Book Review: MOON OVER MANIFEST by Clare Vanderpool

Augusta Scattergood is back as my guest blogger today.  And she's brought with her a review of this year's Newbery Award winner, MOON OVER MANIFEST by Clare Vanderpoole.  I'm thrilled to say she's also snagged an interview with Clare. Drop back by on Monday for that sweet treat!

But first, Augusta's reflections on MOON OVER MANIFEST.

This year’s Newbery winner took a lot of people by surprise. It shouldn’t have. Everything that gold medal stands for is right there inside this novel. An adventure story and a mystery, the book interweaves letters from the First World War with musings from the society page of a local newspaper. The Ku Klux Klan makes an ominous appearance as does a conjurer, a preacher, and one of the most intriguing heroines to appear in historical fiction since Calpurnia Tate.

Young Abilene Tucker has been sent by her father to Manifest, Kansas, for the summer. Or so she thinks. Manifest is a town with history, with her own father’s history to be precise. He’s sent her there to stay with a sometimes preacher named Shady Howard. Eventually, Abilene decides she’ll just make the best of it.

She’s hardly picked herself up from a jump off the train before she’s face to face with a pathway called Perdition. Turns out, Manifest, Kansas is nothing like the stories her father told. “I tried to conjure up something smooth and sweet from those stories, but looking around, all I could muster was dry and stale. Up and down Main Street, the stores were dingy. Gray. Every third one was boarded up.”

And that’s Abilene’s introduction to the place she’s destined to spend more than a summer exploring. A broken pot leads her down the Path to Perdition where she meets Miss Sadie. Miss Sadie, the local fortune teller and potent maker, has found Abilene’s treasured compass, and the young girl schemes her way into Miss Sadie’s stories, hoping not only to retrieve the compass but to learn what connection her father had to this Kansas town. As a mystery unravels and Miss Sadie’s reveries unfold, Abilene digs deeper into Manifest’s history. But the harder she— and her new friends— delve, the less they seem to discover and the less it all seems to make sense. Even worse, Abilene is no closer to discovering her father here.

The time is the Depression, 1936, but Vanderpool’s skillful plotting takes the story back to 1917 via newspaper articles and remembered stories. This complicated novel, remarkably, ties the story up so that in the end young readers will see the connections. While they might need grounding in the time period to understand all the threads that run through the story, that should never keep a good student from enjoying the sheer mystery and adventure of MOON OVER MANIFEST, this year’s Newbery winner.

Thanks so much, Augusta!  I'm reading Moon Over Manifest myself right now.  I love reading about the first half of the 20th century in the US and I look forward to making the conections in this story!  Kind of you not to include spoilers!

Book Review: QUEEN OF PALMYRA:

Augusta Scattergood has worked as a reference librarian and an elementary school librarian. A book reviewer for The Christian Science Monitor, Delta Magazine, and other publications, she also writes for children, her favorite genre being middle-grade fiction.

She blogs about reading, writing and especially writing for kids at http://ascattergood.blogspot.com/ 

I'm always honored when she shares a book review for use on my blog!  Welcome back, Augusta.  

Why do you think the 60s are ripe for fictionalization? What is it about that amazing time?

Not that I'm complaining. Almost 10 years ago in a Writing for Children class at The New School, I first had a smidgen of an idea for a story that would take place during Mississippi Freedom Summer, 1964. I didn't know whether the time period was intriguing to kids, I just knew I had to tell that particular story. Now, all these years later, my novel is on the verge of publication. Amazing, even to me.

Books about the 60s are cropping up everywhere. Most I’ve read have been pretty darn close to the truth. Kids' books like Deborah Wiles’ new novel Countdown. Literary fiction, movies, Mad Men. The Help has spent over 60 weeks near the top of the best seller list. Secret Life of Bees? A terrific crossover novel and a not-half-bad movie.

My latest discovery is Minrose Gwin's,  The Queen of Palmyra, a complicated and amazingly told story of a time in our history some would just as soon forget.

The setting? A small Southern town where neighbors tend to help each other out. Share coffee on the front porch. Bring casseroles for births, funerals and most everything in between. At least on the outside, everyone’s happy. Well, maybe not 11-year-old Florence Forrest's family, who’d just as soon the neighbors do their meddling on their own side of the fence.

And if anybody needed a casserole, the Forrests do. They are falling apart. Florence's father has failed at yet another job, and her mother, Martha, insists they return to the family’s hometown where Martha’s cake business will support them. Florence’s teacher grandmother seems sympathetic to the young girl’s plight—her raggedy, outgrown summer shirts and shorts and inability to place the states properly on a map. But despite her love for the child, the grandmother is limited by her relationship with her shiftless son-in-law.

There’s only one person left to help out. Florence’s care is mostly given over to the grandparents’ long-time maid. Over six feet tall with bad veins and legs that pain her, Zenie, named for Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, agrees to take on Florence for the summer. Mostly she ignores the girl. Then Eva, college-educated and filled with ideas, moves in with her Aunt Zenie and turns the Black community— and young Florence’s life— upside down.

A powerful sense that all is not right with the world starts in chapter one as the young narrator looks out on the children going off to school. With their shirts "tucked into their pleated skirts," they carry their books and "little lunch boxes and satchels. Watching this parade of regular children on their way to school, I feel like a dead girl looking down from heaven on the trickles of the life she is missing out on."

That's the voice of one strong narrator, telling a powerful story.

In the interest of full disclosure, let me put it out there right now. I know Minrose Gwin. However, when I was sent this book by the publicist, I had no clue that my life and that of the writer had intersected. But we were friends in our early college days in Mississippi, until we were 19 and departed that women's college. We had different names back then. Many years have passed. I had no idea.

And I loved the book.

Later, I discovered serendipitously, that Ms. Gwin is now an English professor at my alma mater, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. So not only am I proud of this book as an alum and as a former, almost-childhood friend rediscovered, I'm just plain delighted that it's such a good book. For what it has added to the discussion of race, growing up in the South, and life in the turbulent 60s, it should stick around for a very long time.

Enjoy an interview with the author.