Tales about growing up
From a poetic basketball athlete to a young sleuth, this crop is rich with themes of love and family
It’s children’s and teens’ book award season for the American Library Association, and twins have pride of place in a duo of winners. For middle grade and teen readers, Kwame Alexander’s The Crossover (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 237 pages, $21.99) won the John Newbery Award for “best book” — a quick-moving, suitably bouncy-but-tough novel in verse about a pair of basketball champ brothers.
Josh’s patent joy at playing ball marks the first rhythmic, forceful poems here, setting the context for a family bound together by love and play. Josh, poet and narrator, takes us through a championship season in which he and his twin, Jordan, become estranged for the first time, a season in which the family’s very cohesiveness is threatened by their father’s tragic stubbornness about his health. (“Is hummus really the answer?” Josh wonders, comically, as his mother responds to heart disease with a healthy diet.)
The sports theme, short lines and brisk pace make this book a quick read, but Alexander deepens and enriches the theme of play with his characterization of Josh’s family — a family for whom basketball is everything but education is even more.
By contrast, Jandy Nelson’s I’ll Give You the Sun (Dial, 371 pages, $19.99, ages 12 and up), winner of the Printz Award for “best young adult novel,” tends toward the lengthy and leisurely.
Nelson presents the alternating perspectives of twins Noah and Jude, Noah writing of the summer they are 13 years old; Jude writing of the winter they are16. What happened during the years between provides the mystery — how did Noah change from a luminous, exuberant, gay artist in love with the boy next door to a conformist jock who never draws and seems to have a girlfriend? How did Jude morph from being a surfing, cliff-jumping bad girl to a hoodie-shrouded, grieving sculptor afraid to risk a thing?
It may be that Nelson builds a few too many coincidences into her tale, but most important to her readers will be the emo- tional barriers, calamities and releases Noah and Jude endure, create and surmount in their relationship with each other, their love interests, their parents and the making of art.
In comparison to these award-winning, angst-laden teenagers, Alan Bradley’s 11year-old amateur chemist and detective, Flavia de Luce, now solving her seventh mystery in As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Doubleday, 360 pages, $29.95, ages teen — adult), is a refreshing model of restraint and rationality.
Published for adult readers, the Flavia de Luce mysteries are nevertheless a great read for teens with a taste for extensive vocabulary, sophisticated language and a mannered, eccentric heroine and narrator.
Difficult not to like a story that begins, “If you are anything like me, you adore rot.”
In this latest adventure, motherless Flavia has been “banished” (so she feels) from the crumbling family manor in England to Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy on Toronto’s Danforth, the very place that her own mother once trained in the arts of chemistry, sleuthing — and possibly assassination, Flavia surmises briefly.
No sooner has she checked into her room than a corpse lands at her feet, landing her at the same time with a puzzle to solve: who, when, how, why? With a chemistry teacher who’s an acquitted murderess and a series of girls who have vanished abruptly from the halls Flavia now treads, this is no conventional school story. Sheer confection.
For little ones, Home, written and illustrated by Carson Ellis (Candlewick, 40 pages, $19, ages 4-8, on sale Feb. 24), offers comforting fare, homely, fanciful and reassuring.
A house in the country, an apartment, a wigwam, an underground lair, a shoe, Valhalla (“A Norse god lives here”) — Ellis illustrates them all and more, ranging from the probable to the imaginary, the realistic to the literary.
Each one of Ellis’s abodes begs for a sustained visit, or at least viewing. Tiny details, almost-hidden creatures, exotic landscapes and architecture make Home as much a fairy tale as a catalogue of homes — playful, thought-provoking and full of character. Deirdre Baker teaches children’s literature at the University of Toronto.