Review of The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery

elegance_of_the_hedgehogThe Elegance of the Hedgehog

by Muriel Barbery

Translated from the French by Alison Anderson

Europa Editions, New York, 2008. 325 pages.
Original title: L’elegance du herisson, published in France in 2006.
Starred Review
Sonderbooks Stand-out 2010: #3 Fiction

Two people live at number 7, rue de Grenelle, who are far more than what they seem. The building holds eight luxury apartments and their amenities. Paloma, on the fifth floor, is planning to burn theirs down and commit suicide on her thirteenth birthday.

Why should a child with so many advantages and so much intelligence decide to end her life? Paloma explains:

“All our family acquaintances have followed the same path: their youth spent trying to make the most of their intelligence, squeezing their studies like a lemon to make sure they’d secure a spot among the elite, then the rest of their lives wondering with a flabbergasted look on their faces why all that hopefulness has led to such a vain existence. People aim for the stars, and they end up like goldfish in a bowl. I wonder if it wouldn’t be simpler just to teach children right from the start that life is absurd. That might deprive you of a few good moments in your childhood but it would save you a considerable amount of time as an adult — not to mention the fact that you’d be spared at least one traumatic experience, i. e. the goldfish bowl….

“But one thing is sure — there’s no way I’m going to end up in the goldfish bowl. I’ve thought it through quite carefully. Even for someone like me who is super-smart and gifted in her studies and different from everyone else, in fact superior to the vast majority — even for me life is already all plotted out and so dismal you could cry: no one seems to have thought of the fact that if life is absurd, being a brilliant success has no greater value than being a failure. It’s just more comfortable. And even then: I think lucidity gives your success a bitter taste, whereas mediocrity still leaves hope for something.”

Meanwhile, the other surprising person in the building is Madame Michel, the humble concierge, who is determined never to give away to anyone in the building how brilliant she is.

“I conform so very well to what social prejudice has collectively construed to be a typical French concierge that I am one of the multiple cogs that make the great universal illusion turn, the illusion according to which life has a meaning that can be easily deciphered.”

Since the image of the concierge is someone who lazily sits around and watches popular television shows, until her husband’s death, Madame Michel let him preserve that part of her image.

“With the advent of videocassettes and, subsequently, the DVD divinity, things changed radically, much to the enrichment of my happy hours. As it is not terribly common to come across a concierge waxing ecstatic over Death in Venice or to hear strains of Mahler wafting from her loge, I delved into my hard-earned conjugal savings and bought a second television set that I could operate in my hideaway. Thus, the television in the front room, guardian of my clandestine activities, could bleat away and I was no longer forced to listen to inane nonsense fit for the brain of a clam — I was in the back room, perfectly euphoric, my eyes filling with tears, in the miraculous presence of Art.”

Paloma and Madame Michel share the beginning of the book in parallel, still in complete ignorance of each other. Paloma is trying to record some Profound Thoughts before she leaves the world, but also decides to write a journal alongside that records “masterpieces of matter.” She’s looking for “Something incarnate, tangible. But beautiful and aesthetic at the same time.” The examples she comes up with are quite wonderful, and incidentally will make the reader look at some common things very differently than ever before.

The book gets off to a slow start as the two philosophize, and criticize the rich supposed intellectuals around them, living in their building. This book was probably not the best to choose to read in a doctor’s waiting room, which was where I started it. It was, however, a fabulous choice to curl up with in bed on a lazy afternoon with snow gently falling outside, which was where I finished it.

Then one of the residents dies, his apartment is sold, and a Japanese filmmaker moves in. This man, Monsieur Ozu, immediately detects the two particularly brilliant souls among his neighbors, despite their clever disguises. Paloma says about him:

“So here is my profound thought for the day: this is the first time I have met someone who seeks out people and who sees beyond. That may seem trivial but I think it is profound all the same. We never look beyond our assumptions and, what’s worse, we have given up trying to meet others; we just meet ourselves. We don’t recognize people because other people have become our permanent mirrors. If we actually realized this, if we were to become aware of the fact that we are only ever looking at ourselves in the other person, that we are alone in the wilderness, we would go crazy. When my mother offers macaroons from Chez Laduree to Madame de Broglie, she is telling herself her own life story and just nibbling at her own flavor; when Papa drinks his coffee and reads his paper, he is contemplating his own reflection in the mirror, as if practicing the Coue method or something; when Colombe talks about Marian’s lectures, she is ranting about her own reflection; and when people walk by the concierge, all they see is a void, because she is not from their world.

“As for me, I implore fate to give me the chance to see beyond myself and truly meet someone.”

Monsieur Ozu is the one who tips these two extraordinary individuals off to each other. As Paloma begins to suspect Madame Michel, we discover where the title of the book came from:

“As for Madame Michel . . . how can we tell? She radiates intelligence. And yet she really makes an effort, like, you can tell she is doing everything she possibly can to act like a concierge and come across as stupid. But I’ve been watching her, when she would talk with Jean Arthens or when she talks to Neptune when Diane has her back turned, or when she looks at the ladies in the building who walk right by her without saying hello. Madame Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside, she’s covered in quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary — and terribly elegant.”

As Madame Michel’s cover begins to come down with Paloma and with their amazing new neighbor, things begin to change.

Here is a beautiful book, definitely for reading when you are in a philosophical state of mind. I can see why it has been popular with book clubs. I will say up front that I don’t like the ending, but it still didn’t ruin the book for me. The philosophy is not exactly cheery, but I did like all the meditations about beauty, and the things to love, in the end, about life.

This book makes me wish I could read French well enough to try it in the original language. The translation job must have been tricky, as Madame Michel’s appreciation for language, and her keen eye toward the way supposedly educated people misuse it, show us more of her brilliance. For example, Alison Anderson managed to translate a note with a misplaced comma into English. I wonder what the original was like, and if she was able to translate directly.

A book that will leave you thinking about it for a long time.

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Review of Thunder-Boomer! by Shutta Crum

thunder_boomerThunder-Boomer!

by Shutta Crum

illustrated by Carol Thompson

Clarion Books (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), 2009. 32 pages.
Starred Review

I should have reviewed this book in the summer, when I first read it, and when I meant to review it. And that’s simply a reflection of how behind I am on getting reviews written.

This book is a positively wonderful expression of a summer storm. The illustrations and the text combine with the onomatopoetic expressions written in the pictures (Who’s responsible for that? The author or the illustrator or both together?) to transport you into a summer storm, complete with thunder and lightning and hail.

The book starts with an oppressively hot summer day. Mother fans herself with her hat (“Swish, swish, swish”) and puts her feet in the pond next to Tom who’s slapping his feet against the surface (“plap, plap, plop”), and says, “We need a thunder-boomer.”

We see the wind pick up. It catches the clothes on the line. The dog catches Dad’s underwear! The sky darkens ominously. I love the way Carol Thompson captures the way the colors of the day dramatically change as the storm approaches and leaves. Together, they catch the sounds of the storm, the drama and the emotions of the storm.

At the end, they discover a gift from the storm, a little kitten whose purr is like the voice of the storm.

This is truly a beautiful book. Okay, it’s a little more appropriate for late summer than for early winter, but the story is nice any time of year.

If I were choosing books for consideration for next year’s Caldecott, I’d definitely hope this one gets considered for an Honor for the beautiful way the watercolors evoke the power and spirit of the stormy day, with the rain even bleeding out of the picture areas into the white space, like water leaking into the house. (Oh, except reading the note about the illustrator, I learn that she lives in England, so she wouldn’t be eligible. Well, this book is a truly distinguished work of art.)

A wonderful cozy adventure of waiting out a thunderstorm in a nice safe shelter.

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Review of Letters from Rapunzel, by Sara Lewis Holmes

letters_from_rapunzelLetters from Rapunzel

by Sara Lewis Holmes

Winner of the Ursula Nordstrom First Fiction Contest
HarperCollins, 2007. 184 pages.

Cadence Brogan feels like Rapunzel. Only her tower is Homework Club, and she doesn’t have hair long enough to rescue her.

Cadence is a newly-identified genius who harnesses her creativity working hard to not give her teachers what they want. When she is required to do homework during after-school Homework Club, she keeps busy writing, but she’s writing letters to a mysterious “friend” of her father’s, using the pen name Rapunzel.

Cadence became Rapunzel when her father went away, a victim of the Evil Spell. Her mother calls it C. D., clinical depression, but Rapunzel is poetical, like her father, and thinks of it as the Evil Spell. She found a torn up letter her father was going to write to this mysterious friend. She doesn’t have even a name, but she does have the post office box number. The fragment says,

. . . You are the secret to my success as a poet and a human being. Writing these letters every day has helped me keep my heart open, to be willing to live, to keep the darkness . . .

Maybe if Cadence, as Rapunzel, can write letters to this mysterious benefactor herself, maybe she can draw back the darkness and get her father back from the hospital.

The book, Letters from Rapunzel tells the story of her quest, in the form of the letters she sends to the box, along with copies of her creative alternatives to her teacher’s assignmments. There is plenty of humor in the situations Cadence gets herself into, but plenty of poignancy as well, as she deals with her father’s absence and Evil Spell on top of pressures from school and her Mom. She uncovers things no one wanted to tell her along with some profound truths about herself.

This is definitely a promising first novel. It covers some profound issues with a light touch. Quick reading that will make you smile, but will also make you think.

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Review of The Patron Saint of Butterflies, by Cecilia Galante

patron_saint_of_butterfliesThe Patron Saint of Butterflies

by Cecilia Galante

Bloomsbury, 2008. 292 pages.

Agnes and Honey have lived all their lives at Mount Blessing. They have always been friends, always done things together.

But now that Agnes is past twelve and was given a copy of The Saints’ Way by their blessed leader, Emmanuel, she would like to be a saint. Perhaps it will take fasting, or punishing herself if she does something wrong, but she wants to live a holy life.

Honey, on the other hand, would rather push the boundaries. Her mother left her at Mount Blessing when she was a baby. When Honey’s caught kissing a boy, she’s labelled a harlot — in red marker, next to the welts on her back from her whipping.

When Agnes’ grandmother Nana Pete finds out, she wants to rescue the girls and Agnes’ brother Benny from the commune for good. But there are some secrets in their pasts that need to be cleared up, and Nana Pete’s health is precarious, and Agnes does not want to leave her parents or her home. And she certainly doesn’t want to give up the call to the life of a saint. Certainly Emmanuel can’t do anything wrong, can he?

This powerful and thought-provoking novel pulls you in and lets you see both girls’ perspective at once. Will they be able to break free?

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Review of When You Reach Me, by Rebecca Stead

when_you_reach_meWhen You Reach Me

by Rebecca Stead

Wendy Lamb Books (Random House), 2009. 199 pages.
Starred Review
Sonderbooks Stand-out 2010: #1 Children’s Fantasy and Science Fiction

When You Reach Me is hard to categorize. Technically, you might call it Historical, since it is set in 1978 and 1979. But the focus is not the time period or issues of the time period, so I don’t think it really fits that category. There’s a touch of science fiction, a touch of mystery, and a touch of adventure. Mostly, I feel like this is a school story, a story of a sixth-grade girl who loses her best friend and must learn how to cope — while strange events are going on around her.

Also interesting, the day before I picked up this book, I read a chapter from Reading Like a Writer, by Francine Prose, on point of view. She talks about the rarity of good fiction written in the second person.

Francine Prose says,
“The truth is that marvelous fiction has been written in the second person, though in these cases, the ‘you’ is less likely to be the reader in general than someone in particular, an individual to whom the story (often metaphorically or imaginatively) is being addressed.”

In When You Reach Me, part of the puzzle is to whom exactly Miranda is telling her story. Who is the “you”?

She’s telling the story to someone, someone who has sent her mysterious letters that seem to be able to foretell the future. How did the letter writer know, for example, that Miranda’s Mom would appear on The 20,000 Pyramid on April 27?

They live in an apartment in New York City, and Miranda must walk past some alarming characters on her way home, but she has her friend Sal to walk with. Until the day that Sal got punched. That’s the day that Miranda thinks it all started.

I admit I can’t help but fall for a character who carries around Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time everywhere she goes. Miranda faces a lot in this book. Trouble with friends. Scary situations. A stressed-out mother. Things going missing.

Miranda comes through. She figures out how to be a better friend, navigates some tricky situations, and ultimately solves the mystery of the letters.

I like Miranda’s way of dealing with someone she’s afraid of:

“I have my own trick. If I’m afraid of someone on the street, I’ll turn to him (it’s always a boy) and say, ‘Excuse me, do you happen to know what time it is?’ This is my way of saying to the person, ‘I see you as a friend, and there is no need to hurt me or take my stuff. Also, I don’t even have a watch and I am probably not worth mugging.’

“So far, it’s worked like gangbusters, as Richard would say. And I’ve discovered that most people I’m afraid of are actually very friendly.”

This story is surprisingly simple for something with a complicated idea behind it. It will leave your mind spinning in a small, pleasant way, and your heart warmed.

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Review of Project Sweet Life, by Brent Hartinger

project_sweet_lifeProject Sweet Life

by Brent Hartinger

HarperTeen (HarperCollins), 2009. 282 pages.
Starred Review
Sonderbooks Stand-out 2010: #2 Other Teen Fiction

I first heard about Project Sweet Life after a girl patron at Herndon Fortnightly Library won the monthly prize drawing in Kay Cassidy’s Great Scavenger Hunt Contest. For registering the winner’s entries, the library won a choice of five books, and as soon as I read the description of this book, I not only chose it for the library, I also bought a copy to give to my son for his fifteenth birthday, which is in the middle of the summer. It seemed completely appropriate.

Dave and his two friends Victor and Curtis believe that the summer you are fifteen should be the year when a summer job is optional. “You can get one if you really want one, but it isn’t required. And I really, really didn’t want one.”

He explains his philosophy:

“I certainly understand that some people, even some fifteen-year-olds, need to work. They’re saving for college, or they have to help pay bills around the house. For them, a summer job at fifteen isn’t optional. But my dad makes a good living as a land surveyor. He wears silk ties! And my mom is stay-at-home. We aren’t poor.

“The adults won’t tell you this, but I absolutely knew it in my bones to be true: Once you take that first summer job, once you start working, you’re then expected to keep working. For the rest of your life! Once you start, you can’t stop, ever — not until you retire or you die.

“Sure, I knew I’d have to take a job next summer. But now, I had two uninterrupted months of absolute freedom ahead of me — two summer months of living life completely on my own terms. I knew they were probably my last two months of freedom for the next fifty years.”

Unfortunately, Dave’s dad has been discussing the situation with his own friends, the fathers of Victor and Curtis. On the first night of summer vacation, all three dads inform their sons that there will be no more allowance, and they need to get a summer job.

When the three friends meet that night after dinner, they discuss the situation and the incredible unfairness of it all. That’s when, together, they come up with the scheme for Project Sweet Life: Instead of slaving away at a minimum wage job all summer, they will fake the job, find a quicker way to make the same amount of money, and then loaf off all summer.

Brent Hartinger does a wonderful job showing us their schemes, which actually work — and then inevitably have bad luck snatch all the money out of their grasp. It adds up to a hilarious coming-of-age friends-forever adventure that is tremendous fun to read.

I got a piece of writing advice long ago that I have seen work many times: Never let your characters solve their problems by coincidence, or no one will believe it. Instead, have your characters get into trouble because of coincidence, and everyone will think how true to life that is.

In the case of this book, it seemed slightly unlikely that their schemes would work out so well, but then when bad luck snatched the profits from their grasp, it suddenly seemed true to life and also very funny. I think the unlikelihood of their success in the first place made their downfall that much funnier, though we definitely felt sorry for them. As the summer wears on and their bank balance gets lower, their plans get more and more desperate.

For the record, my now fifteen-year-old son did not have a job this summer. But I’m not worried that this book will give him the wrong idea. Although the book does not hold up the boys’ behavior as a good example, and does show that their choice ended up in more work than a job would have, it also has some great things to say about friendship and doing what’s right.

This book had me laughing out loud as I read it, and even as I’m writing the review, I can’t stop smiling. Most of all, it’s simply tremendous fun.

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Review of A Kiss in Time, by Alex Flinn

kiss_in_timeA Kiss in Time

by Alex Flinn

HarperTeen, 2009. 371 pages.
Starred Review

On my second day of vacation, I committed the wonderful luxury of staying in bed until noon and reading a novel. A Kiss in Time is the novel I chose.

I loved Alex Flinn’s Beastly, where she sets the fairy tale “Beauty and the Beast” in modern-day New York. When I heard she was doing a version of “Sleeping Beauty,” where Sleeping Beauty is woken up by a modern day American teen, I simply had to snap it up.

Now, I’ve got a special interest in Sleeping Beauty tales, because several years ago I attempted to write my own version where Sleeping Beauty was sleeping in a castle in Germany, and is woken by an American military kid whose last name is Prince. Unfortunately, I got bogged down with details. How does she get an ID card? A passport? I couldn’t decide whether she’d get media attention and be a celebrity princess or just adapt to modern life as some sort of refugee. What’s more, in my version, all of her family and her life before were dead, so it got rather depressing.

My own attempt to write the story gives me that much more admiration for Alex Flinn pulling it off so beautifully. Mind you, Orson Scott Card has already done a magnificent job in his book for adults, Enchantment. But with A Kiss in Time, Alex Flinn has written the light-hearted teen fantasy I was shooting for. I was delighted with the way she had the entire kingdom sleeping, as in the original fairy tale, and figured out a way to deal with them waking up in the 21st Century.

Jack is something of a screw-up, and he’s had enough of museums, so he decides to ditch the tour group his parents sent him on and spend a day at the beach. He brings along his friend Travis, but they have some trouble with the directions they’re given and somehow wind up struggling through a thick hedge of thorns. On the other side, there’s a medieval kingdom, where everyone’s asleep. Travis thinks they might as well help themselves to some jewels, but then Jack discovers a gorgeous girl asleep in a room by herself. Something compels him to give her a kiss….

Well, Talia’s father wakes up awfully angry with Talia for having touched a spindle despite all his warnings. He throws Jack in the dungeon, since, after all, a commoner shouldn’t be kissing the princess. Talia’s willing to help Jack escape to Florida, but he seems strangely reluctant to marry her. In Florida, Talia has a lot to learn about the modern world, but it turns out there are things she can teach Jack about dealing with people.

And both teens have a lot to learn about true love.

This is a light-hearted and fun approach to the age-old story, and the question of how have people changed across the centuries. My hat goes off to Alex Flinn for doing such a wonderful job telling this tale.

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Review of The London Eye Mystery, by Siobhan Dowd

london_eye_mysteryThe London Eye Mystery

by Siobhan Dowd

David Fickling Books, New York, 2007. Originally published in Great Britain, 2007. 323 pages.
Sonderbooks Stand-out 2010: #5 Other Teen Fiction

“We took Salim to the Eye because he’d never been up before. A stranger came up to us in the queue, offering us a free ticket. We took it and gave it to Salim. We shouldn’t have done this, but we did. He went up on his own at 11.32, 24 May, and was due to come down at 12.02 the same day. He turned and waved to Kat and me as he boarded, but you couldn’t see his face, just his shadow. They sealed him in with twenty other people whom we didn’t know.

“Kat and I tracked Salim’s capsule as it made its orbit. When it reached its highest point, we both said, ‘NOW!’ at the same time and Kat laughed and I joined in. That’s how we knew we’d been tracking the right one. We saw the people bunch up as the capsule came back down, facing northeast towards the automatic camera for the souvenir photograph. They were just dark bits of jackets, legs, dresses and sleeves.

“Then the capsule landed. The doors opened and the passengers came out in twos and threes. They walked off in different directions. Their faces were smiling. Their paths probably never crossed again.

“But Salim wasn’t among them.

“We waited for the next capsule and the next and the one after that. He still didn’t appear. Somewhere, somehow, in the thirty minutes of riding the Eye, in his sealed capsule, he had vanished off the face of the earth. This is how having a funny brain that runs on a different operating system from other people’s helped me to figure out what had happened.”

This mystery reminds me of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, narrated as it is by someone whose “brain runs on a different operating system from other people’s.” This one is much less grim and offers an intriguing mystery with a believable solution.

This book is, fittingly, more cerebral than emotional, since Ted isn’t very good at reading emotions. Though we can see the emotions of everyone in his family are on edge when Salim disappears, and the author handles it well.

I’m not sure when I’ve last read such an enjoyable mystery appropriate for middle school students through teens. Ted is a young teen himself, but the reader can believe that he had the insight and noticed the details to solve the mystery. It isn’t a case, as in some mysteries for young people, of just happening to deal with stupid adults.

My biggest regret, after reading this book, is that I never went up in the London Eye when I was in London.

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Review of Hello Baby! by Mem Fox and Steve Jenkins

hello_babyHello Baby!

by Mem Fox

illustrated by Steve Jenkins

Beach Lane Books, New York, 2009. 32 pages.

Okay, this one you simply have to look at yourself. Yes, again Mem Fox has created lyrical, soothing rhymes to share with a baby:

“Hello, baby!
Who are you?
Are you a monkey with clever toes?
Perhaps you’re a porcupine, twitching its nose.
Are you an eagle, exploring the skies?
Perhaps you’re a gecko with rolling eyes.”

But what makes this book stunning and unforgettable are the incredibly detailed cut-paper illustrations by Steve Jenkins. I’ve raved about his illustrations before, in my reviews of Actual Size and Dogs and Cats. They only seem to get better with each new book. When I saw Hello Baby! I had to pass it around to my co-workers to watch them marvel as well. He makes cut paper look alive.

These animals aren’t necessarily the traditional ones you’d teach your baby, including warthogs and geckos. But I’m sure the visual feast here will capture your child’s attention. There’s a final cozy question:

“Then who are you, baby?
Wait, let me guess–
Are you my treasure?
The answer is . . .
Yes!”

I like the way they made the hands reaching out to each other a range of colors, so you can see almost anyone’s hue there. That’s one place it doesn’t look as lifelike, because no real person’s hand has all those colors, but the use of mottled paper in that place works so that it could apply to anyone.

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Review of Maybe Yes, Maybe No, Maybe Maybe, by Susan Patron

maybeMaybe Yes, Maybe No, Maybe Maybe
by Susan Patron
pictures by Dorothy Donahue

Orchard Books, New York, 1993. 87 pages.

I love Susan Patron’s Lucky books so much (The Higher Power of Lucky and Lucky Breaks), that I wanted to read her earlier book.

Maybe Yes, Maybe No, Maybe Maybe is a beginning chapter book that gently shows PK, a girl in between two sisters, dealing with big changes with grace. This story is not as deeply profound as the Lucky books, but you can see some of the same storytelling seeds. PK has some of the same quirky individuality as Lucky, which makes both girls seem true and alive.

PK’s big sister Megan is almost a teenager, is Gifted, is getting hormones, and is changing in so many ways. She no longer comes to listen to the stories PK tells to her little sister Rabbit while Rabbit sits in the bathtub getting clean and wrinkled. PK finds the stories in the hamper where they’ve rubbed off people’s skin.

But Mama says they need to move to a bigger place, a place that won’t have the built-in laundry hamper. How will PK find the stories? Even her friend Bike is upset.

Based on Susan Patron’s Newbery acceptance speech, there’s a lot of her own story in this tale. Perhaps that’s what makes it feel so warm and genuine. A nice beginning chapter book about dealing with big changes with grace.

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