Review of Just a Girl, by Lia Levi

Award Winners, Beginning Chapter Books, Children's Fiction Review, Historical, Starred Review 0

Just a Girl

A True Story of World War II

by Lia Levi
with pictures by Jess Mason
translated from Italian by Sylvia Notini

Harper, 2022. Originally published in Italy in 2020.
Review written February 24, 2023, from a library book.
Starred Review
2023 Mildred Batchelder Award Winner

The Mildred Batchelder Award is given every year to a children’s book originally published in a language other than English in a country other than the United States. It’s given to the publisher, to encourage them to find and translate such books.

Just a Girl is a gently told early chapter book about a terrible time. The author Lia Levi was a girl living in Italy in 1938, having just finished first grade. The book begins as she’s told she won’t be able to go back to school this year, but will have to go to a Jewish school.

As the war progresses in Italy, her father loses his job. They think things will get better after Mussolini is put out of power, but then the Germans come and things get worse. Lia and her sisters have to hide in a convent boarding school and use fake last names.

The author does a good job of telling about bad things, but also reassuring the reader with insertions as her older self. She does acknowledge that she was luckier than many others and does highlight the unfairness of her family being targeted for who they were. And through all of the story, the worries and troubles are punctuated with stories of kids finding ways to have a good time.

And in the last chapter (I don’t think this is a spoiler.), she wrote a letter to a radio station and began with, “I am a Jewish girl.” She was surprised when her mother tore it up.

What terrible mistake could I have made? And even if I had made a mistake, couldn’t we have fixed it?

Mama’s face isn’t serious, though.

Now she’s happily tossing all those bits and ripped-up pieces of paper everywhere as though they were confetti at Mardi Gras.

“You’re not a Jewish girl,” she says, smiling. “You’re a girl. Just a girl.”

What’s this all about? For years now, they’ve been shouting and writing female student of Jewish race next to my name everywhere.

I know perfectly well that the laws against the Jews have been repealed. But what is this about not being a Jewish girl?

Mama laughs.

“You’re mixing things up. Of course you’re still Jewish,” she says. Then her face gets very serious and she tries to explain. “You’re Jewish, but that’s something personal. It doesn’t need to be a label you wear on your forehead. You’re Jewish, you have two sisters, you go to school, you like going to the movies. . . . These are all facts about you. If you want to, you can tell others, but only if you choose to. These facts are no longer of any importance to the State, to the authorities. They have to let you go to school, to the gym, to the library, to your tennis or dance lesson, without saying: she can, but she can’t; he can, but he can’t.”

A lovely story that gives a gentle way for young children to learn about discrimination.

harpercollinschildrens.com

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Review of Solito, by Javier Zamora, read by the author

Audiobooks, Award Winners, Biography, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review, True Stories 0

Solito

A Memoir

by Javier Zamora
read by the author

Random House Audio, 2022. 17 hours, 8 minutes.
Review written May 2, 2023, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review
2023 Alex Award winner

The Alex Award is for books written for adults that will appeal to teens. Solito is a worthy winner, since in the entire memoir the author is nine years old. It’s the intense subject matter that put this book into the adult market.

Solito is a memoir — and the story of the author’s journey from El Salvador to the United States all by himself in 1999 when he was nine years old. His grandfather took him on the first leg to Guatemala. But then Javier was entrusted to a “coyote,” supposed to be taken safely to Mexico and then the USA to be reunited at last with his parents.

The trip was supposed to be relatively simple, taking a maximum of two weeks. Pretty early on, the plans got messed up. I won’t tell you how many weeks or how many tries it took before he was reunited with his parents, because I don’t want to mess up the suspense — but it was more than one try and much more than two weeks.

The journey was harrowing. In boats, in cars, buses and vans, and on foot through the desert. The author remembers details from a child’s perspective, doing what people told him, and making up names for the desert plants and animals. He is especially grateful to the adults who took him under their wing when plans went terribly awry, pretending he was part of their family to get him safely past officials.

The author doesn’t tell you what to think about the journey. But my reaction is that this is terrible. No child should have to go through such an arduous journey just to have to be with his parents.

But no matter what you conclude, this amazing story will have you riveted and will touch your heart.

javierzamora.net

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Review of Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver

Audiobooks, Award Winners, Fiction Review, Historical, Starred Review 2

Demon Copperhead

by Barbara Kingsolver
read by Charlie Thurston

HarperAudio, 2022. 21 hours, 3 minutes.
Review written June 30, 2023, from a library eaudiobook
Starred Review
2023 Pulitzer Prize Winner
2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction Winner

I’ll be honest: When I was in the middle of this long audiobook, I wasn’t enjoying it much. It tells the story of Demon Copperhead — a kid named Damon, who, like the father who died before he was born, had red hair. He was born in the very rural Lee County, Virginia, to an addict Mom, and bad things just kept happening to him, so the book was somewhat depressing. I kept listening, because it was written by Barbara Kingsolver, who is a truly amazing author.

There was abuse from a stepdad, overdose death of his mother, terrible foster home situations, and eventually getting addicted himself. The narrator had such an authentic rural Virginia accent, I was surprised when he spoke at the end of the book in the “thank you for reading this book” section without the accent.

Something the author does to make all this terrible stuff tolerable is telling the story from the perspective of an older Demon telling about his life. So we know he’s going to survive and get through these awful things. And when things take a particularly bad turn, there’s plenty of foreshadowing, with him wondering if he had done things differently in the events leading up to the disaster, if that would have helped. Or talking about how he didn’t fully appreciate it when things were good — so you know his troubles aren’t over.

When I was in the middle thinking I was tired of listening to it and that I don’t enjoy listening to a rural southern accent as much as a British one — that was when the kids in the story noticed that the media portrays to the world that rural southerners and hillbillies are stupid. Touché! As I began thinking I didn’t really like spending all that time in Demon’s life — then he naturally in the story pointed out that’s how the media wants me to think.

The book also showed the opioid crisis and how it gained full steam. (I’m going to call it Historical because it begins in the 1990s.) The drug companies actually looked for populations likely to get hooked and sent their representatives there, giving doctors kickbacks if they prescribed the addictive painkillers. Damon got hooked after a football injury — beginning by only taking exactly what was prescribed. The whole awful situation is told in a way that reminds the reader that these are people’s lives that were destroyed, not some kind of lazy subhumans who deserved their fate.

And yes, by the time I’d listened to all 21 hours of this book, I was glad I did. I ended up having a much higher view of the folks in the communities portrayed, and I was pleased and proud to have spent so much of my time with a kid who got way more than his share of tough breaks in life, but whose heart shines like gold.

barbarakingsolver.net

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Review of Seen and Unseen, by Elizabeth Partridge and Lauren Tamaki

Award Winners, History, Starred Review, Teen Nonfiction 0

Seen and Unseen

What Dorothea Lange, Toyo Miyatake, and Ansel Adams’s Photographs Reveal About the Japanese American Incarceration

by Elizabeth Partridge
illustrated by Lauren Tamaki

Chronicle Books, 2022. 124 pages.
Review written February 26, 2023, from a library book
Starred Review
2023 Sibert Award Winner

Seen and Unseen won the Sibert Award for the best informational book for children published in 2022. The book tells the story of the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II, especially looking at the testimony of three photographers.

Here’s the beginning of Dorothea Lange’s section:

In the San Francisco Bay area, Dorothea Lange was asked to photograph the roundup and forced relocation of all Japanese and Japanese Americans on the West Coast. Officials wanted documentary photos to show it was being carried out in a humane, orderly way.

Dorothea was horrified by the government’s plan. The prisoners would be held without charges filed against them and without the right to a trial. That was illegal in the United States. But there was a war on, and Japanese Americans’ rights were suspended.

Dorothea could have refused, but she ws eager to take the job. She wanted her photographs to show what the government was doing was unfair and undemocratic.

We see many of the pictures she took in the pages that follow, along with descriptions of what was going on. But most of the ones we see are labeled “Impounded” — they were withheld from the public during the war, to try to hide the brutal conditions of the imprisonment of American citizens.

Meanwhile, photographer Toyo Miyatake was imprisoned in the camps. He smuggled in his camera lens and took photos, giving a starker and more realistic picture of life in the camp.

Later in the war, he was asked to open an official photography studio to document special events like weddings and funerals. But in a silly and humiliating bit of red tape, they wouldn’t let him press the button on the camera and they hired a white American to do that.

The final photographer featured is Ansel Adams. He came in 1943, paid by the government, to support “loyal” Japanese Americans being resettled in other parts of America. They showed him happy faces — not necessarily the true story.

This book as a whole shows how a terrible national tragedy was presented to the public in general at the time. The book is full of illustrations as well as photographs and vividly presents what happened.

I thought this page was particularly striking, with a picture of a father talking to a little boy:

“I don’t know what’s going to happen to your mother and me,” future US Congressman Norman Mineta’s Issei father told him and his four siblings. “But just remember: All of you are US citizens and this is your home. There is nothing anyone can do to take this away from you.”

He was wrong.

elizabethpartridge.com
laurentamaki.com
chroniclekids.com

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Review of American Murderer, by Gail Jarrow

Award Winners, History, Science, Starred Review, Teen Nonfiction 0

American Murderer

The Parasite That Haunted the South

by Gail Jarrow

Calkins Creek, 2022. 159 pages.
Review written January 15, 2023, from a library book
Starred Review
2023 YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Finalist
2022 Cybils Award Finalist, High School Nonfiction

I’m squeamish, so I didn’t expect to enjoy this book from the “Medical Fiascoes Series” as much as I did. But Gail Jarrow, a past winner of the YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award, makes the story of this medical mystery fascinating.

It’s all about a parasite. Scientists in Europe discovered that hookworms were making people sick in the late 1800s. But in 1902, a scientist named Charles Wardell Stiles discovered a distinct type of hookworm in America. He named it Necator americanus, which means “American murderer.”

But after discovering the new parasite came the dawning realization that more than 40% of rural southern families were infected with it, up to 2 or 3 million people.

Afflicted people complained of diarrhea and a bloated abdomen. Their skin was paler than normal. Children were physically underdeveloped. Adults didn’t have enough endurance to perform even minor work, and they were usually poor because they couldn’t earn a living. Some people had experienced these symptoms for years, and family members had died with the same ailments. None of them knew why they’d been plagued for generations. They just accepted it.

The rest of the community considered these people sluggish and lazy. Because pica was a common symptom, the infected were often mocked as “dirt-eaters.” No one understood that the symptoms were not a sign of weak character or low mental ability. They were evidence of a tiny worm — actually hundreds of worms — slowly sucking blood from a victim’s small intestine.

Living during the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s easy to understand why most of this book is about convincing people — and doctors — that hookworm was real and convincing them to get treatment. Scientists also worked to get them to change things about their everyday lives. The worm gets into people through skin — mostly when people walk with bare feet on infected ground soiled with infected human feces.

So besides getting people to get tested and treated, there was also a campaign for sanitary privies. But those were expensive, as were shoes for growing children.

But the whole story of fighting the bug is an amazing success story with millions of lives saved and improved. I especially liked the many photos of infected people before and after treatment. The last chapter covers ways parasites still endanger people today, yes, even in America.

Overall, this is an abundance of clear information about a major public health problem from a hundred years ago that I previously knew absolutely nothing about. Almost every spread has photos or side bars, and the story is riveting as Gail Jarrow tells it. An amazing achievement.

gailjarrow.com

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Review of All My Rage, by Sabaa Tahir

Award Winners, Contemporary, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

All My Rage

by Sabaa Tahir

Razorbill (Penguin Random House), 2022. 376 pages.
Review written February 13, 2023, from a library book.
Starred Review
2023 Printz Award Winner
2023 Walter Award Winner, Teens
2022 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature Winner
2022 Boston Globe/Horn Book Award Winner, Fiction and Poetry
2022 Cybils Finalist, Young Adult Fiction

What a beautiful book. I closed the book completely understanding all the awards and acclaim this book has received.

All My Rage tells the story of two Muslim seniors in high school who have been best friends for most of their lives — until recently when they had a fight after Noor told Salahudin she had feelings for him and wanted something more. He said she’d ruined their friendship.

But they come back into each other’s lives when Salahudin’s mother Misbah dies with failing kidneys — a problem she couldn’t afford to treat because they don’t have health insurance, running their own motel.

Both of them have more problems than they can cope with after Misbah’s death. Salahudin’s father numbs his mind with alcohol, so it’s up to Salahudin to figure out how to pay the bills and keep the motel, the place his mother had loved.

Misbah was like a foster mother to Noor. She came to America after all her family but her were killed in an earthquake in Pakistan when she was a second-grader. Her uncle who was studying in America found her, digging her out of the wreckage of their family home. But he couldn’t find any other living relative to take care of her, and now he runs a liquor store near the army base where he’d first found work in America. He doesn’t want Noor to go to college, but work in the liquor store so he finally can go to college. She secretly submitted seven applications, but without Salahudin to help her with the essays — she’s getting rejections. Will she never be able to leave the small desert town?

Their problems and misunderstandings get much much worse as the novel goes on. I will only say that although hard things happened, and some of the characters made bad decisions along the way, the ending was tremendously satisfying. Don’t give up on it as a depressing and discouraging book! The difficulties they face makes the story all the more of a triumph.

And the writing is lyrical and beautiful. Along with the stories of Noor and Salahudin, we get his mother’s story, beginning with when her parents told her she was getting married. Captions at the beginning of the parts come from Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art,” which is about “the art of losing.” As our characters cope with one loss after another, the reader gets pulled into the story, rooting for them and suffering with them. These are characters I will never forget.

SabaaTahir.com
PenguinTeen.com

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Review of Freewater, by Amina Luqman-Dawson

Award Winners, Children's Fiction Review, Historical, Starred Review 0

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.

lbyr.com

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

Award Winners, Biography, Graphic Memoir, History, Starred Review, Teen Nonfiction 0

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

Award Winners, Historical, Paranormal, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

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

Award Winners, Biography, Starred Review, Teen Nonfiction 0

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.

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