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First of all, if you have not read Ellen Klages The Green Glass Sea, get out there and buy/borrow a copy immediately! It’s the book that precedes White Sands, Red Menace and I would say it’s pretty necessary to read that one first, not to mention it’s an absolutely brilliant book. That being said, if you’re on to book two as I am, Klages latest is just as great as her previous.

It’s 1946 and we pick back up with friends Dewey and Suze who are now living in Alamogordo, New Mexico, after the first Atomic bomb has recently been tested, a bomb that the girl’s parents each had a part in creating. Dewey has been living with Suze and her family since her father died and has become an intricate part of their family. While Suze’s dad works with rocket experiments at the missile range and her mom works on protests, Suze and Dewey work on the separate friendships they are forming in their new neighborhood and how those friendships fit in with their own special bond. Just as the girls are beginning to fit in at their new school and with their new friends, Dewey’s estranged mother shows up, wanting to take Dewey away.

This book is filled with all sorts of amazing relationships and tons of history. I currently live at the Air Force base in Alamogordo, where the novel takes place, making it an even cooler read for me. Klages puts a lot of background about the town into the pages of the story, while flawlessly drawing the reader into the lives of her characters. She writes unlike anyone else I’ve read and these two books she’s created have become some of my absolute favorites. Dewey and Suze feel like real, normal girls, living in a crazy, confusing time. Girls and boys alike can learn a lot from this novel and it and it’s predecessor are high on my list of recommendations.

White Sands, Red Menace will be available in early October.

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Just Finished: The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, The Brothers Grimm: Two Lives, One Legacy, The Talented Clementine,Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages was this year's winner for the Scott O'Dell prize for historical fiction.

Dewey is a weird kid-- there's something wrong with her leg that makes her limp and she spends all of her time making gadgets and fiddling with stuff. Her dad is working on some top secret project that is going to help win the war and when her grandmother dies, she goes off to live with him.

Dewey didn't realize how top secret this project was. She didn't realize she was moving to a place that didn't officially exist... All she knew was everyone was living out in the desert working on the gadget. The gadget would win the war. The gadget would make everything better.

Suze has been living at Los Alamos for awhile when Dewey moves there-- Suze is a bit awkward and bossy and both of her parents are working on the project-- her mom's a real scientist, not just a typist or secretary like the other moms. When Dewey's dad has to go to Washington for awhile, Dewey moves in and the pair form an unlikely, but entirely realistic, friendship.

What's great about this book is the portrait of day-to-day life at Los Alamos-- you never think about kids living with their families, going to school, and being kids. You never think about the divisions between scientist kids and military kids. And you never think about Los Alamos just plain not existing... (well, at least I never thought about those things.)

This balances the line perfectly of being meticulously researched and historically wonderful, while not letting this detail overshadow the actual story. I liked how realistic the interactions between the kids were-- this unlikely friendship took a long time to develop and it never came across as hokey or simplisitic.

My favorite part of the book was how delicately it dealt with some very large issues that need to be tackled when dealing this topic-- it put them in there so you knew people were worrying about them, but Dewey hears about them and deals with them in a way that is very true to her age. In Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character) Feynman (a minor character in this book, much to my delight) talks about the horror of what they had done after the first test. The book captures this horror well with the adults and the confusion of the kids at what's going on.

Something happens about 3/4 of the way through the book that is a bit of a spoiler so I'm not going to talk about it too much, but it was just too much and I don't really think it was necessary (but it might be for the sequel that I am very much looking forward to!)

The other thing is... I'm assuming that if you're reading my blog, you know what the gadget was-- you know what was invented at Los Alamos during WWII to win the war. Dewey and Suze, and therefore the reader, never find out was the gadget was, and I'm not sure how much sense the ending of the book is going to make if you don't know. I also don't know if the intended audience is going to automatically know what the gadget was...

Still, an excellent book and a well-deserving win.

Once upon a time, a very long time ago, I promised I'd review this years Newberry winner, The Higher Power of Luckyby Susan Patron.

I wanted to wait down until all the fervor over SCROTUM faded away. And then it came back. And then it faded again.

Anyway... Lucky really surprised me. I hadn't heard anything about it before Newberry day and in reading the description-- it didn't sound kid-friendly. It sounded like it was going to be really nostalgic and an adult book written for kids.

It wasn't! I was so happy!

Lucky lives with her French guardian (he absent father's ex-wife) in the middle of the desert. She likes to eavesdrop on 12 step meetings to find out how people find their higher power-- higher power sounds like a handy thing to have, but Lucky's hoping to avoid hitting rock bottom in order to get it. Hitting rock bottom doesn't sound like much fun.

At the same time, Lucky's worried her guardian is going to go back to France-- she seems homesick and her passport was out the other day.

Deep down, this is a really sweet tale that will appeal to younger readers, but also has some really big issues for older readers to get into.

Most enjoyable was the large cast of wacky, but believable, characters. A good book and my favorite Newberry winner of the last few years.

Hattie Big Sky by Kirby Lawson was a Newberry Honor book that is being found in the YA section at all the libraries I've visited!

Hattie is an orphan who inherits a homesteading claim in Montana. In order to keep the claim, she has to cultivate a large portion of it (which involves clearing it first!) and fence off most of it. By hand. By herself. She knows nothing about farming. Or cooking. Or anything. She wants to keep the claim, but she'll be lucky if she even survives.

Her next door neighbors are helpful and nice and the first friends Hattie makes, but one of them is German, and it's smack in the middle of WWI. Montana is rife with anti-German sentiment, loyalty leagues and other things making things hard for Hattie's friends. How can she reconcile her soldier-friends killing Germans across the ocean with her German neighbor fencing her claim in the middle of the night?

Tragedy and hope about in another great example of what historical fiction should be in this book that's perfect for Tweens and those right on the kidlit/YA break.

My favorite part was the ending and how it was handled. The author's note at the end is great, as are the recipes!

The Pull of the Ocean by Jean-Claude Mourlevat won the Batchelder award for translated work this fall.

The Doutreleau children are all sets of twins, except for the Yann, the seventh and the last. Yann is small and mute, but notices everything and communicates with his older brothers silently. One night he wakes up to his parents fighting and lets his brothers know they have to leave, to escape. For days they walk, following Yann's inner compass to the ocean.

This is more than just a retelling of the Tom Thumb. This story is told in brief accounts of people who saw the children and interacted with them only briefly-- sometimes only seconds, never more than an hour or so. Interspersed are the accounts of the children, but never Yann.

This book is surprisingly powerful and moving without ever being overwrought, over-contrived, or melodramatic. I couldn't put it down and it haunts you long after you turn the final page-- I highly recommend!

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Remember how I reported on the Scott O'Dell Award ceremony? At the time, I may have mentioned the speech of Ellen Klages. I may even have said something along the lines of, "It was one of those speeches you wish Horn Book would consider reprinting in one format or another." Well, Horn Book be damned, me mateys, I'LL reprint it! How's that for initiative? And lest you think I've spent hours transcribing these words from the tiny tape recorder I keep in my pocket at all times, I have Ms. Klages herself to thank for sending me the speech in its entirety. Voila.

First of all, I want to thank Scott O’ Dell and his wife Elizabeth Hall, for founding this award and for recognizing the importance of historical fiction, especially for children. I want to thank Hazel Rochman and Ann Carlson and Roger Sutton, the members of the O’Dell committee, for selecting The Green Glass Sea out of the hundreds of amazing books that were published in 2006. I want to thank my editor, Sharyn November, and her boss, Regina Hayes, for taking a chance not only on a first novel, but one that seemed an unlikely topic for a children’s book. And all the people at Viking, all the sales reps who were so enthusiastic and hand-sold this book to booksellers and librarians. And thanks to my agent, Michael Bourret, who shepherded it from a manuscript to an object out in the world.

A lot of people think that history is boring. It’s just names and dates and facts that you have to memorize for a test. I suspect that I’m preaching to the choir here; I don’t think most of the people in the room feel that way. But too many people do.

Up until last October, I was primarily a science fiction writer. Which means I’m in a unique position to recognize that this -- [holds up GGS] -- is a time machine. ‘Cause that’s really what we want out of historical fiction. We want to go there. We don’t want to be on the outside, looking in. We want the backstage tour. We want to be there as the events of history are unfolding around us.

That’s what we want as readers. Most writers are also readers, but for a writer, it’s slightly different. If I’m going to spend a year or two of my life someplace in the past, there has to be a hook. We writers are observant magpies, taking shiny bits back to our nests to play with. And we’re easily distracted -- ooh, shiny!

For me, that shiny was the green glass. I read one sentence about it in an account of the Trinity Test, and I thought -- cool -- and I wanted to find out more. And there isn’t much more about it, because the glass was a footnote, a side effect. It wasn’t all that important to the scientists at the time. But it was what got me hooked.

So I read some more books, and in each of them I found another, one sentence, description of the glass, or of people going to go see the glass. And I took those single sentences home and collected them, lined my little magpie nest with them, until I had enough information that I could almost see it, in my mind’s eye.

And I wanted to go there.

I wanted to go there more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life. But it’s gone. It was bulldozed before I was even born, and the only picture I’ve ever been able to find of it is in black-and-white.

If I was a painter, I would have made a big color picture, hung it on my wall and looked at it. But I can’t even draw. My tools are words. So I wrote myself a story in which I got to go to the green glass sea, in the company of two odd, quirky little girls named Dewey and Suze. And I saw it -- through their eyes.

Because that’s the other important thing about historical fiction. It reminds us that history isn’t just dates and facts and places. It’s people and their lives and their stories. Sometimes it’s extraordinary people in ordinary times, changing the world. And sometimes it’s ordinary people in extraordinary times, as the world changes around them.
By seeing the past through their eyes -- how they live, what they do, how they think -- we get a new perspective on the present.

[Picks up GGS] If you accept that this is a time machine, then there’s one thing you need to know, the one unbreakable law of time travel -- you cannot change the past.
But I hope that when you close the cover of The Green Glass Sea, and return to your own life, you may discover that the past has changed you.

Thank you.

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Usually when I've detached myself from an event that involved delicious food and kidlit chatter I like to give myself a few days to decompress before hammering out some kind of encapsulation of the event. That works especially well if no one at said event knows who I am. Yesterday, however, Sharyn November (editor extraordinaire, y'all) asked if I'd be blogging about the thingy thing I was attending and my reaction was peppier than I'd intended. I seem to have said, "YOU BET!" Then again, why not? Let's try the whole while-it's-still-fresh-in-your-mind approach. What have I got to lose?

So yesterday was the day the Scott O'Dell Award was officially bestowed upon author Ellen Klages for her book The Green Glass Sea. The bestowing, as it happened, occurred at a little restaurant called Choice. Inside, the place was reserved entirely for the O'Dellolites (well YOU try to come up with a name for them then) and I was happy. Roger Sutton was there. The charming Laura Lutz from Queens (who should seriously consider blogging, missy) was there. Rita Auerbach. TWO (count 'em) TWO Newbery committee members including Monica Edinger and my BPL homie Michael Santangelo. There were numerous others who will forgive me for not mentioning them by name, and of course, star of the evening, author Ellen Klages.

Let me tell you a little something about Ellen Klages. I love her. I'm not saying I didn't love her before I met her or anything. Sure, her book was well-written and a helluva lot of fun. And it certainly fulfilled every requirement a person could possibly have in mind regarding smart historical fiction. But see, the thing about writers is that you just never know. It would be nice if every book gave a clue as to how cool its respective author is, but this is simply not always the case. Ms. Klages, however, is the kind of person you want to sit down with over a cup of coffee for hours at a time just so you can pick her brain for a while. She was much in demand, however, so brain picking had to be foreshortened. I was able to ask her about the cover change The Green Glass Sea went through. As you might recall, Roger Sutton displayed the before and after of that particular image and it turns out that the girl in Cover #1 was from an old photograph owned by Ms. Klages herself. And yes, sure as shooting, people assumed that the kid was Anne Frank so the entire look was reworked before publication.

The presentation of the award was in fine fettle. Ms. Klages was introduced by, I believe, chair Hazel Rochman. She in turn gave props to her fellow committee members Roger Sutton and Ann Carlson. She also happened to mention some interesting facts regarding Mr. Scott O'Dell's Island of the Blue Dolphins. Many people turned the book down, it seems, because they wanted the lead character to be a boy rather than a girl. Huh.

Then Ellen Klages stood up to speak and she killed, brother. Killed. It was one of those speeches you wish Horn Book would consider reprinting in one format or another. Klages has the enviable ability of speaking naturally in front of a large group while at the same time never straying off topic, losing her train of thought, or being anything less than truly interesting. She described her fascination with the original glass sea, and how no one ever took a single color photograph of it before it was bulldozed out of existence. She mentioned that she has a piece of the glass which she carries around in her pocket within small black pouch. She used to carry it around in her own homemade lead container, but the glass tended to shatter that way. We then got a rousing explanation of how Ms. Klages melted down lead soldiers on her stove, then poured the lead into an Altoids container to create the box. Someone had apparently pointed out to her that the melting of lead was probably more dangerous than the radioactive glass, but she certainly took precautions. The conclusion drawn by one and all was that there was more than a drop of Dewey (the book's protagonist) in Ms. Klages. That's for sure.

Another thing I took away from the evening was that Ms. Klages has previously worked on adult sci-fi. This caused me to prick up my ears. Perhaps... perhaps she might consider writing some sci-fi children's books? I'm waiting for that particular trend to pick up and take wing, but so far no great sci-fi American children's author has appeared in the last decade or so. Perhaps Ms. Klages could fill this void.

The tables about the room were spotted with lovely roughened green sea glass which was just enchanting, if also mildly unnerving. The food consisted of tender meats, cheeses, wine, crab-like balls of something, wine, brownies, fruit salads, quesadillas, and wine. All in all, a brilliant little ceremony and proof positive that the Scott O'Dell Award is making some excellent choices these days.

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Everything's back to normal. A big old award came out and I missed hearing about it until now. Apparently the more than deserving Ellen Klages has won the Scott O'Dell Award for The Green Glass Sea. Roger Sutton, who announced the results on his blog, was on the committee that selected the winner. A big congrats going out to Ms. Klages, then. Hers was a truly enjoyable novel and worthy of the honor.

Thanks to Roger Sutton for the link.

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I am thrilled to learn via Read Roger that Ellen Klages has won the Scott O'Dell Award for her novel The Green Glass Sea. Roger, who is on the committee, writes, "The award is presented to a children's or young adult book published in English by a U.S. publisher and set in the Americas."

Here's a link to my recent review.

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