Shooting the Moon

Frances O'Roark Dowell
Atheneum 2008

Jamie Dexter is an army brat, her dad a full bird Colonel running a base in Texas during the Vietnam war. When her brother skips college, and medical school, to enlist Jamie couldn't be happier. In her 12-going-on-13 year old mind, there can be no higher honor than to serve one's country. Isn't that what her dad is always saying? But then why does her dad, always referred to as the Colonel, keep trying to talk his son out of his enlistment? And why instead of letters does her brother keep sending Jamie rolls of film for her to develop?

It's apparently natural that history repeats itself as the echoes from Vietnam and our current situation in Iraq reverberate in literature. As seen through Jamie's eyes we watch her move away from her pro-war position as she comes to meet and know other soldiers on the base. She never waivers in her pride for her brother, never loses the respect of or for her father, but a shift takes place when she comes to realize that the price of service, the high price of honor, may not always be justified.

I walked into this book cold and I wasn't sure I was going to like it. That may be the point, to have a young girl so gung-ho for war that it might appear a bit uncomfortable or distasteful. Naturally she's going to grow and change by the end - she's in those awkward years as it is - so the only real questions are how will she change, and how much.

But the book has a serious flaw: it's missing it's final third. In the last couple of pages (no, I won't spoil the ending here) there is a new piece of information that would seriously effect Jamie's entire family. Worse, the two years following this information are essentially tidied up in two paragraphs that seriously cheat the reader from watching the effect on Jamie as she grows into being a young woman. If this was a conscious decision to withhold this information in lieu of a sequel, it was a serious mistake. As it stands, this ending is a sort of slap in the face. Imagine if the Harry Potter books jumped from number four to number seven with two pages to cover the two years in between. That's how much I feel the ending here leaves out.

Some might disagree. The book did receive the Boston Globe/Horn Book Honor for fiction this year.

As a final note, this book and Barbara Kerley's Greetings From Planet Earth both deal with Vietnam from a child's eye view and the moon features prominently as a symbol in both. It's curious, because Kerely's book deals with what happens after the soldier returns home and less about how the family felt when it happened. In that sense these books might be well suited for a classroom to discuss the full range of feelings concerning either the Vietnam War or the effect of war on families in general.

What To Do About Alice?

How Alice Roosevelt Broke the Rules, Charmed the World, and Drove Her Father Teddy Crazy!
by Barbara Kerley
illustrated by Edwin Fotherignham
Scholastic 2008

Yes, a picture book biography about Teddy Roosevelt's tomboy daughter "running riot" in and out of the White House around the turn of the century.

“I can be president of the United States, or I can control Alice." And so it is that while Teddy is attempting to lead the nation his daughter is rough-housing with boys and giving herself an education from all the books at her disposal. Being the independent spirit she is doesn't keep her from being a goodwill ambassador for her father -- though she apparently had the same pressrelated issues that follow celebrities these days -- eventually "settling down" with a fine congressman and being wed in the White House.

Barbara Kerley's name would have been enough for me to pick this up, having enjoyed her middle grade novel Greetings From Planet Earth last year, but the real draw for me are the illustrations by Edwin Fotheringham. For a decade now I've been catching the man's spot and poster illustrations and have always been left wanting more. With his self-described blotty lines his style goes beyond a retro mid-century modern -- the man's work is a living time warp,
it's the real deal, you could take most of his work and drop it into magazines in the 1950s and not know they came from the future.

That said, only about half the illustrations in this book work. I don't know if it as editorial input or if his heart wasn't into some of the spreads, but there are pages that feel a little lifeless compared to the vibrancy of others. I feel bad even mentioning it because Fotheringham's weakest illustrations best a lot of other illustrators top work in picture books these days but given this is his picture book debut I really wanted his work to knock it out of the park. I really want the rest of the world to see what I see. Not that he's having any trouble getting work...

The story itself is a tidy biography of a colorful, spunky girl who happens to have been real. I like this trend of spunky girl characters, and having a real-life character is only better. Much of what Papa Teddy sees as running riot most children and parents today would just call "childhood." This familiarity of behavior makes it accessible to kids now who might find it amusing that what is normal was once considered bad. Alice may have been rambunctious, but it would have been wrong to stifle her, and thankfully Teddy was too broken up by the loss of the girl's mother, his first wife, to discipline the life out of her. A quiet lesson in there for parents, I should think.

I think this is a great book. Double duty for Women's History Month and President's Day

Feathers

Jacqueline Woodson
Putnam 2007

I've been floundering with this book for over a week now, trying to figure out what exactly it is I want to say. Twice now my attempts to review the book have quickly become examinations of the 1970's and why it feels like we're seeing more books set during that time and what, if any, relation all this has on our current political landscapes and whether younger readers really want to read about all this as "period" reading.

At it's simplest the story come from the wrong-side-of-the-tracks family. A boy with long hair transfers mid-year to the new school on the bad side of town, literally on the wrong side of the tracks. Being the new kid, the odd fish, makes him the easy target for the bullies and because he looks white and the other students are a rainbow of browns he is instantly viewed with suspicion. The Jesus Boy, nicknamed because of his hair and serenity in the face of his non-violent approach to life, causes unease because some of the kids begin to wonder if he isn't Jesus come back to test their faith. When finally pushed to the edge by Trevor, the class bully, JB finally lets lose a verbal assault that disarms Trevor but proves JB is like the rest of them, capable of cruelty and anger. JB's secret is that he was adopted by black parents who moved across the tracks because life wasn't any easier for them on the other side. Kids are egalitarian in their cruelty.

The story is told from the point of view of Frannie who, along with her deaf brother Sean, give us another perspective on being outsiders. Frannie doesn't feel she fits in with those around her who are more deeply connected to their church, and her brother Sean makes a connection between his deafness being a separate world that keeps disconnected. Frannie wants to believe as her friends do but she sees too many contradictions to settle her rational mind; Sean knows that no matter which side of the tracks he lives on he'll always be an outsider to the hearing world, a world he can never be a part of unlike his sister who can travel in his world through sign language.

The title comes from Frannie's book-long inquiry into a poem by Emily Dickinson which begins with the line "Hope is a thing with feathers." Indeed, it makes me wonder what Woodson herself hopes for both within the book and without.

Setting the story in the 1970's allows for a certain distancing from the idea of a segregated society, but the the ideas that lie beneath are as real today as they might have been 30 years ago. Somewhere between then and now American society has recreated new divisions and seems desperate to reclaim old one. Politics, religion and even music have moved to their respective sides of the track and don't take kindly to outsiders attempting to pass or blend in.

So why go there? Are we seeing an increase of writers who came of age during those times who feel the resonance so strongly with our current climate? The 70's are equally alive in Barbara Kerley's Greetings From Planet Earth so I'm wondering if this is a trend or a blip or just coincidence.

This perhaps moves outside the parameters of the review, but sometimes the universe sends a message and you have to puzzle it out the best you can. For a very long time now I've been wondering what to make of my particular generation, a shoulder generation who are alternately claimed as being either the tail end of the Boomers or the front end of Generation X. To my knowledge this generation is not formally recognized by marketers or the media and my experience has been that those born between 1958 and 1963 have a general sense of feeling left out. It was while I was at my wife's graduation ceremony this week that I had another old idea brought back to the surface. It was under the guise of referring to a graduating class as a karass, a term invented by Kurt Vonnegut, taken from Cat's Cradle (published in 1963 coincidentally), which is defined as "a team that do[es] God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing."

I'm beginning to feel as if my karass is making itself known in children's literature.

Greetings From Planet Earth

by Barbara Kerley
Scholastic 2007

Warning: Contains spoilers.

It's 1977. Theo and his middle school classmates are working on a science project that mirrors that of the Voyager space probe. By asking a series of questions to generate ideas for their projects -- Who are we? What makes us human? -- Theo and his classmates are gently directed to examine what it is about humans that make us unique in the universe to include as an artifact for their own imaginary space probe.

While Theo is wrestling with this question he has even larger questions closer to home to confront. His father enlisted to fight in Vietnam when Theo was small and has not come home. His mother has told him his father is missing, not dead, but refuses to allow Theo and his sister to speak of him. On his birthday Theo once again receives a gift from his missing father, a model of a rocket, a family tradition meant to serve as a token of memory for his father. But Theo suspects that his grandmother may have some answers about his father that his mother won't address.

In secret meetings Theo's grandmother fills in the gaps about her son, his father. She hints and and intimates that the reasons for his disappearance may be more complicated than he can understand and she is clearly working against the wishes of Theo's mother in telling him so. His curiosity piqued, Theo's class project leads him to issues of Life magazine where he begins to get an education in the Vietnam War. He learns about the MIA's and POW's and feels this is the secret his mother has been keeping from him. He searches his mother's room and discovers more, letters his father sent that Theo was never shown, letter specifically about his return from the war and why he has not returned home yet.

Theo's sister becomes suspicious of their grandmother's activities on the weekend and enlists Theo to shadow her to a children's center where they witness a hippie working with kids. Confused and angry, Theo confronts his mother first with the possibility that his father's a POW and then with the frustration that she has known all along and hid the truth about his father from her. Theo learns that after returning from Vietnam that his father had so much anger and frustration inside of him that he didn't feel he could return home and be a good father. Theo's mom had kept the information from her children because she felt abandoned, and because it was easier to explain when they were young that he was missing.

Only later does Theo connect the dots and realize the hippie he saw at the children's center was his father, living within an hour's bus ride of his family. With everything finally out in the open Theo and his mother explain that their father had recently decided that the time had come to try and return. After many years and a lot of emotional confusion to break through Theo takes the initiative to meet his father in a pre-arranged location. Theo comes the realization that the thing that makes us human is that we ask questions, tough questions, not the least of which are all the questions he has for his father.

I would have been a few years older than Theo is in this book in 1997, probably a classmate of his older sister. It's interesting that Kerley sets the questioning in a Science class because we addressed these issues in Social Studies, but absolutely correct that it was easier to talk about NASA in the classroom than Vietnam. Much of what I learned about the Vietnam War during that time I learned just as Theo did, through Life magazine. These things just weren't talked about; I had an uncle in the military at the time and no one has ever really talked about that either. He came home was all that mattered.

It's an interesting way of addressing similar concerns teens may currently be facing now that The War Against Terrorism (aka The Iraq War) is entering its fifth year. We don't have the same issues where the war isn't being addressed, criticized or discussed in the media but the same confusion among children -- of soldiers or otherwise -- will always exist.

Recently I had a conversation with some parents over another book I enjoyed where, in breaking down the background for the different characters, I mentioned that one of the kids was a military brat (he was a brat) whose father was stationed in and died in Afghanistan. Oh, my god, that's dreadful! Why would anyone write about that in a children's book? That's just distasteful, there's really no call for that.

Honestly.

After all these years, people would still prefer to shelter children from the outside world and have them learn what they can through piecing things together from magazines, television and the Internet? That strikes me as both more dreadful and distasteful than anything a book could present to a child, to force all heads into the sand, but that's partially how we got ourselves into our current geopolitical situation so I shouldn't be surprised.

There's another plus in this for me that has less to do with the war aspect. The book's 1977 setting may provide a conversation starter for children of parents who remember the post-Watergate Carter era. It's a well-written period piece that doesn't feel stale or too deeply rooted to its time making it accessible to contemporary readers who might -- might -- pause to consider what middle school might have been like for their parents.