A Recollection

When I was about five years old we had a dachshund named Ginger who wasn’t fixed and was always making puppies. For one of those batches of pups we went door to door searching for a new home for them. I guess the fact that a five year old could wander  the streets in 1973 says a lot about what a different era it was, but we also lived in a friendly and quiet area where we knew most of the neighbors.

I ended up at one house about two blocks away, was directed by a sign to the back door, and there found two women having a late breakfast and chatting and excited to have a little boy and a puppy to brighten up their day. I got the feeling by the way they talked about adopting a new dog that they both lived there and shared their lives.

Can two women get married? I wondered. The idea did not seem to my child mind to be unlikely. In fact, it seemed likely — knowing how many men and women there were in the world, what were the chances that every man found a woman, every woman a man? It seemed like such long odds, like expecting every one of Ginger’s puppies to be a brown like her instead of black or white or spotted or whatever. (I didn’t know exactly how puppies were made; it was just part of puppy magic that they were all different.)

I figured on the walk home that there must be occasional wife-wife marriages and husband-husband marriages. As soon as I got home I asked my mother if sometimes married couples were two husbands or two wives. She said no. I said there was a couple nearby like that and she said I was mistaken. I argued with her a bit, knowing what I’d seen. She  sent me to my room for a nap.

Four decades later same-sex marriage has become a reality, and now it’s about to be the law in my adopted home state of Minnesota. Among the arguments against it were the case that somehow children would be confused, upset, bewildered and even threatened by wife-wife and husband-husband marriages. And I remember being a little kid and feeling the opposite. I was more upset by the sheer irrationality of every body being expected to be the same, my mother’s brute insistence that the two women who’d taken our puppy couldn’t possibly be a family.

I’m proud that Minnesota is one of the first dozen states to champion marriage equality. And for the record, if my mother was still alive, she would be proud of us, too. She was only 27 years old when I was five, and she hadn’t made up her mind about everything.

The Great Brain Series (Part 1)

 The Great Brain was a series written in the 1960s and 1970s by John D. Fitzgerald of quasi-autobiographical stories from his own childhood. The narrator is also named John D. Fitzgerald, but John is not the eponymous main character — that honor belongs to his older brother Tom, a fast-talking con artist and entrepreneur who is always has some scheme to make money. The books are collections of stand-alone stories, though narrative threads run through each book and the entire series to sort of tie them together. They take place at the turn of the last century in Utah (before Fitzgerald the author was actually born) and give readers an interesting glimpse into the era.

I cannot tell you how much I treasured these books as a child. They always made me laugh AND cry. When Tom wasn’t up to his usual shenanigans, he lent his scheming to better causes, like saving an immigrant boy from bullies or exposing crooked government agents so neighboring Native Americans can keep their land. It was brilliant of Fitzgerald to sometimes make Tom a hero before he swindles another lot of kids out of their hard earned nickels. I read these books to tatters, and when I learned the library was only missing one book — the seventh — I told the children’s librarian. She not only ordered the book for the library, she ordered an extra paperback copy for me to keep, a gesture that makes me tear up even now.

I set out to re-read the entire series in 1990s and got them all from the library. I soon faltered. The funny stories now irritated me — Tom wasn’t really smarter than other kids, just more willing to connive and cheat. He would hide behind technicalities to win bets, shamelessly take credit for victories that were shared with other kids. Maybe I knew that as a kid, but now it bugged me more, and I was annoyed with John for putting up with it and worshipping his older brother. Meanwhile, the more heroic stories felt heavy handed, sentimental and sometimes patronizing.

There are two ways that a children’s book can age badly. One is that it feels dated thirty years later, and the other is that the artifice of the author is too obvious to the adult reader. In that way, though still well-written (and brilliantly illustrated by Mercer Meyer), the books didn’t deliver the magic I remembered. I didn’t make it past the first book.

Now that almost another twenty years have passed since that experience, I went back yet again in the hopes that my mid-90s self was too grumpy and critical (which I’m sure people who’ve known me that long will second.) I started with the eighth book, a posthumous collection I’d never read. I suspect these stories were written at various times in the life of the series, considered by the author not quite up to snuff, and pulled together into a last volume by the family with some duct tape work to patch them together. And though in Fitzgerald’s polished prose, they do feel like ones he’d filed away — a couple are dull, a couple more test our willing suspension of disbelief, and one feels like a re-tread of an earlier story. I do quite like one where Tom foils a dogfighter, but overall these were previously unpublished for a reason. It wouldn’t be fair to re-appraise the series by these alone, though the conniving (even petty and vindictive) persona of Tom reminded me why I’d given up before, as well as a patronizing story where Tom helps save a Native American fellow who could have saved himself just as easily.

I decided to go to my favorite in the series, and the one I feel is the heart of the series, Me and My Little Brain. It has a lot to speak for it. First, Tom isn’t even in it — he’s away at school, and John finally gets to be the hero. Second, it is more of a novel, with an extended story about the Fitzgerald family adopting a troubled toddler who first raises hell and then becomes John’s worshipful shadow. Third, it has a lot of heart because of that relationship.

Here I found some of the magic I remembered. It has a classic middle grade arc of a main character trying and failing to be someone else, and learning who he really is. There are laugh out loud moments, sentimental ones, and a good deal more action than I remembered.  There is one troubling scene–it troubled me as a kid–and a Dickension wont to melodrama, but by the last page I was tearing up, both because of John’s courage and because I felt the pangs of nostalgia for the first time I read it thirty-plus years ago.

Two Kinds of Heaven

The spring in Minneapolis has finally sprung, and the last few days have been glorious. Yesterday I didn’t have to work, so I took B. to the big playground at the riverside park. He had a great time, and on the way across the parking lot he took both me and his mom by the hand, looked back and forth between the two of us, and said “I happy” [sic]. After a long nap we went to the smaller playground we can walk to. We set out to see diggers, knowing there was construction two blocks away, but they were gone by the time we got there. The playground was to keep him in good spirits.

Later I read a good story, “Train Dreams” by Denis Johnson.

There’s a story by Harlan Ellison about a guy getting to pick one day to relive over and over as a kind of heaven (or hell). Most people pick seismic days: weddings, etc. He picks an ordinary, decent day that is not extraordinary. I might pick this one. Nothing special, but a day I could re-live. Satisfying meals if not special ones. Sunshine and family. A tall glass of lemonade. Playgrounds and a good story.

*

As a college student I wrote a story about Heaven. It has been a topic of interest to me for some time. I don’t believe in Heaven, per se, with the gospel choirs and halos, but I like to imagine the afterlife. In my story, the hero is met by John Lennon (the only person he would follow) and led to his apartment. It turns out everyone in Heaven has to live with their litter, so he finds a pile of cigarette butts in the middle of his living room. He learns that Heaven is inspired by their happiest time on earth. It must have been inspired by the Ellison story*. Anyway, his heaven is the children’s section of the small-town public library he went to as a child, with the same domed reading chairs that looked like something out of Star Trek, and the shelves fully stocked with all the books he remembered. He opens one and starts reading.

I thought of that story just recently, because I am once again driven by urges to find the books I grew up reading. I have talked about a few of them before, but mentioning Pinkwater and Byars as influences might obscure the most important thing about my formative literary years, which is that I read everything. I wasn’t a kid who liked this-or-that kind of book; I read them all. I read the mysteries, the comic books, the heartbreakers and rib-ticklers. I read sci fi and historical and fantasy and biographies. I even read pre-teen romances, trying to hide them under biographies of baseball players so the librarian wouldn’t notice. I was a true omnivore.

Today I went to the Minneapolis Central library in search of a long-forgotten book about a pigeon lost in New York. I didn’t remember the title or author and searched for it futilely, finally finding a suggestion on WhatsThatBook.com. I saw that the library had one copy in the stacks. What are the stacks? A big, locked room of tall shelves, so close together that they are on motorized tracks. I’d been to the Central Library before but didn’t know about those stacks, which have thousands and thousands of books that are still in circulation but not on the main shelves. And there were all the books I ever read as a kid — many I’d forgotten about. I didn’t have much time so I got the one book (it was the right one) and a few others, but I will be back. I could spend a year just reading and remembering.

*If  anybody knows what this story is, please leave the title in the comments.

Alvin Fernald, An Old Friend

I often think of the friends I grew up with: Homer Price, Henry Huggins, Kerby Maxwell, Danny Dunn, Jupiter Jones, Tom Fitzgerald, and Lewis Barnavelt, among others. I’ve done a poor job staying in touch with those guys, and some of them have done a poor job staying in touch with me (i.e., in print). Oh, well. When you do go back to those old friends, it’s kind of weird, like Harlan Ellison’s classic story, “Jeffty was Five.” You have grown up and the world has changed, but these kids and their worlds are unchanged.

And so it was with trepidation that I reacquainted myself with Alvin Fernald, hero of a series of books by Clifford Hicks, mostly written in the 1960s and 1970s. Hicks was the editor of Popular Mechanics, and Alvin Fernald began his literary escapades as an inventor, but in later books he tried his hand at different things.

As a child I read all of the Alvin Fernald books. My favorite was Alvin’s Secret Code, which deals extensively with codes and ciphers. I had a sudden urge to re-read it and acquired it from A Libris. It was at the library, and available as an e-book, but there’s something magical about reading books that look like (in fact, ARE) the same as the ones you read long ago.

One of the principle characters in that book is Mr. Link, a WWII vet and code expert who helps Alvin and his friends learn to break codes just in time to break a real-life code and find a lost treasure. Mr. Link has infectious enthusiasm for cryptography and probably taught a generation of kids how to break letter substitution ciphers based on letter frequency and figuring out words based on what you know about the person. I still remember the lessons Mr. Link taught me all those years ago. I’ve decoded simple substitution ciphers plenty of times… breaking a “secret language” a girl I knew in high school used to write a message on the board, doing the cryptoquip along with the crossword puzzle in the daily paper, deciphering a postcard from 1911 that I found in an antique shop, and translating the messages in the margins of the first Artemis Fowl book.

What I forgot was that Mr. Link was an “invalid,” compelled by war injuries to stay in bed, and here is where the book  seemed dated, even for 1963 when it was released. They had wheelchairs in 1963, so there’s really no reason the guy should be house-bound. It was still fun to re-read the book, but that part had me scratching my head.

My Alvin experiment didn’t end there. The other book I most wanted to re-read was Superweasel, a 1974 book that has Alvin as a caped crusader against polluters, and might be one of the first environmentally-themed kid lit mysteries. (I wonder if Carl Hiaasen ever read it?)  Heck, it even precedes Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang, while featuring a similar theme of sabotage to protest environmental hazards. The problem of pollution and its solution are way over-simplified, but I’ll go ahead and call it visionary. I particularly like how Alvin’s sister Daphne emerges as a more complete character and an asset to his enterprise. I think one lesson that emerged from comparing the two books is that subversive books hold up better over time than pro-establishment books.

Lots of books have boy geniuses, but I like Alvin because he’s not overly sophisticated or precocious, like the Dilton Doilys that spout information straight from the author’s research (or worse, get it wrong). Alvin is a lousy speller and sometimes fakes his way through things with bravado more than knowledge, but he models the meta-attributes of intelligence: enterprise, drive, and curiosity. Superweasel has him applying those to an altruistic venture, and as a kid I felt like it was magical: a real life superhero, and evidence that one kid could make a difference.

In The Wacky World of Alvin Fernald, a 1981 collection of shorts that is for all practical purposes the end of the series. (There was one more issued in 1998 along with re-issues of the rest, and I’m kind of dubious of that one). It’s a mixed bag, but I like the first story where Alvin floats a lot of big ideas past his friend Shoie and his sister, and lays out his credo: what the mind can conceive, I can achieve. There are worse mottos a kid could live by.

Are You Joking?

When I got home from work yesterday, Byron ran to greet me (as he sometimes does): Daddy! Daddy! It’s like a TV show from the 1950s, only in color: I hang up my coat, swoop him up and ask him what he did today. He says he went to the zoo, which he actually did several days ago, but I guess it tops what he did on Thursday.

He has Thomas on his shirt, that very useful engine. “What kind of animal is Thomas?” I ask. He laughs. “He’s not animal!” “I know,” I tell him. “I was joking.”

And one of those little light bulbs went on. “Joking.” Byron knows what joking is, he does it all the time — hiding and surprising us, or putting on Mommy’s slippers and saying “I’m Mommy. I’m Mommy.” But he didn’t get that this marvelous form of play had a word. And that such joking — of being intentionally ridiculous — might be done by big people seemed to tickle him to no end.

For the rest of the evening, he kept returning to that: “Is Thomas an animal? Are you joking, Daddy?” Then he would laugh all over again.

Give me a room full of two-year-olds and I’ll kill.

 

The Real Boy

The Real Boy is fundamentally about magic: how it protects, how it destroys, and what happens when the magic is exhausted.

Anne Ursu’s previous books involve portals between the real world and magical worlds, but The Real Boy is a straight-up fairy tale, and a dark one (as fairy tales ought to be). If there is source material, like the Greek myths that inform The Cronos Chronicles, or the Hans Christen Andersen story that inspired Breadcrumbs, I don’t recognize it. There is a magical city, a massive wood, a dire place called the plaguelands, and a hierarchy of magical elite and “muggle” peasantry. If it wasn’t for the name on the cover and all the kitties, I might have guessed it was by Philip Pullman or Jonathan Stroud.

The hero of the story is Oscar, a low-ranking assistant to a highly-regarded magician named Caleb. Oscar has trouble with faces and grasping the unwritten rules of social interaction, and he  feels more kinship with the shop’s cats than its customers. He has a knack for recalling the uses of various herbs, and has read extensively on their properties — talents he keeps secret — but  he has no people skills.

In a contemporary/realistic book, Oscar would clearly be labeled as having Asperger Syndrome, but because he lives in a world without such labels and taxonomies, the story deals directly with his experience, and not the metadata of the experience. He isn’t a kid with a disability, he is just a kid with peculiarities — a weird kid. He is bullied and teased a bit, but is more importantly, casually dismissed as a marginal person. He doesn’t feel like a “real boy,” and few people treat him like one. It’s no easy thing to work a kid built from modern understanding of autism spectrum disorders into a fairy tale world. There must have been a million ways to get it wrong, but Ursu gets it right. Oscar’s nature is recognizable, but it’s not self-conscious.

I don’t like reviews that rehash the plot and I won’t do it here. Bad stuff happens, and there is an adventure. There’s magic, monsters, sleuthing, and heroism. There’s a sympathetic healer’s apprentice named Callie and some sick kids and some trees and a small army of cats and a goat. It’s a great story, layered and moving and occasionally shocking. What impresses me is how well integrated everything is: character and setting, inner and outer narrative arcs. It’s a book I’m eager to use in a class on writing middle grade fiction, because it does everything good books do.

I think what everybody will talk about is Oscar, and the deft magic Ursu pulls off herself in making a book like this work. I hope teachers, librarians and reviewers recognize this book as one that  ”embodies an artistic expression of the disability experience,” (as the Schneider Family Award puts it), without labeling and filing it away as such. Oscar doesn’t need a label, and neither does The Real Boy.

The Next Big Thing Blog Tour

I am it. Or one of its. I was tagged by Trisha Shaskan in the “Next Big Thing” Blog Tour, which just means authors get to talk up their new books — which is all they really want to do — and pretend they’ve been pinned at a party and compelled to do so. Thanks, Trisha!

1. What is the working title of your next book?

The Winter of the Robots

It is no longer a working title, though it originally had a different title. It is about  kids building robots. It looks like this. Isn’t it pretty?

2. Where did the idea come from for the book?

My drives to and from work take me by a lot of industrial areas — barbed wire and concrete and who knows what going on back there. That led to imagining the industrial wasteland-slash-junkward where a lot of the action of this one takes place. I also wanted to set a book in my own neighborhood. One thing led to another.

3. What genre does your book fall under?

Well, it’s middle grade fiction, and in the same vein as my other books, kind of a tall tale more than all-out science fiction or fantasy. There are lots of robots but pretty well within the realm of the possible. It is “sciency” fiction, not science fiction.

4. What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

It’s tough to answer this because I don’t know many child actors and the main characters are all kids. It would be cool for Everette Plen, who read the audiobook version of The Tanglewood Terror, play one of those characters.

5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

It’s all about robot battles, but the science club rivals have to set their differences aside and team up when they have to fight some real-life robot battles.

6. Who is publishing your book?

Knopf Books for Young Readers

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

About nine months. Or maybe a year. It’s a blur, now.

8. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I think robot books are hot, but I hope mine stands out as being more realistic — I had to think about what kids could do with supplies they had access to. I didn’t just drop a fully conversant, powerful robot in the book.

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?

My neighborhood was a big inspiration. I never set a book in my own neighborhood before. And no specific kids, but I really enjoyed learning about robots and robot teams — those kids are amazing.

10. What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?

For me it’s always about the characters, and the main character in this one is Jim. Jim’s story is, in many ways, a tough one — he has a strained relationship with his parents and in a lot of ways he’s a delinquent kid. He skips school, lies, cheats, and steals. But he’s a sympathetic character, and everything he does, he does out love and friendship.

Now comes the fun part, where I tag people. First of all, by coincidence, they’ve all written baseball books — and some really good ones! 

    

Here are the new books. I am linking to their blogs so you can click through and see their own answers to the questions above… look for them next week!

   

Audrey Vernick, author of the great true-story baseball picture book Brothers at Bat, has a new picture book, Bogart and Vinnie, illustrated by Henry Cole. It’s about a dog and a rhino. 

Jordan Sonneblick is the award-winning author of a bunch of books, including  Curveball: The Year I Lost My Grip. His new book is Are You Experienced? and is about drugs, time travel, and rock and roll.

James Preller is the author of Six Innings, one of the best middle-grade baseball books you’ll read, and dozens of other books for pretty much every age level. His new series, Scary Tales, begins this summer with I Scream, You Scream and Home Sweet Horror.

Steve Brezenoff has a baseball mystery as part of his Field Trip Mysteries chapter book series coming out, and two more installments in the Ravens Pass chapter book series. He also has a YA novel coming out in 2014, Guy In Real Life, about WoW gaming and romance and how terribly those two things intersect.