The Homecoming: The Vandeerbeekers Lost and Found by Karina Yan Glaser

"WHY DO BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE?" LANEY ASKED.

ISA ROCKED HER BACK AND FORTH. "I DON'T KNOW. IT DOESN'T SEEM RIGHT, DOES IT?"

When big sister Isa discovers clothes neatly folded and hidden in the storage building in the community garden, she realizes someone has been sleeping in the chilly shed, and she names him the P.M., for "Person of Mystery." Isa secretly begins to leave food there every night, but when six-year-old Laney discovers a secret, everyone in their multi-racial, multi-pet family is soon in on it. Then Isa's twin Jessie overhears a conversation between their elderly neighbor, Miss Josie and her great-nephew Orlando, Jessie's special friend. Orlando is explaining that he didn't call Miss Jessie back because his phone suddenly stopped working. Orlando's mother has disappeared again, and Miss Josie tells Orlando his mother wants him to go back Georgia until she returns, unless...

"UNLESS WHAT...?" ORLANDO ASKS.

"UNLESS YOU WANT TO STAY HERE. WITH US. PERMANENTLY."

Now Jessie guesses who the P.M. is, and of course, the Vanderbeeker kids get involved, as they always do. Their parents find out that Orlando's mother stopped paying rent before she left, and Orlando was evicted. Telling no one, he's kept going to school and sleeping in the garden shed. For one thing, Orlando feels responsible to their formerly reclusive upstairs neighbor, Mr. Beiderman, who is training with him to run in the New York Marathon, and to his friends on the cross-country running team, and he really doesn't want to go back to Georgia to live with another great aunt. But when Miss Josie's elderly husband, Mr. Jeet, takes a turn for the worst and dies, things become even more complicated. Miss Josie learns that she cannot be Orlando's guardian because she has only one bedroom in her apartment, and of course the Vanderbeeker's apartment is full, with ten-year-old Oliver sleeping in what is really a large closet as it is.

It all comes to a climax when, on the day of the Marathon, Jessie finds a note from Orlando, saying he's fulfilled his promise to Mr. Beiderman and doesn't want to burden everyone else and has taken the early bus to Georgia. In a flurry of Vanderbeeker activity, word is passed through the runners in the race to Mr. Beiderman, who makes an on-the-spot decision and then a phone call.

"THAT'S MY TRAVEL AGENT! SHE'S GOING TO GET US ON A FLIGHT THAT LEAVES AT THREE THIRTY. OKAY WITH YOU?" HE ASKS JESSIE.

THE VANDERBEEKERS WERE STUNNED. THEIR NEIGHBOR, WHO ONLY A FEW YEARS BEFORE REFUSED TO LEAVE HIS APARTMENT, HAS A TRAVEL AGENT?

Mr. Beiderman and Jessie make their plane to Atlanta just as the cabin doors are about to be closed, and all's well that ends well for Mr. Beiderman, who does have a second bedroom and decides to become Orlando's guardian, and for Miss Josie, and the Vanderbeekers, who welcome their young friend home at last, in Karina Yan Glaser's fourth book in series, The Vanderbeekers Lost and Found (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020).

And that's just ONE of the plotlines is this latest novel for middle readers from the popular Vanderbeeker series. With a lively family of kids originally ranging in age from five to thirteen, loving parents, and a lively, close-knit urban setting, there's something for a wide range of readers in these upbeat stories of modern family life. (See all reviews here.)

A child once wrote to the beloved children's author Beverly Cleary, sayiing she liked the way her books were "happy-sad," and Karina Yan Glaser's Vanderbeeker stories have that quality, too. And for fans of the Vanderbeeker family, I recommend another series of the adventures of a large family, beginning with The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy.

Previous Pandemics! Influenza! How the Flu Changed History by Barbara Krasner

September 18, 1918: Nineteen-year-old Reuben Law boarded a ship in New York... bound for France. Law was a soldier. The U.S. had joined World War I in 1917. Two days into the journey Law wrote into his journal that he felt weak. He was in a state of delirium. Law had the Spanish Flu.

This so-called Spanish Flu did not actually begin in Spain, but it spread rapidly through soldiers living in close quarters and then to the civilians in Europe and subsequently to most parts of the world. Fifty million people died before 1920, far more than the number of battlefield casualties in World War I.

But even in 1918, influenza was not new to the world. The first identified epidemic was in 1510, and it appeared again in 1580, spreading throughout the world in a mere six weeks. The so-called Russian Flu in 1889 killed over a million people. In the period following the pandemic flu of 1918, scientists began to study the disease.

It was determined that iinfluenza was caused, not by a bacterium like TB, but by a virus which could be shared easily between humans and other mammals. The virus itself was isolated in the 1930s, and in 1938 Dr. Jonas Salk (famed for his polio vaccine) developed a working flu vaccine that was given broadly to military inductees during World War II. However, after the war scientists discovered that there were two types of flu that affected humans, named Types A and B, and after some additional research they learned that there were several strains of both A and B, making it more difficult to predict which combinations would be effective in any given year. In more recent years it was learned that influenza strains develop in both swine and bird populations, and it can then spread to all parts of the world rapidly.

Since the 1918 pandemic, there have been other deadly outbreaks of influenza--the H2N2 influenza in 1957 which killed three million people in its first five months, the H2N2 "Hong Kong" flu which killed one million, and the 1976 "Swine Flu," during which 40 million Americans were hurriedly vaccinated. A mistake in one manufacturer's vaccine created a "flu shot scare" which caused severe neurological symptoms in a small number of cases, causing the formation of the World Health Organization to assume oversight of the manufacture of vaccines.

Given that the current pandemic of COVID-19 is spread as an aerosol through the air in exactly the same way as influenza, author Barbara Krasner's Influenza: How the Flu Changed History (Infected!) (Capstone Press) should be practically required reading for middle elementary and middle school students. Very thorough in portraying some of the drama of the 1918 Flu, this slim volume also traces the history of influenza epidemics and the scientific background for precautions such a quarantine, closures of public spaces, handwashing, and masks first required in that unforgettable time, as well as subsequent epidemics, as well as the development of vaccines and the public health agencies that oversee the control of this sometime deadly disease. With ample photos, fact boxes, "Fast Facts" and other inserts,  a glossary, bibliography, and index, and a very readable font and short chapters, this well-written informational book  provides a basic understanding of the nature of influenza and the personal and social effects of pandemics for middle readers.

Speaking Poetically... Out of Wonder: Poems Celebrating Poets by Kwame Alexander

"Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing," wrote the award-winning poet Lucille Clifton. That's a broad statement, since the word "wonder" itself can carry dual meanings, to be in awe and to question something, but its meaning applies well to children, who know both feelings well.

But poetry often doesn't feel natural to most young people, who, like even the best of rapper-poets, are still tied to the idea of fixed rhyme and meter. But along comes Kwame Alexander, writing a novel about, of all things, a twelve-year-old who lives for basketball and outdoing his twin brother at it. It's not easy combining vibrant game-play with sibling rivalry and life and death in blank verse stream-of-consciousness poetry for middle-schoolers, but Alexander did it with aplomb, winning the 2015 Newbery Award with his novel The Crossover (review here).

Now Alexander turns his attention to spreading the word for poetry. As he describes his growing-up years, he had a head start.

In my home words came alive.
Our house was a Walmart of books,
Reading was our hobby, our playdate.

But since not all kids come with a home court advantage, Alexander and his teammates, Chris Colderly and Marjorie Wentworth, offer poems written in the style of famous poets such as e. e. cummings, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, Nikki Giovanni, and fourteen more. Here's Wentworth, doing Dickenson:

I keep an old vase in my room
That says believing in roses make them bloom.

And in the style of Robert Frost:

I have stopped to shake the dry snow
from the branches and watched the outline
of each bare tree sharpen like stone,
and consider that quite often
Life is too much like a pathless wood.

Colderly also takes a crack at Nikki Giovanni's colloquial style:

Poetry is barbecue, cotton candy,
blues, Birdland, Sunday morning gospel,
ripples on a pond.

And here he is, doing the poet Gwendolyn Brooks:

Bronzeville lads, way past cool,
Voices like butter, melting blues,
Bronzeville lads, gone too soon.

Kwame Alexander's Out of Wonder: Poems Celebrating Poets (Candlewick, 2017) has a lot to offer young readers in the upper elementary and middle school years in this introduction to the wonder of words and their power. The old saying, "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," is true, and enticing young people to "get" the feel of famous poems and try their hand at writing their own both introduces these poets and offers models for writing. Teachers will want a copy of this book on their own shelves as a way to introduce their students to ways of writing from the senses and from the heart. "The exercise of celebrating poets in their own voices leads naturally to the idea of the classroom writing prompt—which Colderley, writing haiku in the style of Basho, seems to anticipate: “Pens scratching paper/ Syllables counted with care/ Poets blossoming,” says Publishers Weekly.

Kwame Alexander's other books also include the free verse soccer-themed story, Booked (see review here) and the best-selling The Playbook: 52 Rules to Aim, Shoot, and Score in This Game Called Life. Rebound, Alexander's prequel to his Newbery winner, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in April of 2018.