Shownotes, the quick version
Links to books are to indiebound always; never to Amazon.
Books mentioned:
24/6
The Mindful Day
A High Five for Glenn Burke
Books reviewed:
Mr. Popper’s Penguins
Bud, Not Buddy
Out of Left Field
(related books mentioned: The Green Glass Sea and White Sands, Red Menace)
Links to things mentioned:
Libro.fm
Dismantling the White Default article
Me on Instagram
My book, TA-DA!
Hicklebee’s Bookstore
A League of Their Own
Books mentioned, in depth:
As of today, I’m actually reading three books!
I know, I know, but two are nonfiction.
I’ve got one nonfiction audiobook going,
one non fiction book going, and one middle grade ARC going!
I’m trying to read a bunch of ARCs (Advanced reader copies) that I have for october thanks to the fun of the hashtag #ARCtober. We’ll see how many I can read!
My nonfiction audio book is
24/6 by Tiffany Shlain,
and it’s about unplugging one day a week,
having a sort of tech shabbat, and how that can affect your life.
I’m really enjoying it so far and there are plenty of practical tips to make it work for you. I’m getting much more intentional with social media these days so this is right up my alley!
This is an Audio Listening Copy from Libro.fm that I get access to as a bookseller. Libro.fm is the best way to listen to audiobooks and support your local indie bookstore.
My non fiction book that I’m reading in the physical form:
The Mindful Day: How to find focus, calm, and joy from morning to evening
by Laurie J. Cameron.
I got this from the bookstore I work at and am savoring it, reading it slowly and taking in all the tips. I’m sure I’ll have lots to share when I’m done.
The Middle Grade ARC I’m reading is
A HIGH FIVE FOR GLENN BURKE by Phil Bildner.
It comes out at the end of February 2020, and I’m loving it so far. It’s about a boy baseball player who’s favorite Major league player, Glenn Burke, invented the high five (WHAT! I KNOW! HOW DID I NOT KNOW ABOUT THE INVENTION OF THE HIGH FIVE UNTIL NOW?).
Glenn was also gay but not openly gay until after he was done playing baseball. Silas, the main character, does a report in school on Glenn as a small step towards coming out. He wants to come out to his best friend Zoey first, but after that he’s not sure of the plan. He for sure knows he doesn’t want things to change; he loves his baseball team and the vibe they have going. I love baseball books and I love learning about things I don’t know, so this book hooked me right away. I’ll DEFINITELY be talking about it on the podcast, so stay tuned!
Book reviewed, in depth:
This week the books are centering around books my Mom loved.
My mom was a teacher from the age of 22 until the day, yes, literally THE DAY she turned 55 and could retire.
It was a Tuesday. In October.
She walked out y’all. SHE. WAS. DONE.
For most of her career she taught kindergarten, first, or third grades,
but she was licensed to teach from K to 12.
She LOVED reading and taught all of us kids how to read.
We always had books around and she ALWAYS bought tons of books for us.
My Mom’s birthday is in two days, October 6th,
so I thought this would be a great way to celebrate her.
She passed away in early 2018 unexpectedly and my world was rocked. It’s still not easy having my Mom around, but I’ve been learning how to talk about her more and keep her spirit and story alive.
Today I’ll be leading off with two books that she loved,
then ending with one book that I know she would have loved.
Mr. Popper’s Penguins
By Richard and Florence Atwater, with illustrations by Robert Lawson.
Published 1938 originally, the version I have was published 1988 by Little Brown.
Winner of a Newbery honor.
This was one of my Mom’s favorite books.
Maybe because Mr. Popper was a dreamer?
I don’t know.
If I think really hard I can picture her reading it to us.
I just always knew about it and always knew she liked it.
So of course it was one that I had to re-read to share here!
How fitting that it starts in September as well, toward the end of the month. Mr. Popper is a painter, and he’s spent the spring and summer painting the outside and inside of houses. He’s ready for a rest. Mrs. Popper isn’t keen on him being at home more because he’s not the tidiest, but she’ll take a bit more mess to have him around she supposes. His kids, Bill and Janie, are excited too. Mr. Popper and his family appear to be white.
Mr. Popper knows how he’s going to spend his time too. He’s going to read up on things happening all over the world. Just because he’s never had the chance to explore doesn’t mean that he can’t read about it! One night he tunes into the radio to hear Admiral Drake from the South Pole and wouldn’t you know he calls out Mr. Popper by name! Mr. Popper had sent a letter to Admiral Drake, and Admiral Drake is going to send him a surprise. Let me read that bit to you here.
When the surprise comes, it’s a penguin! A penguin? How can Mr. Popper take care of one? Well, he knows quite a bit about them from his research, so maybe he can pull it off. And so the book continues on with hilarious things happening. At one point the windows are open, they douse the floors of their house, and their living room is like a skating rink. With snowdrifts spilling into the windows!
No wonder my Mom loved this book!
It has a ton of things that she loved: whimsy, wackiness, letter writing (she wrote so many letters and sent cards for every occasion), and exciting grownups. I think that’s why I like it so much: Mr. Popper is a grownup but he’s still a dreamer. It shows that you can be child like as a grown up too. You can read and learn about things (kids can never have too many examples of adults reading for pleasure!) and you can make it work when a penguin shows up at your house.
I think that’s also why this book has stood the test of time. It came out in 1938! And has never gone out of print. Considering books can go out of print 6 months after they come out, that is REMARKABLE. It’s an imaginative, whimsical and super fun story. It’s impossible to be angry while reading this book, and it’s a GREAT read aloud. And it’s rather short, which is nice! Not too much to get through.
By the end of the book I think everyone who reads it or listens to it will think about their dreams, no matter how big they are, and think about how they can do something about them. And isn’t that a great thing for a book to inspire people to do?
Bud, Not Buddy
By Christopher Paul Curtis
Published 1999 by Delacorte Press
And It won the Coretta Scott King Award as well as the Newbery award.
This is another book that my Mom loved.
I distinctly remember my Mom saying,
“Kathy Ellen, you should read Bud, Not Buddy. It’s really good.”
And then what did I do?
Um, not read it, because my mom said it was good.
WHAT?
Oh yeah, cuz I was a kid who was like, “oh, my mom liked it so it must not be good.”
Oh young Kathy Ellen. You were foolish.
I DID read it a bunch of years later and LOVED it.
I told my Mom.
“Yeah, I told you to read it for a reason,” she said.
When I was helping run a middle grade book club, I told this story to the kids.
“Basically, if your Mom thinks a book is good, you should just listen to her,” I said.
“You know what, just listen to her all around and you’ll be fine.”
Bud is named Bud and not Buddy thank you very much. He’s a 10 year old Black boy who’s been through some stuff. The book opens with him in an orphanage, getting ready to be placed in a home. His new foster brother and foster parents turn out to be pretty awful though, so Bud ends up escaping.
He’s got his suitcase, which holds all his most important possessions, and he’s got an idea about who his Father is, so he’s heading off to find him. His Mom, who died when he was 6, never told him who his father was, but she did keep these posters advertising a certain band that changed names often but always had the same name at the front: Herman Calloway.
Bud aims to find Herman in Grand Rapids any way he can,
and he learns a lot about himself along the way.
I immediately connected with Bud because of how he feels about his name. He’s got strong opinions and he’s not afraid to tell people them. He tells them what he wants to be called and they call him it. I don’t have as much success, but I wish I did!
My entire first name is Kathy Ellen, and when I introduce myself I usually motion with my hands to say that it’s both names or I say both names or Kathy Ellen is my entire first name, but maybe I should lead with Kathy Ellen, not Kathy? I don’t know. It ends them with the name I don’t want them to call me. ANYWAY I love my name but for my entire life I have dealt with people saying it wrong and I bet I will deal with that for the rest of my life. So I felt for Bud from the start.
Why do I think my Mom liked this book?
I think she liked how scrappy and resourceful Bud is. He’s pretty brave to leave his foster home and try to make his way out to Grand Rapids; he very cleverly heads to the library to hang out and knows where to go to wait in line for food. He tries to hop a train but that plan gets derailed (sorry, had to go for that pun!) and even when he finds who he thinks is his Father it’s not smooth sailing. My mom was a very hard worker and had to work hard from childhood on, so I bet she saw herself in Bud too.
I love love LOVE Bud’s voice. It’s so authentic, young and wise at the same time, and unique.
His rules are so great and often times funny.
Here, let me read you a bit about the rules:
I think kids will really love this book because of all the agency Bud has.
There are great themes discussed in it too; Bud has to deal with the loss of his Mom and grief, finding a new family, trying to figure out who he is, and how he’s going to move forward with his life. Set during the Depression, it’s a great historical story as well, talking about issues faced by Black people and how certain places were dangerous for them.
Part of Bud’s voice that I really enjoyed was the fact that when he was describing people, he described the features on all of them, but early on in his descriptors he called the white ones white, and rarely called the black characters black. I’m guessing this is because the default for him is seeing other Black people; it’s not as often that he interacts with white people. I wonder if you have noticed there’s been a push recently to describe every character in longer stories. I think this is helpful because it’s great to know that part of a character’s identity, and it also helps break the idea of white people being the default.
I was struggling to find the best way to say this and knew someone who already had,
So I’ll share this from Renee Harleston.
This comes from and article published on writingdiversly.com in 2018 titled: Dismantling the White Default writing diversely.com
Dismantling the White Default
November 25, 2018
“White as default” is when whiteness is the litmus test for what is considered normal behavior, culture, and appearance .
Through media, books, visual media, politics…etc. we are socialized to think it’s normal to be white and everyone else is defined by their proximity to whiteness. Think about how difficult it is to find “nude” shoes and lipstick for most shades darker than tan. Or even try to find a non-white main character in a book or movie that isn’t specifically about race or is a biography.
A common problem I see is the disparity between the description of the white vs. non white characters. Almost all stories will have some kind physical description of (at least) the major characters. How detailed the description will differ based on the writing style of the author and the character itself (not all characters require physical descriptions).
Non white characters always have some form of description to make sure their non whiteness is made clear, usually via a description of skin tone. It becomes problematic, however, when there isn’t be a comparable descriptor for any of the white characters. The absence of that description (really the absence of race) IS the trigger for the reader to understand of the character is white.
When authors avoid physically describing a character’s whiteness but put effort into to pointing out non-whiteness what you’re doing is increasing the invisibility of whiteness, standardizing it, making white the norm and making everyone else the “other.” When you do this you are are helping to increase the privilege of being the standard that everyone else is compared to and judged by.
It’s really important for me to point out that race isn’t the only category where this happens. When we write about different marginalized identities the non-marginalized side of that category is always the default. A character’s non-hetero sexuality is overtly made known where all others are assumed straight. The same goes for physical disabilities, gender binaries, citizenship…etc.
I found it really interesting that the idea that Black is the default in Bud’s world is conveyed through his voice.
Finally, I really loved that the two older characters in the story were loosely based on the author’s grandparents. I love when real life gets woven into fiction. There’s a reason this is an award winning book. It’s just the right length, it’s engaging, and it’s a story that will stay with you. So basically, listen to me and My Mom and read Bud Not Buddy already, won’t you?
Out of Left Field
By Ellen Klages
Published 2018 by Puffin Books
My mom would have LOVED this book because it stars a girl baseball player.
My mom knew A TON about baseball.
We all played baseball or softball,
and my mom was the first woman head coach in our town’s little league.
She in general was a very sporty person and always told my sister and I that we could do anything, so she would have been down with this book.
I first came across this book when I was in California. I was on the committee for the NCIBA (Northern California Bookseller association) Middle grade awards committee; basically we read books that were published in 2018 by authors who lived in California. We created a long list, a short list, and then members helped pick the winner. That same year my book was on the long list and short list for picture book selections, which was SUPER EXCITING. Anyway, back to this book. I loved it when I read it then, and started handselling it at Hicklebee’s, the bookstore I worked at at the time.
I later met the author and got the book signed when her book was one of three books up for the middle grade award through the Northern California Book Awards. My book was also one of the three picture books chosen on the short list! It was awesome to go to an event as a celebrated author and a fan of other people’s books. I’m happy I have a signed copy because I really love this book and I know it will stay on my shelf forever.
This book stars Katy Gordon, a ten year old girl white girl who is one heck of a pitcher. It’s 1957, and She plays with the boys in her Northern California neighborhood, who call her Gordon. Her “Sunday Pitch,” which is her signature one, is nearly impossible to hit. A little league coach stops by and notices, and soon she’s got a form to head to tryouts. When he asks her name, she doesn’t say Katy. She says Casey, which she figures is close enough to KC, her initials. She doesn’t tell her Mom about the tryout either, and goes over with her catcher, PeeWee who is japanese. They both make the team, but soon Katy finds out something shocking and heartbreaking: it’s AGAINST THE RULES for a girl to play.
She’s fuming. After all that talk at practice about how Little League doesn’t discriminate; the coach says, “your race, your religion, your ethnic heritage, it doesn’t matter” she can’t play because she’s a GIRL? Her friend PeeWee still plays, which riles Katy up. And her friend Jules is trying to be understanding but doesn’t feel as passionately about baseball as Katy does. What’s a girl to do? Write letters. Research. And try her hardest to get on the field.
Katy is a spunky, smart, go getter character that you can’t help but fall in love with. I love her family as well; it’s her, her mom, and her two (out of the house, in college or working already) older sisters. Though her sisters aren’t featured in this book, they’re talked about quite a bit and it’s apparent that they never took no for an answer and defied the gender roles of the time in their choice of activities and educational pursuits. Katy’s mom encourages her to write a letter to Little League, and here’s the response she gets.
She decides she should prove that women had played, and starts to do research.
I don’t want to give away the whole story, but if you’ve watched A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN or even know about it, you know that women played baseball. I knew a bit about baseball but didn’t know about many of these women, and there were whole leagues I had no idea about. I LOVE that this shows Katy diving deep into research because something is fascinating to her, and thankfully her teacher lets her do a project on it. The current events of the time are also talked about (School integration, Sputnik, our attempts at launching a satellite) which I think will get readers thinking about that point in history.
Finally, there’s a great section in the back featuring stats on all the women ball players who are talked about in the book.
I love books like this.
It’s rather quiet in its conflict and has a realistic ending, but I think there’s space for books like this in the market.
Basically one girl is on a hunt to solve the mystery of why women baseball players aren’t more widely known.
The story’s voice is unique and draws you right in too.
You do NOT need to love baseball to like this book; baseball is just a part of the story.
It’s more about a girl fighting for what she believes in and fighting for other women’s stories to be told.
I think anyone would be inspired by that message, and may even want to dig around in the past to see what stories they can unearth.
There’s a great author’s note in the back with more information, and the paperback edition I have also has sample chapters from the two other books in the Gordon Family Saga. I had no idea there were more books about this family! The first two books The Green Glass Sea and White Sands, Red Menace, center around Katy’s sisters, who are around her age at the time of the stories. The second book takes place in 1947 and the first one before that (couldn’t find an exact year). I may go back and read them, who knows?
