Drive the Ball Home: Booked by Kwame Alexander

No one's blaming you. I'm just asking--

I'm tired of this. You're always fussing
at me for not reading your stupid dictionary.

You don't let me do ANYTHING.You take my phone,
you took my Mom,
and now you want to
take away
the last good thing
in my freakin' life--
SOCCER

Calm down, Nicholas.

NO. My life sucks.
I get bullied at school
I get bullied at home.
I HATE MY LIFE!

Nick's life had seemed like an open field and he was dribbling fast toward the goal. with the crowd chanting his name. Nick and his best bud Coby are headed for the Dr. Pepper Dallas Cup games, on opposite teams, but there together. He's in honors classes at Langston Hughes Magnet, and April has been smiling at him a lot lately.

But things begin to go wrong. His logomaniac dad hassles him daily to study his precious book, the dictionary of arcane words that nobody uses. Nick hits a dry spell in academic fervor at school. Ms. Hardwick calls him out in English for daydreaming, and the meanie twins, Don and Dean, are planning to pound him when they catch him alone.

Then Mom drops the bomb. She's going back to Louisville to take up her beloved horse training job, and it looks like she means to stay. Nick knows all that is because Dad dragged her off to a no-horse town because of his teaching job, and when he unloads on Dad, he is grounded and made miss a tournament to meet with a shrink to talk about his "problems." Nicky feels like he's gotten an unfair foul call from, like, everyone.

And then things gets worse.

Everything slo-mos...
Two crazed eyes glued to the ball.

You wind for the kick. WHACK!
POW!--Coby's kick, aiming for

the ball, finds your--THWACK!
ankle instead.

Nicky feels like he's drawn a double yellow card. He finds himself hospitalized with appendicitis and a broken ankle, while Coby heads off to Dallas. But at least Mom comes home. Maybe she'll stay, but then, maybe not.

Kwame Alexander's companion book to his slam-dunk 2015 Newbery Award-winning The Crossover, chooses another sports as metaphor in his latest, Booked (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016). Alexander makes good use of the usual stuff of the middle-school novel--bullies, hard-nosed and quirky teachers, a special girl, trash talk with his sports buddy--all in unique free verse form, Nick's stream-of-consciousness thoughts--a jumble of the emotions of twelve-year-old kid as he runs up against a new game whose rules he has to learn as he goes along. Growing up is hard to do, and sometimes you get a bad call along the way, but Alexander's young heroes have got game, and in this new one, if Nick doesn't kick the winning goal, he at least learns to make that good pass that moves the ball down the field. Another winning season for Kwame Alexander.

The Apartment: Weekends with Max and His Dad by Linda Urban

Dad was sitting in the orange armchair, ukulele in his lap. On the big TV was a movie, Big Bad Blues. The movies Max liked were action movies. This movie was a documentary, which meant nobody did anything.

Blue was another word for sad, Max knew.

"He should sing about pizza or rockets or car chases," said Max. "He'd be happier."

"Maybe when you feel bad, you can sing things that you can't find words to say otherwise," said Dad. "Maybe songs can help you sort through the sad or the bad or the uncomfortable."

Max knew about being uncomfortable.

It's uncomfortable visiting Dad on the weekend in his new apartment. Since the divorce, he's visited Dad at Grandma's house, which is fun, but Dad in an apartment makes Max feel sad, too. There's only one orange armchair and a television set in the living room. All the rooms are white. Even everything in the kitchen and bathroom is white--except the bedroom that Dad says is Max's. It's blue. It has blue curtains with football helmets, and the blue bedside lamp looks like a football helmet. Max isn't sure he likes blue best anymore.

What Max was feeling was like somebody was sitting on his chest.

Max had liked the Detroit Lions last year, when he was in second grade. He still liked the Detroit Lions now, but not as much.

"All set, sport?" asked Dad.

"I'm not a sport," said Max. "I'm a spy."

Things have changed for Dad and for Max. Max is into The Sneaky Book of Spy Skills and his action figure Stevicus, and Dad is trying to learn to play blues on his ukulele. There's no place for Max to sit except for the wood floor, which inspires his own blues song.

"I'm sad because my butt hurts. I've been sitting on the floor.

If I don't find a couch soon, baby, I won't come here no more."

But Dad is trying. He agrees to play Agent Cheese to Max's Agent Pepperoni. He swaps the lamp and curtains for red ones and offers to re-paint Max's room. He reads the sneaky skills book, and in disguise as spies he and Max go out for Ace's Restaurant for the Country's Best Bacon and Pineapple Pancakes, and the two shadow a mysterious man in the yellow shirt, giving Max a chance to teach Dad how to take sneaky spy photos. Then Dad leads Max into Ineeda Furniture, where together they choose a sofa named Olle.

Dad tells Max he is practicing to play his ukulele at the local open mic night, but then he points out that Doctor Spin's Club is not exactly kid-friendly. Max sees that sad guitar-man look on Dad's face and he feels blue when he thinks that maybe he's the reason Dad doesn't go. Dad assures him that the real reason is that he's not quite good enough for prime time. But on the next weekend Max meets the upstairs lady, Mrs. Tibbett, with her dogs Peggoty and Barkis, who lets him walk them in the park. Max confides his dilemma to her, and Mrs. Tibbett helps him plan for a surprise open mic party in the apartment for the next weekend.

The party is big success, with neighbors Mr. Polaski and his accordion and little Estelle on kazoo, but the next weekend brings a new problem. Max brings his best friend Warren along so that they can finish their animal habitat projects together. But Max forgets to bring the clay porcupine his mom helped him make and the shoebox, markers, and other materials to the apartment. But Dad, Warren, Ace, and Mrs. Tibbett pitch in to brainstorm last-minute substitute materials, and Max suddenly realizes that the somebody-sitting-on-his-chest feeling is gone.

Some days were house days and some days were apartment days. But both were home.

Award-winning author Linda Urban's latest, Weekends with Max and His Dad (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), achieves some surprising depth of understanding in this story of a father and son adjusting to a new family situation, with some pain and changes for both of them. Into the humor of this beginning chapter book, Urban brings poignant touches of insight by her well-drawn characters as Max and Dad make Max a new home away from home. Illustrator Katie Kath provides plenty of black-and-white drawings which evoke the emotions shared in this excellent short novel for the not-quite-middle reader set, one with a warm but realistic look at what it takes to make an apartment home.

Ex Libris: The Island of Dr. Libris by Chris Grabenstein

THE THETA PROJECT: Lab Note #318
Prepared by Dr. Xiang Libris, PhD., DLit.

I am thrilled to report that after an exhaustive search, I have found the ideal subject for our first field test, which will commence as soon as Billy G., a twelve-year-old male with a very vivid imagination arrives on-site.

His mother will be busy. His father will be away. He will be bored. In short, Billy G. will be perfect.

When his mom informs him that she needs some time away from his dad, Billy's internal alarms start to go off. And when they arrive at their lake cottage, loaned for the summer by her mathematical mentor, Dr. Libris, the situation goes from worrying to wretched. The cottage is nice enough, with a log cabin exterior and a modern interior, but Billy is not fond of aquatic activities and the place is strictly lacking in digital attractions.

It was pretty much a bust.

No TV, DVD layer, or XBox. No computer whatsoever.

There was, however, a framed needlework sampler on the wall.

A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
--Carl Sagan

Billy is also a bit spooked by the security cameras everywhere, even in his bedroom. He tosses his unwanted swimsuit over it and heads outside to look around, stuffing his iPhone in his pocket.

Bad moves. In short order, Billy meets another summer kid, the wimpy Walter, drops and breaks his phone, and meets up with the island's own bully, Nick Farkas, and his two henchmen. Spotting some Space Lizard comics in Nick's bike basket, Billy experiences a brief moment of hope that he'll be invited to play the video game with Nick's crew, but Farkas quickly disabuses him of that idea. His parents are breaking up, his summer is a bummer, and the local bully is itching to beat him up. Great.

But curiosity wins out, and when Billy explores the cabin's lower floor, he finds a strange library, with many familiar books locked behind glass doors. No key is in evidence, but there is a riddle, which Billy quickly solves, and he locates the key in record time. He takes down a book, the Labors of Hercules, and smiles at the bookplate inside:

EX LIBRIS X. Libris

Dr. Libris may be a weird guy, but he does have a sense of humor.

Billy starts to read about Hercules' challenge of Antaeus and realizes he's hearing yelling and curses coming from somewhere. It's outside, and when he leaves the cabin, he realizes that it's coming from the island in the center of the lake, the location of Dr. Libris' fortress-like study. Billy can't believe his eyes. The two combatants seem to be Hercules and Antaeus. After a bad night of mythic dreams, Billy resolves to try a more sedate book. Mom recommends her favorite, The Adventures of Robin Hood (Puffin Classics). But when his curiosity overwhelms him, he gives in and decides to row over to Dr. Libris' island.

And what he finds there is indeed a world ex libris, a world populated by Robin Hood, Maid Marian, and the Sheriff of Nottingham. Hercules shows up, and after a bit of combat with Robin, capitulates and squeezes into what seems to be Little John's old uniform to become one of Robin's "Merry Persons." In short order, Walter has to see what's going on and joins Billy in the mixed company of Poseidon, Pollyanna, Tom Sawyer, Jack and his Beanstalk Giant, even The Three Musketeers and assorted literary monsters, including even the Space Lizard of comic book fame. Things are looking quite Grimm for Billy, Walter, and their fictional friends.

How could he defeat the Space Lizard? Even Hercules was not strong enough.

"Ho, lads and lassies!" said Robin Hood. "All is not lost."

"I'm not Little John, or you, Maid Marian. I'm not a hero. I'm just a kid who can't even save his own family...."

"Nonsense," said Maid Marian.

"Each of us can choose what or who we shall be. We write our own stories every day."

And with a little help from the formidable Nick Farkas' Space Lizard Cheat Sheet and Jules Verne's time machine, Billy does it all, managing the monsters and even arranging a quick trip for his parents back in time to the day they first fell in love, in Chris Grabenstein's newest literary romp, The Island of Dr. Libris (Random House, 2015), working with references and classical characters from One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish (I Can Read It All by Myself) to To Kill a Mockingbird, from The Hobbit; or, There and Back Again to Holes.

With a breezy, spoofy style that goes down easily for summer reading and with a promising premise that kids can choose how they help write their own life stories, Grabenstein works fifty famous novels (titles appended), into this book-boosting novel, which joins his freewheeling fantasy best-seller from last summer, Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library.

Chris Grabenstein polished his literary acumen on his many middle reader mysteries and his comedy chops as co-author of James Patterson's I Funny series.

Under Pressure: Water Balloon by Audrey Vernick

So I just stand there, like the world's biggest loser. Forever. But forever, it turns out, is not long enough. Leah's face just looks blank, but Jane! Jane could kill people with the meanness on her face.

I look for courage. I remind myself that we have always been friends and that this is the only way to fix it. "Look, I'm sorry about before. That was a really bad idea. With the water balloons. I screwed up. I thought it would be funny. It wasn't."
"God, Marley! I can't believe I even invited you. You just completely ruined it. This will always be the party when..."

Everyone is staring.

Now Jane is hissing at me. "Did you really think we were going to be having little water balloon fights? I mean, when are you ever going to grow up?"

I walk to the driveway and get my bike.

Since the summer after second-grade, water balloon fights have been a ritual with Marley and Leah and Jane, a surprise blitz sometime after school ends, with points for originality.

With Jane and Leah absorbed in the eighth grade drama class performances, things have not been as close between them for the past year. But Jane's July 4 pool party seems like the perfect time to revive the water balloon blitz tradition, and Marley carries it out to perfection, surprising Jane's guests, especially her new high school theatre friends, with a barrage from an upstairs window. But the blitz is a bust, and Marley realizes that her long-term friendship with Leah and Jane is irreparably sunk.

Nothing is going right for Marley this summer. Her newly separated parents have decided she will stay with her dad in his dreary rental house most of the summer while her mom visits friends and helps out after her own mom's hip surgery. Her dad surprises her on the second day by telling her he's gotten her a daily babysitting job for the duration with a couple of clingy but quarrelsome five-year-old girl twins who seem to hate her right away. To make the isolation from her old happier life complete, Dad's computer needs fixing and he claims that "the economic realities of maintaining two households" rule out internet connections anyway, so there's no hope of keeping up with her other friends through Facebook and e-mail. And her dad, a hardcore weed-hater, seems to believe that a great father-daughter bonding activity involves rooting up the endlessly blooming dandelions in his neglected yard.

Marley herself feels like a water balloon, overstretched, shapeless, and ready to burst at any moment.

Then good things happen. The boy next door, Jack, seems to like her, even inviting her on a "date" to watch a Yankees' game in the city with him. Marley begins to "will" Jack to come outside and go with her while she walks her dog, Gehrig, and when she begins to spend the late afternoons watching Jack's baseball practices, she meets her Literary Mag co-editor Callie, who seems happy to be her friend.

Marley still longs for her old life, but little by little she finds a place in her new life, an understanding that old relationships don't necessarily last forever, that new ones can grow to fill their place, just as new grass grows in the places where the dandelions once bloomed.

Going up the back stairs, I almost trip over a potted plant. I take a closer look. I'd know it anywhere.... A dandelion, potted in a planter by my weed-hating dad. This could only be a Gesture. It must have killed him to do it--to rescue a plant he'd want to exterminate and plant it. For me.

I let the thoughts run loose in my brain instead of trying to hold them inside. And I wait for wisdom.

Wisdom's a no-show.

But I have learned something this summer. Life has some fantastic surprises.

From a bare-bones overview, Audrey Vernick's debut novel, Water Balloon (Clarion, 2011), may seem like just another "life after parents' divorce" trek through well-trodden fictional territory, but Vernick's lyrical telling of this story from the inside out through the observations of the memorable Marley make it an exceptional read. Marley is a believable thirteen-year-old, with one foot still in a childhood of best friends forever and a happy home life, reluctant to face the finality of the changes which are rushing toward her and seemingly beyond her control. But her basic goodness and self-awareness forge a a new way despite her fears. Just as her pesky twin charges sense that they are the only ones who can master their training wheel-less bikes, wisdom does show up for Marley in the discovery that she, too, must go forward into the very different life that lies ahead.

Kirkus Reviews agrees: "A nicely reassuring read with a satisfying ending; a harbinger of more good novels to come from this author."

Horse Time: Fear of Falling by Laurie Halse Anderson

This is totally weird. How come they're not getting on my case? How come Dad's not telling me how badly I messed up?

And then I hear the strangest thing. Dad is apologizing--apologizing to me. "God, I'm so sorry, David," he says. "It's all my fault."

I blink, suddenly feeling dizzy. "Your fault? But--"

"I was stupid," he says harshly. "I pushed you too hard, too fast. You never would have tried that jump in a million years if I hadn't pushed you to do it. I--I just wanted--" he holds out his hands helplessly. "I'm sorry." He turns to Mom. "I'm so, so sorry."

David loves horses and riding. He desperately wants to learn to jump, hoping to please his estranged father whose chance to compete as an Olympian was ended in the boycott of the 1980 games. But David is haunted by a recurring nightmare in which his horse refuses a jump and he has a disastrous fall.

When his father, who has been absent and uncommunicative for over a year, suddenly reappears at the barn with a expensive jumper, King's Shadow, David is both elated and fearful--eager to show off his beginning skills but afraid that he will never equal his father's expectations. Quinn, his riding teacher, advocates a go-slow technique, what he calls "horse time," allowing both the rider and horse to learn at a comfortable pace, but David's father urges him to try an advanced jump which causes a bad fall with potentially severe injuries.

And then David learns that his father's return to Pennsylvania stems not from a desire to be with his family, but a desperate attempt to obtain a job with a local friend's help. David realizes that the money his dad should have sent for child support has gone into the purchase of a pricey jumper, and his conflict only grows when he sees his father force his unwilling mount into a difficult jump which causes the horse an injury as well.

Torn and confused by his father's behavior, David resolves to give up jumping and confesses his decision to Quinn:

"I don't want to be anything like him. I'm even thinking about giving up jumping. Who needs it? It's just for show, anyway."

"Well," Mr. Quinn says, gazing at Trickster rather than me. "I hope you won't do that, David. As much as you may not want to hear it, you do have your father's gift with horses. Only you have an advantage."

"We can't help being like our parents in some ways," Mr. Quinn says. "But you just showed that you're different from your father. You've got a lot of respect for these animals, David. You've also got good intuition--when you stop and listen to it."

In her new edition of Fear of Falling #9 (Vet Volunteers) (Puffin, 2009) Newbery author Laurie Halse Anderson continues her popular Vet Volunteers series with the continuing story of David Hutchinson, first featured in Trickster #3 (Vet Volunteers). (See my review here.) As in the other titles in this notable series, the young protagonist has solid support from adults like Quinn and veterinarian Dr. Mac, as well as his young friends who volunteer regularly at her animal clinic, as they work their way through the middle school years--on, as Quinn puts it, the slow but steady pace of "horse time."

The War between Us: The Totally Made-Up Civil War Diary of Amanda MacLeish

Only in our house, thought Amanda MacLeish, could a Friday night family Monopoly game turn into the Civil War.

And as that ironically named "Family Night" Monopoly game plays itself out to an aborted ending, we see that the MacLeish family is already a house divided. Mom grimly plays for blood; thirteen-year-old Steffi suffers through the Friday ritual in bored-teen martyrdom; Dad remains annoyingly cheerful as he steadily wins, as always; and fifth-grader Amanda tries to keep the peace as the game disintegrates into another of her parents' frequent quarrels.

Things fall apart quickly for Amanda as her father suddenly moves out of the house. At first Amanda blames her mother's inexplicable crankiness for the break. But when Amanda makes an early morning bike trip to visit her father at his motel, she is hurt and bewildered when he dad keeps the chain on the door and orders her to wait outside while he dresses to drive her right back home. Mystified at this behavior, she hears Steffi's suspicion that there is another woman involved, the truth of which is confirmed when, waiting for a classmate at the community center, she watches her father greet a pretty blond with a private but familiar kiss.

Amanda finds little comfort in the awkward silence at home and gradually becomes estranged from her best friend Beth because of her inability to talk about her family's breakup to anyone. Instead she throws herself into her social studies assignment to compose a Civil War-era journal of a Maryland farm girl named Polly Mason. In Amanda's narrative Polly, too, realizes that she lives in a house divided when her older brother Thomas volunteers for the Union Army and her fifteen-year-old brother Jeb joins a Rebel regiment in the Army of Virginia. When her brothers are listed as wounded in the early battles of the war, Amanda has Polly disguise herself as a young Paul Mason and set out on foot to search the scattered tent hospitals near the battlefield, hoping to bring her brothers home and reunite her fractured family.

Polly does learn that her brothers are alive, but not whole. Thomas has lost a leg, and Jeb an arm, and when they come together again, Polly sees that the Masons will remain a family, but a much changed one. As Amanda writes Polly's story, she also gains insight into her own altered family. A field trip to Gettysburg, with her dad surprisingly along as a chaperon, helps Amanda to make her own separate peace with Beth, with her father, and with her future in her own broken but still loving family.

In her new novel The Totally Made-up Civil War Diary of Amanda MacLeish notable author Claudia Mills carries off a real tour-de-force. Skillfully balancing the dual story lines of Amanda and Polly within the framework of a fifth grade class working toward a performance at the end of its Civil War unit, Claudia Mills reveals Amanda's growing understanding of the meaning of her family's split as much through her journal writing in Polly's voice as through her own experiences. The journal entries are believable as the work of a talented fifth grade writer, and in an admirable parallel of the "house divided" theme, Mills also shows continuing racial tension between two boys in Amanda's class as they read their Civil War journals aloud. It is an altogether remarkable piece of writing with few false notes, as Mills skillfully weaves the meaningful subplots into an integral part of Amanda MacLeish's own memorable story.

All this may seem a weighty structure for a middle reader novel, but as reviewer Liz Rosenberg puts it, "Despite its somber themes, Claudia Mills’s newest novel sparkles like a glass of ginger ale, peppery and sweet. Spirited Amanda blunders through mistakes that only make us love her more. A splash of American history, a dollop of friendship, a pinch of philosophy, humor, pathos, even a dash of romance --The Totally Made-Up Civil War Diary of Amanda MacLeish has something for every young reader."