Chu Ju's House by Gloria Whelan

The best part of being a teacher librarian is when a kid comes in to the library holding a book against his or her heart and tells me that this is the best book they have ever read.  Sometimes these are popular fiction that everyone is reading, but sometimes they are hidden treasures.  These treasures are books that speak a personal truth and trigger something profound in a few children.  Chu Ju’s House is one of these books.  It has been on my list of books to read ever since Nancy, an ESL student from China, told me it was the best book ever, and I should read it.  This is the book that got her hooked on reading. 

I finally got around to reading it.

The thing about books like Chu Ju’s House, that are set in modern history in a different culture, is that I can’t judge the authenticity of the time, place or cultural relationships among the characters.  What I can tell you is that it felt real to me. 

The story is set In China in the 1970’s, a time when poor families could only have two children.  It begins with the family awaiting the birth of a child that they desperately hope will be a boy.  Nai Nai, (her grandmother) refers to Chu Ju as a useless girl.   
The new child ends up being another girl. 

Chu Ju is an amazing character.  She is a strong, resourceful girl.  When Nai Nai makes arrangements for her baby sister to be sold so that the family can try for a boy child, Chu Ju runs away.  At first she finds work on a traveling fishing boat.  Then she looks after silk worms with girls who have been sent from an orphanage to work for the owner.  Eventually she connects with a woman and her son on a small farm.  She ends up living with them until the son goes off to Shanghai to work and escape the farming life. 

Apart from being an entertaining adventure and coming of age tale, this book seems to open a window to the world of China in the 1970’s.  While it is a predominantly rural setting, the reader is also exposed to a flavor of city life. There are hints about what might have happened to her sister and other girl babies who were abandoned to orphanages had Chu Ju not left.  There are also hints as to what might befall a single girl on her own were it not for the ultimate goodness of many people she meets on her way. 

I too think this is an amazing book.

Tree Girl by Ben Mikaelsen

This book is set in Guatemala in the 1980’s during the time of the civil war, a time of genocide for the indigenous population.  The main character, Gabriela, is a real person.  This story (with her name changed to protect her) is based on interviews Mikaelsen had with her.  

Gabriela grew up in a small Mayan canton in the high mountains of Guatemala surrounded by her family and friends.  The trees in the forest outside her village were her refuge and solace. She loved climbing them and spent so many hours in them that she acquired the nickname Tree Girl. This ability would later save her life.

Gabi was the only child in her family sent to school to learn to read and speak Spanish, and more importantly, to learn to think. While she was growing up, her community was mildly troubled by conflict between the guerillas and government soldiers asking them to tell about the actions of the other. They continued about their business hoping they would be ignored.  

It was not to be.

Following her mother's death, Gabriela took on more responsibility for her family. After a journey to the larger center to sell their produce, she returned to discover that government soldiers had massacred her entire community. She found her sister, Alicia, and injured brother, Antonio, hiding in the forest, and fled with them. Antonio died shortly afterwards.

Desperate to find food for them, Gabriela entered a village just prior to the arrival of government soldiers. She climbed into a tree in the middle of the square and hid while they brutally humiliated and slaughtered the residents.  Afterwards, unable to find her sister, she set out on her own for Mexico, always searching for them.

Eventually she reached a refuge camp. Life in the refuge camp was not easy, but in it Gabriela began to recover from the trauma she experienced and find the goodness in herself again.

I finished this book thinking of the recent hype around The Hunger Games. In The Hunger Games, the heroine, Katniss, has to fight for survival in a dangerous, futuristic, but fictional world. In Tree Girl, the heroine, Gabriela, has to fight to survive in the very real world of Guatemala in the 1980's. It is not for the faint of heart. The brutal, casual violence is far more horrific than that in The Hunger Games, because the indifferent rape, torture and murder of approximately 200,000 people is not fiction.

There are two powerful themes that intertwine throughout this book.  On the one hand we see and experience vicariously the human capacity for evil. On the other we see and experience the human capacity for hope and goodness.

Perhaps these themes are also articulated in The Hunger Games, but the authenticity of them in Tree Girl forces the reader into a profoundly different awareness of what it means to be human. It also forces the reader into taking a closer look at the real world that we all share. My first reaction after finishing this book was to go in search of more information about the Guatemalan conflict.  A simple google search revealed that the Indigenous peoples’ struggle in Guatemala is far from over.  I’m still pondering what I will do about it.  Doing nothing is not an option.

The Year the Swallows Came Early by Kathryn Fitzmaurice

There is absolutely nothing sweeter than a simple tale, well told. The Year the Swallows Came Early by Kathryn Fitzmaurice is one of them.
Groovy (Eleanor) Robinson has big dreams. She loves to cook and plans to go to school to become a famous professional chef. At age 11, she is already on her way.
In the mean time she lives with her mother and her father “in a perfect stucco house, just off the sparkly pacific” in San Juan Capistrano where the swallows migrate to every year. One Saturday morning while she and her daddy are out walking, the local policeman stops them and takes him off to jail.
Groovy is beside herself with disbelief and certain that this has been a terrible mistake. To add to her confusion and distress, her mother confesses to having called the police herself. It turns out that her father has indeed done a terrible thing. His actions have robbed her of her dreams.

When the reality of it finally takes hold:

“The feelings started real slow, like tiny raindrops that can’t make up their minds if they’re going to pour from the clouds, or pass through with the breeze.
But then the more I looked at his handwriting in the bank book----the zero scratched in black pen---the faster those drops fell, until it felt like I was sitting in a big, blowing thunderstorm. And just like those storms that can be so sneaky, I didn’t see it coming. And before I knew it, I felt soaking wet, with nowhere to go. So I sat there for a long time, until I shivered from all the cold swirling around me.
And then it happened. It started coming up into my toes, staying there for a minute, waiting to see if I would push it away.
But I didn’t.
So it crept up past my knees, and then into my stomach, finally finding its way to my heart. Where it stopped and settled in deep.
And here’s what I thought: I wished I’d never found what was in that box because feeling mad at Daddy was a million times worse than feeling sad.”(pp 167-168)

Groovy changes her name to Eleanor, and sinks deeply into paralyzing feelings of grief, anger and emptiness.
Frankie, her best friend, has his own cross to bear. Two years ago his mother left him with his stepbrother to go away for a week. She hasn’t returned. Frankie won’t read her letters or postcards. He is filled with such anguish that he is making himself ill.

This is a beautiful book – I picked it up and couldn’t put it down till I finished it. It is a treasure. Tiny gold and silver nuggets of words you find yourself rereading just to savor them. There is beauty in the descriptions. Kathryn Fitzmaurice, takes the reader into a hypersensitive awareness of atmosphere - physical, emotional, and spiritual. Enthralled by her writing we live vicariously through her very real characters as they experience loss and sadness, anger and despair, and just maybe, joy and peace.
Each spring the swallows return to nest bringing awe and wonder with them. This book brings its own kind of awe and wonder as it wends it way into our hearts with its story of friendship, family, and forgiveness.

I would recommend this book to fans of the Lucky books by Susan Patron, Katherine Hannigan’s Ida B, Deborah Wiles Each Little Bird That Sings or Love, Ruby Lavender, and Phoebe Stone’s, Deep Down Popular.

The Giant-Slayer by Iain Lawrence (Red Cedar Club Book)

I was born a few years before Dr. Salk introduced the first polio vaccine. My mother tells stories about waving at my father through the hospital window after the births of myself and later on, my sister. No one was allowed in for fear of spreading polio. I was too young to recollect the atmosphere of terror, but children I went to school with carried visibly the remnants of their battle with the disease.
Through this book I have come to understand a time in my own history much clearer.
I picked it up because so many of my Red Cedar Club readers have raved about it. They were not wrong. 

Laurie Valentine is a young girl at the time of the polio epidemic. Her mother has died and her father is a fundraiser for the March of dimes in the battle to defeat polio. Laurie is left alone most of the time.

When Dickie, a younger boy, moves into the neighborhood, she makes her first friend. Then Dickie comes down with polio and ends up living at the Bishop – a hospital for children with polio. Laurie disobeys her father’s orders and goes to visit him. She finds him in a room with other children surviving inside iron lungs. To ease her own discomfort, and to help them pass the time, she begins to narrate a story about a giant named Colosso and Jimmy the Giant-Slayer. The captivating tale is populated with mythical creatures from many different regions and cultures.  There are gnomes, trolls, griffins, dragons and minotaurs.
As the saga unfolds there is an intertwining of the reality of the children’s lives and the story. Dickie, Chip, Carolyn and Jimmy find themselves represented in the characters as Laurie weaves them, miraculously, into the tale. Reality becomes even more blurred with Dickie's claim to dream the events and predicaments they find themselves in prior to Laurie telling them. Then disaster strikes, and the children must continue the story to save their friend.

Iain Lawrence melds historical fiction with fantasy in this book. His gift is that while the fantasy of the story provides counterpoint to the harshness of the polio ward, it also integrates them. Yet what makes the novel especially profound is that as the children engage in conversations about the story and their roles within it, readers are forced to examine the power of story - and our capacity to become creators and actors in our own tales.

All Our Children Are Special

The profound gift of literature is that it can open us up to many different kinds of truths. It is perhaps, the only vehicle for helping us to understand what it means to be someone other than ourselves.
Growing up in a household with a disabled father made me aware of how important it is to build bridges and create spaces to understand that individuals are not their disability.  Of course, it also influenced my reaction to these two books here.

After Ever After by Jordan Sonnenblick takes us inside the head of a teenage boy. Both Jeffrey and his best friend, Tad, are cancer survivors. Jeffrey’s cancer is now in remission, but Tad’s is a recurring kind. Both boys are profoundly changed by their treatment. Tad uses a wheelchair. Whereas Jeffrey has been left with a limp, it is his cognitive ability, especially in the area of mathematics, which has been affected. Both boys, and their families, live with the threat of ‘What if it comes back?’ hanging over their heads.

The characters are real people you come to care deeply about. On one level they are just teenage kids trying to deal with regular adolescent issues. Jeffrey hopes for the miracle of Lindsay Abraham, the new girl in class, becoming his girlfriend. Like all kids that age they struggle with figuring out who they are and want they want to become. On another level, it deals with much bigger societal issues. The mastery of Sonnenblick’s writing is that he brings it all together.

I loved this book. I couldn’t put it down. I learned much about the effects and aftereffects of cancer and chemotherapy, on kids and their families. It has is has its own kind of hilarity. It has it’s own kind of joy. It is not sappy in the least, although I admit to crying. I loved this book because it highlights the idiocy of massive standardized testing in schools. I loved this book because it demonstrates how powerful we can be when we act together.

This is a great book!


Out of My Mind by Sharon M. Draper is about a child with a different kind of challenge. It is told from the perspective of Melody, a gifted child who has cerebral palsy. 
Her frustration and trapped brilliance seize us from the first pages:
“Words have always swirled around me like snowflakes – each one delicate and different, each one melting untouched in my hands.
Deep within me, words pile up in huge drifts. Mountains of phrases and sentences and connected ideas. Clever expressions. Jokes. Love songs.
From the time I was really little – maybe just a few months old – words were like sweet, liquid gifts, and I drank them like lemonade. I could almost taste them. They made my jumbled thoughts and feelings have substance.….
…By the time I was two, all my memories had words, and all my words had meaning.
But only in my head.
I have never spoken one single word. I am almost eleven years old.”

This book takes us into Melody’s head and the classroom at Spaulding Street Elementary School where special needs children are warehoused. Eventually the students are integrated into other classrooms, but for the most part they are viewed as freaks by the majority of the school population. Melody gets an aid to assist her in a more meaningful integration. Then she gets a Media–Talker, a kind of computer that enables her to speak through voice-generated technology.

Melody wants to be just like all the other girls her age. She worries about her clothes. She wants to have girl friends. She wants to be accepted. She thinks the Media–Talker will enable all this. It doesn’t. On they other hand, it does enable Melody’s intellectual capacity to be understood and accepted. She ends up on the Whiz Kids' team and helps them win the first level of their competition.  In the end, in spite of her incredible ability, it is her disabilities that her classmates and others seem to focus on.

The book works to educate the reader about what it is like to be so profoundly disabled. Melody is a spunky engaging character and I wanted her desperately to succeed. It speaks to why inclusion of these children is so important in regular classrooms.

It isn’t really a bad read except that so many of the characters are too one-dimensional. People are often fearful, stupid and curious about individuals with special needs, but I don’t think they are deliberately malicious as Draper represents Melody’s peers in this book. The teachers from the special class are also presented unrealistically. Like everyone else, teachers have preconceptions about what disabled individuals are capable of, but none that I have met, have ever been as unaware or ignorant as some of the teachers in this book are portrayed.

However troubled I might be by the one-dimensional rendering of many of the characters in Out of My Mind, it is still an important book on many levels. It challenges our thinking about what it is like to be disabled and hopefully will force readers to take a hard look at our own attitudes and beliefs. 
It certainly did so for me.

The Tiffany Aching Collection by Terry Pratchett

One of my favorite characters in literature is the young witch, Tiffany Aching, from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. I rarely reread books, but I no sooner finished the last in the series, I Shall Wear Midnight, when I started rereading The Wee Free Men again. I think it was better the second time round.  

Before you read any farther, let go your preconceptions of witchcraft. Tiffany Aching is most definitely not that sort of witch. Just to start, how many witches have you encountered who are encumbered with a clan of little people? The Nac Mac Feegles (also known as the Wee Free Men) are Pictsies, a kind of Gaelic fairy folk, (but don’t say the word fairy in front of them if you wish to keep your teeth.) They are a boisterous bunch of six inch, blue skinned, kilted little people who love to steal, drink, fight, and tell lies. They are exceptionally good at all of it. They make their home in a mound on the Chalk. Tiffany, being the witch of the Chalk, is their “big wee hag.” Much to Tiffany’s chagrin, the Nac Mac Feegles are near her all the time.  

In The Wee Free Men, then eight years old, Tiffany’s fairy tale notions of witchcraft are dispelled when she meets the witch finder, Miss Tick.  Miss Tick informs her, “Once you learn about magic, I mean really learn about magic, learn everything you can learn about magic, then you’ve still got the most important lesson still to learn... Not to use it. Witches don’t use magic unless they really have to. It’s hard work and difficult to control. We do other things. A witch pays attention to everything that’s going on. A witch uses her head. A witch is sure of herself. A witch always has a piece of string…. A witch delights in small details. A witch sees through things and round things. A witch sees further than most. A witch sees things from the other side. A witch knows where she is and when she is..”  

For the main part, Tiffany doesn’t really even practice magic. Mostly being a witch is just being in the center of things, being aware of what is going on in her community and looking out for her people. In involves cutting old people’s toenails, mending cuts and broken bones, birthing babies, and tending to the dying. 

When necessary, Tiffany can, of course, do all kinds of extraordinary things; things like taking pain away, transferring heat and cold, and seeing into the future (when she can get her jumble to work properly) But to Tiffany this isn’t magic, it is just something you learn to do, only you have to be a witch to learn to do it. She can step out of her body and travel away from it for a time, and has learned the trick of becoming invisible – but these skills are more connected to particle physics, than some kind of hocus pocus. 

It isn’t easy being a witch. Tiffany must strive to act ethically at all times. It involves having to make decisions: sometimes between right and wrong, and sometimes between wrong and wrong. The thing is - being a witch means you must make them. In Tiffany’s case, this involves layers of thinking. She has her first, her second, her third and sometimes even her fourth thoughts before she is finished.  

While the everyday life of a witch can be tediously humdrum, Tiffany manages to get herself into some very tricky situations. In spite of her age and lack of experience, in The Wee Free Men, she manages to rescue her little bother, Wentworth, and the Baron’s son, Roland, from the Queen of the Elves. It is a gripping adventure wherein a talking toad, the Nac Mac Feegles and a frying pan play important roles in the rescue.  

A Hat Full Of Sky takes us into Tiffany’s life as she apprentices to become a witch. Apprenticing involves looking after an older, wiser witch, and learning from them. Occasionally she learns a trick or two, but it is pretty much constant drudgery. Young witches like Tiffany accompany their mentors as they go about their witch business – looking after the sick and elderly, and learning to be the caretaker of a community.  

Unbeknownst to Tiffany, her secret trick of stepping out of her body has attracted the attention of a Hiver. It manages to take control of her body and abuses her power. With the help of the Nac Mac Feegles and Miss Level, they manage to drive the Hiver off. Eventually Tiffany and another older witch, Mistress Weatherwax, capture it. I guarantee the ending will not be what you might anticipate. 

In Wintersmith, the third novel, Tiffany ignores her mentor, and ends up dancing with Winter. He unfortunately gets in a muddle and falls in love with her. In his wooing of her, he creates snowflakes and icebergs in her image. The balance between the seasons goes off kilter as Winter brings on a blizzard that buries the chalk and everything on it. Tiffany takes on the power of summer and strange things happen as plants sprout from her feet and the world turns green where she walks. Tiffany must fix the mess she has inadvertently created before everyone she knows and loves dies.  

In the last book in the series, I Shall Wear Midnight, Tiffany is now the fully-fledged witch of the chalk. The baron dies and Roland, his son, takes over. Roland has gotten himself engaged to a weepy, but beautiful, princess with a tartar for a mother. Tiffany's conflicted feelings about his engagement are compounded by his no longer seeming to be her friend.  On top of this, a powerful demonic spirit, the Cunning Man, is stalking her. The Cunning Man despises all witches and uses his powers to fill minds with suspicion and hate towards them. Tiffany must defeat him, because if she doesn’t, and he manages to take over her body, the other witches will have to destroy her. Thankfully Tiffany has many allies, including new witches, a promising young man, and the fearless Nac Mac Feegles to help her.  

While these novels are part of a series, I found each one to be a satisfying read unto itself. Each is punctuated with deep philosophical musings, some serious dictum for how to live a rich meaningful life, and bouts of screaming hilarity (mostly, but not always, due to the Nac Mac Feegles.) The main characters feel like old friends who have invited me to hang out with them for a while. I hate it when the visit ends, and look forward to my next encounter.  

Due to Terry Pratchett’s battle with Alzheimer’s, it is unlikely there will be more Tiffany Aching books. 
I am heartbroken.

Your Own, Sylvia: a Verse Portrait of Sylvia Plath by Stephanie Hemphill

Sylvia Plath poetry needs to be spoken out loud and listened to.
Her words are sharp as diamonds – a dark necklace that sparkles and cuts at the same time. It is not for the faint of heart.
In 1973, the year I was 20, I was introduced to her work through The Bell Jar.  I read it out loud while traveling with a friend from Kamloops to Vancouver. We were both hooked. I couldn’t stop coming back for more. I read everything of hers I could get my hands on.

This book about her life came to my attention as a runner up for the Michael Printz award (an award for best young adult novels - if you read nothing else, read the books on this list)  
Your Own Sylvia has been around for a while, but I recently found it as an audio book and got it.

I just finished it.

I loved it.
 Hemphill tells Sylvia’s life story in verse. While it is fiction, it is based on real events and real characters. The reader (or in my case) listener gets to know her through the different poetry and different voices of these many characters.  Like Sylvia's life, this book will take you on an emotional roller coaster.  
I was completely enthralled.  
I loved for her.
I hated for her.  
I wept for her. 
Most of all, 
I feared for her.

I loved it.
I learned much more about Sylvia Plath’s life, but at the same time came away wanting to know more.
I was introduced to different categories of poetry. I want to go back and reread Plath’s work to find them. 
I came to understand more profoundly what it meant to be a woman - an incredibly brilliant women during the 40's 50's and 60's.  If she were alive, she would be a year older than my mother.  I am left full of questions to ask my mother about her experiences growing up in those times.

This is a truly glorious book. But alas, not one I will get for our elementary school library. I will however be getting one for my own bookshelf.
I loved it.