Month: February 2010

Favorite Reads of 2009: Fiction

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Yeah, I know.  Finally.

After about a zillion kick-in-the-pants reminders from my friends, I’ve gotten around to creating my list of favorite fiction for young readers from 2009.  Take note: this is not a list of the “best” fiction, or the most critically acclaimed, or the most award-winning.  There are plenty of lists around the board where one can find such things already.  My list is of personal favorites, and personal favorites only.  What books do I wish I owned, or wish I had written?  That’s what these are. 

Yes, that means lots of glaring omissions, most notably When You Reach Me.  I’ve got no beef with When You Reach Me, but I feel as if it’s gotten all the accolades it needs, and adding it to this list seems kind of like gilding the lily at this point.  (As if I had any guild to start with.)

I also have to say that if you are a parent, please please please review these books before handing them to your child.  Everybody has different tastes and standards where kids’ reading is concerned. 

Now, Here We Go!

Best Picture Book Writing of the Year: The Dunderheads by Paul Fleischman, illus. David Robers.  OKAY, OKAY.  I know this is supposed to be  a list of novels, but I had this on my list of Best Picture Books and completely forgot to type it in!  But if you’ve missed this suave lil’ gem of a picture book, pick it up right away.  This classroom caper is a glorious mishmash of Ocean’s Eleven and Miss Nelson is Missing! with some of the tightest storytelling you can fit in 52 pages.  A soon-to-be-classic.  (All ages)

Favorite Read-Aloud: Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin.  I’ve been touting Lin’s novels as superior fare for the elementary school set for ages, and it looks like the Newbery Committee finally got on my side this year.  This beautiful, old-fashioned adventure tale takes its setting and inspiration from Chinese folktales, and Lin’s story of a spunky girl out to seek her fortunes with the help of magic goldfish, talking dragons, and tiger-fighting twins is somehting that belongs on every child’s bookshelf.  (All Ages)

For Those Who Like Their Plots Thick, and the Worldbuildng Thicker: The Lost Conspiracy by Francis Hardinge — Sentient volcanoes!  Exotic killer beetles!  Assassins that dye their skin blue with the ashes of their victims!  This has been touted as the fantasy novel of the year, and I’m not inclined to disagree.  Taking cues from Maori and Pacific Islander cultures, Hardinge has crafted one of the most satisfyingly complex fantasy cultures I’ve ever encountered.  As a bonus, the story is thick with intrigue, has a clever heroine who evolves from a beleaguered underdog to spirited leader, and one of the creepiest bad guys this side of Simon Legree.  (Ages 12)

Romance Done Right: Lips Touch: Three Times by Laini Taylor.  In these three fantastical tales (two short stories and one novella), Taylor explores budding romance and everything a first kiss can mean: not just love, but betrayal, temptation, and salvation.  The stories borrow motifs from traditional folklore — babies cursed at birth, children kidnapped by fairies, young ladies perishing from poisoned fruit — and uses it to stunning effect, drawing out the elemental, enriching darkness of fairy tales and giving them new life.   Her prose reads like a colorful exotic costume discovered in an attic trunk; it’s just lovely.  As a bonus, the first story draws on Christina Rossetti’s beloved poem “Goblin Market” for inspiration.  Gotta love that.  (Age 12+)

Historical Fiction That Won’t Kill You: Crossing Stones by Helen Frost.  It can be difficult to sell a historical novel to a kid when it’s 300+ pages long.  TA-TA-TA-TWAAAA!  Helen Frost to the rescue!  Her succinct story of two families who grow and change during World War I and the suffragette movement is told in a series of poems narrated by the different characters.  Clever readers will notice that the form and shape of the poems reflects the personalities of the characters.  Regardless, it’s easy to get swept away by Frosts’ clear, succinct imagery, knowing period references, and characterizations so keen that you fall in love with them with just a few lines.  (Age 12+)

 

The Book I Wish I Had Read When I Was Twelve: The Kind of Friends We Used to Be by Frances O’Roark Dowell.  There are many, many books that tell the story of the Good Book-Loving Girl and the Mean Best Friend Who Rejects Her After Getting on the Cheerleading Squad.  O’Roark Dowell takes this premise and transforms it: hey, cheerleaders are people too, and just because your best friend has developed different interests from you, it doesn’t mean you can’t still work at being friends.  The tone of the writing is so spot-on middle school and clever that I wish I had a highlighter pen to score all the quotable lines.  Oh, and did I mention that the protagonist wears black boots and listens to Joni Mitchell?  SCORE!  (Age 9-13)

Most Terrifying Book of the Year: The Carbon Diaries 2015 by Saci Lloyd.  It’s Bridget Jones’ Diary – meets – An Inconvenient Truth, as a middle-class London teen recounts the trials and tribulations of Britain’s efforts to cut back national carbon emissions by 60%.  When a series of floods threatens to destroy civilization and make such rationing pointless, it’s almost enough to make you cower under the bed with a box of compact flourescent lightbulbs, but Lloyd seasons her story with enough glorious humor to make the book as touching as it is terrifying.  The scene where Dad trades in mum’s Saab for a horse, cart, and pig is worth the price of admission alone.  My only complaint: 2015?!?  C’mon, don’t we have a little more time before the end of the world?  (Age 14+)

For the Aspiring World Traveler: Hannah’s Winter by Kierin Meehan.  When Hannah, an Australian girl, is sent to spend the winter as an exchange student in Japan, she is thrilled by the prospect of adventure, but soon finds that her hosts’ house is haunted by an ancient samauri, and requires her to solve an ancient mystery to be rid of it.  What makes this story more fun than spooky is its overwhelming love of the oddities of foreign travel: the Bean Throwing Festival!  A suit of armor that emits colored smoke!  Donuts filled with green tea ice cream!  Someone send me a dozen of those, pronto.  (Age 10+)

For When You Feel the Need to Wield Some Axes: Heroes of the Valley by Jonathan Stroud.  There’s nothing like the classic combination of Vikings and snark to keep a reader happy.  Stroud uses both to masterful effect here, giving us the tale of black-sheep-of-the-royal-family Halli and his adventures between a dozen or more warring clans . . . which he has mostly “accidentally” angered himself.  A funny, exciting tale about family, destiny, and whether or not you should believe stories about man-eating trolls in the mountains.  (Age 12+)

Best Summer Story: The Small Adventure of Popeye and Elvis by Barbara O’Connor.  What’s a kid to do when he’s alone for the summer in the deep forest of the Deep South with nobody but his strict grandmother and deadbeat uncle for company?  When a rickety RV with a six-kid family gets stuck in the mud nearby, Popeye sees it as his best chance for excitement. When a series of small boats keep mysteriously appearing in the creek nearby, he and his new friends find a perfect adventure.  In the hands of any other writer, this book’s setting (rural impoverished South) would be the makings for high drama, but O’Connor keeps it refreshingly light and honest.  And funny.  Did I mention the funny?  (Ages 7-9)

Doing it Old School!  Fire by Kristin Cashore.  A prequel to last year’s hit fantasy novel, Graceling, this tale continues Cashore’s penchant for strong characters, a very old-fashioned fantasy setting, and the trials and tribulations of a girl so beautiful that men literally throw themselves on their swords for her.  The fact that she can also control minds makes for a very interesting shades-of-grey morality story.  I’d also like to give points to Cashore for Fire’s father, Cansrel, who with his silver-blue hair, party-boy ways, and habit of collecting exotic animals, makes him the glammest fantasy character I’ve ever run across.  (P.S. I’ve no idea what “doing it old school” really means.)  (Age 15+)

A Swedish Import So Lovely it Puts IKEA to Shame: A Faraway Island by Annika Thor.  I’ve described this book before as “Anne of Green Gables – meets – Number the Stars,” and I stand by that.  This book — the first in a bestselling, beloved series from Sweden — is the story of sisters, two Jewish girls from Vienna who are evacuated by their parents on the eve of World War II to live with foster parents on a tiny island off the coast of Sweden.  Times are tough, especially for older sister Stephie, who finds it difficult to make friends, worries for her left-behind parents, and whose foster parents are dead ringers for Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert.  But eventually, she comes to find home.  Thor teases out lovely details — the traditions and festivals of the islanders are especially sweet — and is wise enough to make her characters uncomfortably complex: the villagers are kind but also bigoted; Stephie has a well-meaning schoolmate who gives her a picture of Hitler as means of lessening her homesickness (whoops).  I can only hope that American publishers continue to bring the remaining books in this series to our shores.

Best Reissue: The Serial Garden: The Complete Armitage Family Stories by Joan Aiken.  From the author of the beloved Wolves of Willoughby Chase comes a set of charmingly loopy fantasy stories, published in various volumes and periodicals and finally collected here.  On her honeymoon, Mrs. Armitage makes a wish that she will “never be bored with happily ever after,” and in the ensuing magical adventures, she never is: the family finds out that the kindergarten teacher is really a witch, what to do when the house has been comissioned by fussy wizards, a Christmas party in which all the children are turned into fish, how to deal with a ghostly governess, and much more.  Aiken’s style never takes itself very seriously (this is a family who, when a unicorn turns up in the garden on Tuesday morning, responds by blustering “but this usually only happens on Monday”), and the stories usually end with all problems resolved and the characters sitting down to tea.  It makes for a glorious read aloud, too.

Every Good Boy Does Ritalin

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So, the big news around here lately is that Jeffrey has been officially diagnosed with ADHD.  We’ve suspected it for a while, but until recently it was difficult to separate symptoms of the disorder with the usual abberations of early childhood behavior. 

We had him psychologically profiled when he was five, and even tried a short run of Adderol, but it had no apparent effect, which is common for very young children taking Adderol.  He couldn’t try any other medications because he, at the time, could not swallow pills.

Since entering first grade, things have been rough for Jeffrey at school.  He couldn’t follow directions, he couldn’t sit still long enough to listen to a story.  When doing math, he would forget what number he was counting to in the middle of solving a problem.  Within the first week of school, I was notified that Jeffrey was occupying almost all of the student teacher’s time.

His teacher — who is amazing, and I’m very thankful we landed in her class — has taken great pains to help with Jeff’s behavior, but by the halfway point of the year, things were bad.  Jeffrey was old enough to realize that he was falling behind his classmates, he couldn’t seem to control the problem.

“Focus!” he would yell at me.  “I need to focus, Mom!”  He pounded the sides of his head with his palms, gritting his teeth.

Then he began acting out in class (which surprised everybody), and would come home so frustrated that he would throw his backpack down a window well before coming inside.  I began getting phone calls from the school, and there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it.  Jeffrey wasn’t intentionally doing these things; he hardly seemed aware that he was in La La Land 90% of the time.

After a lot of tears and hair-pulling, I decided to take him to our doctor and give medication another go-round. 

Our first attempt was with Concerta, but this unfortunately caused Jeffrey to have a manic episode (he came home talking a mile a minute, biting his cheeks, and so dizzy that he couldn’t eat).  This terrified me, and I felt terrible.

After that terrifyingness, we switched to Ritalin, and his teachers have noticed significant differences in his behavior.  For the first time ever, he was coming home with his worksheets filled out, with words written legibly (instead of clusters of random letters scattered about the page).  He was able to pay attention during classroom read-aloud time (instead of wandering off to play with toys).  Best of all, his teacher arranged for him to take his standardized tests one-on-one with an administrator, and he scored above expectations in every category!

Yessss!  He’s a really intelligent kid, but it’s difficult for people to see that when he can’t line up in a row like all the other good boys and girls.  His teacher called me immediately when she got Jeffrey’s scores, and we were both practically jumping up and down together. 

However, it isn’t a miracle cure.  Jeffrey still spends most of his time at church chewing on his shoelaces and rolling on the floor, and piano lessons are as much of a trial as ever.  But he’s starting to see himself as a kid who can make good, and that’s a very big thing.

Valentine’s Day Weekend at Zion’s National Park

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The kids had a four day weekend over President’s Day, so we decided to head down south and take advantage of the mild winter weather and cheap hotel rates.  (Really.  A place called the Bumbleberry Inn gave us a room for $45 a night.  Wowsers.)

Highs were in the low 60s, and it was great to shed our coats and go “walking in the top of the mountains,” as William had been begging to do.

Best of all, it wasn’t overbearingly crowded.  In summertime, Zion Canyon feels like an amusement park, with hikers shuffling through on each other’s heels.  During our winter stay the park wasn’t anything near empty, but it was uncrowded enough to give us some nice solitude on our hikes.  Brian has declared that he never wants to visit Zion again in the summertime.  Hear, hear.

The downside of the warm weather was muddy trails.  But Eleanor found this rather thrilling.  She purposely trod through the thickest, stickiest ruts, singing “Mud!  Mud!  Mud!  Mud!” at the top of her lungs. 

She was such a good little hiker — halfway through our first hike, she turned to us and cried, “Do you know what?  I haven’t whined a single time during this hike!”  It was true, she hadn’t; Brian and I hadn’t even realized it before she pointed it out.  After that, whenever she was about to get cranky on the trail, we reminded her of how she didn’t whine, and she quieted down.

Mud!  Mud!  Mud!  Everyone’s shoes got a nice little coat, as if we’d all been dancing in a bottle of Burnt Ochre.

One of the trails we chose had a lot of spur trails and no directional markers, so we ended up going the wrong way, all the way to the top of one of the little valleys in the Court of the Patriarchs.  It was still beautiful, even if the trail eventually disappeared. 

Jeffrey loved the Emerald Pools, so much so that he did not heed our warnings about hiking with wet shoes.  Alas and alack.

Brian’s dad, Randy, joined us for the Emerald Pools hike (he had caravanned down with us, in order to visit extended family in Cedar City) and was invaluble when it came to holding children’s hands on the steep parts of the trail.  At one point, he was occupied holding both William and Eleanor’s hands, and an older, white-haired gentleman who passed us took the time to tell Randy that “you should enjoy them when they are so young like this — they grow up so fast!”  Apparently, the white-haired man was under the impression that Randy was the children’s father!  Randy decided to take it as a compliment to be taken for a 32-year-old, although when we later bumped into that white-haired man again, he took care to say “Come along, grandchildren” in as distinct a voice as possible.

The only real challenge to the trip was finding places to eat for dinner.  Most of the cheap restaurants in Springdale were closed for the season, or only serving lunch.  But a exploratory drive to Hurricane revealed a Chinese buffet place that was, we thought, a perfect way to ring in the Year of the Tiger.  Plus, they had Jell-O.  You haven’t really lived, cuisine-wise, until you’ve watched your seven-year-old try to eat Jell-O with chopsticks.

In the evenings, we holed up in our hotel and watched the Olympics while munching on microwave popcorn.  I don’t know if we got very much rest, sleeping all together in the same room, but we certainly returned to Salt Lake feeling much less stressed.

It Made Me Want to Ride a Tauntaun

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Two weeks ago we made the trek up to Midway to see the ice castle that’s been making a lot of local news.  It’s a series of towers built using an underground sprinkler system, hoses, PVC pipe, and loads of ingenuity.  It was absolutely beautiful, even if it unforunately caused me to get “Theme from Ice Castles (Through the Eyes of Love)” stuck in my head.  You know:

Pleeeeease, don’t let this feeling eeeeeeend . . .

I’ll spare you the rest.

This tower had a tunnel going through it, which I think is impressive as all get out.

The towers were built by Brent Christensen, a local businessman who has no background in art but is pretty darn amazing anyway.  He was inspired to make these towers after he saw the results of a broken sprinkler head spraying water into long icicles on someone’s lawn.  The building began back in November, and he’s still working on them — even on the day we were there, he was climbing on top of the towers, fusing icicles together and tinkering with water systems.  It’s gorgeous work, I hope he does it again next year!

So how long do you think it will take to melt come spring?

Orange Rolls

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I hosted a Soup Party at my house this past weekend — everyone who came brought a different kind of soup, and I provided crusty bread and dessert.

For dessert, I decided a nice contrast to soup would be tasty orange rolls.  For some reason, my brain had forgotten that everyone would be filled up with the aforementioned crusty bread, and then we’d be following that up with more bread.

But nobody seemed to care.  In fact, they all requested the recipe, so here it is.  It’s adapted from a (badly written) recipe I clipped out of Cooking Light years ago.  The dough is rich but tender, enriched with a little butter and sour cream, and the glaze is unusual — a orange-flavored sugar syrup that is tempered with more sour cream.  It’s advised that you consume these sticky treats with a fork.

Orange Rolls

For the dough:

  • 1 3/4 tsp. instant yeast*
  • 1/2 cup warm water
  • 1/4 cup sugar
  • 1/2 cup reduced-fat sour cream (do not use fat-free)
  • 2 Tbs. butter
  • 1 tsp. salt
  • 1 egg
  • 3 cups flour, plus more for dusting while kneading

For the filling:

  • grated zest from one orange
  • 3/4 cup sugar
  • 2 Tbs. butter, melted and cooled (this is for brushing on the dough before sprinkling on the filling)

For the glaze:

  • 1/4 cup plus 2 Tbs. sugar
  • 2 Tbs. butter
  • squeezed juice from half of one orange (the one you just zested for the filling)
  • 1/4  cup reduced-fat sour cream (again, do not use fat-free, it tastes like plastic)

To make the dough, combine yeast, water, sugar, sour cream, butter, salt, egg, and ONE cup of the flour in a mixer and beat until smooth.  Add remaining 2 cups of flour and mix until a soft dough forms, about 5 minutes.  Turn out onto a floured board and knead until smooth and elastic, adding extra flour to keep the dough from sticking to your hands.  Place dough in a greased bowl and cover, then let rise until doubled in size (about 1 hour 15 minutes).  While the dough rises, combine the sugar and orange zest for the filling (do not add the butter!). 

When dough has risen, punch it down and turn it out onto a board (I like to use a clean cutting board coated with cooking spray to prevent sticking).  Spray a 9″x13″ baking pan with cooking spray.

Divide dough in half; roll out one half into a rectangle, approx. 8″x10″ (I actually have no idea what size the dough was, I’m just estimating).  Brush the rectangle with 1 Tbs. of the melted butter, and sprinkle half of the zest/sugar mixture on top.  Beginning at the short end, roll up the dough into a big log, pinching the seam to seal it.  Cut the log into about eight rolls and place spiral-side up into the baking pan.  Repeat with the other half of the dough, using remaining butter and filling.  You may have to cut the second log of dough into only 7 rolls; I’ve never been able to fit more than 15 rolls in a pan.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.  Cover the rolls with plastic wrap and let rise in a warm spot for 25 minutes or until doubled in size.  When ready, bake the rolls for 25 minutes or until golden brown. 

While the rolls bake, prepare the glaze: Combine sugar, butter, and orange juice in a small saucepan and bring to a boil over medium-high heat.  Cook for 3 minutes, or until sugar dissolves.  Remove from heat, let cool slightly, and stir in sour cream.  Drizzle glaze over warm rolls; let cool for 20 minutes before serving.

*Note: You can substitute the instant yeast with 2 1/4 teaspoons dry-active yeast.  Just proof it in the warm water with a pinch of sugar before combining it with the other ingredients.