The Astonishing Maybe - an audiobook review

The Astonishing Maybe
By Shaunta Grimes
Read by Ramon De Ocampo
Macmillan Audio

I recently reviewed The Astonishing Maybe for AudioFile Magazine. I can't post my review here; however, I'd like to say just a few things about it.

Gideon Quinton is the book's main character, a rising middle-schooler whose family has recently relocated to Nevada. He is the story's main character, but his new neighbor, Roona, drives the plot. She and her mother are most everything that the Quintons are not. Against all odds, she and Gideon become inseparable.

I don't want to say that this is a book about depression and incarceration and a troubled family because I don't want that to put you off from reading it. What I want to say is that if you have a child or were a child, or are a child, or know a child that comes from a perfectly nice, safe, and boring family—be thankful, be grateful, be kind—and read this book because you need to know that there are other families that are just as loving as yours, but they're struggling and they need you look on their struggles with compassion rather than judgement.

If you have a child,  or are a child, or were a child, or know a child that comes from a family struggling with depression or an incarcerated parent—be caring, be resilient, be persistent—and read this book because you need to know that there are other families out there that are just like yours. You are not alone.

With a sprinkling of magical realism and hopefulness, Shaunta Grimes does a stellar job of tackling difficult topics for young readers. I hope you read or listen to her book.


My review of The Astonishing Mabye for AudioFile Magazine is linked here. [https://www.audiofilemagazine.com/reviews/read/155703/the-astonishing-maybe-by-shaunta-grimes-read-by-ramon-de-ocampo/]

Read an excerpt from The Astonishing Maybe

Sweep: The Story of Girl and Her Monster - an audiobook review

Sweep: The Story of a Girl and Her Monster
By Jonathan Auxier
Read by Sarah Coomes
Brilliance Audio, 2018
8 hours, 14 minutes

Enter the world of Nan Sparrow, an indentured child laborer in the soot-filled chimneys of Victorian London.

Coomes's voice and Auxier's prose combine to create an immersive experience. 

 Read my complete review of Sweep for AudioFile Magazine and hear a sample of the book here.

Sweep swept the journals, receiving starred reviews in Horn Book, SLJ, PW, Booklist, Kirkus, and School Library Connection. 

In addition to AudioFile Magazine's Earphones Award for "truly exceptional titles that excel in narrative voice and style, characterizations, suitability to audio, and enhancement of the text," Sweep recently won the Sydney Taylor Book Award in the Older Readers category. award honors "outstanding books for children and teens that authentically portray the Jewish experience."


This Publishers Weekly article has a #booktalk for Sweep by the author, Jonathan Auxier.

My copy of Sweep was provided by AudioFile Magazine.

A Clatter of Jars - an audiobook review

A Clatter of Jars by Lisa Graff
Read by Ellen Archer
2016, Listening Library

Quirky magical realism.
Read my full review at AudioFile Magazine.

A Clatter of Jars is Lisa Graff's follow up to 2013's, A Tangle of Knots.  I reviewed A Tangle of Knots in 2013, and declared, "If you read no other middle grade fiction book this year, you will have made a good choice." The magic doesn't wear off in A Clatter of Jars, a deftly woven, magical realism story set in the same world as the preceding book, where many people possess Talents - from the mundane (ability to understand frogs) to the powerful (telekinesis).  I particularly enjoyed this story because it features a boy who we may assume has some sort of spectrum disorder, and it has a subtle Lord of the Rings reference.

I often tell kids at the library that it's OK to start with a second book in a series if the first book is unavailable. (I don't like to see them go home empty-handed!)  Most authors do a fine job of catching the reader up on prior events.  However, because of the rich details of the world Lisa Graff has created, A Clatter of Jars is best read after A Tangle of Knots.


An audio excerpt from A Clatter of Jars and my review for AudioFile Magazine may be found here. [http://www.audiofilemagazine.com/reviews/read/114587/a-clatter-of-jars-by-lisa-graff/]

Merrow - a review

Merrow by Ananda Braxton-Smith
Candlewick Press, 2016

Everything turns into a story the moment it's done. The facts of things do not store well.  They rot and fall apart. But the stories we tell last and even grow.

 The Marrey family has long lived on a remote cove on a remote island in a Northern Sea.  Twelve-year-old Neen Marrey has lived there all her life with her sour Auntie Ushag whose appetite for hard work and subsistence living leaves no room for the distant townsfolk's talk of the Others and the Otherwise.  Besides, most of the talk centers on the Marreys anyway, especially since Neen's father drowned and her mam disappeared.  Townsfolk say her mother was a merrow and returned to the sea. Even the Marreys only friends, Ma Slevin and her blind son, Scully, gifted with the Othersight, are filled with stories of the kraken, merrows, water horses, and the like.  And what of Neen herself - afflicted with the Scales?  Could her mother's merrow blood be running in her veins?

     "All right?" asked Scully.
     "I suppose so," I said.  I wanted to be by myself.  "Thank you."
     I couldn't sleep that night.  The sun going down made no difference.  For a long while, there wasn't enough air to breathe.  The weird blood swarmed in my chest, and I longed for morning.  Not only that, the story stuck to every part of me: to my body with its scales, my mind with its waves and silver flashes, and my soul with its homesickness.
     Scully Slevin is a true seer, and a honey-tongue with it.  He has a word hoard bigger than any wrecker's haul, and he sees things nobody else does. That needs no proof.  You only have to see him and hear him to know what he says is true.
     Proof is for those with no eyes or ears in their heads.

Merrow is a coming-of-age story steeped in old world folklore and swimming in the atmosphere of a bygone time when Old Irish legends still held purchase in the hearts and minds of the island's people. The lines between truth and legend, dreams and reality, Catholicism and Celtic ways, are be blurred in this haunting, wistful story.  Whether it is fanciful or realistic is for the reader to decide.



 First published in Australia in 2010, as part of the Secrets of Carrick series, Merrow is coming to the U.S. this fall.

(Advance Reader Copy provided by the publisher at my request)

Vacation

I'm on vacation this week - escaping the cold.

Until I get back, perhaps you'll enjoy my recent reviews for AudioFile Magazine:

• The Blackthorn Key by Kevin Sands (murder, mystery, and adventure set in a fantastical London, circa 1600) 
• This Side of Wild: Mutts, Mares, and Laughing Dinosaurs by Gary Paulsen (a funny memoir)

Graceful - a review

When I reviewed The Last Present by Wendy Mass, I wrote the following:

The Last Present is the final book in the Willow Falls (or "birthday") series, realistic fiction with just the right amount of magic, courtesy of Angelina, the mysterious old woman with the duck-shaped birthmark. Angelina is seemingly the architect of all that occurs in Willow Falls, the town where nothing happens by coincidence and everything happens for a reason. Readers of the series will delight in revisiting their favorite characters - Leo, Amanda, Tara, Rory, David and all rest, as their stories intertwine and the story of Angelina is finally revealed. ... I'm sad to see it come to an end. It's been great fun!

Apparently, I wasn't the only one who was sorry to see the Willow Falls series come to an end. In the forward to Graceful (Scholastic, 2015), Wendy Mass writes that her readers let her know "IN NO UNCERTAIN TERMS" that they were not ready for the series to end.  Graceful (due out tomorrow) is a gift to her readers.

I think fans of the series will be happy with Graceful, in which Grace fills in (somewhat unwittingly) for the mysterious Angelina as the architect of all that occurs in Willow Falls.  This is a series about friendship and family and the cosmic connectedness of all things. It can best be described as magical realism, and it is a series that should be read sequentially.  Mass does her best to catch the reader up with previous occurrences, but the series is so intricately plotted that it is difficult to skip a book or read them out of order.

Willow Falls has been a great place to visit, but I think Ms. Mass is ready to move on now.  All of our questions have been answered and all loose ends are tied.  It's been fun!  Enjoy!

The Willow Falls series by Wendy Mass

• 11 Birthdays
• Finally
• 13 Gifts
• The Last Present
• Graceful

My Advance Reader Copy was supplied by the publisher.

Echo: A Novel - a review

If this is how the year is starting out, it's going to be a banner year for middle-grade books.  First, Gordon Korman's Masterminds (more on that fantastic new thriller another day) and now Echo: A Novel.

Ryan, Pam Muñoz. 2015. Echo: A Novel. New York: Scholastic.

I received an Advance Reader Copy of Echo from Scholastic and was intrigued that it was wrapped in musical notation paper and had a smartly-boxed Hohner Blues Band harmonica tied to it.


I was happy to see an apparently music-related book, and was somewhat surprised to find that Echo begins with a fairytale, "The Thirteenth Harmonica of Otto Messenger," a fairytale replete with abandoned princesses, a magical forest, a mean-spirited witch, and a prophecy,

"Your fate is not yet sealed.  Even in the darkest night, a star will shine, a bell will chime, a path will be revealed."

Though brief, I became enthralled with the tale and was surprised and taken aback when I reached Part One and found myself not in the fairytale forest, but in

Trossingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany, 1933, home to the world's oldest harmonica manufacturer.  I couldn't wait to find out what became of the abandoned princesses, but soon found myself wrapped up in the story of young Friedrich Schmidt, a German Jew during Hitler's ascendance to power.  This kind-hearted, young boy of a musical family was surely destined to be gathered up in the anti-Semitic wave sweeping through Germany. I became engrossed in Friedrich's story, anxiously hoping that things would work out for him and his family, and was again surprised when I reached Part Two and found myself in

Philadelphia, 1935, home of the then-famous Albert Hoxie and the Philadelphia Harmonica Band, and of the Bishop's Home for Friendless and Destitute Children, where I found myself in the company of piano-playing orphans, Mike and Frankie Flannery.  Their story was no less heart-wrenching than Friedrich's, and I found myself desperately rooting for the young boys when I suddenly arrived

in a migrant worker's community in Southern California, 1942, where young Ivy Maria Lopez was about to play her harmonica on the Colgate Family Hour radio show, but her excitement was short-lived.  I fell in with this hard-working, American family and hoped, along with Ivy, for her brother's safe return from the war.

Of course, there's more, but this is where I will leave off.

Pam Muñoz Ryan has written a positively masterful story that will take the reader from the realm of magic through the historical travails of the oppressed and the poor in the midst of the 20th century.  Through it all, music gathers the stories together in a symphony of hope and possibility.  In music, and in Echo, there is a magic that will fill your soul.

It may only be February, but I predict that praise for Echo will continue throughout the year.

On a library shelf near you - February 24, 2015.

A Tangle of Knots - a review

Graff, Lisa. 2013. A Tangle of Knots. New York: Philomel.

A travelling salesman with a Talent for tying knots. "The Owner," a man with no discernible Talent of his own, other than perhaps floating a few inches above the ground. Miss Mallory, who has a Talent for matching orphans with new families. And Cadence,

If you peeked in the window of the orphanage you would see her,

"Cadence, that was her name.
She was standing there now, Cady, deciding what to add to her bowl of batter.  If you squinted through the window, you could just make her out from the chin up (Cady was barely a wisp of a thing). You'd see the shiny, crow-black hair that hung smooth as paper from the top of her head to the bottom of her earlobes.  And you'd see the petite - pixieish, Miss Mallory called them - features of her face.  Tiny nose, tiny mouth, tiny ears.  Cady's eyes, however, those were large in comparison to the rest of her.  Large and dark and round, and set just so on a face the color of a leaf that has clung too long to its tree."

Cady has a Talent for baking the perfect cake.

A chance encounter in a long ago bus station,  a powder blue suitcase, a boy with a Talent for getting lost - these and hundreds of other threads are tangled together, and slowly unravel to reveal a mystery of love and longing and desire and family. A wonderful book!

If you read no other middle grade fiction book this year, you will have made a good choice.