Round 3, Match 1: Boxers and Saints vs Far Far Away

What should we demand of YA literature?  Is that even an answerable question?  YA has grown into such a gorgeous, vast country that to narrow it down seems impossible, and probably undesirable.  It has any genre you’d like, any level of seriousness, books for escape, books for confrontation; it’s a country diverse both vertically and horizontally, a country that welcomes all reader-immigrants, no matter your age, gender, race, sexuality.  I couldn’t be prouder to be a YA writer.  We’re lucky folk.

And yet I think there is something we can demand of it.  When I was a teenager – and by the way, there is no faster way on EARTH to lose a YA audience than to begin a sentence with “when I was teenager” – nevertheless, when I was a teenager, I, like so many others my age, tended to skip teenage fiction altogether and go straight to Stephen King for one simple reason:  Judy Blume aside (and God bless her forever and forever), most of the rest of it lied.

You know what I mean.  Books where the bully was really a sensitive kid who’d end up your best friend.  Where everyone was chaste and had terrific grandparents.  Where all problems, no matter how serious, could ultimately be resolved by confiding in your dad.  And heck, they weren’t really problems anyway because nothing that could happen to a teenager could be really bad, could it?  Especially in a book where people said “Heck”.

Fortunately, that world is mostly long-gone.  YA is now fearless in dealing with things that actual teenagers think about:  liberty, privacy, sex, drug use, loneliness, illness both physical and mental, injustice, poverty, suicide, death, all of the boundary-pushing thoughts that consume a boundary-pushing time. True, this does sometimes result in YA having its fair share of what I like to call CBAITs (Crappy Books About Important Things, on which more in a moment), but in terms of negotiating with the real world, YA is where the most interesting things are happening now.

What then to make of Far Far Away by Tom McNeal?  Its back cover is festooned with starred reviews; it was shortlisted for the National Book Award; and to reach the semi-finals of Battle of the Books, it beat both Kate DiCamillo’s Newbery-winning Flora & Ulysses AND Rainbow Rowell’s world-conquering Eleanor & Park.

And I didn’t believe a word of it.  This is just my opinion (and I strongly suggest you read other opinions; reading is personal, and you may react totally differently, truly) but I don’t think I’d have believed a word of it when I was fifteen, either.  I won’t rehash the plot again as it’ll have been well-covered in earlier rounds, but here are just some of the things I didn’t believe:

I didn’t believe Jacob Grimm (of the Brothers Grimm) would need to help an American teenager in order to cross over to the other side.  I didn’t believe the whimsy of Jeremy’s father trying to run a (literal) two-book bookstore meshed with Jeremy and Ginger subsequently being starved to near-death by a serial killer of children.  I didn’t believe that EVERY missing child named in the book – either abducted in the present or the past – would end up having a happy ending.  I didn’t believe Jeremy and Ginger would suffer no discernible trauma after a life-scarring experience.   Most of all, I didn’t believe Ginger would say “Zounds.”  It’s as bad as “heck.”

I found the book false in the most objectionable way:  the teenagers aren’t allowed to be real people.  They’re wishful constructs of overly nice kids.  Going by the Disney references and the answering machines instead of cellphones, I’m guessing these are meant to be fifteen-year-olds in the early 90s(?)  And their idea of rebellion is to sneak into the kind Swedish baker’s house and put Pop Rocks on his Trix?  Again, this is a book with a serial killer of children in it, and it’s so polite, I kept wanting to offer it a cigarette.

Because of the Grimm connection, a lot of energy is spent on the fairy tale aspects of the story.  But even fairy tales create a universe in which the story can logically take place.  And they can certainly be harrowing and full of real danger and truth – anyone with a passing acquaintance of the astonishing work of Margo Lanagan knows that.  But Far Far Away gives itself over to whimsy and a fake, coddling darkness (even though they’re kidnapped and tortured by a serial killer, everyone lives happily ever after), that it’s almost as if it’s a YA book written for 8-12s.  I’m more than happy to believe in fairy tales, but I didn’t believe any of Far Far Away.

Finally, one last thing I couldn’t believe:  it’s 2014, but the SINGLE foreign character in town (aside from the ghost) ends up being the deranged villain.  Really.

Far Far Away makes me think we can demand something of YA literature.  More than that, I think we MUST demand it from YA literature:  the truth. Fortunately, Gene Luen Yang’s astounding Boxers & Saints – just by being its restlessly truthful self – rebukes everything Far Far Away gets wrong.

I confess I went into Boxers & Saints a little wary.  I’ve got a real thing against CBAITs (again, Crappy Books About Important Things; you know exactly what I’m talking about: books with either important subject matter or important formats that are so terrible-but-worthy they turn reading into medicine for young people.  People tend to be far too afraid to give these books bad reviews and they often go on to win prizes.  Don’t get me started.).

Anyway.  Boxers & Saints is about the Boxer Rebellion in China, told alternately from the point of view of one of the revolutionaries (Boxers) and one of the Chinese Christians who suffered (& Saints).  I was worried about getting a dry history lesson without much narrative oomph or characters who were little more than historic ciphers.

I was utterly delighted to be wrong, wrong, wrong.  Boxers & Saints is extraordinary.  Told in graphic novel form, it seeks relentlessly for truth, never letting any of its characters completely off the hook for the mistakes they make.  And oh my, everyone here makes mistakes.  Big ones.  Both Little Bao, the revolutionary who commits atrocities in the name of what seems to be a good cause, and Four-Girl, the converted Christian who chafes against what its teachings require of her, are allowed to be complicated, realistic, flawed human beings.

They’re also funny and brave and daring and goofy and merciless and merciful and grow and change and regret and falter.  In short, they’re like the real teenagers you might know.  They don’t get fake happy endings; they get real life, in all its mess and wonder and complexity.

These are two very specific stories, told truthfully (and, interestingly, with large doses of magical realism, proof again that a story can be a fairy tale and not be false) and with open eyes.  And because they’re specific and told with utter truth, they are of course universal.  I suspect that Yuen ultimately has his sympathies most with the Christian Four-Girl, but even then, everyone is shown warts and all, with compassion that isn’t stupid or blind.

Boxers & Saints is exactly what I’d like to demand from YA literature, from ALL literature, for that matter:  the truth, breathtakingly, intelligently told, through characters who act like real human beings, and a recognition that this is a world with endless, multiple endings, happy and otherwise, all leading on to more and more amazing questions.

Boxers & Saints is YA at its best.  It’s certainly one of the very best YA novels of the past couple years, and it’s my whole-hearted choice as winner of this semi-final.  May it sweep to final victory.

— Patrick Ness

As always, two polar opposites go head to head in the very first nail biting, teeth clenching battle of Round 3. Despite an incredibly well written judge commentary by Mr. Ness, I feel just as conflicted with it as I do with my loyalties to the two novels. I both reluctantly agree and strongly disagree with his assessment of Far Far Away, understanding that it has failed to realistically portray life as a teenager as a coming of age, twenty first century YA novel should. However, I do not believe that it was Mr. McNeal’s intention to create an up to date, politically correct, and realistic piece of fiction. He wanted to transport his readers into a world of magic and fantasy, cross the boundary between utopia and dystopia, and mainly take us on an unforgettable adventure. I think in this way, it doesn’t necessarily have to be boxed and labeled specifically as a YA novel, and perhaps just acknowledged as a piece of fantastical, ageless fiction. I think that with his review of Far Far Away, as well as his brilliantly direct view of what YA novels should and should not be, it is no wonder that Boxers and Saints will proceed into the final round. It’s a pity, though, as there is again the Far Far Away and Eleanor and Park rivalry for the coveted win of the Undead Poll. One things for sure; this years Big Kahuna round will not be one to miss.

– Kid Commentator GI

Mr. Ness – Chaos Walking, A Monster Calls, all great books, by the way – gives some very interesting commentary on what it means to be a YA book, and how Far, Far Away is not believable. Two very big questions. There’s the idea of nostalgia we’ve been talking about, how books like Far, Far Away are not for kids, but about them (I’d question whether Far, Far Away is even YA, but it’s not really middle grade either). I can enjoy these books (I’m talking to you, Hokey Pokey), though often they’re not fully believable – really, there has to be a serial killer who suddenly appears halfway through the book? I am drawn to Far, Far Away precisely because it’s not truthful – it’s a pack of fairy-tale lies, with both the best and the worst of Grimm – that can maybe illuminate truth. Far, Far Away is an escape – a nostalgic one, sure, but still a good book – while Boxers & Saints offers the brutal truth. In their own ways – sometimes effective, sometimes not – both can be powerful. Yet Mr. Ness’s reasoning is, indeed, eloquently explained. I understand the need for truth; I’d still question what truth is, however – how variable it is, and how you get there. Still, I can find no fault in having the remarkable Boxers & Saints move on to the final round.

– Kid Commentator RGN

Sugar and wheat: two staples of the American diet; two unlikely subjects for children’s books.  And yet sugar and wheat, or sugar versus wheat, is one way to think about the battle between Kathi Appelt’s The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp and Cynthia Kadohata’s The Thing About Luck.

At this point, it is traditional for judges to offer a few words about the folly of comparing books. How, after all, can one compare a work of fantasy (like Scouts) to one of contemporary realism (like Luck)? A quiet, coming-of-age tale (like Luck) to a humorous, talking-animal yarn (like Scouts)? An omniscient storyteller (Scouts) to a first-person narrator (Luck)?

But let’s be honest: as critical readers, we do. And I’m going to be bold enough, judgey enough, to suggest that there is a universal metric.  It’s called the punch in the gut. The punch can come from reading a description of something you understand, deeply, but had never quite put into words; it can come from strands of a plot coming together in a way that seems both surprising and inevitable; it can come from a moment of wonder or laughter—the mouth wide open, that is the natural state of childhood and of love. Tastes are subjective, books as different as the people who write them. But as years pass, there are books we forget and books that leave the indelible mark of the gut punch, whether they’re about talking spiders or girls left to fend for themselves on abandoned islands or boys being raised by graveyards.

Which brings us back to sugar versus wheat. Which would you pick first? Yeah, me too—sugar. Scouts, set in Texas, interweaves the stories of the animals of the Sugar Man Swamp—namely the raccoon brothers and eponymous scouts, Bingo and J’miah—with the story of the swamp’s human caretakers—namely 12-year old Chap Brayburn who recently lost his beloved grandfather, Audie. As the swamp comes under threat, the human and animal stories clarify each other and intertwine, but, in a satisfying way, never completely merge.

Appelt’s brand of storytelling—with its big ‘ole voice talking right at you and alternating characters and plot strands—is becoming a lost art and with reason. It’s hard to do well. The book’s folksy voice, the type you want to read aloud, goes a long way toward holding together a bursting-at-the-seams story, which manages to work in everything from the history of the Good Lord Bird to the DeSoto automobile to muscovado sugar. Appelt particularly shines when describing animals–both as a naturalist and a humorist.  Just take her description of Sweetums, Chap’s cat, after Chap mistakes the creature’s anxiety over an impending environmental threat for fear of a thunderstorm:

Hmmph! Is there anything worse to a cat than being ridiculed? We think not. Sweetums jumped out of Chap’s arms and headed for the bedroom, where he dodged underneath the bed and started grooming himself.

Indeed!

As that first person plural demonstrates, Appelt never leaves the reader guessing how to feel about a character. There are heroes to root for. There are villains, both human and animal, to hiss and boo. The moral universe of Scouts is as simple and comforting as the sugar pies that play a pivotal role in the plot. But this is not a criticism: there needs to be plenty of space on library shelves for stories that reinforce children’s innate sense of morality and justice–especially the youngest readers’.

But a slightly older reader can appreciate a more complex carbohydrate, which brings us to wheat. Luck, set in the agricultural belt of the Midwest, is the story of twelve-year old Summer and the harvest season she spends on the road with her grandparents and younger brother while her parents tend to elderly relatives in Japan. Compared to the sugar-rush of Scouts, Luck is as quiet and mundane as the fields of grain at the center of it. Summer and her prickly grandmother Obaachan fight; Summer falls (briefly) in love; Summer worries about her little brother’s inability to make friends. Not much happens and yet—in an extraordinary feat of capturing the small moments in which we grow up—everything happens.  Summer comes to terms with the complexity of the people who love her and takes a risk that allows her to glimpse her adult self.

Luck is filled with nearly as much informative minutiae as Scouts although most of it revolves around a single subject: harvesting wheat. I never thought I would find the mechanics of combines so captivating or the timing of a harvest so full of dramatic tension but Kadohata draws us into chores and routines that paint a world. (In this way, Luck reminded me of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, which I loved as a kid for their depiction of farm work and its trials and rhythms.)

But what Kadohata does most masterfully of all is bring to life the people who occupy this world. In an age in which we tend to pathologize unusual children, Kadohata’s portrait of Summer’s socially-challenged younger brother Jaz captures his unique range of gifts and deficits rather than resorting to an easy label. Anyone who has grown up in an immigrant family will recognize Jiichan, Summer’s grandfather, with his tireless work ethic and philosophical appreciation for stories and life. But the most extraordinary character of all is Obaachan, Summer’s grandmother. A traditionalist, Obaachan believes in arranged marriage and the healing powers of Japanese salty plums, but loves America’s Funniest Home Videos and Bruce Springsteen. She constantly shoots off zingers at Summer’s expense (“You look like Yoko Ono, 1969,” she tells her on a particularly bad hair day) but quietly sacrifices herself for her family at every turn, leaving her granddaughter puzzled as to who she really is. As Summer explains,  “It seemed like there were two Obaachans—the good one and the bad one.”

Luck is a more complex story than Scouts. But that’s not why it’s my winner. A book must—more than anything else–make you care about its characters, be they real or fantastical, funny or serious, good or bad or both. Kadohata has drawn Summer and her family in such emotionally rich detail that I found myself racing through the story just to find out what happened to them. By contrast, while Appelt’s animal characters leapt off the page, for me, her human characters lay flatter. As a result, while I enjoyed the story, I wasn’t turning the pages with the same urgency. And when I got to the end, I didn’t feel the same gut punch that I felt when I read the following passage (don’t worry, no spoilers here). It takes place—appropriately enough for this battle’s final note–in a field of wheat:

“Thunder, help me. I’m scared,” I said, looking at him. He lifted his head curiously, then sat up and placed a paw on my leg.

I suddenly burst into sobs, and the next thing I knew, I wasn’t sobbing because I was scared, but because my grandparents worked so hard and because Jaz couldn’t make a friend at school and because I knew how desperately my parents wished for their own business, and I doubted they would ever get that wish.

I squeezed onto the floor and hugged Thunder to me. As I hugged him something unfamiliar welled up inside me. Maybe it was courage. I mean, this was my world, the black sky and the stars and the wheat. I knew this world backward and forward and upside down. I got back into my seat and looked around at the wheat. Something started to happen: The dust of my personality started to settle and my fear left me.

These two books really could not have been more different, and yet somehow opposites in this match did attract and made for a surprisingly interesting match. The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp was quite evidently a children’s book from start to finish, while The Thing About Luck could be enjoyed by a broad variety of ages, which is what makes it the victor of this match in my book. I strongly agree with Ms. Marsh in that for me, I have to really fall in love with the characters of a book to love the book itself. However, the strength and hilarity of Bingo and J’miah was enough for me to overlook the weak, secondary human characters. From a glance, the storyline of The Thing About Luck may seem a bit simpler than the action packed, fantastical adventure of two raccoons on a mission to save the swamp. But if one were to delve a bit deeper into the world of Summer, Jaz, and their two crazy, love able grandparents, they would find something much more interesting entirely. They would find a truly amazing story about a young girl trying to find herself while simultaneously helping her family survive another season, and it’s a story that every reader that has been a teenager can resonate with. Emphasis on the teenager, as I believe that anyone who has not yet experienced a crisis of identity will be unable to appreciate the novel to its fullest.

– Kid Commentator GI

Ms. Marsh, who wrote last year’s contender Jepp, Who Defied the Stars, perfectly captures the magic of The Thing About Luck. In the wheat fields, “Not much happens and yet—in an extraordinary feat of capturing the small moments in which we grow up—everything happens.” I did love Appelt’s sugar pies, but Kadohata’s wheat was richer and fuller; I, too, really got that “gut punch.” (I actually think the characters in True Blue Scouts were meaningful, if clear-cut, but Obaa-chan was definitely masterfully done.) That’s why I want Luck to win the battle. But, as I said yesterday, we have four distinguished contenders, and the Undead Book will throw a wrench into the mix. Predictions? There’s still hope for my dream final, The Thing About Luck, Rose Under Fire (somehow beat Eleanor & Park!), and I’m still undecided in the first match. Also, a nod to Ms. Marsh: sugar vs. wheat! I think apples and oranges is getting a bit old.

– Kid Commentator RGN

One of the joys of reading a well-written book is that you can be transported by it to a reality that is other than your own. You find yourself totally immersed in another place, another time. And yet, different as that time and place may be, you also find yourself drawn into it, identifying with its main characters. . .at home. And that is what happened to me while reading Hokey Pokey and P.S. Be Eleven.

It would be hard to find two books that are more different in their language, their setting, and the motivations of their main characters than Jerry Spinelli’s brilliantly imagined Hokey Pokey and Rita Willaims-Garcia’s dead-on, realistic portrayal of the lives of three young African-American sisters in P.S. Be Eleven, the sequel to her award-winning novel One Crazy Summer.

However, in some ways they are similar. Both authors are poetic and assured in their use of language and their self-assured storytelling. Both books are about growing up. Both stories are rooted in dreams.

But in very different ways. Spinelli’s story spins out within a dizzying dreamscape as removed from adult reality as the Victorian writer J.M. Barrie’s Never-Never Land in his famous play Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. The dreams that touch the hearts of Delphine, Vonetta, and Fern are as real as the radical decade of the sixties in which their stories are played out. Spinelli’s Jack wanders through a surreal landscape where bicycles run in herds like wild horses and the Hippodrome has hippos to ride on. His dream is one of totally immersed escape. Delphine has to deal with her father’s remarriage, holding her family together, and trying to understand her distant mother through letters. Plus a drug-addicted Uncle back from Vietnam. Her dream is to make it all come back together.

Black Panthers, the Jackson Five, Shirley Chisholm, a teacher named Mr. Mwila from Zambia, a recommendation to read Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. (It is amazing just how literary a book P.S. Be Eleven is at heart.) Versus a Hokey Pokey Man dispensing colored ices, an mean-spirited kid named Destroyer with a steam shovel, places called Tantrums and Cartoons, and Great Plains and Thousand Puddles (all to be found in the map in the front of the book).

Like I said, two very different books. Way Different.

If I were to imagine a musical background for each of these, then P.S. Be Eleven would be the Temptations and the Jackson Five. For Hokey Pokey it would be the soundtrack from one of the Warner Brothers Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote films that Spinelli has playing in the background of the place called Cartoons in his tale.

My choice?

Much as I admire the creativity of Spinelli’s near-Joycean descent into Jack’s dreamscape subconscious, there were times when I felt that the land of Hokey Pokey became a little. . .you know. And I wonder just how many kids will stick it out to read the entire book, as well-written and ambitious as it is.

P.S. Be Eleven is no less ambitious in its loving, incredibly detailed recreation of that now long-ago decade. Williams-Garcia’s intelligent, precocious narrator, who grows in empathy and understanding, is so accessible, despite the complexities in her life and times. P.S. Be Eleven is a book I can imagine both teachers and kids loving.

So, P.S. Be Eleven is my choice.

— Joseph Bruchac

The first opinion that I ever heard of Hokey Pokey was a warning; it’s a little bit strange. I thought to myself, okay, I’ve handled strange books before, I’m sure that I can handle this one just as easily. Yeah… I was wrong. I opened the book, read the first five pages, closed the book, and walked off dazed and confused, completely unsure of what I had just read. I did the same the next day, and the day after that, until I had finally reached an even stranger last five pages than the first. It wasn’t until the day after that that I realized the true unmatchable beauty of the book. It had transported me into a whole different world, a world so incredibly simplistic, so extremely “childlike”, that I cannot explain it in words. And that is why Jerry Spinelli is so remarkable, because he puts the unexplainable and the unfathomable into words, beautiful, simple, and pure words. To be honest, I probably still cannot tell you the plot of Hokey Pokey. In fact, I’m not sure there was one. But I do know that I experienced the true joy of reading; being transported into a completely different world.

On the other hand, as Mr. Bruchac pointed out, the same thing can easily be said about P.S Be Eleven. I thoroughly enjoyed the companion novel to One Crazy Summer, feeling as though I really learned from the book about the culture of African-American sisters trying to get by in 1960 Brooklyn. But I thought that the real hook for me was that although much of the book incorporates the African-American race and culture, I felt as though the story could be about anybody, be it Chinese, White, or Hispanic. The novel really hit home for anybody and everybody who was ever a child trying to find their place in the world, and it was brilliantly written. Sadly, as much as I enjoyed the novel, I must again disagree with Mr. Bruchac, and side with Jack and his bike on this one.

– Kid Commentator GI

Mr. Bruchac is right that Hokey Pokey might get a little, “you know,” and I think that’s how many readers felt. It lost the first round of the Mock BoB to March: Book One, and I’ve seen a couple comments that aren’t too complimentary. And P.S. Be Eleven is definitely a “literary” book. It’s lived up to its expectations from the Mock BoB, and worthily, at that. Now, it wasn’t my favorite middle grade book in the competition (that would be the similar, and more elegant, in my opinion, The Thing About Luck, which may be up against P.S. Be Eleven next round), but it was pretty good. Looking ahead, soon we’ll be down to four books. Boxers & Saints, Far, Far Away, P.S. Be Eleven, and the winner of tomorrow’s battle (if only both could win). I’ll take a moment to point out that, as of today, all the 4 National Book Award finalists/winners present in the Battle are in it. In fact, I feel like all the books remaining are quite literary indeed, though of course all 16 books are.

– Kid Commentator RGN

I read Eleanor & Park by the phenomenally gifted Rainbow Rowell first. The narrative is a strongly voiced tight third, rotating between Eleanor, the chubby, wild-haired, fashion-challenged new girl in town, and Park, the half-Korean boy who, by comparison, is well accepted in the community and has a loving family. The story takes place in the 1980’s, and the frequent pop culture references provide touchstones of connection for our two protagonists. When Park first sees Eleanor get on the school bus, he is less than impressed. Their slowly burgeoning acceptance-turned-infatuation-turned-love-turned-deep friendship is a beautiful thing to experience. A subplot involving Eleanor’s harsh home environment is harrowing and heartbreaking. I had minor quibbles with some muddled pacing in the middle and the underdevelopment of a few secondary players, but nothing that interfered with my reading enjoyment. I loved this book. Upon finishing, I wadded up my third tissue, sighed happily, and thought, “This is it. This is The One.”

Then I read Far, Far Away. Before I discuss this book, I must confess something: I have Reading Biases. Two of them are specific to Tom McNeal’s lovely book. First, I’m biased against omniscient narratives. Too often, omni POVs serve as protection against critical crucifixion while they “tell” rather than “show,” or insert the author’s voice at the expense of Story. Second, I’m biased against books that purport to be for children but are really for and about adults, or at least written through the filter of adult nostalgia. Far, Far Away triggered both these biases within the first few pages. In short, I was prepared to hate it.

McNeal’s book is narrated by the ghost of Jacob Grimm. Though told in first person, the narrative is functionally omniscient as he tells the story of Jeremy Johnson Johnson and a strange bakery in a somewhat ephemeral-seeming small town. An early flashback scene demonstrates my potential problems with the book: Jacob Grimm enters a library and encounters other ghosts, who inform us that generations of historical research and literary criticism have cast discomfiting shadows on Jacob’s life work. Meta-loving Adult Rae cackled madly. Kid Rae rolled her eyes. But as I continued to read, Kid Rae’s voice grew quieter and quieter. Jacob’s narrative began to win me over with its lovely language, its fairy tale quality, the melancholy voice, the sense of impending danger, and the delightful quirkiness of the characters. I became genuinely frightened for Jeremy, which made the happy ending all the more satisfying. By the time I turned the last page, I had fallen in love. Again. Dang it.

Two books. Both darn near perfect. I highly recommend either one. And yet, I must choose.

Because it overcame my biases, and because I can’t stop thinking about it days after finishing, I’m giving the slight edge to Far, Far Away.

— Rae Carson

A part of me has just died, ruthlessly killed by Ms. Carson’s inability to be biased, just for this once. As well as the heartlessness of the Battle Commander’s impossible pairings.

Eleanor and Park was the first book that I read in this year’s Battle of the Books. I remember just thinking to myself that it was all downhill from here, that there could not be any book that trumped the sheer perfection that was Rainbow Rowell’s maiden novel. Probably one of the most diverse, unexpected, and moving pieces of realistic fiction that I have ever read: I was almost correct. That was until I read the rest of this year’s bracket, and determined that they were all incomparably amazing pieces of literature. I completely fell in love with the love that Park had for Eleanor, along with his final act of heroism, saving the life of his first love, even if it meant losing her. Touching, adorable, and filled with dozens of “aww” inspiring moments, your heart would have to be made of steel to not want the magical love that Eleanor and Park have. I then read Far, Far Away, with the image of it vindictively stomping over the lifeless body of E&P, and I immediately believed that there was no way that I ever could like it. Much to my dismay, I was powerless against Jacob, Jeremy, and Ginger, convinced that the cake that I had eaten prior to opening the book was bewitched. Completely my kind of genre, fairy tale mixed with fantasy, I fell to the greater power that was Tom McNeal’s storytelling. But I will still stubbornly disagree with Ms. Carson’s final decision, putting her own selfish needs of an unbiased, clear conscience above that of all E&P fans.

– Kid Commentator GI

I, for one, am glad that Far, Far Away overcame Ms. Carson’s biases. Far, Far Away is a complex, haunting fantasy (filtered by adult nostalgia, sure, but that’s okay for a somewhat nostalgic 14-year-old), while Eleanor and Park is just that: Eleanor and Park. There’s nothing wrong with a poignant love story, but by the end, it gets too emotive, too forced – powerful, but overwrought. For me, the unexpected is more intriguing, and while I was a bit surprised by McNeal’s BIG PLOT TWIST (I sort of saw it coming), it worked. Ms. Carson is right, Far, Far Away might not be for children, it might be more for young adults. But it’s better than Hokey Pokey, for sure. If that book isn’t filtered by adult nostalgia, I don’t know what is. Even P.S. Be Eleven and The Thing About Luck are, just a bit more subtly. If these books weren’t filtered by adult nostalgia, we (not kids) wouldn’t be reading and enjoying them. Now, everyone’s going to be deeply upset about Eleanor and Park, before remembering that it’s probably going to win the Undead Poll (I’m still rooting for Rose Under Fire, which may have a remote chance).

– Kid Commentator RGN

Ah . . . the joys of reading!—especially when the reading includes Gene Luen Yang’s Boxers & Saints and Steven Jenkins’s The Animal World: A Collection of the Fastest, Fiercest, Toughest, Cleverest, Shyest—and Most Surprising—Animals on Earth.
The Animal Book brought to mind a cherished childhood book: Reptiles and Amphibians, a small paperback I vowed to keep forever, but which slipped away from me somewhere along the way. The Animal Book is a thousand—maybe a million—times more engrossing and covers a far more territory than my lost little paperback.  With an overflow of captivating illustrations and a head-spinning number of facts, Jenkins takes us on a journey into an amazing world of creeping, crawling, walking, racing, flying, swimming, diving, sounding creatures, schooling us on how they live and move and have their being—senses to defenses.

The assassin bug, the blind shrimp, the cheetah, cicada, the Etruscan shrew, the howler monkey, the kangaroo rat, the praying mantis and the vampire bat are just a few of the 300-plus members of the animal kingdom we encounter in this handsome book. That encounter is even closer when you come to a life-sized illustrations. How awesome (and humbling) it was to put my hand beside that of a grown gorilla.

Sometimes it is a fact that astonishes, a fact such as an adult mayfly’s time on earth: thirty minutes to a few days. That’s the sort of thing that makes you stop and think about how you spend your time on earth, how you so often take time for granted.

Most thought-provoking and enthralling, too, is Gene Luen Yang’s Boxers & Saints, historical fiction served up in two linked graphic novels.

As a child, I had nothing like Boxers & Saints. Until now I knew very little about Yang’s subject: the late 19th-century uprising in China against foreigners and Chinese Christians, known as the Boxer Rebellion.

With razor-sharp wit and wisdom, Yang gives us history fast-paced and real in the stories of Little Bao and Four-Girl, two young people for whom life has been no crystal stair who find themselves on opposite sides of the conflict and adhering to contending faiths.

Yang pulls no punches. With vivid, wrenching scenes of warfare and massacre Yang makes readers face up to how savage we human beings can be. At the same, Yang calls us to compassion. He had me pondering what wondrous, heavenly things we could achieve if all oppressions, all prejudices, all greed, all lust for conquest ceased.

What’s more, Yang thinks enough of young intellects to not hold back on the fact that historical events don’t come in neat, tidy packages, that almost always history is a mess of events springing from the actions of not pure evil and pure good people, but flawed, often mixed-up people: people caught up in a whirlwind who behave nobly and/or ignobly as a consequence of their fortunes/misfortunes, the guides they have been given, and the choices put before them.

I found myself with an unenviable choice when SLJ asked me to choose between the works of two fine artist-writers: Gene Luen Yang’s Boxers & Saints and Steven Jenkins’s The Animal World, two works that are necessary, two works that will stay with me for years, two works I am sure to revisit.

Which will I revisit first?

Boxers & Saints.

— Tonya Bolden

Prior to reading the graphic novel phenomenon, Boxers and Saints, I had already idiotically judged the book by its cover. And its cover was quite obviously that of a graphic novel, a genre that I have never particularly favored. I had always precociously thought of them as incredibly easy, depth lacking comic books that I didn’t have the time to read. Well boy, did Gene Luen Yang prove me wrong. Filled to the brim with both emotional and historical depth, Boxers and Saints completely turned me into a graphic novel junkie, even going as far as purchasing Luen Yang’s latest novel, The Shadow Hero, on my Kindle (which I loved.) The Animal Book, however, completely captivated my imagination from the very second I laid eyes on it. It heavily reminded me of a Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? for older animal enthusiasts. Therefore the nostalgia was extremely prevalent. But I must admit that I am now extremely biased towards this book in the worst possible way, seeing as it killed my own personal prediction of All The Truth That’s In Me taking the entire competition by storm. However, in this particularly difficult and interesting match, I must side with Ms. Bolden, and give this one to Boxers and Saints. Because it truly did change the way that I will read graphic novels forever.

– Kid Commentator GI

Boxers & Saints is some powerful stuff. It sure does revisit history in an astonishing and brutal way, rivaling Rose Under Fire, and it’s easily one of the most inventive and ambitious books in this competition. It could go far, even when it might be up against everyone else’s favorite love story – Eleanor and Park (yes, I don’t love it) – or everyone’s favorite fantasy book, Far, Far Away. And that’s not to discredit The Animal Book. Ms. Bolden was reminded of “a cherished childhood book,” and it’s a truly wonderful feat. Because, even as books like Hokey Pokey may be somewhat controversial (and still in the mix), good books do lose battles. There are surprises, some good, some bad. I mean, how many people thought Rose Under Fire (another favorite) would lose (with good reasons, I think) to The Thing About Luck?

– Kid Commentator RGN