May B.

By Caroline Starr Rose

225 pages written in verse

What is it like to love words but not able to gain command over them?  May wants to be a teacher, but she is not be able to stand and read on command in her one room school house where memorization and recitation are key.  What is it like to be asked to help your family by leaving home the only place you feel truly safe? That is what May does.  She moves to the next sod house to be a companion and housekeeper to the new wife who isn’t used to the hardships and loneliness of prairie living.  Not only is May alone, but Mrs. Oblinger seems to despise her as much as the sod walls, dirt floor and endless nothingness out the door.

After being forced to sit in the front row with the little kids because she can’t read well, May is taken from school and her dream of being a teacher. Schooling seems useless for her and she is asked to move to the neighboring homestead.  May agrees to  try this new life for six month.  At Christmas her father will check on her to see how it is going.  Isolated from her family and neighbors, the unthinkable happens.  She is abandoned – totally alone and then she is trapped in the soddy by a snowstorm that completely covers the house.

May might not be able to  read or recite from her reader, but she is an amazing person –  strong, determined, resourceful and knowledgeable. Having students in may classroom who worked as hard as May does would be a joy. I wish we could all be so inspired and follow lead through difficulty and failure to achieve our goals.

I wonder how thing will go for May as her story continues.  I hope she find the courage and support to achieve her dreams.  Certainly with her as a teacher, no child would feel the sting of humiliation and shame in that room.

The Mighty Miss Malone

By Christopher Paul Curtis

320 pages of characters you will love in situations that will give you much to consider

Deza loves school.  She is the best and the brightest.  She has a wonderful best friend, a passion for reading and her exceptional family.  What is not to like about Deza?  Well, maybe she is a little to verbose and maybe she is a bit to sure of herself and bossy, but… The Mighty Miss Malone is 12-year old Deza Malone part of a close-knit family whose motto is “We are a family on a journey to a place called Wonderful.” Deza dreams of going to college and becoming a teacher just like her beloved, Mrs. Needham.

Dreams are hard to keep alive in the Great Depression. Deza’s father is out of work and further changes mean the Deza’s mother is also out of a job. This forces her fine friendly father figure to leave home in search of some kind of work.  When they hear nothing from him Deza, Mother, and her older brother Jimmie go to find him.  They try to stay together.  They try to make it right, but nothing seems to work.  Deza’s world seems to go up in smoke.  The hut they’ve been living in at the Hooverville outside Flint is burned down. Jimmie leaves to see if he can make it as a singer in Chicago. With one room to share, Deza and her mother want more than anything else is to have their family back together.  How can that be?

The twists and turns of the Malone family story reveal the devastation of the Depression and prove that Deza truly is the Mighty Miss Malone.  It’s hard to predict which direction the story will take.  The story keeps taking twists and surprise turns so you must keep on reading.  You just have to find out what happens to Deza and her family – there is no way not follow her through to the end of the story.  You’ll need to know what happens in the end.  Will her family find “wonderful” – the trip to find out is worth every step.   Along the way you’ll moments that will give you something to think about – no matter how bad off a person is, someone else has it worse. What an amazing story.  It offers an honest and painful look at a terrible time in our country through the eyes of an amazing girl who refuses to let go of her dream.  May we all be so courageous!

I hope you will find and read Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai.  The story takes place in a year.  It is the journal of 10-year old Ha and captures the changes in her life from Tet in 1975 (Year of the Cat) to Tet in 1976 (Year of the Dragon). It is a time of turmoil for Ha. She has lived through the fall of Saigon, escaped her country on an over-crowded boat, become a refugee on Guam and then Florida and been is sponsored by a family in Alabama.  Once there is Alabama, she must learn how to survive in a place that holds little welcome or respect for her differences, nor any love for her homeland.  The book is written in verse.  The words are beautiful, clear and precise.  Here’s one entry:

Wishes

I wish

Brother Khoi wouldn’t

keep inside

how he endures

the hours of school

that mother wouldn’t

hide her bleeding fingers

that Brother Quang wouldn’t

be so angry after work.

I wish

our cowboy could be persuaded

to buy a horse.

that I cold be invisible

until I can talk back.

that English could be learned

without so many rules.

I wish

Father would appear

in my class

speaking beautiful English

as he does French and Chinese

and hold out his hand

for mine.

Mostly

I wish

I were

still

smart.    (p. 158-159)

There is hope as the new year approaches.  Ha and her family will make a new home and find comfort and happiness once more – Ha will always long for home, and yet know this “is not so bad.”

Part of this story is autobiographical.  Much of what Ha experiences, is what the author experienced.  She captures the feelings and emotions clearly so readers have a window her world of confusion, hurt and determination.

Combined with A Million Shades of Gray by Cynthia Kadohata and The Buddha’s Diamonds and When Heaven Fell by Carolyn Marsden readers canl learn much about Vietnam  – the country, the people and the process of healing and begin to understand a bit more about loss.

Hurricane Dancers – the first Caribbean Pirate Shipwreck

by Margarita Engle

Set in 1510, readers of Hurricane Dancers meet pirate Captain Bernardino de Talavera, a ruined conquistador who has worked the native Indians on his land to death. To escape debtors prison he steals a ship, takes some hostages, and becomes the first pirate of the Caribbean. One of those hostages, Alonso de Ojeda, has been governor of Venezuela and is known for selling the native people for profit. Another captive is Quebrado.  He claims a Taino mother and Spanish father and although this makes him an outcast, it gives him the ability to communicate in two languages.

Quebrado has been enslaved and traded from ship to ship for as long as he can remember.  Called El Quebrado, the boy of broken dreams, by the sailors he toils under – Quebrado takes care of all things on the pirate ship until it is caught in a hurricane and capsized.  Quebrado is freed.  He is washed onto Cuba, the only free island left in the Caribbean.   Helped by islanders, Quebrado thinks he will find a new way of life until Talavera and Ojeda make their way to the same village.

Now the question is, what will Quebrado do?  Will he escape?  Will he stay? Will he go off on his own?

Beautifully written in verse this piece of historical fiction offers an unusual  view of life in early 16^th century Cuba.