A Great Presidents’ Day Book for 8-to-12-Year-Olds: Russell Freedman’s ‘Lincoln’

If the children’s department of your public library has put up a Presidents’ Day display, it probably includes Russell Freedman’s Lincoln: A Photobiography (Clarion, 160 pp., $20). And well it should. In this innovative book Freedman marries the picture-book and chapter-book forms to create a dynamic portrait of Abraham Lincoln that deals extensively with his youth and early adulthood but also covers his presidency and the Civil War. First published in 1987, Lincoln: A Photobiograpy was one of the most acclaimed books of children’s nonfiction of the 1980s, when it won the 1988 Newbery Medal and “Best Books of the Year” honors from School Library Journal and Publishers Weekly. Freedman has also written other excellent nonfiction books for tweens discussed in an earlier post www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2007/03/03/ (which recommended them for 9-to-12-year-olds, though they may appeal to some younger children who are strong readers).

(c) 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

A Totally Unauthorized Reading Group Guide to the 2008 Newbery Medal Winner, Laura Amy Schlitz’s ‘Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!’

10 Discussion Questions for Young Readers
Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices From a Medieval Village
By Laura Amy Schlitz
Illustrated by Robert Byrd
Source: One-Minute Book Reviews
www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com

Laura Amy Schlitz calls Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! “a book of miniature plays – 19 monologues (or plays for one actor) and two dialogues (for two actors).” Strictly speaking, she’s right. The speakers in Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! are young people between 10 and 15 years old who live on or near an English manor in the 13th century, the time of the religious wars known as the Crusades. They include girls like Nelly, who helps to support her family by catching eels, and boys like Hugo, who has to track down a wild boar as his punishment for playing hooky. But some characters know one another, so their stories overlap and at times read more like a collection of linked short stories than a series of plays. This unusual format may have helped the book win the 2008 Newbery Medal, given by the American Library Association to “the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children.”

Questions for Young Readers

1. The speakers in Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! live in medieval times, also known as the Middle Ages. Many people first learn about that era from fairy tales about princesses and others who live in castles. What ideas did you have about the medieval life before you read this book? How did your ideas change after you had read it?

2. Most books of fiction have a main or most important character. Does this book have one? Why or why not? How did the presence or absence of a main character affect your enjoyment of the book?

3. Why do you think Laura Amy Schlitz began the book with the tale of “Hugo, the Lord’s Nephew”? What aspects of this story would grab your attention right away?

4. Schlitz made up all the stories in this book. If you didn’t know that, would you have thought that some of the tales were true? What makes them seem believable?

5. “Camelot, it’s not.” These were the first words of a review of Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! that appeared in a New York newspaper. What did the writer mean? [“You Are There,” by John Schwartz, The New York Times Book Review, Dec. 16, 2007.]

6. Some of the characters in the book speak in prose (such as “Nelly, the Sniggler,” “Pask, the Runaway” and “Will, the Plow Boy”). Others speak in poetry (such as “Lowdy, the Varlet’s Child,” “Thomas, the Doctor’s Son” and “Otho, the Miller’s Son”). Why do you think they do this? Might the book have become monotonous or less interesting if everybody spoke the same way?

7. What does Otho mean by: “There’s no way to retrace our steps, / the mill wheel’s turning — ”? How does this line relate to his life? How does the line relate to the theme of the book as a whole? [Page 29]

8. Pictures can have different purposes in a book. For example, they can show you exactly what you see on page (acting as a mirror), or they can or focus on and enlarge a detail (acting as a magnifying glass). What purposes do Robert Byrd’s pictures serve in Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!? Why might the sun and moon have human faces on pages x-1 and elsewhere?

9. Before you read Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!, did you ever think that you might have liked to live in medieval times? How did the book affect your view?

10. The characters who speak in poetry in this book use different verse forms. Thomas speaks in iambic pentameter when he says: “A healthy man is careless with a bill — / You have to make them pay when they are ill.” (The two lines form a heroic couplet, a specific type of iambic pentameter.) [Page 18] Lowdy speaks in a different verse, dactylic, when she say: “Fleas in the pottage bowl, / Fleas the bread.” [Page 60] If you’ve studied verse forms, how many can you find in the book?

Extra Credit
Schlitz writes about the “Children’s Crusade”: “In 1212, a French shepherd boy had a vision that the Holy Land could be recovered by innocent children. Thirty to forty thousand children from France and Germany set off to Palestine, believing that God would favor their cause because of their faith, love, and poverty. They believed that when they reached the Mediterranean, it would part, like the Red Sea. They were mistaken. Most of them starved, froze to death, or were sold into slavery.” [Page 37] Some scholars aren’t sure that this “crusade” occurred in the form Schlitz describes. You may want do some research on the “Children’s Crusade” and decide what you think might have happened.

Vital Statistics
Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices From a Medieval Village. By Laura Amy Schlitz. Illustrated by Robert Byrd. Candlewick, 85 pp., $15.95. Ages 10 and up.

Published: August 2007 www.candlewick.com

Furthermore: The American Library Association has posted information about 2008 Newbery at www.ala.org/ala/alsc/awardsscholarships/literaryawds/newberymedal/newberymedal.htm .
Schlitz is a librarian at the Park School in Baltimore. She also wrote the text for the 2007 picture book The Bearskinner (Candlewick, $16.99) www.candlewick.com, illustrated by Max Grafe, and an excellent neo-Gothic novel for ages 10 and up, A Drowned Maiden’s Hair www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2007/03/10/.
Robert Byrd’s site is www.robertbyrdart.com.

This reading group was not authorized or approved by the author, publisher or agent for the book. It is copyrighted by Janice Harayda, and its sale or reproduction in any form is illegal except by public libraries that many reproduce it for use in their in-house reading groups. Other groups that wish to use this guide should link to this site or use “Contact” page on One-Minute Book Reviews to learn how to request permission to reproduce the guide.

If you are a librarian and found this guide helpful, please consider adding One-Minute Book Reviews www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com to your library blog or ready-reference links, so patrons can find other guides and reviews. One-Minute Book Reviews accepts no advertising and appears on Open Directory lists. It is the sixth-ranked book-review site in the world on the Google Directory of “Top Arts/ Literature” blogs: www.google.com/Top/Arts/Literature/Reviews_and_Criticism/.

Janice Harayda www.janiceharayda.com is an award-winning journalist who has been the book columnist for Glamour, the book editor of the Plain Dealer in Cleveland, and the vice-president for awards of the National Book Critics Circle www.bookcritics.org.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

A Review of the 2008 Newbery Medal Winner, Laura Amy Schlitz’s ‘Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!’: Voices from a Medieval Village’

A prize-winning collection of linked monologues and dialogues in prose and poetry by characters, between 10 and 15 years old, who live on bankrupt English manor in the time of the Crusades

Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices From a Medieval Village. By Laura Amy Schlitz. Ilustrated by Robert Byrd. Candlewick, 85 pp., $15.95. Ages 10 and up.

By Janice Harayda

This is a refreshingly subversive book. Perhaps only a school librarian like Laura Amy Schlitz could have found a way not just to publish but to win a Newbery Medal for a book that defies almost every fashion in American education.

Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! is about children like the destitute Barbary, who knows that a lord’s daughter will someday give birth “and squat in the straw, / and scream with the pain / and pray for her life / same as me.” It’s about girls like the crippled Constance, who makes a pilgrimage to a site associated with Saint Winifred, who was decapitated after she fought a man who tried to “seize” (read: rape) her. (Her head miraculously reattached itself her body.) And it’s about boys like the miller’s son Otho, who plans to cheat his customers the way his father does because: “There’s no use in looking back, / for here’s the truth I’ve found: / It’s hunger, want, and wickedness / that makes the world go ’round.”

This book is, in other words, about everday life in the Middle Ages, as described in 19 linked monologues and two dialogues by characters between the ages of 10 and 15. All of the speakers live on or near an English manor that, in 1255, has been bankrupted by the Crusades. So it isn’t surprising that their talk often turns to God, Jesus, the Apostles, the Virgin Mary, Hell, Judgment Day and saints who died gruesome deaths. Their lives are so brutal that for some, this world has nothing on the next.

To help children make sense of all of it, Schlitz adds background in marginal notes and pages of explanatory text that can get a bit breezy. Why did people go on Crusades? Partly because the pope said that killing people was “a religious duty”: “Ordinary people could escape the tedium of their everyday lives, see the world, kill Muslims, and go to heaven in the bargain.” Schlitz almost makes it sound as though you could get frequent flyer miles for it. In a post-9/11 world, you can’t get much less fashionable than talking about killing Muslims, in a tone that borders on flip, in book intended for use in schools.

The monologues tend to work better than the interleaved explanatory pages, but it’s unclear why some characters speak in prose and others in poetry. The verse forms range from bouncy dactyls to stately heroic couplets, which helps to keep the speeches from becoming monotonous. But some of Schlitz’s poetry is hard enough to scan that it may defeat many students and even teachers. This book would have benefited from a few notes on the verse forms and on the obvious parallels with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

Even so, it’s a worthy Newbery winner. Good Masters, Sweet Ladies! offers a fascinating view of the Middle Ages from which many adults may learn as much as children. Schlitz’s characters tell exciting stories of falconry, boar-hunting and other pursuits that offer more realistic view of medieval life than fairy tales about demure princesses. And although the Newbery judges aren’t supposed to consider the artwork, it can’t have hurt that this book has such appealing watercolor and pen-and-ink illustrations by Robert Byrd, who found inspiration in an illuminated poem from 13th-century Germany.

Best line: A lament by Lowdy, the daughter of a varlet (a man who looked after the animals owned by the lord of the manor): “Fleas in the pottage bowl, / Fleas in the bread, / Bloodsucking fleas / In the blankets of our beds …” Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! has many good lines, but these stand out because they are written in dactylic meter, which is much less common in children’s books than iambic or anapestic.

Worst line: Schlitz writes about the Children’s Crusade as though its existence were an established fact: “In 1212, a French shepherd boy had a vision that the Holy Land could be recovered by innocent children. Thirty to forty thousand children from France and Germany set off to Palestine, believing that God would favor their cause because of their faith, love, and poverty. They believed that when they reached the Mediterranean, it would part, like the Red Sea. They were mistaken. Most of them starved, froze to death, or were sold into slavery.” Many scholars question whether this crusade occurred or, if it did, whether it attracted “thirty to forty thousand” children. Schlitz gives no source for this information beyond a general bibliography that lists only one book that deals primarily with the Crusades.

Published: August 2007 www.candlewick.com

Furthermore: Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! won the 2008 John Newbery Medal from the American Library Association, given to the most distinguished work of American literature for children www.ala.org/ala/alsc/awardsscholarships/literaryawds/newberymedal/newberymedal.htm .
Schlitz also wrote an excellent neo-Gothic novel for ages 10 and up, A Drowned Maiden’s Hair www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2007/03/10/. Robert Byrd’s site is www.robertbyrdart.com.

Janice Harayda www.janiceharayda.com is an award-winning journalist who has been the book columnist for Glamour, the book editor of the Plain Dealer in Cleveland, and the vice-president for awards of the National Book Critics Circle www.bookcritics.org. This site posts a new review of a book for children or teenagers every Saturday.

(c) 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Two Children’s Classics That Didn’t Win the Newbery — What Are the Others?

This week I was going to compile a list of 10 great children’s novels that didn’t win a Newbery Medal from the American Library Association www.ala.org, similar to my list of 10 classics that didn’t get Pulitzer (”Famous Pulitzer Losers,” www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2007/04/16/). But I ran out of time, so I’ll just mention two:

Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White. A 1953 Newbery Honor Book that lost the top prize to Ann Nolan Clark’s Secret of the Andes.

Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt. Shut out of all prizes in 1976. Lost to the Newbery medalist, Susan Cooper’s The Grey King, and Honor Books The Hundred Penny Box, by Sharon Bell Mathis, and Dragonwings, by Laurence Yep.

What are the other classics – books children have enjoyed for decades — that didn’t win the Newbery?

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Forsooth, ‘Tis Two Brief Excerpts From Laura Amy Schlitz’s ‘Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!’ So That Thou May Know the 2008 Newbery Medal Winner

Twenty-two men and women of the 13th century talk about their lives in Laura Amy Schlitz’s Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices From a Medieval Village (Candlewick, $19.99, ages 9 and up), illustrated by Robert Byrd, which won the 2008 Newbery Medal for the most distinguished work of American literature for children. Some of these fictional characters deliver their monologues or dialogues in poetry and others in prose. Here’s an example of each:

Otho, The Miller’s Son

“Father is the miller

As his father was of old,

And I shall be the miller,

When my father’s flesh is cold.

I know the family business –

It’s been drummed into my head:

How to cheat the hungry customer

And earn my daily bread …”

Nelly, The Sniggler*

“I was born lucky. Nay, not born lucky, as you shall hear — but lucky soon after and ever after. My father and mother were starving poor, and dreaded another mouth to feed. When my father saw I was a girl-child, he took me up to drown me in a bucket of water …”

* “A sniggler is a person who catches eels by dangling bait into their holes in the riverbank.”

You can read a longer excerpt and find more information about Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! on the publisher’s site www.candlewick.com.

(c) 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

www.janiceharayda.com

‘Hugo Cabret’ Wins 2008 Caldecott, ‘Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!’ Gets Newbery

[Note: Additional posts about these awards will appear later today.]

Librarians honor one of their own for the second year in a row in giving Newbery to Laura Amy Schlitz

By Janice Harayda

Brian Selznick has won the 2008 Caldecott Medal for his bestselling illustrated novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Selznick merges the picture- and chapter-book formats in his tale of a young orphan and thief who lives in a Paris train station and tries to solve a mystery that involves a mechanical man begun by his late father. Books that win Caldecott medals typically have about 32 pages and suit 4-to-8-year-olds. The Invention of Hugo Cabret has 533 pages and may be the longest to win the award. It popular among 9-to-12-year-olds.

The American Library Association announced the award today at a meeting in Philadelphia. The Caldecott Medal honors the most distinguished American picture book for children. A review of and reading group guide to The Invention of Hugo Cabret appeared on One-Minute Book Reviews on April 21, 2007, www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2007/04/21/.

Laura Amy Schlitz has won the Newbery Medal for Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village, a collection of monologues by characters from an English village in 1255. By giving the award to Schlitz, the librarians honored one of their own for the second year in a row. The 2007 Newbery Medal went to Los Angeles librarian Susan Patron for The Higher Power of Lucky. The medal honors the most distinguished work of American literature for children published in the preceding year.

The Caldecott Honor books are Henry’s Freedom Box by Ellen Levine and Kadir Nelson, First the Egg by Laura Vaccaro Seeger, The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain by Peter Sis and Knuffle Bunny, Too: A Case of Mistaken Identity by Mo Willems. The Newbery Honor books are: Elijah of Buxton by Christopher Paul Curtis, The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt and Feathers by Jacqueline Woodson.

Christopher Paul Curtis won Coretta Scott King Award for an author for Elijah of Buxton.

The Honor awards for authors went to Sharon M. Draper for November Blues and Charles R. Smith Jr. for Twelve Rounds to Glory: The Story of Muhammad Ali.

Artist Ashley Bryan won the Coretta Scott King Award for an author for Let It Shine.

The Honor awards went to illustrator Nancy Devard for The Secret Olivia Told Me and Leo and Diane Dillon for Jazz on a Saturday Night.

Geraldine McCaughrean’s The White Darkness won the Michael L. Printz Award to www.ala.org/yalsa/printz for excellence in literature for young adults.

The Printz Honor Books are Dreamquake: Book Two of the Dreamhunter Duet by Elizabeth Knox, One Whole and Perfect Day by Judith Clarke, Repossessed by A. M. Jenkins and Your Own, Sylvia: A Verse Portrait of Sylvia Plath by Stephanie Hemphill.

(c) 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Do Christian Themes Kill Your Chances of Winning a Newbery Medal? Laura Amy Schlitz’s ‘A Drowned Maiden’s Hair’

A gripping neo-Gothic novel snubbed by the American Library Association

A Drowned Maiden’s Hair: A Melodrama. By Laura Amy Schlitz. Candlewick, 389 pp., $15.99. Ages 10 & up. [See further discussion of these ages below.]

By Janice Harayda

Do Christian themes kill your chances of winning top honors from American Library Association? You might think so after reading two also-rans for the 2007 Newbery Medal for the “most distinguished” work of children’s literature, Kate DiCamillo’s The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane and Laura Amy Schlitz’s A Drowned Maiden’s Hair.

The winner, The Higher Power of Lucky, has many virtues discussed in a Feb. 19 review on this site, particularly its vibrant descriptions of the Mojave Desert and engaging illustrations by Matt Phelan. But Susan Patron’s underdeveloped plot helps to make her novel at best a B/B-minus book.

DiCamillo’s Christian allegory, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, doesn’t have that problem. Neither does A Drowned Maiden’s Hair, a gripping neo-Gothic first novel that has more complex themes and shows a stronger command of language and storytelling than the winner.

Then why did Schitz’s novel get shut out of the medals? Consider the plot: In 1909 a high-spirited 11-year-old named Maud Flynn rejoices when she learns she is to be adopted by a trio of unmarried sisters who promise her treats like “ready-made dresses” and bacon instead the gritty oatmeal served at the Barbary Asylum for Orphans.

But Maud grows uneasy when she learns that the women are fake spiritualists who expect her to take part in séances intended to con the rich widow Eleanor Lambert into thinking that she’s hearing from her dead daughter. A sister named Hyacinth tells Maud: “Any minister worth his salt would tell her she would see her daughter in heaven. But Eleanor Lambert doesn’t want to see her daughter in heaven. She wants her now.” Hyacinth adds that Mrs. Lambert “wants to resurrect the dead – which is impossible.”

Anyone who has read The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane may see a theme emerging: While DiCamillo’s novel implicitly affirms the possibility of resurrection, Schlitz’s explicitly denies it. And A Drowned Maiden’s Hair goes further by casting the superintendent of the Barbary Asylum as a religious hypocrite who treats children cruelly while displaying a picture of Jesus and the words: “Suffer the Little Children to Come Unto Me.” The ALA might have snubbed DiCamillo’s novel for fear of appearing to promote Christianity (although many librarians have no trouble recommending The Chronicles of Narnia, also regarded as a Chrisitan allegory). But Schlitz doesn’t promote it. Has even a historically appropriate mention of religious hypocrisy become taboo? Must authors shun any mention of Christianity to win an ALA award? Books about other faiths don’t seem to face the same obstacles. A Caldecott Honor citation went in 2006 to Zen Shorts, a picture book about Buddhism.

A Drowned Maiden’s Hair isn’t flawless. From a literary standpoint, Schlitz makes two big mistakes. Children may not notice one because the story is so suspenseful: Schlitz tells her story from Maud’s point of view but sometimes credits her heroine with ideas that are unrealistic for her. At the orphanage Maud led a life so sheltered that she can’t remember ever having gone outside at night. But she soon encourages one of her new caretakers to wear her hair in a pompadour because it’s “stylish.” How would she know? Maud also reflects that the books at the orphanage were “mostly moral tales.” This is an accurate but adult characterization of what she would have been reading. The problem becomes clear when you compare A Drowned Maiden’s Hair with another novel about a distant era, Little House on the Prairie, which works so beautifully, in part, because Laura Ingalls Wilder never makes such slips: She tells you only what Laura, her young heroine, would have seen or thought. Children love the book partly because they understand – even if they can’t express it — that it shows the world from their point of view.

The second mistake Schlitz makes is that she has Maud’s older brother, Samm’l, adopted by other parents, appear early in the book and promise to send for her after he gets his own farm, though Maud never sees or hears from him again after that. Parents, I ask you: If you promise your child something like this, will your child forget it? No, and the readers of this book aren’t going to forget it, either. Schlitz seems to have inserted a scene involving the brother either because she wanted to add background about Maud without larding the novel with exposition or because she is setting up a sequel. Either way, it’s a cheat.

None of this spoils the pleasure of reading the novel. Schlitz has spent much of her life working as a professional storyteller. And as befits that background, she grabs your attention with a terrific beginning and sustains a level of suspense as high as you are likely to find in any children’s novel of 2006. And A Drowned Maiden’s Hair does more than tell a captivating story. It asks children to consider large questions such as: What does it mean to be “good”? To what degree are you responsible for your own actions if adults require you to act a certain way? Can material comforts – like pretty clothes and ice-cream sodas – bring happiness? And, yes, is there life after death?

“People throw the word ‘classic’ about rather a lot,” Megan Cox Gordon wrote in the Wall Street Journal, ‘but A Drowned Maiden’s Hair genuinely deserves to become one.” Fortunately, when librarians have snubbed worthy books, such as Tuck Everlasting, children usually have the last word.

Best line: The first: “On the morning of the best day of her life, Maud Flynn was in the outhouse, singing ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic.’”

Worst line: Maud’s comment: “Pompadours are stylish. And a pompadour would make your face look taller.”

Age level: The moral questions raised by this novel justify the “ages 10 and up” recommendation from the publisher. But the story would fascinate many younger children, too (and has no sex or “bad words” that would rule it out in some homes). One way to think of A Drowned Maiden’s Hair is that it’s a good book for children who loved the period details of “Little House” series (typically recommended for ages 6–9) but recently have outgrown it and are ready for a story that is more challenging.

Published: October 2006

Furthermore: Schlitz also wrote the biography The Hero Schliemann: The Dreamer Who Dug for Troy (Candlewick, 2006, ages 9-12), illustrated by Robert Byrd. [Note: I haven't read The Hero Schliemann. Can any parents, teachers, or librarians comment on the book for visitors who might like to know more about Schlitz's work? Jan]

Links: www.candlewick.com

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Good Biographies for 9-to-12-year-olds

Russell Freedman’s books help children get excited about the lives of great men and women

By Janice Harayda

If you’re looking for good biographies for 9-to-12-year-olds, I have two words for you: Russell Freedman.

Many authors have written captivating nonfiction for preteens, including the prolific and much-admired James Cross Giblin, who won the Washington Post-Children’s Book Guild Award for his body of work. But Freedman’s work is the gold standard for the sort of book known as the “photobiography,” a heavily illustrated book that takes a documentary approach to history. Along with other books, photobiographies can help 9-to-12-year-olds make the transition from simple chapter books to more complex works that may or may not have pictures.

Freedman is best known for his elegant Newbery Medal–winning Lincoln: A Photobiography (Clarion, 1987). But he has also written many other acclaimed biographies for 9-to-12-year-olds, including Eleanor Roosevelt: A Life of Discovery (Clarion, 1987), Martha Graham: A Dancer’s Life (Clarion, 1998), Babe Didrikson Zaharias: The Making of a Champion (Clarion, 1999), and The Voice That Challenged: Marian Anderson and the Struggle for Equal Rights (Clarion, 2006). Freedman’s books tend to be as beautifully designed as they are well-written, so they make wonderful birthday and holiday gifts.

Parents and grandparents: This post was inspired by a visitor searching for “a biography for a 9-year-old.” If you can’t find what you need, why not leave a comment with your question or send an e-mail message to the address on the “Contact” page? Many teachers and librarians visit this site. So if I can’t answer your question, they may be able to help. Please put your question in the e-mail subject heading. One-Minute Book reviews is a noncommercial site that does not accept advertising or free books, so its recommendations aren’t influenced by marketing concerns.

Links: www.clarionbooks.com

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

A Review of ‘A Drowned Maiden’s Hair’ Coming March 10

What happened to the review of A Drowned Maiden’s Hair, the children’s novel that many people thought should have won the 2007 Newbery Medal?

A new review of a book for children or teenagers appears every Saturday on One-Minute Book Reviews with all reviews permanently archived in the “Children’s Books” category. But since Feb. 25 I’ve written more than a half dozen unplanned posts about the uproar over the 2007 Newbery Medal winner, Susan Patron’s The Higher Power of Lucky, which angered some librarians with use of the word “scrotum” on the first page. These posts have included a book review, a reading group guide, and a list of reasons why the American Library Association might have given the novel its most prestigious award for children’s literature.

So the review of Laura Amy Schlitz’s A Drowned Maiden’s Hair that was supposed to appear today will be posted on Saturday March 10. Comments on other children’s books may appear later today or tomorrow. In the meantime, if you’re looking for some light entertainment, you may enjoy my two posts about the amusing search terms people have used to find my comments on the The Higher Power of Lucky. My favorite terms include “lucky scrotum,” “a character named scrotum,” and — yes — “janice harayda scrotum.”

(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

‘Barbara Walters Scrotum’ and Other Funny Search Terms People Have Used to Find My Site This Week

The most amusing keywords or keyphrases of the week

I have blogged frequently this week about Susan Patron’s The Higher Power of Lucky, which uses the word “scrotum” on the first page and won the American Library Association’s 2007 Newbery Medal for the most distinguished work of children’s literature. My posts included a comment about a segment of The View on which Barbara Walters read aloud a dictionary definition of “scrotum.”

People have entered some pretty funny keywords or keyphrases into their search bars as a result all of this. And because a lot of those people have ended up at One-Minute Book Reviews, their search terms have showed up on my “Blog Stats” page. Some of the most amusing appear below. My blog stats don’t show which of these terms originally included a plus sign or the word “and.” Some of these terms appeared in quotes and some didn’t.

lucky scrotum
patron scrotum
Barbara Walters scrotum
library scrotum
Newbery scrotum
scrotum book
view walters scrotum book

For those of you who may want to keep your “scrotum” in perspective, I posted a detailed review of The Higher Power of Lucky on Monday and a reading group guide to the book on Thursday.

On Wednesday, Feb. 28, I will announce on this site the finalists for the first annual Delete Key Awards, which recognize the year’s worst writing in books. The announcement will include examples of bad writing from from books on the short list. You may find some of these funny, too. The winner of the Delete Key Awards will be announced on March 15, the Ideas of March.

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Six Reasons Why ‘That Scrotum Book’ Might Have Won the 2007 Newbery Medal Despite the ‘S Word’

What were those librarians thinking? A former book awards judge offers possible answers

By Janice Harayda

First, I have no inside knowledge of the workings of committee that gave the 2007 Newbery Medal to The Higher Power of Lucky, which uses the word “scrotum” on the first page. Second, if I did have it, I would be skeptical, because the leakers in book awards contests are often judges who are sore that their choices didn’t win.

But I have followed the American Library Association’s awards for years and, as a journalist, and have interviewed former members of the Caldecott committee, which awards the prizes for picture books. I have also served as vice-president for awards of the National Book Critics Circle and, as such, helped to judge its annual awards program.

Based on that experience, I’d like to offer a half dozen possible reasons why the Newbery judges might have given the 2007 medal to Susan Patron’s The Higher Power of Lucky:

1) The majority of the Newbery committe thought The Higher Power of Lucky really was the most distinguished work of children’s literature published in 2006. If so, I disagree. But the committee made a defensible choice. This was not one of those ALA awards — and there have been more than a few of these — that make you say, “Was the medal winner threatening to go public with Britney Spears-type crotch shots of the Newbery committee members?” I am fully prepared to believe that somebody did have crotch shots of the librarians during the years when they gave no award to Tuck Everlasting and only an Honor Book citation to Charlotte’s Web.

2) The librarians thought that the word “scrotum” was no big deal in a novel for 9-to-11-year-olds given that you regularly hear 3- and 4-year-olds saying “penis” and “vagina.” If so, I agree.

3) The Higher Power of Lucky is upbeat. The ALA committees tend to favor books that are upbeat, unlike the judges of adult books, who often seem to equate bleakness with meaning. This could explain why the organization didn’t honor Tuck Everlasting. Although Patron’s heroine doesn’t have an easy life, The Higher Power of Lucky has a happy ending.

4) Apart from its use of “scrotum,” The Higher Power of Lucky won’t offend anybody. Yes, that’s a big “apart from.” But this is plausible. The ALA choices don’t really honor the most distinguished books for children so much as the most distinguished books that librarians can recommend to everybody. And Patron’s book meets the current tests of ideological “correctness” (with, for example, a young heroine who likes science and isn’t afraid of snakes).

5) Book awards often to go everybody’s second choice. Again, this happens in book contests of all kinds. Often prize judges disagree so strongly about which book should win that they all have to abandon their first choices and pick a title that everybody can agree on. So the award goes to everybody’s second choice instead of a few people’s first. Kate DiCamillo’s The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane is much richer and more complex than The Higher Power of Lucky. But it is so clearly a Christian allegory – with a full-page picture of a crucified rabbit and many biblical parallels – that you can see how librarians who preferred it might have had trouble building a consensus.

6) Susan Patron is a librarian and the librarians were “taking care of their own.” Could be. Patron has worked for years as a librarian in Los Angeles, which has one of the largest public libraries in the country. I would be surprised if she hadn’t served on Newbery or Caldecott committees or didn’t know some of the librarians who helped her get nominated. And personal ties can play a role in who wins book awards. Undercutting this idea is that the ALA didn’t “take care of” Laura Amy Schlitz, a Baltimore librarian who wrote the gripping A Drowned Maiden’s Hair, the Wall Street Journal called “a classic” and was many people’s first choice for the award.

Which explanation is most likely? I don’t know. But I do know that every bookstore and library has many books that children could enjoy as much as The Higher Power of Lucky. Most of those books will never win medals from anyone.

For a review of The Higher Power of Lucky, please see the Feb. 19 post on One-Minute Book Reviews, archived in the Children’s Books category. You can find more information in the Reading Group Guide to the novel posted on this site yesterday.

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

www.janiceharayda.com

Reading Group Guide to ‘The Higher Power of Lucky’ for Libraries

10 Discussion Questions for Young Readers

The Higher Power of Lucky
By Susan Patron with Illustrations by Matt Phelan
Winner of the 2007 Newbery Medal

Libraries may reproduce this guide for use in their reading programs as long as the byline, copyright line, and URL for One-Minute Book Reviews appear on it. Others who want to use this guide should link to this site or request permission from the e-mail address on the “Contact” page.

By Janice Harayda
© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
One-Minute Book Reviews
www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com

Lucky Trimble, age 10, lives with her dog in a cozy trailer that looks like a “shiny aluminum canned ham.” And she wants to stay there – at least until she becomes a world-famous scientist. But Lucky worries that her guardian will go back to France and she’ll have to go to orphanage. To avoid that fate, Lucky decides to run away. This decision brings results that are at first worse, and then much better, than anything she had imagined.

Question 1
This book is about a 10-year-old fifth-grader named Lucky. Lucky’s mother has died, her father isn’t around, and she lives with her guardian, Brigitte. You might say, “Lucky doesn’t sound lucky to me.” Why do you think Susan Patron (pa-TRONE) gave her that name? What are some of the ways Lucky is lucky?

Question 2
At first, you might think that Lucky doesn’t have any family, because she doesn’t live with relatives like parents, grandparents, or brothers and sisters. But after a while you may see that Lucky has created her own kind of “family.” Who are some of the members? What does this book teach you about families?

Question 3
Lucky eavesdrops on people who go to meetings and talk about the bad things that happened because they drank too much liquor. She notices that some people talk fast and get straight to the point of what they have to say. A man named Short Sammy is different. He doesn’t “head right to the good part” of his story:

“To stretch it out and get more suspense going for the big ending, he veered off and told about the old days when he was broke and couldn’t afford to buy rum, so he made homemade liquor from cereal box raisins and any kind of fruit he could scrounge up. This was the usual roundabout way he talked, and Lucky had noticed that it made people stay interested, even if the story had got quite a bit longer than if someone else had been telling it.” [Page 2]

Is Susan Patron sometimes like Short Sammy? Does she veer off and talk about Lucky’s “old days” to keep you interested? When does she this? What do you learn about Lucky from the stories of her “old days”? Would you have been as interested in Lucky if you didn’t know about those things?

Question 4
Lucky overhears people talking at meetings about finding a “Higher Power” that helped them feel more in control of their lives. She wishes she could find one, too.

“Being ten and a half, Lucky felt like she had no control over her life – partly because she wasn’t grown up yet – but that if she found her Higher Power it would guide her in the right direction.” [Page 5]

Later Lucky sees ants working together in an ant colony. She thinks that “to an ant, its Higher Power might be the whole colony itself.” [Page 21] Does this tell you anything about what kind of “Higher Power” Lucky wants to find? Does she eventually find it? What is the “Higher Power” of Lucky?

Question 5
Lucky lives in a desert in California called the Mojave. What did you learn about the desert from The Higher Power of Lucky? Why do you think Susan Patron chose to have Lucky live there? What are some things that Lucky could do where she lives that you couldn’t do where you live?

Question 6
You may have noticed that the weather in the desert plays big role in The Higher Power of Lucky. Weather is important in a lot of other stories, too. That’s partly because the weather affects what the characters can – and can’t – do. And storms are often symbols of emotions. In this book the desert gets hit by a storm with “fifty-five-mile- per-hour winds.” [Page 94] Do you think that Lucky’s feelings were ever stormy, too? When? At the end of the book, what happened to the windstorm? What has happened to any stormy feelings that Lucky might have had?

Question 7
Lucky has a friend named Lincoln who loves to tie knots. He “knows how to tie a million different ones, plus bends and hitches.” [Page 17] You can look at those knots in many ways. For example, the knots could symbolize Lincoln’s feelings. Lincoln may at times feel tied up in knots because his parents disagree about whether he should be thinking about becoming president. The knots could also remind you of the “bends and hitches” in the plot of this book. The most interesting knot is “the
Ten-Strand Round Knot” that Lincoln gives Lucky. [Page 67]

“The neat round buttonlike knot had no cord ends sticking out that might unwind.” [Page 68]

You could see this round knot as a symbol of the life Lucky wants – one with no loose ends. A circle can also symbolize “unbroken love.” What do you think the round knot represents to Lucky? What have you seen in your own life that’s a circle and means “unbroken love”?

Question 8
Susan Patron uses the word “scrotum” on the first page of The Higher Power of Lucky and elsewhere in it. [Pages 1, 6, 7, 132] She explains that a scrotum is “a little sac” in a man or animal that “has in it the sperm to make a baby.” [Page 132] Some adults thought that she shouldn’t have put that word in a book for people your age.
Do you agree or disagree with those adults? Why?

Question 9
Some librarians have said that they aren’t going to get The Higher Power of Lucky for their libraries because it has the word “scrotum” in it. What would you say to those librarians?

Question 10
Characters often have names that tell you something about them. In the past you may have read picture books about a dog named Spot the Pup. Even if you haven’t read those books, you could probably figure out that Spot has … spots! Many characters in the Harry Potter novels also have names that tell you something about them. You can learn more about their names by searching the Internet for “Meanings of Harry Potter Character Names.” What books have you read that have characters whose names help you understand them? When you read a book, always ask yourself: Why does a character have this name? The author of a book may be giving you a clue to a theme of the book.

Vital statistics:
The Higher Power of Lucky. By Susan Patron. Illustrated by Matt Phelan. Atheneum: A Richard Jackson Book, 134 pp., $21.99.

Links: www.simonsays.com

If you found this guide helpful, please consider adding One-Minute Book Reviews to the “Ready Reference” links at your library, so patrons can find other guides and reviews. One-Minute Book Reviews accepts no advertising and has been approved by, and appears on, Open Directory lists. Janice Harayda is an award-winning journalist who has been the book columnist for Glamour, the book editor of The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, and a vice-president of the National Book Critics Circle.

The guide is copyrighted by Janice Harayda. It is illegal for any person or institution, including students and schools, to copy or sell this guide. This guide may be reproduced only by library staff members for use in library reading groups. Please link to One-Minute Book Reviews if you want others to know about this guide and do not work for a library.

(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

My Final Word on ‘That Scrotum Book’, Including How to Lobby Your Library to Carry ‘The Higher Power of Lucky’ If You Don’t Have Time to Write a Letter

The last word on scrotums …

Okay, I’ve just about exhausted what I have to say about scrotums, at least until I get to Dr. Phil’s vasectomy reversal (yes, he had one) which his wife, Robin, discusses in her Inside My Heart (Nelson, 2006), soon to be reviewed on One-Minute Book Reviews.

A couple of final thoughts about Susan Patron’s Newbery Medal–winning The Higher Power of Lucky, reviewed at length in this space on Monday, Feb. 19:

1) Want to encourage your library to carry The Higher Power of Lucky? Make a formal request that the library buy the book. At most public libraries, any cardholder can do this by filling out a postcard at the checkout desk. You may also be able to do this online by logging onto the library’s Web site. Don’t give the staff an opportunity to say, “We didn’t think this book is right for our patrons.” Tell your library that you’re a patron, and it’s right for you. If you have a child with a library card, it would be even more brilliant to get your child to request The Higher Power of Lucky. This would achieve two things. First, you will be teaching your child about the wonderful range of services offered by public libraries, which often include buying books that you request. Second, you will force the library to choose between buying the book and breaking the heart of your adorable child, who may be requesting the purchase of a book for the first time. And if the library doesn’t buy the book, you could have your child ask a librarian to explain why it couldn’t buy the book. As I said … brilliant, isn’t it?

2) Want to find out what you missed if you didn’t see Barbara Walters’s discussion of Susan Patron’s book on The View today (Feb. 20)? Go to the blog Watching the View http://www.watchingtheview.com/feb-20-recap-banned-childrens-book. This site has an amusing recap of the show on which Barbara Walters apparently read aloud a dictionary definition of “scrotum” … just in case you were still unclear about which part of the male anatomy Patron was describing.

Postscript: This turned out not to be my last word on scrotums. Since writing this post, I have published reading group guide to The Higher Power of Lucky and thoughts on why the book might have received the Newbery despite its use of the word “scrotum.” Both of these posts appeared on Feb. 22. If you don’t see them on the main page of this site, you will find them archived in the “Children’s Books” category on One-Minute Book Reviews. My original review of The Higher Power of Lucky appeared on Feb. 19 and evaluated, among other things, how the word “scrotum” fits into the novel as a whole.

© 2006 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

What Are Canadian Librarians Going to Do About ‘That Scrotum Book’ During Freedom to Read Week (Feb. 25-March 3)

A postscript to yesterday’s review of The Higher Power of Lucky: Next week (Feb. 25-March 3) is Freedom to Read Week in Canada, which “encourages Canadians to reaffirm their commitment to intellectual freedom.” And because big books tend to appear simultaneously in the U.S. and north of the border, we may assume that the 2007 Newbery winner is there or on the way. Don’t you wonder if any Canadian librarians will dare to speak out against Susan Patron’s novel during Freedom to Read Week?

(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

‘That Scrotum Book’ for Children: A Review of the 2007 Newbery Medal Winner, ‘The Higher Power of Lucky’ by Susan Patron

Some libraries have banned the winner of the American Library Association’s highest award for for children’s literature. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the book that caused the uproar?

The Higher Power of Lucky: A Novel. By Susan Patron. Illustrated by Matt Phelan. Atheneum: A Richard Jackson Book, 135 pp., $16.95. Age range: 9-11. [See further comments about these ages at the end of the review.]

By Janice Harayda

Who would have thought that the American Library Association www.ala.org would give its most prestigious award for children’s literature to a novel that uses the word “scrotum” on the first page? Not those of us who have observed its choices for years and have found that they tend to suffer from an excess of caution, often rewarding deserving books only after children have embraced them.

So it was, in a sense, startling that the ALA gave the 2007 Newbery Medal to Susan Patron’s The Higher Power of Lucky, which tells the story of a 10-year-old orphan named Lucky Trimble who hears what an Amazon reviewer has called “the s word” while eavesdropping on a 12-step meeting through a hole in the wall. Patron writes on the first page:

“Sammy told of the day when he had drunk half a gallon of rum listening to Johnny Cash all morning in his parked ’62 Cadillac, then fallen out of the car when he saw a rattlesnake on the passenger seat biting his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.”

This is hardly shocking language when many 3-year-olds know the words “penis” and “vagina” and psychologists routinely urge parents to introduce the medically correct terms for genitalia as soon as their children can understand them. You would think that librarians would rejoice in the arrival of a book that supports this view instead of rolling out words you are more likely to hear from children, such as “dickhead” and “butt-head” and, of course, the deathless “poopy-head.”

But some people have reacted to The Higher Power of Lucky though Patron had issued a manifesto in favor of kiddie porn. At least a few libraries have banned the novel, the New York Times reported yesterday. And a librarian in Durango, Colorado, accused Patron of using “a Howard Stern-type shock treatment” to attract attention.

All of this distracts from the more important question: How good is this book?

Answer: Not bad. I’d give it a B or B-minus, though it was far from the best work of children’s literature published last year. I haven’t read all the candidates for 2007 Newbery, including the Honor Books. But among those I have read, Patron’s novel has less literary merit than Kate DiCamillos’s The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane or Laura Amy Schlitz’s A Drowned Maiden’s Hair, both rumored on library listservs and elsewhere to have been contenders for the award.

But The Higher Power of Lucky does have virtues, some of which are more therapeutic than literary. Patron describes the principles of 12-step programs not just for alcoholics but for “gamblers, smokers, and overeaters.” This may help many children who have relatives in such programs and don’t understand them. And Lucky is an intrepid and often amusing heroine who defies a few female stereotypes. She loves science, has close male friends, and lives in a trailer in the Mojave Desert, which has a dramatic landscape that Patron describes vibrantly. No one could accuse this novel of fostering the rampant materialism you see in so many children’s books. The Higher Power of Lucky also has evocative black-and-white illustrations by Matt Phelan that add so much to the book that you wonder if it would have had a shot at the Newbery without them. Perhaps above all, the novel has a worthy theme: What constitutes a “family”?

So what’s not to like about the book? The writing — vivid as it can be — is at times careless or clunky. Patron confuses “lay” and “lie” in a line of dialogue on page 4, and while you could argue that this misuse is in character for the speaker, she makes similar lapses in expository passages. She tells us that a character had “a very unique way of cooking.” She does not appear to have mastered the use of the semicolon and overuses it, including in conversation, in a book for children who may themselves be struggling to figure out its purpose. She also italicizes so many words — a sign of weak writing — that her book reads at times like a children’s version of the old Cosmopolitan edited by Helen Gurley Brown.

Most of all, some aspects of the plot and Lucky’s character are thin and underdeveloped. Toward the end of the book, Lucky behaves recklessly and is also dangerously mean to a friend. And while such events might have made less difference earlier in the book, they come so late that Patron has left herself too little time to persuade us that her heroine has learned from them. Other late events are insufficiently foreshadowed to make them believable. And that brings us back to that incendiary “scrotum.”

Lucky finally does learn the meaning of the word. But it turns out to have so little relation to the rest of the plot that its use in the beginning looks gratuitous. The metaphorical gun on the wall in the first act turns out to be firing blanks. The Higher Power of Lucky is not about its heroine’s sexual development or anything else that might have justified the use of the word. Patron could have reworked the offending passage with no loss to the book. In that sense, she may have made a mistake. But libraries would be making an even more serious one if they ban a book that has much to offer children.

Best line: This book has many good descriptions of the landscape of the Mojave, such as this image of a dust storm: “Tiny twisters of sand rose up from the ground, as if minature people were throwing handfuls in the air.”

Worst line: Clearly many people think it’s the one about the scrotum. For variety I’ll go with the ungrammatical first line of the third chapter, which includes a dangling modifier: “Out of the millions of people in America who might become Lucky’s mother if Brigitte went home to France, Lucky wondered about some way to trap and catch exactly the right one.”

Age range: The publisher recommends this book for ages 9-to-11. But The Higher Power of Lucky has a much less complex plot and smaller cast than many novels beloved by children in that age group, such as the Harry Potter novels. And its heroine is a 10-and-a-half-year-old fifth-grader, and children tend to read “up,” or prefer stories about characters who are older than they are. So this book may have much more appeal for children below its age range, including 7- and 8-year-olds, than 11-year-olds. This fact may explain much of the controversy about the book. Many librarians and teachers who would have no trouble with the word “scrotum” in a book for fifth-graders may be upset because they know that this one will end up in the hands of many second- and third-graders.

Furthermore: You may also want to read two related items posted on One-Minute Book Reviews on Feb. 22: a reading group guide to The Higher Power of Lucky and a discussion of six possible reasons why this book one the Newbery despite having the word “scrotum” on the first page. Check the “Children’s Books” category on this site if you don’t see them on the home page of this blog. The reading group guide is also archived in the “Totally Unathorized Reading Group Guides” category.

Published: November 2006

Furthermore: Patron’s name is pronounced “pa-TRONE.”

Links: You may also want to read the review of The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, archived in the “Children’s Books” category on this site.

One-Minute Book Reviews is an independent literary blog created by Janice Harayda, an award-winning journalist and former book editor of The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer and vice-president for awards of the National Book Critics Circle. Please visit www.janiceharayda.com for information about her comic novels.

If you found this review helpful, please consider forwarding a link to One-Minute Book Reviews to others, particularly sites for parents and libraries. To my knowledge, this is the most comprehensive review of The Higher Power of Lucky on the Web that anyone can read without registering or providing personal information and that was written by a highly experienced critic who has judged a national book awards competition. One-Minute Book Reviews is a four-month-old site that has grown rapidly, in part because of links from libraries and other book-related groups or institutions. Additional links will help to make it possible for future reviews like this one to keep appearing

(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Review of ‘That Scrotum Book’ for Children Coming Later Today

A tempest swirls around this year’s winner of the most prestigious award for children’s literature

Did you see the article in yesterday’s New York Times about the controversy surrounding the 2007 Newbery Medal winner, The Higher Power of Lucky, which uses the word “scrotum” on the first page? A review that evaluates both the controvery and the literary merits of the book will appear later today on One-Minute Book Reviews. Technorati is often slow in listing posts. If you’re interested in finding out what the fuss is about, please bookmark this site or keep checking back. I hope to post this review by early afternoon.

If you are a member of the media seeking a quote from an expert who is not a teacher or librarian but knows this book well, or from someone who has been a judge for a national literary awards program, use the e-mail address on the “Contact” page of this site to get in touch with me.

(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

One-Minute Book Reviews is an independent literary blog created by Janice Harayda, an award-winning journalist who has been the book columnist for Glamour, the book editor of The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, and vice-president for awards of the National Book Critics Circle.