High Stakes

It all started in June of 2012.  I read debut author Martha Brockenbrough's Devine Intervention.  To this day, moments from those pages are as real to me now as they were then.  When Martha Brockenbrough writes, I want to read it.

On April 28, 2015 her newest title, The Game of Love and Death (Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic Inc.) was released.  I could hardly wait for the weekend to begin reading it.  In fact, I didn't quite make it to Saturday.

In a moment of weakness I read the first page of The Game of Love and Death @mbrockenbrough before work was done. See no sleep in my future.

— Margie Myers-Culver (@Loveofxena) May 1, 2015

It was followed by these tweets.

Dear @mbrockenbrough I am up to chapter 35 in The Game of Love and Death. The story is mesmerizing. The writing is exquisite.

— Margie Myers-Culver (@Loveofxena) May 3, 2015

My eyes are filled with tears. I have finished the remarkable book The Game of Love and Death by @mbrockenbrough Oh my goodness Martha!

— Margie Myers-Culver (@Loveofxena) May 4, 2015

Chapter 1
Friday, February 13, 1920
The figure in the fine gray suit materialized in the nursery and stood over the sleeping infant, inhaling the sweet, milky night air.  He could have taken any form, really:  a sparrow, a snowy owl, even a common housefly.  Although he often traveled the world on wings, for this work he always preferred a human guise.  

With this first paragraph we readers step into a world we will not easily be able to leave.  The being standing over the sleeping boy is Love.  With a drop of his blood, he strengthens the heart of Henry Bishop.  Two words softly spoken to the child as he leaves will be needed.  Henry is now a player.

The following evening, in another part of Seattle nearby, Death, Love's opponent, bends to pick up a sleeping baby girl.  She awakens but Death holds her until she rests comfortably again.  With a single black tear from her eye, Death writes a word on the child's forehead.  This word will direct every facet of Flora Saudade's life. Death utters five prophetic sentences. Flora is now a player.

Seventeen years pass before the players are deemed ready, before the game commences.  Love and Death meet an ocean away, sealing the fate of Henry and Flora by writing their names on a paper. The rules are determined as is the length of the game with a roll of dice.  So much will happen between the 27th of March, 1937 and the 7th of July, 1937.  For Love to win

"They must choose courage," he said.
"They must choose each other at the cost of everything else. ..."

At seventeen Flora Saudade, an African American, has a single life passion, fixing, improving and flying airplanes.  At night she is a jazz singer of exceptional talent in a nightclub, The Domino.  The Domino belonged to her parents before they were killed in a tragic accident.  Now Flora and her Uncle Sherman are co-owners.  She no longer attends school dividing her time between caring for her Grandmother, working at the airfield for Captain Girard and singing.  Her dream is to find a sponsor so she can buy a plane, fly around the world and surpass her heroines, Bessie Coleman and Amelia Earhart.

Through the curse of influenza and the stock market crash, Henry Bishop, a white boy, with no family of his own, has been living with his best friend, Ethan Thorne, at their mansion.  His father and Ethan's father were best friends.  Bernard Thorne owns The Inquirer newspaper in Seattle.  The Thornes have plans for Henry and Ethan; school, college and working at the newspaper. Henry has secrets.  Ethan has secrets; some Henry does not even realize.  All Henry longs to do is play bass; practicing, playing, and writing music makes his heart sing.

Through an assignment as cub reporters, Ethan and Henry cross paths with Flora.  The drop of blood given by Love, the word written with a black tear by Death and the competition provide an almost otherworldly attraction of the two, Henry and Flora.  Little do they know the clock is ticking.  There is slightly more than two months left.

Do Love and Death sit idly by?  A sparrow may soar near and sing when least expected.  The familiar black cat around the small green house or the club appears and disappears as if by magic.  A Thorne family relative having created a scandal in the east arrives for an extended visit.  There is a new "mayor" in the Hooverville city in Seattle, residence of men without jobs during the Depression.

The layers of story between Flora and Henry, Death and Love, the mix of the four, family and friends build toward a conclusion which will leave you gasping for breath.  Twists and turns you do not see coming heighten the tension to the point where you wonder what sort of resolution will be presented.  This game, this race against time, between Love and Death has been played for hundreds of years.  Love has never won.  Never.


For me excellence is in the details.  In Martha Brockenbrough's mind words are used like a pencil- thin brush.  Her portraits of places, people and events, regardless of the historical time period, are painted so intricately you are transported by the beauty and realism.

The use of dates with some of the chapter headings supplies an additional immediacy.  There are shifts from scene to scene within chapters delineated by a line depicting the passage of time.  Death and Love move with ease to various spots on the globe.  Each of these is flawless, flowing like a film upon a screen.

Whether it's the narrative, thoughts of the characters or the dialogue between them, Brockenbrough gets to the truth of human and immortal natures.  All aspects of what makes us who we are find a place in this story.  She examines with careful thought the roles of Love and Death not just in this game but in the course of human existence.   My copy of this book is peppered with sticky note markers.  Here are some lines and passages.


People are funny about things they couldn't see.  If they couldn't see it, it wasn't there.  Or at the least, it didn't affect them.  But the world didn't work that way, did it?  There were things all around that you couldn't see, and these things had power.

Flora opened her mouth to sing and Henry swallowed hard.  He'd never heard anything like her voice, which made him wish he had his bass in his hands, just so he could return the sounds, a mix of chocolate and cream, something he wanted to drink through his skin. 

The sky flashed white and thunder boomed, and the rain fell once more, like letters tipped out of a liquid book.

To be written into story.  That was how even the lost lived on.


Haunting, heartbreaking, heartwarming, powerful, stunning and eloquent are only a few of the words to describe The Game of Love and Death written by Martha Brockenbrough.  Roles of gender, race and class are adeptly blended within a historical setting which is in turn all part of the game of the two eternal beings.  This is a book you will want to read, recommend and then read again.  This is one of those titles when you finish, you look around and can't believe it is May 2015.  A large part of you remains in 1937.

To discover more about Martha Brockenbrough and her other work, visit her website by following the link attached to her name.  Please enjoy Martha's guest post, Friend Friday, at author Kirby Larson's site in which she speaks about The Game of Love and Death.  Martha was recently interviewed at Kirkus about this new title.  UPDATE:  Martha Brockenbrough wrote a guest post on author Gae Polisner's blog, that wee bit heap on July 10, 2015.
  
Update: Martha Brockenbrough writes an essay about book ideas at NW Book Lovers. She did win a position on the 2016 Pacific Northwest Book Awards list.

This tweet in reply to mine is a treasure.  Thank you Martha for this and your books.

I have been waiting for this woman's response to my book for months. It was worth it.:-) https://t.co/N9r8pgGvqM

— Martha Brockenbrough (@mbrockenbrough) May 4, 201

Hunting For Home

There is a tiny treasure resting on my bookshelves among all my gardening books.  On my birthday it was a gift from my mom and dad.  The inscription reads

June 11, 1980
To our daughter who is as lovely as a flower-----
Happy Birthday, Margie
With love,
Dad and Mom

They each wrote their own names; their signatures as distinctive as they were.  The book, The Language of Flowers, was originally published in 1968.  Printed in England my edition is the fourth printing in 1976.  This volume lists over seven hundred flowers with their meanings.

Seven kinds of daisies are listed.  In Tracy Holczer's debut middle grade novel, The Secret Hum of a Daisy, daisies figure prominently.  Considering the ox-eye daisy is prevalent in the wild I decided to look up what it represents.

Daisy, Ox Eye, .... A Token

Indeed.


All I had to do was walk up to the coffin.  

Twelve-year-old Grace is at her mother's funeral.  For all the years of her life, it has always been her and her mother alone moving from place to place; fourteen new schools in total for Grace.  Now she would be living with her maternal grandmother, a woman who, before Grace was born, had asked Grace's mother to leave her home after Grace's dad and grandfather were killed in an automobile accident.

In Grace's mind this woman who sent her own daughter away could not possibly want Grace.  At her Grandmother's house, she refuses to live inside taking up residence in her grandfather's workshop.  Here she can't hear the nearby river; its sound a painful memory of her mother's drowning.

After nine months, the longest time they have ever stayed in one place, Grace has grown to love living with Mrs. Greene and her daughter, Lacey, who has become her best friend.  When her mother wants to move again, Grace takes a stand arguing.  That discussion and afterward, those words exchanged in frustration, anger and disappointment is the last time Grace sees her mother alive.

Wishing for Before, afraid of After but needing to connect with life, a new person in a new small town, Grace like many experiencing loss of a loved one is looking for a promise.  When she finds a folded silver origami crane in the bushes on her way to school she believes it is a sign from her mom. In each new home her mom would create a scavenger hunt for Grace.  More and more clues are seen and collected.  Who is leaving these for Grace and why?

Origami cranes, larger cranes fashioned from found metal objects with messages tucked inside, a horse named Beauty, a park, a school project, a field of daisies, spoons and an Egyptian death ceremony are important pieces in Grace building a foundation, finding her place. Poetry, writing letters and stories told by supportive community members and family friends strengthen the framework providing shelter.  Will windows and a door open into Grace's heart?


With the single first sentence, readers, like Grace, are seeking answers.  We want to know more about her Grandmother Jessup, her dad, the community members, teachers and staff at school, Mrs.Greene and Lacey, the next door neighbors, Jo, Max and Mr. and Mrs. Brannigan and...her mother. Their roles are important in shaping Grace's new life.

Tracy Holczer builds her characters conversation by conversation.  We listen to Grace's thoughts as she weighs the pros and cons of her choices.  Talking, thinking and journal writing shape a picture of the past, present and possible future.

We want to understand the significance of the treasure hunt and its link to the meaning of home.  Using the clues and the placement of the paper cranes, we travel from place to place, idea to idea, on a road of discovery right along with Grace.  This moves the narrative briskly with a gentle tension.  Here are some samples of Tracy Holczer's writing in this title.

Each of her birds held a sorrow or a wish---all her sleepless nights and worries, all her hopes for the future---formed into words and sketches tucked deep inside those birds and meant to fly away.  Before that day, I didn't know what she might be worried about, what might have made her feel sorrowful.  I only understood my own sorrows, the way they would settle into the empty spaces meant to be filled by other things---a father, a place to call home---and I didn't know how to scrape them out now.


"You need to give her a name," I said.
"Give who a name?" Grandma said.
"The truck.  We had a name for our car and Mama talked real nice to her, like with plants.  That car always started right up."
"You want me to talk to the truck?" Grandma said real quiet, like it was occurring to her I might have slipped clear off my nut.
Sheriff Bergum looked amused.  "Come on, Miranda.  Give it a try."
"I most certainly will not."
Just to poke at her, I ran my hand along the crisp green metal.  "There you go Granny Smith.  You take your time. I know you can do it."
When I walked to the tailgate, Grandma stared at me through the rearview mirror; her eyes almost kind.
"You can give it a try again," I said.
In a shuddering cough of smelly gray smoke, the truck started right up.  Even I was surprised.


"You will go your whole life Gracie May, and every single person in it will fail you in one way or another.  It's all about repair.  It's all about letting yourself change those pictures."


The Secret Hum of a Daisy written by Tracy Holczer is about feeling hopeless and finding hope, never having a place to call home and finding people who make a house a home and it's about love helping to fill the hole of loss.  It's about being human but extending ourselves for the benefit of others, knowing everyone's lives will be richer for the efforts.  This is a memorable, moving debut.

You will find information about Tracy Holczer, this book (the first chapter for you to read) and a study guide by following the link embedded in her name to access her website.  This link takes you to a page explaining her free Skype visits.  It also includes links to blog posts during her tour, a post at Nerdy Book Club, Unleashing Readers and an American Booksellers Association Q & A. At OneFour KidLit is an additional interview.

Joy In The Moment

It's never truly expected.  Whether the cause is an illness, an accident or old age, it can, in seconds, stun you with the finality of the loss. A literal shift in your world is felt; a sense of normal has vanished.  When a cherished one dies, a chunk of you goes with them.  The challenge is to hold on to the best parts of them; filling your memories with who and what they loved.

My dad loved taking pictures.  I have inherited eight carousels, numerous boxes and metal containers of slides.  He used to make his own slides from developed negatives.  Looking at those, knowing how his hands meticulously pieced each one together, fills me full of huge affection and appreciation for this man.

I love taking pictures too.  In one of my libraries, a K-12 school, we built a dark room for the photography and yearbook classes I taught.  Frequent readers of my blog will remember me mentioning having a darkroom in my home.  With digital photography the possibilities of creating astonishing images is nearly without limitation.  But...to stand in a darkroom, putting a negative you've developed into an enlarger, exposing the photographic paper and watching the picture come to life as it passes from one tray to the next is like witnessing magic.

In Circa Now (Disney Hyperion) author Amber McRee Turner, through the shared love of photography, tells a story of being lost and found. A single picture becomes that single pebble thrown into a pond, rippling outward.  The effects are uncertain and life-changing.

Circa Monroe's walk home from school was so gusty, she thought the wind might very well snatch the books from her backpack and rearrange their pages.

When Circa enters her house, going to the large roomy space shared by her parents' business, Studio Monroe, her dad a photo restorer and her mom a portrait photographer, we enter her world.  In the first two chapters we come to comprehend the unique personalities of these two people, how they shape Circa's life.  We become acquainted with a distinctive photographic specialty of Mr. Monroe, the Shopt, the placing of additional images in pictures making them seem a part of the original.

In the next chapter, the third chapter, all sense of normal, disappears from Circa's and her Mom's lives.  During a delivery to a demanding client, three months and three weeks earlier, Circa's Dad is killed in a tornado.  Her Mom's continuing battle with depression increases their struggles.  When the Memory Wall project, her Dad restoring dozens of photographs to help residents in the local assisted living facility, is taken away from her by her Mom, Circa feels like the final thread to her old life has been broken.

Another surprise awaits Circa, her friend, Nattie and her Mom when they return home from church the next Sunday.  They catch a boy trying to escape from their backyard by climbing over their fence.  Miles has no recollection of his past prior to the tornado.  In his things is one of the copies of the reunion photographs her Dad was taking to the park the day the storm hit.

The lives of Circa, her Mom, Miles and Nattie are intricately interwoven together as each works through life's adjustments striving to maintain and strengthen relationships.  What Circa's Mom does not know but Circa, Miles and Nattie do, is Shopt images might hold the key to unpredicted possibilities; curious coincidences or magical moments.  So much depends on defining family.  So much depends on true friendship.  So much depends on lasting love.


In the writing of Circa Now author Amber McRee Turner has given readers a cast of characters for whom we care deeply (Stanley being the hardest to feel empathy). She gives us windows into their hearts through their thoughts and conversations.  You want to hug every single one of them; knowing their strengths and weaknesses.

Turner places these people in some of the most difficult situations; loss of a parent and spouse, loss of home, and loss of memory.  Each chapter, each episode, and each ray of hope, even those shrouded in mystery, creates a plot which swirls around them; connecting them in ways which will make readers gasp.  The pacing is impeccable; you pause when necessary to ponder a point but then race on with your reading wanting to know.

Beginning with the end of chapter two, Turner includes Shopts with short stories scripted beneath them at most chapter endings/beginnings.  This creates further closeness between the readers and this narrative.  There is a descriptive, realistic intensity about her writing.  Here are some samples.

She opened the door and breathed a sigh of relief when she saw that it was Nattie.  Sweet Nat, standing on the front porch holding an armload of paper flowers.
Nattie smiled and held the flowers out to Circa, who noticed right away that they'd been crafted out of at least a dozen kinds of old wrapping paper.  "It's kind of like a whole year's worth of leftover happy," Nattie said cheerfully, looking fancy as ever in her favorite church hat.  Circa had never known Nattie to not be pretty.  Especially today, the way her dark skin contrasted against the pale yellow of her dress.  Circa recognized it as Nattie's Easter dress, but modified somehow.  Like she had snipped a doodad here and there to make it more suited for a regular Sunday.

"Makes me feel really freaky," he said.  "As if I'm just going through motions like some kind of robot person or something."
"Yeah, I bet," said Circa, trying briefly to imagine Miles as a robot.  "But you know what?  My dad used to say something about Great-Aunt Ruby and the other people at Maple Grove.  He said that just because the book's too high up on the shelf to reach, it doesn't mean the story's not there."
"Yeah, I get it," said Miles.  "I just wish I even knew where the shelf was."


The importance of Circa Now written by Amber McRee Turner is in its value to those who have suffered loss and for those who need to support family and friends.  It creates a bridge of understanding rare and rich for all readers.  This is a heartprint title for me, completely uplifting.


To learn more about Amber McRee Turner please follow the link embedded in her name above to access her website.  Here is a link to a 10 Minute Review by Colby Sharp at sharpread.  John Schumacher interviews Amber McRee Turner at Watch. Connect. Read. I have included a link to the lyrics of the song, A Prayer Like Any Other, which is featured frequently in this story.

Here is a special tweet Amber McRee Turner sent out on Twitter.

Reading is...the way up. #TheShopt #nerdybookclub @donalynbooks pic.twitter.com/TMI0nORMma
— Amber McRee Turner (@ambermcturner) June 21, 2014

Here is my non-digital, darkroom Shopt from years ago.  It's Saint Mary's Cathedral, Gaylord, Michigan the old blended with the new.

If Only...

If only we could turn back the clock; pick a point in time to revisit.  Those things we did or didn't do could be corrected.  Those things we said or did not say could be remedied.  Sometimes dialing back is not necessary; amends can be made.  Other times it's simply too late.

The loss of a loved one, whether it's expected or sudden, makes us feel not only extremely sad but strangely off-kilter.  All that we knew, the rhythm of our days, is missing.  In The Center of Everything (Harcourt Children's Books) author Linda Urban, opens the door of opportunity to find what has been lost; to have a wish granted in an extraordinarily ordinary way.


In the beginning, there was the donut.

It is Bunning Day, an annual celebration to honor Captain Cornelius Bunning, inventor of the donut hole, according to the story told in Bunning, New Hampshire.  This year Ruby Pepperdine is standing in a square in a circle along the parade route.  This year sixth grader Ruby Pepperdine is the Bunning Day Essay Girl.

As Ruby waits and watches for each portion of the parade to pass, we discover that unlike most of her family and friends, in the three months since her beloved grandmother, Gigi, has died, she can't seem to find the balance her life used to have.  There is a single moment weighing heavily on her mind and in her heart.  An occurrence in Mrs. Tomas's art class brings this into focus causing Ruby to wonder about doing what or talking like you are supposed to.

There is also the wish which could make all well again.  Tradition has it if you throw a quarter with your birth date on it on your birthday through the donut hole (on Captain Cornelius Bunning's statue) before the next Bunning Day has ended, your heart's desire will come true.  As fate would have it, on Ruby's twelfth birthday past, her quarter went through the hole.  So much is riding on what she has wished.

Her parents, an assortment of aunts, uncles and cousins as well as significant townspeople, teachers and schoolmates fill her musings of the past few days and the minutes prior to her reading her essay.  She thinks about what she has done and said.  She worries if her forever friend, Lucy, is still her friend.  She wonders if the new relationship with Nero is over.

Nothing is the same.  Everything is the same. Life circles around more than one center.  It's about listening...really listening.

When Linda Urban writes a book, this book, even if you feel its excellence at the first reading, it gets better when you read it again.  There are passages, single sentences too, that you want to copy on a piece of paper, fold up, place in a pocket and carry with you.  Her characters are so real you want to live in their town sharing the ebb and flow of their days.

Through point of view, alternating chapters between the past and present, the thoughts of Ruby and others with ties to the Bunning Day parade, Ruby's world unfolds before us.  We see our sixth grade selves in Ruby and her two friends told with clarity and humor.  We know and understand her sense of loss; it rings poignantly true.

There are many passages I keep replaying in my mind.  One is the conversation with her parents in the car on the way to the fireworks, The Hole Shebang.  Here are a couple more.

Ruby knows the speck that poked her too. It was the reason she still feels so sad when everyone else has moved on.  She had tried to forget about it, but today it reached out and poked her.
And she wishes there was a way she could reach back.

"You ever read Holes?" Nero asks.
Ruby nods.  "I loved it."
"I didn't read it for a long time. I thought it was going to be about a donut shop.  Once I found out it was about something else, I was mad that I hadn't read it sooner."
"I know," Ruby says. "You get this idea of what something is like, and that gets in the way of finding out what it's really like."
"Exactly." Nero looks straight at Ruby. She gets this feeling he's not just talking about books and that he's going to ask some sort of crazy Nero DeNiro question, and suddenly Ruby understands how all her teachers must feel, torn between curiosity and the fear of losing control of things.


Linda Urban's The Center of Everything, in the course of a single afternoon and evening slowly but with purpose, much like the character Patsy Whelk organizes the order in which parade entries will walk the parade route, reveals how Ruby Pepperdine looses her place and finds it again.  This is a beautiful story about loss, friendship, family and community.  This is a story to savor and share.

Please follow the link embedded in Linda Urban's name to her website.  Here is a portion of the beginning for you to read.

The Center of Everything by Linda Urban - Excerpt by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt