Double Jeopardy: Lost and Found by Andrew Clements

Being on his own was a nice change--very nice. He looked like no one else, he talked like no one else. For this one day, Jay Grayson was twinless, purely himself. He was a regular, one-of-a-kind kid. And all day long it felt great.

Jay and Ray Grayson are identical identical twins, so alike that even their parents have to search for the freckle on Ray's ankle to tell them apart. And to make things worse, their parents got so giddy after the arrival of their incredibly cute twins that they named them--inexplicably--Jay Ray and Ray Jay. At first being twins is fun, and the two bask in the extra attention they get from everyone. But by the time they finish fifth grade, both boys are feeling a bit inhibited by the constant presence of their shadow selves. It's hard to compete with, hard to differentiate yourself from, well, yourself, another you, sharing your room, your voice, and your life 24/7.

So when the family moves to Cleveland and Ray is sick on the first day, Jay reports alone to his new school, to a homeroom filled with kids with last names between A and L. There he discovers that Ray has no desk, no schedule, and doesn't appear even on the teacher's roll. Then Jay suddenly understands why. Among the manila student folders stacked on the teacher's desk, he spots his own name on a suspiciously thick blue transfer folder and realizes that Ray's records have been mistakenly stuffed into his own folder as if they were one person. Jay knows he should say something to his teacher about the filing error, but the temptation to spend the day just as himself, Jay Grayson, not half of a pair of twins, is irresistible.

As Jay thinks about the experience, he realizes that there is a liberating possibility here. As he puts it to the skeptical Ray, they could both be Jay Grayson, alternating days at school, and have the experience of being non-twins, not to mention every other day off from school, as long as they can get away with it. It's not as hard as they think, either. The twins build a temporary garage hideout inside stacks of unopened moving boxes where they take turns hiding until their parents drive off to work in the morning. In the afternoon Jay and Ray tutor each other on the schoolwork they miss and divide up the homework more-or-less equally.

For the first few days, it's a sweet deal, but the boys soon find that trying to fit into each other's new lives, pretending to be the other on alternate days, has its problems. Lab partner Michelle really "likes" the smooth-talking Ray, but is put off by Jay's shy and stammering attempts at conversation. Ray finds it hard to explain to soccer buddy James why he doesn't have the major knee scrape that Jay acquired at practice the day before, and soon the two guys are hip-deep in deception all around.

Andrew Clements' just published Lost and Found puts a new twist on the oft-used "trouble with twins" plotline. As he consistently does with his intriguingly developed characters, Clements shows the tired-of-being-twins protagonists learning quite a bit about the real knack of being themselves in the midst of their identity deception. As Jay puts it when their cover is blown,

The experiment had failed miserably. Instead of feeling free, they were both locked into a prison of lies. Instead of getting to be themselves, they kept having to pretend to be more and more like each other.

And that could never work. Jay now saw that it was stupid to have thought that they could even pretend to be the same person. They were two totally different people, always had been, always would be--no matter how it might look to others.

Clements has a neat ironic twist for his readers near the end, with Jay forced to play Jay-Ray one more time as he is trying to turn himself in at the school office, but when things get squared away and the appropriate boom lowered on the two part-time truants, Jay and Ray head for their separate homerooms--at opposite ends of the sixth-grade hall--for a new and separate start on the school year.

The brothers walked side by side in silence until they reached the corner, where the hallways crossed. They stopped, then looked at each other for a second or two. It didn't feel like looking into a mirror, not at all. And they both grinned.

Amazing week, huh?" Ray said.

Common Ground: Extra Credit by Andrew Clements

Andrew Clements' books are all about finding a common ground. In his best-selling Frindle, Nick Allen's free-wheeling ways with neologisms (in this case "frindles" for ballpoint pens) comes up against his teacher's linguistic purism. In No Talking (reviewed here) the clash begins with the usual one between boys and girls and goes on to become a conflict between the kids and school authorities, with the students asserting that they "have the right to remain silent" to the eventual consternation of their teachers, and in his last novel, Lost and Found, (reviewed here) identical twins come to grips with their commonalities--and their differences.

But in his just published Extra Credit, (Atheneum, 2009) Clements takes on the search for common ground between two very divergent cultures.

In the search for enough extra credit to ensure that she is promoted to junior high, Abby Carson reluctantly takes on a cross-the-curriculum semester-long extra credit pen pal project, one which has her writing letters to a student in a village school in Afghanistan. Abby chooses the location only because she loves climbing the simulated rock wall in her school gym, and after all, Afghanistan has lots and lots of rocky mountains!

When Abby's hasty penciled letter arrives at its destination, however, the school authorities are in a quandary. Their best student is eleven-year-old Sadeed, by far their most proficient in English, but "Abby in America" is obviously female, and by local customs it would be unacceptable for Sadeed to correspond with a girl. Finally a compromise is reached, and Sadeed is asked to have his younger sister Amira dictate her replies to him to translate into his neat handwriting and formal English.

But when Abby receives his long, painstaking reply, she is suddenly ashamed of her slapdash first letter, and in truth, of her lack of attention to her own school work altogether. As Sadeed points out, he has no time or energy for climbing mountains; to him the Hindu Kush is a beautiful but overwhelming presence, whose ice and snow are a hindrance to communication and sometimes a threat to life. As the letters continue, Sadeed begins to put more of his own feelings into his "dictated" letters, and Abby is touched by the tiny rock Sadeed sends her, telling her that if she looks closely, she will see that it is a little mountain in itself. Feeling a bit ashamed that she called her level and fertile farm "flat and boring," she sends him a sample of rich Illinois soil, saying that if he looks closely, he will see in it a bit of an American field.

"I like that idea, that of all the people who have ever lived on the Earth, I am the very first one to touch this spoonful of soil. And now you are the second one.

It's the kind of thing that makes you think." she writes.

But just as Abby and Sadeed are beginning to understand each other's lives, fundamentalists in his village discover the project, and Sadeed writes one last letter to tell Abby that their correspondence has become too dangerous to continue. He is afraid, he says, that these people will make it impossible for his sister to continue to go to school. Sadly and thoughtfully, as Abby prepares her final oral report, she re-reads his letter. "Wishing you every happiness in your life," he had written.

It felt so final. Like a last good-bye. It felt like from now on she would be going along one road in life and he would be taking a different one.

In his first letter he had talked about the field of tall corn, the one in the picture she'd sent to him. What had he called it? Then she remembered--"like a smile of God."

And for the first time in her life, Abby really looked at the land speeding past her eyes in the June sunshine. She saw it through Sadeed's eyes.

And it wasn't flat and boring. It was beautiful.

Dog + Haiku = Dogku by Andrew Clements

Noted author writes
In ancient Asian verse form
To tell lost dog tale.

It's a familiar story--a lost, adorable puppy shows up on the doorstep, and a kind-hearted woman with dog-loving children implore the dad to let the pup stay. Notable fiction writer Andrew Clements turns his hand to this old story in picture book format--with a twist. In his new book, Dogku, Clements adapts the Japanese haiku form to the story of a homeless shaggy puppy who turns up at a family's kitchen door just as the mother of the family is trying to pour her first cup of coffee:

There on the back steps
The eyes of a hungry dog.
Will she shut the door?

No, of course she can't! Not with those big brown eyes and expressive floppy ears begging for a break! Getting into gear quickly, she gives the homeless pooch a bath before the kids come down for breakfast, and by the time the kids run for the school bus, the pup has a name ("Rags? Mutt? Pooch? No, not Rover! Mooch? Yes! Mooch! Perfect!"), a meal, and hope for a home.

Fast, loud, and crazy,
Food, coats, then the front door slams.
Mooch hates the school bus.

Mooch enjoys a ride in the family pickup, a good bark-up with the neighbor's dog, a test of patience with a squirrel, and a bit of a dust-up with the lady of the house over some chewed laundry and spilled week-old trash, followed by a satisfying nap ("Could life be sweeter?") before the kids return:

The sound of children,
That's what was missing all day.
Mooch loves the school bus!

But his bliss is over when Dad calls a family meeting about Mooch, and he hears the funereal word "pound." When Dad suddenly walks out the door, Mooch sags to the floor as the sad-faced boy strokes his ears. Things are tense as Mom and the kids wait wistfully until they hear Dad's steps at the front door again.

A new doggy bed!
Food, a bowl, a squeaky toy!
Mooch has found his home.

As a successful author of fiction for school-age children, Clements knows all too well the writer's dilemma: with the million or two words in the English language to choose from, how to select the right ones? As he says (in haiku, naturally),

Vast ocean of words--
I am almost drowned again.
A haiku floats by.

In the wide garden
I am dizzy with flowers.
I choose a small vase.

Dogku, with its charming illustrations by Tim Bowers, is an effective and delightful introduction to the haiku poetic form, which specializes in catching the sudden "bright moment." This happy little book is perfect for presenting this poetic form to young readers.