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This Thursday, April 15 is a lot more than just tax day.  It's Teen Literature Day and there's big doings to celebrate and support teens and the books they love.  Drop on over to Cynsations to check out Operation Teen Book Drop with 10,000 new books going to Native reservations and tribal lands! It's going to be an amazing Thursday. So right after you mail your taxes, go buy a book for a teen and join in the fun. Teen Literature Day is made possible by YALSA and a growing group of publishers, bloggers, and authors.  It's great to know that April 15 isn't just for taxes anymore!  

But come back later today for more on writing backstory. We'll talk a bit about handling flashbacks, and why prologues are just plain wrong.  See you soon.  HH

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Greetings, reader guys, it's Carl once again. Our faithful friend and reviewer cyber kid 303 has told us about another good read:

I just finished reading Orphan Train Rider by Andrea Warren. It is a biography about a boy named Lee Nailing and his family. It is 1926 and America is in a recession, a lot like today. One family in particular is having a hard time. They are the Nailings and their mom has just died. They had 7 kids and their dad alone could not feed and take care of them all. The three oldest, Fred, Ross, and Evelyn had to live on the streets. The baby went to live with family friends. Their dad kept the toddler. But the two other kids named Lee and Leo went to an orphanage. Since their dad was not dead, he would sometimes come and visit them in the orphanage. Lee had always wanted to be a train engineer. When he was told he would ride a train through the country all the way to Texas, he was excited. When they were boarding the train, he and his brother found out that their little brother, Gerald, going with them because their dad did not have enough money to take care of him after all.


The train was full of orphans traveling from town to town. Whenever they stopped at a town, the orphans would have to line up so people could look at them and decide if they wanted to adopt any of the children. Lee, Leo and Gerald get separated and go to live with different families. Read this amazing true story. Do they ever see each other again? Do they live happily ever after? Read and find out.


Cyber Kid 303 out!!!!!!

Thanks, cyber kid! I'm really glad you told us about a biography because they are some of the best books out there--and the amazing thing is that the stories are true!!



We also have a picture of cyber kid with his prizes from the March Madness Author Shoot-out:





He's wearing his Deadwood Jones T-shirt (generously donated by Helen Hemphill) and holding his bag of Deadwood Jones salt water taffy and the signed copy of Erec Rex:The Dragon's Eye. Well done, cyber kid!

PS--let us know how you like Erec Rex!

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This is the Formerly Sick and Sneezing CARLMAN writing to you this afternoon. I spent the weekend in bed with a knock-me-flat cold. Whew! It was a rough one but I'm back and feeling better--good enough to say

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Yippee-yi-yo, partners, the Old Book Prospector sure was right about this one! The Adventurous Deeds of Deadwood Jones by Helen Hemphill is more fun than a rodeo, a shoot-out, and a saloon fight all rolled together! Thirteen-year-old Prometheus Jones and his eleven-year-old cousin Omer, both African-American boys living in Tennessee after the Civil War, have just won a horse in a raffle. A couple of racist guys refuse to believe that two black boys could have won a horse and so cause a lot of trouble--so much that Prometheus and Omer have to hightail it off to Texas, where Prometheus thinks his father might be living. They need money and join a cattle drive from Texas to Deadwood, South Dakota. The West is a beautiful but harsh and unforgiving land, however. If you're not careful every minute, bad things can happen. Even something as simple as crossing a river can mean disaster. And bad things happen in this book But there's also a lot of fun and adventure here. You've got encounters with the Pawnee and Sioux Indians, a jailbreak, the shooting match to end all shootin' contests, plus some unforgettable cowboy characters like Beck, the trailboss, Nack, and Rio. So saddle up, cowpokes, and enjoy this wild and exciting ride! Yeeeeee-haaa!!!
Carl

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Editor’s Note This is the last edition of Ypulse Book Essentials and the last day of our separate Ypulse Books Newsletter. We will continue to cover YA and children's book publishing as a part of Ypulse and publishing related news will be covered... Read the rest of this post

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Adventurous Deeds of Deadwood Jones


by Helen Hemphill

Front Street (November 2008)

ISBN-10: 1590786378, ISBN-13: 978-1590786376

My rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

“Halleloo!” Omer grins, wide and proud. “That sure is some fine riding, Prometheus!” A string of sweatshines down one side of his forehead into brown eyes teh color of oiled leather.
I throw my leg over the filly’s back and slip to the ground while Omer slides a rope over Miss Stoney’s neck and hands her off to Pernie Boyd Dill.
“Got my four bits?” I ask.
“I ain’t paying four bits for you to break a filly.” Pernie Boyd sets his wide-brimmed hat on the back of his sandy hair and rests his hands on his hips. He bears the same ferret-eyed stare and pitted skin as his daddy. “You getting dreadful sassy, Prometheus Jones.” Pernie Boyd talks big, as long as his brother, LaRue, is nearby.
LaRue spits tobacco into the dirt. “You’re getting nothing,” he says.
–The Adventurous Deeds of Deadwood Jones by Helen Hemphill, p. 11.

Prometheus Jones, a young boy who has a talent with horses, breaks a horse for two racist brothers who refuse to pay him. Instead, they give him a raffle ticket for a horse. But when Prometheus’ ticket wins, the two brothers rile up the crowd against Prometheus and his cousin, Omer, and try to steal teh horse away from him. Prometheus and Omer escape on the horse with an angry, racist crowd of white boys and men after them–men who can kill them. So Prometheus and Omer keep riding–to Texas, to look for Prometheus’ father who was sold as a slave. Along the way, they get hired as cowboys, and undergo adventure and strife.

Adventurous Deeds of Deadwood Jones is an entertaining story. I found myself interested in Prometheus’ adventures and scrapes, and wanting to know what happened to him. I cared about the characters–Prometheus and Omer, especially–and wanted them to get through everything safely. The book is a kind of survival story; there was so much that threatened Prometheus’ survival, from extreme racism, to stampeeding buffalos, to Native Indians angry at their land being invaded. Prometheus faces all of these challenges with courage.

Prometheus is a likable character. He repeatedly stands up for others even though it means great risk to himself, even his life, because he is an African American in a time when there’s a huge amount of racism. He also repeatedly stands up for his own rights, fights for what is his, and does the right thing. He is hard working, skilled at what he does, and repeatedly gains the respect of others. I loved how Prometheus is so good at what he does–calming crazed horses and shooting with such accuracy. All of those things gave him hero-like qualities, and helped me care about him.

However, there was a distance between Prometheus and the reader. It didn’t feel like we were fully in him; I wanted more emotion, more character involvement, more sensory information–more of Prometheus, and who he really is, not just what he does. I also wanted to see more of Prometheus’ relationship to his horse. We’re told that he ends up caring for her, but I didn’t see any of that relationship, and I expected to because he was so good with horses.

Prometheus was the most well drawn character, and then Omer and a few of the cowboys. Some of the other characters felt flat or not fully drawn; I would have liked to see more sides of them. At times it felt like sensory detail was dumped in a few places–too many different details all at once–and then long stretches where there was nothing.

Hemphill included great details of life in the west that helped it seem believable, such as that the cowboys sang not to each other, but to the cattle to calm them down.

When Prometheus starts having a number of things go wrong for him (spoiler alert)–he loses his precious horse, and his cousin is killed–and Prometheus himself loses hope and his upbeat way of looking at the world, the story starts to lose me. It felt like it changed the whole tone of the book, from a lighter adventure story to a more depressing story.

I found it upsetting that Omer, Prometheus’ cousin, was suddenly killed. Omer was important to Prometheus, and Prometheus was protective of him. The book took a depressing turn after that, especially since Prometheus and Omer had planned to go to Texas together and that goal brought both hope and forward momentum, and because Omer was such an innocent. Granted, I always have a hard time when good characters die in books–but if there’s more emotional working it through and hope, then it feels like there’s more reward for the reader for sticking through that hard period. And I didn’t get that from this book. Still, I kept reading. And I had no problem with the abusive and horrible characters dying.

I also didn’t find the ending satisfying enough. Throughout the book, Prometheus’ drive is to find his father, who was sold as a slave in Texas. But once Omer dies, Prometheus doesn’t care about it, and we never see whether he finds his father though we’re led to believe that that won’t work out. We also don’t see him gaining a replacement or happiness, though he does stay on with the cowboys.

Still, I wanted to read about Prometheus’ adventures, and the adventure and the setting should appeal to readers who like adventure. This would be a good book to give to boys who don’t like to read, since there’s adventure, danger, and a hero who stands up for what is right. It may spark their interest, especially because it doesn’t shy away from some of the bad things that could happen in that time period. The book is an excellent way to help readers deeply understand racism and the unjustness of it. It also shows readers that there were African American and Mexican cowboys, not just Caucasian cowboys–something that does not seem to be widely known. For that reason, it might be useful in school as supplemental material for history or English projects. At the back of the book there is an author’s note with a little more information.

Recommended.

For a fun book talk of the book, see the video below.

Other reviews:

Reading YA: Readers’ Rants “An energetic read for ages 10 and up, this is a surprisingly accurate, gritty portrayal of life in the Old West, telling it like it was for hundreds of young boys who left their homes and plantations after the Emancipation Proclamation and struck out for the untamed West.”

BookMoot “Wait a minute, I’m only on the second page of the story and I am totally and utterly committed to this young man and his predicament. How did Hemphill do that?”

Children’s Book Page “Hemphill lassos readers with her gift for dialogue and nail-biting scenes of danger, and holds them with fascinating descriptions of cowboy life and clever historical references….”

Author Interview:
GuysLitWire

Maw Books Blog “I had no idea that cattle driving could be so exciting, but it’s not hard when you have Prometheus Jones as a main character.”

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The paintings of the Dutch masters have always been fascinating to me.These expressive portraits are astonishing. Being a "fabric" person, I find myself looking at the exquisite lace collars. The viewer can almost feel the crisp linen. In the van Miereveld, below, the intricacy of the lace is apparent. The Jan Cornelisz Verspronck at the left details the lace and the patterned damask dress.

How did the artists accomplish this?

In museums I have crept ever closer to see if I can determine the technique that so perfectly evokes the lace and fabric but looking closely, all I can see is blobs of paint and, seemingly, chaotic brushstrokes. At this point I usually see a guard moving determinedly in my direction so I back up, no clearer in my understanding than before.


I invoke this bit of art appreciation because it came to mind as I reached the bottom of page two of Helen Hemphill's new book, The Adventurous Deeds of Deadwood Jones. I had to stop reading in order to drive the entling somewhere and as I reluctantly set the book aside I found myself worrying about the young hero, Prometheus Jones. Was he going to get his money for breaking that horse? He sure was a cool customer facing down those loathsome Dill boys.

Wait a minute, I'm only on the second page of the story and I am totally and utterly committed to this young man and his predicament. How did Hemphill do that? Was it her use of verbs or adjectives? Prometheus hasn't even said that much yet, can it be his "voice?" Maybe it is my fondness for Westerns? How did she do it? How did she pull me in so quickly?

Well, however she accomplished it, I cheered, I gasped, I cried for fourteen year old Prometheus as he and his cousin Omer join a cattle drive headed to South Dakota. They plan to make the return trip to Texas with the outfit so Prometheus can look for his father there.

Prometheus has a gift for working with horses. He knows he has to prove himself to the cattle boss, even though the boss is surprisingly free of the prejudice that Prometheus and Omer have frequently experienced as young black men.

Cattle drives are hard work. Difficult river crossings, long hours in the saddle, snakes, stampedes and the threat of Indian attack mean cowboys are on constant alert. Prejudice and frontier justice are equally lethal as Prometheus discovers when he encounters some old enemies who are determined to have him hanged.

Hemphill's character, Sassy, from her book Runaround is a girl you want to hug. Prometheus is a young man whose hand you want to shake. His sense of fairplay, justice and loyalty is admirable and endearing.

In the author's note at the end of the book, Hemphill explains that her inspiration for this story was a 1907 autobiography of Nat Love, an African American cowboy who began working for cattle drives when he was fifteen years old. With Prometheus Jones, the author has honored Nat and cowboys everywhere.

The Adventurous Deeds of Deadwood Jones by Helen Hemphill, Front Street, (Nov.) 2008.

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