Review of Freewater, by Amina Luqman-Dawson

Freewater

by Amina Luqman-Dawson

Jimmy Patterson Books (Little, Brown and Company), 2022. 403 pages.
Review written February 2, 2023, from a library book.
Starred Review
2023 Newbery Medal Winner
2023 Coretta Scott King Author Award Winner
2022 Cybils Middle Grade Fiction Award Winner

I was lucky and picked up this book at the Chantilly Regional Library immediately after its win of the Newbery Medal was announced, while the library was still closed. To be fair, I was the one who had turned it in at the Chantilly library the week before. I’d had it checked out because it was a Cybils Finalist, but had decided I wouldn’t get around to reading it. I changed my mind! But I also decided that to be fair to all the people wanting to read it, I should read it quickly and return it.

Here’s what the author puts at the front of Freewater:

Some escaped the treacheries of enslavement by going North. But there were also those who ran away to the deep swamps and forests of the American South. There, in secret, they created free lives.

This is a tale of what might have been.

After that, we’re pulled into the action, with dogs chasing a boy named Homer and his 7-year-old sister Ada. Homer is upset with himself because he’d promised to bring his friend Anna with them, and Mama went back for her. But now neither Mama nor Anna is here, and they’re trying to fight off the dogs. But a river is nearby, and Homer and Ada jump into the river.

The river does take them away from the dogs, but it sweeps them downriver into the swamp. After some wandering, a man camouflaged in the trees rescues Homer from a snake. He takes them to some “tree people” — people dressed like trees, camouflaged like trees, who lead them further into the swamp, until they come to the community of Freewater, where an entire community of Black folks have been making their home in the swamp for years.

So this is the story of life in that community. But there’s lots of tension. The master of the plantation is clearing part of the swamp, and plans to hire some militia men to find all the runaways he suspects are living there. At the same time, Homer wants to go back for Mama and Anna. And Sanzi, who was born in Freewater, longs to go outside the community and bring back useful things that will make her a hero — but in her eagerness and impatience, sometimes things go wrong. So the reader worries for the community. Can they continue to live free, in hiding, foraging from the swamp and stealing from plantations?

Things all come together when there’s a big wedding at the plantation Homer escaped from. He thinks that would be the opportunity to help his Mama escape. But when he goes, several children of Freewater insist on going with him, including little Ada. It’s all too easy to imagine disaster happening.

Without telling what happens, it’s dramatic and tension-filled and very satisfying. I finished the book very happy about this year’s Newbery choice.

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Review of Victory. Stand!: Raising My Fist for Justice, by Tommie Smith, Derrick Barnes, and Dawud Anyabwile

Victory. Stand!

Raising My Fist for Justice

by Tommie Smith, Derrick Barnes, and Dawud Anyabwile

Norton Young Readers, 2022. 204 pages.
Review written January 18, 2023, from a library book
Starred Review
2023 Coretta Scott King Author Award Winner
2023 Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor
2022 National Book Award Finalist
2023 YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Finalist
2022 Cybils Award Finalist, High School Nonfiction
2023 Capitol Choices Selection

This graphic novel memoir tells the story of world-record-breaking track star Tommie Smith, who raised his fist on the gold medal podium of the Mexico City Olympics in 1968 to protest racial injustice in the United States.

The book weaves in scenes from that pivotal race through the whole book, while telling the story of Tommie’s life. He started out as the seventh child of a sharecropping family in Texas, and left with a busload of other Black folks to California. There, he got to go to school regularly, and his life changed.

I love the way graphic novel memoirs show you the emotions of the characters. We see Tommie grow and develop into an athlete. He won a college scholarship in three sports — football, basketball, and track. But when he began breaking records in track, that became his focus.

At the same time, the Civil Rights Movement was gaining steam and Tommie wanted to bring attention to the cause, using the platform of being a world-class athlete.

But when he raised his fist during the anthem at the Olympic games, he was sent home immediately and his athletic career ended. He also became a target of hate and couldn’t even find a job for a while.

I like the way the book describes his emotions and thoughts while standing there on the platform. “We had to be seen because we were not being heard.”

Eighty seconds.
That’s how long we stood
there as the anthem played.

Those fists in the air were
dedicated to everyone at home,
back in the projects in Chicago,
Oakland, and Detroit,
to everyone in the boroughs
of Queens and Brooklyn,
to all of the brothers
and sisters, fathers and mothers
in Birmingham, Atlanta, Dallas,
Houston, St. Louis, New Orleans,
to everyone struggling, working
their fingers to the bone
on farms across America,
to everyone holding out hope
that things will get better . . .

. . . that was for you,
from John and me.

This is a powerful story of someone who gave up so much in order to make a statement about people who were being overlooked.

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Review of When the Angels Left the Old Country, by Sacha Lamb

When the Angels Left the Old Country

by Sacha Lamb

Levine Querido, 2022. 400 pages.
Review written February 24, 2023, from a library book
Starred Review
2023 Michael L. Printz Honor
2023 Sidney Taylor Award Winner, Young Adult
2023 Stonewall Book Award Winner, Young Adult

Oh, this is an amazing book. I read it because of the awards it won, and even with my expectations high, I was blown away.

The story tells of an angel and a demon who are leaving a shtetl in Poland and going to America to check on Essie, the granddaughter of a rabbi in their shtetl whose letters haven’t made it back home. But this book is nothing like what I’d expect from that description. Along the way, they encounter various people preying on Jewish immigrants and defend their people.

Along the way, they also befriend Rose, a girl who’s emigrating to America on her own, after her best friend she thought would go with her had the audacity to marry a man. But Rose takes an interest in Essie and her lovely picture.

This book reminded me of the wonderful book The Golem and the Jinni, by Helene Wecker, with some of the same naivete of the angel in dealing with people. At the same time, this book is very different, surprising, and refreshing. It’s the kind of book I couldn’t resist talking about because it so captivated me.

Here’s the first paragraph:

In the back corner of the little synagogue in the shtetl that was so small and out of the way it was only called Shtetl, there was a table where an angel and a demon had been studying Talmud together for some two hundred years. Indeed, they had been studying in that corner since before the little shul was built, and had been rather startled to look up one day and realize an entire building had sprung up around them.

And on the next page:

Little Ash knew hardly any magic and did not even have the wings with which most adult demons fly from place to place. He had made trouble in the demons’ yeshiva, where they learn their magic, and without completing his studies he had been sent to Poland, where he found he liked it better than at home, as in his father’s palace other demons were always treating him like a child and telling him what to do.

The angel had been sent to Shtetl for a purpose it had now forgotten, and had stayed in Shtetl to hinder the mischievous whims of Little Ash. Like Little Ash, it resembled a human youth; unlike Little Ash, who considered himself to be male, the angel had merely chosen the shape of a man for convenience, as angels have done since the time of Abraham, Our Father. It had never had a bar mitzvah, or a bat mitzvah, or any such ceremony at all, and had never bothered to wish for one.

Its name, of course, changed according to the activity in which it was engaged. At the moment, the angel’s name was Argument.

The argument they’re having at the beginning is that they should follow the young people of Shtetl to America. Little Ash convinces the angel by showing it that doing so would be a mitzvah, finding out what happened to Essie.

Much of the book takes place on the way to America, where they encounter the first unscrupulous person and a spirit not at rest. The angel gets a name when the demon makes him papers, and that changes some things about it.

And I don’t need to tell you all that happens. But it’s an imaginative, wonderfully-spun historical novel about an angel and a demon working together to help people who need help, with much danger to themselves along the way.

levinequerido.com

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Review of The Woman All Spies Fear, by Amy Butler Greenfield

The Woman All Spies Fear

Code Breaker Elizebeth Smith Friedman and Her Hidden Life

by Amy Butler Greenfield

Random House Studio, 2021. 328 pages.
Review written February 26, 2023, from a library book
2022 YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award Finalist
2022 Cybils Award Winner – High School Nonfiction
Starred Review

Okay, I meant to read this book once it was named as a Finalist for the YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award last year. When this year it won the Cybils Award for High School Nonfiction, that intention took on new urgency. On top of that, a book for younger kids about Elizebeth Friedman, Code Breaker, Spy Hunter, by Laurie Wallmark, was a 2021 Sonderbooks Stand-out and a 2023 Mathical Book Prize Honor Book. And I watched a PBS documentary about her online, “The Codebreaker.” This book for older readers gives many more details about her fascinating life.

Elizebeth Smith was born in 1892 and got started in code breaking by working for an eccentric millionaire, looking for hidden codes from Francis Bacon in the works of Shakespeare. That search came to nothing, but it was there that Elizebeth met her husband-to-be William Friedman, who turned out to be an equally brilliant code breaker.

Elizebeth ended up using her skills for the government to unravel and create coded messages during World War I, during Prohibition against rum runners, and during World War II and beyond. She and her husband helped found cryptanalysis as a science, and trained the nation’s corps of codebreakers.

Her career spanned world wars that happened before computers were used to solve codes, and she brilliantly could spot and break multi-layered cyphers of many different types and in many different languages, using paper and pencil.

This book is packed with amazing stories of her skills, with plenty of personal details about what was going on in her life. Her husband ended up battling mental illness, but Elizebeth carried on, a working mother when that wasn’t the norm. It tells about interagency rivalry as well as national security secrecy that kept her from getting credit for her amazing work.

I enjoyed the frequent “Code Breaks” in the book that looked in more detail at a specific kind of coded message. Those gave me new appreciation for Elizebeth’s intricate level of skill, showing how messages would get coded in multi-step processes — and she would still break them. (Though I was able to solve the simple cypher the author put in the Acknowledgements.)

This book tells a wonderful story of a brilliant woman who, in a time when women’s brains weren’t valued, used hers to defeat bad guys.

amybutlergreenfield.com
GetUnderlined.com

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Review of From the Tops of the Trees, by Kao Kalia Yang, illustrated by Rachel Wada

From the Tops of the Trees

by Kao Kalia Yang
illustrated by Rachel Wada

Carolrhoda Books, 2021. 32 pages.
Review written 2/3/2023, from a library book.
Starred Review
2023 Asian/Pacific American Literature Award Winner, Picture Books

I’m so glad I checked out award winners and found this book. Kao Kalia Yang has taken an incident from when she was a small child in a refugee camp on the border of Thailand and has made a beautiful picture book from it, assisted by the wonderful paintings of Rachel Wada.

Since Kalia was small and didn’t remember anything but living in a refugee camp, she asked her father if the whole world is a refugee camp. He told her No, but wasn’t able to explain what the wide world is like.

So one day, he had her mother dress her up in her good clothes, and he climbed with her on his back to the top of a tree. From there, she could see far beyond the refugee camp. Her mother took a picture of them.

“Father, the world is so big,” I say.

My father answers, “Yes, it is.” He says softly, “One day my little girl will journey far into the world, to the places her father has never been.”

My father tells me to smile at the camera, but I can’t because I now know that the world is bigger than anything I had imagined. My little legs will have to carry me far.

I love that the Author’s Note at the back includes the photograph that inspired the story.

kaokaliayang.com
rachelwada.com
lernerbooks.com

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Review of Chef’s Kiss, written by Jarrett Melendez, illustrated by Danica Brine

Chef’s Kiss

written by Jarrett Melendez
illustrated by Danica Brine
colored by Hank Jones
lettered by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou

Oni Press, 2022. 160 pages.
Review written February 26, 2022, from a library book
Starred Review
2023 Alex Award Winner

The Alex Award is given each year to ten books published for adults that will be of interest to teens. The committee picked a fun one with this rom-com graphic novel.

The characters in this book are new adults. We meet four of them on the first panel, moving into a new apartment together after college. Two have jobs already, which they’re ready to begin. One is staying in school with a new major (theater), and the other, Ben, has job interviews lined up.

We follow Ben to the interviews, and in each one, the interviewer loses interest when Ben admits he doesn’t have professional experience. He decides to lower his sights, but even the trash collectors want professional experience!

It’s at that point that Ben sees a Help Wanted sign at a restaurant, with “No Experience Necessary” at the bottom. And the cook who talks with him is heart-throbbingly handsome. Ben does have some ideas about cooking and something of a knack for it. But it’s a three-week training process before he can be permanently hired, and he has to please the owner’s pig!

The training is full of ups and downs, as he gets to know his handsome coworker. But then on the last day, his parents learn that he didn’t get the writing job he’d told them about. They pressure him instead to take an internship with a literary magazine, with their support, rather than continuing with “this nonsense” of working in a restaurant.

The whole thing is super fun, with adorable characters trying to set out into adult life. Since it’s a graphic novel, it didn’t take me long to read, and left me smiling.

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Review of Queer Ducks (And Other Animals), by Eliot Schrefer

Queer Ducks
(And Other Animals)

The Natural World of Animal Sexuality

by Eliot Schrefer
illustrations by Jules Zuckerberg

Katherine Tegen Books (HarperCollins), 2022. 230 pages.
Review written February 22, 2023, from a library book
Starred Review
2023 Michael L. Printz Honor Book
2023 Capitol Choices selection

Oh my goodness, I learned so much from this book! You’ve probably heard of the book And Tango Makes Three — a book about two male penguins starting a family and hatching an egg together? Well, that’s merely a drop in the bucket of same-sex relationships in the animal kingdom. In fact, “The number of species with confirmed substantial queer behaviors, published in well-regarded scientific journals, is 1,500 and growing.”

The thing is? In the past, we didn’t have an easy way to tell male and female penguins apart. Or the males and females of many species. So when scientists saw animals having sex or doing sexy things, they assumed they were looking at males and females. Well, now we have blood tests we can use to determine sex, and there’s a whole lot more going on out there.

The entire book is fascinating and eye-opening, even for me, a straight cisgender woman. But because I have a transgender daughter and left a church that doesn’t affirm LGBTQ people, I especially enjoyed the chapter on velvet-horned deer.

I already knew that many varieties of fish and frogs often change their gender. But I didn’t know anything about velvet-horned deer.

As they grow from yearlings into adults, all male deer go through a “velvet” stage, in which their growing horns are covered by soft fuzz. As they reach sexual maturity, the velvet is generally shed, revealinng the bone antlers underneath. Some deer born with external male genitalia, though, never shed their velvet, and have bodies closer to those of female deer.

Known as velvet-horns, these intersex deer don’t enter the pecking order of the rest of the deer society. In fact, they’re soon driven out by the males. They skip the bachelor herds and the groups of mothers, and instead form their own troops of three to seven velvet-horns. Velvet-horns don’t produce offspring, but live out healthy deer lives in their own velvet-horn societies.

Life as a velvet-horn sounds kind of awesome, actually. You hang out with your “found family” of like-minded deer, skip the work of birthing your own fawns, and avoid the deer-on-deer violence of the bachelor herds.

That’s just part of the chapter about animals apparently outside the gender binary. But I wish I could show it to the pastor whose entire argument that being transgender is “against God’s design” was because of a verse in Genesis that says God created them “male and female.” Because God also created the animals “male and female” and it turns out that they aren’t constricted by that. (Of course, God also made “day and night” — and we still know about twilight. It was never even close to a good argument, but knowing what I know now, it got even worse.)

And I knew, from old “Wild Kingdom” TV shows, that many birds do elaborate courtship dances. What I didn’t know is that some birds will do them to a member of the same sex and pair bond with them for life. In albatrosses, it’s often the females who do this. They’ll have some sex on the side to get eggs, and then they work together to raise the chicks — and those two-mother “nest-holds” end up having better chick survival rates.

I can’t even begin to tell all the stories of what I learned in this book. They’re told in an engaging way and just completely surprised me. It turns out that animals of all kinds have lots of sex and a lot of it is not males and females making babies. Who knew?

The author of the book is gay, and grew up being told that was unnatural and twisted.

This is partly a book for lonely eleven-year-old Eliot, who only began to see himself as worthy of full respect many years after coming out. I thought that queerness separated me from the rest of the animal world, but came to love myself once I began to feel deep in my bones that being “unnatural” didn’t automatically make me bad or wrong. That’s still certainly true: there’s no innate link between unnatural things and wrongness. After all, reading books could be considered “unnatural,” but few people argue that it’s bad. Regardless, the young Eliot would have had a quicker journey to self-acceptance if he’d known the science that’s in this book.

I admit I giggled a little when I first checked out this book. Once I started reading, I was flat-out fascinated! It’s not often I read a book so packed with scientific facts I didn’t know before.

Here’s a paragraph from the concluding chapter:

While the “why” of animal queerness is still a topic of productive and exciting scientific debate, the “that” of it — the fact that animal queerness exists and is substantially represented in the natural world — is unmistakable. There’s an incredible diversity to animal sexual behavior and sexual expression, and each new piece of research in this exciting field has led to revelations that reshape what we assume animals are capable of — and what humans themselves are capable of. Queer behavior in animals is as diverse and complex — and natural — as any other sort of sexual behavior.

It turns out that queer humans are not unusual after all, if you look at the wider animal kingdom. And that’s a refreshing and eye-opening perspective.

Oh, and let me also mention that it’s all told in a humorous and friendly tone, with cartoons at the front of each chapter portraying an animal GSA group. The book doesn’t stir up lustful feelings, but it does stir up lots of scientific curiosity and wonder.

Learn some science! Read this award-winning book!

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Review of Too Many Pigs and One Big Bad Wolf, by Davide Cali and Marianna Balducci

Too Many Pigs and One Big Bad Wolf

by Davide Cali and Marianna Balducci

Tundra Books, 2022. 32 pages.
Review written January 8, 2023, from my own copy.
Starred Review
2023 Mathical Book Prize Honor Book, Grades K-2
2022 Sonderbooks Standout: #9 Silly Fun Picture Books

This very silly book is a counting book that’s not really a counting book.

Here’s how it begins:

Once upon a time, there were three little pigs.
Then the wolf ate them.
THE END.

This story is too short!
I want a longer one!

In the longer story on the next page, there are four little pigs that get eaten.

And so it progresses, the narrator adding wild things to the story, the “reader” complaining, and the result always the same.

The pigs are drawn from beads on an abacus. There are not more than ten beads on a row, and often they’re grouped by fives, so counting is easy.

The graphics, the silly stories, and the dialogue between the narrator and the objector are simply loads of fun. We never see the pigs get eaten, and there’s a feeling that these are actors that are not really harmed, since the same abacus gets reused. So it keeps things light and silly, despite so very many pigs supposedly getting eaten.

This is another one you’ll enjoy most if you check it out for yourself, as my description can’t do justice to how much fun it is. You can throw in some counting when you read it to your kid, but I don’t think they’ll think of it as a counting book.

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Review of Revolution in Our Time, by Kekla Magoon

Revolution in Our Time

The Black Panther Party’s Promise to the People

by Kekla Magoon

Candlewick Press, 2021. 390 pages.
Review written August 20, 2022, from my own copy, purchased at the Walter Awards and signed by the author.
2022 Printz Honor Book
2022 Coretta Scott King Author Honor Award
2022 National Book Award Finalist
2022 Walter Dean Myers Honor Award
Starred Review

Revolution in Our Time is an amazing work of scholarship, telling the complete history of the Black Panther Party for young people, complete with hundreds of photographs and plenty of sidebars and analysis. It won multiple Honor awards, and the meticulous research and clear presentation make it an obvious choice, even for awards that are usually won by novelists.

I didn’t know much at all about the Black Panthers. And honestly, all my impressions of them were negative. I certainly didn’t know that much of their reason for existing was to protest the same disproportionate police violence against Black people that still exists today. But it went much further than that. They wanted to help Black people in poverty and help Black communities come together. Reading this book helped me understand the organization was much more nuanced than anything I’d heard about them.

The Panthers fought a revolution in their time, just as we are fighting one in ours. They were called troublemakers, terrorists, and branded as anti-American, but the truth of their work belies these labels. They boldly claimed their place at the vanguard of a centuries-old fight for equality, and their legacy continues to lead the way forward. The story of the Black Panther Party is one of violence and heartbreak and struggle and conviction. It is the story of a group of young people who set out to change the world around them — in very radical ways.

They came up against many obstacles — including an FBI effort to stop them. They had many successes and many failures. This book tells their complete story, and it opened my eyes.

I was especially interested to learn that especially at the beginning, they were careful to follow all laws. They “policed the police” following police actions with legally owned guns, to protect people in their neighborhoods from police violence. I’m afraid I’m not surprised this resulted in some changes to what was legal.

I like the way the last chapter focuses on how young the founders of the Black Panther Party were. There is a reason the author targeted this amazing work of scholarship to young people. Here’s a paragraph from that last chapter:

I discovered an archival video in the course of my research, with former civil rights movement leaders who were looking back in the early 2000s at their own words and convictions of the 1960s. They declared in retrospect that the biggest mistake of the civil rights era was to believe that all the problems could be solved in their lifetime, and they failed to train the next generation to take up the mantle in the necessary ways to maintain the struggle. My own life experience bears this up in a lot of ways: young people are often underestimated and excluded from challenging conversations. Whether it’s to protect the children, or due to a misguided faith in their own power to solve everything, the perennial mistake of elders is to dismiss the power and potential of youth. On the flip side, the mistake of youth is often to dismiss the wisdom and experience of those who have gone before. In their day, the Panthers didn’t make either of these mistakes. They placed the core of their emphasis on building a cadre of revolutionary youth, and they promoted empowerment through education about Black history. They were undermined and overturned at every stage, perhaps partly because of the truly systemic nature of the change they envisioned, and the fact that they made real progress in these directions in a very short time frame.

Not that the author paints a completely rosy picture of what the Black Panthers were trying to do. But whatever you know about the Black Panthers, I suspect this book will give you a fuller picture. An amazing story of people who wanted to bring about equality and were willing to fight to get it.

keklamagoon.com

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Review of Anya and the Dragon, by Sofiya Pasternack

Anya and the Dragon

by Sofiya Pasternack

Versify (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), 2019. 394 pages.
Review written May 19, 2020, from a library book
Starred Review
2020 Sidney Taylor Book Award Honor, Middle Grade

Anya and her family live in a village in Russia during the time of the tsars. Their family is Jewish, and they’re trying to blend in. But Anya’s papa has been sent to fight in the wars, and the magistrate says that doesn’t give them relief from taxes because they’re Jews, so they’re likely to lose their house.

Meanwhile, magic has been forbidden by the tsar, but everyone in the village quietly uses magic anyway – except for Anya, who hopes she will discover that she has magic at the time of her bat mizvah.

When the tsar’s fool and his family come to their village, the youngest son, Ivan, makes friends with Anya. His father tells Anya that they have come to capture the local dragon and take it to the tsar. He will pay Anya to help them find it, which could solve all their problems.

Is there a dragon in their village? And if Anya hands him over, would she be responsible for his death? Meanwhile, a foreigner has come to the village who is also looking for the dragon. And he’s strong and magical and determined not to let anyone stand in his way.

Based on the title, readers won’t be surprised when Anya does meet a dragon. But there are many surprises about what the dragon is like.

I like the way this book takes a simple fantasy tale about a magical creature and weaves in thoughts about right and wrong and doing good as Anya is getting ready for her bat mizvah.

I also like Anya’s courage, persistence and cleverness as she faces many dangerous mythical creatures as well as a supernaturally strong man who wants to kill her. This story has adventure and danger as well as humorous, kind, and loving characters.

hmhbooks.com

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Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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