Round 2, Match 3: Some Writer! vs When The Sea Turned to Silver

JUDGE – CYNTHIA KADOHATA
Some Writer! by Melissa Sweet Houghton Mifflin Harcourt	When the Sea Turned to Silver by Grace Lin Little Brown

 

On the surface, Some Writer! and When the Sea Turned to Silver are utterly different books, one nonfiction and filled with details from author E.B. White’s real life, and one a fantastical journey through a vividly imagined world. Yet both are about finding your way to your destiny.

In Grace Lin’s When the Sea Turned to Silver, the young protagonist Pinmei thinks of herself as “a scared mouse, a quiet girl, a coward.” She lives with her grandmother, Amah, a renowned storyteller, in a hut on the side of a mountain. A brutal new emperor has been sending his soldiers to all the villages, taking away the men to build a wall around his vast kingdom. Whenever a wife, child, or mother begs for a man’s freedom, the soldiers say, “Bring the emperor a Luminous Stone That Lights the Night and you can have your wish.” One night, the soldiers come to Pinmei’s house and take away her grandmother, though Pinmei doesn’t understand why. She and her young friend, Yishan, set out to find the Luminous Stone and rescue Amah.

Amah ends up in a prison with a stonecutter, who is grateful to be imprisoned with her. As a storyteller, the stonecutter says,“You can make time disappear. You can bring us to places we have never dreamed of. You can make us feel sorrow and joy and peace.”

As Pinmei searches for her grandmother, she discovers that she too can make time disappear for others, because she’s actually a talented storyteller herself. The main action alternates with many short stories filled with color and texture, darkness and light, that hold within themselves their own perfect logic and offer moments of epiphany connecting to the main story. During their quest, Pinmei and Yishan encounter magical items and animals and people that Lin masterfully manages to root in their own firm reality. It’s amazing how involving each smaller story is, and amazing as well how Lin weaves all the parts together as Pinmei takes her hero’s journey through the ancient Chinese landscape. There is evil and sadness in these pages, but also triumph, courage, and discovery. And, of course, in the end Lin ties everything together as only she can – there’s nobody else quite like her. She has also illustrated the novel, including the beautiful cover. All in all, a bravura performance.

Some Writer!, a biography of E.B. White, is written by Melissa Sweet, a Caldecott Honor winner. It’s the story of Elwyn Brooks White, who was born on July 11, 1899 and knew he wanted to be a writer by the time he was seven or eight. As a child, he was kind of frightened: of the dark, of the future, of public speaking, of not knowing things he really ought to know. But he was abundantly loved and lived a happy and safe childhood with his large family. He owned a dog, chicks, lizards, and pigeons. He loved summer and animals and words. Some Writer is told scrapbook-style, with photographs, illustrations, pages from book manuscripts, poems, and handwritten journal excerpts. It’s a book best not rushed through, but rather savored and wandered through, the way you might wander through a forest, stopping to closely examine a leaf here, a snail there.

While White was growing up, he wrote stories and poems, and in the summer loved to wake up before his family and canoe by himself on a glassy lake. By 1917 he was set to go to Cornell. The summer before he left for college, he wrote “My utter dependence galls me, and I am living the life of a slacker.” And “Eighteen and still no future! I’d be more contented in prison, for there at least I would know precisely what I had to look forward to.” He traveled to Ithaca, New York, before college started, and then he got so distracted by hanging about town that he missed the first few days of school. He enjoyed college, and afterwards he worked as a camp counselor and then found employment at a few writing jobs he disliked. He took a road trip across America, “travelling light and trying new adventures.” In the mid-1920’s, he got a low-paying job at The New Yorker writing captions, short articles, and fillers. Then, on a train trip in 1926, he fell asleep and “dreamt of a mouse who was fully dressed in dapper clothing with a hat and cane.” He wrote a few stories about this mouse, but it was not until 1945 that his first children’s novel, based on this dream, was published. Stuart Little was banned by some libraries, but kids loved it, and thousands of them wrote to him. White went on, of course, to write Charlotte’s Web and The Trumpet of the Swan. And perhaps, during this time of strife – and of intolerance from both sides of the fence in America – one more item about his life is worth noting. White fiercely opposed McCarthy-era blacklisting, and was courageous about saying so. “It is not a crime to believe anything at all in America,” he said.

One hates to choose between two such excellent books, but one must. Grace Lin is one of our most talented writers: her prose is extraordinary and her storytelling divine. I’ll never forget first reading When the Mountain Meets the Moon – it blew me away – and When the Sea Turned to Silver is also very, very lovely. But my heart was just so moved by the life E.B. White lived, by the way your years can seem to meander at times and still lead to greatness. I love the idea of kids reading this book and seeing that you can get extraordinarily good at something while still receiving an occasional D in school; taking a road trip here and slacking off there; and working for years in jobs that are wonderful but not really your destiny. Then you take all your accumulated skill and focus everything you have – and end up one of the finest children’s writers of all time. You can not know where you’re headed, and yet you can be headed in exactly the right direction. While When the Sea Turned to Silver takes the magical and makes it real, Some Writer is real enough to touch, it’s down-to-earth, and yet it’s totally mystical.

For that reason, I have to choose Some Writer. I simply loved this book.

—Cynthia Kadohata

Cynthia Kadohata fangirling right now: The Thing About Luck was my favorite book of the 2014 battle, a deeply moving and subtle story. And Ms. Kadohata’s decision lives up to my hopes, with insightful and beautifully written phrases. She expresses a “clear preference” for Some Writer!, which is the part of a decision Roger Sutton said “matter[ed] most” in 2013. Her specificity (in the penultimate sentence) is a solid achievement, especially considering that not all the judges this year fully clarified their reasoning. (That is, if you want logic in the first place: Mr. Dashner, in his hilarious decision, simply went by his gut.) Mr. Kiely, for instance, advanced The Sun is Also a Star because it was an inspiring love story, but he didn’t compare it with Dolssa or identify a flaw in either book that would cause the other to win.

The Round 2 decisions, though, have spelled out their logic very well, from Mr. Steptoe’s musical metaphors to Mr. Schrefer’s talk about book structure. Interestingly, Ms. Kadohata summarized the books’ plots much more than other judges this year, which is useful for those who haven’t read the books, but superfluous for those who have.

I also want to note Mr. Sutton’s “frequent assertion” in 2013 “that there’s too much diplomacy in children’s book discussion.” As usual, many judges have given their praise––obligatory, if heartfelt––without substantively critiquing the books. (Shouts out to Ms. Yolen for her constructive criticism of Wet Cement!) Perhaps the overwhelming positivity is due to the lack of controversial books in this year’s battle, while earlier we had books like X and Grasshopper Jungle…

– Kid Commentator RGN

SOME WRITER!
WILL MOVE ON
TO ROUND THREE

 

 

 

JUDGE – ELIOT SCHREFER
Ghost By Jason Reynolds Simon & Schuster	March, Book Three by Congressman John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell Top Shelf Productions

 

 

The beauty of reading books is that they don’t have to duke it out afterwards. I can read me some Dragonlance Chronicles: Dragons of Winter Night on Saturday and some Howards End on Sunday, and I don’t have to decide whether I like gully dwarves and blue dragons more than Edwardian politics and real estate bequests. (Examples drawn at random. Totally, totally at random.)

I had mixed feelings while my novel Endangered was in the Battle of the Books back in 2013. I was all proud of my new little book, and worried about how the world would treat it, and like a nervous parent ushered it out into the world, and it was looking back at me waving as it stepped out into the sunshine, and the birds were chirping all around it, and I shouted “you’ll be fine, kid!” but then the clouds rolled in, and I could see that The Fault in Our Stars was out there waiting for it, and it was so much bigger and stronger, and I screamed “Endangered, baby, come back home, you don’t have to go out there and try to prove anything! Stay with me where it’s warm!” but it was too late. As Martine Leavitt very kindly phrased it in her decision, “I wouldn’t want my book to come up against a John Green book in a dark alley.”

That said, to have librarians, teachers, real teens (!), and authors I’ve long admired discussing something I wrote was so incredibly useful. I still have notes I took from Leavitt’s decision, and Kathi Appelt’s, and the online comments, and they’ve helped me become a better writer. The battle is the pretext for the important work of discussing books. Really, I’d call that a total win for victors and losers both. (A warning shot for this current contest, though: Let me just say that I wouldn’t want my book to come up against a John Lewis book in a dark alley.)

What a year it’s been for March: Book Three! National Book Award, Printz Award, Coretta Scott King Award, Sibert Medal, and the upcoming inevitable Emmy-Grammy-Oscar-Tony grand slam: the only sticker this book jacket doesn’t have at this point is Scratch-n’-Sniff Blueberry. And these stickers are there for very, very good reason. I’ve never read a book (except for March: Book One and March: Book Two) that got my heart rate so consistently high. I was soldered to this novel, filled with constant low levels of panic, melancholy, and hope. In a year that saw President Trump tweeting that John Lewis is “all talk talk talk – no action or results,” this book is resounding proof negative.

What a tremendous portrait of the courage and tenacity of Congressman John Lewis and the civil rights movement. What an argument, too, for graphic novels themselves. From the 1963 Birmingham church bombing through the moment when Obama takes time out of his own inauguration to thank Lewis, we readers are steeped in feeling and mood. Nate Powell’s art manages that trick of staying focused on expressive faces while never losing the epic grandeur of a scene. The pages never lull into repetition, with the composition and the ratio of black to white space varying wildly. Though there are striking images on each panel, the book also has a ton of text, not shying from delving right into thorny or uncomfortable particulars, such as the divisions John Lewis’s trip to Africa created within the American civil rights movement.

In a non-graphic novel, I feel like tone is the result of an accumulation of words, and takes time to accomplish. Whenever I picked up March: Book Three, though, I didn’t have to get more than half a page in to pick up the mood—through the magic of pictures it telegraphed itself, and was the book’s first, rather than last, achievement. This immediacy of the graphic novel form is perfectly combined with the urgency of the events on the page. The sequence in which LBJ watches as Fannie Lou Hamer’s testimony draws media focus from him during the Democratic National Convention captures, succinctly and efficiently, the quiet dignity of storytelling wielded against an enormous institutional apparatus intent on controlling message. March: Book Three is accessible to a wide number of readers, young and old, and is essential reading in our here and now.

A quibble: this book doesn’t feel particularly of children’s literature to me, unless you consider all graphic novels to be inherently kidlit, which I do not. I guess I mean that I don’t feel it particularly engages with the experience of being a young person. That doesn’t change the fact, however, that what it has to say will be hugely useful to young readers. I almost don’t want to bring up the question of whether it’s children’s literature, as I would hate any generic classification to prevent March: Book Three from having its impact on the lives of its young readers. Though I finished the book days ago, I keep returning to the words of Diane Nash, represented in its early pages: “Dr. King, when children are murdered. . . we can tell people not to fight only if we offer them a way by which justice can be served without violence.” Useful words in the months and years to come.

If March: Book Three is unlike any other book I’ve read, Ghost has a family resemblance to plenty of other middle grade books, and felt like slipping into a comfortable old sweater, even if one decorated in some new designs. (Awkward metaphor alert.) Castle Cranshaw, also known as the “Ghost” of the title, is on the run. His father shot at him and his mother when he was younger, and has since been in prison. Ghost’s mom has little money to spare and works long hours, and school is a source of bullying and tension. He’s ripe for a mentor, and a release that will finally let him feel good about himself. Running track becomes it.

Though there is something familiar about this “the family we make” premise, Ghost is in no way cliché. Ghost doesn’t become a world track star. His father doesn’t get out of prison at just the worst moment. (Though maybe, since the story will continue in further books, these events will occur in later volumes.) Instead Ghost is a realistically observed, wholly believable account of one kid’s struggle to find a tolerable way to exist in the world. Ghost is “the one who yelled at teachers and punched stupid dudes in the face for talking smack. The one who felt… different. And mad. And sad. The one with all the scream inside.”

Reynolds gets right inside Ghost. Reading can often feel like a three-way conversation between reader and character and author. In an imperfect work, little tics about how a character is presented might say more about the author’s intentions than about the character him/herself. But Reynolds closes the psychic distance on Ghost so fully that the author gets entirely out of the way. When I was reading, it felt like just me and Ghost. I was inside that kid’s brain, completely and truly. What an achievement.

I’m so grateful that Ghost’s story will continue in more books. There’s good reason we love to read about outsiders finally finding a place they belong, and there will always be room for many versions of that tale. Reynolds has done a near faultless job, but because of the guaranteed benefits of Ghost’s comfortable structure, it feels like an easier achievement than March: Book Three. There’s a reason awards committee after awards committee has found March: Book Three to be singular. The book’s design team is lucky that the Battle of the Books doesn’t come with a sticker!

Winner: March: Book Three.

 

 

—Eliot Schrefer

And Lewis’ brilliant story marches on. (Bad pun alert.) I actually teared up reading Mr. Schrefer’s insightful decision, which brought back all the memories of reading March. There’s this moment on page 202 where Lewis, hit by a trooper’s club, says, “I thought I saw death.” The page goes black. “I thought I was going to die.…Get up.…Keep moving.” The page goes white, figures blur on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, as if a dream. And John Lewis runs. He keeps moving. Like Ghost, he is running for more than his future. He runs for his family’s future. He runs for his country’s future. As Mr. Schrefer says, whether it’s a kids’ book or not, March: Book Three deeply deserves the attention it’s gotten. Let’s remember it for years to come.

– Kid Commentator RGN

I despise Round Two. The picks are almost always more difficult than the Round 1 picks. And alas that means losing one of my favorites, Ghost. I was running (pun intended) on the high of Ghost’s first match win after The Girl Who Drank the Moon fell prey to the Newbery curse. But my heart sank when I read your warning, Mr. Schrefer. “I wouldn’t want my book to come up against a John Lewis book in a dark alley.” If March and Ghost met up in a dark alley, I would hope that Ghost would run far, far away. Sorry, I can’t resist the plethora of potential puns. (And I obviously can’t resist alliterating either.) But all puns aside, March’s win is more than well deserved. Regardless of if it “engages with the experience of being a young person” (although it does for me, a young person), it is a book for the ages.

 

– Kid Commentator NS

 

MARCH, BOOK THREE
WILL MOVE ON
TO ROUND THREE

 

 

 

 

JUDGE – JAVAKA STEPTOE
Freedom in Congo Square by Carole Boston Weatherford illustrated by R. Gregory Christie Little Bee	When Green Becomes Tomatoes by Julie Fogliano illustrated by Julie Morstad Macmillan

I like to think of these two books as pieces of music: One is like a work song, the other a classical concerto. In this way they are quite different and yet comparable, with one resonating for me more than the other.

 

The Work Song: Freedom in Congo Square

The work song in Congo Square rings simple and clear as we get one day closer to Congo Square. It connotes the movement of emotions the enslaved black Americans felt from anger, to fear, to just plain tired; from anticipation, to hopefulness, to jubilee. It keeps you wrapped in the blanket of their struggle until we finally arrive at Sunday, when this blanket is shed and laid out for a picnic, when you feel the beauty of the sun and can celebrate. But like any work song, the end is not the end. The toil is not over.  Instead, the song, in its repetitive process, keeps the mind and the heart focused, as the work of the slaves is never really done.

For this reason, I wanted more insight into these few hours of freedom. I enjoyed the celebration but would have liked to see the meeting of family members, the sharing of information, the plots to overthrow shackles and chains. That being said, I loved the rhythm of the language and the sparseness, muted colors, and interesting compositions of Gregory Christie’s illustrations. The night scene particularly struck me, as it reminds us of the horrible slave ships that brought millions of Africans to the Americas.

 

The Concerto: When Green Becomes Tomatoes

Much like a concerto, Tomatoes moves from one emotional touchpoint to another, following a cast of principal characters, with poetic accompaniment. Unlike Congo Square, this time we experience the silly, the dreamy, the awe of nature’s beauty. The intricacy and sparseness of the illustrations are beautiful and complement a feeling of wonder propelling us forward through the seasons, while the text is light, airy, and comfortable. I can see how the language might have gone to a deeper place considering the range of emotions children feel on a daily basis, but overall this poetry collection could easily be enjoyed by any reader.

 

The Verdict

When Green Becomes Tomatoes is like a nice song that gets stuck in your head, one you hum over and over and makes you tap your foot—a classical concerto that everyone appreciates. But Freedom in Congo Square wrenches your heart. It does the hard work. It says something important and brings to light issues that still need to be addressed today. And for that reason, it is the winner of this round.

—

I love Mr. Steptoe’s comparison of these books to pieces of music, and I fully agree that Freedom in Congo Square needs to move on because, as a work song, it reminds us of history, struggle, and joy.

There might be a way, though, to merge the concerto and the work song (which, in this context, is “political”). I think this beautiful poem by Ross Gay, a poet and professor at Indiana University, does just that:

A Small Needful Fact

is that Eric Garner worked
for some time for the Parks and Rec.
Horticultural Department, which means,
perhaps, that with his very large hands,
perhaps, in all likelihood,
he put gently into the earth
some plants which, most likely,
some of them, in all likelihood,
continue to grow, continue
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures,
like being pleasant to touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe.

Source: PBS

– Kid Commentator RGN

Two of my favorite books in the battle are pitted against each other. Of course. (Nimona vs. Marvels last year was another painful match.) I think there’s something to be said that Freedom in Congo Square, a picture book with very few words, is advancing to Round 3. Like I said in my first comment this year, I was so so impressed with Congo Square and everything about it is wonderful and important and just so good!!

– Kid Commentator NS

FREEDOM IN CONGO SQUARE WILL MOVE ON TO ROUND THREE

 

JUDGE – BRENDAN KIELY
The Passion of Dolssa by Julie Berry Penguin	The Sun is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon Random House

What a difficult task! Of all the books to have paired together, here are two uniformly critically acclaimed, wildly successful and popular books, both Printz Honor finalists, one a National Book Award finalist, the other a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist—the list goes on and on for both of these books, and asking someone to chose between them is next to impossible. What’s more, they are vastly different kinds of stories. One is a work of historical fiction, bursting with vivid medieval and religious detail from the times of the Inquisition, and the other is a contemporary romance, a story of doomed love when political forces much larger than the lovers seem certain to keep them apart. This enormous distinction may have tipped the scales for another judge, but not for this one. Instead, it was like being given a menu with only two desserts listed—my favorite two!—and I still had to choose one. (What if I want both?)

Both books dance between multiple perspectives. Nicola Yoon in The Sun is Also a Star flips back and forth between the two young lovers, Natasha and Daniel, and adds a third perspective, a kaleidoscope of people and situations that weave a web of interconnectivity between Natasha and Daniel. Likewise, Julie Berry in The Passion of Dolssa toggles between a charismatic matchmaker, Botille, who will do everything she can to help her family, the visionary saint on the run for her life, Dolssa, and Lucien, the maniacal clergyman chasing her. But Berry doesn’t stop there. She complicates (in a good way) and broadens the story by creating a frame within a frame, within a frame, investing a haunting power to Dolssa’s story that sends echoes of her name and story from 1241 right up through today. It’s a magnificent feat of storytelling.

I admire both authors’ ambition and execution. Writing multiple perspectives in one story is already hard—making each point of view distinct and vital to enriching the overall story and not overwhelming one perspective or another is incredibly difficult. And in both novels, the choice to tackle the story in this way is not only a demonstration of writing mastery (Nicola Yoon and Julie Berry are both masters I deeply admire), it’s also a way to deftly build the world in which the story takes place, to layer it with complexity and depth—in short, to make it more epic!

In The Passion of Dolssa, we begin in 1241. I can see and smell the dirt roads Dolssa travels as she flees Lucien, and the clouds of dust still lingering as Lucien interviews the people who’ve seen her. The attention to historic detail is perfectly balanced, lifting the book into the cinematic without ever bogging the reader down in over-researched minutia. The medieval world in all its grim and muddy glory is vibrantly alive.

I really like that Dolssa and Botille flourish with empowerment. It’s important—not only these days, rather, always!—to read and champion stories that portray young women boldly navigating and standing up against the impossible odds of a world so awfully determined to harm them. In fact, Botille’s line near the beginning of the book rings like a bell whose vibrations we still hear today: “To be needed is one way to be safe. The other is to have money.” And by the end of the story, this question of needing to be safe is haunting and palpable as it is entirely up to Botille to save the ones she loves. What resonates most for this reader, too, is the notion that storytelling in and of itself might have the power to save us.

In effect, both books leave us with a sense, or an assurance, of grace, that while the trials and tribulations of our everyday lives (and these are not to be understated, the Inquisition and the imminent threat of deportation are intense pressures) seem omnipotent and omnipresent, there is still something larger at work that provides hope.

And yet, I must choose one of these books. In the end, The Sun is Also a Star rises to the top for its bold insistence that falling in love with the one person best suited for you is every bit as magical and improbable, as it is certain and inevitable.

For every person who has fallen so deeply in love, The Sun is Also a Star reaffirms the nearly ineffable quality of joy you already know, and for those looking for love, it promises that given time, the circumstances will slowly arrange and you’ll find yourself joyously falling when you least expect it. Even professed cynics find their voice in this novel, voicing the quiet hopes that lie beneath steely veneers. As Natasha says halfway through the novel, “But there’s part of me, the part that doesn’t believe in God or true love, that really wants him to prove me wrong about not believing in those things.”

The Sun is Also a Star is a book for our times, not for it’s politics (which it showcases in all the terror and horror of deportation and immigration rights in the United States today) but even more so for its proud reminder that love indeed can conquer all.

 

—Brendan Kiely

It’s noteworthy that Mr. Kiely himself coauthored a book balancing two perspectives. All American Boys, the recent much-acclaimed YA novel by Kiely and Jason Reynolds (Ghost!), uses the voice of both a white teen and a black teen in a powerful book that makes us (and its protagonists) confront police brutality. Yoon’s romance and Berry’s historical fiction novel are less overtly political than All American Boys, but both provide their own take on the personal being political. Natasha, as an undocumented immigrant, faces the threat of deportation, but she and Daniel fight back with their endearing love. Even the inquisitors of 13th century France meet the resilience and passion of three sisters in a small, provincial town. Yet although the writers’ sympathies clearly lie with the oppressed, the plethora of perspectives gives us access to the inquisitors, the family members, the security officers. I found The Sun Is Also A Star a bit sappy despite its brilliant characters and backdrop of politics, culture, and history, but it’s still an incredibly moving book. And both these novels just affirm humanity in this troubling time. Hurrah for that.

– Kid Commentator RGN

Every year that I’ve done this, there’s one book––historical fiction––that gets eliminated in the first round against a book that I enjoyed but not nearly as much. I think of it as my own private version of the Newberry Curse. In 2015, it was The Family Romanov. Last year, it was The Hired Girl. This year, it’s The Passion of Dolssa. (What do the judges have against historical fiction? Can we call it the Historical Fiction Curse? No? You think I’m too bitter about a book that got eliminated two years ago? Fine then.)

Don’t get me wrong, I really liked The Sun Is Also a Star! But I’ve never been a sucker for romances unless they’re really good or heart wrenching. Sun was neither,. I spent a lot of time thinking I should be crying, and no time actually crying. But to each their own I guess! I never expected Passion to advance farther than Round 2, so I’m not that upset that Sun is advancing. This time, at least.

– Kid Commentator NS

THE SUN IS ALSO A STAR
WILL MOVE ON TO ROUND TWO

 

 

 

JUDGE – NOVA REN SUMA
Anna and the Swallow Man by Gavriel Savit Random House	The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge Abrams

After I finished the two books up in this round, I was left excited by the depths of imagination both of these authors created on the page.

I’ll tell you what I look for as a reader: I like to be delighted by language, I like to forge a deep connection with a character, and always, always, I want to be swept away by a story. Both of these books succeeded in sweeping me away. I loved the language in each. They showed artistry, and imagination, and I would recommend them both: Anna and the Swallow Man by Gavriel Savit and The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge. But only one can be chosen to move on to the next round, and, to me, ultimately, that choice was clear.

Let me begin by telling you about Anna and the Swallow Man, a moving and surreal story that sweeps you up from the first page. We begin in Krakow, Poland, in 1939, on the day seven-year-old Anna’s father is taken away by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp to die. But Anna doesn’t know this. She can’t know. She is only seven, and the story unfolds in a subtle, heart-wrenching manner, allowing us a sense of the greater world surrounding Anna—that terrifying world—while also letting us to see how she interprets it. Of Krakow, we are told, “What was that place now, what were its rooms and sidewalks, what was each inch of negative space between the buildings and automobiles and boot heels of the city, if it was not the great open mouth that had swallowed her father up?”

With her father gone, her new life begins when she meets a strange man who seems as if he can understand the language of swallows. He won’t give her, or anyone, his name, and so she calls him the Swallow Man. Soon, fatherless, she follows him, and their adventures lead them to wander from place to place, hiding much of their time in the woods of Poland, skirting the edges of violence. They come upon a man who escaped the Jewish ghetto, and soon he, too, joins them in their wandering, until he meets his tragic end. The book doesn’t shy away from tragedy. We learn, “It is not good to stay living amidst death. But attempting to think of that time—of those days in that place—without an understanding of horror is like trying to draw the spaces between fingers without an understanding of the fingers themselves.”

I appreciated the elegance of the prose and the balance between what Anna knows and understands as a young child, and what the reader knows and understands from context, from history. Anna and the Swallow Man was wonderfully creative, elegantly written, and a fairy tale in itself. The end is left open—which is something I personally love as a reader, handing over the power of interpretation, so the story lives on in my imagination. I will be thinking about this novel for a long time.

Next let me tell you about The Lie Tree, because here, too, I was swept away.

Now we are in Victorian England, and we begin as fourteen-year-old Faith is forced to move with her famous scientist father and the rest of her family to the remote island of Vane, where her father’s expertise in the field has been sought out by local scientists. But very soon upon arrival, and after some odd and even frightening behavior, Faith’s father is dead in the night… murdered, she suspects. Her father has left behind a secret only Faith knows: a secret he was guarding from everyone in the scientific community. Hidden in a sea cave is a magical specimen known as the Lie Tree. It feeds off lies and can ultimately reveal deep and lasting truths, and Faith will make it grow larger than it ever has before once she starts lying to feed it. “A lie was like a fire,” Faith discovers, and she will about burn up the whole island with hers, all so she can find out the truth and avenge her father’s untimely death from those who stole him from her.

Faith was a character I hungered to follow. She was aching to break free of the confines and expectations of girls of her station and time, desperate to be acknowledged and seen for her intellect. She was brave in the face of her fears. Witnessing her transformation throughout the story was one of the great joys of the book.

Her father said these cold words to her before he died, “A girl cannot be brave, or clever, or skilled as a boy can. If she is not good, she is nothing.” But Faith proves this wrong. We watch her transform: “I am not good. Something in Faith’s head broke free, beating black wings into the sky. Nobody good could feel what I feel. I am wicked and deceitful and full of rage. I cannot be saved. She did not feel hot or helpless anymore. She felt the way snakes look when they moved.”

It was moments like that—as Faith deepened and grew and exposed who she was meant to be—that sang for me. The Lie Tree is a murder mystery, a fantastical adventure, a story of revenge and of coming-of-age. It was thrilling to read, at once a page-turner and a book I wanted to savor for all the gorgeous feats of language.

So how to make a choice between these two books?

To those who know me, or know my own work, you might think you can guess my choice: I appreciate surreal storytelling, and I always love an imaginative open end. And while I do admire Anna and the Swallow Man for these qualities especially, it was the deft plotting and delicious writing and deep characterization found in The Lie Tree that soared for me. There is a singular power in The Lie Tree that cannot be denied. This power shows through in every line, in the assured plotting, and in the intricate workings of the mystery. A writer who can so artfully weave a mystery until it bursts open at the end in such a satisfying way, and all the while write page after page with incisive beauty that punctures the depths of her character, has my awe—and my vote—every time.

This is a writer with undeniable mastery of her craft. With admiration, and a marked-up copy of the book littered with underlined passages that wowed me, I choose The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge to move on to the next round.

—Nova Ren Suma

And we enter a new category: YA books! What exactly is a YA book? We think of it as a book geared towards teenage audiences, but there’s so much variation in what teenagers appreciate and are mature enough to read, not just in terms of content but style. I, for one, was enthralled by Anna and the Swallow Man, but the literary style and the sobering content made it seem “adult” despite Anna’s young age. In grappling with the actions of a young girl in WWII, Savrit’s beautifully written story reminds me of Between Shades of Grey, a finalist in the 2012 battle, which some also felt was slightly “adult.” These books, as well as The Lie Tree, are in the end about female empowerment, but Anna’s story ends in a complex way that both empowers Anna and prevents her from acting powerfully. Like Ms. Ren Suma, I like its open-endedness, but after talking to a teacher about it, I also recognize the problems in an ending that gives Anna a lack of control (although she is 7, and this is 1941 Poland). Faith’s story ends differently: it’s the girl who has control over a powerful, magical tree. As Ms. Ren Suma said, The Lie Tree swept me away in its fantastical, historical world, and I’m delighted that it’s moving on to the next round.

– Kid Commentator RGN

Moving into this year’s YA brackets, I’m glad I’m actually part of the intended audience. I crave validity! But regardless, I’m so pleased with the winner of this round. The Lie Tree! (So good.) I was in awe of the Faith’s (and the plot’s) complexity. And there were some spot-on yet subtle bits of wisdom that crept up on me, making the book that much more enjoyable. (One of my favorites, you request? Thanks for asking!) “‘I assume that the high road is a longer and more wearisome journey?’ Myrtle asked briskly.” Of course, Myrtle was referring to a literal high and low road, but there were so many moments where the reader could see Frances Hardinge’s intent. But amidst these tidbits and the fascinating historical details, Faith still managed to steal the show. I felt so strongly attached to her by the end that it pained me to close the book. As for Anna and the Swallow Man? Unfortunately, as is the case with many WWII novels that I’ve read, I didn’t enjoy it as much as I thought I would. Though I think the plot was very well done (the ending was my favorite part), I share RGN’s sentiment regarding Anna’s narrative. I could have used more of her and less of her circumstance, but maybe that’s just me. Regardless, I’m just happy that The Lie Tree is moving forward!

– Kid Commentator NS

THE LIE TREE
WILL MOVE ON TO ROUND TWO

 

 

 

 

JUDGE – JANE YOLEN
Wet Cement by Bob Raczka Macmillan	When the Sea Turned to Silver by Grace Lin Little Brown

Bob Raczka’s concrete poetry collection Wet Cement begins with a pun (concrete/cement, get it?) and ends with a copyright notice that is itself a concrete piece, though not an actual poem.

The spreads are constantly and consistently clever, playful, and inventive. However, as a poet myself, I kept getting caught on rhymes that just missed—one of his quirks is rhyming a singular word with a plural: Or using rhyme words that are not quite slant and not quite right: twelve/himself; shawls/at all; there/scared.

And yet when his poetry hat is on tight, the poem is as clever and perfect as the art.

For example. the Big Dipper poem works as a poem even without the concrete art making the poem look like the Dipper. It is both clever and deep.

Way down there on earth, you hold firefly jars

Filled up to their lids with light.

Up here in the sky, I’m a vessel of stars,

My brim overflowing with night.

But the editor in me wanted one more pass on the poem to straighten out its meter so that the first two lines read:

Down there on earth you hold firefly jars

Filled up to their lids with bright light.

All in all, a good book of concrete poetry that just (slightly) misses the mark. I happen to be a huge fan of Raczka’s work in concrete poems, especially the formatting. We once talked about doing a book together. I just wanted the poems inWest Cement themselves to be as perfect, surprising, and thought-provoking as the amazing art.

Ritual disclaimer: Grace Lin is a friend of mine and a neighbor two towns away.

It took a few chapters before I totally got into both the rhythm and the magic system of When the Sea Turned to Silver, but suddenly, and without realizing it, I was totally engaged. After that, I was reading the book any time I could, galloping through both the narrative portions and the tales within the tale.

The book begins with disaster, is filled with magical journeys, ends with. . .but I shall not tell you that.

Along the way are stories—some noted as such and told as if an old storyteller had written those chapters. Others are embedded in the fabric of the novel itself.

The prose is metaphor rich, and lyrical. The storyteller’s voice is engaged and engaging.

Some of the stories are ones I recognized, having put together twelve anthologies of folk tales. Others I recognized parts of, either as strictly Chinese or as ones with European variants. But knowing the provenance of the tales within the tale was an added bonus for me. A young reader (or even a non-nuanced older reader) can enjoy them as they meet them here for the first time.

Lin is a magician of this kind of weaving which—like the magic jacket of many patches in the novel—keeps us warm and warns us in days of danger, political upheavals, and mystery.

If I have to choose between these two very different books for the one to move on in the Battle of the Books, without hesitation I would choose Grace Linn’sWhen the Sea Turned to Silver.

–Jane Yolen

Lin’s storytelling captured me back in the 2013 battle when I read Starry River of the Sky, and When the Sea Turned to Silver is no different. It’s one of my favorites this year, and I’m ecstatic that it’s continuing in the battle. The folklore’s fascinating partly because it speaks in a language we see so rarely these days: that of fables. A king helps an old man and gets a Paper of Answers that saves his kingdom; two patricians are turned into monkeys for their greed; an artist whose paintings come to life gets revenge through his art on those who would abuse his talent. In some ways, it’s a very different moral universe than the stories we tell today. The villains get punished in an unexpected yet fitting way, and the protagonists win out of love and goodness. In the end, though, we’re rooting for Pinmei and Yiishan, marveling at their innocence and growth as they navigate a fantastical and awe-inspiring world.

Raczka, turning poetry into visual art, also creates something unexpected. Ms. Yolen makes a good point that the poetry could be a little tighter, but that didn’t inhibit my enjoyment of Wet Cement’s delightful inventiveness. The joy of both books is that they take us into amazing worlds we don’t expect – and if books are for anything, that’s what they’re for.

– Kid Commentator RGN

WHEN THE SEA TURNED TO SILVER WILL MOVE ON TO ROUND 2