#newberyaward

[newberyandchai]

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1977)

Roll of thunder Hear my cry Over the water Bye and bye Ole man comin’ Down the line Whip in hand to Beat me down But I ain’t Gonna let him Turn me around.

[Spoilers ahead]

What an important book — just as tense as The Slave Dancer in parts, but less horrifying and more insightful and entertaining... which I have some (not-so-groundbreaking) thoughts about. (These posts keep getting longer and longer, but forgive me; I was excited about this one.)

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry was always on the shelves in my elementary classrooms, but I was never interested enough to pick it up. I remember thinking that the book must be written in something like Shakespearean English, given the title. And I suppose this is kind of true, although not with ye olde English. The dialog spoken by the Logan family is written in African American Vernacular English while the narrative portion is in more traditional written English.

I appreciate this because it both gave insight into how Cassie and her family communicated with each other without code-switching and illustrated the idea that speaking "properly" is not indicative whatsoever of actual intelligence. Even today, in which it seems like any non-white person is automatically dismissed if they can't speak perfect English without a thick accent, I appreciated seeing phrases like, "You care what a lot of useless people say 'bout you you'll never get anywhere, 'cause there's a lotta folks don't want you to make it” spoken aloud by characters. The Logan family felt much, much more real than the Black characters in Slave Dancer, who were almost always talked about collectively as "the blacks" and as though they didn't have the mental capacity to communicate at all.

But before Analysis Brain takes over the rest of this post, let's go into the plot a bit:

The story is about the Logans, a Black family in the American South during the Jim Crow era. There has just been a lynching in the community, which leads Cassie on a roundabout journey during the school year to figure out the role she is supposed to hold in society as a Black girl. A lot of different relationships between the Black and white people in the community take place:

TJ, a friend of Cassie's brother Stacey, thinks he's a hotshot for hanging out with some older white boys and feels like this has elevated his social status, even though they're just toying with him as a joke. They end up getting him to commit a crime with them and pin it on him because they're aware of their privilege; it's ultimately their word against his.

Cassie's teacher embodies the "don't bite the hand that feeds" mentality. When Cassie is outraged after finding out that her class's textbooks used to belonged to white children and were only given to the Black school once they were torn up and worn out, her teacher punishes her and her younger brother for having a problem with it.

Jeremy, a boy from a prominent white family, likes to hang out with Stacey and walks in the mornings with the Logan family before they part ways to go to their separate schools, but Stacey rejects his friendship several times because he's suspicious of Jeremy's motives. In this case, a genuine offer of friendship is confused for being transactional, just from what he's seen of other interactions between Black and white folks.

In the end, tensions between Cassie's family and the Wallaces, the white family that orchestrated the first lynching, come to a head. TJ, who participated in a robbery with two of the Wallace sons that led to a white man's accidental death, is about to be lynched, but a sudden fire in the Logans' cotton fields leads to everyone helping to put out the flames. TJ escapes the situation with his life, but he still ends up going to jail for the crime. At the very end, Cassie realizes her father had set fire to his own field to cause a distraction that would end up affecting everyone in the community if they didn't all work together to stop it.

But my favorite part by far was the long con that Cassie pulls on a rude white girl, Lillian Jean. In short, LJ disrespects Cassie and asks her to call her "Miss" as a show of subservience, and when Cassie protests, Cassie's grandmother makes her apologize to both LJ and her father to avoid an even worse conflict, even though she's done nothing wrong. Cassie decides to take this apology to the extreme and pretends to be LJ's friend and "know her place": she carries her books for her, compliments her, brushes her hair, etc., as though she was LJ's personal servant. During this time, she learns all of LJ's most important schoolgirl secrets, including which boys she likes. After some time passes, Cassie suddenly drops the act and pushes LJ into the mud one morning, making her promise to not bother her again and threatening to reveal her secrets if she tells anyone what Cassie did.

The chapter ends with Lillian Jean seeming completely shocked, saying she truly thought Cassie was her friend during the entire act. I think this shows the true ignorance in the white perspective at the time: many religious leaders in the Bible-thumpin' South preached that whites were God's chosen people and Black people were always intended to serve others, so I doubt Lillian Jean even thought to view Cassie as a real person. To her, Cassie could only ever be an uneducated, opinionless servant — a background character without her own personality who only has value when serving white people. For Lillian Jean to confuse Cassie's act with true friendship shows how many assumptions she's making about Cassie's very personhood.

In this case, I don't think the book was trying to portray LJ as a serious aggressor; if anything, it shows that she's not really at fault at all by way of sheer ignorance. From what the rest of the book shows, Lillian Jean was just parroting her family's views when she saw Cassie acting as though she had value beyond what was socially expected of Black members of their community, so she belittled Cassie to put her back into the role she was "supposed" to fill. Of course, this mindset is still around today in different ways (e.g., the more modern "I don't care if you're gay, but don't shove it down my throat" mentality if a same-sex couple dares to hold hands or essentially do anything a straight couple would do in public), and maybe it always will be.

This is nothing new (High School Musical illustrated roughly the same thing through teen romance and dance numbers nearly 20 years ago), but: There's such a deep-seated need to show others where we feel they belong in relation to ourselves, and I think this largely reflects what we were shown and taught by others in our childhoods. Our egos are too fragile to be able to let go of the things that other people do and not feel a desire to "put them in their place" if we were shown all our lives that our own place is higher on the totem pole — but acting rudely because of ignorance isn't an acceptable excuse in the Internet Age.

One of the quotes I try to live by goes something like, "Your first thought is what society has told you to think; your second thought determines your character." We have more opportunities than ever before in history to inform and shape that second thought into something kind, respectful, and productive.

With The Slave Dancer, I felt nothing but disgust and a strong desire to put the book down (or even throw it in the trash) while reading Jesse's perspective of being an unwilling white participant in the transatlantic slave trade. The idea that the slaves in Slave Dancer did not have any dialog forced the focus onto the despicable actions of characters like Ben Stout, who tormented slaves for fun, and it was just tragedy after tragedy until the slaves all perished at the end of the book.

But when given only the perspective of the Black characters in Roll of Thunder, I couldn't put it down and read the whole thing across two days. Both stories depicted race-related violence and gave a good picture of what people are truly capable of when driven by a hatred of the "other," but I was much more willing and eager to root for the Logan family and read about their lives in their own words than play the part of the powerless observer like Jesse.

This is long enough: 9/10, Recommendable.

[belascoainyneptuno]

Today, I had the privilege of sharing the stage at the fabulous @planetworddc with my dear @megmedinabooks. And by that I mean my dear #NewberyAward winner #MegMedina! This event was coordinated by the indefatigable @kelp52, with the enthusiastic support from @aobfound. I’ve had the joy of translating Merci Suárez Changes Gears and Merci Suárez Can’t Dance. And that means that Meg and I have a friendship that is at least 800-pages long. Last night, Meg, Valerie Block,(my wife —not on social media!), and I took an Uber to “Cuba Libre.” We had a great time. I hope that one day we will be able to go to #CubaLibre, without the quotation marks. Apropos of that, while over one hundred fifth graders and their teachers from two local schools entered the auditorium, we played #PatriaYVida. I told the audience that today we commemorate the first time that the #Cuban national anthem was sung on the island. And that was the reason why we were playing the song that has become a de facto anthem for #Cubans everywhere, while one of its composers remains in prison in #Cuba, precisely for singing that song. Then we talked about the #MerciSuárez trilogy, and the joys and the challenges of translating such beautiful, polyphonic, and multilayered #books. Some days, I can’t believe my life. And today was one of those days. Thanks to everyone who made this possible! Now, go and read Meg Medina… in English, in Spanish, in the language that makes you happy! https://www.instagram.com/p/Cj9Atxjv5pD/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[slickcatbooks]

Today is William H. Armstrong’s birthday! Who remembers Sounder? Learn more on our Literary Calendar! #slickcatbooks #greatbooksgreatmemories #literarycalendar #birthdays #authorsbirthdays #williamharmstrong #sounder #newberyaward #record #vinyl https://www.instagram.com/p/CTzxmtPloGe/?utm_medium=tumblr

[motherforquer]

I loved these when I was a kid! . . . #books #booksofinstagram #bookstagram #elementaryschoollibrary #herecometheanimals #childrensbooks #childrensbookstagram #kidsbooks #vintagebooks #newberyaward #childhoodmemories #80smemories (at Baltimore, Maryland) https://www.instagram.com/p/B56xolqB65F/?igshid=i2f4svacvjxr

[noodlenuts]

Occasionally, already-popular books are worth continued promotion. There is so much to love about Matt de la Peña and Christian Robinson's "Last Stop on Market Street" (2015) that although many of you may be familiar with it, I felt compelled to share it here for those who aren't. 📚📙📗 A wonderful intergenerational story, "Last Stop" is an upbeat reminder that picture books can reflect the reality of our world without being sad. It reminds us that not everyone lives in a beautiful suburb, drives a car, has lots of money, and that that's just fine. The use of dialect reminds us that not everyone speaks the same way, but the story is clear that we all need to communicate with each other. Robinson's art brings the city to life with colour even in what is supposed to be a dingy neighbourhood. A lovely ode to urban life, and seeing the good in things. ⚫ ⚫ ⚫ #noodlenutskidsbooks #bookstagraminthe6ix #laststoponmarketstreet #laststop #marketstreet #mattdelapena #mattdelapeña #christianrobinson #newberyaward #newberymedal #caldecott #caldecotthonor #caldecotthonorbook #corettascottkingaward #corettascottkingillustratorhonor #notablechildrensbook #awardwinning #awardwinner #grandmother #grandson #intergenerationalstories #intergenerational #diversebooksforkids #weneeddiversebooks #sundaysout #afterchurch #blackkids #brownkids #representationmatters #diversitymatters https://www.instagram.com/p/B168ZaxHQCm/?igshid=bk7xovj8i2f7

[almacayasso]

#newberyaward #contest #clay #claytoon #charlottesweb #wilbursboast #escape #ya #enrichmentzone #nypl #inwoodlibrarybranch

[beautyexplore1989]

Cynthia & Paul 4ever #cynthiarylant #paulmccartney #wings #childrensbook #newberyaward

[cheshirelibrary]

Congratulations to the 2015 Caldecott and Newbery Medal Winners - "The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend," illustrated and written by Dan Santat, and “The Crossover,” written by Kwame Alexander.

[xfoxygrandpax-blog]

Get ready world, here comes the next best seller 👶📚📖✒👟👞👢 #childrensbook #myfirstbookivewritten #itsaboutshoes #shoesfindingaplacetolive #icantdraw #mydrawingsucks #soitookallthepicturesmyself#nextbestseller #newyorktimes #bestsellerlist #newberyaward #caldecotaward #illberichafterthis #asolewithnohome

[newberyandchai]

The Slave Dancer (1974)

A review quote on the back of this book called it "horrifying," and that word is 110% accurate in describing my reading experience. I had to look up from time to time just to mentally process what I had just read.

The Slave Dancer is banned in virtually all school districts, and I certainly never saw it on any classroom shelf. It depicts in vivid detail the grotesque conditions of a boat heading to and from Africa to take a group of 98 slaves to America in the mid-1800s. The main character Jessie is kidnapped and forced to play his fife for the slaves each day to keep them active so their muscles don't atrophy over the course of the four-month journey. They're forced to do a kind of shuffle-dance in their chains, and if they don't move fast enough, they get whipped by a cat-o'-nine — a whip with nine knotted "tails." Both the crew and the slaves are subjected to the cat-o'-nine if they don't do what they're told (blah blah something about symbolism and how even the slavers are slaves to the industry...).

Jessie says, "I saw the others regarded the slaves as less than animals, although having a greater value in gold." The crew jam-packs the ship with so many slaves that there is nowhere for them to move. (I have memories of cramming into a crowded PRT car at WVU at the last minute, taking shallow breaths to avoid breathing in someone's body odor or too-strong perfume that's taken over the entire car — I'm imagining that discomfort tenfold.) There's so little space that many of the slaves afflicted with dysentery can't even make it to the latrine buckets fast enough because there are just too many people to get past.

Each day some of the crew tosses dead bodies overboard, with even some still alive if they're thought to be sick and spreading illness. Jessie notices a very young girl who makes a scene upon boarding the ship. She dies only a few days into the journey: "[Stout] held her upside down, his fingers gripping one thin brown ankle. Her eyes were open, staring at nothing. Foam had dried about her mouth. With one gesture, Stout flung her into the water." Jessie protests and is slapped by one of the crew in return.

There was one scene that I think will stick with me for a very long time. Ben Stout, one of the crewmembers in charge of the slaves (and whom Jessie feels is a truly evil man), drops Jessie's fife down into the slaves' hold and forces him to go retrieve it as a kind of sick punishment.

"I caught sight of a black face turned up toward the light. The man blinked his eyes, but there was no surprise written on his face. He had only looked up to see what was to befall him next. I went down the rope knowing my boots would strike living bodies. There was not an inch of space for then to move to. I sank down among them as though I had been dropped into the sea. I heard groans, the shifting of shackles, the damp sliding whisper of sweating arms and legs as the slaves tried desperately to curl themselves even tighter. ... To search the hold meant I would have to walk upon the blacks."

I can't even imagine the smell. For four months, day after day, week after week, with friends and family members who couldn't survive the trip simply being tossed overboard each morning... There's no way to comprehend the scale of that tragedy today, and nothing we experience in the U.S. could even come close.

At the end of the book, the crew sees a rival ship that could board and arrest them for being part of the slave trade, so the crew starts throwing the chained slaves overboard right and left to destroy the evidence. To top it off, a storm devastates the boat immediately after. Only Jessie and a single slave boy survive; every other slave and crewmember has either drowned or been killed. Jessie makes it home, but he lives with the memory of those months for the rest of his life. As a result, he can no longer tolerate hearing music of any kind.

This book reminded me a lot of the Studio Ghibli movie Grave of the Fireflies. It's a movie I think everyone should watch at some point in their life, but only once — no one would ever watch it a second time for fun. It's about two young siblings trying to survive alone in WW2-era Japan, and ultimately they both slowly starve to death. (Cinema Therapy's review of this movie examines it in depth if you're looking for a summary/don't want to submit yourself to the trauma of watching the whole thing.)

It's an important story that shouldn't be forgotten, but not for its entertainment value. My takeaway is that I think historical fiction has equal value to real history, in some cases, because it's able to humanize the past. Reading "many slaves did not survive the journey to America" in a textbook is just not the same as reading a description of a dead child being flung overboard by her ankle.

I don't know how this book fits into the larger conversation around banned books. This is a work I don't think someone under 13 should read, and even that's pushing it. I believe kids can handle a lot more than we give them credit for, but this was too much.

5/10 for the sheer devastation this brought, and I don't think I can give a Recommendable/Not Recommendable rating because it's in the same place as Grave of the Fireflies: the "this is important to preserve and talk about, but not fun in the slightest and will stay in your head in some capacity for the rest of your life" category.

[slickcatbooks]

Did you know that classic children’s books were turned into records? #slickcatbooks #greatbooksgreatmemories #sounder #williamharmstrong #newbery #newberyaward #newberymedal #newberywinner #newberyawardrecords #vinyl #vinylcollection #vinylcollection #vinylcommunity #vinylcollector #childrensclassics https://www.instagram.com/p/CO0SyHWBoay/?igshid=1g5iqjm4zcebw

[newberyandchai]

Welcome!

As the page bio already says, I will be documenting my journey of reading all 101 Newbery Award-winning books on this blog.

The Newbery Medal is given each year to the author of the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children. It's named after John Newbery*, an 18th-century English publisher known as the "Father of Children's Literature."

The "chai" part of this blog's name is because I like chai lattes a little too much — and it also has a nice ring to it. (Would you shop at a bookstore called Newbery & Chai? I certainly would.)

I grew up a voracious reader, and it occurred to me recently that many of my favorite books from elementary school were Newbery winners. Several moments from those books have stuck with me for more than two decades — Debbie doing arm circles to gain confidence in Criss Cross, Maniac McGee untying the giant knot, the pastel Kleenex floating in the wind in Kira-Kira.

I wondered what I was missing out on by not continuing to read children's literature (and adult books are so complicated! tedious! a real time investment!), so I thought a good place to start would be with titles that have already been chosen as the best of the best.

The ins and outs:

I'm only reading each year's winner, not any of the runners-up.

I'm not following any particular order and am skipping around the years based on what interests me at the time.

I've read many of these before, so they may not merit a full reread.

I will be sticking to a 1-10 rating scale** but banning the score of 7.

Pour yourself a cup of milk tea and come along with me as I discover new favorites and fondly remember old ones.

(If you've come here from elsewhere and aren't familiar with Tumblr, you can find other helpful links — such as a list of all the winners and the titles I've already read — by clicking on the compass icon in the sidebar in the desktop version of this site.)

*Newbery put children's literature on the map largely by including advertisements for real products in the texts he wrote and published, such as mentioning a brand of "fever powder" that supposedly would have saved a girl's father in one book from death. (Manipulating children was profitable even in the 1700s, I suppose. #undisclosedad?)

**I go back and forth between being lenient and being strict about awarding 10s, so to counteract that variation, I will be adding Recommendable/Not Recommendable to each book. (Consider it the purely subjective pass-fail grade of kids' books.)

[newberyandchai]

The View from Saturday (1997)

This was a short book, so I’ll (hopefully) keep this a short review. I enjoyed it a lot (much, much more than the author’s previous book, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler) but you’ll have to skip to the end for my rating. (Fun fact: E. L. Konigsburg is one of only a handful of authors to win the Newbery Medal twice.)

What I especially liked about this book was that it did a good job communicating that the decisions you might think are relatively unimportant can be very nuanced and meaningful to others in the smallest ways. The story begins with a pretty long explanation of how a teacher came to choose four particular sixth graders to be on the school’s academic team. It then explores the backgrounds of the students in question and how they’re all connected to one another while they’re participating in an important Academic Bowl.

It’s a Breakfast Club-type story in that kids who wouldn’t normally be close are brought together and maintain a bond that extends beyond their social lives at school:

The fact was that Mrs. Olinski did not know how she had chosen her team, and the further fact was that she didn’t know that she didn’t know until she did know. Of course, that is true of most things: you do not know up to and including the very last second before you do. … They called themselves The Souls. They told Mrs. Olinski that they were The Souls long before they were a team, but she told them that they were a team as soon as they became The Souls.

It also had a bit of a Slumdog Millionaire-esque feel because as each question is asked at the competition, the book breaks into personal stories told in first person that explain why each character knows the answer to the question — Noah answers a question about calligraphy, Nadia answers a question about seaweed, and so on. One of the stories introduces the new (weird) kid at school, Julian, who is responsible for starting The Souls: he slips secret notes to the three other kids and invites them to a tea party at his new house, where his father is starting a bed and breakfast. They begin to meet regularly:

Something in Sillington House gave me permission to do things I had never done before. Never even thought of doing. Something there triggered the unfolding of those parts that had been incubating. … I told jokes I had never told before. I asked questions I had never asked before.

Outside of the tea parties, no one speaks to or acts like they’re friends with one another. However, the only part of the book I didn’t like involved them coming together at the end to prevent Nadia’s dog, Ginger, from being drugged during a school stage production of Annie so some other kid’s dog could take her place. It was pretty gross: “…laxatives and tranquilizers and those four little legs will buckle, and those little bowels won’t hold…”

… Did they really need the laxatives? On top of the sedatives? (Really?)

But I’ll end on a bit of a less gross, more bittersweet note: I resonated with this small passage after rereading it for this blog post in ways I didn’t when encountering it for the first time just a few months ago. The team has [spoiler, as you may have guessed] just won the Academic Bowl:

Mrs. Olinski felt a strange sense of loss. … She drove for miles worrying about it. Finally, almost involuntarily, she said out loud, “Win some, lose some.” She glanced at Mr. Singh and laughed. “Why did I say that?” Mr. Singh replied, “Because it is how you feel at this moment, Mrs. Olinski.” “I am happy that we won, Mr. Singh, But I don’t understand why I feel a sense of loss. This is not like my accident when my loss was overwhelming. Why, after this wonderful victory, do I feel that something is missing?” “Because something is.” Miles hummed past before his voice floated back to her. “For many months now, you have been in a state of perpetual preparation and excitement. Each victory was a preparation for the next. You are missing future victories. … Now you must put down anchor, look around, enjoy this port of call. Your stay will be brief. You must do it, Mrs. Olinski.”

Something-something about aging, the ephemeral nature of existence, the danger of losing yourself to the past, recognizing the present as always transient, each moment is fleeting, something-something… I already have too many gray hairs for this.

“Victories” isn’t exactly the word I would use when talking about this scene in a wider context, but comparing different points of your life to a ship coming in, staying a while, and inevitably setting sail once again for a different destination is a lovely, tranquil thought. The focus isn’t on the end of the stay, but always on each new beginning — on that first step off the gangplank, onto the sands of an unfamiliar shore...

This feels like a true 7, but because that number is still banned, I’ll go with 8/10, Recommendable.

[newberyandchai]

Crispin: The Cross of Lead (2003)

I'll tell you how much I enjoyed this book: Despite having left my copy at home during a recent trip, I was so invested in the story that I found a free PDF online (don't try this at home, kids) and finished reading it on my phone across several coffee shop visits, completely ignoring the books I had actually planned to read.

I had intended to write about Moon Over Manifest first, but I think it's important that I talk about Crispin: The Cross of Lead before I get into that — they have somewhat similar plots in the sense that both main characters are concerned with finding out new things about their parents, but I really enjoyed one story and really disliked the other. So, join me as I try to explain why that might be through some long-winded explanations.

First, a four-paragraph summary (with spoilers, as usual):

The year is 1377, and a boy called only "Asta's son" just recently lost his mother due to illness. The two lived as very poor serfs who worked the land of the nobleman Lord Furnival, which is under the control of a steward while Furnival is off pillaging or whatever he's up to. One night, Asta's son is caught overhearing a conversation that he doesn't understand between the steward and another man, and for reasons he doesn't know, he is immediately declared a "wolf's head" by the steward, which means he could be killed on sight by anyone. He briefly finds refuge with the local priest, Father Quinel, who tells him that his real name is Crispin and gives him a lead cross with writing on it that belonged to Crispin's mother. The priest says he'll tell Crispin more about his father soon, but he is killed before Crispin can find out this information.

Crispin spends some time hiding and scavenging in the woods and avoiding the numerous people now looking for him, still unaware of what he's done to deserve this. He comes across a large man who goes by the name Bear one night, who declares himself Crispin's new master. Crispin unwillingly obeys, but he soon grows to love Bear, who is a traveling musician. He teaches Crispin how to play the flute and imparts some wisdom on abandoning the master/servant dogma that Crispin has lived his whole life by. Bear can read the writing on Crispin's cross but doesn't tell him what it says.

The pair travel to a town where Bear has some business to attend to, and Crispin overhears from the townspeople that Lord Furnival has died. The men looking for Crispin discover him there, but after he hides from them, they kidnap and torture Bear to try and get Crispin to reveal himself. Crispin finally finds out that the words on the cross say that he is Lord Furnival's son, and he deduces that the reason the steward sent everyone after him is because he's worried Crispin will try to now claim himself as heir to the lordship.

Crispin confronts the steward and says he doesn't want anything to do with being part of the nobility and just wants to leave the town with Bear in peace, which the steward initially agrees to. However, as they're leaving, he goes back on his word and tries to kill Crispin. The steward and Bear fight, which ends in the steward's death. Crispin leaves the cross, the only evidence he has of his birthright, on the body of the steward before they both leave the town to live out the rest of their lives.

There's something endlessly fascinating about the 14th century and even earlier times to me, which feels almost like prehistory in that we can only speculate what life was like for the average person. We have so much art and literature from the Renaissance, yet very little from before then (I remember only covering parts of Canterbury Tales and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which were both penned in the 1400s, before moving on to later time periods in my early British literature class). Exploring the Dark and Middle Ages — when religion dominated almost every aspect of someone's life to the point of cultural stagnation — feels as foreign and exciting as taking a peek at the bottom of the ocean.

I think that the most interesting aspect of the book was how religion colored every aspect of Crispin’s thoughts and interactions with others in a way that is so unlike modern times. Every single internal thought or sentence he spoke had some kind of religious flavor to it, with lots of “God willing” and “His will be done.” It’s hard to imagine a time in which life truly was like this, when religion was something you participated in every day and were constantly living as opposed to something you could practice on your own or just visit a building once a week to affirm, like 1/3 of all American Christian adults:

“Thus our lives never changed, but went round the rolling years beneath the starry vault of distant Heaven. Time was the great millstone, which ground us to dust like kernelled wheat. The Holy Church told us when we were in the alterations of the day, the year and in our daily toil. Birth and death alone gave distinction to our lives, as we made the journey between the darkness whence we had come to the darkness where we were fated to await Judgement Day. Then God's terrible gaze would fall on us and lift us to Heaven's bliss or throw us down to the everlasting flames of Hell.”

One professor I had for a religious studies course my junior year (may that department rest in peace as it no longer exists, thanks to WVU and E. Gordon Gee’s terrible financial management) was always emphasizing the idea that the fundamentals of eastern religion aren't so much about belief as they are what actions someone takes. And I don’t mean “action” as in making the conscious choice to treat thy neighbor as thyself or turn the other cheek; I don’t mean religious principles guiding actions in the real world, but rather that not every world religion emphasizes such a divide between the sacred (Heaven) and the worldly or profane (Earth). It's a world where "worship" can take any number of forms (e.g., the Kama Sutra). Conversely, separation between Heaven and Earth is a central tenet in western religions, in which God is perceived as residing somewhere else and not living among people in this world (to put it more simply, “God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life,” as Jeff Mangum sings).

When hundreds of deities are understood to be on Earth among us and “everything is sacred” in eastern religions, what someone believes in and their lived experiences are tied together in inseparable ways. You wouldn’t ask someone whether they believe in gravity or not because someone’s personal relationship with contemplating and accepting gravity has no bearing on whether it’s actually experienced by them; gravity is a force that is central to the fabric of our universe and doesn’t hinge on the belief that it’s real, and every action you take is impacted by it. The concept of “having faith” in gravity is almost entirely irrelevant, whereas having faith is considered a central part of Christianity and has deeply influenced its history and practices.

This ties into Crispin’s belief about some people being destined to always be a servant to a “master.” His worldview was likely influenced by something called the ��great chain of being,” which was a popular idea during the Middle Ages that provided a hierarchy for everything on Earth, down to minerals and plants. But though it’s never mentioned by name in the book, Bear is involved in the very beginnings of what would be the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, which was a rebellion against that very way of thinking. In fact, it’s why the two travel to the city where the men are looking for Crispin in the first place, and one character briefly mentioned, John Ball, was actually a real organizer of the revolt.

Bear, though proclaiming himself Crispin’s new "master" and playing into his view of the world to keep him from running away, actually tries to get him out of that mindset in a few different ways when they first begin traveling together.

“... Will you join me? I give you the freedom to choose.” “You’re my master,” I said. “I have no choice.” “Crispin, decide,” he barked. I shook my head, “It’s not for me to do so.” “Should not every man be a master of himself?” he asked. “You made me call you master.” His face grew redder than it normally was. “You’re a willful fool,” he bellowed. … “Crispin, as Jesus is my witness, churches, priests — they’re all unneeded. The only cross you need is the one in your heart.” Greatly shocked, I didn’t know what to say.  “But,” he added, with a hard edge of anger, “if you so much as spoke my words in public, do you know what would happen to you? … You’d be burned alive.” … what vexed me most was his saying that every man should be master of himself. If I knew anything it was that all men belonged to someone. Surely God Himself put us all in our places. Lord to rule and fight. Clergy to pray. All the rest — like me — were on earth to labor, to serve our masters and our God. Otherwise, it was as much to say stars could go their own way instead of being fixed to turn around our world.

Very clever. In short, this book was extremely interesting and I could probably talk about other parts of it for much longer and do a few more Wikipedia deep dives — Bear's tried-and-true "formula" for visiting a town and earning money from his singing and dancing by appealing to the local priest, the role of stewards versus lords in the Middle Ages, and even the small detail that Crispin had only tried meat once or twice in his entire life before meeting Bear — can you even imagine?

I’m going to be a bit more liberal in my rating today and give it a 10/10, Recommendable. Be prepared for a scathing (or rather, annoyed) Moon Over Manifest review coming soon.

[newberyandchai]

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (1972)

I was unfamiliar with this book, but not the gist of the story (although I’d often wondered what “nim” was when seeing the title on the shelf of the elementary school library at a very early age). I remember watching the movie version at some point in my childhood — maybe over several rainy days during recess? — and remembered it to be a much more fantastical, magical tale than what the text told.

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH was less action-packed and more straightforward than the movie, but because of that, I ended up liking it all the more. They’re almost entirely different stories (even Mrs. Frisby underwent a name change to avoid copyright infringement with a certain flying disc sport, and the movie is called The Secret of NIMH instead), but I’m okay with that because of just how much was changed. I see why they made certain creative decisions for the movie, and the animation is quite good for the early 80s.

(P.S. The full movie is available online for free.)

The movie feels almost like an alternate universe fanfic — or AU, for us fanfiction fiends — in a unique reimagining of the plot, but that doesn’t mean the source material is boring by any means. The next three paragraphs are a brief summary of the entire thing (which certainly includes spoilers, so… close your eyes):

Mrs. Frisby is a widowed mouse with three children who lives inside a cinderblock on a farm. The family usually moves to their winter home before the harvest begins, but Mrs. Frisby’s youngest son gets sick and can’t be moved in time. With the help of a crow, she visits an old owl to ask for help in what she should do. She is surprised to find out that the owl used to know her late husband, and he tells her to visit the rat colony that lives near the farm. The plan is to ask the rats to move her house out of the path of the farming equipment that will be coming through the area in just a few days’ time.

Mrs. Frisby goes to see them and learns about the story of the rats from their leader, a very old rat named Nicodemus. An original small group of rodents had been experimented on at the National Institute of Mental Health many years ago, and both rats and mice had received doses of a drug that increased their intelligence, strength, and lifespan. The group of rats and mice — which included Mrs. Frisby’s late husband, Jonathan — ended up using their new thinking skills to plan an escape. The rat colony, which has expanded and now contains multiple generations after the escape, is now literate and scientifically advanced.

Mrs. Frisby learns that the rats have been working on a plan to grow their own food and generate their own electricity so they no longer have to scavenge and steal from humans. They move her house out of the path of the plow through some simple engineering, but humans from NIMH are alerted to the presence of the super-intelligent rats after a grisly incident involving one dissenting rat and his followers trying to steal a motor from a local shop. The colony then has to stage an evacuation of their home when some exterminators come, but they must simultaneously pretend to be unintelligent rats and make their escape look chaotic and unplanned (as it would with normal rats) to mislead the humans. Some main characters perish, but the colony survives and ultimately leaves the area to rebuild while Mrs. Frisby goes back to a normal life with her family.

So: In the movie, it’s implied the rats got some kind of magical powers during their time at NIMH, and Nicodemus is depicted as a wizard figure with glowing eyes. There’s a magical amulet that glows red when worn by someone “with a courageous heart,” and the dissenting rat who breaks away from the main group (Jenner) is much more of an antagonist who is actively seeking to wrest control of the colony from Nicodemus. (There’s also some murdering, a sword fight or two, and some interesting medieval-style clothing choices for the rodents.) The climax of the book is changed from the extermination to the house-moving scene, in which the cinderblock starts sinking into the mud as they try to move it, but Mrs. Frisby uses the amulet as an Infinity Gauntlet (kind of) and moves it to safety with the Force (more or less).

Surprisingly, I still enjoyed the less-dramatic version of events in the book. It posed some thoughtful questions about being an intelligent being in a world that sees you only as a pest or a lab experiment, and Mrs. Frisby was almost a Frodo-like character in that she was only associated with the larger conflict secondhand; she really only wanted the rats’ help to move her house, just as Frodo ultimately only wanted to return to the Shire but had no choice but to be the bearer of the Ring. They were both swept up and involved in in the larger plots of their respective books (somewhat unwillingly, at least in Frodo's case).

Despite this, Mrs. Frisby does make the heroic choice on her own to volunteer to drug the farm cat, Dragon, so the rats are able to move her house without any threat of danger — even after finding out her husband had died trying to complete the same task. She's only a passive observer of the rats' plan to avoid the exterminators and watches everything unfold from a tree branch ("Mrs. Frisby could not bear to watch; and yet, even more, she could not bear to not watch"), even though she could do nothing to help.

Another difference is that the book spends much more time explaining the origin of the rats and their time at NIMH, including how they were taught by the researchers, how they formulated their escape plan, and why they started working toward the goal of building a self-sufficient colony — which held my interest from beginning to end. One passage sticks out in my mind: While the rats and mice are moving through the building's airducts during their escape, the air kicks on and all but two of the mice, who weigh much less than the rats, are blown back and left to wander the endless maze of ductwork seemingly forever:

We were approaching the lighted square of the opening when the roar began. The blast of air came like a sudden whistling gale; it took my breath and flattened my ears against my head … when I opened my eyes again I saw one of the mice sliding past me, clawing uselessly with his small nails at the smooth metal beneath him. Another followed him, and still another, as one by one they were blown backward into the dark maze of tunnels we had just left. … But the rest were lost, six in all. They were simply too light; they blew away like dead leaves, and we never saw them again.

Chilling.

Lest this become more of a movie review/comparison than book, let’s just say I liked it a lot and think anyone would enjoy it — 8/10, certified Recommendable.

[newberyandchai]

An update

I've had a Google Sheet going for a while now to track my progress -- and boy, do I have a lot of posts to make.

Books I've completed but have yet to write thoughts about:

A Year Down Yonder (2001)

The Last Cuentista (2022)

The Whipping Boy (1987)

Crispin: The Cross of Lead (2003)

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (1972)

Moon Over Manifest (2011)

The View from Saturday (1997)

Books I'm looking forward to reading:

M.C. Higgins, The Great (1975)

Freewater (2023)

The Eyes and the Impossible (2024)

Out of the Dust (1998)

So: sit tight, dear reader! I'll get caught up eventually.