Book Vine: A Handful of Stars

I will never forget the year that Cynthia Lord came to our local SCBWI conference. She is lovely person (we had some great conversations about sensory processing issues), but what I remember most is this:

Cindy, author of RULES and TOUCH BLUE, reverently took out her Newbery Honor Medal ... and let us all rub it for good luck.

RULES had just come out back then. Cynthia Lord has gone on to write the HOT ROD HAMSTER and SHELTER PET SQUAD series.

Her latest novel is A HANDFUL OF STARS. This contemporary middle grade book launches on May 26.

I was lucky enough to be included in Cindy's book vine. A group of authors are reading the ARC, blogging about A HANDFUL OF STARS, and mailing the book on to the next fan/blogger.

Read about it at Cynthia Lord's website.

Here is the blurb from Goodreads:

A Handful of Stars is set during a harvesting season among the blueberry barrens of coastal Maine. Small-town veteran Lily, and Salma, a Hispanic migrant worker, forge an unexpected friendship.

For me, this was a six flag (I use small Post-It flags to mark my favorite parts) and multiple-tissue book.

The plot kicks off when Lily's blind dog, Lucky, slips his collar in the blueberry barrens. A girl Lily's age who is working alongside her family  helps the old dog to safety. Lily and Salma's budding friendship, and Lily's longing to help Lucky see again, form the focus of the story. A HANDFUL OF STARS is a gentle book, appropriate for younger middle grade readers. It is a great end-of-year or summer read for your third graders and up.

Who will like it?

• Animal lovers
• Artists (both Lily and her friend Salma paint bee houses in the book)
• Children who are on the fence between caring and not caring about clothes, appearances, and crushes.

What will readers learn about?

• Migrant workers.
• Maine.
• Blueberries.
• Small town beauty pageants and small town prejudices.
• Navigating new friendships and nurturing old ones.

Robert Frost's long poem "Blueberries" is mentioned in A HANDFUL OF STARS (the stars are a reference to the bluberries' star-shaped blossom-end). Here is the opening of that poem, which is filled with such wonderful dialogue:

Blueberries

by Robert Frost

“You ought to have seen what I saw on my way  
To the village, through Mortenson’s pasture to-day:  
Blueberries as big as the end of your thumb,  
Real sky-blue, and heavy, and ready to drum  
In the cavernous pail of the first one to come!          
And all ripe together, not some of them green  
And some of them ripe! You ought to have seen!”  

Read the rest at Poets.Org

And here is one of my favorite quotes from A HANDFUL OF STARS. Lily is describing Salma's artwork, but she could be describing one of the reasons that I love poetry.

"Maybe when we see things all the time, we stop really looking at them. And it takes an artist, someone who can look past the ordinariness, to remind us how special they really are."

(For an example of this idea at work in a poem, look at Pablo Neruda's "Ode to My Socks.")

Last, I would like to thank to Cindy Lord for sharing a link to her favorite blueberry enchilada recipe! This is the kind of book research I aspire to do someday.

Another recipe:
Apple Blueberry Enchiladas
from Winter Wheat.

Amok in Men's Clothes: Literary Cross Dressing

so much depends upon a red mini van filled with women who publish children’s books A few weeks ago, my straight-off-the-lot Toyota Sienna had some unusual passengers. I’d volunteered to chauffeur a carload of children’s lit agents, editors and authors to the airport/train station near my house. They were in Maryland for our regional SCBWI (http://www.scbwi.org/) conference. In the back, where my kids usually sit: Linda Pratt of Sheldon Fogelman Agency, Martha Mihalick of Greenwillow, and Aimee Friedman – Scholastic editor and YA author. Riding shotgun, none other than Newbery Honor winner Cynthia Lord. Wow. I listened to their shoptalk. Chimed in about hot titles and favorite reads in children’s books. But the most fascinating topic that came up is what I am calling literary cross-dressing. The conversation began with Kevin Henkes. The picture book author is also an award-winning children’s novelist (not to mention a hottie, according to my passengers). I loved his Newbery Honor winner Olive’s Ocean. The book is told in third person, but the limited omniscient narrator sticks to the thoughts and experiences of adolescent Martha Boyle. The voice is so true to girlhood that Aimee Friedman said her reaction to the book was, “How did Kevin Henkes get inside my head?” I wish I had written down the lengthy list of male authors who the experts in my car said write great female protagonists. However, when I asked about women who write well in boys’ voices, it was quiet enough to hear my van’s brand-new engine humming. “J.K. Rowling,” someone offered. Lots of agreement. Then…not much else. “Why is that?” I asked, realizing that the novel and two picture books I’ve been shopping around all feature boys. The conversation stuck with me. Why do so few women write in boys’ voices? Is it that hard to do?

Maybe you’re like me – growing up with sibs of the opposite sex. I did not realize until I was an adult and an author how fascinated I’d been with my brothers, how deeply I remember their adventures and quirks and mishaps. Probably because they were so strangely different from me. (You'd never catch me with a pair of y-fronts on my head, pummeling my brother in a mock pro-wrestling match.) Some cross-dressed reading to check out, in addition to Olive’s Ocean: Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy is third person omniscient, but pre-adolescent Lyra is the central character in the story; Nancy Springer’s realistic YA novel, Toughing It; Wendelin Van Draanen’s middle grade novel, Flipped, alternates between the female and male first person narrators; William Carlos William’s poem, “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime,” is one of my favorites -- the speaker of the poem is a woman; classics like Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary. Love, Stargirl, by Jerry Spinelli. To my mind, Stargirl was a better read because the male narrator guided the reader as he tried to understand Stargirl. If you think of more good reads, send a comment. Or maybe you know of a book where literary cross-dressing does not work – a male author just couldn’t pull off that female voice (or vice versa).

Your weekly writing exercise TBP soon.