Hard Times: R My Name Is Rachel by Patricia Reilly Giff

It's rent day. I pull on my wrinkled Sunday dress. I must have grown when I wasn't looking.

My good shoes are under the bed. I pull them on. My feet have grown, too.

I talk to myself all the way to town, talk out loud, using the most persuasive voice I have. This has to work. Otherwise--

Never mind otherwise.

The real estate man sits with his feet up on the desk. Who's buying a farm now? Who's even renting?

"I want to talk to you about our farm," I say.

"We don't have the money just now." Every word is pulled out of me.

Twelve-year-old Rachel used to be happy. She liked their snug apartment in the city. She loved her school and little local library that kept her in books. She loved their family friend, Miss Mitzie, who invited her into her cozy flower shop and gave her sweet hot tea and her warm friendship. She even loves Clarence, the cranky stray cat whom she feeds every day with scraps from Charlie the butcher.

But then the Great Depression settles like a cold fog over their lives. Her father’s bank job ends with the closure of the bank. He finds another job open in another state, but that means the family–Rachel, ten-year-old Cassie, and nine-year-old Joey–must leave the place they’ve always known as home and move to a farm a long way for everything they love.

Their old truck loaded with everything they own, the family sets off over the wintry roads–but not before Rachel, with the surprising collusion of the usually non-cooperative Cassie, manages to catch Clarence the cat and take him along.

The family finds the farm an overwhelming disappointment–no electricity or water, peeling paint, holes in the roof, cobwebby and full of mice–and in the confusion of arrival, Clarence escapes into the woods. And in short order things get worse. A heavy snowstorm blocks the road to town on Pop’s first day at work, and by the time he is able to walk to town, dressed in his best gray suit and red silk tie, the job has been given to someone else. The only work Pop can find is in a grocery, working only for handouts of vegetables too old to be sold. And to Rachel’s dismay, the two-room community school and library are closed for lack of funds.

Then Pop hears of work with the Mr. Roosevelt’s WPA. But it’s far away, on the Canadian border, and he’ll have to be away for at least two months, leaving the children on their own. For over a month, they hear nothing from Pop, no letter telling them where he is, and no letter with money to make the rent. As the oldest, Rachel knows she has to find some way to keep them going with food to eat and a roof over their heads.

Just released in its 2012 paperback edition, Newbery author Patricia Reilly Giff’s R My Name Is Rachel (Random House, 2011) tells a story all too familiar to many of us whose families, my own included, faced similar tough times during the Great Depression. Rachel keeps her siblings together as best she can, even walking miles to town each day to work in a store for hours in exchange for packets of seeds to plant their garden. Only her own resilience and the letters that come from Miss Mitzie give her the strength to keep going. Despite the family’s struggles, R My Name Is Rachel is a hopeful story that emphasizes both self reliance and the value of human connections and mutual assistance.

Says Publishers Weekly, “Rachel's searing, present-tense narrative exposes her fears, determination, and hopefulness in the face of wrenching challenges. Recurring motifs——color, flowers, and drawings by a neighbor that Rachel discovers in unlikely places——add lyricism to this story of family solidarity.”

Hard and Fast: Best of the Best by Tim Green

Josh's father pointed to the knob on the pitching machine that controlled its speed. "I think you're ready for ninety," he said.

Josh swallowed. Ninety miles an hour was a fast ball you might see in college or even the pros, and even though he stood nearly six feet tall, he was still just twelve.

"That scares you?" his father asked. "It should."

"I wouldn't do it if I didn't think you could handle it. I want to make sure that you develop everything you've got. I want you to go further than me. Everyone who sees you knows that you've got it."

Josh LeBlanc's father is a great little league coach whose guidance has led his team to national attention and earned himself a substantial stipend from Nike coaching traveling teams. Josh is a player of rare talents, hitting and playing shortstop, but his father's frustrated personal ambitions are putting a lot of pressure on him on the field and at home.

His father is pushing Josh to leave his team and join a local winning Little League squad which has earned a a slot in the playoffs leading to the Little League World Series, insisting that that venue will almost surely yield lucrative college scholarships. Josh is reluctant, but a promise that his best friend Benji can join the team if he qualifies leads him to agree with his father's plan.

But his father's ambitions at home are threatening to destroy the family. Insisting that his five-year contract with Nike means that the family should move to a grander house and lifestyle, his dad is soon spotted tooling around town in a sporty Audi convertible with an all-too-attentive red-haired real estate lady named Diane Cross who obviously is aiming at landing more than a big sale. And when his dad moves out of their home and moves in with his new obsession and hints that with Diane's guidance he's planning to "leverage" his contract with Nike into a cash investment which will make him rich, Josh knows that change is coming at him a lot harder and faster than a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball.

As the elimination games for the World's Series play out, Josh and his friend, would-be star reporter Jaden, also begin to investigate Diane's background and uncover a record of sleazy and downright illegal deals by her husband, "Right" Cross. Investigative journalism is Jaden's meat and potatoes, and she is sure that if they can manage to video the supposedly estranged couple together, they can show Josh's dad that he is being scammed. Josh's greatest hope is that his dad will change and reconcile with Josh's mother, but the surveillance plan by the two young sleuths proves dicey and dangerous as it is played out against a backdrop of the team's advancement to the final game of the Little League World Series.

As always, Tim Green's Best of the Best: A Baseball Great Novel (Harper, 2012) in its new edition for this season balances both exciting game play and family dynamics in a tautly-written novel for middle reader baseball fans in another solid sequel to Green's best-selling Baseball Great and Rivals: A Baseball Great Novel.

Drawing On Her Strengths: Ellie McDoodle, New Kid in School by Ruth McNally Barshaw

THE END

Seriously. This is the end. I'm doing this new journal to keep track of my family's move to a new house (new city, new schools, new everything). There won't be much to keep track of, though, because this is the END of everything good.

Eleanor McDougal, a.k.a. Ellie McDoodle, graphic diarist extraordinaire, introduced in Ruth McNally Barshaw's Ellie McDoodle: Have Pen, Will Travel, is back in an even-better sequel, Ellie McDoodle: New Kid in School. In this one, Ellie's problem is worse than camping with worrisome relatives in the woods: she's moving away from her six best friends, her house with her own room with her own clouds painted by her own mother on her own wall, her school where she knows everyone, and even her nickname, McDoodle, for her constant cartoon commentaries on daily life.

In the new place, she has to share a room with her high-school senior sister and go to a school where nobody knows her name and nobody can get it right. (On the first day she's called Eleanor, Allie, Ella, Elmo, Ollie, Ellie McDoo-gal, and, worst of all, Smellie McDoo-doo.) The school already HAS a best artist--Rachel--so nobody, including the cranky art teacher, Ms. Trebuchet, cares about Ellie's comic drawings.

But Ellie's got spunk and resilience and a dab hand for a caricature on her side. She sets out to find something good in her neighborhood and finds a humongous library and great woods to explore. And at school she finds a way to put her art skills and Ms. Whittam's social studies unit on non-violent protest to good use--organizing some long-needed action against the slow lunch line that leaves her class three minutes to actually eat their lunch--if it is indeed edible! In the course of designing a logo for the movement (a circle with a capital Q (for queue) with a diagonal line) and stickers and T-shirts with the logo for her co-protesters, Ellie wins the hearts and minds of most of the class--and the majority of the school board members--and becomes a fifteen-minute media darling when the protest turns up on the evening news.

Ellie even gets her nickname back from her new classmates and writes a new END to her current graphic diary.

THINGS I'VE LEARNED:

1) When I'm most sad, I should watch, because things are bound to get better.

2) A brand-new situation is like a blank canvas: I can be a real artist and make it great.

3) It's okay if new people don't like me right away. They will eventually.

4) From now on, I'm going to find the "new kid" and be friendly.

I need a new sketchbook. This isn't the end... it's only the beginning.

Ellie McDoodle: New Kid in School is an empathetic, funny, and highly readable semi-graphic novel, a format which seems to be in style these days. In addition to the best-selling Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw, recent books which make use of this format for middle school girls include Katie Davis' The Curse of Addy McMahon, reviewed recently here, Margie Palatini's Geek Chic: The Zoey Zone, reviewed here, , Marissa Moss' Amelia's Notebook series, two of which are reviewed here, Rachel Renee Russell's Dork Diaries: Tales from a Not-So-Fabulous Life, and the similar format adopted by Newbery author Jennifer Holm in her unique graphic collage-styled Middle School Is Worse Than Meatloaf: A Year Told Through Stuff, reviewed here. All of these engaging middle school characters are transitional sisters under the skin with whom 'tween readers will feel right at home.

Running Free: Paint the Wind by Pam Munoz Ryan

Newbery winner Pam Munoz Ryan (for Esperanza Rising) returns to the American West, this time the high plains, in her latest novel, Paint The Wind.

"The only way to capture a ghost is to paint the tail of the wind." Maya's violet eyes widened, her voice breathless with conviction.

With one hand, she picked up the small brown and white plastic horse and moved it in swift arcs over the chenille bedspread. The June sun eased a notch lower in the southern California sky and flooded through the west windows of the two-story house where she had lived with Grandmother. Maya made the figure prance through the shimmering air and whispered, " I am a mysterious phantom, belonging to the stars. Who will find me?"

With the other hand she chose a black stallion and swept it upward after the ghost horse. She raced the black horse forward and said, "I am riding the wind. I am coming for you."

As the novel begins with echoes of The Secret Garden, orphaned Maya lives a shuttered life with her coldly controlling and neurotically protective paternal grandmother. Forbidden to speak of her mother, whom Grandmother holds responsible for the accident which killed both her parents, Maya has only a few fleeting mental images, one photograph of her laughing mother, waving at someone from horseback, and a shoebox of her mom's toy horses, to keep her memories of her alive, and these Maya keeps hidden away from her Grandmother's sight.

But when her grandmother suddenly dies, Maya learns that she indeed does have another family, a family which Grandmother Menetti despised as "living like animals," a grandfather Walter, great uncle Frederick, and great aunt Violet Limner, who live and work a ranch seemingly in another world. In two days Maya finds herself sleeping in her mother's old bed in her room in the fascinating old ranch house filled with photos of her mother, even a duplicate of the one Maya has secretly held dear. Maya learns that she was the one her mother was waving to in her photo, and begins to feel that she has come out of a long captivity to her real home.

But too soon Maya is whisked away to the summer camp on the Sweetwater River where her Aunt Vi is doing summer research, a camp where she soon learns that she will be doing chores, riding horses, and dealing with her difficult younger cousin Payton for the season. At first lonely and fearful, Maya soon discovers that she has the Limner knack for handling horses and when her riding skills are strong enough, Aunt Vi takes her on a long ride to see the wild horses. In a small herd there, Maya sees the brown and white mare Artemesia, the once-wild mustang that her mother trained and rode before her death and who has escaped to join the stallion Sargent's harem herd.

When the government rounds up Artemesia's group in a scheduled "gather" of the wild mustangs, the mare and her foal escape, and on a day when Aunt Vi is away from camp, Maya decides to tack up and look for Artemesia and her baby on her own. When a sudden earthquake causes an avalanche which blocks the course of the Sweetwater, Maya's saddle horse flees and Maya finds herself with serious injuries, feverish and unable to walk, with no one knowing her whereabouts. Her only hope of quick rescue is to coax Artemesia to allow her to ride her across the river and back into camp.

In alternating chapters, Ryan weaves, as she says "like a braided rein," the story of Artemesia, the "ghost" horse, and the story of Maya into a gripping but poetic story of love lost and found. With the high desert's beautiful mountain ranges as a backdrop, Paint The Wind is a modern story which has the feel of old-fashioned horse classics like Misty of Chincoteague or King of the Wind: The Story of the Godolphin Arabian which will appeal to today's readers and perhaps draw them back to those shimmering, satisfying novels of C. W. Anderson, Marguerite Henry, or Walter Farley.