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conulyI really do enjoy middle grade novels, but there's little point buying them nowadays with the kids all grown up, so my usual method of getting my fix is to go to the bookstore or the library, get a huge pile, and read through them in one sitting. Obviously that's not working now!
Just now I read Naomis Too, the sequel to Two Naomis. There's a long-standing tradition in middle grade fiction of name-dropping all the other children's books the author wants their audience to read. The Naomis books at least have an excuse - the bookish character has a librarian mother! And, unlike most books that engage in this shameless cross-promotion, this book recognizes that children might, occasionally, want to read something published in their own lifetime. Many other books don't do that, to the point where I sometimes wonder if the authors have read anything more recent than their own childhood*. It's a good book, realistic, though it ends a bit dismally - the Black Naomi encountered a string of probably-racist-microaggressions at her school, one after another, and was never quite able to work out how to solve them or even prove that most of them were happening. She did, however, at least get through to her stepsister, the other Naomi. Still, no closure on the school front. That may be a little more realism than I wanted in my realistic fiction.
And then yesterday I read Planet Omar: Accidental Trouble Magnet. This one is perhaps a bit too optimistic - even if you could get the racist bully and the racist neighbor in your life to become best friends with you by happening to be there to lend a sympathetic hand in their hour of need, what're the odds that you'll be so lucky?
(It also has a really weird and jarring scene in the middle where Omar tells us that his sister is a tattletale by relaying the time when his father was very upset that the batteries to the TV remote were missing, because Omar had taken them for his controller, with the fallout that he lost his video games for a month. Which seems like a lot of overkill for a problem that's much more easily solved by saying "Hey, kid, here's where we keep the spare batteries. If you need one and it's not there, let us know, we'll buy some at the store. Don't steal them from the remote again, thanks." Especially when that's about the only time we see those kids get punished for anything at all, so it's out of character overkill.)
Anyway, parentheticals aside, I guess what I want is a book that only name-drops a few books (published this century and diverse) and that's not too optimistic OR too pessimistic.
* This is especially annoying when the main character is reading an all-white booklist, which is about always when the authors don't think about it. I had this problem with The Vanderbeekers. Honestly, I wanted to take the family bookworm and give him a new pile of books that had characters that might possibly look like him.
Just now I read Naomis Too, the sequel to Two Naomis. There's a long-standing tradition in middle grade fiction of name-dropping all the other children's books the author wants their audience to read. The Naomis books at least have an excuse - the bookish character has a librarian mother! And, unlike most books that engage in this shameless cross-promotion, this book recognizes that children might, occasionally, want to read something published in their own lifetime. Many other books don't do that, to the point where I sometimes wonder if the authors have read anything more recent than their own childhood*. It's a good book, realistic, though it ends a bit dismally - the Black Naomi encountered a string of probably-racist-microaggressions at her school, one after another, and was never quite able to work out how to solve them or even prove that most of them were happening. She did, however, at least get through to her stepsister, the other Naomi. Still, no closure on the school front. That may be a little more realism than I wanted in my realistic fiction.
And then yesterday I read Planet Omar: Accidental Trouble Magnet. This one is perhaps a bit too optimistic - even if you could get the racist bully and the racist neighbor in your life to become best friends with you by happening to be there to lend a sympathetic hand in their hour of need, what're the odds that you'll be so lucky?
(It also has a really weird and jarring scene in the middle where Omar tells us that his sister is a tattletale by relaying the time when his father was very upset that the batteries to the TV remote were missing, because Omar had taken them for his controller, with the fallout that he lost his video games for a month. Which seems like a lot of overkill for a problem that's much more easily solved by saying "Hey, kid, here's where we keep the spare batteries. If you need one and it's not there, let us know, we'll buy some at the store. Don't steal them from the remote again, thanks." Especially when that's about the only time we see those kids get punished for anything at all, so it's out of character overkill.)
Anyway, parentheticals aside, I guess what I want is a book that only name-drops a few books (published this century and diverse) and that's not too optimistic OR too pessimistic.
* This is especially annoying when the main character is reading an all-white booklist, which is about always when the authors don't think about it. I had this problem with The Vanderbeekers. Honestly, I wanted to take the family bookworm and give him a new pile of books that had characters that might possibly look like him.
