August 2019 – The Dusty Jacket

The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes (J)

The Hundred Dresses

The Hundred Dresses

Eleanor Estes (Juvenile Fiction)

How did it all start? Maddie wasn’t quite sure, but then she remembers. It started with a girl, Wanda Petronski, who lives on Boggins Heights with her dad and brother. Wanda comes to school every day in the same faded blue dress that doesn’t seem to hang right. She’s quiet and sits in the far corner of the classroom. Nobody seems to pay her much mind, except that her last name is silly and hard to pronounce. She’s practically invisible until that one day when Wanda wanted so desperately to be a part of the group. So hungry for companionship and inclusion. That one day when the other girls were talking about dresses and Wanda said, “I got a hundred dresses home.” Who knew that that one single sentence would have such an effect…not just on Wanda, but on so many more.

Oftentimes, a book or story acts as a balm—more for the author than the reader. It is a last-ditch effort of making things right…of righting a wrong. R.J. Palacio accomplished this through her wonderful and poignant book The Wonder, a novel about a boy with Treacher Collins Syndrome (TCS) where bones and facial tissues develop abnormally. She says that the inspiration for her book came after a chance encounter with a little girl in an ice cream store. In “A Letter to Readers”, Estes’s daughter, Helena, says that her mother’s inspiration came from a classmate who was much like Wanda. An immigrant shunned by her peers and longing to fit in and be liked. Her mother, like Maddie, realized too late that complacency is just as bad as participation and that popularity should never be achieved at the expense of another.

The Hundred Dresses won a Newberry Honor in 1945 and has never been out of print since. There is a very good reason for this. Although it is a mere 80 pages, Eleanor Estes makes every sentence reverberate within our very heart and soul and Louis Slobodkin’s beautiful illustrations give this heartfelt story a vibrant beauty and grace. This is a story that should be shared and discussed with readers of all ages. It reminds us of the power of words and the heart’s amazing capacity to find and offer forgiveness. Children find it difficult to remove the target from someone else’s back for they know all too well that there is a very good chance that the target will find a new home upon their own. It takes a tremendous amount of courage to stand up for what is right. Only later in life do we realize that sometimes the only thing worse than living with shame, is living with regret. In this age of bullying and intolerance, the lessons learned from The Hundred Dresses are still as relevant and important today as they were in 1944. Gratefully, we have Wanda and Maddie who remind us that it is never too late to say, “I’m sorry” and more importantly, “I forgive you.”

Rating: 5/5

*Book cover image attributed to www.amazon.com

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The Little Giant of Aberdeen County by Tiffany Baker

The Little Giant of Aberdeen County

The Little Giant of Aberdeen County

Tiffany Baker (Adult Fiction)

The day I laid Robert Morgan to rest was remarkable for two reasons. First, even though it was August, the sky overhead was as rough and cold as a January lake; and second, it was the day I started to shrink.

Truly Plaice was destined to be a big girl. During her mother’s pregnancy, the town began to take bets as to what her final weight would be upon delivery. Turns out, nobody in that town won. No one came close. Her school teacher called her a “little giant” and Truly became known for her massive size and build. Where her sister, Serena Jane, was wispy and beautiful, Truly countered with her girth and homeliness. But with so many things, Truly simply accepted this genetic disparity as fact and actually said the difference between the two was quite easy, “The reason the two of us were as opposite as sewage and spring water, I thought, was that pretty can’t exist without ugly.” So, through her own eyes, Truly shares her story of wickedness and witchcraft, of poverty and prosperity, of life and death, and of a very big woman in a very small town.

Throughout this book, I wasn’t sure whether to feel pity or pride for Truly. Here is a woman who has wholly resigned herself to her situation and although she feels the occasional stab of pity, jealousy, or regret, her unconditional surrender to her circumstances is both admirable and heartbreaking. Her friend Amelia may have summed up Truly’s attitude perfectly one day when they were both walking home from school, “Things are what they are. You can’t change them.” Perhaps Truly realized this early on in life and found that she’d be much happier by choosing resignation over resistance.

Tiffany Baker does a nice job at keeping her story entertaining and engrossing by throwing in several plot turns and twists. Although there is a lot going on with multiple characters and their individual story lines, Truly proves to be a capable storyteller and manages to keep everything orderly and fluid. However, despite an engaging story and a unique main character, there was a big plot hole that kept my rating at a four versus a five. I found that Truly’s need for a cure and her want of one were at constant odds. The reasons she stated for not pursuing treatment are legitimate to her circumstances at the time save one…money. You can’t claim poverty as an excuse when you constantly remind the reader that you have a suitcase full of money hidden under your bed. This was clearly frustrating for me, but not enough to override the valuable lessons contained within The Little Giant of Aberdeen County: love the skin you’re in, be courageous in accepting that which you cannot change, and never think that you are so full that there is not enough room to let anyone else in.

Rating: 4/5

*Book cover image attributed to www.amazon.com

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Adam of the Road by Elizabeth Janet Gray (J)

Adam of the Road

Adam of the Road

Elizabeth Janet Gray (Juvenile Fiction)

Three things gave Adam Quartermayne comfort: his harp, his friend Perkin, and his dog Nick. But for five months now, all Adam truly cared about was his father finally coming to take him out of school. “Today he’s coming. I know it!”, Adam would find himself saying over and over again. But his father was Roger the Minstrel, and the open road was his home. Roger will come for him and when he did, together with their harp and viol, they would travel the countryside—entertaining people with their songs and stories. But life is unpredictable and just when Nick had settled into the life he had always dreamed of fate comes along and changes everything.

Elizabeth Janet Gray takes young readers to late thirteenth-century England—a time of Welsh revolt and a period when England’s population boomed and towns and trade expanded. Best of all, it was a time for minstrels and what an important commodity they were. As Gray writes, “When a book cost more than a horse and few could read, minstrels’ tales were almost the only entertainment. Minstrels brought news, too; they told what was going on in the next town, and what was happening in London, and where the king was.” Gray transports her readers to a time filled with wine (the hot spiced wine is particularly pleasant), women (Jill Ferryman was especially goodhearted and kind), and song. Lots and lots of song! She gives us an adventure for the ages filled with robbers, thieves, narrow escapes, dastardly deeds, and daring-dos.

At the heart of this book is eleven-year old Adam, whose solid moral center, resilience, loyalty, bravery, and kindness make him the ideal protagonist. He understands that stealing food—regardless of the degree of hunger—is wrong and that showing genuine appreciation for an otherwise undesirable gift is an admirable trait. More importantly, he shows us the value of faith and family. Time and time again, the reader is reminded that a minstrel’s home is the open road. As Roger once said to Adam, “A road’s a kind of holy thing. It brings all kinds of people and all parts of England together. And it’s home to a minstrel, even though he may happen to be sleeping in a castle.” But I think in the end, Adam may have been more in agreement with the Roman philosopher Gaius Plinius Secundus, better known as Pliny the Elder (or just Pliny if you were a close chum). For it was Pliny who gave us the beloved saying, “Home is where the heart is” and Adam’s heart was firmly placed within a master minstrel and a red spaniel with long silky ears. Perhaps Pliny would have made for a rather good minstrel?

Rating: 5/5

*Book cover image attributed to www.christianbook.com

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The Dry Grass of August by Anna Jean Mayhew

The Dry Grass of August

The Dry Grass of August

Anna Jean Mayhew (Adult Fiction)

In August of 1954, we took our first trip without Daddy, and Stell got to use the driver’s license she’d had such a fit about. It was just a little card saying she was Estelle Annette Watts, that she was white, with hazel eyes and brown hair. But her having a license made that trip different from any others, because if she hadn’t had it, we never would have been stuck in Sally’s Motel Park in Claxton, Georgia, where we went to buy fruitcakes and had a wreck instead. And Mary would still be with us.

It’s 1954 and Jubie Watts, her mother, brother, sisters, and their maid, Mary, are embarking on the ultimate road trip from Charlotte, North Carolina to Florida. They’re traveling without father and there’s talk of the Klan in Georgia. “We’ll be fine,” Mama assured. She needed this trip and nothing was going to change her mind. So with that final word, the six of them headed out in the family’s Packard for a journey that would have unforeseeable impacts on them all.

Several reviewers noted that fans of Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 novel The Help (I read it and count myself as a fan) would also enjoy this book. “A must-read,” one went so far as saying. But other than the story being set in the South during segregation, the parallels stop there. Mayhew’s story does deal with the atrocities of racial and social injustice, but—through the Watts family—she also delves into the darkness of infidelity, alcoholism, and physical abuse. This is a story about both a country and a family being torn apart from the inside out. The ugliness of racial disparity and the effects of substance abuse are on full display and is authentic in their depiction and raw in their detail. What’s perhaps most disturbing is the fact that in this place and time in American history, these behaviors were indeed the status quo and viewed as socially acceptable.

In the back of the book, there is an author Q&A section where Mayhew is asked if her novel is young adult fiction given that her protagonist is thirteen years old. Mayhew answers, “My novel is literary fiction; however, I hope young adults will read it, because it’s set in a time long before their lives and can give them a look into history through the eyes of someone of their age.” I searched Penguin Teen for iconic YA heroines and pulled up such descriptions as “sharpshooter, ancient beast tamer”, “futuristic Resistance fighter”, “post-apocalyptic survivor”, “female gladiator”, and “dress-wearing demon destroyer”. After reading The Dry Grass of August, it was refreshing to see just an ordinary young girl standing up for principles she feels are worth defending and standing beside people she feels are worth protecting. Jubie Watts is such a person and a heroine that any reader—young or old—can learn a thing or two from.

Rating: 4/5

*Book cover image attributed to www.amazon.com

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