Dean Schneider

BookPage Children's Top Pick, September 2014

Award-winning author Jacqueline Woodson was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1963, in a “country caught between Black and White.” John F. Kennedy was president, Martin Luther King Jr. was planning the March on Washington, and Malcolm X talked of revolution. But, like her picture book Show Way (2005), Woodson’s new memoir-in-verse, Brown Girl Dreaming, is of the ages—an African-American family’s story traced across the generations to Thomas Jefferson Woodson, perhaps the first son of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, and William J. Woodson, who fought for the Union in the Civil War. Her story is “history coming down through time,” narrated as if she is standing right next to us, pointing out family pictures on the wall of her childhood home.

Woodson’s father always said that “there’s never gonna be a Woodson that sits in the back of the bus,” but her mother yearned to move home to Greenville, South Carolina. In beautifully drawn family and community scenes, Woodson shows the warmth of life in the South, even while she learns to sit in the back of the bus, to step off the curb for white people, and not to look white people in the eye. When they move again, Woodson feels a sense of loss and sees New York City as “treeless as a bad dream. Who could love / this place—where / no pine trees grow, no porch swings move / with the weight of / your grandmother on them.” Readers may well find this one of the best books they have ever read, rich with a sense of time and place and glowing with the author’s passion for words.

This article was originally published in the September 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

A burning witch, a girl celebrating her birthday, a master puppeteer and his two orphaned assistants, and a dark city half-drowned in fog animate Laura Amy Schlitz’s lushly written Victorian gothic tale, Splendors and Glooms.

It’s Clara Wintermute’s 12th birthday, and the Phenomenal Professor Grisini and his Venetian Fantoccini (puppets) perform at the Wintermute mansion. Later that evening, Clara disappears, and Grisini, “with his foreignness and his flamboyance,” is the prime suspect. His assistants, Lizzie Rose and Parsefall, come to realize that Grisini is not just a puppeteer but an evil magician who has kidnapped Clara.

Until now, Lizzie rose had thought that “magic spells—and evil magicians—They’re only in plays.” But she and Parsefall discover Clara’s horrible fate and soon find themselves en route to Venice, where the stories of Grisini, the children and the witch—Cassandra Sagredo—converge in a magical castle, complete with spells to keep the children from running away.

A challenging read for its intended middle-grade audience, the novel is expertly plotted and elegantly written, a dramatic Dickensian story of good and evil, the odd machinations of fate and the ever-present dripping fog of London. Schlitz animates her characters as adeptly as Grisini does his puppets, and readers may well notice that the fantoccini are not the only things manipulated by strings in this story: Spells, enchantments, desires, secrets and power pull strings of their own, as do—importantly for the fates of Parsefall, Lizzie Rose and Clara—loyalty and love.

Schlitz, author of the 2008 Newbery Medal-winning Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices From A Medieval Village, again demonstrates her storytelling prowess and love of the grand tale. Besides the rich language, setting and plot, Splendors and Glooms features an utterly delicious story that weaves its spell through the fortunes of innocent and not-so-innocent children, the cadaverous puppet master, a dying witch eager for revenge and dramatic action in a castle tower that will have readers as entranced as Grisini’s audiences.

“I saw change coming and that’s always a worry,” Helena says at the start of Richard Peck’s Secrets at Sea. The Upstairs Cranstons are going to Europe in search of a husband for Olive, “pushing twenty-one without a man in sight.” If the Cranstons shutter the windows and shut up the house, life will change for Helena’s family, for they are mice, among the First Families on the Hudson River, having arrived ages before the Dutch or the English.

They were all family—the wealthy human Upstairs Cranstons and the mice Cranstons below—but with the usual inequities of wealth and social class. The mice knew all of the joys and sorrows of their counterparts, but the humans knew nothing of theirs, didn’t even know a word of their mouse language. Peck sets his tale on the eve of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, masterfully delineating the domestic world of the Cranston families from Helena Cranston’s mouse-eye view, including her brothers and sisters—the skittering Louise, reckless Lamont, meek (even mousy, you might say) Beatrice and her own worrying self.

They are all off on an ocean voyage, along with the Upstairs Cranstons. The sea journey is deliciously related, full of funny scenes that beg to be read aloud, and readers will sense the fun Peck must have had in the writing. The Upstairs Cranstons are, of course, in the ship’s first-class section; Helena and her family are not. But, as Helena knows, it is the job of mice to keep the families together, so she overcomes her fear of water and does what must be done. What ensues are adventures galore—lifeboat drills, cat-and-mouse chases, the dispatching of an evil nanny, a hilarious princess’ reception and plenty of romance.

Ever versatile, Peck has fashioned a social comedy that is a pure delight.

“Everyone knows that Alberto Santos-Dumont invented the airplane,” right? Even if you’ve never heard of Santos-Dumont, you’ll be delighted to meet this real-life historical figure in Victoria Griffith’s vivid debut picture book.

Alberto was a Brazilian in Paris who had a 35-foot dirigible of his own design as his personal mode of transportation. He’d fly his airship over the streets of Paris, landing to run errands, stopping at Maxim’s restaurant for coffee or dropping by the hat shop to replace the hat burned up by the airship’s hydrogen gas. Alberto told the shop owner, “I tell you, these machines will mean the end of all wars.” He felt that flying to different countries would open eyes and minds to how people all over the world have much in common. In fact, as Griffith writes in her fascinating author’s note, Alberto became distraught over the use of airplanes in warfare, so much so that, further saddened by his fall from favor, he took his own life in 1932.

But Alberto wanted to do more than fly his dirigible through the skies of Paris, though he is the only one known ever to do so. In 1906, he flew an airplane of his own design for 20 seconds, the first pilot to take off and land a self-propelled craft. The Wright brothers had flown in Kitty Hawk in 1903, but their plane required high winds and a rail system to propel the plane. Clearly, it’s a matter of debate as to what constitutes a true airplane, as the Wright brothers have gone down in history, and Alberto Santos-Dumont is largely unknown.

But now this fine picture book resurrects his story in lively prose and large-scale illustrations rendered in pastels, chalks, oil pastels and oil paint, perfectly capturing the drama of the events. The fuzzy lines lend a feeling of history to the illustrations, and gestures and humorous touches, such as a dog holding the dirigible’s tether or Alberto racing horse-drawn carriages, make Alberto Santos-Dumont and his times come alive.

The Fabulous Flying Machines of Alberto Santos-Dumont is a lovely work for young readers who will soon spread their wings, too.

The 2008 Caldecott Committee made a bold decision in selecting Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret as its Medal winner. A 544-page novel as best picture book? It did have 158 illustrations central to the telling of the story, and the committee decided it was a new form of picture book.

Now, Selznick is back with Wonderstruck, an even bigger novel. As in Hugo Cabret, artwork tells much of the story, two independent threads of visual and prose narrative weaving in and out, eventually coming together as the protagonists meet and their stories join. Young Ben’s prose narrative begins in 1977, at Gunflint Lake, Minnesota, and young Rose’s visual narrative begins in 1927, in Hoboken, New Jersey. Both characters yearn for a better life, trying to find their places in the world. Ben’s mother has died, and his journey takes him to New York City in search of the father he never knew. Rose is deaf and her parents are protective, but she, too, is lured by the big city.

Selznick’s pencil drawings perfectly capture Rose’s heartbreak­ingly earnest expressions, and a full-page spread evokes in careful detail the “cabinets of wonders,” early museum displays of objects that evoke the wonders of the world. By the end of the novel, Ben wonders if we’re not all collectors of objects, moments and experiences, “making our own cabinet of wonders” during our lives. This becomes the novel’s theme: being open to the wonders of the world.

Not everyone is open to being wonderstruck, but Ben and Rose are; as they say (in a line borrowed from Oscar Wilde), “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

“Time to visit kinfolk,” Aunt Tilley would say to 12-year-old Delana, reaching for the basket behind the sofa. Delana’s African-American family resided in that basket—photographs of aunts and uncles and cousins were brought out to have their stories told and bits of family history absorbed by Delana. But when Aunt Tilley dies and Delana begins to look further into the stories behind these tintypes, “card visits” and portraits, she realizes that Aunt Tilley’s stories weren’t always accurate—things don’t match up. Aunt Tilley had been so protective that Delana had lived a cautious “locked-up life,” always told what to do and how to be, and never learning the true story of the mother and father she has never known.

When Tilley dies, into Delana’s life comes her mother’s close friend, Ambertine, who urges Delana to get some “freedom wings,” to dream a world better than the one she has. While Tilley taught Delana to beware of life, Ambertine encourages her to see the world anew and decide what she wants out of life. Delana studies her pictures, “searching their faces for clues to me,” gradually “bringing some order to the kinfolk” and finding family in the pictures she has had all along, with new ones offered by Albertine and Grandpa.

Tonya Bolden, best known for her award-winning works of nonfiction for children and teens, sets this beautiful, quiet, “shimmershining” novel in 1905 Charleston, West Virginia, a step into the 20th century, yet not so far from slavery days. Much of the novel has to do with the legacy of slavery and Grandpa’s determination to make a place in the world for his family. Delana’s earnest first-person point of view rings true to the spirit and passions of a girl about to turn 13, and Bolden’s photographs from her personal collection help readers to be partners in Delana’s search for family.

Readers who find themselves entranced by Bolden’s photographs might also try Walter Dean Myers’ Here in Harlem and Lois Lowry’s The Silent Boy, both wonderfully wrought volumes that tell stories in words and photographs.