The Soul of an Octopus/Sy Montgomery: reflections

Last week I went in and out of three city bookstores. I might as well have traveled the world.

In the glorious indie Penn Book Center, on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, Ashley and I talked about who was reading what and why (a favorite conversation) and (in the midst of it all) I asked for a copy of Sy Montgomery's National Book Award nominated The Soul of an Octopus. Sy and I met when I reviewed her glorious book about swimming with the pink dolphins years ago. I've read all of books (for adults) since (Sy is an award-winning natural-world storyteller for children, too). And once, it seems ages ago, Sy and her friend and my husband and I sat in a restaurant just off Pine Street in Philly talking about the worlds we love.

The Soul of an Octopus is Sy's best book yet—and that is saying something. It's Sy as Sy—the intrepid explorer with the gonzo heart in the petite and capable body. It's Sy spending Wonderful Wednesdays with her friends at the New England Aquarium as they get to know—and be known by—a succession of form-shifting, camouflage-bedazzling, big-one-minute-squeezing-through-a-two-inch-crevasse-the-next octopuses. Sy falls in love with the first octopus touch. She begins to live on octopus time. She scubas into seas to see the wild octopus up close. And then she returns to the barrels and tanks and public displays to watch Octavia and Kali and Karma conveyor-belt food up their suction cups toward their mouths, beat with three hearts, unlock puzzles, and demonstrate intelligence, compassion, and personality akin to any human being.

But let's also pause right there, with human beings. Because, while Sy has always taken the time to introduce us to the other explorers and animal-kingdom lovers that she encounters in her wild adventures, we have never met characters quite like these—young people, older people, expert people, diving people, people with diagnoses, people with broken hearts, appreciating people. Sy's communities of octopus lovers are immaculately drawn. So much so that kindness (about which I was just recently musing, here) is as integral to this story as Sy's desire to understand octopus consciousness. Indeed, I would say the two are inextricable.

We can't help but love (even more) the wise and personality-prone octopus as we read (and finish) this book. We also can't help but love Sy.

I leave you with an early passage:

Perhaps, as we stroked her in the water, we entered into Athena's experience of time—liquid, slippery, and ancient, flowing at a different pace than any clock. I could stay here forever, filling my senses with Athena's strangeness and beauty, talking with my new friends.

Congratulations, Sy.

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Goblin Secrets/William Alexander: Reflections

I am not by nature a reader of fantasy or steampunk.  Perhaps it's because my childhood was spent studying picture books with titles such as We Help Daddy and Are You My Mother? that I grew up all Seriousness and Responsibility, less than funny, and (oh, the curse) unimaginatively thoughtful.  What can I do to help my daddy, and are you, in fact, my mother?  Such were the profound mental exhilarations of my childhood.

But I digress (and exaggerate).

Yesterday I placed my many inadequacies aside and brought home William Alexander's Goblin Secrets, winner of this year's National Book Awards. I knew absolutely nothing about the story except for what the great Gary D. Schmidt said about it during and just after the awards ceremony.  My thinking was this:  If Gary D. Schmidt loves this book, Beth Kephart better give it a whirl.

Beth Kephart's happy that she did.  Lacking the vocabulary to offer a precise critique, she'll just say this:  the world Alexander creates—of creaking gears and angry pigeons, traveling caravans and glass clocks, brave boys and forgiving goblins—is engrossing, palpable, nearly Venetian as it limns its masquerade.  The characters are heart-string-tuggers.  There's a river here that doesn't just flow but talks.  There are coming floods.  There are anticipated disasters.  These are kids who take it upon themselves to rescue sinking cities.

Which is all so absolutely apropos in the wake of the storms, rivers, seas that threaten to undo us.
 

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Inside Out & Back Again/Thanhha Lai: Reflections

One of the great sorrows of my past many months has been the paucity of books I've had the time to read.  Life just isn't right without a book in one's hand.  And my blog is hollow when not celebrating the work of others.

How happy I was this weekend, then, to settle in with Inside Out & Back Again, the 2011 National Book Award winner for Young People's Literature. It's, well:  it's perfect.  A story told as a child truly sees. A collection of free-verse poems that set the small things (the taste of papaya) against the big things (the consequences of an abrupt flight from home) and makes us feel, deeply, what it is to lose everything that defines you, and what it is to start all over again.

Like Thanhha Lai once was herself, Ha, the story's narrator, is just ten years old when Saigon falls and she finds herself on a boat to the United States.  Supplies are scarce.  The vessel is crowded.  Ha is a kid, and she's hungry:

Morning, noon, and night
we each get
one clump of rice,
small, medium, large,
according to our height,
plus one cup of water
no matter our size.

The first hot bite
of freshly cooked rice,
plump and nutty,
makes me imagine
the taste of ripe papaya
although one has nothing
to do with the other.

Once the boat finally makes it to Guam, the family waits until it boards a plane for Florida, where it waits again, this time to be adopted by an American sponsor. Chosen at last by a car dealer from Alabama (who seeks to train Ha's brother, an engineer, in the art of car mechanics), the family moves again:

We sit and sleep in the lowest level
of our cowboy's house
where we never see
the wife.

I must stand on a chair
that stands on a tea table
to see
the sun and the moon
out a too-high window.

The wife insists
we keep out of
her neighbors' eyes.

Mother shrugs.
More room here
than two mats on a ship.

I wish she wouldn't try
to make something bad
better.

Everything about this book feels right.  The natural quality of the child's voice.  The intelligent use of symbols.  The piercing grace of the story itself.  The deep, authentic sadness.  Simple words.  Big ideas.  A whole, long tug on the heart.  Inside Out & Back Again is a lasting achievement.  It elevates the genre.

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May B./Caroline Starr Rose: Reflections

Ten years ago, I was spending these heated summer days reading through 160+ books written for children and teens.  Picture books, middle-grade books, history books, biographies, verse novels, novels—you name it.  I'd been asked to chair the Young People's Literature Jury for the National Book Awards.  I was serious, as I tend to be, about the responsibility.

Among the books that rapidly made its way to the top of my pile was Marilyn Nelson's Carver: A Life in Poems.  Here was George Washington Carver's life told with lyric majesty.  Here was poverty and agriculture, botany and music, and I loved every word. Nelson's book would go on to be among the National Book Award finalists that year.  It remains a book I return to repeatedly, cite often, keep tucked into a special corner of my shelves.

It seems fitting, then, that I have spent much of this warm, quiet day with Caroline Starr Rose's magnificent middle grade novel-in-verse in hand.  It's called May B. and it takes us to the Kansas prairie, where young Mavis Elizabeth Betterly, a struggling reader in school, has been sent fifteen miles from her home to help a new homesteader out.  Tragedy strikes, and May B. is soon alone—fending off winter and wolves and the flagellation of self doubt until:

It is hard to tell what is sun,
what is candle,
what is pure hope.

That is May B., thinking out loud. That is the quality of the prose that streams through this book—timeless, transcendent, and graced with lyric spark, moving, always, the consequential story along:

She rocks again.
"The quiet out here's the worst part,
thunderous as a storm the way
it hounds you
inside
outside
nighttime
day."

And:

He had that look that reminds me
someday he'll be a man.

Caroline Starr Rose is both a teacher and a writer (and a fine blogger).  She wondered, she writes, how children with learning differences, such as dyslexia, made their way, years ago, and May B. arose in part from that question, as well as from Caroline's own love for social history.  I listen for rhythms in the books I read, and I found them aplenty here.  I look for heart, and found that, too—abundant and dear. Special books fit themselves into special places, and May B. has a new home here on my shelves—right beside Ms. Nelson's Carver and Jeannine Atkins' Borrowed Names, where versed, artful, backward-glancing works for younger readers go. 

A non sequitur, perhaps:  When I finished reading May B. an hour or two ago, I realized something.  I have at long last collected enough fine young adult literature of different genres and slants to teach that YA course that I have so often been asked to consider.  Ideas form.

May B. is due out from Schwartz & Wade Books, January 2012.

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John Updike and the Beauty of the Book

It is often only after dinner has been cooked and all the spices put away that I travel back into my office to learn how the rest of the world has fared throughout the day. So that I did not know until late last night about the passing of John Updike. It took my breath away. It seemed wrong, not yet his time, for how Updike still gleams in his poignant October interview with Sam Tannenhaus at the New York Times, how gloriously that white hair still shines. Even as Updike suggests that perhaps it is time to step away from the writerly task. Even as he confesses the "stickiness" that attends the writing of an historical novel. Even as he notes the prevailing glory and glamor of youth.

It feels personal with me and John Updike. Not because I've loved or even read all 61 of his books, but because he always represented to me the potential elegance of the writerly self. In 1998, when I knew next to nothing about books but somehow found myself seated at the National Book Awards, it was Updike who spoke that night about the inherent physical beauty of books and type. I looked at the enterprise differently after that. I never opened another book without feeling its particular weight or noting the width of its margins or the roundness or sharpness of its letters "b," "w," "a."

So may the great man of letters rest in peace. In his own work, and in the reviews he wrote about the work of others, he had and has so much to teach.

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