GraceAnne Andreassi DeCandido
LadyHawk
© 2008 GraceAnne A. DeCandidoWhat's LadyHawk reading?
Favorite titles 2008
June, and my Printz nominee already, Steven Kluger's My Most Excellent Year: a novel of love, Mary Poppins, and Fenway Park. I laughed and cried all the way. It is so over-the-top that it reads as true as the email, diary entries, IMs, and letters that move along the narrative. Just terrific.
I am in love with this one and it is already on my personal Newbery list: Shooting the Moon by Frances O'Roark Dowell. Every single word is spare, perfect, inevitable. It has a brilliant first sentence and a heartbreaking last -- the final scene is a jab to the heart.
April 2008, and already cherished by me: Hilary McKay's Forever Rose and Elizabeth E. Wein's The Empty Kingdom.
A title from late 2007 Susan Goldman Rubin's Delicious: the life and art of Wayne Thiebaud. An absolutely "delicious" study of a contemporary painter, how he makes art, and what art does, packaged in a wonderfully designed book that young people (and pretty much anyone else) will enjoy.
My favorites of 2007
Gary Schmidt's The Wednesday Wars. What a lovely book. What a great read. Long Island in 1968, Holling is in seventh grade. He has a great teacher, a best friend, a girl he likes, and an older sister. His dad is one of the genuinely awful parents of children's literature. There is great stuff about running, about baseball, about school and what really happens there, about bullies, and about Shakespeare. There is some really great stuff about Shakespeare. This is probably my Newbery pick for the year.Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a medieval Village: Seventeen monologues from young people in an English village about 1255. This is about as perfect a volume as could be. It's lovely, it's research is solid, Laura Amy Schlitz writes like an angel, teachers all over the country will be weeping with joy and relief, and librarians will love it. Not only that, I think the kids will, too. My favorite book of the year.
Ashley Bryan's Let It Shine, an extraordinarily beautiful picture book even by Bryan's standards, of cut paper images in stained glass colors, illustrating three spirituals, "This little light of mine," "Oh when the saints go marching in" and "He's got the whole world in his hands." Utterly full of joy.
Jeanette Winter and her son Jonah Winter have made the spiritual and musical genius Hildegard of Bingen accessible to young folk in an exquisite little volume, The Secret World of Hildegard.
Cohn and Levithan, having swept me away with Nick and Norah, do it again with Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List. Brilliant and a tour-de-force, and it's all true. And funny. And sweet and sly and sexy.
A most beauteous edition of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass, in one trade paperback volume, with small headpieces by the author, and a lovely brief collection of "lantern slides," glimpses of the past or the future or a moment, after each of the three books. The audiobook, with narration by Pullman and a full cast of actors, is brilliant.
The seventh and last and best, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling. Love, loss, friendship, loyalty. Choices make us who we are.
What could be better than sly, witty, tender, vivid stories of a dragon and his cohorts who fought in the Napoleonic Wars? Three volumes, starting with His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik, with a fourth to come in September. Temeraire is a wonderful character, smart, curious, and very much an adolescent -- but also an imperial dragon of luminous personality and power.
Perhaps our favorite family children's book from my son's youth was How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen, by Russell Hoban with fabuloso illustrations by Quentin Blake. David Godine has finally brought it back into print, so everyone can read about sneedball and low and muddy fooling around and listen to Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong once again. I always identified with Aunt Bundlejoy Cozysweet.
I have been slow in finding books to love this year. Now I can tell you that Elizabeth Wein has once again forged a powerful tale that unites ancient Ethiopia with the Arthurian legends, but she makes us wait for Book Two until next year. Telemakos is a compelling character, as is his aunt Goewin, you won't be sorry to be in their company in The Lion Hunter.
Love and lust, vampires, werewolves, and Italian food. What is not to love in Cynthia Leitich Smith's Tantalize.
Picture books: Jeanette Winter, always a joy, chronicles in a gorgeous picture book The Tale of Pale Male, red-tail hawk of New York City.
Nancy Willard the master storyteller gives us The Flying Bed, with stunning pictures by John Thompson.
Shameless Son's Promotion
Keith DeCandido, my son the pop culture demigod, has written Supernatural: Nevermore, based on the television series' characters and taking place in our home borough, the green and leafy Bronx.
2006 Favorites (not in any order)
I did very much like Karen Cushman's The Loud Silence of Francine Green and Susan Cooper's Victory, and I am besotted with Hilary McKay's Casson family, and Caddy After After is genuinely wonderful. The dark, elegant Peter Pan in Scarlet by Geraldine McCaughrean is not to be missed.
Discovered late in the year, but quite marvelous, are Delia Sherman's Changeling and Martine Leavitt's Keturah and Lord Death. The latter has been nominated for a National Book Award, and it is brilliant: gorgeous storytelling wrapped in a cloak of the many different kinds of love. Changeling is funny and fresh and fine, another in the short list of fabulous books set in New York City this year (a few more are below). It is takes place in New York Between, and Sherman balances the Between of Faerie with a terrific young heroine named Neef, ringing changes on every single New York and Faerie trope you can imagine, and a few you can't.
Ellen Kushner's Privilege of the Sword:
The legions of you who have read Swordspoint and have been longing to know What Might Have Happened Next will revel in this, where Kate, niece of Alec now Duke Tremontaine, becomes a swordswoman. Kushner has done wondrous things with images and tropes from the theatre, from the demimonde, from the world of spirited girls who learn swordsmanship, from romance novels, and from myriad other sources to craft this gorgeous tapestry of emotions, many of them dark; passions, some of them mean; and sexuality, all of it tangled. It is really really fine.The Braid by Helen Frost
Not only is this a compelling call-and-response tale, told in the voices of two Scots sisters, Jeannie and Sarah, but the structure of the telling is very beautiful. Chapters alternate each sister's voice, and an intricately structured poem links the chapters. Frost's note at the end of the book explains her pattern. The voices of the girls are clear and real, even as life tears them from each other, one to stay on the island in the Outer Hebrides, one to shipboard and the long forced journey to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.Every so often, a book comes along, published for young people, that I find myself pressing on all those folk I know who love books but don't spend their professional time toiling in the vineyards of children's and teen literature. Megan Whalen Turner's The King of Attolia is one of them. Elegantly constructed, doling out information to its readers in small shards, with a captivating hero and heroine and a regular guy/guard, from whose perspective we see most of what goes on. There are wheels within wheels, glancing insights into truth and falsehood, perception and reality, love and loyalty, but all of this happens in the midst of a completely absorbing story. Wow.
Shannon Hale takes us back to the world of Goose Girl and Enna Burning in River Secrets - a beautiful and stirring tale with a male protagonist and a fiercely lyrical storyline. One of the best of the year for sure.
Gary Paulsen has resurrected a forgotten but fascinating hero in The Legend of Bass Reeves, combining fact and fiction in a mesmerizing hybrid.
Linda Zuckerman distills a lifetime of editing and care for language into the pellucid text of I Will Hold You 'Til You Sleep and Jon J Muth matches it with exquisite watercolors that shape and extend this gentle tale of parental and generational love. I love this so much.
More irresistible picture books: Thelonius Monster's Sky-High Fly Pie, by Judy Sierra with illustrations by Edward Koren, which brings back fond memories of The Giant Jam Sandwich by John Vernon Lord along with its own hilarity; Sleepy Boy by Polly Kanevsky, illustrated by Stephanie Anderson, thought and memory, father and son; and When You Were Small, by Sara O'Leary, illustrated by Julie Morstad, as delicate and imaginative and sly a tale as can be imagined. Matteo Pericoli'sThe True Story of Stellina (irresistible, great picture book art, and a New York story) and the ineffable Stefano Vitale's pictures for Alice Walker's There's a Flower at the Tip of My Nose Smelling Me.
Yes, I went to Paris this spring. But even if I hadn't, I would love Barbara McClintock's Adèle and Simon, the older sister walks her little brother home and he loses, then regains, nearly all of his possessions in this exquisitely illustrated and charmingly told tale.
For teens, I absolutely swooned over Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan and nearly drowned in Garret Freymann-Weyr's Stay with Me. Hmmm. New York again, both of them.
My son, Keith R.A. DeCandido, pop culture demigod, has written a splendid original Buffy the Vampire Slayer novel, called Blackout, which features Spike and Slayer Nikki Wood in 1977 New York City. Published by Simon Spotlight Entertainment in paperback, 2006.