My
favorite gruff dad customer was looking for audiobook recommendations
for his teenager daughter.
Gruff
dad: "Anything good?"
Me:
"Egg and Spoon by
Gregory Maguire!"
Gruff
dad: "Where is it?"
Me:
"The library."
I
suck at retail. I ended up selling him The Midnight Dress
because I had it marked down to
a dollar. It was too formulaic for me to get through, even with an
Australian accent, but one dollar. Egg and Spoon is
great though! I never read Wicked,
although I might now, because Egg and Spoon is
utterly brilliant until it splutters out at the end but we'll just
ignore that bit and focus on its reveling in Russian fairy tales and
the cross narratives of a peasant and a high-born girl who
accidentally switch places when Katya's private train stops in
Elena's starving village. One senses a Prince and the
Pauper coming on until Elena's
guardians immediately realize that they have the wrong girl. Elena's
village is starving, her mother is dying, and her brother is recently
conscripted, so Katya starts walking with every sensible expectation
that she'll meet the train coming back for her, but Elena manages to
conceal her identity long enough that the butler and governess are
better off abetting her than revealing their sins to her
short-sighted great aunt. Then there's Baba Yaga. And the tsar.
Everything about Egg and Spoon is
so delicious, so fantastical, and so magically realistic. It doesn't
smell Russian, but that's a lot to ask for in a novel. It's Russian
enough. Bleeding good. How it compares to Binny for Short
is an open question because
they're two completely different books, though they (and The
War that Saved My Life) all
three are age-appropriate early adolescent girl books in a genre of
fantastic scope. And they're all three bloody marvelous. I can't
believe it took me this long to read Binny for Short.
I got it on the drop date, started it, set it down to savor, and
waited over a year. The thing that really sparked my reading it is
that the sequel's coming out this summer. Binny isn't
Hilary McKay's strongest novel, but that's like saying that North
America isn't God's strongest continent. It's amazing. McKay really
rocks her minimalist approach to language here which is grand, but I
do love it when she's effusive. The plot is that Binny's father died
insolvent, and Binny had to give up her dog and is still grieving it,
but then her terrible old great aunt who was instrumental in getting
rid of the dog dies and leaves Binny her crumbling English seaside
semi-detached house. Let's pause here to appreciate Hilary McKay's
appreciation of the seaside, as other British authors, despite never
being more than two hours from the sea, tend to forget they're on a
big island. So Binny is a local in this seaside holiday town and the
whole book is intercut with scenes from a harrowing afternoon trying
to pull a fishing net off some rocks with her best enemy from next
door. Of course, seventy-six years ago, British problems weren't
limited to seaside proximity and dog grieving. Kimberly Brubaker
Bradley is amazing and she does World War II again, in England here.
The War That Saved My Life has
so much happening and it all ties so together into this compelling
bundle of hope and triumph for one little girl that the best praise I
can give it is to thoroughly retell the story: Ada is a club-footed
ten-year-old who has never left the one room flat she lives in with
her horrible mother and her six-year-old brother Jaimie. The story
begins around the time Ada teaches herself to walk: she's been
scooting around on her bottom her whole life. When he was a baby,
Ada took care of Jamie, but now he's a kid out running around and
she's alone all day. Ada went outside once, but her mother found out
and beat her. So Ada teaches herself to walk all summer and Jamie
hears that there's going to be a war on. All the children will be
evacuated, but mum, useless slut, won't let Ada and Jamie go. Ada
decides to evacuate without permission, and she and Jamie take the
grueling slow walked on a club foot to the train station. Ada's
never been out: she's never gone this far, never seen trees or
toilets. At the small town train station where they disembark, the
evacuees are parceled out to willing families and Ada and Jamie,
filthy and smelly, are chosen by no one, but the posh lady who's in
charge of the evacuation committee takes them in her car (first time)
to the house of someone. The evacuation of the children of London,
like the orphan train and other institutional child distribution
schemes of the near past, depended on children being randomly handed
out to anyone willing to take them and the results were thoroughly
mixed. Ada and Jamie are brought to the home of Susan Smith, a
depressed woman. Becky, who lived with her, died last fall and Susan
hasn't done anything since then except sit in a chair and stare at
her hands. It's never clear whether Susan and Becky had a Boston
marriage or were just super BFFs, but they were at Cambridge together
and Susan's grieving and wants no filthy children a bossy rich lady
is forcing on her. As the the bossy woman drives away, Susan sighs
and looks the children over and takes them upstairs for their first
full bath. Ada would resist, but there's a pony in the yard. A
pony! She saw a girl ride a pony once and she knows she can ride
this one. The tragedy of the children's deprivation is mind-boggling
as Susan takes them through the concept of sheets and underwear, to
the doctor who can't understand why Ada doesn't have crutches, to
illiteracy, to fruit, to "Ada's not allowed outside." She
is now, but it takes a while to manage her fear. There's a lot of
Ada and Jamie cowering while Susan screams, "I'm not going to
hit you! I'm angry, but I'm not going to hit you!" The horse
is named Butter and Ada can ride it as much as she likes. She meets
the posh lady's daughter, and her stable manager, who teaches Ada
proper horse things. Lots of London evacuees go back; their families
miss them and their host families make sure they know they're second
class children. Then the war gets real. An airfield goes up next
door and Jamie knows the pilots and the planes. London's going to be
bombed, then it is bombed, the bombs keep coming. German planes
crash in the fields. So do British ones. The men go away and Ada
helps some afternoons on her crutches at the stable. She's still a
nightmare kid. There are no easy, middle class reformations here.
Ada spends Christmas Eve screaming until Susan wraps her in a blanket
and sits on her because it seems to soothe. Susan's trying to get
hold of Ada's mum the whole time, because with her permission, Ada
could have an operation on her club foot, but when Ada and Jamie's
mother turns up, things get worse. I simply cannot recommend this
book highly enough. For all the pain that KBB can bring to a middle
grade novel, she makes it work, and it's worth it. But back
to a kinder, gentler Britain and a kinder, gentler world, the kind
where someone, probably Missie, left Magic Bunny: Chocolate Wishes
by Sue Bentley on my hold shelf
and I read it while I had the flu because it wasn't as heavy as my
other books. Magic Bunny: Chocolate Wishes is
a companion to the Magic Puppy, Magic Kitten, and
Magic Pony books and
turned out to be the third in the Magic Bunny series.
Normally, I wouldn't read the third book in a series first off, but
I feel confident that I was able to piece together the happenings in
Moonglow Meadow from the introduction. Dark rabbits live in the
uninhabitable waste next to MM, and they want to overrun MM and steal
it from the white rabbits. This all sounds terribly racist, but
black rabbits would be even worse. Presumably, we can't just call
them evil rabbits, because, at the end of the series, all the
rabbits, dark and white, will reconcile and make friends. But, for
now, the dark rabbits, want to take over Moonglow Meadow by stealing
the white rabbits' magic key. So, naturally, Arrow the magic rabbit
with a key around his neck teleports to England where he meets a girl
named Dawn who just had her first sad and lonely day at a new school.
Like Binny, Dawn had a dog she loved but her parents were hit by the
recession and had to move to an apartment complex that banned pets.
The dog lives with her aunt now, so that's okay, but Arrow convinces
Dawn to sneak him into the apartment and protect him from the dark
rabbits. Because that's where a magic bunny with a magic key is
safest: in an eight-year-old's bedroom. It's Easter week, and
Chocolate Wishes might
refer to the one time that Dawn eats a candy egg, but that's never
clear. Dawn does some stupid stuff, like sneaking Arrow to her
aunt's and into school. Dawn's new desk is next to a girl named Emma
who loves awkward practical jokes that make people uncomfortable, and
Dawn and Emma's burgeoning friendship is a thing once Emma finds out
that Dawn hasn't a secret bunny. Emma has a rabbit, Blackberry, who
is well cared for but lives in a shed. As a rabbit alarmist, I
didn't like Dawn's keeping Arrow a secret from her parents. Kids
could try that, and if the rabbit wasn't discovered immediately,
which is likely, things could end extremely badly for the rabbit.
Really, rabbits aren't great pets for kids and they hate being held,
although reading Magic Bunny would
lead you to assume the opposite. Someone in the online rabbit
community was just telling the story of a kid who pulled off a
rabbit's tail because the rabbit was trying to get away and the kid
didn't want it to. Imagine the panic you would need to be in to run
away and leave your arm behind: that's where this rabbit was. Magic
Bunny does nothing for proper
rabbit care, but, as a bland early chapter book it was thoroughly
adequate. And, finally, I re-read The Ordinary Princess
while I had the flu too, and it
was great and wonderful and when I was seven I loved it and I still
do.
Next
up: Some good and not so good things.
