Grade 5 summer Reading

I feel pretty solid about my booklist this year. Probably because I've actually read almost all of them.

The One and Only Ivan -K. Applegate
Sky Sailors -D. Bristow
Monkey King: Birth of the Stone Monkey -W. Chen
The Dark Hills Divide -P. Carman
The Search for Wondla -T. Diterlizzi
Falling In -F. O. Dowell
Out of my mind -S. M. Draper
Soldier Bear -T. B. Dumon
The Big Splash -J. Ferraiolo
At the Sign of the Sugared Plum -M. Hooper
The Girl Behind the Glass -J. Kelley
The Scepter of the Ancients -D. Landy
This is Just to Say -J. Sidman
William S. and the Great Escape -Z. K. Snyder
You'll like it here (everybody does) -R. White

Summer and Bird

by: Katherine Catmull

Ages: 12+ ... hmmm tough one
Rating: 5/5

About: One morning two sisters wake up to an empty house. Their mother and father are nowhere to be found. All that is left is an open window, and unlocked secret closet and a coded message from their mother. So those sisters set out into the forest to find their parents. They find instead a bird with patchwork plummage, a secret way into another forest very different from the one they know and they find they are not who they thought they were, they are not the sisters that they thought they were, and life is more complex than they thought they knew.

Thoughts:
Beautiful and weird and wonderful.

I don't know how to describe how I feel about this book, except that I loved it.

The writing was beautiful, descriptive and thoughtful and often poetic.  Many aspects of the story were weird, with magic and side stories that seemed to come out of nowhere and yet were important to the larger world of the story. The evil in the story was a twisted story on its own, and even though the "bad guy" gets defeated the conflict doesn't entirely resolve... at least right away because the conflict has roots beyond the typical villain.  This story was wonderful, it was heartfelt and has the feel of classic fairytale fantasies (think The Neverending Story).

The age recommendation for this story is difficult. It's a children's story, but the pace is slow enough that I don't think it would appeal to a lot of emerging readers. There is a sense of philosophy in this story about true selves, love, mistakes, pride, family, death, balance. It's not inappropriate for a nine year old, the story is just a bit dry and can be complex. And yet, it's quite simple in a lot of ways -a family does it's best to find eachother but there are obstacles in their way. I think this would be a great book to be read out loud -especially for a mom to read to her daughters. The father, poor guy, gets left behind. The story very much revolves around the relationships between the sisters, and the mother and her daughters.

The narrative tries hard to teach the reader about the different perspectives in a conflict or disagreement. I didn't mind this for the most part, but it got tired near the end. Maybe in part because even understanding those perspectives doesn't necessarily make for easy resolutions. In part because it doesn't give the reader credit to make those understandings on their own.