- Buddy by M. H. Herlong
- Camo Girl by Kekla Magoon
- Counting by 7s by Holly Goldberg Sloan
- Fourmile by Watt Key
- The Fourth Stall by Chris Rylander
- The Lions of Little Rock by Kristin Levine
- One Came Home by Amy Timberlake
- One for the Murphys by Lynda Mullaly Hunt
- Perfect Game by Fred Bowen
- Rump: The True Story of Rumpelstiltskin by Leisl Shurtliff
- Summer of the Wolves by Polly Carlson-Voiles
- Zombie Baseball Beatdown by Paolo Bacigalupi
My initial thoughts:
- Lots of baseball
- I will need to learn how to pronounce some names (I'm looking at you, Bacigalupi)
- I am not particularly excited about any of these
I am now 3 books in (technically 4, because I read Counting by 7s a while ago, but I'll probably read it again - it goes fast). Much like last year, I have enjoyed them more than I expected to. I am not really going in any particular order; mostly, I have 6 in my apartment and 6 that I need to process before I can take them. The 6 I have are mixed into a pile of books to read this summer and I've kind of been pulling them out willy-nilly.
Without even further ado, let's talk about them. First up, Kristin Levine's The Lions of Little Rock. It was fine. I think the kids who dug Breathing Room will probably enjoy this - historical fiction, set in Little Rock during the school integration battle. My favorite thing about it was her decision to set it during the 1958/59 school year, a year after the Little Rock Nine, when all the high schools in Little Rock closed for the year instead of integrating. It's a part of the story that doesn't get told and it drives home just how strong the opposition to integration was. My least favorite thing was a fairly throwaway bit that left a lasting sour taste in my mouth: at one point the protagonist, Marlee, is giving a class presentation on a Native American tribe. Her friend had given her a feather as a talisman, to give her courage in the face of public speaking, and up to this point (and for the rest of the book), Marlee keeps the feather tucked in her pocket. But at this moment, she pulls it out and tucks it in one of her braids and talks about looking like an Indian girl and I just...ick. (I don't have the book here with me or I'd give you the direct quote.) It was one of those weird throwaway moments that shouldn't have been there.
Next, Watt Key's Fourmile. If The Lions of Little Rock is this year's Breathing Room, I'm going to say that Fourmile is this year's Wild Life. A boy, a dog, a rural setting... While neither book appeals much to me, Fourmile is definitely a better book than Wild Life - I thought the southern setting was pretty well-drawn and there is some genuine tension. Dax is a truly scary character (mitigated solely by the fact that in my head, he looked exactly like Dax Shepard) and the ambiguity around Gary added some anxiety. There were real stakes, and I appreciated that. This also turned out to be yet another baseball book, a fact I mention because I keep thinking about ways to group these books and baseball would be one easy theme (Fourmile, The Perfect Game, and Zombie Baseball Beatdown). I didn't object to much, although I was annoyed that Foster's mom didn't step up at the end - that she had a gun in the house and didn't take it with her when she and her son were in such serious danger rang a little false to me.
Finally, Paolo Bacigalupi's Zombie Baseball Beatdown, my favorite of these first three books. This was fairly unexpected, given that I am not a fan of zombie stuff or baseball, but I certainly hadn't gone into it expecting to find a book that was hiding a treatise about the horrors of American meat production and immigration policy and racial discrimination. That sounds a little heavy-handed, but it isn't, I swear! It was fun thinking of the dozens of books that could be paired with this, from Eric Schlosser's Chew on This and Fast Food Nation to Francisco Jimenez's The Circuit to Darren Shan's Zom-B series (and more, I'm sure). It was funny and scary and occasionally a little too gross for me (so probably perfect for middle schoolers) and truly insightful. I hope kids read it for the humor and the gore and get tricked into asking questions about where their food comes and what it really means to be an American and I kind of can't wait to hear what they have to say about this book.
One more thing! In between those three books up there, I also read Andrew Smith's 100 Sideways Miles (the kind of YA book that makes me sad I don't work with slightly older kids), Nikki Loftin's Wish Girl (which is lovely and magical and namechecks Andy freaking Goldsworthy), and Claire Legrand's The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls (creepy and crawly and really magnificent - it got raves from the kids who read it last year and those kids were right).
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