My hopefuls

I admit that I have not been reading as much this past year as I would have liked.  So my "hopefuls" form a small subset of a not-so-large universe of 2013 J reads.  These titles have appeared on several mock lists and have won in some cases.

What more can you say about an author who wrote The Underneath and the Keeper--both books I was rooting for way back when?   Appelt is warm and muddy and droll and her universe of animal- people -raccoons, wild hogs, a cat or two, gators, rattlers, the ghost bird--the ivory billed woodpecker, and the legendary Sugar Man populate a bayou swamp somewhere near the Gulf of Mexico.  Her people- people include 12 year old Chap (named after the roadrunner Chapparal by his bird obsessed grandfather); Sonny Boy Beaucoup -owner of all the swamp who wants to put Chap's pie business out of business so he can wrangle a deal with the greatest gator wrestler Jaeger Stitch to build a theme park to showcase her talents.  The absent grandfather Audie - enduring spokesperson for all things
essential to the preservation of  the swamp- presides over the narrative maintaining a necessary equilibrium. The voice, as in most of her fiction is the essential ingredient in luring and guiding the reader into and through this swampy, humid, mythical, mysterious stew of people and animals bad, good, dangerous and brave!  My #1 pick.


12 year old Summer Miyamoto-2nd generation Japanese American- whose family follows the wheat harvest is not having much luck. Her Japanese-born grandparents are in charge of her and her brother Jaz as they travel from their home in Kansas to various Midwestern states in a tense showdown between mother nature and machinery.  If Summer's family can't make their wheat quota their home may be in danger of foreclosure.  Despite the pressure and danger of working the trucks, Summer's humor (and her grandmother's caustic wit) and resilience in the face of ailing grandparents, bad weather, and a challenged brother, propel her to a final act that will ensure that their year of bad luck may be over.  Throughout the book are drawings of the various machines involved in the harvesting of the wheat displaying the fine-tuned choreography of man and machine. This is a story about working class people, migrant workers, farming, and coming-of-age.   A book that may be a "hard sell" but one that needs a good threshing!






Place is intriguing and so is the narrator of this (maybe YA) book about a boy, Jeremy Johnson Johnson who can hear the voice of Jacob Grimm (narrator) in a town called Never Better.  This is part fairy tale (dark indeed like a Grimm tale), part love/magic story (Jeremy and Ginger); part ghost story-- Jacob (the other half of the famous Brothers Grimm) is caught between the dead and the not-dead and is sent to protect Jeremy from the villainous "Finder of Occasions."  I have not read anything quite like this one and despite the evil that lurks within, I would put this forward to older J readers as a suspenseful, creepy, look behind the curtain kind of tale.










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