fascism we need to understand fascism’s detailed cruelty to a child. This happened in living memory. We are well along on the road to it happening again. It needs to stop.

Available via Biblio.com