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Round 1, Match 6: Liar and Spy vs Splendors and Glooms
Liar & Spy by Rebecca Stead Wendy Lamb/Random House |
Splendors and Glooms by Laura Amy Schlitz Candlewick |
Judged by
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Shall I Compare Thee
They want me to compare you, the two of you. But I don’t want to. I’d rather compare you to a summer’s day, or to my Mistress’s eyes, or to anything but to each other. How can I choose between you when I love you both, when you are each so different? One of you temperate, the other anything but. One of you shaking with rough winds, the other blooming with the darling buds of May.
But perhaps this is the wrong question. Perhaps I need instead to ask, How do I love thee?
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
Let’s start with you, Splendors and Glooms.
You are the kind of book I adored as a kid and still do. You are The Wolves of Willoughby Chase; you are David Copperfield. You are gothic. Your words are like sugarplums, rich and sweet and a little spicy. Your words describe orphaned children and fiendish adults. They describe chilblains and secrets and locked towers. They describe Dickensian mud and Dickensian characters. It’s hard to out-Heep Uriah Heep, but your villainous Grisini, master of the greasy compliment, stacks up wonderfully well. Your words describe a magical world; they leave sugarplum visions dancing in my head. An opal that consigns its owner to a fiery death. A fire opal in a filigree cage. It flashes like the eye of a phoenix. An automaton watch that can turn a child into a puppet. On the watch, a tiny clockwork wolf leaps at a tiny clockwork swan. The wolf just misses the swan, it always just misses. But Grisini, the human wolf, catches his prey: A girl turns into a puppet. She dances in front of a painted backdrop. The orphan children leave London with the puppet-girl. They travel through mud and snow to a gingerbread house. There, the opal is smashed, the watch is burned, the puppet turns to flesh and blood. But the flesh-and-blood girl is stiff and obedient, burdened not only by her parents’ expectations but by an awful secret. She cannot dance until she sets the secret free. And thus is it that you, Splendors and Glooms, bring your story to a haunting and satisfying conclusion: The girl dances; the bad guys are buried; the orphans find a home; and wafting over everything are the smells of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.
Now for you, Liar and Spy. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
What I most love is the way your various images connect to and drive the plot—images of dots in particular. You begin with seventh-grade Georges who, in the Science Unit of Destiny, learns that the old map of the human tongue is wrong. That there’s no specific place we experience different tastes—sweet here, bitter there. Instead, the dots of our taste buds are all alike—and that’s what they are, aren’t they? Dots? Our tongues are covered with dots. The second image of dots revolves around Georges Seurat’s painting “Sunday in the Park,” which as Georges says is painted entirely with dots. You have to stand back for the dots to resolve into an image. Georges’s parents (who named him after Seurat) say that the painting reminds them to look at the big picture, which Gorges is trying to do. But that’s a tall order. His father lost his job; his family has just moved from a house to an apartment. Georges’s mom works double shifts at the hospital and is never at home; Georges lost his best friend to the “cool” table; and one of the other “cool” kids picks on Georges—teasing, shoving, taunting.
And so we begin with dots. We begin with Georges meeting a dot in his new landscape, a kid his age in the apartment building. The kid, Safer, conscripts him into spying on the upstairs neighbor, who lives behind a locked door. Yes, you, Liar and Spy, contain locked doors, too, but they are emotional locks. Neither Georges nor Safer needs any of the elaborate stratagems Safer maintains are necessary to spy on the neighbor, and that is because Safer is hiding something from Georges: Safer has the neighbor’s key. This discovery opens an emotional door for Georges. It helps him step closer to the painting of his own life. He understands that while the big picture is important, so is the present: “Life is really a bunch of nows . . . The dots matter.”
Georges is shifting the way he looks at things. Why is the cool table the cool table? Who’s to say his table isn’t the cool table? It is, after all, a matter of perspective. And here the Seurat dots and the taste-bud dots converge; together, they fuel the next stage of Georges’s journey. Georges and a group of “uncool” kids (now, the Blue Team, each kid with a blue dot on his palm) put into effect an ingenious plan: In a Science Unit of Destiny experiment, each kid is to taste-test a chemical that sends 90% of the population running for water (the other 10% can’t taste it). The Blue Team kids taste it, but they don’t let on. They watch as the “cool” kids rush to the water fountain. The Blue Team stays put. It’s not that these kids are excluding anyone, it’s that now they’re including themselves. They’re shaping their own destiny.
And now, Liar and Spy, you unfold revelation upon revelation. Georges discovers that Safer’s lie about the upstairs neighbor and the key conceals a secret fear: Safer’s scared to leave the apartment building. This discovery explodes Georges’ own secret: Georges can admit that, like Safer, he’s been lying to himself, and that his lie conceals his own secret fear: His mother is, indeed, in the hospital, but not as a nurse. She’s sick, she’s a patient. And with new understanding, Georges helps Safer open the front door of the apartment building, helps him discover that the world outside isn’t as scary as he’d imagined.
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
But I realize now that even counting does me no good. Neither of you “out-counts” the other. You are both terrific. I have to go on my gut, choose what I would have loved most as a kid—that kid who was an unabashed lover of the gothic. That kid who loved rough winds and intemperance and doors that really lock. And so the grownup version of her reaches out and, reluctantly, with many second thoughts, chooses Splendors and Glooms.
But the dots matter.
— Franny Billingsley
And the Winner of this match is……
SPLENDORS AND GLOOMS
This is probably the most unfair match of the first round because many of us wouldn’t bat an eye if you told us this would be the Big Kahuna round. I can’t think of a better person to judge this match then Franny who, with her own middle grade novel, THE FOLK KEEPER, is a master of both lush prose and precise economy. I think very highly of both of these novels, but something weird happened over the course of Heavy Medal season: I flip-flopped. Initially, I liked LIAR & SPY better (and I’m in the minority that liked LIAR & SPY even better than WHEN YOU REACH ME), but I gradually warmed up to the strengths of SPLENDORS AND GLOOMS. Do I see a Newbery rematch with THE ONE AND ONLY IVAN in the next round—or will the dreaded Newbery curse strike yet again?
— Commentator Jonathan Hunt
First of all, Ms. Billingsley, a joy to read. Your lyrical writing is simply beautiful.
Now, the books: I didn’t like Splendors and Glooms, at least the first time. I found it boring. Now, however, with the aid of my own mind and Ms. Billingsley’s description, I remember the dry humor of the book, but most of all, the way Schlitz makes her world real. There is a certain vividness to scenes like the one say, where Parsefall and Lizzie in a funny chain of events get bumped around on the train, with an ominous and black pall hanging over the story. And so I remember that – the irony! I guess I probably loved it after all, somehow. Splendors and Glooms has a hidden richness to it. And yes, again, magical. (I have to read it again.)
So is Liar and Spy, towards the end, where the plot speeds in a rush of revelation. At that point, the book resonates with even more of a sense of humanity than in the beginning. For it is not just the reader discovering imaginary events; it is Georges overcoming defiance and anger, Safer defeating fear, and Candy being adorably cute. There is an overwhelming feeling of community and safety that is not present at the start of the story, and the dots do connect. (Similar, in some ways, to Wonder.)
By my book, a tossup. There are so many good books this year!
— Kid Commentator RGN
About Battle Commander
The Battle Commander is the nom de guerre for children’s literature enthusiasts Monica Edinger and Roxanne Hsu Feldman, fourth grade teacher and middle school librarian at the Dalton School in New York City and Jonathan Hunt, the County Schools Librarian at the San Diego County Office of Education. All three have served on the Newbery Committee as well as other book selection and award committees. They are also published authors of books, articles, and reviews in publications such as the New York Times, School Library Journal, and the Horn Book Magazine. You can find Monica at educating alice and on twitter as @medinger. Roxanne is at Fairrosa Cyber Library and on twitter as @fairrosa. Jonathan can be reached at hunt_yellow@yahoo.com.
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