*Spoilers Included!*
Fact: It is a truth universally acknowledged that a new book from Christopher Paul Curtis is a great good thing.
Fact: There is a new book out there. It is by Christopher Paul Curtis.
Opinion: It doesn’t work.
When you hand a kid a Christopher Paul Curtis novel you can rest safe and secure in the knowledge that the book you’re handing over is going to have humor leavened with little moments of surprising heart and clarity. You know that the title is going to make an era from the past more real to the child reader than any number of history textbooks at school. You know this. And the remarkable thing about The Mighty Miss Malone, Mr. Curtis’s newest novel, is that it manages to accomplish all these things, and accomplish them well, without being a particularly good book. There are times when Mighty Miss Malone sparkles and crackles and comes to life on the page. Of course there are. This is Christopher Paul Curtis we’re talking about here. But those moments are buried deep beneath a plot that is at times quite slow, a protagonist that is passive, and a plot twist that seemed so nice he used it twice. Mr. Curtis is one of our finest writers for young people working today and this is not his finest work. It’s fine. Not great.
If you were paying close attention to the book Bud Not Buddy then you might have caught a glimpse of a girl named Deza Malone when Bud stopped in a Hooverville for a while. Turns out that there’s more to her situation than meets the eye. A formidable student and smart gal, Deza spends much of her time defending her older (yet shorter) troublemaking brother Jimmie. But when their father has a horrible accident out on Lake Michigan everything changes for the worse. The man who returns to them seems like their dad but there’s something different about him. Before they know it he’s left town to find work, their landlord kicks them out of their home, and their mother is determined to go to Flint, Michigan to find Deza’s dad as well as some work of her own. Sometimes the biggest plans are the most difficult to carry out, though. And sometimes help comes from the most unexpected of places.
A quick note: If ever you heard the words “Spoiler Alert” you are hearing them now. I have every intention of giving away every plot twist, every surprise ending, every little secret Mr. Curtis has tucked away in the folds of this novel. Should you wish to be surprised by ANYTHING in the book, cease and desist with reading this review right now. Seriously, I don’t want to ruin something for you that you might really enjoy. Go. Shoo. Scat. Off with you unless you’re fine with that (or have read the book already). All gone? Then let’s begin.
I think the key to the novel lies in its creation. In a note to the reader, Mr. Curtis recounts how the idea for this book came into being. He was invited to speak to an African American mother-daughter book club in Detroit about Newbery winner Bud Not Buddy. “Big mistake”. According to him the minute he walked in he was confronted by some of the moms wondering what exactly happened when that random girl in the Hooverville kissed B