Here are three Cybils nominees all featuring beautiful stories of introverted kids who must reach out of themelves and their comfort zones to make things right for those around them. As a child and a teen, I had so much difficulty making friends that I often ahd trouble identifying with stories of characters who started friendless and ended up surrounded by groups of friends. Here, the characters come slowly into more self-confidence, and ending up more realistically with just one friend.
The First State of Being
by Erin Entrada Kelly
Greenwillow, 2024.
ISBN 9780063337312
Read from a library copy. Ebook and audiobook available from Libby.
As we meet Michael Rosario, he is in the middle of shoplifting some canned peaches, a favorite of his mother, to add to his secret Y2K stash. Michael has a great many worries, and the world shutting on January 1, 2000, is one of them. There’s also local bully Beejee Gibson, Michael’s general lack of friend-making skills, starting 7th grade, and his crush (secret, of course) on his 16-year-old babysitter, Gibby. So when a boy Gibby’s age wearing strange clothes shows up and starts playing with the stray cats, Michael’s first reaction is anxiety and trying to think of ways to get rid of Ridge. Mosley, the elderly neighbor who checks in on him when his mom is working (nearly always), urges patience, in case Ridge is just a kid going through a rough patch. Both Ridge’s questions and the transcripts that appear between chapters of Michael’s narrative show that Ridge is a traveler from the future – both fascinated by and completely unprepared for the 1990s. Ridge is a kid in trouble, and Michael will need to step out of his constant anxiety and work with other people to be able to help him. Michael is described as Filipino and economically insecure and lives in what appears to be a majority-minority community.
There is big, world-changing stuff going on here, and yet it feels subtle – big changes in the world made by small changes in Michael’s thinking over time. It’s a gorgeous book filled with small details that make all the difference even as they rock Michael and his world. It left me feeling like I had been touched by something beautiful.
Olivetti
by Allie Millington
Feiwel & Friends, 2024.
ISBN 978-1250326935
Read from a library copy. Ebook and audiobook available from Libby.
I learned to type on my parents’ IBM Selectric typewrite, which was simultaneously more advanced than the typewriter star of this book, and much less advanced than the computers I started using soon afterward. Still, there’s an undeniable romance to an old-school typewriter.
Olivetti, a typewriter of the same make, felt himself part of the Brindle family, holding the journal entries of its mother and primary owner, Beatrice and part of collaborative family story-telling sessions. Then he’s displaced by “the glossy show-off”, a new laptop. Even worse, one morning Beatrice throws out all of the memories she’s typed on him and takes him to a pawn shop.
Things might have ended there, except that 12-year-old Ernest, the quietest of the Brindle children, tracks Olivetti down after Beatrice doesn’t come back home. Fortunately, the pawn shop owner has a daughter Ernest’s age, Quinn,who is eager to be a friend (something Ernest hasn’t had in some years). Olivetti decides to break the typewriter code of silence by retyping Beatrice’s thoughts. Hopefully by working together, they can find Beatrice – and perhaps bring the Brindle family, divided by past trauma, back together again.Major characters read as white.
The only label Ernest is given in the book, by his dismissive older brother, is as having a “loner issue”, but his sensitivity to noise and desire to spend most of his time by himself reading a dictionary set off a neurodivergent ping for me – though that might be partly my own experience as a parent of such kids. Still, it’s clear that while Ernest has been burned by his attempts to connect with both family and friends, he cares deeply. Olivetti’s voice keeps the story from being too heavy, while Ernest gives it plenty of depth. At just under 250 pages and with a story firmly grounded in reality, this is one that could make a good classroom read-aloud as well. Highly recommended.
The Sky over Rebecca
by Matthew Fox
Union Square Kids, 2023
ISBN 978-1454951919.
Read from a library copy.
It’s a dark and snowy January in Stockholm when Kara first sees a snow angel with no footprints leading up to it. Introverted and socially awkward, Kara readily confesses to being better at observing nature on her walks and through the telescope her beloved grandfather has given her during his recent decluttering than at making friends. Still, Kara’s curiosity is piqued when she sees a girl a little older than herself in clearly inadequate clothing carrying sticks to a tiny island in the frozen lake that Kara had never noticed before. Rebecca, is slow to trust but in desperate need of help for herself and her younger brother Samuel – but Kara slowly learns that they live during World War II, and a slip in time brings them into each others’ worlds only unreliably. As she learns more of their situation, she is more and more determined to help them out of their terrible situation. Kara and major characters read as white. She lives with her single mother, who works long hours to be able to afford their apartment.
This is a lyrical and moving story of friendship, courage, love, loss, and hope, both beautiful and anchored in reality, and one I find myself wanting to reread.
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