Book Review: The Wicked and the Just, by J. Anderson Coats (Harcourt, 2012)

Recommended for ages 12 and up.

This debut novel by J. Anderson Coats brings to life an unusual setting:  13th century Wales, ten years after the English have conquered the area.  The novel intertwines the story of two teenaged girls, the English girl Cecily, and the Welsh Gwenhwyfar (for help in how to pronounce Welsh names, see J. Anderson Coats' website!)   The story is told from both girls' point of view.


To quote from the publisher's summary, "Cecily would give anything to leave Caernarvon and go home. Gwenhwyfar would give anything to see all the English leave. Neither one is going to get her wish."  Cecily's father has been sent to Wales by the English king to occupy the Welsh territory and subjugate the natives.  Gwenhwyfar dreamed of being the lady of the manor at Cecily's new house, but now her family circumstances have changed and she must work as a servant for this very spoiled and bratty English girl.  


Can Cecily fit in with the English community in the little town?  Will Gwenhwyfar will able to survive, taking care of her ill mother and her younger siblings?  And when it turns out the Welsh are not as conquered as the English thought, and revolt erupts in the countryside, the two young women's relationship will change dramatically.  


Author J. Anderson Coats is a historian and a librarian, and in her first novel she does a great job bringing to life an era and a place most of the readers will know nothing about, through the lens of these two young women.  Although neither character seems very likable at the beginning, their characters grow on the reader as they cope with the changing political situation around them.  The author does not shy away from depicting the violence that was endemic at the time.


A historical note is included that provides some historical context on the English occupation of Wales and the background for the troubles that ensue and are depicted in the novel.  


Recommended for fans of historical fiction.  

Book Review: Never Fall Down: A Novel, by Patricia McCormick (Balzer & Bray, 2012)

Recommended for ages 12 and up.


Release date:  May 8, 2012


Patricia McCormick, the acclaimed author of Sold and other young adult novels, has written another extraordinary MUST READ book, this one based on the true and unforgettable story of Cambodian Arn Chorn-Pond, an 11-year-old boy who survives the radical Communist Khmer Rouge regime by becoming a musician in the Killing Fields.

In a brief preface, McCormick lays the scene by explaining that when the Khmer Rouge came to power, it herded everyone in Cambodia into work camps in the countryside, separating families and forcing everyone, even children, to work long hours with little food.  Nearly two million people died--one in every four people--either from starvation or torture and execution, the worst genocide ever inflicted by a country on its own population.

Told in the first person by our young narrator, this book opens in 1975, with a happy scene of Arn and his little brother sneaking into an American movie and having fun reenacting the scenes afterward.  But soon the Khmer Rouge soldiers march into town, and everyone leaves, as soldiers tell the population that the Americans are coming to bomb the city.  During the forced march, many people drop from exhaustion by the side of the road, dying even while they are walking.  But the misery of the trek is nothing compared to what they encounter when they reach their camp.  Like the Nazi soldiers in the concentration camps, the Khmer Rouge soldiers take all the prisoners' belongings, all their clothes, and even cut the girls' hair, dehumanizing them by making them all look alike in black pajamas.  High ranking and educated people disappear first, and everyone else is slowly starving from the relentless work and tiny food rations.  Will Arn and his family be able to survive?

When a Khmer Rouge soldier wants to know what kids can play music, Arn raises his hand, at the same time wondering if it's some kind of trick.  "Just give me one bowl of rice, I think, then you can kill me."  He and five other boys quickly learn traditional music from an old musician.  Soon the band is playing all the time, and Arn soon realizes the true reason for their band--they are forced to play music to cover up the noise of the constant killings taking place at the camp.

Arn's story--his survival of the Killing Fields, becoming a child-soldier for the Khmer Rouge, and finally being discovered in a refugee camp hospital by an American, adopted, brought to the United States, and eventually becoming an advocate for children of war--is unforgettable, and reminded me very much of Elie Wiesel's Night, another story of a young man's survival under the most unimaginable horrors.  Like Wiesel and other Holocaust survivors, Arn makes himself numb to the horrors around him..."You show you care, you die.  You show fear, you die.  You show nothing, maybe you live."

McCormick provides an epilogue which fills the reader in on Arn's life since the novel ends in 1984.  In order to write this novel, she spent hundreds of hours interviewing him, talking to his adoptive family, and in Cambodia, where they retraced his life during the reign of the Khmer Rouge.  She also interviewed surviving family members and other camp survivors.  However, the final result is a novel, not a memoir, and she used her own imagination to imagine scenes that Arn could not recall.  She does a masterful job capturing Arn's voice, using his own distinct speech patterns in English rather than forcing his recollection into standard English.

Arn's amazing story has been told before in a children's book, a picture book by Michelle Lord, A Song for Cambodia (Lee and Low, 2008).

In a preface, McCormick reveals one of her goals in writing Arn's story for young readers--inspiring in them a "deepened resolve to fight genocide wherever it occurs and a strengthened commitment to peace."

For those teens obsessed with The Hunger Games, why not give them a true story of a totalitarian regime to think about.

Book Review: mister death's blue-eyed girls, by Mary Downing Hahn (Clarion Books, 2012) (

Recommended for ages 12 and up.


Release date:  April 17, 2012

It's June, 1956, and school's just about out for the summer. Teenage Nora and her friends have a party with a few boys, dance, hang out and drink too many beers. But none of them can imagine that their lives are about to change forever because of a shocking murder. 

The next day, the bodies of two of the girls from Nora's group, Cheryl and Bobbi Jo, are found shot to death in the woods near their house. Everyone thinks that Buddy, Cheryl's ex-boyfriend, who looks like an imitation of James Dean, must be guilty of the brutal crime. But when no conclusive evidence is uncovered, he's released by the police, although everyone in the town still assumes he did it, and worse yet, that he got away with it. 

This excellent mystery, written from the point of view of Nora, her friend Ellie, Buddy, and the actual guilty murderer, takes place in a time that seems so innocent now--a time of listening to Elvis records with your girlfriends, worrying what would happen if a boy touched your knee, and having ice cream sodas at the neighborhood drugstore.  But with the murders life changed for all the teens in the story. 

What would it be like to have your friends murdered, begin to question not only your Catholic faith, but your very belief in God, and not know how to go on living? And what if everyone in town thought you were a murderer? This is different from other Mary Downing Hahn books I've read--not a ghost story, but a story nonetheless of how the dead can haunt us in other ways. It's a coming-of-age story as well as a mystery and a real page turner.  Highly recommended. 

Note: the novel is inspired by a similar crime which took place when the author was a teen; the author knew both girls who were the victims and remembers vividly being at a friend's house when the bodies were discovered.  She writes in an afterword that the event has haunted her for years.

Women's History Month Book Review: Touch the Sky: Alice Coachman, Olympic High Jumper, by Ann Malaspina (Albert Whitman, 2012)

Recommended for ages 5-10.

Young Alice Coachman, growing up in segregated Albany, Georgia, in the 1930's, just couldn't help herself.  She wanted to soar and touch the sky.

"Bare feet shouldn't fly./Long legs shouldn't spin./Braids shouldn't flap in the wind./'Sit on the porch and be a lady,' Papa scolded Alice," this book about the future Olympic athlete begins.  When she watched boys doing the high jump at a track meet, "Alice's feet tingled, wanting to try."  

We see Alice's dreams growing bigger as she gets older, until finally the high school coach needed a jumper for a track and field tournament in Alabama.  Her family was too poor to afford proper clothes for the competition, so her teachers pitched in and bought her shoes, shorts, and bright white socks.  For the first time, she competed with the best black athletes in the South.  In 1939, she won her first national medal, and soon she was asked to enroll at Tuskegee, where she'd be able to train with the best.  Alice worked hard to pay her school fees.  

Alice dreamed of the Olympics, but with the world consumed by war there were no games to enter.  Could she still compete in 1948?  Would she achieve her dream of a gold medal in the high jump--and  finally touch the sky?  

Written in a simple yet poetic style, this book captures the spirit of a true American heroine and a pioneer in sports, one who is not widely known today.  It's a real "girl power" story, as well as a tale about overcoming prejudice.  The stunning large format oil paintings, by illustrator Eric Velasquez, with their vibrant colors and sweeping compositions, capture the intensity of Alice's story, and especially of her jumping.  

An author's note shows photographs of the real Alice and her teammates and tells about what happened to Alice after her triumph at the Olympics.  A bibliography is also included.  

Alice Coachman

When it rains, it pours, and another picture book about this outstanding athlete will be released later this month.  Queen of the Track:  Olympic Champion Alice Coachman, is published by Boyds Mills press.  It's written by Heather Lang and illustrated by Floyd Cooper.  

GIVEAWAY:   Would you like to know more about Touch the Sky and win a copy of this book and other women's history picture books?  Check out Ann Malaspina's post at Kidlit Celebrates Women's History Month and leave a comment to enter.  

Book Review: The Wild Book, by Margarita Engle (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012)

Recommended for ages 8-12.

In her newest book, award-winning author Margarita Engle turns to her own family history for inspiration.  Set in 1912, this novel in verse brings to life the story of Engle's grandmother, Fefa, who grew up in Cuba afflicted by "word-blindness," the term used at that time for dyslexia.  She struggles every time she is handed a book to read:

I know that the words
want to trick me.
The letters will jumble
and spill off the page,
leaping and hopping,
jumping far away,
like slimy
bullfrogs.

Her mother refuses to accept "the hissing doctor's verdict," and gives her daughter a book--a blank diary, or is it "an ordinary/schoolbook/filled with frog-slippery/tricky letters/that know how to leap/and escape?"

She tries to patiently write in her blank book each night, her "wild diary," and wonders how reading can look so easy, yet be so impossible?  Will her wild book "ever seem tame?"  She struggles on with her reading, reading slowly to sound out the words.  What good can come of this word blindness?  In a surprising twist, Fefa's careful powers of observation with the written word will end up helping to save her family from danger.

Engle's spare verse captures so eloquently 11 year old Fefa's frustration and yet fascination with words, reading, and writing, as well as the Cuba of yesteryear, a time when bandits roam the land, kidnapping children and holding them for ransom.  The pages of the book are nearly as blank as the pages in Fefa's wild book, with the narrative told with few words but memorable poetic images.  Fefa lives in the countryside on a farm, where her many sisters and brothers tease her and on her Sunday outings to town she strolls around the plaza with her cousin, while "girls just daydream/and smile."  With a mama who loves poetry, words are a part of their every day family life, with her mother reading poetry out loud, and fairy tales filling Fefa's head.  The poems are full of tiny details of the family's life in Cuba, such as making jewelry out of reeds from the river, and roasting a whole pig in a pit for a feast.

While this story deals with a serious learning disability, there is hope in the end for Fefa.  This would be an excellent choice to read out loud with a child, which would allow the reader to hear the beauty of the verses and to discuss the story as well.

Book Review: The Academie, by Susanne Dunlap (Bloomsbury, 2012)

Recommended for ages 12 and up.


Susanne Dunlap is a favorite author of mine for YA historical fiction with a romantic flair, books that will realistically appeal much more to girls than to boys.  This is her fourth YA title (she has also written historical fiction aimed more at adults) and the first set in France.

In this new novel, Eliza, the young daughter of future U.S. President James Monroe, is in France with her mother, where she is left behind in a chic boarding school just outside the city that's run by a former courtier to Marie Antoinette, Madame Campan.  The school is attended by France's finest young ladies, including Caroline Bonaparte, the youngest sister of the up-and-coming French general, as well as Hortense Beauharnais, the daughter of Napoleon's wife, Josephine.  The book is set in the turbulent year 1799, the year in which Napoleon overthrew the French Directory and took power for himself as First Counsel, leading of course to his eventually crowning himself Emperor (although not in the course of this novel).

The book alternates between four different narrators:  Eliza, Hortense, Caroline, and Madeleine, the mixed-race--and of course entirely unsuitable--daughter of a cruel, drug-addicted Paris actress. Eliza quickly picks up on the bad blood between Hortense and Caroline at school, wondering what role she will play in the school's hierarchy of students.  All the girls seem much more concerned with their love lives than any studying, not too surprising since their primary curriculum seems to be learning how to talk prettily to young gentlemen, including the lads from the nearby boys' school who sometimes visit for training exercises.  But the school's far from boring.  There seems to be plenty of intrigue, with Caroline whisking innocent young Eliza off to a clandestine party in Paris when they're supposed to be asleep in bed.  All the girls develop crushes on the wrong sort of man--Hortense on a music teacher, Caroline on a general that her brother doesn't want her involved with, and both Eliza and Madeleine, the actress' daughter, on Hortense's handsome brother, Eugene.  Will anyone wind up with the man of their dreams?  You'll have to read on to the shocking ending to find out.

And in the middle of all of this romantic drama, there's a political drama behind the scenes, a possible coup, one that the girls are determined to witness, even dressing up as soldiers to sneak off and see what's going on.  Not to mention Eliza's trying to come to terms with her racial attitudes from growing up with slaves on a Southern plantation.

Although I greatly enjoyed The Academie, I can't say it's my favorite of Dunlap's novels.  I found it occasionally confusing switching back and forth between the different narratives, and I found it hard to suspend my disbelief at some of the girls' dangerous antics, which seemed a bit far fetched for young girls in this setting.

An author's note explains that while all three of her main characters (Eliza, Hortense, and Caroline) indeed attended the same boarding school, they were probably not all three there at the same time and the author admits to taking some liberties with the actual timeline in structuring her story.  Nonetheless, the real Eliza and Hortense remained friends and Eliza even intended Napoleon's coronation as emperor in 1804.  And the rivalry between Napoleon's family and Josephine and her children is a well-established historical fact.

This novel is set at a time period we don't see portrayed much in historical fiction--after the French Revolution, but before Napoleon fully takes power.  For that reason alone, I would recommend this book.  I think young people, particularly girls, will enjoy the romance and political intrigue that Dunlap skillfully portrays in this school setting so different from today.

Tweens and teens wanting to learn more about the real Napoleon might enjoy the lavishly illustrated
Napoleon:  The Story of the Little Corporal, by Robert Burleigh (Abrams, 2007)

Teens might also enjoy Betsy and the Emperor, by Staton Rabin (Margaret K. McElderry, 2004), which tells the story of a young girl who gets to know the famous man while he is a prisoner on St. Helena.

HARD TO BELIEVE, BUT TRUE:  I was stunned to read in the LA Times (see link below) recently that there are plans afoot in France to make a Disneyland-like theme park based on Napoleon, complete with snowy battle re-enactments and a ride on Napoleon's hat. What will be next?  An amusement park with a pretend guillotine where you get your head cut off and then reattached???

• You: Struggling France reembraces Napoleon (latimes.com)

Book Review: May B. by Caroline Starr Rose (Schwartz and Wade, 2012)

Author Caroline Starr Rose describes her striking debut novel in verse for middle grade readers as "part Hatchet, part Little House on the Prairie, part Out of the Dust.  It's a story of courage and hope."

Set on the Kansas frontier, this novel tells the story of May, who's just twelve years old when her pa pulls her out of school and hires her out to a couple who've recently moved out to the endless Kansas prairies.  "I won't go," is the book's poignant first line, but of course she has no real choice, in the way of all children in that era.  She'll bring in some extra money for her family, and it will just be until Christmas, her ma promises her.

May hopes to be a schoolteacher one day, a surprising goal given that she has trouble learning at school.  "What sort of teacher can't read out lessons?" she wonders.  Yet she perseveres, bringing a book and her slate with her.  When the couple she's sent to live with leave her alone in their sod house, at first she's sure they'll be returning.  But when the days pass, she realizes she's been left to fend for herself, miles from any other settlers and with no help in sight.  With the harsh Kansas winter coming, she must find food and fuel if she's to survive, summoning every bit of her courage and knowledge to make it through alive.

I particularly enjoyed the author's use of free verse in this short novel, which is accessible to even reluctant readers.  The author's poetry is particularly evocative in describing the vastness of the Kansas prairies:  "grass/always grass,/in different shades and textures/like the braids in a rag rug."

This novel deals with several different themes; on the one hand it is an exciting survival/adventure story, much in the spirit of books like Hatchet, in which May must survive on her own, with no adults to help her.  The author also portrays the harsh realities of life on the prairie for settlers, a less warm and fuzzy environment than what we'd encounter in classics such as the Little House series.  Moreover, May B. is also a poignant story of a child trying to overcome a disability; in this case dyslexia.  Of course no one understood dyslexia at that time, and often children with this disability were simply seen as stupid or not trying hard enough.  We see one teacher, Miss Sanders, who's sympathetic to May and doesn't force her to read aloud, and another, simply known as "Teacher," who humiliates her by seating her with the youngest children.

May B. received starred reviews from Publisher's Weekly and Kirkus.  It's an excellent historical fiction choice for upper elementary and middle school students.

A study guide for May B. is available here.