The Plot
Bud Caldwell has been “in the system” since his mother died when he was 6. But he’s just about fed up with being farmed out to families who don’t actually want a son, just a servant and the check that accompanies him. So he sets out in search of his father, with only a handful of posters his mother saved to guide him.

My Thoughts
Again with the Depression, though this one, instead of a white girl as the protagonist, has a black boy. We also get to see a slightly different perspective than in the other books — the action of this book takes place in and around cities, and we visit a soup kitchen and a Hooverville in the course of the story.

I didn’t really expect to like this book very much; from the cover, it appeared to be an ‘issue’ book, which is rarely a positive sign. But it turned out not to be so very issue-y after all. Bud, though he’s black, doesn’t spend his time dealing with prejudice and hardship heaped upon him because of the color of his skin. He’s also an engaging character, with clear reasons for what he does. Even when we can see there would be a better option for him, we can understand why he’s made the choice he has.

The central plot of the book is Bud’s search for a place he can call home. He begins the book feeling comfortable in his group home with the other kids, but that’s short lived, as he’s soon sent off to stay with another family. After he takes off, the reader half expects that someone will pursue him and bring him back, but this never happens: indeed, it never seems to occur to any of the adults that Bud encounters to question the account he gives of himself.

Bud eventually manages to make his way to the city where he believes his father to be living, and presents himself to the man. Naturally, the man denies the possibility that Bud is his child, and even the reader would tend to believe this is the case. So we’re then left with the mystery of why Bud’s mother had this strange obsession with the man in question.

I felt the solution to the mystery was pretty obvious, but the “big reveal” was handled pretty well, using clues that had been scattered throughout the whole book rather than just the several pages preceeding the revelations.

The Plot
A team of 4 6th graders has had surprising success in the region’s Academic Quiz Bowl tournament. The four of them were actually a group prior to being assigned to the team by their teacher, but she didn’t know that, and they didn’t tell her. The book is more a series of interconnected short stories than one overarching plot.

My Thoughts
Much like The Big Four and Borders of Infinity, the stories in this book, while interconnected and involving many of the same characters, have been loosely tied together by an extra plot of surpassing thinness. In this case, the plot is an Academic Bowl match, at which all of the student protagonists are competing. As they answer questions, we delve more deeply into stories that explain why they know that particular bit of information.

As a device to thread the book together, it was a bit weak, but it worked well enough. The layers of ties between the characters was also interesting, and the slow revelation of the connections was well done. There was always time between one tidbit of information and the next so that each could be appreciated; there was no point at which I felt ‘augh, infodump’. And, upon reflection, almost all of the connections were pretty believable, though I had my doubts about them in the beginning. Explanations were provided for the questionable bits.

Since I feel that there aren’t enough books that focus positively on children who’re gifted academically, I have to say I wasn’t displeased to find this one. And, in spite of the fact that several of the children had personalities I found annoying, I can’t fault the book for that, because quite often people are annoying. It’s unrealistic to expect that I’ll like all the characters in every book.

I do have one reservation though: the speech pattern of Nadia, the only female member of the foursome. She spoke like Data, never using a contraction, and as a result, I found her conversation unnatural. Native speakers of American English use contractions. To not do so comes off as stilted and unreal. The fact that the most poorly written member of the group was also the only girl was especially irksome, and keeps me from being able to give the book a higher recommendation.

The Plot
Living in the Dust Bowl isn’t pleasant, but Billie Jo and her parents are scraping by. She dreams of getting out of the dust and it seems to her that playing piano may be her ticket away from the poverty stricken little town where her family lives. But life changes for her after a sudden and shocking accident claims the life of her mother and damages her hands so that playing becomes nearly impossible.

My Thoughts
The plot is not one to appeal to me in the first place — as I’ve mentioned before, random character deaths to force the growth of others is just not a device I approve. It’s overdone and is generally evidence of lack of creativity on the author’s part. All the same, I admit it’s possible to use this device well, to build up to it and, through the writing, make it less of a cliche.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen here.

The accident is absolutely grotesque: Billie Jo’s father leaves a bucket of kerosene near the stove and it catches on fire; she quickly gets it to the door, intending to fling it out onto the dusty ground, but instead the flaming oil hits her pregnant mother, who was just coming back inside. Billie Jo tries to put out the flames with her hands, but only succeeds in sustaining severe burns; her mother dies and the baby follows soon after.

It might be possible for the book to recover, had it contained interesting characters and good writing. But instead of that, the author has chosen instead to write the whole story in a sort of pretentious half-poetry, half-angsty teenager series of journal-esque records. Most of the content wouldn’t be out of place on a LiveJournal today, and, much like the vast majority of 14 year olds writing there now, it doesn’t make for very compelling reading.

Billie Jo and her father both seem to have given up hope almost even before the book starts, and though they’re showing a glimmer of energy by the end, her pessimistic, passive aggressive whining has made it impossible to care.

The Plot
During the Depression, a teenage girl from Chicago is sent to live with her grandmother in the middle of nowhere. She spends a year there in the very small town, getting to know her grandmother and the people who live around her.

My Thoughts
In the grand tradition of Anne of Green Gables, Cheaper by the Dozen, and the first few Little House books, A Year Down Yonder is a series of incidents strung together: a biography rather than a novel with a beginning, middle and end to the plot. The various incidents are a bit more interconnected than in some of my examples, but the essential flow is the passage of time rather than the passage of events.

But since I happen to be a fan of that sort of book (no point shoehorning a bad plot into what’s not a plot-y book), I have no objections to it. What makes or breaks this sort of book are the characters: if they’re interesting, then it works. If they’re dull, then no one cares about their lives and the whole thing falls flat. The main character’s grandmother is the person who dominates most of the incidents; it’s her presence that either causes them to happen or makes them unusual enough to be worth retelling. And she is unique enough that I enjoyed seeing what throwing her into the mix would do.

Unfortunately, I found most of the rest of the town’s denizens to be one dimensional and poorly developed. Only a few got a significant amount of page time, and they were mainly confined to behaving in the same way each time they appeared. There was no development on their parts over the course of the year.

The Plot
Crane Man and Tree Ear are two people who live on the fringe of an ancient Korean village known for its pottery. When Tree Ear’s curiousity accidentally causes the destruction of a valuable box, he becomes first the indentured servant and then the apprentice of one of the potters, Min. He later finds himself on the road to the capital, entrusted with a valuable sample piece to show to the royal commissioner.

My Thoughts
My initial impression of the book was a poor one — I hate it when non-English names are ‘translated’ into what they mean. It’s ridiculous. Just because a name happens to have a meaning doesn’t mean it’s still not a proper noun, and in my opinion, proper nouns should not be translated.

(How silly would this sound? As Pearl, The Lord’s Addition, Consecrated to God and Beloved One grow up in Civil War era Massachusetts, they experience adventures which range from the tragic to the absurd.)

However, after reading for a while, I discovered that it was only these two characters whose names were written in this manner. I presume this was meant to symbolize their status as outsiders in the life of the village, and while I think it was effective, it was also jarring to me to have to read the stupid names every few lines. It would have been better to have been told what they meant in the beginning, and then be given whatever the words were in Korean.

Other than that, however, the story starts off strong. We begin by outlining the extreme poverty in which Tree Ear and Crane Man live, but that moves quickly, and they’re neither of them angstful over the situation. Quickly enough the action moves to Tree Ear’s relationship with the potter Min, and his slow learning of the potter’s trade.

We falter a bit, however, when we come to the climactic portion of the tale. Min, a slow worker, has not been able to complete a requested sample piece during the royal commissioner’s visit to the village, so Tree Ear volunteers to take the item to the man. Tree Ear, meanwhile, has been told that he will not be taught to actually throw pots by Min, because a potter must leave his business to his son and Min’s real son is dead. He is trying to deal with his disappointment, his worries about leaving Crane Man behind, and his nervousness about travelling with such valuable cargo.

Given the title of the book, I was just waiting for something to happen to the vases, and lo and behold, they were smashed. Tree Ear collects the biggest pieces and takes them with him to the capital, where the shards are enough to convince the royal commissioner that he should grant Min the contract. Tree Ear returns to the village to find Crane Man has died, but never fear, because Min and his wife have decided to adopt Tree Ear and make him their son.

The Plot
In medieval England, a young serf known only as “Asta’s son” finds himself on the run after his mother’s death and an inexplicable accusation of theft. He meets up with Bear, a travelling entertainer who helps teach him the wayas of the world and how to survive outside the confines of his tiny village. The pair travel to a large town to attend to the possibly treasonous business of Bear and end up solving the minor mystery of why the boy has been declared an outlaw.

My Thoughts
I had been slow to start this book because the ugly brown cover and the stupid title really turned me off. I feared it would be dull and plodding, and when I did finally begin to read it, it seemed as if my fears were justified. The main character, Asta’s son, who later discovers his name to be Crispin, begins the book as a cringing, superstitious, passive fool, and as we spend our time in his thoughts, it was aggravating to read.

But I can’t say that it isn’t a possibly realistic portrayal of how someone, starved and downtrodden all their lives, told God has made them this way for a reason, might think. And he does develop over the course of the book to a point where, if not exactly someone I was interested in reading more about, he’s at least tolerable.

The book opens with the funeral of Crispin’s mother. Her death has left him alone in the world, and he is at a loss until circumstances force him down a path he wouldn’t have realized existed. In short order, he is on the road, everyone who was ever sympathetic to him either unavailable or dead. His ignorance and confusion dominate the next section, even as he meets up with Bear and starts to wake up to the wider world around him.

I found Crispin’s development over the course of the book to be handled in a believable fashion. He doesn’t become super by the end of the book, which would have made it all silly, and he doesn’t continue to wallow in blissful ignorance either, which would have made it all pointless. The choices he makes are reasonable based on his background and the information that he has: when it’s revealed that both his parents were of noble blood, this idea is so far beyond the realm of his experience that exploting it beyond the immediate situation doesn’t even really occur to him. He is content to be no longer a serf, and as he can’t comprehend the idea of becoming a lord, he remains with Bear.

My main gripe with the book is Crispin’s mother, who seems to have been an unbelievably passive and pathetic creature. Presumably abducted by Crispin’s father, there’s no evidence in the book that she ever attempted to escape or notify her own father of her whereabouts during all the years after. From what we’re told, she seems to have been fairly minimally supervised, and it might well have been possible for her to get information passed. Her decision to hide her background from her son has some logic to it, at least as long as he was too young to pretend he didn’t know, but by the time the book opens Crispin is of an age to prevaricate, and could certainly pretend he was unable to read if nothing else.