I grew up with this book.  Who didn’t grow up with this book?  Seriously?  I naturally assume that EVERY single household has a copy (or two) of it.  That’s how huge in my head it is.  I remember this book somehow, magically, always within arms reach.  It’s one of the very first picture books that my husband and I purchased after we got married because it felt unnatural to set up our house without this book in it.

Who didn’t want to be Max?  What a lucky little boy.  Sent to bed without dinner.  But who cares?  Who needs dinner when a forest starts to grow in your room and an ocean tumbles by with a private boat to sail to where the wild things are.  And although the wild things roar their terrible roars and gnash their terrible teeth and roll their terrible eyes and show their terrible claws, it doesn’t matter because you easily tame them and become their king.  And then  you have a wild rumpus and swing from the trees and have a grand old time.  And the best part, when you sail back home you have your supper waiting for you anyways!  A nice warm supper after a grand adventure.  Yes.  Who doesn’t want to be Max?

A book that I will make sure my boys grow up just as I did.

Who’s excited for the movie?!  I am.  Maurice Sendak has worked closely in making sure the movie matched his vision and from what I understand is ecstatic with how it turned out.  The movie will be released on October 16th of this  year.  Two more weeks!  This is one that’s worth getting a babysitter for  – that’s how I determine how all movies are lately – are they worth the cost of a babysitter and the price of a ticket?

Where the Wild Things Are movie trailer:

So what are your thoughts about Where the Wild Things Are?

I read Where the Wild Things Are as part of  Banned Books Week. The book has been challenged because of its witchcraft and supernatural elements.  Witchcraft?  Because he tamed them?  I don’t get it.

Links of interest:  Maurice Sendak Wikipedia entry, more book blogger reviews, and the Terrible Yellow Eyes website which is a fantastic art site!
Genre: Picture Book
Publisher:  HarperCollins.  November, 1988.  (Originally published 1968).
Paperback, 48 pages. ISBN:  0064431789
Where the Wild Things Are is available from your favorite independent bookstore, Powell’s, and Amazon.

So I decided that it was high time that I actually read the book.  And I must admit that there was no way that I could read the book without the movies influencing me.  I was constantly comparing them to each other and taking note of how both movies adapted the book to screen.  So I feel like I have now come full circle and finally discovered the words that inspired both movies.

Do I even need to summarize?  The infamous Willy Wonka hasn’t shown his face in years and is opening his factory to five lucky children for a tour and a promise of something grand and wonderful to one of them.  Augustus Gloop, Veruca Salt, Violet Beauregarde, Mike Teavee and Charlie Bucket (how could you forget those names?) all get more than they bargained for in Wonka’s wild and crazy factory.

I found Charlie and the Chocolate Factory delightful.  Dahl is a master storyteller and the book was fun to read.  I did find that although the book was short, I found myself unable to read it straight through.  Not sure why I needed little breaks from the narration.   It’s a perfect book to read-a-loud as a family or one-on-one with younger kids.  It’s fast paced and funny.  A story for everybody of all ages to enjoy.

As soon as I finished, I had to put in the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Johnny Depp version) movie and and have it playing now.  This review is taking me forever because I keep watching the movie instead.  I’m not going to go into a movie critique  at all.  Suffice it to say that there are noticeable differences in both movies from the book which I think make both stories better.  It’s fun to see which dialogue they’ve changed and what they’ve kept especially has I have the book fresh in my mind.

And to prove just how influential this story is in our household, check out these family photos from about three years ago:

Can I just mention that I sewed that vest?  Because I don’t sew.  So I was  impressed with myself.  And for those who will ask (because they always do) – yes, that is my husband’s real  hair.

I read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl as part of Banned Books Week.  In 1988, a Colorado librarian placed the book in a locked vault because she thought that it espoused a poor philosophy of life.  I would highly recommend reading this essay entitled Charlie and the Political Correctness Factory which I found very enlightening about how Dahl changed some of his text after it was printed and the changes made in the movie.

Links of interest:  Roald Dahl website.  Other Maw Books reviews: James and the Giant Peach (which I reviewed last year for Banned Books Week),  The Witches and yesterday’s post about the Mike Teavee song lyrics (where I ask which movie you liked better).
Genre:  Juvenile Fiction.  Approx ages 9-12.
Publisher:   Puffin.  June 1998.  Originally published 1964.
Paperback, 176 pages.  ISBN 0141301155
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is available from your favorite independent bookstore, Powell’s, and Amazon.

Gilly has been bouncing around in foster care homes for as long as she can remember.  She has a rough exterior and she won’t allow herself to get close to anybody.  Because what’s the point?  She’ll just be gone soon anyways.  But she’s smart and bright.  She does well in school just to prove everybody wrong and at the height of her success she purposely stops trying.  She feeds off of being able to control her surroundings and being able to manipulate those around her.

Gilly is in yet another new home.  One that she obviously will not tolerate.  How could she with  Maime Trotter, her obese foster mother, her new brother William Ernest who cowers at the slightest look in his direction, and the blind man next door who loves poetry – but that’s not the worst of it – he’s black too.  Gilly carries around a photo of her mother Courtney and knows that one day she will come and get her.  But when she finds herself beginning to care about her new family, she realizes that she better abandon them before they abandon her and she devises her own escape.

Gilly begins as a little girl with many prejudices and a rough exterior that she won’t let anybody through, as well as a heart that doesn’t want to be broken again.  She only wants one thing and that’s to be wanted.  But it’s the one person that she wants the most that doesn’t want her in return.  And when the chance comes will she realize that she was only chasing a dream?

A beautiful story about breaking through walls and the softening of the heart.  I highly recommend it.

I read The Great Gilly Hopkins as part of  Banned Books Week (I’m reading one banned book a day) and it was in the top 25 of most often challenged books from 1990-2000.  And to tell you the truth, it felt pretty obvious while I was reading what some parents would find offense about.  This includes Gilly’s language particularly the use of the words “damn” and “hell.”   But she is always reprimanded for it, she knows it’s wrong and the language is specifically used to illustrate the background that Gilly came from and how she changes.   Her character simply wouldn’t be the same without it.  Another reason is that Gilly is prejudice against her black school teacher and her black next-door neighbor Mr. Randolph.  Although Gilly doesn’t think much of them, both characters are portrayed in nothing but the best light.  At the end of the book, both are people who Gilly love dearly.  It’s an example of how prejudices are overcome once you actually get to know somebody.  And really, that’s something that is supposed to be wrong?  Hmmm . . . she also steals money.  So that could be another reason.  A ridiculous one at that.  (Edited to add – I found it ridiculous because she was made to return the amount and pay it off by doing chores).   SmallWorld Reads has some great commentary over at her blog about Gilly’s language that is worth checking out.

All valid reasons for having a parent know what their children are reading so they can discuss things like how words can effect people or prejudices are wrong.  I think it’s sad that somebody would rather try to remove it from a library’s collection instead of using the opportunity to engage their child with meaningful dialogue and teachable moments.

Links of interest:  Katherine Paterson website.  Other Paterson books reviewed by Maw Books:  A Midnight Clear, Selected Christmas Stories, Bridge to Terabithia (often challenged as well).
Genre:  Juvenile Fiction, approx ages 9-12.
Publisher:  Harper Collins.  June 1987.  (Copy I read and cover shown here is from Scholastic reprint 1995)
Paperback, 160 pages. ISBN 0064402010
The Great Gilly Hopkins is available from your favorite independent bookstore, Powell’s, and Amazon

Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing is about nine year old Peter but mostly it’s about his two year old brother Fudge who is probably the cutest thing grown ups have ever seen.  But he’s a huge handful and always getting into trouble.  The book is ultimately about the adventures of Peter “managing” Fudge.  Because if it wasn’t for him, nobody would be able to control Fudge.  This involved helping out with Fudge’s birthday party, finding him when he disappears at a movie theater, trying to get Fudge to eat and convincing Fudge to ride a trike for a TV commercial among other things.  And then there is a very unfortunate incident with Peter’s pet turtle Dribble.  This scene was so impressionable on me as a child that I remembered some twenty years later exactly what was going to happen.  A mark of a great book?  I think so.

As a mom, I loved Fudge’s antics and the families attempts to “parent” him.  It’s the type of book that parents will enjoy reading with their children because both will come away with something fun.  I couldn’t help but think if I had read this book when I only had my first child if I would have found it believable or not.  See, my first child was not a talker.  No way would I have believed that a 2 1/2 year old would have talked as well as Fudge.  Luckily, my second does.  I couldn’t help but think about how our life experience always plays a role in our reading.

I loved Peter.  I loved Fudge.  I can’t wait to revisit them in Superfudge, Double Fudge, and Fudge-a-Mania. Such fun to read a book from my childhood and not come away being disappointed.

I read Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing as part of Banned Books Week. Judy Blume is no stranger to her books being challenged.  In 2004, the ALA announced that Blume was the 2nd most highly challenged author of the past 15 years.  So what is it about Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing that has parents shaking in their shoes?  One reference I found in the School Library Journal was because it included a scene with a dead turtle.  Blume is quoted as saying,  “She said, ‘Don’t you know that reptiles have feelings, and reptiles feel fear?’”  I was surprised that it was because of the dead turtle not the fact that the turtle was swallowed, which reminds me of my review of How to Eat Fried Worms from last years Banned Books Week because people said it encouraged kids to eat worms.  Crazy stuff.

Links of interest:  Judy Blume website, Maw Books review of Are You There God?  It’s Me, Margaret (another highly challenged book) which I read for last years Banned Books Week.
Genre:  Juvenile Fiction, approx ages 4-12.
Publisher: Puffin.  April 5, 2007.   Original publication 1972.
(I read the Scholastic student edition  (cover shown here) published 2002,  ISBN 0439559863)
Paperback, 128 pages. ISBN 0142408816
Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing is available from your favorite independent bookstore, Powell’s, and Amazon

Hush is the story of Toswiah.  Toswiah has a nice life.  In fact, a great life.  Her family is great,  her best friend is great, school is great, she loves the mountains of Denver and her father loves his job as a cop.   But everything changes when her father witnesses the murder of a black boy from two white police officers.  Loyalty is the most important thing in the agency but when he considers testifying against the men, his family is put at risk.  So much so, that they have to leave in the  middle of the night and join the Witness Protection Program.

No longer twelve-year-old Toswiah from Colorado, she is Evie from San Francisco.  Her father spirals into a deep depression, her mother is overcome with religion, and her sister is making plans to leave for school the first moment she can.  Hush is a coming of age story but how does one come of age when you are suddenly forced to reinvent yourself?  To leave everything behind – your entire identity and look to the future when you can no longer speak of the past?

I appreciated this quote from Woodson from a Reading Rants interview:

A lot of what Hush, the book about the witness protection program, the big question is, when someone takes your name away, who do you become? If I woke up tomorrow and I couldn’t be Jacqueline Woodson, what would that mean? How would I begin to re-identify myself?

I ask the same question about myself.  What if I was no longer Natasha Maw?  How would I reinvent myself?  And if this had happened to me when I was twelve, instead of thirty, how would that have changed me?  Would I have splintered off into somebody completely different?  And what happens when permanence is taken away?  When you are no longer defined by even the possessions, momentos, and even family photos that you had in the past?

In Evie’s/Toswiah’s own words: “Does it matter what I am, if I’m not anyone?!”

Beautiful book.  Highly recommended.

I read Hush as part of Banned Books Week in which I’m reading and reviewing a challenged or banned book a day. Hush was on the Challenged Children’s Books compiled by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.  However, my internet searches of why it’s been challenged have turned up empty.  There was one instance of a friend calling her sister retarded and then went on to explain mentally challenged.  It might be a stretch but this is the only thing that I can even think of of why it could have been challenged.  Nothing else sticks out to me at all.

Links of interest:  Jacqueline Woodson website,   More book blogger reviews of Hush.  Other Woodson books reviewed by Maw Books:  I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This, Show Way, Feathers, If You Come Softly, Behind You, Peace Locomotion, Locomotion, and Miracle’s Boys.  My experience meeting Woodson at LA Times Festival of Books.
Genre:  Young Adult Fiction
Publisher: Putnam Juvenile.  January 7, 2002.
Hardcover, 192  pages.  ISBN:  0399231145
Hush is available from your favorite independent bookstore, Powell’s, and Amazon.

Set in the 1930’s during the great depression in the dust bowl of Oklahoma, Out of the Dust is told as a diary in free verse form, a style of writing that I love more with every book I read.  Billie Jo is fourteen and loves to both write and play the piano.  She’s also eagerly anticipating the birth of her baby brother.

But that all changes when an accident leaves her hands wounded and her mother and brother die in childbirth.  Billie Jo’s father is emotionally unreachable:

I don’t know my father anymore.
He sits across from me,
he looks like my father,
he chews his food like my father,
he brushes his dusty hair back like my father,
but he is a stranger.

I am awkward with him,
and irritated,
and I want to be alone
but I am terrified of being alone.
We are both changing,
we are shifting to fill in the empty spaces left by Ma.
I keep my raw and stinging hands
behind my back when he comes near
because he
stares
when he seems them.

September 1934.

Dust is just as much of this story as anything else.  It’s everywhere and non-relenting.  It makes for a bleak and harsh environment.  Billie Jo wants to escape it all but when she does she comes to realize that the landscape is more a part of her than she realized.

Out of the Dust is a great historical fiction novel for young readers and I loved the free verse.  Recommended.

Genre:  Historical fiction, ages 9-12.
Publisher: Scholastic Paperbacks.  October 1, 1997
Paperback, 240 pages. ISBN:  0590371258
Out of the Dust is available from your local independent bookstore, Powell’s, and Amazon.

It isn’t long before Dr. Norcom begins making sexual advances on Harriet, even to the point of building Harriet her own cottage to be out of the house from his wife.  Harriet begs to be married to a free black man, but Dr. Norcom becomes enraged.  Thinking that if she becomes pregnant with a white man’s baby, Dr. Norcom will sell her, she does just that not once but twice.  But to no avail.  When she realizes that he plans to sell her two children to a plantation owner, she knows that she must take matters into her own hands.

She does manage to trick Dr. Norcom to selling the children who are then purchased by their white father, who athough is a kind man, doesn’t set them free.  Harriet then sets her eyes on her own escape to freedom.  Harriet runs away and leads Dr. Norcom to believe that she has fled North, but in all actuality she is hiding in a crawlspace at her grandmothers house.  She lives in this tiny crawlspace for SEVEN years watching her children, unbeknown to them, through a peep hole in the wood.  She eventually does escape to the north and is able to be reunited with her children and become a force in the abolition movement and writing her autobiography.

The notice put out by her master, when she escaped:

Letters from a Slave Girl is written in a journal format, as letters that Harriet writes knowing full well that they’ll never be sent (she writes to some who have already passed on).  I particularly enjoyed this format of storytelling.

Mary E. Lyons, the author, states in the author’s note:

Harriet Ann Jacobs did not actually write Letters from a Slave Girl.  But a biographer is also a storyteller, and after reading Harriet’s correspondence, a letter format seemed the natural way to tell her story.

Letters also suit Harriet’s biography because learning to read and write was a rare accomplishment for an enslaved child.  Many slaveholders were fearful that literate slaves would be more difficult to control.

. . .  To retell portions of Harriet’s story, particularly her childhood years, I reconstructed details thout would bring her to life: social occasions, meals eaten, words spoken.  (Even Harriet, when recalling events from years long past, had to make up dialogue for her autobiography.)  But the major events in Letters from a Slave Girl are true.  Every person and place mentioned in the letters really existed.  Even the weather conditions are accurate.

Letters from a Slave Girl is a great book to introduce younger readers to Harriet Jacobs and her amazing story.  You can learn more about Harriet Jacobs at PBS, or of course, read Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. I think Mary E. Lyons did an excellent job conveying Harriet’s voice and story.

Letters from a Slave Girl is part of my themed reading for the month of February which celebrates Black History Month.  Join me this month as I explore books that celebrate the history of African-Americans.  Also reviewed this month: The Story of Ruby Bridges by Robert Coles, The Slave Dancer by Paula Fox,  Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope by Nikki Grime, The Well by Mildred D. Taylor,  Freedom Walkers, The Story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott by Russell Freedman, Through My Eyes by Ruby Bridges and  Show Way by Jacqueline Woodson.  Other reviews of interest:  A Thousand Never Evers by Shana Burg, Yankee Girl by Mary Ann Rodman, Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson, and Elijah of Buxton by Christopher Paul Curtis.

The Slave Dancer is not an easy read.  It’s very slow to start and I admit that I would often set the book down because it really dragged.  The story certainly picked up after arriving in Africa and acquiring its cargo.  By cargo, I mean men, women and children taken from their homeland and forced into conditions that no human should ever have to experience.  There are some difficult scenes to read about.  I heard somebody describe it as a “casual cruelty.”   That’s exactly what makes this book such an emotional read.  There is a scene where they just start throwing people overboard.  It’s just awful.

Jessie has a lot of guilt about the role that he plays in the slave trade.  He learns about prejudice, racism, trust, and eventually friendship.  The Slave Dancer is well worth reading and an excellent insight into the slave industry.

The Slave Dancer is part of my themed reading for the month of February which celebrates Black History Month.  Join me this month as I explore books that celebrate the history of African-Americans.  Also reviewed this month:  Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope by Nikki Grime, The Well by Mildred D. Taylor,  Freedom Walkers, The Story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott by Russell Freedman, Through My Eyes by Ruby Bridges and  Show Way by Jacqueline Woodson.  Other reviews of interest:  A Thousand Never Evers by Shana Burg, Yankee Girl by Mary Ann Rodman, Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson, and Elijah of Buxton by Christopher Paul Curtis.

In a teachers guide, Patricia Reilly Giff says the following:

Lily’s Crossing was about my childhood. I was inspired to write that because for years, I thought about my childhood during the Second World War, in Rockaway, New York, which I loved. We didn’t sleep in Rockaway, we didn’t have a cabin there, but we went there almost every day in the summertime. I loved the water. I was clumsy out of the water, but in the water, I could swim. I was good around boats, so I always felt good about it. So I thought one day that I would write Lily, and it took me about four years to finally do it.

The book is fiction, but it’s based on so much that I did do. I am Lily; I am the grandmother. The bakery really existed, but it was in St. Albans, where I grew up. And Albert is a composite of many boys in my life when I was growing up.

Certainly, we went to the bakery alone–and during the war, when the baker couldn’t get eggs or sugar, the offerings were pretty slim in the bakery. There were signs up, like “loose lips sink ships.” It was wartime and when I went to bed at night, I’d look out the window and see the search lights and always worry that the German planes were coming. I was afraid a lot, and so the time period is real, the story is fiction, but the setting, the background, is true.

When my sister, Anne, was born, my mother put stars up on her bedroom ceiling, over the windows, and they were beautiful. Eventually, they dried a little in the back and once in a while, a star would float down from my sister’s ceiling onto the bed or onto the floor and we called them “falling stars,” we thought they were magic. So, putting the stars on the ceiling reminded me of my childhood, my sister’s childhood of that time, during the Second World War.

As you can see, it’s a great book for younger readers to go back into the past and learn of a time that was difficult for many.  I love books that connect with the author’s background.  Lily was a great character with a great voice.  Having read a couple of other books this year about young girls with family members going to war (Shooting the Moon and Jimmy’s Stars), I’d have to admit that this was not my favorite among them but it’s still not one to be missed.

On the same topic I recently read When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka (my book review) a book for adults that I really enjoyed, which was preceded by Weedflower by Cynthia Kadohata (my book review) a book for Young Adults.  Now I’ve come to Journey to Topaz, a book for Middle Readers.  All are fictionalized accounts but the first two are based on the author’s own experience and all follow the journey of Japanese Americans living in California in the 1940’s.  After the bombing of Pearl Harbor they are taken to the Tanforan Racetrack and literally live in horse stalls, and then they travel by train to Topaz, Utah where they are settle in a internment camp in the isolated desert.  I know there are a lot of books on this subject, but I have enjoyed these three that I have read this year.

To best summarize Journey to Topaz, I’d like to simply share with you the words of the author, Yoshicku Uchida, as written in the prologue (in 1984),

It has been many years since I first wrote Journey to Topaz and more than forty years since the United States government uprooted 120,000 West Coast Japanese Americans, without trial or hearing, and imprisoned them behind barbed wire.  Two-thirds of those Japanese Americans were American Citizens, and I was one of them.  We were imprisoned by our own country during World War II, not because of anything we had done, but simply because we looked like the enemy . . .

Journey to Topaz is the story of what happened to one Japanese American Family during this wartime tragedy, then called “the evacuation.”  Although the characters are fictional, the events are based on actual fact, and most of what happened to the Sakane family also happened to my own.  I wold ask readers to remember that my characters portray the Japanese Americans of 1942 an to recall that the world then was totally different from the one we know today.  In 1942 the voice of Martin Luther King had not yet been heard and ethnic pride was yet unborn.  There was no awareness in the land of civil rights, and there had yet been no freedom marches or demonstrations of protest . . .

I hope by reading this book young people everywhere will realize what once took place in this country and will determine never to permit such a travesty of justice to occur again.

I really enjoyed Journey to Topaz and it would be an excellent resource in the classroom or otherwise to introduce to children what happened during the Japanese-American evacuation.  Yoshiko Uchida is a prolific author with more than 30 books and anthologies.  I’d like to read her memoir titled The Invisible Thread:  An Autobiography, as well as Picture Bride.  Yoskido Uchida does not have a website but I did find an author study site for a college course which has a lot of information.