The Summer of the Swans: 1971 Newbery Award Winner

The beginning of March 2014 I started a new undertaking: reading every single Newbery Medal Winner book.  A number of them I have read in the past, but I am reading them with fresh eyes,and reviewing them for others. I am not reading them in order, as some will require some effort on my part to find them all.  Want to keep track of which books I read?  Check them out at Confessions of a Wannabe Reader!

Cover of the book - The image is used for identification purposes only under the fair use clause

Sara Godfrey: Teenage Angst

"She could never really be sure of anything this summer.  One moment she was happy, and the next, for no reason, she was miserable."

Sara Godfrey is fourteen, and suddenly nothing seems right with her world.  It is summertime, and Sara lives in a West Virginia town with beautiful older sister Wanda and her mentally-handicapped brother Charlie, who are watched over by her father's younger sister Willie while he works in another state.  Sara finds fault with everyone but her little brother, because he can't help himself, and wishes she could fly away like the swans that live on the nearby lake.  She is also extremely overprotective of Charlie, and stops at nothing to "avenge" any wrongs done to him, though most are minor, and the resulting punishments she endures puts her deeper into a "world is out to get her" funk.  When Charlie disappears, Sara must come out of her teen-aged moodiness to figure out what really is important to her, and why her family does what they do.

This was a quick read for me, as I read it in only twenty minutes.  It was a good read, and an accurate description of teenage angst.  The Summer of the Swans, by Betsy Byars, is the story of one girl discovering that the world is not unfair to her, no matter how much she thinks it is.  Sara, being a middle child, feels like everyone is threatening to her, and she must act out to protect herself and her brother.  When she discovers that people can and do change, or at least her perceptions of them can change, she matures.  The story takes place in only two days, but was a good story nevertheless.

One thing I find interesting is the amount of Newbery Award winning books that take place in West Virginia.  I seem to have read them almost one after the other.  Summer of the Swans is just one example.  Missing May, Shiloh, and Belle Prater's Boy (while not a winner it is a Newbery Honor Book) all take place in West Virginia and Walk Two Moons has part of its setting in the Appalachians as well.

A Year Down Yonder: 2001 Newbery Award Winner

The beginning of March 2014 I started a new undertaking: reading every single Newbery Medal Winner book. A number of them I have read in the past, but I am reading them with fresh eyes,and reviewing them for others. I am not reading them in order, as some will require some effort on my part to find them all.  Want to keep track of which books I read?  Check them out at Confessions of a Wannabe Reader!

Cover of the book - Used for illustration purposes only under the fair use clause

Sometimes I binge read and then remember to write up reviews on several books at once, or I write up reviews on sheets of paper and then have to find time to type them into the computer, so forgive the multiple posts today.

Mary Alice Dowdel: The City Gal

Mary Alice Dowdel used to spend just her summers at her grandmother's house in southern Illinois, but the year is 1937 and the Great Depression has hit her family hard.  Her parents are boarding in a single room, her brother is working out West, and the fifteen-year-old is sent to live with her grandmother for the entire year.  She is not happy with the prospect, as her grandmother lives in a very rural area that is very hick to the Chicago girl.  Her grandmother is tough as nails and very no nonsense, and Mary Alice dreads the prospect of living with her.  But that changes as Mary Alice gets to know her grandmother and warms up to some of the townsfolk.   She learns that maybe the year spent "down yonder" wasn't so bad.

I had read this story before and thoroughly enjoyed it when I read it.  A Year Down Yonder is the middle book of a trilogy by Richard Peck, who also wrote the book Strays Like Us (another book I really enjoyed reading).  It is the heartwarming tale of a teen who learns that her seemingly backwards grandmother isn't as backwards as she seems.  It is also a tale about coming home.  This book, which seems to be written for teenagers instead of children, is an awesome story of remembering a stage in childhood for a young woman.  Some of it reminded me of elements of the book Belle Prater's Boy, particularly the revealing of some of the townsfolk's secrets and the way that some of the hoity-toity elite of the town try to stay away from the country bumpkins.  It is a very good read.