The Wolf Hour Goes Roaming: Blog Tour, Stops #1 and #2

The Wolf Hour is prowling the blogosphere this month.  I hope you'll be brave enough to follow along. Here's a taste:

Stop #1

Finding Wonderland:

Despite their often bleak or violent content, fairytales are traditionally seen as stories intended for children. What's the optimum age of your target reader for THE WOLF HOUR? Who is this book for? Who, if anyone, is it not for?

Sara Lewis Holmes: 

Age and readership questions are hard. Do you like to shiver and chew your lip ragged as you read? Do you like a story that twists and turns and doesn’t go where you expect it to? Do you enjoy a story that KNOWS it’s a story, and might even challenge you to think about your own Story and whether you like your place in it? If you do, even if you aren’t in the 8-12 age range for this book…read on!

 More Q and A here:  Finding Wonderland, with Tanita Davis and Sarah Stevenson


Stop #2

Meanwhile, at Charlotte's Library, Charlotte had me respond to three quotes from the book, which was wonderfully fun.

She also had this to say about the main characters:

"Magia is one of the most lonely heroines I've read this year, and it was easy to sympathize and mentally encourage her as she pressed onward.  Not only does she have fight an evil, magical antagonist, she has to resist the expectations of ordinary human folk, making her very relatable.  Martin the wolf, with his penchant for a good book, and failed efforts to break the story of the three little pigs (not because he knew that's what he was doing, but because he simply was not interested in being a vicious killer), is one of my favorite wolf characters ever, and possibly even more relatable!" 

Thank you, Charlotte.  More of her insights here:  Charlotte, at Charlotte's library.

What I'm Reading Now: Darth Paper Strikes Back

Darth Paper Strikes Back by Tom Angleberger


Is it real? Should I believe? That's what Tommy always wants to know about the paper Yoda finger puppet Dwight uses to dispense wisdom and advice to his classmates. Especially now that Yoda is challenged by another force, Darth Paper, a scorn-spewing puppet wielded by hard-hearted Harvey---and Dwight is sinking under the full weight of a school system which wants to expel him.

The brilliance of this book is that the intended readers---upper elementary and middle schoolers---will absolutely know the answer to the "Is it real?" question. They are long past believing in the magic of inanimate objects. So they get to revel in the question behind the question: What is true?

This is exactly what author Tom Angleberger gives them as his hero, Tommy, with an earnest dedication to justice, gathers stories from his classmates of Dwight's benevolence, with the intent of presenting them to the school board. Each tale ("Origami Yoda and the Pre-Eaten Wiener", "Origami Yoda and the Exploding Pizza Bagels of Love") is told by a different kid---in voices that refreshingly reveal their own struggles and mistakes, but also show Dwight's clearly weird approach to life. What's more, some of the episodes result in outcomes probably not appreciated by the adults at the school (who have to clean up vomit from pre-eaten wieners, after all) and you become seriously worried these stories won't be enough to save Dwight. Especially not when Darth Paper.... okay, I won't ruin it.

Ultimately, this is a story that respects kids enough to let them be juvenile and flawed--- and yet totally affirms their power and goodness in the face of "dark times." Read it you will for the humor, the Star Wars insider jokes, the lunch table power struggles---but changed you will be by the power of paper. And yes, I do mean the paper that makes up the pages of this book. But only because it's real. Only because it makes you believe. And only because it is truly good.

This blog entry is cross-posted on Goodreads

What I'm Reading Now: A Time of Miracles

A Time of Miracles by Anne-Laure Bondoux,
 translated from the French by Y. Maudet

I would've loved this book when I was in middle school. Back then, I sought out stories of heartbreak and disaster---most of them set in wartime and most of them offering a glimpse of the beauty still possible in the middle of human waves of conflict.  Most of those stories would've been set during the Holocaust, but this one isn't.  It begins in a makeshift camp called the Complex, in 1992, a time so recent that I was bewildered not to know of it, scrambling to figure out what was going on and why bad things were happening around me.  Everything seemed as achingly real and as slightly off-kilter as a vivid dream.

The precise language here is stunning, and manages to be wholly clear while retaining a cadence that makes you believe the translator didn't stray far from the original French.  Most of all, the novel never wavers from the viewpoint of the child narrator, a boy named Koumail, who as a baby was rescued from a train wreck with only a French passport. As he journeys with his rescuer, the saintly Gloria, he grows slowly more aware of both his past and his dangerous present until at last, he (and we) can see the whole of the story which has engulfed him.

If I'd have studied the map at the front of the book, I might have realized sooner that this was a story of refugees fleeing the armed conflict that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union, but I was afraid of learning too much too soon. And to me, this is the magic of A Time of Miracles. We witness only as much as we are able to bear, but grow capable by the end of the story of knowing the full truth.

Highly recommended. Cross-posted at my Goodreads account.

Note: This book was the winner of the 2011 Batchelder Award for "a children's book considered to be the most outstanding of those books originally published in a language other than English in a country other than the United States, and subsequently translated into English and published in the United States."  I'm not embarrassed to say that I read it because my friend, Adrienne Furness, served on the committee that chose it, and I was deeply curious to see what she and her fellow librarians had selected.

Hug a Library Today

I know other authors eat starred reviews for breakfast. But this is my first ever. And it's from the American Library Association, who made it possible for me to be a writer in the first place, by supporting the place where as a child, I checked out and read my weight in library books each week. (Okay, MORE than my weight, probably. No one ever actually used a scale. If I could carry them up the winding steps from the children's room and out the front door of the Lawson McGhee Public Library in Knoxville, TN, I was golden.)

In this era of tough choices, when more and more libraries and librarians are struggling for funding and their proper place at the heart of every community, I would like say: Libraries and librarians change lives. They changed me. I'm forever grateful.

From the review by John Peters, in the September 15th issue of Booklist:

Operation Yes. Holmes, Sara Lewis (author). Sept. 2009. 256p. Scholastic/Arthur A. Levine, hardcover, $16.99 (9780545107952). Grades 5-8. REVIEW. First published September 15, 2009 (Booklist).

Take one class of seemingly ordinary sixth-graders in a rundown school just outside a North Carolina military base, add a new teacher with a love for both improvisational theater and a big brother stationed in Afghanistan, then truck in a shy new student whose single mom has just been dispatched to Iraq. The result is the most buoyant example of ensemble work since E. L. Konigsburg’s The View from Saturday (1996) and the best of Gregory Maguire’s Hamlet Chronicles. Bringing Second City techniques to classroom instruction, Miss Loupe wins over her initially reluctant students so thoroughly that when devastating news comes that her brother has gone missing, the young folk band together in an effort to give something back—not just to Miss Loupe, but to all who are or have loved ones in the armed forces. The result? A triumphant performance that puts on display not only a diverse array of individual talents, but no fewer than 100,000 little plastic soldiers. Flicking among points of view with increasing speed, Holmes tracks the blossoming of Bo Whaley, an often-in-trouble kinetic learner who takes to improv like a duck to water; his just-arrived cousin Gari (who will without doubt grow up to be a professional campaign manager); and a supporting cast of gently caricatured classmates, parents, and faculty. Though only a small part is actually written as a script, the entire tale is purest stagecraft: quick, funny, sad, full of heart, and irresistibly absorbing. For another modern-day homefront story, see the starred review of Julia Keller’s Back Home.

— John Peters