Author: Loree Burns

CHRISTMAS DAY IN THE MORNING
By Pearl S. Buck
Illustrated by Mark Buehner
HarperCollins, 2002

Category: Picture book

Our family has grown a few holiday traditions that I adore; my absolute favorite revolves around (surprise, surprise) our collection of holiday books. Early in December I pull the seasonal favorites out of the attic, wrap them up in holiday paper, and stack them under the ceramic Christmas tree my great-grandmother made nearly fifty years ago. Each night one of the kids picks a book for us to unwrap and read. I love to watch them agonize over the choice, trying to discern from the size and shape and heft of the package if it is this favorite or that, forgetting which book they were hoping for the moment their eyes spy the treasure under the wrapping.

Tonight we read CHRISTMAS DAY IN THE MORNING, a story written by Pearl S. Buck in 1955 and beautifully illustrated anew by Mark Buehner. If you read this blog with any regularity, then you know I like a book that stirs my emotions. This one does it every single year. It is the story of a man remembering Christmases past, particularly the very special Christmas when he realized his how much his father loved him … and how much he loved his father in return.

Do you have a favorite holiday book? Do tell! Tradition also dictates that I add a title to the holiday book collection each year …

HATTIE BIG SKY
By Kirby Larson
Delacorte Press, 2006

Category: Middle-grade fiction

Good Lord, this book nearly killed me. As I read the final chapters to the kids last night, I was an absolute mess, box of tissues at my side, throat clenching, voice catching, tears streaming. The kids were stunned silent; I was too overwrought to bask in the momentary quiet.

Hattie Inez Brooks is sixteen and alone in the world. She is passed around from distant relation to distant relation until the day she receives a letter from an uncle she barely remembers:

“Being of sound mind, I do hereby leave to Hattie Inez Brooks my claim and the house and its contents, as well as one steadfast horse named Plug and a contemptible cow known as Violet.”

And so Hattie embarks on a new life on the Montana prairie, a life driven by the desire for a place of her own and by the challenge of proving up on her Uncle’s claim. In order to take legal ownership of his 320 acres, Hattie must cultivate at least one-eigth of it (forty acres) and set four hundred and eighty rods of fence (um, a lot). And she must do it in ten months.

Hattie’s story captured the admiration of my eight-year-old boys (they were behind her from the moment she got Uncle Chester’s letter) and the heart of their mother (I’m behind her even now). Hers is a hard journey … cruel and maddening and heartbreaking. And beautiful. Hattie Big Sky is one of those literary gals I will think about for a very long time.

I’ve been reading nonstop these past few weeks, but you wouldn’t know it by the state of my Reading Blog. An entire week since my last entry! My excuse? The Children’s and YA Bloggers’ Literary Awards, aka the CYBILS. I am one of five book-blogging women serving on the Nominating Panel for the MG/YA Non-fiction category. Thirty-seven books were nominated in our category; you can see the full list here.

Participating on a book award selection committee has taught me a few things:

1. There were some stellar MG/YA Non-fiction titles published this year. STELLAR.

2. I am a terrible book critic. Here on my blog I can choose not to write about books I dislike. In the world of book award selection, however, one must articulate one’s negative feelings about books … and speculate on where the author went wrong. BLECH. I found this particularly awkward as I sit here waiting for early reviews of TRACKING TRASH to arrive. Double BLECH.

3. I am quite good at praising books.

4. I prefer to read books willy-nilly, to experience works that stumble into my life accidentally and which change me and my world in quiet and completely unexpected ways. I love exploring the connections between the books I read, the places I find them, the times I read them, and the way these things combine to give a book meaning. Reading books for the express purpose of comparing them and assembling them into order of significance was stunningly difficult.

Anyway, all this rambling is meant to explain the quiet week on my Reading Blog. I’ll be back to reading (and blogging) willy-nilly soon. And I will post the MG/YA CYBIL award finalists as soon as our deliberations are complete.

LITTLE PEOPLE AND A LOST WORLD
By Linda Goldenberg
Twenty-First Century Books, 2006

Category: Middle grade non-fiction

I have a folder in my closet labeled “IDEAS”. This is where I tuck interesting newspaper articles and scraps of paper on which I have jotted random thoughts that might someday make a start for an article, book, or story. I find I don’t give my Idea folder the attention it is due, though, because I am too busy turning other ideas into articles, books or stories. I am a writer who is blessed (cursed?) with more ideas than time to bring them to the page.

This morning, though, I paid a visit to the Idea folder. I was looking for an article I vaguely remember clipping, an article about the discovery of a skeleton in Indonesia that scientists believed could represent a new and tiny human species. I found it under a slip of paper that says “I didn’t fumble it! I just dropped it by accident!” (words I overheard my daughter scream at her brothers while they were teaching her to play football). Sure enough, “Ancient Dwarf Found” is a 2004 article that reports the very story that Linda Goldenberg has turned into a new book for middle grade readers. I knew this idea had potential!

LITTLE PEOPLE AND A LOST WORLD is an adventure in anthropology. Goldenberg takes readers to Liang Bua, a limestone cave on the island of Flores in Indonesia. In September 2003, Australian and Indonesian scientists unearthed the skeletal remains of a human with an unusually small stature. By telling the story in real time–from the skeleton’s discovery, to its identification as a thirty year old woman who stood only three feet tall, to studies that indicate the woman, and others like her, possessed both high intelligence and a small brain (a rare combination in human evolutionary history), to the dramatic scientific battle over her bones—Goldenberg creates one of my favorite kinds of books: a scientific mystery. LITTLE PEOPLE AND A LOST WORLD pulls readers into the world of modern scientific discovery, shows them the passion as well as the warts, and leaves them pondering our very existence. Well done, Linda Goldenberg!

LITTLE PEOPLE AND A LOST WORLD has been nominated for a 2007 CYBIL award. You can check out the other nominees in the Middle Grade & YA Nonfiction category here.

A THANKSGIVING WISH
By Michael J. Rosen
Illustrated by John Thompson
Scholastic, 1999

Category: Picture book fiction

It’s all about wishbones around here these days. Here is the problem: we have one thoroughly dried and ready to snap wishbone from our Thanksgiving turkey … and three snappers clamoring for it. While we were working out a fair solution to this dilemma the other day the book A THANKSGIVING WISH sprang out of the recesses of my brain. Didn’t I have a book about a grandmother who saved wishbones year round? Wasn’t it a Thanksgiving book? Why hadn’t we read it this year?

The answers to these questions are: yes I do have a book about a grandmother who saves wishbones all year; yes it is a Thanksgiving book; and we hadn’t read it because I had not yet pulled out the box of Thanksgiving books. (Ahem, well, they are out now and we are enjoying them a great deal, thank you very much. Late is better than never.)

So, I read A THANKSGIVING WISH to my daughter before school and the two of us had a good cry together. (Okay, I cried. She comforted.) This is one of the most touching holiday books I have ever read. Every year Bubbe collects wishbones so that when her grandchildren arrive to celebrate Thanksgiving each will have a wishbone of her own (smart woman!). When Bubbe passes away, her children and grandchildren assemble to celebrate Thanksgiving as usual, but nothing is the same. Rosen’s storytelling, Thompson’s artistry, and Bubbe’s Thanksgiving wish make for an unforgettable book.

As for our wishbone dilemma, we have devised a happy solution. My daughter will bring our single wishbone to show-and-tell tomorrow, and her brothers will be allowed to snap it later in the day. Oh, and I have promised to collect wishbones year round, like Bubbe. Here’s hoping I remember to pull the collected wishbones—and this book—out before December next year!

THE BEST CHRISTMAS PAGEANT EVER
By Barbara Robinson
Trumpet Club, 1972

“The Herdman’s were absolutely the worst kids in the history of the world. They lied and stole and smoked cigars (even the girls) and talked dirty and hit little kids and cussed their teachers and took the name of the Lord in vain and set fire to Fred Shoemaker’s old broken-down toolhouse.”

So begins one of the funniest Christmas books I have ever read. The kids and I picked this up (where else?) at the library book sale in August. Not a one of us knew what we were getting into. And while the kids may not be old enough (or sophisticated enough) to appreciate the underlying irony of the story—that it took a pack of kids like the Herdman’s to teach a community the true meaning of the Christmas story—they enjoyed those wacky Herdman’s a great deal.

Reading this book is bound to become a Burns family Christmas tradition … especially if I can find a version of it with print my poor, old eyes can see without holding the book at armslength. (I don’t need glasses, really. I just need longer arms!)

JOHN, PAUL, GEORGE & BEN
By Lane Smith
Hyperion, 2006

Category: Picture book FICTION

Lane Smith is a marvelous illustrator. His books always appeal to me artistically, and JOHN, PAUL, GEORGE & BEN was no exception. The book is gorgeous.

BUT …

… I have reservations about the liberties Smith takes with his text. Here’s the premise: John Hancock, Paul Revere, George Washington, Ben Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson (Tom didn’t make the title page) are children … classmates, in fact. And each displays the characteristic that would later serve the Revolutionary cause so well. John is bold and writes his signature in huge letters on the chalkboard. Paul is noisy (because of the excessive time he spends ringing bells) and shouts embarrassing things to his customers (“EXTRA LARGE UNDERWEAR? SURE WE HAVE SOME!”). George is honest and so admits to cutting down the cherry tree … and the apple orchard and the barn and his father’s carriage. You get the idea. And while it is all funny, hardly a word of it is true.

I know the book is written tongue-in-cheek, but will the target audience?

TEAM MOON: HOW 400,000 PEOPLE LANDED APOLLO 11 ON THE MOON
By Catherine Thimmesh
Houghton Mifflin, 2006

Category: Middle grade Non-fiction

I was born in December 1969, about five months after Apollo 11 landed on the moon. By the time I was old enough to understand the gravity of the accomplishment (pun intended), much of the excitement and drama of the event had been lost to the routine nature of space travel. Space travel is never routine, of course, but it felt that way to me when I was growing up. As a result of this naiveté, the intensity of TEAM MOON took me by surprise. This book actually gave me goose bumps!

TEAM MOON is grounded by the 1961 challenge from President John F. Kennedy: “I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to earth.” Guiding readers through eight years of toil and discovery by more than four hundred thousand people (in addition to the three astronauts on the Apollo 11 flight, there were “the flight directors, controllers, planners, and engineers; the rocket designers and builders and technicians; the managers, supervisors, quality control and safety inspectors; the programmers, electricians, welders, seamstresses, gluers, painters, doctors, geologists, scientists, trainers, and navigators”), Catherine Thimmesh successfully re-creates the drama that surrounded one of humankind’s most incredible accomplishments. If you did not witness the landing—and this applies to a whole lot more people than just the middle grade readers the book is written for—TEAM MOON is the next best thing.

TEAM MOON has been nominated for a 2006 Cybil Award. You can peruse the other nominees in the Middle Grade & YA Nonfiction category here.

BUD, NOT BUDDY
By Chistopher Paul Curtis
Scholastic, 1999

Category: Middle-grade fiction

Occasionally I realize that there are piles and piles of fabulous children’s books in the world that I have not read yet. Take this list of 100 Best Children’s Books. I have only read sixty-five of them … and several of those were read more than twenty years ago! But I try not to let the idea of unread “best books” bother me. Instead, I focus on how cool it is that there are hundreds upon hundreds of powerful, meaningful, life-altering books out there just waiting for me to find them.

Which brings me to BUD, NOT BUDDY by Christopher Paul Curtis. The chidren’s literature world heaped praises on BUD, NOT BUDDY back in 2000, when it was awarded both a Newbery Medal and the Coretta Scott King Award. It has taken six years for the book to cross my path; now that it has it will forever be on my list of favorites.

I read BUD, NOT BUDDY out loud with my boys. They were intrigued from the very first chapter, when ten-year-old Bud Caldwell (don’t call him Buddy) is taken in by a foster family … a mean foster family. After enduring a pencil up his nose, false accusations of a bed-wetting habit, and a few scary hours locked in a shed, Bud runs away. Where he goes and how he manages to get there is a story of courage and spunk that we won’t soon forget.

I hope this book finds its way into your hands soon!

TRACKING TRASH
by Loree Griffin Burns
Houghton Mifflin, 2007

On Friday I got an f&g. For those who may not know (I didn’t until very recently) this term refers to a “folded and gathered” copy of the manuscript. TRACKING TRASH is now essentially in its final form … and it looks great!

I have two other bits of trashy news to share:

First, TRACKING TRASH will be featured by the Junior Library Guild as a 2007 selection. Junior Library Guild (JLG) editors review over 1,500 books each year, usually prior to publication, and choose 264 to recommend to their member schools and libraries. JLG selections span twelve reading levels; TRACKING TRASH will be featured in one of the non-fiction categories (either Elementary or Middle Grade). I am thrilled.

Second, I am currently planning my TRACKING TRASH book tour. I will be in various parts of Washington state between March 2 and March 10, 2007. In addition to the Beachcomber’s Fair in Ocean Shores (where I did a lot of the research for the book), I will be visiting schools, libraries and booksellers in the Seattle and Grays Harbor areas. I’ll post a full itinerary on my website when it is finalized. Meanwhile, I have several days still available for school visits … feel free to pass the word to educators and parents you may know in and around these areas. More information on my school visit presentations can be found here.