A few last Newbery books
I have finished reading I, Juan de Pareja in Spanish! Because I am boss! And have therefore completed all the Newbery books from the 1960s!
And now I think I will take a break from Newbery books for a bit, even though I still have twenty-four left to go. (Why are there so many of them? Why?) It’s been interesting reading a lot of books that I wouldn’t necessarily choose for myself - refreshing, even, to branch out - but...it’s still a lot of books that I wouldn’t necessarily choose for myself.
Case in point: Ann Nolan Clark’s Secret of the Andes, which is about a young Inca llama herder Cusi. No one will explain to him anything about anything, because if they did, the book would be ten pages long, and more importantly, Cusi has to learn the importance of blindly obeying orders.
Seriously, everyone is all “Cusi, stop asking questions, questions are bad.” I am utterly perplexed by this message.
Case in point part the second: William H. Anderson’s Sounder, which I approached with trepidation, on the grounds that it is an award-winning book about a dog, and, well. We all know what happens to dogs in award-winning books.
It’s actually a very good book, though I’m not sure I would have thought so if I had read it as a child. Sounder is a sharecropper’s hunting dog - none of the humans ever get names, only Sounder - and the book kicks off with Sounder getting one of his feet blown off when he tries to stop the sheriff from taking the sharecropper off to jail.
I think I might have found that scene just a bit upsetting, as also the scene where the jailor destroys the Christmas cake that the sharecropper’s son attempts to take him in jail - allegedly to check if there’s a file in it - or the scene where the son, trying to find his father, gets a crowbar tossed at him by a foreman while he’s looking into a quarry.
It is, as I was saying, a good book; but it’s intense. Anderson has clearly taken the dictum “show, don’t tell,” to heart, because he never does come right out and tell us that racism is bad; he never needs to, because it’s so obvious, so enraging, how unfair this is. Why does the sharecropper have to do years of hard labor for a single theft? Why isn’t his family allowed to know where he is? Why did the sheriff have to shoot the dog?
Sounder lives through the shooting, incidentally, though he’s scarred for life by it; he loses an eye, he can’t walk very well. Of course he dies by the end of the book, but the book’s construction makes that almost a triumph. He died, sure; but he’s not suffering anymore, and he died at home, and he got to see his master the sharecropper come home before he went.
And now I think I will take a break from Newbery books for a bit, even though I still have twenty-four left to go. (Why are there so many of them? Why?) It’s been interesting reading a lot of books that I wouldn’t necessarily choose for myself - refreshing, even, to branch out - but...it’s still a lot of books that I wouldn’t necessarily choose for myself.
Case in point: Ann Nolan Clark’s Secret of the Andes, which is about a young Inca llama herder Cusi. No one will explain to him anything about anything, because if they did, the book would be ten pages long, and more importantly, Cusi has to learn the importance of blindly obeying orders.
Seriously, everyone is all “Cusi, stop asking questions, questions are bad.” I am utterly perplexed by this message.
Case in point part the second: William H. Anderson’s Sounder, which I approached with trepidation, on the grounds that it is an award-winning book about a dog, and, well. We all know what happens to dogs in award-winning books.
It’s actually a very good book, though I’m not sure I would have thought so if I had read it as a child. Sounder is a sharecropper’s hunting dog - none of the humans ever get names, only Sounder - and the book kicks off with Sounder getting one of his feet blown off when he tries to stop the sheriff from taking the sharecropper off to jail.
I think I might have found that scene just a bit upsetting, as also the scene where the jailor destroys the Christmas cake that the sharecropper’s son attempts to take him in jail - allegedly to check if there’s a file in it - or the scene where the son, trying to find his father, gets a crowbar tossed at him by a foreman while he’s looking into a quarry.
It is, as I was saying, a good book; but it’s intense. Anderson has clearly taken the dictum “show, don’t tell,” to heart, because he never does come right out and tell us that racism is bad; he never needs to, because it’s so obvious, so enraging, how unfair this is. Why does the sharecropper have to do years of hard labor for a single theft? Why isn’t his family allowed to know where he is? Why did the sheriff have to shoot the dog?
Sounder lives through the shooting, incidentally, though he’s scarred for life by it; he loses an eye, he can’t walk very well. Of course he dies by the end of the book, but the book’s construction makes that almost a triumph. He died, sure; but he’s not suffering anymore, and he died at home, and he got to see his master the sharecropper come home before he went.