A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. 2012 year marks the 50th anniversary of one of my all-time favorite books. There was even a whole blog tour about it, to go along with 50th Anniversary Commemorative Edition. This has yummy extras, such as a brief bio and memories of L’Engle by her granddaughter, photos, a facsimile of the manuscript for the first chapter with corrections, and L’Engle’s Newbery acceptance speech.
I asked our youth fiction librarian to buy the special edition and went on hold for the CD book (not a new edition). The CD book came in first, and I listened to only a little bit before deciding that it wasn’t for me. It’s narrated by Barbara Caruso, whose narrations of the Anne of Green Gables books I have very much enjoyed. I loved her old-fashioned accent for those books, but even though Wrinkle is somewhat old at this point, one of the things that I love about it is that it feels contemporary. Having the old-fashioned voices took that feeling right out of it. Also, while I freely admit that I can’t create as many character voices as, say, Jim Dale or Katherine Kellgren, it was quite disconcerting to have Meg sound exactly the same as Anne and Charles Wallace speak with the same voice as Davy. My boy is excited to hear the story, too, but I’m not sure that seven is quite old enough to grasp the concepts behind it, and at this point, seeing as I wasn’t enjoying the narration, I might wait until I have time to read it to him myself.
When I was ten, I got into a fierce argument with my best friend about which was better, Wrinkle or A Wind in the Door and A Swiftly Tilting Planet. I had not read the second and third books yet, but loved Wrinkle so much that I wouldn’t believe her that the second two were as good or better. I saw her point when I finally did get around to reading them, though Mari Ness’s thoughts on A Swiftly Tilting Planet felt like unwelcome disillusion, with criticisms of the book that I couldn’t really disagree with, despite having loved it so hard for since childhood. Though Robin McKinley’s Beauty still has to be my most re-read comfort book of all time, I am likely to pick up any of the first three time trilogy books during stressful times.
In case you haven’t read or don’t remember the book, here’s a brief summary of the plot: prickly teenager Meg Murry and her genius kid brother, Charles Wallace, meet up with the popular but surprisingly nice and very smart older boy Calvin in the woods near their property. They also meet with some strange old women who are clearly making a joke of pretending to be witches, but just as clearly really are much more than ordinary humans. These three – Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which (much to Microsoft Word’s chagrin, I am leaving the periods off of the “Mrs”, British-style, as L’Engle intended) – send the three children off to find Mr. Murry, a physicist who went missing while researching the tesseract some years ago. This journey that takes them to many other planets, including ones where the inhabitants are sightless but still have better knowledge of the universe than humans. They see a dark shadow of evil over earth and even more heavily over the planet of Camazotz, where Mr. Murry is being held captive by a disembodied brain called IT. In the end, it’s up to Meg to save the day, Meg who has been used to relying on Charles Wallace for comfort. There’s also a grand mix of theology (implicitly Christian) and science, both real and invented. I love the strong and memorable characters, Meg’s journey to independence and acceptance of herself, and the easy relationship between science and religion, increasingly rare these days. Some people may find the science of the tesseract a little fuzzy, and others say that Charles Wallace’s character could be a little more fleshed out. They may be right, but this is still a book that does so very much well, with a story and characters that stand on their own and give plenty to chew on afterwards. L’Engle’s world is one where the Dark is real and ever-present, filled with the knowledge that fight will be hard and still worth fighting, that love (to say it tritely) makes the world go around. Perhaps most importantly to my adolescent self, it shows an unpopular girl (in other ways rather unlike me) turning out ok and learning to accept herself.
Cross-posted to http://library-mama.dreamwidth.org and http://sapphireone.livejournal.com .
Linger by Maggie Stiefvater. Read by Dan Bittner, Pierce Cravens, Emma Galvin, & Jenna Lamia. There isn’t really a way to tell this story without spoilers for the first book. In the first book, Sam, a young werewolf, and Grace, bitten as a child but somehow never turned, fall in love and risk it all to find a way to stay together, as Sam will otherwise just turn into a wolf and stay that way forever. A new werewolf, Jack, also attempts a cure but dies instead. And Sam is horrified to see the leader of the pack and Sam’s adopted father, Beck, turn up with a truck full of new werewolves to ensure a future for the pack. 
Everyone is waiting for warm weather to turn wolves human again and answer mountains of questions. Are Beck and Ulrich really permanently wolves? Did the new wolves, including Grace’s friend Olivia, survive the winter? Will the pack be able to survive the impact of Cole’s turbulent past? Will Sam and Grace remain undiscovered, and what will her parents’ reaction be if they find out? I was really wishing that I had more time in the car (something I rarely wish) so that I could finish this sooner. Stiefvater has for me a perfect combination of good characters, compelling plot, just detailed enough world, and beautiful writing. She’s able to make me believe that two teenagers could fall in love and know it’s forever, even when most of the time in real life, I’d advocate for waiting a bit longer. I love the shifting theories about how being a werewolf works – rules that, like real-life science, exist but aren’t easy to nail down. This is the middle volume, and so of course you’ll want to start at the beginning and end at the end. But even with all of that against it, this was a story that grabbed me and hasn’t let me go yet. I recommend this trilogy to anyone who enjoyed Twilight, especially Team Jacob, as supernatural romance done better. 
Overcoming Dyslexia by Sally Shaywitz, M.D. Shaywitz is a Yale doctor who has been involved in dyslexia research for decades, including writing an article about dyslexia that was published in Smithsonian magazine in the mid-1990s. This is a thick and comprehensive book about the history, nature and treatment of dyslexia. On the one hand, very good information, at least considering that it’s now nearly a decade old. On the other hand, the text was so dense, with tiny type and frequent fillers about the marvels of modern science, that I found myself wanting to hurl the book across the room and tell Shaywitz to get to the point already. The revolutionary teaching method promised in the subtitle was not introduced until page 172, especially amazing given that dyslexia is often inherited, making it very likely that a dyslexic parent would be trying to muddle through this. /end rant
Dead End in Norvelt by Jack Gantos. It’s 1962 in Norvelt, a Pennsylvania town founded as a self-sufficient homestead community by Eleanor Roosevelt in the Depression. Now, in 1962, the original residents are slowly dying off – all women, as the men died of black lung from working in the mines much earlier.When I first started this book, about a boy named Jack Gantos growing up in the same town as author Jack Gantos, I was prepared for another thoughtful and moving but ultimately somewhat boring book about growing up in a slow, long-ago time. The start felt a tad slow to me, as young Jack gets in trouble for accidentally firing a Japanese WWII rifle that he hadn’t thought was loaded at the local drive-in screen. One of his major entertainments seems to watching war movies from his yard using binoculars. Maybe not boring for boys, but boring for me. The tension ramps up for Jack as his father orders him to mow down his mother’s treasured field of corn for feeding the poor, with the upshot that Jack is grounded for the summer. His big project is digging a bomb shelter and a runway for the old fighter plane his father is trying to fix up. This plane and destruction building the runway causes are symptomatic of the tension between Jack’s mother, who was born in Norvelt and loves it, and his father, who wasn’t and who considers it a dead-end town to be escaped. The only time Jack is allowed to leave the house is to help one of the original residents, the former town nurse, Miss Volker, type obituaries of the others as they pass, as Miss Volker is too arthritic to do so. Long ago, she promised to marry Mr. Spizz, the tricycle-riding town sheriff, when all of these ladies were dead, and he never lets her forget it. Additional color comes from the nosebleeds Jack gets whenever he is frightened, from his best friend Bunny, a fierce Small Person who is the daughter of the local mortician, and the unexpected death by truck of a strange Hells Angel. All of these elements weave together into a story that has lots of over-the-top gross humor combined with nostalgia and sorrow at the ending of a utopia as well as good old-fashioned kid fun. Spoiler – the old ladies turn out to be dying of unnatural causes, and somehow, this is mostly treated as something to laugh at. This treatment makes the book lighter for the grade-school readers it’s aimed at, but I still found the casualness the murders were treated with a little horrifying. For those who can get past this, this book has enough excitement to pull a reader in as well as enough meat to leave the reader with something to think about. 
Uniquely Gifted by Keisa Kay and Beverly A. Trail “Twice exceptional” is a term I’ve newly become acquainted with. It refers to people (often specifically children) who are both gifted and have some sort of disability like a learning disability, ADD or ADHD, or sensory integration issues… among many other possibilities. My friend Dr. M. actually told me to look for the term. You can Google lots, of course, but sometimes a book is nice, and this is the book that I found that I could interloan easily. It’s divided into three sections, with lots of essays from parents and kids, teachers, and administrators each talking about their experience with (or as) twice exceptional students. This book came out a dozen years ago, and that 2000 copyright makes a big difference when it comes to things like finding resources on the Internet. However, educational systems change at a glacial pace, so the stories of struggles by families for support still sadly ring true, and effective methods for support will still be the same. I came to the happy conclusion that my boy is much closer to the normal range than most of the children described in this book, so that the extreme adaptations sometimes described won’t be necessary for him. Also unlike some of the horror stories here, the teachers and administrators at his school are all very supportive so far and commited to helping him reach his full potential. However, I have quite a few friends whose kids do fall into the twice exceptional spectrum, for whom this book might be useful. 
The Steampunk Bible by Jeff Vandermeer. I was at work looking through a list of upcoming nonfiction Steampunk titles, without any thought of being able to buy them for any of my library collections. Then I wondered where The Steampunk Bible would actually fall. And – score! 809.387, in the Dewey 800s (literature), one of the areas for which I do the purchasing. Even more exciting, it appeared on our weekly front-page of the Web site carousel of new purchases. That generated enough demand that I had to buy a second copy, a moment of geeky librarian happiness. 
12 Things to Do Before You Crash and Burn by James Proimos Herc was nicknamed Hercules by his father when he was six. But his father has just died in a plane crash. He was a popular self-help expert, loved by his audience, but a terrible father. Herc, definitely up there on the difficult teen scale, gives this eulogy at the funeral: “He was an ass. My father was a complete and total ass.” Following this, and no doubt further trying incidents at home, his mother ships Herc off to his uncle in Baltimore for two weeks. In the train on the way there, he sits by a Beautiful, Unattainable Woman who is reading Winnie the Pooh. When she leaves the book behind, he determines to track her down to return it. Meanwhile, his uncle, busy working long hours, gives him, like the Hercules of legend, twelve tasks to accomplish: Choose a mission. Find the best pizza joint in town. Clean out the garage. Muck the stalls at Riverbend farm. Read a complete book under a tree. Go to a place of worship and pray. Go on seven job interviews. Spend the day thinking big thoughts. Write them down. Eat a meal with a stranger. Make your uncle something. Recite a poem at Blake’s Coffee shop Midnight Poetry Reading. Complete your mission. Somehow, the force of his uncle’s personality is enough that Herc goes with it, forming most of the book. 
The Astonishing Secret of Awesome Man by Michael Chabon. Illustrated by Jake Parker. Awesome Man himself takes through a day in the life of… Awesome Man. He describes his costumes, his powers (the “Awesome Power Grip,” aka hugging), and his sidekick dog, Moscowitz. We see Awesome Man beating villains like Radioactive Jell-o from Outer Space and Dr. Von Evil. And then, alas, Awesome Man is beaten by his arch nemesis. He must flee to his secret fortress, a small patch of suburbia in an undersea bubble. After some deep reflection huddled on his bed, Awesome Man realizes that the problem is that he’s out of positrons. He needs to eat to regain his strength! But once on the job again, will he ever stop long enough to reveal his secret identity to the reader? The ending is undeniably sweet. The bright, smooth pictures have occasional retro-feeling dot fills, giving a hint of old-school comics. There are just enough details to let you discover new details in subsequent readings. This is ideal for superhero-obsessed preschoolers and early elementary kids, with just the right blend of action and innocence.
Fabric-by-Fabric One-Yard Wonders by Rebecca Yaker and Patricia Hoskins. Here is an ideal sewing book for busy people. This book features stylish and fairly simple sewing projects with just one yard of fabric (plus notions & sometimes a contrast fabric). It starts with great detailed general sewing instructions, including what type of foot, needle & stitch length to use for different fabric types. Full-sized patterns are included for most projects; some simpler designs just have measuring instructions. From there, it’s divided up by fabric type, each fabric including a short introduction with more on how best to sew and later care for it. Fabrics include lightweight cottons, quilting-weight cottons, home dec, flannel, woven pile, coated fabrics, fleece, knits, and wool & felt. In general, the projects included lots of bags, little kid clothes, shorter women’s tops, some home décor items, and several toys. The projects I thought were the coolest included a hot pad apron; the flirty skirty; a quilted 8-bottle tote; a swaddle blanket with ties; the multi-use bucket; the kid’s comfy chair; a real kid-sized arm chair; the monster-wear hat & mittens; a superhero cape & shorts; a stuffed pig which gives birth to piglets who then attach to velcro teats to nurse; the speedy ruffle scarf; and the last-minute tunic. The ones I’d be most likely to make – mostly simpler and things I can’t buy – include the seafarer’s tricorn hat; a flat-screen TV cover. The book had lovely layout and design, with large photos and diagrams included for all the projects, in addition to the patterns. Smaller illustrations demonstrate techniques needed for particular projects. Coming from the knitting world, I wished that each project had included a source for the fabric, since for many of the simpler designs, the print will make or break the project. There was a list of websites for fabric sources at the end, though the URLs were missing from several of these, and there was no way to tell even which designer the featured fabrics came from. The projects came from many different designers, whose bios and blog addresses were also featured at the end. I’m not running out to buy it, but I am keeping it in mind for when I finish those sewing projects I bought fabric for in September.
Leave It to Chance. Volume 1: Shaman’s Rain. by James Robinson and Paul Smith with Jeromy Cox. “Why aren’t there more Nancy Drew-style books anymore?” the creators of this book asked themselves, and set out to create one. Well, kind of. These people are comics types, so this is a graphic novel. And they seem to like fantasy, too (fine by me.) Chance is the 14-year-old daughter of a famous modern-day magician whose job is protecting the town of Devil’s Echo. She thinks she should be learning to take over the family business, but her father, shattered by the loss of his wife several years back, has decided that only boys should do magic. Refreshingly, Chance’s preferred clothes are pretty gender-neutral, so that even though her gender is central to her motivation, there isn’t a lot of girliness that would turn boys off of reading it. That’s great, because Chance’s adventures are top-notch. She frees a small dragon from being sent to a possibly hostile dimension. Naturally, he escapes, and chasing him down leads her straight into trouble, as well as a cute and powerful sidekick. Chance finds a dead body, perhaps related to the vicious mayoral campaign underway; overhears a gathering of very disgruntled sewer goblins; and decides to try to locate the kidnapped daughter of a local shaman. She teams up with a Hispanic female police officer and a reporter, and ends up solving bunches of interrelated mysteries while always managing to stay just out of danger herself. The art style is clear and vigorous and shows plainly that Devil’s Echo is diverse in the normal human sense in addition to its magical denizens. This is just right for elementary-aged kids looking for straight-up excitement. While there are definitely shady characters, there isn’t any graphic violence and our heroine always manages to squeak out of even the tightest situation without harm. My love brought this home from the library for us, and as it’s out of print, that may be the easiest way to get it in general. There are two more volumes that I haven’t seen, but may yet track down.
alibrarymama 