July 15, 2010

• Interlude

  Sometimes it’s good to put things off.  I don’t advocate procrastination, mind you, but sometimes you’re supposed to wait.  I have been borrowing and returning two books over and over again for months now.  I’d read a few pages and take them back.  I didn’t want to hate them.  I didn’t want to be wrong.  I’m glad I waited.

  On Monday The Horn Book arrived on my desk, thick and loaded with reviews and speeches.  This moved me to look up the award winners’ speeches on line and I listened to them all.  They were funny and made me cry and laugh.  I had read most of the books but I had been borrowing and returning Deborah Heiligman’s Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith since February 2009.  I blew it off – what didn’t I know about Charles Darwin, after all?  (It turns out there was a lot, actually.)  I’m so tired of the evolution creation thing I could scream. (You might be, but this isn’t that.)  I don’t want to read a biography written for kids and dumbed down. (Well, now, aren’t you the arrogant little twit Miss.  And what made you think it would be ‘dumbed down?’)  I was so wrong; every single one of my PREconceptions were MISconceptions and I should probably be taken out and flogged by some secret librarian society where the use dirty book tape and old pocket cards for the flogging.  Simply put this is a brilliant piece of work, new, insightful, heartfelt, and infinitely respectful of both parties and beliefs involved.  In her dedication Heiligman says, “And finally, thank you to Charles and Emma.  You two are just the best.  I am going to miss you.”  Me too.

  Deborah Wiles’ Countdown arrived on my desk in May 2010.  I leafed through it, took it home, leafed through it, put it on the floor, picked it up, leafed through it, put it in the pile and then….well….I stacked other books on top of it.  After I finished Charles and Emma I needed something completely different and Countdown moved to the top of the pile.  Talk about the right book at the right time!  I loved through the sixties.  I remember duck and cover, I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis and Kennedy and Khrushchev and Pete Seeger and rock and roll.  This novel is not just a piece of historical fiction, although it is a brilliantly written piece of historical fiction with characters and settings that jump off the page and into your heart.  The 60s come alive in these pages through the growing of one eleven year old girl through the course of two weeks.  A lot can happen when your eleven and the world’s two superpowers have decided it’s time to play chicken with nuclear warheads and you live near Washington D.C. and your dad is an Air Force pilot and your sister is going to change the world and your best friend just isn’t anymore.  This book is not just a picture book of two weeks in one year of one decade, although it is a brilliantly executed picture book/scrapbook of two weeks in one year of one decade.  This is the perfect marriage of the two genres.  While each could stand alone each would be weaker for want of the other.  Hmmm, maybe it’s not so different from Charles and Emma after all.

   

  And so it goes

  • 7:01 pm
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