Round 1, Match 6: Liar and Spy vs Splendors and Glooms

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

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

I have a problem.

No, it’s not that I can’t choose between Jepp, Who Defied the Stars and Starry River of the Sky. I have a bigger problem than that.

I am supposed to choose which of these two books is better. But I have no idea what “better” means.

I’m not crying wolf here. I’m not just trying to be provocative.

“Better” is a word that can mean just about anything. Does Jepp taste better than Starry River? (No. They taste equally disgusting.) Does Starry River serve as a projectile better? (Yes. It’s nearly square dimensions make it perfect for launching at spouses who interrupt you while you’re trying to figure out what the word “better” means.)

Okay—I’m not trying to be obtuse. I know that saying something is a “better book” does not, usually, mean it’s better for launching across a room.

Nor does it mean that it weighs more, or costs less, or has a smaller carbon footprint.

I wish it did, though. You see, you can measure weight, and price, and carbon footprints. We can all stand around a scale and agree that The Oxford English Dictionary weighs more than Curious George. The reason we can do this is because we have an agreed definition of what “weighs more” means.

We have no such thing for “better.”

Here are some possible definitions of better: Funnier, faster-paced, more emotionally potent, more lyrical, more tightly constructed, more inventive, more ambitious.

Probably we’d all agree that some combination of these judgments comprises “better.”

But how do we balance them? Do we have an equation? Such as:

(Funny) + (Fast-paced) + 3(Emotionally Potent) + (lyrical) + 2(tightly constructed) + (inventive) + 0.5(ambitious) = goodness

That would probably be my equation. I think tight construction is more valuable than fast-pacing, and emotional potency is more valuable even than tight construction. But I’m already second guessing myself. Is tight construction really two times more valuable than inventiveness? I’d have to think more about it.

And this (ridiculous) attempt at a definition of “better” brings up an even more obvious problem. I might think that tight construction is more important than inventiveness, but James Joyce would certainly disagree with me. Who’s right? (Don’t just say James Joyce because he’s more famous; that’s not fair; besides, I’m gonna catch up! I know it!).

So we (you, me, James Joyce) value literary attributes differently.

We also judge them differently.

Which is more emotionally potent, Where the Wild Things Are or Any Given Goosebumps Title?

Me? I’m for Where the Wild Things Are, because I love books that take an emotional experience and reify it—in this case through beautiful pictures, lyrical prose, and a dream-like narrative. But there are literally MILLIONS of children who would disagree vehemently with me, who love Goosebumps and hold those books close to their chests as they fall into their troubled, nightmarish slumbers. Are you going to tell them that they are wrong? That the emotions that they feel for Goosebumps are somehow less than the love I feel for Where the Wild Things Are? I certainly would do no such thing. Because children are terrifying little creatures, and they would kill me.

Okay, so not only do we not have an agreed upon definition of what makes something “better” (2 x emotional potency? 3 x?); even if we did have such a definition, we could not just look at a scale and determine which book “weighed in” as better. That determination relies upon totally subjective judgments. And not just theoretically subjective, like, “Is theft wrong?” Really subjective, like: if me and Tommy from the second grade started to debate which was better, Where the Wild Things Are or Goosebumps, we would both likely end up shouting at each other through our tears.

Okay, you’re probably saying, but we didn’t ask Tommy to be an SLJ BoB judge. We asked you (and we’re regretting it more with every paragraph that goes by). So go ahead and tell us which book YOU think is better.

Not so fast. Even if I were to develop my definition of “better” to a point of unerring precision; even if I were allowed to evaluate the criteria of “better” on a wholly subjective basis, I would still be unable to make a decision in many, many cases. For example, which gets a higher “emotionally potent” score, King Lear or Othello? I weep like a baby when I read both of them. Which gets a higher “funny” score, Holes or Matilda? I don’t know! It depends on the day I’m reading, the time of day, who I’ve just had a conversation with, and whether I am feeling fat and unlucky or brilliant and unrecognized.

Do we really want our determination of “better” to be dependent on my self image?

In other words, we have a problem.

So I’m not going to decide which book is better. Because, as I hope I have made abundantly, redundantly clear, I don’t believe that saying one book is better than another means anything at all.

What, then, am I going to do? Well, just because we can’t determine which book is better does not mean we can’t talk about how much we love these books.

I realize that “love” is just as subjective as “better,” and that I’m going to have to come up with some way of explaining my “love,” and might end up looking kind of like my ridiculous equation above.

But “love” avoids a couple of the logical pitfalls that “better” succumbs to. First, while there are different reasons to love a book, I do not have to decide which is worth more. Is the book funny? Yes! Is it emotionally potent? Yes! Is it tightly constructed? Yes! So I love it! Easy.

Also, Tommy and I don’t have to shout at each other anymore. He can say that Goosebumps is emotionally potent, and I can say the same for Where the Wild Things Are, and we can both be right. Which is a relief, because I have been reduced to tears by second graders in the past, and it is really, really bad for my self-esteem.

Finally, my personal fickleness and indecision isn’t quite so important when I am not relegating one book to an inferior status. I don’t have to worry about deciding whether Othello is better than Lear, or if Holes is better than Matilda. They’re all freaking awesome. Some days I feel like a fat kid at boot camp, some days I feel like a genius in a skirt, and that’s okay.

My reasons for loving a book do, in fact, overlap quite a lot with the criteria from the equation up there, though let’s take out all the arbitrary multipliers. To recap: I like books that are funny, fast-paced, emotionally potent, lyrical, tightly constructed, inventive, and ambitious. Few books do all of these things, and some books that I love deeply do just one or two, but really, really well. But these are the criteria that make up my holistic assessment, “Did I love this book?” And therefore these are what I’ll be looking for in Jepp, Who Defied the Stars and Starry River of the Sky.

Let’s start with Grace Lin’s Starry River of the Sky. It is the story of a runaway boy named Rendi who has arrived at “Village of the Clear Sky”; the moon has gone missing, strange travelers keep showing up, and Rendi has a mysterious past. The major structural conceit of the novel is that Lin regularly breaks from the narration and has a character tell a tale drawn or inspired from Chinese folklore.

So, did I love it?

Yes.

I loved Lin’s writing. It is simple, clear, suggestive, and moving. She uses similes that are so vivid they should be clichés, but aren’t (though I intend to steal them and abuse them until they are): “Master Chao sighed again, this time a heavy sigh that fell like a stone in water.” Or her description of how a story-teller feels when he can’t come up with a tale: “So while his head was empty, the rest of him was full of anxiety. Even as he filled the oversized buckets with the gourd, his thoughts were turning and twisting like dough deep-frying in oil.” I spend a great deal of each day feeling exactly like that.

So the sentence-level work is very effective. Her chapters, and the stories that interrupt them, are also expertly crafted; Lin manages her pacing and our expectations so that each chapter break makes us smile or sigh. A particular favorite is the scene when Rendi composes a message out of snails for the little girl Peiyi. The end of the chapter reveals that he’s been composing “Peiyi is a melonhead”—but before she sees his message, the snails crawl away. I always felt, as a reader, well taken care of. It made me trust Lin; it made me feel grateful.

The trust was well-founded. The grand construction of Starry River is as thoroughly and carefully planned as Lin’s chapters and sentences are. Every character, every detail that is introduced will play a role in the book’s satisfying conclusion. Open my copy of Starry River and you will find furiously scribbled marginalia that reads, “Wait! Is he…?” and “Just like before!” and “WHAT???? THIS BOOK IS SO TIGHT, YO!”

I took to the book’s main characters right away. The two children are simply sketched—more suggestive outlines than detailed portraits—but they are shaded with deep emotions that I easily identified with. It takes Lin just a moment here and a moment there to make us feel like we know these children, and that we care for them.

It is through these children that Lin explores themes of parental disappointment and parental loss. I’m a sucker for these themes, so I fell for them like a stone in water. (Did I pull that off?)

Final report card for Grace Lin’s Starry River of the Sky

Funny: Not raucously, but sweetly.

Fast-paced: Yes; the simple scenes and stories seem to turn the pages themselves.

Emotionally potent: Very.

Lyrical: Very very. (How’s that for lyrical?)

Tightly constructed: Very very very.

Inventive: The structure of weaving folk tales into one long narrative is, I think, a brilliant move—as anyone who’s read my books would have guessed. And her illustrations, which punctuate the text, feel both traditional and new. (They are, incidentally, knock-out gorgeous).

Ambitious: Not in the grand, sprawling sense. But what attempt to write a serious book not ambitious?

Katherine Marsh’s Jepp, Who Defied the Stars takes place at the very end of the 16th century, in the Spanish Netherlands and Denmark. It tells the story of Jepp, a court dwarf—his “acquisition” by the Spanish Infanta, his life in her retinue, his daring escape, and his attempt to make a life for himself in which he determines his own fate.

Did I love it?

Yes.

First of all, I love this period of history, and this region of Europe in particular; it is the era of Shakespeare, of scientific investigation, of exploration. In a few years, Newton will be born and the Dutch will establish on the isle of Mannahatta one of the first pluralistic, democratic states in the world. This is the early modern world at its most new and exciting—and Katherine Marsh makes us feel it.

I loved Jepp. Which is important, because he is the novel. The book is told from his perspective, and he turns out to be a sensitive and complex youth, someone who feels deeply, keenly, and whom we can easily identify with. At a particularly low moment, he says: “When a child falls down, only his mother can comfort him—her soothing words and caresses seem to him a balm like no other.” I know just how he feels; and he is constantly making me feel that way.

The other characters are vividly drawn, too. Magdalena, his ultimate love interest, is captivating—smart and witty and tough; the opposite of the sweet, melancholic girl Jepp first falls for. The astronomer Tycho, with his imperious manner, copper nose, and pet moose, starts out frightening but quickly becomes both amusing and admirable. Pimm, the court jester, is a classic melodramatic villain; I want to hiss every time he makes an appearance on the page. I could rattle every character in the book off from memory—that’s how vivid they are.

But perhaps the most important element of the book is its central question: Can you defy the stars—as well as your history, your position, your stature—and make what you will out of your life? Jepp’s struggle with this question is absolutely believable. He careens from one conclusion to another, but intelligently, earnestly. He doubts his inner strength from time to time, but we never do; and we are certain that somehow, despite the many vicissitudes of Jepp’s fate, Jepp will indeed chart his own course. When he ultimately does, it is deeply satisfying.

There are a couple of elements of Jepp that I did not love, though, and I think it is my job, as a BoB judge, to discuss them—even though I acknowledge that they are deeply, one-hundred percent, without any question, subjective.

The first is the style in which the book is written. Marsh says in the notes to the book that she “spent a lot of time with the etymological dictionary making sure that the English words [Jepp] spoke were in use before 1600 in order to give his voice a distinctive and antiquated feel.” But Jepp would not have sounded antiquated to himself, nor to the people around him. I kept finding that his ornate and olde-tymey language came between us. For example, when he’s feeling lovesick at the court, he narrates: “I retreated to the library and its many books, searching in the stories of the ages for a cure to my wounded heart. I had never imagined it capable of suffering so grievous an injury and feared this delicate organ would never mend.” For me, the passage’s verbiage mutes its impact.

The second aspect of Jepp that gave me pause was one element of the plot. The central mystery of the book’s first part (spoiler alert!) is how Lia, the beautiful, sorrowful dwarf, got pregnant. The court giant is blamed, and we are led to believe, for a time, that he is indeed the guilty party; after all, he and Lia are in love. But enough hints are scattered that we are not surprised to discover that the pregnancy is the result, instead, of rape by Lia’s superior, the court jester. The rape of a dwarf who is kept, effectively, as a slave, is seriously upsetting; I felt I needed more help in navigating and coping with such a trauma. But I am a writer of Middle Grade fiction. One of my talents is having the sensibilities of a ten year old. More mature readers may have no such problem.

Final report card for Jepp, Who Defied the Stars

Funny: At times. I love Ulf the moose and the fact that Tycho continually loses his nose.

Fast-paced: For me, the language and content made Part One feel slow. Starting with Part Two, and the arrival at Tycho’s castle-observatory, the world becomes thrilling and the story hums.

Emotionally potent: Very. You live, effectively, inside of Jepp’s head for the duration of the book, and his thoughts and metamorphosis is very moving indeed.

Lyrical: Sometimes. Often, I found the language an impediment; and then, Marsh would write a sentence that would make me marvel.

Tightly constructed: Deceptively so. The book feels epic and sprawling at first, but by the final turn, you realize that every character has a role to play. The conclusion is tight and satisfying indeed.

Inventive: Absolutely. Setting a novel in the mind of a seventeenth century dwarf—and pulling it off—is as unexpected as it is compelling.

Ambitious: From the setting to the language to the central question, every element of this novel is ambitious. Ambitious is the word for it.

So which book wins? Oy. How am I supposed to know?

As I said, I loved them both. Yes, I had more problems with Jepp than with Starry River. But that doesn’t mean anything. I have more problems with my brother than I do with some dude I knew in high school, too. I still love my brother more.

I’m tempted not to choose at all. One isn’t “better” in any objective sense. And today I might love one book more, and tomorrow the other.

But I will choose. Because, it turns out that, despite my objections at the outset, there has been some value to this exercise. I might not have read either Jepp or Starry River had I not been asked to judge, and I certainly would not have given them such close readings. You see, while I totally do not believe in saying that one book is “better” than another, I absolutely believe in reading books carefully and talking about how much we love them, and why. Because in reading a book closely, in taking the whole novel into your mind and flopping it over and turning it around and trying to chew it and hurl it across the room at your wife, you discover secrets—and not only the book’s.

I did not know that Jepp’s line about mothers would make me cry. Why did it? Well, I’ve figured that out, but I’m not telling anyone except my analyst.

And when Old Mr. Shan, in Starry River of the Sky, looks up and his eyes are suddenly bright and clear, and he says, “I remember everything now. The secret to peace is…” Well, I won’t give it away. But let’s just say I had to put the book down and reconsider a thing or two about myself and my family.

So while deciding which book is “better” means just about nothing at all, this exercise has proven very valuable indeed; for, it turns out, to analyze a book is to analyze oneself.

I can’t deny the next judge that, can I?

So I have to choose.

(And Adam chose Starry River of the Sky to advance to the next round of the 2013 Battle of the Kids’ Books, in a top secret note delivered to our super private judge wrangler’s desktop.)

— Adam Gidwitz

There were an awful lot of books this past year that alluded to stars in the title.  Three of them made it into BOB, two of them—FAULT and JEPP—were inspired by the same Shakespeare quote, and the third one—STARRY RIVER OF THE SKY—wins here to advance to the next round.   Given that Adam’s novels are quite close in spirit to Lin’s (that is, the weaving of fairy tales into a larger narrative), this judging assignment was somewhat surprising, but as Kathi showed us earlier, that can work for or against a book.  I don’t share Adam’s concerns about JEPP, but to my mind these are close enough that I can live with either book, and this decision now sets up a middle grade showdown with the winner of SPLENDORS AND GLOOMS vs. LIAR & SPY, arguably the most anticipated match of the first round.

— Commentator Jonathan Hunt

Final Report Card for Mr. Gidwitz’s Decision:

Funny: Hilarious, both in its length and in the quips that you make. I very much agree that Starry River of the Sky was cutely humorous, and some parts of Jepp were as well.

Fast-paced: Not particularly. You want to read on, but can be overwhelmed by it. And yes, with Grace Lin’s book, you simply want to see where her magical stories will take you. On the other hand, the verbosity of Marsh’s language and a slow-moving and/or tragic plot in some places does prohibit the connectivity somewhat.

Emotionally potent: Well, this isn’t really that type of writing. Starry River is very profound, at least for me, as Lin expertly points out the significance and simple truth of stories, tales that we may not know and are foreign to us but are of the utmost meaning. (The title agrees.) And she does this in the shell of a heartwarming, accessible children’s tale!  Marsh also touches on the very important question of fate and creates heartwarming characters in Jepp and Magdalena.

Lyrical: Again, not really the situation for it, but “like a stone in water” is excellent, Mr. Gidwitz, although Lin really gets the credit for it, and also for a nice flow to her language and beautiful comparisons. Jepp is not particularly lyrical but it has its gems, as you correctly noted.

Tightly constructed: It could be less long-winded and more concise, but that would lessen the hilarity of your judgement. I agree that Starry River is compact and has no loose ends, while Jepp seems more long-winded, because of the language. On that note, Mr. Gidwitz, that problem with Jepp is stylistic and therefore subjective; for some, it might be a nice addition to the 16th century feel. Your other complaint is valid, I think; Lia’s  rape is awkward and slightly overdone.

Inventive: I think both of the books, and your own presentation of your decision, are all very inventive.

Ambitious: Yours is very ambitious, and also very in sync with your writing style (A Tale Dark and Grimm!). Because of my love for the importance of Starry River, I think it’s extremely ambitious, and so is Jepp, of course.

Decision: Your choice, Mr. Gidwitz, of Starry River, is something I completely agree with. You’re both lucky and unlucky that this was a relatively equal match-up. (It’s fair! You can’t choose!)

— Kid Commentator RGN

Set these two books side by side, and with the exception of their trim sizes, it would be difficult to find anything about them that is similar.  But once I sat back and let the full impact of both stories settle in, I realized that they had more in common than one might imagine.  For one, they both feature orphans.

One is the story of an orphaned girl, raised on the bayou by a quirky cast of townsfolk.  The other is the story of a displaced girl raised in the jungle by a cast of orphaned bonobos.  (Okay, I promise, that’s the end of my cleverness).

Both stories have strong narrative voices, told in the first person past tense.  Mo LoBeau, of Tupelo Landing, is the natural sister of so many well-loved middle grade heroes.  One can’t help but read her and conjure up Opal, Frankie and Turtle. She shares their attributes as well:  pluck, smarts, and gumption.  It’s easy to get on her side from the very opening pages, and the reader is literally lifted through the story by the buoyancy of the language.  This book was written in my native tongue, and it made my ears happy to hear it.

Sophie’s voice, in Endangered, is not nearly so dear.  Hers is older, and more melancholy.  But it is just as distinct.  In it, are the echoes of colonial Congo, with its odd mixture of French, Lingala, English, and yes, even the grunts and “murps” of her apes.  However, the author also used Sophie’s voice to cast her as an outsider.  We’re aware, throughout the tale, that Sophie is caught between worlds, desperate to claim at least one as her own, but uncertain about where she fits.  This uncertainty is apparent in every move she makes, with the exception of her almost psychotic attachment to Otto, the orphaned bonobo.

As well, both stories feature settings that play integral roles.  Turnage’s Tupelo Landing is almost as out of time and place as Schrefer’s Congo.  However, the first tends to wrap its citizens in a protective nest.  Even when one of them is murdered, the place itself provides solace.  Mo, despite her orphan status, is for all intents and purposes everyone’s child and sister.  And the community provides a safe haven for her even in the midst of turmoil and bad weather.  Throughout the story, there is never any question about where home is, even though there might be questions about its residents.

On the other hand, the Congo is never to be trusted.  For a huge portion of the book, Sophie is no one’s child or sister, more a member of the bonobo herd than her own kind.  While the creek in Tupelo Landing surely has poisonous snakes, nothing can compare to the venomous crew of the Congo, especially the armed kata-kata, men and boys with rifles and machetes.  As Sophie treks through the jungle, across abandoned manioc fields, along the marshes of the river, and through the abandoned villages of her war torn country, she must largely avoid the roads and trails that might expose her and the orphaned Otto.  Schrefer does a fine job of grounding the reader.  Throughout the story, we are constantly aware of Sophie’s surroundings, we know exactly where she is.  He has made her a fully sentient being, one whose senses become even more acute as she ventures forth.

In fact, the question of trust looms large in both stories.  Who is real and who is not?  In Mo’s case, the two people most responsible for her are constantly disappearing for up to three days at a time.  She never knows when one will arrive and the other depart. Mo is lucky for sure in that she has the rest of the townsfolk to rely upon.  And they don’t let her down, especially her best friend, Dale.

Trust is a harder problem for Sophie.  In her world, nothing is as it seems.  The three humans whom she actually interacts with along her journey are practically magical:  the teacher in the boarding school; Wello, the boatman; and even Bouain, the child soldier who wears the fingertips of his victims on a cord around his neck.  In fact, by the time she encounters Bouain, she actually turns to magic to escape, the magic being her connection to Otto.  One could argue that that wasn’t magic.  I say it depends upon your definition of magic.

Both of these stories are page-turners.  Both are full of surprises.  And both have endings that satisfy.  (Caveat:  I’m not a huge fan of the “years later” kind of ending that Schrefer used here—a post-ending-ending–but in this case, it wasn’t a deal breaker).

So, what to do?  How to decide?  When I read the lines out loud in Mo’s story, my heart sang.  I loved the cadences, the idiomatic speech, the lyricism embedded throughout this story.  It was like sitting at dinner with my great aunts. I found myself at turns laughing, and at turns puzzled.  Where was the author taking me?  I had that question more often than not.  And just when I thought I had it all figured out, Turnage threw another wrench into the plot and made me reconsider.  The book was a flat-out joy. I know that young readers are going to soak this one right up.

On the surface, it seems that Endangered is for an older crowd, and can thus be more expansive in its breadth, but I also think there is going to be a lot of overlap with the readers for these two books.  After all, Lucky doesn’t shy away from hard issues.  There is, along the banks of the bayou a smattering of child and spousal abuse, abandonment, alcoholism, murder, robbery, memory loss, police corruption, underage drinking, sexual innuendo.

In many ways, both books are a celebration of the impressive tenacity of children.  Mo and Sophie make us think of the human spirit as a treasure.

But at the end of the day, it’s Sophie who does this best.  At least for this reader.  In her overwhelming devotion to Otto, we see the enduring possible, even in the face of overwhelming cruelty.  Likewise, I think it makes us uncomfortable to consider that a human’s love for an animal can be so intense and personal that she would risk her life, and possibly the lives of others, in order to save it.  Schrefer does not shy away from that question, either.  Instead, he puts it on the page in a bold way, and in so doing, we are asked to reach down deep and look at humanity at large.  It’s how we treat the least of us, I think, that is at the core of this story.  My experience tells me that children have no problem understanding this.

In the face of so much desperation, Sophie makes her own painful and misbegotten “Sophie’s choices.”  But we can buy them because she is, after all, still a child, a girl who in many ways has also been, despite her parents’ obvious love for her, nonetheless abandoned.  Like Otto’s constant need for body-to-body contact, Sophie’s primary dream is not for Otto; it’s to be held by her own absent mother.  And by extension, she’s asking the world itself to hold her beloved Congo in its arms, so that at long last it too can become more fully human/humane.

Here’s the thing.  It doesn’t happen very often, but once in a while, I enter a book on page one, and when I exit that book, I feel like I’ve come to see something about the world that I didn’t know, or I didn’t think I knew.  It feels like I’ve trued something that needed truing.  Endangered was one of those books.  

— Kathi Appelt

My pick for this round was THREE TIMES LUCKY, and when I saw that Kathi was assigned to judge this match, it brought back memories of Tamora Pierce judging GRACELING, and I thought THREE TIMES LUCKY would walk all over ENDANGERED.  Kathi makes these books sound very evenly matched, but ultimately Sophie had the edge over Mo in celebrating the tenacity of children.  I can’t help but wonder if some of that is because Mo’s story is unresolved, probably to be continued in a series of books.  We can only hope so.  I always figured that ENDANGERED would be a nice first round bye for either CODE NAME VERITY or THE FAULT IN OUR STARS, but thanks to a quirk in the bracketing, it survives to the next round where . . . it will be a second round bye for THE FAULT IN OUR STARS?

— Commentator Jonathan Hunt

Alas, another one of those dreadful pairings! At this rate, none of the younger books will get to the finals – where I do not believe they would be slaughtered, because they have tenacity and some hidden strength, like Sophie and Mo.

But Ms. Appelt makes excellent insights about the competitors, and gives Mo her due. I particularly like how she talks of both books as being “magical;” while primarily used to describe Endangered, the word fits Three Times Lucky just as well. The climax, with storms and hidden secrets, seems nearly otherworldly, as does Colonel and Mo’s arrival in Tupelo Landing, not to mention the recurring luck in the story. Our main character, in fact, seems to be the only character commonplace in this type of children’s adventure. From Miss Lana and Dale, to Detective Joe Starr and Lavender, the populace of the book is uniformly strange. In the end, all the “magic” is revealed.

You see, these children’s books can have quite a lot of depth! (And on that note of magic, there are plenty of other books in this battle that evoke a dreamy, imaginary feel – Splendors and Glooms, Starry River of the Sky. I think all good books have something of that aura, in fact.)
Endangered also goes deep into the human condition, particularly a queer relationship with animals. In this case, however, the magic is not revealed, not solved in the least. Schrefer merely asks for humans to do what we can, and love the world and the beings in it, using Sophie and Otto as an example. But the human spirit is subjective, and I’m not sure that Endangered expresses it better than Three Times Lucky – for me, a tossup, as one must also take into account Ms. Appelt’s observation that Schrefer brings us to a completely new, and true, world.

— Kid Commentator RGN

Judging is inherently biased.  It is a blatantly subjective process.  Since I am primarily a writer of novels in verse, I foolishly assumed that I would be asked to choose between two volumes of poetry.  Instead, I have received two works of prose, and just to make the choice even more challenging, one is historical fiction, while the other is nonfiction.  This is not a simple case of comparing apples and oranges; it’s apple pie against whipped cream.  I want both!

Titanic: Voices From the Disaster, by Deborah Hopkinson, and Code Name Verity, by Elizabeth Wein, are both spectacular feats of literary accomplishment.  Both are based on towering mountains of detailed research.  Both cover historical topics so disturbing and terrifying that in my opinion, both books are only suitable for teens.  Younger children would be devastated.

At this point, I should probably admit that I have read other books about the Titanic, but I have never seen anything about captive British women pilots in World War II.  I didn’t know they existed, and I happen to love the rediscovery of forgotten aspects of history.  On the other hand, Titanic surprised me with an astounding array of heart-wrenching photographs, personal anecdotes, and excerpts of letters by survivors.

Let’s talk about those photographs.  Am I supposed to judge this Battle between a famous shipwreck and unknown women pilots solely on the basis of words, or are visual images a factor?  I don’t know.  If there are rules in this Book Battle, no one informed me.  This is extreme fighting.  Anything goes.  There are no pictures in Code Name Verity, so once again, I have to say:  give me both the fruit pie and its whipped dairy topping!  They both win.  No?  Well.  I guess there are rules after all.

Okay, so I’ll start with photographs.  Along with the quotes and letters in Titanic, the visual images provide an exquisite supplement to the author’s expertise.  Hopkinson writes like a gentle encyclopedia, presenting so much information in such an incredibly organized fashion that at times it is actually possible to forget that there will not be a hopeful ending for most of the endearing real-life characters who are described, quoted, or portrayed through vignettes of specific moments:  the arrival on deck, reading a book at bedtime, or bailing icy water out of an overcrowded lifeboat.  My favorite aspect of this book is the emotional impact of all the combined bits and pieces.

By contrast, Code Name Verity does not make an organized impression. The rambling style is one more commonly found in adult novels than those meant for young people.  It is a first person story, but the identity of the narrator keeps changing, as she writes a long, baffling confession (or accusation, or diversionary puzzle, or secret code—we’re never sure which).  She writes between grueling bouts of torture by monstrous Gestapo executioners, so a reader might be forgiven for assuming that there will be no hopeful endings here either.  I have to admit that I’m glad there were no horrifying pictures inserted into the twists and turns of agonized stream of consciousness monologues.  Yet somehow, Wein manages to slip merciful touches of almost-humor into the captive pilot’s small acts of defiance.  For instance, when the daring heroine (or sly double agent—we’re never sure which) writes:  “The evil of daily life here is indescribable,” she gets carried away by the joy of writing the truth, forgetting, yes, actually forgetting, that her words will be read by Nazi interrogators, who will punish her brutally.  Okay, that’s not really my kind of funny.  But there is mercy in the striking description of her utter relief when her hair is washed, to rid her of lice.  Best of all, there are traces of poetry.  In one notable dream scene, the statement, “I just want to go on flying and flying in the moonlight” made me smile gratefully, especially since the dream moon is green.  On page 28, the description of a pilot’s aerial view of Scotland is a passage so breathtaking that I felt as if perhaps I actually had received a volume of poetry after all.  And on page 252, I found my favorite line in the entire book:  “Must be lovely flying in peacetime.”

Both books are fantastic within their own specialties, but Code Name Verity is the one I choose.

—  Margarita Engle

This is a hard match for me. On the one hand, I think that, despite being both a Sibert Honor book and YALSA Nonfiction finalist, TITANIC is still sorely under-appreciated. I am grateful, however, that Margarita pointed out the strength of the primary source material here, particularly the photographs, as well as the emotional impact of the piece in spite of our familiarity with this fateful story. On the other hand, I find CODE NAME VERITY to be one of the best young adult novels of the year, and once again, despite being a Printz Honor book and a Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor book, it feels like it deserved even more. I’m happy that Wein has won so many fans because of it, and hopefully, they will turn to her earlier fantasy books while they await her next effort.  Can CODE NAME VERITY knock out our second consecutive nonfiction contender?

— Commentator Jonathan Hunt

Simply put, I love Code Name Verity. It’s one of the best books of this year, and it deserved favorite in this battle. It’s downright brutal and then you make peace, eased along by some incredibly smooth language. I don’t care if it’s a kid’s book or not; it made into the contest.

Nevertheless, this is the type of mindless bracketing that I dislike, and leads to the loss of so many good books along the way.

For Titanic is excellent, too. As our judge pointed out, Hopkinson makes us lose ourselves in flawless, innocent descriptions of life and people aboard the Titanic, before leading us slowly to the dreadful end. I felt a sense of impending doom whenever I read anything relatively calm in the least. In this battle, this achievement may well only be equalled by Bomb, The Fault in Our Stars, and Code Name Verity. High praise, indeed.

Both books are masterful, and manage to capture the emotion in tragic events wonderfully. Perhaps the thing that tips Code Name Verity over the top (discounting beautiful writing and characterization) is the fact that Wein manages to do this with a made-up story, albeit historical fiction. Indeed, it seems just as true as Titanic.

— Kid Commentator RGN