Perry was born and raised in Blue River Co-Educational Correctional Institute. His mother discovered she was pregnant after she was incarcerated. The warden had herself named as the foster parent in order to keep Perry and his mom together.
That's the thing about Blue River. Warden Daugherty believes in treating the residents fairly and with respect. The residents, most of them, return the respect and work together to overcome the flaws that landed them in jail.
Perry has attended public school his entire life. But when he enters middle school, someone decides he needs a "real" family. Finally "outside", Perry only wants to be back with his mother and his family at Blue River.
A school project on local history gives Perry a chance to get the whole story behind his mother's arrest and sentence. His research opens the eyes of at least one classmate.
When he suspects that someone who claims to be looking into his mother's case is talking through his hat, Perry devises a genius "trap".
I suggest that you locate your tissues before you get too far into this book. There are several moving melancholy scenes in here.
In a weird way, Twitter sort of made my Fusenews posts this side of obsolete. If you want cool things to see online it’s often just a case of knowing whom to follow. And yet I love my little Fusenews. Pressed as I am for time today, let’s pretend that these are little tweets:
Pinterest continues to remain a strange elusive creation that I have a hard time wrapping my head around. Fortunately sometimes it will do something like post images from William Steig’s Agony in the Kindergarten (circa 195o) and all at once everything is clear. Thanks to Alex Penfold for the link.
And while you’re looking at vast numbers of images, why not look at this collection of international children’s art. Purdy. Thanks to Warren Truitt for the link.
Adrienne says, “I Can’t Imagine There Was Ever a Time in Which This Version of Little Red Riding Hood Wasn’t Creepy.” I don’t quite know what she means since I haven’t yet seen the . . . GAAAAAHHHHH!!!
- I want a new Leslie Connor middle grade novel for kids and I want it now now now now now. (This is called “baiting the universe” and should only be attempted under the strictest of circumstances.)
- Was anyone else aware that Thomas Locker died this year, or just BookMoot? First I’ve heard of it. Shoot.
- As per usual, the best round-up of the year is happening at Chicken Spaghetti. If you want to see every last Best Of list printed for 2012 books, seek ye no further.
- Speaking of Best Of lists, I am not usually flummoxed by the books folks pick. I like to think that on the children’s side I see almost everything. So imagine my flummoxing when I check out the 100 Scope Notes Top 20 Children’s Books of 2012 and find that #20 is a book I have NEVER heard of before!?! I am tongue-tied, stopped, and otherwise befuddled. You win this round, Jonker, but I shall have my revenge!!
- The Bookbug children’s bookstore in Kalamazoo, Michigan does many things right. But most recently they managed to make this remarkable little fellow:
Don’t try to buy him for your holiday shopping, though. Apparently to make it you need to get “many different packages of legos from several different vendors.” Worth it.
- You know how weird it was when they redid Spiderman with an all-new cast? Yup. Well, hold onto your hats, folks. A children’s book is getting yet another reworking as well. From Cynopsis Kids:
Columbia looks to Zach Helm (Stranger Than Fiction, Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, which he also directed, and the upcoming The Secret Life of Walter Mitty) to write a new big screen adaptation of Jumanji, based on Chris van Allsburg’s 1981 book of the same name, per THR. Matt Tolmach (The Amazing Spider-Man) will produce the new Jumanji movie. Joe Johnston directed the 1995 feature film incarnation of Jumanji, which starred Robin Williams and Kirsten Dunst.
There is a giant swing installation somewhere in New York City right now. You walk in, you sit, and you swing.
I may have missed the Columbus Circle installation but by gum I am finding this one! Thanks to Crooked House for the heads up.
Crunch
By Leslie Connor
Katherine Tegan Books (an imprint of Harper Collins)
$16.99
ISBN: 978-0-06-169229-1
Ages 9-12
On shelves now.
Leslie Connor forgive me; I sometimes forget how awesome you are. It’s nice to rely on an author. To know that you can trust them to write book after book that isn’t crap. That’s true on the adult side of things, but I feel it’s particularly important to remind folks of this on the children’s literary side as well. When a parent or a teacher or a librarian discovers a writer that fills a gap in their collection and fills it well, they’re allowed to go a little nuts. I went a little nuts when I realized the sheer awesomeness of Leslie Connor for the first time. I had loved her picture book Miss Bridie Chose a Shovel. Sure. Of course I did. I’m human. I’d missed her YA novel Dead on Town Line (which, I’m now thinking I’d kind of like to read). But it was her middle grade book that convinced me of her brilliance. Waiting for Normal. A book that by all rights, due to its premise and its title, I should have hated on sight, and yet I fell for it hook, line, and sinker. Now Connor has settled a little more thoroughly into the middle grade range and once more she tries her hand at something new. Every fiber in my being makes me want to sell this to you as a post-apocalyptic hellscape world without oil with a family tale right out of The Penderwicks. That’s not entirely accurate but if it gets you reading this book, fantastic. Whatever works, man. Whatever works.
It doesn’t get much worse than this. You see every year Dewey’s parents go on a kind of pseudo-honeymoon to New England (his dad’s a trucker) leaving their sons Dewey and Vince and Angus and Eva (the five-year-old twins), with their eldest teen daughter Lil. Only this year, there was a snag. Due to forces beyond their control, the country is out of oil. No oil. Zip, zero, zilch. And as it happens, Dewey and his family happen to run the local bike repair shop. Now that all their neighbors are bike-bound, they’re getting some serious business. Dewey is dedicated to keeping the shop going, but that’s before he discovers there’s a thief stealing from it. Who’s the culprit? Is is someone they know? Worse still, the crises doesn’t look like it’s going to end anytime soon, mom and dad are halfway across the country, and the family is growing tense. Something, it’s clear, has gotta give.
We don’t get as many realistic worst-case scenario books for kids as you might think. Back in the 70s, when there was an actual oil shortage, you couldn’t throw a dart in a children’s library without hitting about ten different futuristic In-a-World-Without-Oil novels for kids and teens. These days, dystopias are far grander. They’re all pseudo-perfect societies or violent reality-show offspring. Books that actually de
Hi Everyone!
I'm thrilled to be here, sharing some thoughts with you. I'm just back from Boston, where I was honored to received an award for my latest book, Where in the Wild? Camouflaged Creatures Concealed... and Revealed, which I co-authored with my wife, Yael Schy. (Our book was awarded the 2008 SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science Books in the category "Children's Science Picture Book." The award is sponsored by Subaru and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and it was shared between the two authors and photographer Dwight Kuhn.) I was planning to write about the award ceremony and the four books that received the prize in different categories (see www.sbfonline/prizes) but I have decided to save that for another day,
except to give you a glimpse of our book's cover and to share one detail about the ceremony. The sponsors of the SB&F Prize arranged to have several local children present the awards to the winning authors. The kids told the audience (and the authors) what they liked about the books. Some of them spoke with passion about questions the books had raised in their minds. To these readers, a book that raises interesting questions is a good book indeed. Then the young book reviewers shook our hands while handing us our award plaques.
The opinions and questions of children often fascinate and delight me. I get a lot of great letters from children and I would be hard-pressed to pick a favorite, but one letter that stands out in my mind came from a nine-year old girl who wondered about the accuracy of various statements in my first book. I'm going to remove her name and address to protect her privacy, but we can call her by her first name, Lisa. Here is what she wrote. I apologize that the letters are small and a little hard to read. Lisa's message is summarized in the last two sentences:
In my presentations at schools, I often tell children, "Wondering is wonderful." I find it wonderful that Lisa is wondering about the statements in my book and whether or not they are true. These musings give her "mixed up feelings," which may sound uncomfortable, but she quickly goes on to reassure us that she finds these feelings magical. Her letter ends with a sentence I find truly memorable. To Lisa, the magic in books is wondering whether the "facts" are true or not! 
I wish readers of my books -- or all books -- would wonder about them the way Lisa does. Active minds read critically, questioning what they read as they blend their own experiences, knowledge and observations with the author's raw ingredients. They create a nourishing stew that is more than a bowl of information.
I have been lucky enough to see see many examples of readers extending or challenging statements in my books. The 2rd and 3rd graders of one class doubted that the average height of elementary school students was truly 4'8", as I reported in the backmatter of How Much Is a Million? I used that figure to estimate the height of a million children standing on one another's shoulders. To find out if I was right, this class set about measuring every child in their elementary school. They determined the median, the mode and the mean, and they graphed their data. Finally, they declared that the average height was only 4'4".
But they didn't quit there. They proposed several possible explanations for the discrepancy between what I had written and what they had found. For example, their school has grades from K-5. Maybe my school went up to 6th or 8th grade. If so, that could explain the difference between their answer and mine. Or, they speculated, their school might be shorter than normal... or perhaps mine was taller than normal. Or maybe I just measured a single child with a height of 4'8" and I said, "He's normal!" In a scientific paper, this section of their report would have been the "discussion" section.
I'll give just one other example of children wondering about what they have read.
In If You Made a Million, I wrote that a million dollars would be equal to "a whale's weight in quarters." A group of schoolkids wondered about that. They looked up the weight of a blue whale (60 tons) and calculated that it is the same as the weight of 10 million quarters, or 2.5 million dollars -- not one million dollars as the book said. When they wrote to me about it, I pointed out that the book did not specify a particular species of whale. And in the backmatter, where I explained the math, I showed that the weight of a million dollars in quarters is about 50,000 pounds, which is "the approximate weight of many kinds of whales, including the sperm whale." Then, as if anticipating their objection, I added that blue whales can be much heavier than that. I thought I had covered my bases and I said so (nicely) in a letter to my challengers, but they were not convinced. Here is a copy of the page that they sent back to me, bearing their comment upon the situation:
Don't you love it? I sure do. I told them they would have to take it up with the illustrator, Steven Kellogg. And I even provided his address!
To me, the point isn't who is right and who is wrong. The point is that they wondered about something they had read in a book ... and they pursued their wonders through research and mathematics. It's magical. As nine year-old Lisa said, "The magic of books is not knowing whether the facts are true or not."
Author: David Schwartz & Yael Schy
Illustrator: Dwight Kuhn
Published: 2007 Tricycle Press (on JOMB)
ISBN: 1582462070 Chapters.ca Amazon.com
Ten pleasantly familiar animals perch boldly exposed — yet cleverly concealed — in full page photographs tossing tantalizing clues to their whereabouts through an assortment of snappy, lyrical, comical and informative poems in this 2007 Cybils Non-Fiction Picture Book Award Finalist.
Click here for the Tricycle Press Reading Guide.
Pop over to Cybils Central to get the scoop on all the 2007 Cybils finalists and, while you’re there, check out the full list of non-fiction picture book nominees.
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Where in the Wild?: Camouflaged Creatures Concealed ... and Revealedcamouflage,
childrens book,
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David Schwartz,
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Where in the Wild?: Camouflaged Creatures Concealed ... and Revealed
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“This is going to sound bad, but Connor is one of the very few hope-infused middle grade authors I can stand to read.”
Ha… I love that! And one of the few authors who writes books with issue-driven “messages” that I can stand to read.
Re DEAD ON TOWN LINE – it’s beautifully written, a YA with the lyricism of MISS BRIDIE. It was under appreciated back in it’s day, I think.
Fuse, you didn’t mention this one earlier in the Newbery contenders. Any hope for this as a dark horse?
I loved, loved, loved this book. I don’t much care for dystopian, so liking this was a little weird for me. This felt more like the Blyton Adventure series where the kids end up fending for themselves without parents (usually through some mishap). It jsut happened because of some global crisis in here but it was kind of far removed from the characters which is why it wasn’t scary or a turn off for me. I liked the way they coped and problem solved a lot. I also liked the inter-sibling exchanges. Glad you liked it too!
PS I think we should start a grass roots campaign for Crunch for the Newbery.
Great review of a fantastic book!
I have a question that I need an answer to fast that has nothing to do with the above book that has just gone on me to read, and to buy list.
What would the term be for the type of illustration used in THE GARBAGE BARGE?”
I know many a smart person stops buy Betsy’s blog so I’m hopin you can help me out.
Lord . . . hm. Well, they’re models with photography. So if you want to get technical about it, it’s a book of photographs plain and simple. Doesn’t take into account the models, though. I say “Models With Photography” is the medium, though it hardly falls trippingly off the tongue, now does it?
What a teriffic review! Leslie Conner has the most authentic voice I’ve heard in a long time.
CRUNCH is a great read. I second the campaign for the Newbery.
Well then I think it’s time we coin a phrase. How about something like diaramaraphy?
[...] Crunch by Leslie Connor [...]