Loyal to the List: 13 and 3/4: Friendship List #4 by Lisa Greenwald

Everyone needs to have at least one person in his or her life who makes them feel like everything is right in the world even if it's not. Just one person.

Best friends Ari and Kaylan are anxious about their upcoming school year and all the changes that will bring.

But for their summer, they've chosen separate summer camps again, Ari at Camp Silver, where her little sister Gemma is also going, and Kaylan back at Comedy Arts camp. They have friends from the previous year, and even special boys, Golfy and Otis, who will be there. How will that turn out? they worry. Will everyone have changed over the school year?

Kaylan has cold feet about it all.

"I don't want to be thirteen and three-quarters. It's too hard.

I want to be little, still. Little forever."

As since the summer before sixth grade, the two turn to making The List for the summer to guide them. Of course, #1 is "Keeping Their Friendship Strong" "Write Each Other Once a Week," and "Make A Time Capsule of Our Lives at Exactly 13 3/4 and Bury It." But the other items they come up with are special to their camps. Some are serious, like "Make a Difference," "Keep a Gratitude Journal" and "Help a Young Camper Start Their Own List," and some are silly camp things like "Master the Art of Tie Dye," "Help Two Counselors Fall in Love," "Sneak Out at Night," and especially, "Do Something Daring."

Some of the things on the list work out. After several weeks of what seems like constant weeping, Ari's little sister suddenly begins to love being away at Camp Silver. Kaylan and her Improv partner crack up even their fellow Comedy campers, but Kay suffers through Family Day with both her mother and her dad with "his person" both attending. Golfy and Otis give them their first real kisses. But when Ari and Golfy sneak out after curfew on their "dare to be daring" goal to drive a camp golf cart (Golfy's idea), they are caught and face the possibility of being unable to return to camp again--ever.

Ari and Kaylan have a lot to share with each other when they return home. School looms just ahead, and they feel both excitement and sadness as they say goodbye to their thirteenth year and bury their Time Capsule together.

The best friends realize that things are changing fast, and that they, too, are changing, but they are still grateful to have each other.

"The whole world is like a narrow bridge. But the most important thing is not to be afraid."

In her fourth book in her Friendship List series, Lisa Greenwald's Friendship List 4: 13 and 3/4 (Katherine Tegin Books, 2020) follows close on the heels of her third, Friendship List 3: 13 and Counting, and join her Friendship List 1: 11 Before 12 and Friendship List 2: 12 Before 13, (see my reviews here. Greenwald has a good ear for the voice of middle-class middle school girls in a time of life in which the change from childhood to young adult comes all too fast for them, a time when the ground beneath their feet seems to constantly shifting. Although Ari and Kaylan have comparatively comfortable lives, they face difficult situations with their parents' marriages, shifting peer relationships, sibling problems, the health of aged relatives, and with their own friendship which they must navigate, knowing when to be (or not to be) "loyal to the list," as they make their way through the changes of early adolescence.

Says author Lauren Myracle, "Brilliant, laugh-out-loud hilarious, and heartbreaking (in a good way)."

Not What It Seems! The Thief Knot: A Greenglass House Story by Kate Milford

Marzana and Nialla are dissatisfied. Desperate for some excitement, they had lurked at a sidewalk table with their coffees, surveilling what they earnestly hoped was a robbery about to take place inside the jewelry store. Instead, it appeared to be the purchase of a surprise engagement ring for a happy young couple.

So the guy had looked a bit shifty. A high percentage of who lived within the city-within-the-city of Nagspeake called the Liberty were shifty--or had been to one degree or another in a previous life," thought Marzana.

"I should have known it was nothing...because... we live in the Liberty, and this is the place where nothing happens."

The neighborhood of the Liberty should be an intriguing environment, being the sanctuary city of former seafaring smugglers. And when talk spreads of the kidnapping of ten-year-old Peony Hyde, and Marzana's sometimes investigator parents receive a copy of the ransom note delivered by the mysterious Emmett, who brought up the possible involvement of someone called "Snakebird," Marzana seizes on solving the case as her remedy for ennui. With Nialla as co-sleuth, she organizes a group to help in their investigations, even calling their friend Milo, resident of the peculiar Greenglass House, where they had been previously involved in a puzzling Christmas enigma, for advice.

Marzana and Nialla recruit fans of fantasy fiction from Lucky's bookstore--Emilia, privy to many secrets of their school's historic building, Ciro, a self-declared born camoufleur, J. J., a magician, and Milo's offering, Meddie, a sometimes visible ghost resident at Greenglass House whose talents including invisibility, walking through walls, and supernatural sight and hearing. When the crew of six discover that their substitute math teacher is the great nephew of Andrew Cormorant, called "the Snakebird," they suspect that the kidnapped Peony may be hidden at the apartment of their real math teacher and indeed they find a little girl chained there--one who turns out to be a counterfeit Peony Hyde, whose real name is, interestingly, Tasha Cormorant.

Now, as Sherlock would say, "The case is afoot!" Marzana's crew, self-named the Thief Knot, discover an undercover conductor on the mostly abandoned Nagspeake subway system, the Belowground, who takes the young sleuths to a nightmarish abandoned station, overgrown with the ornamental ironwork which infests the Liberty, overgrowing buildings, walkways, and especially subway tunnels, where the real kidnap victim is perhaps to be found.

With a plot with as many convolutions as the enchanted ironwork of The Liberty, Kate Milford's forthcoming third book in series, The Thief Knot: A Greenglass House Story (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020), nothing or no one is quite what it seems in a place where time and setting overlay each other. Like the Harry Potter series, the plot draws on the strengths of the young friends to solve a puzzle with many pieces, a band of unlikely mates--differently-abled in abilities, knowledge, and exceptional powers, but one in loyalty.

This is no quick-read Nancy Drew mystery, but one to be taken slowly, savored for its atmosphere, its murky clues, and shifting plot. In the Liberty, the haven for old secrets, Marzana not only helps solve the mystery of the missing student, but also some of the mysteries of her own parents' hidden histories. Milford's over-arching theme of connection, the links between people, places, and their joint history, provides a part-fantasy/mystery tale perfect for middle readers who like to solve puzzles that range from relationships to crimes of the past.

Previous books in this series are Greenglass House (read review here) and sequel Ghosts of Greenglass House (read review here).

Appomattox Revisited: The Cruisers by Walter Dean Myers

We believe that it is our sacred duty to our brothers of African descent to continue teaching them our ways, including our religion, our principles, and our civilization.

We believe we owe it to these visitors to our shore to continue bringing them along, civilizing them as we give them opportunities for honest labor and the fruits of our fair country. To this and this alone, we owe it to ourselves to break the treaty with the Northern states and to do our duty as Southerners.
--Alvin McCraney and the Sons of the Confederacy

When Mrs. Maxwell, principal of Harlem's Da Vinci Academy for the Gifted and Talented, divides the eighth grade into Union and Confederate sides for their unit on the Civil War, she's looking for a creative way to motivate her students to get into the weeds of that epic struggle. Instead it looks as if she's scripted Civil War Two, the Sequel.

Cocky jock Alvin McCraney, always considered something of a closet racist, feels himself enabled to put his beliefs in a flimsily disguised article in the school newspaper, The Palette. Most of the students outside Alvin's circle are uncomfortable with his stance, and some are about ready to rumble. Alvin claims First Amendment rights and, anyway, he says, he's just role-playing in the spirit of their history assignment. And Vice-Principal Culpepper backs him up.

But the canny Mrs. Maxwell sees an double opening here. Zander Scott and his friends, staff of the school's alternative publication, The Cruiser, are in both editorial and academic hot water, and she offers the group a chance to redeem themselves--if they can find a way to mediate both the McCraney matter and the mock Civil War itself.

The Cruisers may not be the most dedicated of academic stars, but they have plenty of smarts and talent on their side, and Zander manages to come up with a plan of passive resistance to McCraney's white supremacists that averts all-out war at Da Vinci and in their Civil War unit as well--and wins for his friends and himself a good chance at graduating from the Academy.

Score one for non-violence and for the adroit award-winning Walter Dean Myers, who negotiates the urban school scene with insight, empathy, and intelligence. His latest, Cruisers Book 1 (Scholastic, 2010) is an impressive beginning to what is intended to be a series involving this engaging group of gifted eighth graders.

Poor Richard Rides Again: Big Nate Strikes Again by Lincoln Peirce

THINGS I CAN'T STAND
by Nate Wright, Esq.

Egg salad
School picture day
Bubble gum that loses its flavor in 20 seconds
Any art project involving egg cartons or pipe
cleaners
GINA

Big Nate is back, but he's not having his best week.

The good news? He's finally been named captain of the SPOFF (Sports Played Only For Fun) fleece ball team. The bad news? That show-off, know-it-all, perfect A+-only Gina is on his team. She can't hit, she can't catch, and she can't pitch--anything but sarcasm, that is, and her pitiful performance is the only thing that stands between Big Nate and the SPOFFY, the coveted soda-can-covered-with-crumpled-foil trophy for the championship.

The good news? He's assigned to do research on Benjamin Franklin, whom Nate finds to be a pretty cool dude. The bad news? His partner on this big-deal project is--Gina.

Nate actually hides out, er, does research on Big Ben in the library while dodging other duties. Nate is proud of his research product, BEN FRANKLIN COMIX, which the stodgy Gina rejects, pointing out the superiority of her thick desktop-published thesis, complete with web photos and copious facts about Franklin, Citizen and Founding Father.

Nate sees an opening here. He makes Gina an offer she can't refuse: she pretends she can't play on fleece ball days, and he "lets" her do the whole report all by herself, assuring that her record of perfect grades will remain intact. It's a win-win for our boy!

But best laid plans often go astray. First, Mrs. Godfrey, stickler for the rules of writing, detects, amazingly, a significant transgression in Gina's report:

Mrs. Godfrey starts flipping through it. Her smile slowly fades.

"Is--is something wrong?" Gina says. Her voice sounds a tiny bit higher than usual.
"Can you tell me about these visual aids?" Mrs. Godfrey asks.

Gina looks panicky. "I...um...printed some of them off the internet and I photocopied the others from library books."

Mrs. Godfrey frowns "The instructions were very clear." She reads them aloud.

"Visual aids are an important part of your project. You must create them yourself. Using images from outside sources could result in a failing grade."

At first Nate secretly smirks. How tragic for poor Gina. But then he remembers that as part of the team, her grade is also his grade. And he's already failing. Ooops!

In Lincoln Peirce's second cartoon classic, Big Nate Strikes Again (Harper, 2010) it's a win-win for both Gina and Big Nate, as Big Nate pulls this one out when he produces his Ben Franklin Comix, which knocks Mrs. Godfrey's socks off with its creative graphic exposition of the well-researched highlights of Poor Richard's career. Advantage: Nate. But then Gina comes off the bench to sub for the injured Nate and hits it out of the park in the championship final of the SPOFF playoff.

Score: Nate: 1; Gina: 1. And the rivalry continues.

As in his New York Times best-selling Big Nate: In a Class by Himself, Peirce hits a home run in Big Nate Strikes Again, with his hilarious spoof of middle school angst and his practiced cartoon exposition. Jeff Kinney, author of the wildly popular Diary of a Wimpy Kid, says, "Big Nate is funny, big time." He ought to know.

Peirce's just-out latest is Big Nate: From the Top.

Transformation: Alchemy and Meggy Swann by Karen Cushman

The black-gowned man, tall and narrow, like his house, peered down at the girl through eyes as dark as her own, nearly hidden by bush black eyebrows as if two caterpillars slumbered on his brow. "Daughter?" he asked, frowning. "I expected a son."

Ye toads and vipers, he would have more disappointments to deal with this day, Meggy thought. She leaned on her walking sticks and dipping and lurching, moved herself into the house--stick, swing, drag, stick, swing, drag--pain accompanying her every step.

With no bequest but a store of impertinent Elizabethan insults from her uncaring and unwed alewife mother, Margret Swann is dispatched in a cart among a load of cabbages to live with her alchemist father, a man she only learned of on the day of her departure, a man who is disgusted at the sight of a crippled, thirteen-year-old daughter deposited at his doorstep. Meggy spends a tearful night on a dirty straw pallet without a bit of food or another word from the sharp-tongued man, comforted only by her goose Louise and the memories of her gran, who loved and nurtured her back in her village.

But Meggy has more than a sharp tongue in her head; she is resourceful and bright and with the help of the alchemist's cheerful apprentice Roger, gradually learns how to navigate the filthy streets of London and make herself useful enough to the alchemist to merit coins enough to keep herself alive. Meggy soon befriends the cooper next door, the acting troop to which Roger aspires, and Master Allyn, a poor job printer who pays her a pittance for hawking his broadsides and ballads in the street.

Although her father seems to care for nothing but his search for the elusive elixir of life, his labors require much money, and one night Meggy overhears him making a deal to provide a pair of political assassins with a poison to dispatch Baron Eastmoreland, a nobleman loyal to Queen Elizabeth. Meggy is torn between her responsibility to stop the murder and save her father from the gallows and her fear that if she does he will turn her out to beg in the streets, or at the worst, take her with him to the gallows as privy to the conspiracy.

Keeping her wits about her, Meggy composes her own ballad, has it printed out as a broadside by Printer Allyn, and positions herself at the Baron's gate. Belting out the ballad which tells the tale of the poisonous plot, Meggy knows that if she succeeds in warning the Baron her conscience will be clear but the precarious protection of her father will also be at an end.

In her latest Alchemy and Meggy Swann (Clarion, 2010), Newbery winner Karen Cushman (for Catherine, Called Birdy (Trophy Newbery,) has fashioned another masterfully funny, feisty, and feckless historical heroine who takes matters into her own young hands to make the best of a bad lot. Meggy Swann is aptly named--an ugly duckling who remakes herself into an up-and-coming tradeswoman, finds work, a home, and a foster family for herself in the household of Master Allyn, and a staunch friend and admirer in young Roger with whom she sees a real future. Indeed, Cushman's plot plays upon the theme of alchemy, as Meggy Swann indeed transforms her disability and dire situation into the promise of a good life ahead.

As the Kirkus Reviews writer says, "Cushman has the uncanny ability to take a time and place so remote and make it live. Readers can hear and see and smell it all as if they are right beside Meggy. She employs the syntax and vocabulary of the period so easily that it is understood as if it’s the most contemporary modern slang. A gem."--Kirkus (starred review)

Cushman's other fine historical fiction includes the notable The Midwife's Apprentice, The Ballad of Lucy Whipple, Matilda Bone, and The Loud Silence of Francine Green, all universal coming-of-age stories firmly anchored in a vividly rendered time and place.

Clash of the Ironclads: Iron Thunder: The Battle Between the Monitor and the Merrimac, A Civil War Novel by Avi

Newbery author Avi, whose The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle (Summer Reading Edition) took the reader to sea as a able seaman of 1832, returns with an up-close and personal story of the transformational battle of the Monitor and Merrimac, ironclads which forever changed warfare at sea.
In Iron Thunder (I Witness) we meet thirteen-year-old Tom Carroll, taken to the Brooklyn Naval Yard by his war-widowed mother, who hopes to find him a job to help the family survive the early years of the Civil War. Small but nimble, Tom is hired for seventy-five cents a week to be the errand boy to John Ericsson, designer of the Union's first ironclad warship, to be christened The Monitor, but known as "Ericsson's Folly" among the Navy Yard workers who doubt it will float. Still, Tom's family desperately needs his small salary to supplement his mother's earnings as washerwoman, and Tom soon becomes Ericsson's ship's boy as the unlikely craft takes shape.

Soon, however, Tom realizes that he is being shadowed by a couple of men who offer him gold coins and steak dinners in return for information about Ericsson's invention. Tom suspects that the two are "Copperheads," Southern sympathizers who are spying to learn if the Union's ironclad is a threat to the South's blockade-breaking Merrimac. Fearing that he himself could be hanged as a spy if caught with the men, Tom begins to spend his nights below deck on the half-finished ironclad, but when, just as the Monitor is to be launched and sail southward, Tom tries to slip home to tell his mother good-bye, only the brawling ability of Tom's streetwise Irish friends helps him escape the Southern spies.

At last, the Monitor begins its slow and perilous journey to Hampton Roads, nearly sinking partway in a powerful squall. Tom is both fearful and exhilarated when he sees the destruction caused by the Merrimac's first outing against the Union's blockading warships. The battle which follows on the next day, when the little Monitor steams bravely into the path of the advancing Merrimac, is thunderous and terrifying as the two ironclads fire their mighty cannons at almost point-blank range. With the failure of the Monitor's speaking tubes, Tom Carroll is thrown into a pivotal position as he relays commands from Captain Worden in the pilot house to the men firing the ship's two cannons from within their iron-sided revolving turret. After four hours, the Merrimac begins to take on water and withdraws from the battle, allowing the crew and captain of the Monitor to claim a partial victory.

Avi's interweaving of historic fact and personalities makes for a tightly written adventure story, with the slightly fictionalized Tom Carroll a believable first-person observer of the sequence of events which may have changed the outcome of the Civil War. This first title in a proposed I Witness series is well-written and documented with period photographs, drawings, and maps, and museum objects taken from the Monitor itself. Iron Thunder (I Witness) is a an engrossing adventure story which would also make great collateral reading along with a middle school Civil War unit.

Indeed, in this book Avi offers a work of fiction with the supporting back matter of an historical work. An extensive glossary is included, along with author's notes which include information about the new USS Monitor Center Museum, which displays the turret and pilot house and numerous objects recovered from the sunken wreck of the ship and offers the visitor a full-sized replica of the vessel and a simulation of the momentous battle itself. A bibliography, including the full account of the confrontation by the surviving Union officers, is also appended.

The Irregulars Rule: Kiki Strike: Inside the Shadow City by Kirsten Miller

Kirsten Miller's debut novel, Kiki Strike: Inside the Shadow City: Inside the Shadow City (Kiki Strike), is a full-blown mystery/adventure geek-chick lit thriller, a sort of literary comic book (without the comic drawings) which will have wide appeal for middle readers.

The narrator, twelve-year-old Ananka Fishbein, is a pudgy, nerdy isolated student at toney Atalanta Academy in Manhattan, who finds her only excitement in trying to avoid the taunts and bullying of the ruling clique, The Five, headed ruthlessly by the beautiful Russian doyen, "Princess" Sidonia Galatzina. But when a sinkhole in Washington Park opens up a hidden room far below ground level, Ananka is intrigued, especially when she spots a tiny, white-haired girl sneaking out of the muddy hole. Investigating the sunken room, she discovers an amazing book, Glimpses of Gotham, a guide to the New York City of 1866, with a tantalizing chapter on an underground world called "The Shadow City." Soon Ananka discovers that the tiny girl is a student at her school under the name of Kiki Strike and begins to follow her in hopes of learning more. Soon Kiki reveals herself to Ananka and invites her to join in the exploration of the underground Shadow City.

Kiki recruits a talented group of girls from assorted Girl Scout troops: Betty Bent, who is a master of disguise; Oona Wong, a sweatshop escapee who is a talented forger and hacker; Luz Lopez, electronic and mechanical genius; and DeeDee Morlock, chemist and explosives maven. Christening themselves the Baker Street Irregulars (The Irregulars for short), the girls acquire uniforms, gear, and a secret map of underground New York, part of the three-level NYCMap kept secret to prevent misuse by criminals and terrorists. Their first mission begins with a secret entry through an empty tomb. With Ananka mapping the Shadow City's chambers as they go, the Irregulars discover chambers filled the skeletons of plague victims, barrooms with bottles of a strange brew called "Devil's Apple," and the bony remains of the author of Glimpses of Gotham, extracting from his dead hands a huge bag of gold coins.

The expedition turns nearly fatal, however, when Kiki orders that DeeDee blow open a certain door despite the chamber's proximity to gas and water mains above. In the explosion, DeeDee is seriously injured and the girls are forced to flee the tunnels and abandon their quest as water from the broken mains fill the basements and streets above. Ananka is suspicious of Kiki's motives, suspecting that she has a vendetta against "Princess" Sidonia, whose house was approximately above the explosion site, and Kiki disappears from the scene for two years.

But when wannabe clique members from the Atalanta Academy begin to be kidnapped, Ananka's investigations reunite her with Kiki, who calls the Irregulars back into existence. Kiki insists that the kidnappers' motive is to gain control of the other two layers of the NYCMap as the ransom for the kidnapped girls. Sending Betty, disguised as a potential kidnappee to a secret offshore party thrown by The Five, the Irregulars track Betty and the other girls tp a secret underground chamber in the Shadow City, and in a convoluted turn of plot the Irregulars, led by the daring Kiki, unearth a criminal conspiracy controlled by the Sidonia Galatzina and her mother Olivia, whose chief goal has been to destroy Kiki, the true heir to the Pokrovian throne and wealth. While "Princess" Sidonia and her mother escape, the other members of the clique are exposed as family members of a smuggling cartel which has used the tunnels of the Shadow City.

Mystery, suspense, adventure, daring and talented girl characters, a disputed fortune, villains you love to hate, Kiki Strike: Inside the Shadow City: Inside the Shadow City (Kiki Strike) has it all for lovers of the thriller genre. Luckily for these readers, there is now a sequel, Kiki Strike: The Empress's Tomb (Kiki Strike) in which the Irregulars come together again to right the wrongs of New York City. Part of the fun of the Kiki Strike novels is in Kirsten Miller's coloring of the narrative with an obvious fondness for her Manhattan setting and her skill in portraying her characters through description and dialogue. For readers who love the exciting twists and turns of plot, these are fun books with wide appeal, and more sequels should soon be forthcoming.