Flora and Ulysses: 2014 Newbery Award

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

Flora Belle Buckman: The Cynic

"I promise to always turn back toward you."

Comic-book loving Flora Buckman, the only way to cope with her distant mother and her depressed father is to be cynical.  When a squirrel is sucked up into a neighbor's runaway vacuum, Flora comes to his rescue and brings the squirrel back to life. She is then amazed to find that the incident has left the squirrel with super hero powers of flight and super-strength, just like in her beloved comic books.  She names him Ulysses and takes him with her.  With the help of Ulysses, the weird boy next door named William Spiver, and a series of zany events, Flora learns to hope and love again and teaches those around her to do the same.

Flora and Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures was an interesting read for me.  The story is fantastic in nature, being a story about a super-hero squirrel.  The zaniness of the story kept me enthralled until the end of the book.  Having already read Kate DiCamillo's first Newbery Award book The Tale of Despereaux and her book Because of Winn-Dixie, I was used to her writing style, which flows freely and reads easily.

The theme of this book is love, family love in particular.  Flora has tried to stop loving those around her because it appears those around her have stopped loving her with all of their heart.  Yet when she saves Ulysses, a little of the cynical wall that she has built up around her heart starts to melt.  Throughout the adventures the tow have, they touch the lives around them, from Flora's parents, to William Spiver and his great-aunt, to the neighbor of her father's.  The story twists and turns and even has an arch-nemesis. Overall, it is a fun read with an ending that seems to mean good things to come for our superhero and his sidekick.

Moon Over Manifest: 2011 Newbery Award

I have 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.

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

Manifest: To Reveal or to Make Known

"If there is such a thing as a universal..... it's that there is power in a story."  

Twelve-year-old Abilene Tucker knows one thing for certain, even if everyone else doubts it; her father will return,at the end of summer to get her.  At the height of the Depression, Abilene is sent to the town of Manifest, Kansas to spend the summer with friends of her father.  She arrives in time for the last day of school and receives an assignment from the solitary schoolteacher: write a story.  Abilene spends the summer figuring out just what her story is, as well as finding out the story of the town of Manifest.  Throughout her journey, she learns that she is helping to heal a town, and that loving and being loved both leave scars.

I read Moon Over Manifest by Clare Vanderpool without knowing anything about either the book or the author.  Perhaps that was a good thing, because I did not have any notions about what I might be reading and were able to discover both the author's storytelling ability and the story itself..  The story spans two distinct times in American History, as it covers both the end of World War One and the Spanish influenza epidemic as well as the middle of the Great Depression, when people had given up hope.  Being a History buff, the stories that are woven through the main plot were fascinating and brought to life an era that is often times drab and dreary for me.

Needless to say, I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and was captivated until the end by the themes of hope and hopelessness, of belonging and loneliness, of the story.   Clare Vanderpool was able to tell a story that is universal.  Like Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, this story tells of heartbreak during the depression, but unlike the former, Moon Over Manifest was able to leave me feeling like something good is coming to the characters.  There is a power in this story.