Horsepower

Grand Theft Horse by G. Neri [illus. by Corban Wilkin]
New York : Tu Books, an imprint of Lee & Low Books Inc., [2018]
220 p. : chiefly ill. ; 22 cm.

This is a beautiful story of a courageous woman who is a gifted horse trainer and takes a stand against the abusive horse racing industry in California.  The core of the story is the sacrifices she makes and the injustices she endures to uphold her commitment to the decent treatment of a horse under her care.   

The book tells the story of her life, and of how she got entangled with an absolutely horrid lawyer who helped her buy a race horse with exceptional potential, but then wanted her to exploit it for short term profits.  When she defies him, he spends years and gobs of money trying to ruin her.

This graphic novel is really a deep delve into what does it mean to have a meaningful life.  It asks the reader to really consider what is success, what is valuable, what is right and wrong. 

I liked this book a lot, but found it a little hard to get into at first.  I worry that it's beginning might discourage young adult readers, but I will definitely recommend it to those who want something more from their graphic novel than just adventure.     

Touching on Family

Far from the Tree by Robin Benway

New York, NY : HarperTeen, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, [2017]

374 p. ; 22 cm.

At first glance, it might seem surprising that Far From the Tree won the 2017 National Book Award.  In some ways it seems like a typical teen "problem novel" - one about three teens who share the same birth mother, but who have had very different lives since birth, and reconnect in various ways as they try to bond with each other and figure out what family really means.     

But the writing is strong in this novel and - in spite of myself - I found myself tearing up several times throughout the book. The emotional moves in the book are subtly developed and when they reach a climax they are quite convincing.

The novel also draws strength from having both a common thread - the three characters are all children of the same birth mother - and from having really complex dynamics: one of the sisters has just given up a baby of her own, one of the teens has an adoptive family that is experiencing a divorce, and one of the teens never got adopted at all.

Each character grows separately and in interactions with the others as the novel moves through several intense episodes and moves toward a final climax that is surprising and also satisfying.

If you have a student looking for a compelling read about family relationships, this novel is highly recommended.

Fiery Brown

A Volcano Beneath the Snow: John Brown's War Against Slavery by Albert Marrin
New York : Alfred A. Knopf, [2014]
244 p. : ill., maps ; 25 cm.

Like many of the history non-fiction books published with the high school audience in mind, this book has an appealing layout with lots of great photos, reproductions, etc.  It makes for a readable history.  I also like that the length of these non-fiction books is long enough for a substantive treatment of the topic, but not so exhaustive as to be daunting.

I read this book because I really wanted to learn more about John Brown and his passionate fight against slavery in the US and his willingness to die for the cause. 

Marrin does a good job describing the life of Brown and the back drop of slavery - especially the way in which slavers decided that they had to expand slavery in the US to keep their power.  He also illuminates the way in which Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry pushed the coming Civil War even closer.  But I think the biggest weakness is that Marrin tries to highlight the radical and "terrorist" nature of John Brown's actions (for example his execution of unarmed prisoners in Kansas) without fully illuminating the absolute horrors and terrorism of the slave labor system.  Having read The Half Has Never Been Told, I am aware that the cotton-slavery system that evolved after 1820 was an even more vicious, brutal and horrid system of torture/slavery that what already existed before 1820.  I think it is a good thing that Marrin wants students to really wrestle with the complexities of when or if illegal, violent action is acceptable.  But to do that you have to really be honest about the system that that action was targeting - and I don't think Marrin succeeded in that.

I would still recommend the book since it is a thorough treatment of Brown's life and conveys a lot of the dynamics of the time.     

Super Tiny, Super Big

Smash! : Exploring the Mysteries of the Universe with the Large Hadron Collider by Sara Latta
Minneapolis : Graphic Universe, [2017]
72 p. : chiefly ill. ; 24 cm.

This little comic book is more of an hors d'oeuvre than an entree, but there's nothing wrong with that.  Weighing in at a mere 72 pages, and managing to convey the amazing science of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) without getting bogged down in its wild complexities, Latta has managed to create a work that should whet the reader's appetite to know more.   It did mine!

Though the story-line is a bit corny (a little youngish for high school) the science is admirable.  In one part of the book, in the space of just a couple pages she manages to cover most of the basics of the standard model: the six "flavors" of quarks,  six kinds of leptons, the four fundamental forces and the bosons associated with them - and, of course, the most famous triumph of the LHC, the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012.

It's nice to have a brief, very accessible book to recommend to a student who is not deep into advanced science, and yet wants to know about particle physics.  If you know such a student, Smash! might be just what they need.

A Short and Wild Adventure

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
New York : A Tom Doherty Associates book, 2015.
90 p. ; 20 cm.

Yes, that is 90 p. as in only ninety pages!  But short can be sweet and this little book is captivating.  It's a wildly imaginative science fiction novella that bridges a non-industrial village tribe with an off planet university where the most brilliant  minds of the galaxy go to study.

It fuses a simple coming of age-journey (albeit to a distant planet!) with a shocking massacre and tense intergalactic diplomacy.

I enjoyed it, and it's brevity was refreshing. My hope is that a short book like this might be inviting to those students intimidated by the heftier science fiction/fantasy books that are so common.  I think once tempted, a reader will want more of the same, and with Okorafor there are many more works to sample.

Harsh Light

The Radium Girls by Kate Moore
Naperville, Ill. : Sourcebooks, [2018]
xviii, 477 p. : ill. ; 214 cm.

This is a fantastic book that ties several important periods of US history together - WWI, The Roaring Twenties and The Great Depression.  It also has a local interest in that half the drama of the story is in Ottawa, IL about an hour and forty-five minute drive from here in Urbana.

But it's a tough book, too.  It's the story of literally murderous corporate exploitation and dishonesty that shortened the lives of hundreds of women who worked in the factories where the luminous (and dangerously radioactive) radium was painted on wartime instrument panels and on civilian-use watch dials.  The deaths of several of the women featured in the book are slow, agonizing, and terrible to read about.  What makes the book inspiring, though, is the courage, grit and determination of the victimized women as they take on the companies that used and abused them - and eventually win significant victories.

This book has a lot of heart. The author succeeds in putting the reader into the lives of the women who worked in the radium-dial industry - capturing the initial excitement of well-paid employment for young women of the twenties and the freedom it gave them, and humanizing the gruesome and tragic illnesses that stalked these young women several years after they started the work.

The book is a great lesson about the dangers of unregulated corporate behavior, the power of unified resistance, and the importance of family, friends, community and the media in taking on powerful foes. It's a long, but very worthy read for anyone interested in US history.



    

Open Heart

The Inexplicable Logic of My Life by Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [2017].
445 p. ; 22 cm.

Yes, it's kind of a long book (logging in at over 400 pages) but it reads pretty easily and it really is a lovely book to read.  A cursory description of the book (teen with dead mother has loving gay adoptive father, smart snarky female friend who loses her mother, and homeless friend who loses his mother, all set in a Mexican American family setting in El Paso) might make it seem like a parody of the YA realistic problem novel, but it is a lot more than that.

The novel is definitely a bildungsroman centering on Sal, the boy whose mother died when he was three and who left him in the care of her wonderful gay friend, the painter Vincente who raises him.  Sal has to deal with changes in him that happen during his senior year.  Who "really" is he?  What is this new anger that causes him to punch out a couple of bigots and homophobes? How will he cope with the loss of his beloved aunt Mima who is old and dying.  And what about his friend Sam - who is very smart and ambitious, but only dates crummy "bad" boys? And theirs Fito, too, Sal's friend who lives with an addict mother - is studious and saving up for college - and ends up homeless?  Yes, it's a lot and yet, Sáenz manages to spin out his novel as if he's just telling you the true story of his own life. 

There is so much heart in this novel.  Several passages really did get me teary, especially the depth of friendship between the teens and the depth of parental love from Sal's father.  As a Kirkus review states, this book is another "stellar, gentle look into the emotional lives of teens on the cusp of adulthood."

In this year of bigotry, racism, presidential vulgarity, and government-inspired hatred of immigrants, reading this novel felt like a spa-vacation for my heart and a retreat for my mind.

Yes, I would recommend it!