Going Softly: Behind You by Jacqueline Woodson

Author Jacqueline Woodson, whose novel Feathers received a Newbery Honor Award recently, is one who writes for all ages and whose books have earned Newbery, Caldecott, Coretta Scott King, and other notable awards. Reminded of her work by her recent awards, I've recently read some of her earlier work. Here are two related books for young adult readers.

Ellie and Jeremiah are fifteen years old, the children of well-to-do, successful New Yorkers, both students at Percy Academy, a prestigious private prep school in Manhattan. When they seem to fall in love at first sight, it would seem that the course of teen love would be smooth for them. It is not, mainly because Ellie is white and Jeremiah is biracial. There are family problems, as well: Jeremiah's parents divorce when his father falls in love with another woman, and Ellie's parents, modern and liberal though they think they are, cannot quite picture their young daughter as part of an interracial couple.

In If You Come Softly,Woodson's intimate look at first love, its depth and pain, is a sensitive story of the fleeting beauty of this beginning relationship between two beautiful young people whose feelings come up against the ugliness of society's reaction to their being together.

In her stand alone sequel, Behind You, Jeremiah is killed by police in a case of mistaken identity, and Ellie, his parents, and his close friends all find it hard to accept his death and go on without him. Jeremiah's spirit, too, is bound to the people he cannot forget and cannot really leave behind.

Woodson traces the history of grief in the separate voices of Ellie, his parents Nelia and Norman, and his friends Kennedy and Carlton, as they gradually turn from isolation and toward each other for solace and a way to go forward into a different life without Jeremiah. As Jeremiah says at the conclusion,

"When you die, you turn away from the world you've always known and begin the long, slow walk into the next place. And behind you--everyone you left is taking a step deeper into their new world. The world they're learning to live in without you.

When you die, your voice becomes the wind and whispers to the living...."

As in all of Woodson's books, there are no sudden and easy revelations, just the slow return of hope and the joy of life.

For my earlier posts on Jacqueline Woodson's Newbery Honor books Show Way (Newbery Honor Book) and Feathers, look here and here.

While We Wait for Breaking Dawn...: The Host by Stephanie Meyers

Young adult readers who are anxiously awaiting the August 2 publication of Stephanie Meyer's Breaking Dawn (The Twilight Saga, Book 4) (in which the heroine Bella must decide to join with Edward Cullen in marriage and in eternal, albeit non-human, life as a vampire) have something to keep them reading. Meyer's forthcoming science fiction thriller The Host: A Novel is set for publication May 6.

A slight departure from the fantasy thriller genre, this new title has an equally innovative plot, in which an extraterrestrial species invades Earth, not through warfare, but by insinuating their worm-like beings into the brains of humans and thus taking over their physical bodies. Most human minds succumb to the takeover, while a few uninfected humans flee and set up rebel camps temporarily out of reach of the "body snatching" occupation force. One human soul, however, refuses to succumb to the takeover, and Melanie's mind co-exists in her brain along with that of its interloper, who calls herself "Wanderer."

The plot takes off when Melanie's resistant soul interacts with that of Wanderer, persuading her to search the desert for Melanie's rebel brother Jamie, who is in hiding with Jared, the boy she loves. Wanderer, too, has a missing soulmate somewhere on Earth, and the two, "the host" and the invader, sharing one body and one set of needs and still human emotions, begin the pilgrimage to find their true loves.

It's an intriguing story line, both as a romance and as science fiction. According to Publisher's Weekly and other advance reviewers, the warfare between Earthlings and Extraterrestrials takes place here not on battlefields but within the conjoined minds and souls of The Host and The Wanderer. Meyer's vampire saga has proven that she is capable of sustaining characters trapped between two worlds, and it is sure to be interesting to see how she works out this familiar theme inside this new premise.

Rose's Briar: Dragon's Keep by Janet Lee Carey

Young adult fans of dark fantasy drawn to novels like Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series for its exploration of good and evil as well as for its romance will find much to love in Janet Lee Carey's Dragon's Keep. Drawing from the Arthurian cycle, Carey builds upon Merlinian prophecy to shape a tale which cuts through the conventional concepts of light and dark, good and evil, in fantasy literature.

Merlin had prophesied that the twenty-first queen of Wilde Island, descendant of Arthur's banished sister Egraine, would "with a wave of her hand" end war and restore the glory of Wilde Island. But the twentieth queen, unable to conceive the long-anticipated princess for many years, takes a witch's cure of swallowing the contents of a stolen dragon egg, and her daughter is born perfect, save for one ring finger in the shape and color of the dragon's claw. Concealing this deformity with golden gloves which she decrees that all courtly women shall wear, Queen Gweneth seeks every magical and religious cure for Princess Rosalind, hoping that she will fulfil the prophecy, becoming the bride of Prince Henry of England and ending the Plantagenet wars. To protect her daughter's dark secret, Gweneth secretly brings about the murder of the witch who helped her conceive, the midwife who delivered her child, and finally Rosalind's beloved old nurse.

As Rosalind turns sixteen the island is troubled by a dragon which carries off even her childhood playmate. When Lord Godrick and his dragonslayer son Kye sail into port with the slain dragon as cargo, the islanders hope that their time of fear is over. But when their rejoicing turns into revenge upon the female dragon's body, its mate Lord Faul appears, harvests her unlaid eggs and snatches Rosalind, flying with her to his island redoubt, Dragon's Keep. There he keeps her as a slave to care for the eggs and help raise the four hatchling pips on bitter thistle and milkweed milk.

As the young dragons grow and learn to speak and fly, Rose, whom Faul renames Briar, feels herself drawn into the fearful family, finally coming to realize that through her mother's stolen dragon egg, her claw, potentially a mark of Satan back home, is at Dragon's Keep a mark of Faul's fatherhood. Hearing the story, even the younglings accept her as their human sister. When Rose/Briar's maid Kit comes with the knights sent to rescue her, she sacrifices her own life to try to save one of the young dragons from a flood, and her sacrifice draws tears of forgiveness for the years of warfare from Faul. As Faul dies of his own tears, Rosalind knows she must return to Wilde Island to reconcile her people with the dragons.

Bound over to trial as a witch by an evil usurper who conspired in her mother's death while she was away, Rosalind has only one hope--that the dragonslayer Kye who knows the truth behind her dragon claw will come to save her and fulfill Merlin's prophecy and that her dragon finger will be recognized as the sign of redemption and peace between the ancient enemies.

Dragon's Keep is a beautifully developed fantasy. Deeply engrossing and lyrically written, the characters are fully realized. From the devoted but monomaniacal queen to the castle's cook to the dragon family themselves, the characters are richly drawn, and the complex theme of beauty and ugliness, good and evil is treated with imaginative but reverent respect. Author of The Beast of Noor, the first book of a proposed series, Janet Lee Carey here shows that she can construct a fantasy world which weaves strands from legend, folklore, and fantasy without leaving behind the all-too-human heart within, all inside the confines of a compelling adventure story that will keep readers in its spell.

Cinder-Bella: Bella At Midnight by Diane Stanley

Author Diane Stanley, noted for her earlier Rumpelstiltskin's Daughter, goes again to the well of the revisited fairy tale in her delightful revisionist Cinderella tale, Bella at Midnight.

Left motherless at birth, little Isabel is dismissed by her distant and distraught father and sent to a peasant nursemaid to be raised in the village of Castle Down. Little Bella, as she is called, grows up ignorant of her noble heritage, happy with her foster parents and big brother Will. Her best friend is the fourth-born son of the King, Prince Julian of Moranmoor, who also was wet-nursed and raised to the age of three with Bella's family. As the years pass the two children grow more fond of each other even as Julian moves on to become a page in the nearby castle of his uncle, Duke Gilbert.

But when Julian joins the other pages and young squires catcalling and flirting with pretty girls at a local fair, he is too embarrassed to greet Bella when she catches their eye, and she is heartbroken by his seeming indifference to her, believing that he is ashamed of her lowly status. Before he can explain, however, Julian is taken away as a truce hostage to the king's court in the neighboring kingdom of Brutanna. Bella, too, is suddenly taken from what she believes to be her family and reintroduced to her father's household, to his difficult new wife and her two new stepsisters. Stepsister Alice is still deep in silent grief for her merchant father, lost at sea, and stepsister Marianne is a pretty, social-climbing opportunist who wrangles a place as lady-in-waiting to the queen and finds peasant-raised Bella smelly and unworthy of notice. Berated and shunned in her father's lavish house, Bella sleeps in the kitchen by the fire and turns to the cook for affection.

But when Marianne's gossipy tale of the queen's squabble with her husband reveals that the king plans to launch a secret attack upon Brutanna which will endanger Julian's life, Bella travels to the Brutannian court. There, disguised as a fine lady in a white brocade dress and glass slippers, she attends a wedding feast and meets secretly with Prince Julian long enough to share the attack plan with him. Seeking to avert the battle and the renewal of the 100-year war between Moranmoor and Brutanna, Julian slips out of the castle and meets with the king of Moranmoor, who rejects his plea and draws his army into formation for combat.

Knowing that Julian will die if the battle begins, Bella settles upon a desperate plan. Disguising herself as the Worthy Knight, the prophesied peacemaker from God who comes to end the long war, by the light of the full moon she rides between the battle lines with a white banner of peace fashioned from her borrowed gown, and her ruse ends the battle before it begins.

That this Cinderella who rescues her prince also marries him is a foregone conclusion. Knighted Sir Isabel by Prince Julian, Isabel becomes his wife in the village church and everyone surely lives happily ever after. A bit of romance, a touch of magic, plenty of adventure, and a strong theme of loyalty, honesty, and honor make Bella at Midnight a novel that has something old and something new, something borrowed and something true to that royal wedding at its conclusion.

Bella at Midnight has appeared on the state children's choice award lists of Georgia, Texas, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, and is a 2008-2009 Tennessee State Book Award nominee for Grades 4-6.