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books

All the Broken Pieces by Ann Burg

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The Vietnam war is something I am pretty underinformed about, aside from what I learned in a few history classes and those classes, as any student of history knows, are biased. But perhaps what is more a disservice than some of the bias is the fact that the Vietnam war lessons come at the end of a long semester (unless one takes a whole class) and gets short changed. A lot of what happened goes unlearned.

All the Broken Pieces by Ann Burg is a novel about the Vietnam war without being about the physical war itself. This quick novel, written entirely in verse, takes place in the aftermath of the war. More specifically, it is set when Americans had the opportunity to save Vietnamese children Vietnamese children of war and give them homes in America.

Burg’s book opens with Matt, one of the rescued children, recalling something that happened in his life — but as readers, we’re left blind to what experiences he had as a child in the war-torn nation. His mom was Vietnamese and his father was an American soldier who raped her and left her. When his mother sends him with Americans, he is adopted into a family that loves him dearly and gives him every opportunity they can. He’s got a natural baseball talent, but even great talent doesn’t stop members of the team he made from making fun of him and his heritage. Tensions were high after the war, as it touched the lives of so many. Rob, one of his teammates, really dislikes him and goes out of his way to make Matt’s life difficult.

As the novel moves forward — and it moves VERY fast — we watch as Matt makes decisions about what he shares and doesn’t share about his experiences. At the same time he is involved in truly American pastimes, including baseball and music lessons, his mind reminds him of his uniquely non-American life. This comes to a head when he and Rob are paired for an exercise on the baseball field that causes them to come to total understandings of one another and of themselves. It is at this moment we as readers develop a total understanding of Matt and his life both in Vietnam and America. At this same time, Matt learns about how the war impacted other people he interacts with daily in America and he relates with them in a new way because he, too, is able to share his experiences on the other side. All the Broken Pieces is a novel that highlights cultural understanding in a way that readers of all ages can relate.

I found this to be quite a moving book; Matt is an exceptionally drawn main character with a great voice that left me wanting to know more. I felt like his adoptive family in hoping he would share his story with me and I felt great satisfaction when he did. Along with that satisfaction, as a reader I felt utter sympathy for him and his experiences. Moreover, this is the sort of book that left me as a reader wanting to know more about the Vietnam war’s outcomes and effects on civilians both American and made-American.

All the Broken Pieces is a Cybils nominee in the middle grade category, and while I don’t disagree with that age appropriateness, I think it might be better appreciated by those who are a little older. This is a story that has less in the way of action and more in character development, and the verse use is spot-on. Berg could not have picked a better way to share her story, and I am excited to see what she does in the future. I think this is a title that’s been under the radar this season, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it get its due come awards time. At least I hope so!

Double Take, Part XIV

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Here’s one with a recently released book and a book yet to be released. Remember what happened last time when two soon-to-be released titles had the same cover? Now, they’re not perfect double takes, but they’re really darn close.

First:


The Sky Always Hears Me and the Hills Don’t Mind is by Kirstin Cronn-Mills and was published September 1, 2009 by Flux. I like this cover a LOT – I like that we don’t get a face on shot of the girl and I love the cloudy sky. It fits the title so well. I’ve had this one on my to-read pile for a while but haven’t gotten there quite yet.


Dreaming of Amelia by Jaclyn Moriarty will be published April 2010 by MacMillan UK. Now on this cover, her hair is about the same color and has a similar aesthetic of loose pieces falling down her back, but the knot is on the side of her head, rather than on the back. She’s looking at the sky again, though this one is a light blue sky. The feel’s totally different than The Sky Always Hears Me but I like it.

Do you prefer one or another? It almost makes me think it’s a shot from the same photo shoot, so the same girl with a slightly different hair style. What do you think?

More Claudette!

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Kirsten over at Curious City left a comment on my last review with a video — she wove together Claudette’s narrative and Hoose’s comments on his inspiration for writing the book. It’s really well done, so I had to share it:

Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose

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Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose is the fourth book in my quest to read all five National Book Award nominees for Youth Literature. Unlike the prior three books, Claudette Colvin is a work of non-fiction.

Claudette Colvin was the catalyst for the Montgomery Bus Boycotts during the 1950s and Civil Rights Movement. But unlike Rosa Parks, she was forgotten and overlooked for her major contribution to integration.

Hoose’s story is meant to share Colvin’s story and shed light into her role into the monumental and oft ignored Browder v. Gayle case that ruled integration the law in Montgomery and all of Alabama.

Claudette refused to give up her seat on the bus as a teenager, and she didn’t go quietly. She was beaten and degraded as police officers dragged her off the bus for not giving up the seat upon the bus driver’s request (which, back then was de facto for blacks). She was sentenced for the crime, but her cause was taken up by Dr. King and Rosa Parks shortly thereafter. As students of American history, we have an idea of what happened when they became involved in the situation in Montgomery.

But Colvin faded from the spot light, even though it was her action that spurred movement from blacks and equal rights supporters of all colors and backgrounds. Why? She became pregnant and birthed a light-skinned baby. Scorned by white culture for being black and refusing to follow Jim Crow and equally scorned by her black community for having a child out of wedlock with what they assumed was a white father pushed her story to the periphery.

Hoose’s book was engaging and solid — I felt like the prose moved in a story-like fashion enough to keep audiences who may not otherwise have found a non-fiction book about a lesser-known history maker reading. Fortunately for Hoose and for readers, Colvin is still alive today and was able to provide insights into the story herself.

The book has segments of her interviews, along with a selection of photos, sidebars, and other graphics to tell the story. Additionally, Hoose fills in many of the holes between Colvin’s interviews to give the book shape and structure.

This, however, made me sad — I actually found Hoose’s additions the dullest and slowest portions of the book. I wanted to read more of Colvin’s own words and I feel like she got short changed for his prose. I’m a big fan of graphics, and I almost would have preferred more, as well. I consider myself a fairly well educated reader and I felt like having more visuals would have helped me better construct an understanding; I imagine for the age range this book is intended for that adding more graphics would be not only helpful but crucial to better capturing the essence of the Civil Rights struggle, particularly in Montgomery.

Although I believe this is a fantastic book, I do wonder how receptive audiences would be to this if it were not hand sold or used as part of a classroom collection/unit on the Civil Rights movement. I think this because she is (unfortunately!) a little known member of such an important era and she will be overlooked on the shelves in favor of King or Parks. That’s not to say she doesn’t belong, for sure. Additionally, I did find the section about her becoming pregnant a bit non-essential — the graphic details about sex here were tangential to the larger issues, and I think they will be a sticking point for use with younger readers.

I think this is a worthy NBA nominee, for sure, but I still hold my torch for Lips Touch. Fortunately for Claudette Colvin, the nomination will get more librarians, teachers, and book loves to read this story and talk up this lesser known but utterly important member of the Civil Rights movement and perhaps will bring a renewed interest in learning about the faces and stories behind it.

Half Broke Horses by Jeanette Walls

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You probably read her memoir, The Glass Castle, and now Jeanette Walls is back with a fictionalized story about her grandmother Lily. Lily is a hard, rowdy woman who wasn’t afraid to go after what she wanted in a time that these activities weren’t seen as lady-like nor appropriate.

The story follows as she grows up in west Texas and then moves on to Arizona to teach — without her 8th grade education. When Lily gets fired thanks to the end of the war, she chooses to move to Chicago and start a life there. But when she married a two-timing louse, she relocates again, back to her wild ways in the desert southwest.

She eventually marries a stable man and has a couple of children, but she’ll never be broke of her wild ways, and the rest of the story tells of other adventures she and her family have.

Half Broke Horses is told in short vignettes, with each chapter being just a page or two long. It’s very episodic, though for the first 2/3 of the book, there is a great flow between the stories. I felt like the last 1/3 of the book, however, fell completely apart as Wells tried to wrap up the entire adulthood of Lily in fewer pages than she had spent describing her childhood. Within four pages, she’d gone from having young children to fighting with a teenage daughter to Wells being born. Too much too quickly for me.

I wasn’t a big fan of this book. I felt like the fictionalization really made the story boring. Wells had a fantastic concept and the character of Lily was interesting, but by fictionalizing the story, it was devoid of any emotion. Additionally, the episodic nature further disjointed the story in a way that I found Lily nothing more than an interesting character — I never had feelings for her one way or another, but rather just went with her.

I didn’t get quite the sense of how wild a character she was, either. I felt like the book was billed as much more of a wild west girl who really broke horses and bucked the tradition, but it seemed to me by fictionalizing the story, it just fell really, really flat. I’ve read more interesting fiction with more interesting female characters who did this. I would have loved this a lot more if this were more biographical.

Like The Glass Castle, I felt distanced from the book. As a reader, I never got fully absorbed in either story, and the more I think about it, I believe it’s Walls’s style. She builds a wall around her story that as a reader, I don’t like. For other readers, this works well because the subjects are real and therefore not always easily accessible or relatable.

I suspect this might get picked up as a film down the road: it’s episodic and fitting to cinematic molding; it’s Jeanette Walls who has proven to be popular; and the story IS interesting. I feel like the help it could get with an artistic director will elevate it and make it more engaging and realistic.

I wonder how hard this story would have been to make biographical, rather than fictional. Walls states in an end note that her original intent was to write about her mother, but her mother insisted that her mother, Lily, was the real interesting one. I wonder how much of the decision to fictionalize came from the publisher, rather than her original intent? Or if it was her intent to do it all along, how much came from her worry to be seen as another James Frey or similar memoirist accused of making it all up?

I believe readers know not everything in a biography or memoir is going to be 100% true (how can it be?). I sure hope it wasn’t done this way to convenience the reader from thinking — there is a good story here, but I just had a hard time connecting and reveling in it knowing that it never could be fully realized as a fictional novel.