The Plot
Summer and Ob have been left bereft by the unexpected death of May, Ob’s wife. Ob especially has pretty much just been existing rather than living in the six months since it happened. Until one day when he feels her presence with him, and starts to believe it might be possible to contact her spirit. Joined by Cletus, a strange boy from Summer’s class in school, the little group travels in search of a woman who claims she can communicate with spirits.

My Thoughts
I’m starting to fear I need to begin deducting points for dead parents/parental figures, since so many of these books seem to be escaping the penalty by having someone die prior to the opening of the narrative. I’ve started trying to keep track, in any case — a - on the Newbery Winners page before the title means that someone was dead before the story opened (and that their death is a major factor in the resulting plot).

Missing May is written from the point of view of Summer, who, after her parents died, was passed around between relatives until rescued and given a real home by Ob and May, an older couple distantly related. She and they are blissfully happy in spite of borderline poverty. The story itself occurs after this period of happiness has been abruptly ended by the death of May, who keeled over one day in her garden.

The first thing that struck me about this book was the overwhelming feeling of dirt and muck. I don’t know why this is: Out of the Dust certainly spends a lot of time discussing how the dust got in to everything and how impossible it was to be clean or free of it even for a few moments, whereas this book doesn’t seem to mention it at all. Perhaps it’s just a deep-rooted prejudice of my own; the characters live in a poor section of West Virginia, and Summer’s family lives in a mobile home. Of course, the word used in the text is trailer, which to me will always first bring up images of a real trailer, the kind you take camping, not the semi-permanent structures with several bedrooms that are mobile homes today. And to me, camping is dirty, with poor sanitary conditions.

Or maybe I’m just making excuses and I’m prejudiced against poor people. I really couldn’t say for sure. All I can say is that when I pictured the characters of this book in my head they always needed a bath and to do some laundry.

The story itself is pretty brief — it’s a slender volume with large print and even then it spans less than a dozen chapters. I would classify this as a “chapter book” rather than a novel. It was an easy read, but I didn’t find the characters themselves very compelling. While I could get a sense of their most important emotional needs, I didn’t feel connected to them as three dimensional characters. Perhaps it’s because, as the title implied, the entire book was focused on just one thing: How much Summer and Ob missed May and what they were doing to deal with that fact. There was very little effort made to develop them outside of this; we never really saw Summer at school or interacting with anyone else. I never got a grip on what made her different from any other little girl who’d been through losses. They were generic.

That said, I’m not sure the book would have been improved by being longer. It accomplished its point, which was to be a portrait of people mired in grief who manage to slog their way out of it and begin moving on with their lives.

The Plot
Salamanca Hiddle and her father moved to Ohio after her mother left them, but Sal still has hopes that her mother will come back to join them. She and her grandparents set off on a road trip to visit her mother, and on the way, Sal entertains them with the story of her year in Ohio and the strange incidents which occurred in the life of her friend Phoebe.

My Thoughts
I admit, I was fooled by the title of this one. I thought for sure it was going to be a story about Indians or Indian culture in some way; that theory fit in pretty well with what seems to be a main criterion for Newbery selection: the book needs to teach a life lesson, be multicultural, or have literary pretensions. Or, even better, several of the above. Once in a while one with none of the above will manage to slip through, but it’s very rare.

Here, as I said, I was fooled by the title. While Sal and her mother have Indian blood in them, they don’t live on a reservation and, in fact, one of the plot threads of the book takes place in middle class suburbia. But in spite of that, this wasn’t one of those books that managed to slip through, either.

The story of Phoebe which Sal tells to her grandparents has obvious parallels to her own: Sal’s mother has left her family, and to the reader, it’s obvious from the beginning that Phoebe’s mother is fixing to have a nervous breakdown or bolt herself. At the start, Mrs. Winterbottom reads almost like a case study from the Feminine Mystique, though in the end we find that her own particular story was a little more complicated than just the problem without a name.

Sal’s own story was fairly well telegraphed from the start of the book, though the author did an admirable job of trying to avoid saying it until the end. Her own mother, depressed and grieving after having a stillborn baby, took off on a cross country bus trip to try and find herself again. She probably would have returned to her family on her own, but unfortunately, there was an accident with the bus and she was killed. Sal’s father took care of all of the arrangements himself, so the reality of the situation hasn’t exactly settled on Sal yet, even after so much time has passed. She can’t quite believe that her mom is really gone.

This book and Missing May had quite a lot in common, as they both featured a girl and her father-figure attempting to cope with the death of the mother-figure. And if you just pull out the Sal road-trip portions of this story, you’d end up with a novella not at all unlike Missing May. But in this story we have a second half: Sal’s school life in Ohio and her involvement with Phoebe’s family. This provides the author with a chance to round out Sal a bit and make her a bit more real than Summer got to be. Her intense denial about the loss of her mother isn’t the only thing we ever see about her.

Unfortunately, the author also felt the need to kill off another character toward the end of the book. She used this to try and illustrate a point — Sal’s father had not brought the body of her mother home to be buried, but had left her near where the bus accident occurred. In the one sense, this is part of what allowed Sal to continue to be in denial, but by the end of the story, she’s decided that she doesn’t need to have a grave she can visit to feel that her mother’s spirit is nearby. The other death is handled in the opposite fashion, and a nearby gravesite is established which can be visited frequently.

I’m just not convinced that we need this extra example to highlight the lesson Sal learned. The death felt gratuitous to me in every sense of the word, since the main character didn’t even seem to care that much. She was upset, but she’d already been very upset.

The Plot
Life is hard in the dark ages, especially for a girl with no family, no money and no place to live. But things start to look up for one such girl when a village midwife offers her some food in exchange for work. Eventually she begins to pick up the magic and knowledge of midwifery, but her lack of confidence in herself continues to hamper her progress. She finally gives up and leaves the village, finding work at a nearby inn.

My Thoughts
Unlike the wary feeling I’ve had when approaching many of these books, this one I was actually looking forward to reading. And it didn’t disappoint, though the whole penniless orphan finding their place in the world is an old and threadbare theme indeed.

The course this book takes is parallel in many ways to Crispin, which, having been written later, could be said to be the imitator. We start off with a cringing, downtrodden, uneducated teenager, who unexpectedly finds themselves taken under the wing of an adult. In this case, our adult is the village midwife, who uses her new charge as a servant and appears to have no intention of actually keeping her as an apprentice, no matter what the other villagers may think.

But neither does she take especial care to keep our heroine, who eventually acquires the name Alyce, from learning on her own. Thus the first half of the book shows Alyce acquiring some confidence in herself and her skills and coming to view herself as a real person with potential and rights. As she develops this sense of self, the other villagers begin to treat her more respectfully as well. This all culminates in a series of events where Alyce cleverly exposes the hypocrisy and sin of those villagers who were rude to her in the past.

The second half of the book is more problematic: after displaying this incredible nerve, Alyce suddenly regresses, collapsing into a pile of self-pitying jelly after a professional setback. I think the story would have flowed better had the incidents been reversed. Alyce should have run off to the inn and regained her confidence and then after returning to the village, assured of her place, she could have taken her revenge. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me that she felt comfortable tricking everyone yet was still so fragile.

And at the end, the book didn’t resolve some of the issues it had raised. For instance, during her stay at the inn, Alyce, through her exposure to a man working there, begins to learn to read. But after her departure, this wasn’t really followed up on. What will being able to read mean for her? We’re never told, and, in fact, it seems as if this skill is completely useless, since she doesn’t appear to have been hampered by it before.

The Plot
After being (wrongly) convicted of theft, Stanley Yelnats chooses what he hopes to be the lesser of two evils: to serve out his sentence at a correctional camp. But once at the camp, Stanley finds that he may have been wrong. All of the boys there are tasked to every day dig out a hole 5′ in diameter and 5′ deep. This will supposedly teach them to be better people and become productive members of society. But it turns out this has a lot less to do with reforming wayward boys than it does with Stanley’s great-grandfather.

My Thoughts
Being neither a child nor a parent when this book first came out, I first heard of its existence when I saw a movie poster up at the theatre. From the poster and from what little I ever heard about the movie (I never saw one single preview for it, which is odd, to say the least), I had developed an idea in my mind of what the book was about. This was pretty much completely wrong.

I also heard that there was a character in the book called ‘Armpit’ (true), which prejudiced me still further against it. I am not a fan of the sort of humor the inclusion of such a name signalled.

Fortunately for me, it turns out there wasn’t much of that sort of humor in the book at all, in spite of having a cast predominantly formed of teenaged boys. The plot itself was also complex for a book of this nature, and required the reader to connect events in three different time periods. First, the pig-stealing activities of Stanley’s great-great-grandfather, then the tragic life of the bandit Kissin Kate Barlow, and finally Stanley’s experience at the camp.

That events in all three time periods were going to collide was apparent from page one (why include them if they’re not important?), but there were at least a few unexpected twists. For example, I’m willing to bet that at least 80% of readers think at some point that the Warden is a descendant of Kate Barlow.

The book was not perfect — Stanley’s reluctance to try and teach Zero how to read rang false to me; even internally he seemed to be rejecting the idea because he felt he’d be a bad teacher, and that just didn’t make much sense. Why would he think that if he’d never tried it? There was no textual evidence that he’d found his teaching skills lacking in the past. But aside from that, it was good, and the resolution was nice and snappy without any artificial delay imposed by the author.