Tinfoil Sky (2012), by Cyndi Sand-Eveland

This review was first published in Resource Links Magazine, “Canada’s national journal devoted to the review and evaluation of Canadian English and French resources for children and young adults.” It appears in volume 17.3.

Tinfoil Sky

When I read the back cover of Cyndi Sand-Eveland’s Tinfoil Sky, I thought to myself “Oh dear, another story about a homeless child and parental neglect.”  It seems that since Jean Little’s fabulous Willow and Twig (2000), there has been an overabundance of novels for young readers that begin with worst-case scenarios, and too often the resolution is neither believable nor empowering.  And then I read on.

Tinfoil Sky succeeds where so many other novels have not.  It is neither maudlin nor overly traumatic. The characters are completely believable in the effective integration of both positive and negative characteristics, as well as their ability to change.

The scene opens on 12-year-old Mel and her mother running from the mother’s abusive boyfriend.  Mel’s one regret is that in their haste she has left her prized possessions—a boxed set of the Chronicles of Narnia, and her journal—behind.  She is sure that Craig will find them and read what she has written about him… Their life goes from bad to worse when Mel’s grandmother refuses to let her daughter into the apartment, and they end up on the street. Through not-unexpected mechanisms, Mel is eventually placed in her crotchety grandmother’s care while her mother serves out a short jail term.  But this is just the set-up: the real story is how Mel copes with a grandmother she is sure hates her, conflicted emotions regarding her mother, and a burning need to discover her past in order to determine who she is in the present.  The adults who help Mel on her journey share a believable combination of distance and involvement.  There is no white knight who takes over and solves all Mel’s problems.  Perhaps her landing a 2-hour per week student job at the library is a bit fortuitous, but it still remains within the realm of realistic possibility.  Even Mel’s friendship with the librarian’s son, visiting for the summer, presents both solace and confusion: Mel is both attracted to him and embarrassed about her situation, wanting friendship but afraid that when her mother is free they will just be leaving again. In the end, Mel’s own strength allows her to hold on to the life she has made for herself, and readers will cheer her final decision.

Tabloidology (2009), by Chris McMahen

This review was first published in Resource Links Magazine, “Canada’s national journal devoted to the review and evaluation of Canadian English and French resources for children and young adults.” It appears in volume 14.5.

Tabloidology

The lessons that Tabloidology delivers are important: issues of representation—truth, falsehood, exaggeration, omission—are combined with a lesson in achieving balance that many readers will be beginning to learn themselves.  On this level, Tabloidology is an ambitious story.  Unfortunately, the narrative style detracts from the power of the message.  It is only a small step from engagingly irreverent to over-the-top ridiculous, but this story takes it.  Many young readers may appreciate the over-the-top humour in the text, but even grade 4 to 6 readers—at whom it seems to be aimed—will likely find it too silly for their tastes.

One of the protagonists, Trixi, writes fictional stories—”a great big pack of lies” (66)—for the school newspaper, which, when the paper is photocopied on a magical photocopier, come true the following day.  A fabulous premise, but excessiveness in a multitude of narrative aspects weakens the effect.  Small issues become traumatic, while serious issues such as poverty and child neglect are considered sources of humour; the adults are made stereotypically ridiculous; and the predictability of the events the protagonists are worried about seems to belittle the reader—or at least not demand very much in the way of critical reading.  So much could have been right with this story, if the humour, the stereotypes, the silliness, were toned down just a little.  The balance the protagonists learn is necessary in media reportage would be beneficial here as well: the important messages that this story could have delivered are lost in a humour that tries too hard.

Jackanapes, Daddy Darwin’s Dovecot, and The Story of a Short Life (1895), by Juliana Horatia Ewing

In my other life, I work for the Canada’s Early Women Writers (CEWW) project, headed by Dr. Carole Gerson at Simon Fraser University.  The project aims to construct an online database of all Canadian women who published—in any genre, in any forum—before 1950.  CEWW is one of the seed projects for the larger database project, the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC), run out of the University of Alberta, and headed by Dr. Susan Brown.

Connecting my love of early Canadian literature with my love of children’s literature, I have been reading through the children’s texts written by some of our authors, with the intent of sharing them—if only superficially—with others.  The first such text was The Bells on Finland Street, by Lyn Cook; this is the fourth.

Juliana Ewing was a well-known British children’s author, with an extensive bibliography. She falls onto my radar for having lived for two years in Canada (1867-1869). Elizabeth S. Tucker’s Leaves from Juliana Horatia Ewings “Canada Home” (1896) is part biographical, part autobiographical, and contains a number of photos of the author and her life in Canada. Given this connection, I thought I would read at least Jackanapes, one of her most successful children’s stories.
My copy of Jackanapes (published in 1895) is bound with two other of Ewing’s children’s books: Daddy Darwin’s Dovecot (1884), and The Story of a Short Life (1885). All three are unquestionably written as instructive moral tales, but where Jackanapes and to a lesser degree Daddy Darwin’s Dovecot retain the reader’s interest, The Story of a Short Life is tedious and we wish that young Leonard’s life had been shorter… or, more compassionately perhaps, that the author had not chosen to write about it. Leonard is a spoilt, demanding child who, when crippled by a fall from a cart, becomes even more spoilt and demanding. Despite the author’s intent of showing how he tries to live up to the family motto, Lœtus sorte mea (“Happy in my lot”), we spend the entire short text wishing that the adults around him practiced some of the logical moral discipline that Victorian children’s texts are generally known for. Instead, when after years as an annoying cripple, Leonard inexplicably succumbs to his injuries and dies, we are shown his parents later blessed with a new family, and who remember and honour the valiant young boy who strove so hard to be like the noble soldiers around him. But failed! Perhaps I should have stopped after Jackanapes and Daddy Darwin’s Dovecot, which have similar morally intent, but are far more enjoyable to read.
Daddy Darwin’s Dovecot is an pleasant story of a young orphan who is taken in as a servant, strives to do well through honestly and hard work, and ultimately succeeds, inheriting his master’s dovecot and doves. The story achieves its goal of showing material gains resulting from moral behaviour, and is an engaging story at the same time. Its success lies both in the simplicity of the story and in the interesting characters, peppered as it is with country accents and quirky characters. The popularity of both Daddy Darwin’s Dovecot and Jackanapes were undoubtedly augmented by Ralph Caldecott’s illustrations, which are sprinkled throughout the stories.
          Jackanapes is the nickname of young Theodore, son of the “big house” in the village. While the story begins with his birth, and ends with his death, it is much more the story of the whole village, the relationships that develop over the years, and how Jackanape’s life is intermingled with all of those around him. (One commentator notes a similarity to Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853), which I think is not inappropriate.) The plot of his life is stereotypic: he leads his less adventurous friend Tony into all sorts of mischief as children; Tony follows him into the military but Jackanapes is by far the better soldier; Jackanapes dies saving Tony on the battlefield; the entire village honours him and Tony is a better man for the sacrifice of his friend. What is engaging about this story is that—unlike young Leonard—Jackanapes is an honourable lad who deserves the respect and love he garners. He is repentant when he is wrong, honest about his activities, and he loves his horse: a better advertisement for the cult of muscular Christianity can only be found in Tom Brown himself.  So in the end, when Jackanapes dies, we are saddened, even to tears. Ewing has excelled in this story: her characters are more well-rounded and interesting than in her other two stories included here, and the picture she paints of village life in the mid-Victorian period is rich with pastoral imagery and honest human emotion. The diction is somewhat heavy at times:  no more than many other novels of this period, but perhaps more than the average child reader—even then—would want to bear for long. But the story itself pulls the reader through, in a way that justifies Jackanapes’s position as one of the minor classics of Victorian children’s literature.

Hound and Hare (2011), by Rotraut Susanne Berner

This review was first published in Resource Links Magazine, “Canada’s national journal devoted to the review and evaluation of Canadian English and French resources for children and young adults.” It appears in volume 17.1

Hound and Hare

Trans. Shelly Tanaka.

Hound and Hare’s underlying message of tolerance is admirable, and one all children need to learn, but in this book the story is not sufficiently engaging to mask the author’s overt moralizing.  The language-play, too, does not engage: phrases like “the dog days of summer, you might say” (11), “stuck here like a pooch in a pup tent” (25), and “raining like hares and dogs” (43) are meant to amuse, but fall flat.  The subtleties of having Harley Hare use canine terms like “This place is going to the dogs” (24) and Hugo Hound use rabbit allusions like “Let’s hop to it” (27) are overshadowed by the numerous attempts at dog and bunny jokes that are less carefully applied.
While the narrative fails to impress, however, the illustrations are delightful.  The coloured-pencil drawings are both simple and expressive. The emotions on the characters’ faces speak more strongly than the words at times, and the detail of setting is just the right level for the younger reader or listener to enjoy.  While a contemporary text, the illustrations remind me strongly of some of my favourite picture books as a child, like Robert McCloskey’s Make Way for Ducklings (1941), or Syd Hoff’s Danny and the Dinosaur (1958).

Apologies to Madeleine L’Engle

When I reviewed Many Waters (1986), by Madeleine L’Engle, I was flippantly critical of the short little mammoths that she had populating her Biblical world. Yesterday, the following report was released in the Vancouver Sun (9 May 2012: B3). Apparently, despite the nuances of our modern language, dwarf mammoths did exist, and they were “cute.” Still, it doesn’t seem any more appropriate than Vietnamese miniature Pot-bellied Pigs: where is the dignity in being a miniature pig? or a dwarf mammoth?

A Fairy Garland of BC Flowers (194-), by Dorothea Allison

In my other life, I work for the Canada’s Early Women Writers (CEWW) project, headed by Dr. Carole Gerson at Simon Fraser University.  The project aims to construct an online database of all Canadian women who published—in any genre, in any forum—before 1950.  CEWW is one of the seed projects for the larger database project, the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC), run out of the University of Alberta, and headed by Dr. Susan Brown.

Connecting my love of early Canadian literature with my love of children’s literature, I have been reading through the children’s texts written by some of our authors, with the intent of sharing them—if only superficially—with others.  The first such text was The Bells on Finland Street, by Lyn Cook; this is the fourth.

A Fairy Garland of BC Flowers

This captivating little book was written by a teacher in the North Okanagan Valley. She came to Canada in 1912 to visit her cousin, as part of a round-the-world tour that began with visits to her sisters in Burma and India. While in Oyama, she fell in love with her cousin’s neighbour, Robert Allison. She had accepted a teaching position in Okanagan Centre, but when the couple married in December of 1913, she gave up her position (as was required of married women at the time) but stayed involved in education and other community services in the Kalamalka area. Dorothea remained involved in North Okanagan community affairs for the rest of her very long life; she died in 1981, at the age of 103.

The volume itself comprises 28 short poems: an introduction, the 26 letters of the alphabet, and a farewell.  The cover, title page, and poems are decorated by delightful wood-cut prints, with a lithe little fairy flitting about the flowers. The copy I have in my hand is signed not by the author, but by the illustrator, Janet Macmillan, whose name when she signed it was Janet Macmillan Blench. The author thanks in her dedication a “Mrs. Helena Parham (Botanist, Vaseux Lake), who has taught us so much about the flowers of the Okanagan Valley.”

As an alphabet, the author tells us, it was difficult to find the right flower for each letter: some were hard to come up with, and for some letters there were too many options. I can well imagine, and modern readers will be surprised by some of the choices she has made: frittillary, kinnikinnick, pentstemon, urtica, and zygadena are not flowers I remember from my Okanagan childhood! The flowers she does include are all local wildflowers: no orchids or jasmine adorn these pages. The poetry is sometimes shaky in rhyme or meter, but at other times perfectly lovely. Description of the volume requires words that are sweet and diminutive: it is truly a “fairy book” of flowers, in tone and content, visually and poetically. If my children were younger, I would want a copy to keep, for it is a fine combination of art, simple poetry, and tribute to the valley I was born in.

Shadow Boxing (2009), by Sherie Posesorski

This review was first published in Resource Links Magazine, “Canada’s national journal devoted to the review and evaluation of Canadian English and French resources for children and young adults.” It appears in volume 15.2.

Shadow Boxing

The death of her beloved mother—especially in the face of her father’s insensitivity—is a hard situation for teenaged Alice.  And Alice does not deal with it well.  Fortunately, Alice has her cousin Chloe, whose mother is as insensitive to her needs as Alice’s father. Together the two of them work to overcome their several problems. If “it takes a village to raise a child,” Shadow Boxing ultimately reveals the strength of community necessary to raise psychologically healthy teenagers.
Posesorski creates truly human characters: her teens are fallible and problematic, yet innocent and engaging.  Her adults represent a fair and sufficiently comprehensive cross-section of urban Canadian life.  The one less-realistic strain in the text is the extent to which some of the adults in Alice and Chloe’s lives are willing to go to help the girls, but Posesorski works to validate their motivations… and is for the most part successful.
What is most compelling in the text is the depiction of Alice’s grieving process.  Her experiences imbue the novel with bibliotherapeutic power, but the emotions are so strong, and so real, that this power should be used judiciously.  Young readers having experienced such a loss recently might do well to wait before reading Shadow Boxing, but at some moment, for some people, this text could powerfully facilitate healing.

A Neil Flambé encore…

If only I read my facebook posts in a timely fashion!  This hot off the presses:  Open Book Toronto has published an article on Kevin Sylvester, in which you can enter a competition to win the first three books in the Neil Flambé Capers series. Enter, all of you, and I hope someone I know wins!

 

Neil Flambé and the Crusader’s Curse (2012), by Kevin Sylvester

You won’t be able to buy this one quite yet. It is set for release on May 8th. You can pre-order copies from the large online retailers, or (my preference) KidsBooks in Vancouver. Or, if you are lucky enough to live in the Toronto area, you can meet Kevin at the Toronto Public Library (40 Orchard View Blvd, Toronto) at 9 am on 12 May 2012. Or so the Simon& Schuster website tells me. They even have a map…

Neil Flambé and the Crusader’s Curse

I am so used to Kevin Sylvester’s cast of characters representing the cultural diversity that I know as Vancouver that an important, subtly expressed, relationship in The Crusader’s Curse failed to surprise me sufficiently: or so I am told. It was called to my attention by another reviewer to whom I lent my copy, a reviewer who is prominent in the children’s literature world for his active support of GBLTQ literature for readers of all ages. In the penultimate chapter, Jean-Claude Chili comments that his friend Hugo Victoire “eez used to loud noises. I snore like a greezly bear” (274). They have been together for “many years” Jean-Claude admits, and he strove to keep Hugo, like his sister—the people he loves—out of what he knew to be a very dangerous situation. Nothing more. For years now GLBTQ critics have been asking for texts that aren’t about homosexuality, or about “coming out,” or focus on the conflicts raging within our strongly heteronormative society, but rather present alternative sexualities as a non-confrontational reality, as they should be. Such representation is slowly beginning to appear. Neil Flambé and the Crusader’s Curse, even more than the first two culturally diverse texts in the series, lies in the vanguard of social tolerance.

More than that, though, The Crusader’s Curse is another delectable taste of mystery and adventure: an international Stanley Park for children. When the Neil Flambé cookbook comes out (I mention the possibility purely from desire, not from insider knowledge), I will immediately cook the recipes from this novel (if I can get my hands on some fresh seagull)! If you ever need to seriously cook your Canada goose—or hedgehog, or garter snake—Neil Flambé is your man, or rather, boy.

But Neil is growing up. As he hits his fifteenth birthday, he seems to have lost his panache; the food he serves his guests appalls them, and the arrogant boy-chef learns to eat humble pie. The reader, privy to the historical backstory upon which Sylvester loves to construct his narrative palimpsests, knows that the curse of the Flambés has descended: Neil’s culinary senses have desserted him. He is almost overcome, and readers are on tenderhooks as they follow Neil’s vacillation between depression, anxiety, and anger, with only enough information (such is Sylvester’s admirable narrative control) to trust that the plot will not burst into flame in the oven. It almost does, and I must admit that the final scenes were hard to follow, relying as they did on the reader’s ability to create visual images from the barrage of action words required. But the failing, I know, lies in this reader: the children to whom I lent the book loved the ending with all of its excitement combined with Sylvester’s inimitable sense of humour. But it made me wonder if there are anime artists and producers waiting to create a film version for us? And would we want that…? Perhaps not: Sylvester’s language not only reveals his subtle, sardonic humour in a way that film could not, but also creates layers of narrative that replicate the nuances of culinary artistry, drawing on all of our senses, not only the visual. So, Mr. Sylvester, back into your garret to garnish Neil Flambé #4 (Neil Flambé and the Tokyo Treasure), or are you starting on that cookbook yet?

Who Is Frances Rain? (1987), by Margaret Buffie

What is it about Lizzie? Why, out of all of the marvellous protagonists that YA literature contains, does Lizzie captivate me? Every time I read Who is Frances Rain?—and this is the fourth time—I want to know more of Lizzie’s story: I want to see how her final years of high school progress; I want to know (despite statistics regarding the permanency of high school romances) more about her relationship with Alex; I want to follow her on the rocky road that the next few years will be. For, once again, Margaret Buffie has created a novel in which there are no solid answers in the end, only hope and promise. Her characters are so real, in both their flaws and their strengths that we implicitly trust in the truth of the narrative, and I at least want to travel with the characters for quite a while longer.

The plot of the novel is fairly simple. Lizzie’s dad has left them, which is difficult for the whole family, but especially for her annoying older brother, Evan. Her mother has recently remarried, and Lizzie and Evan both actively reject Tim, the new husband, and his legitimate attempts to both fit in to and help the family. Here, Buffie’s ability at characterization shines, for Lizzie, Evan, and Tim are all presented in honest human terms: no sugar coating to Evan’s rudeness or Lizzie’s self-centred attempts to sabotage Tim’s positive contributions. Eventually, not surprisingly, Tim can take no more and leaves. This is not a spoiler; it is the guaranteed outcome of the narrative situation Buffie constructs so deftly. But while it is the basic premise of the plot, it is also not the central point. Lizzie’s relationships with Tim—and Evan, and her mother—are a vehicle for the novel’s message that family—and indeed community—does not function unless there is communication, understanding, and forgiveness amongst its members. This is a lesson that Lizzie must learn, and she does so not only through her experiences—both contemporary and paranormal—but also through the pointed jibes of those around her who have had quite enough of her selfishness. At one point, Alex, who has been her brother’s summer friend since childhood, tells her: “You’re running a close neck-and-neck race with Evan for pill of the year, I don’t know why I bother with you” (114). Sometimes we need to hear comments like this; they pull us out of our more self-indulgent emotional moments.

While all of the clues to help her develop a more balance perspective on her family and her own role within it are present in her contemporary world, what really feeds Lizzie’s budding empathy is her experience on Rain Island, where she meets the ghost of Frances Rain. Who is Frances Rain? is more than just an interesting approach to the time-slip novel; Lizzie’s experience of the past crosses the borders of believability in a way that most time-slip novels remain pure fantasy. What she learns through helping Frances Rain’s ghost teaches Lizzie a lot about personal strength and responsibility; by helping Frances Rain find peace, she helps herself understand the difference in degree between her own troubles and those of the adults around her.

Who is Frances Rain? has been challenged and banned a number of times, for its inclusion of both the paranormal and an unwed mother. The illegitimate child in Buffie’s book is born in the early years of the twentieth century, but more than suggesting that such happenings belong in the past and our society has improved since then (a trope that was common in the first six decades of the twentieth century), Buffie is providing a continuity between women of the past and young women such as Lizzie, who are learning to make their own way in our modern world. The physical and emotional fortitude Frances Rain presents is a strength that both Lizzie and the reader can draw on in their own lives: Frances Rain is a part of Lizzie’s past, and shows Lizzie a way to move forward into her future. Perhaps that is why I want Lizzie’s story to go on: I want to be part of her continuing to grow into the strong, self-sufficient woman who was Frances Rain