Middle Grade Monday Book Review: Five, Six, Seven, Nate! by Tim Federle

Here’s what it’s about:

In the sequel to Better Nate Than Ever, Nate Foster’s Broadway dreams are finally coming true.

Armed with a one-way ticket to New York City, small-town theater geek Nate is off to start rehearsals for E.T.: The Broadway Musical. It’s everything he ever practiced his autograph for! But as thrilling as Broadway is, rehearsals are nothing like Nate expects: full of intimidating child stars, cut-throat understudies, and a director who can’t even remember Nate’s name.

Now, as the countdown to opening night is starting to feel more like a time bomb, Nate is going to need more than his lucky rabbit’s foot if he ever wants to see his name in lights. He may even need a showbiz miracle.

The companion novel to Better Nate Than Ever, which The New York Times called “inspired and inspiring,” Five, Six, Seven, Nate! is full of secret admirers, surprise reunions, and twice the drama of middle school…with a lot more glitter.

3 things for a young reader to love

1. The thing I loved the most about my childhood reading was being swept away to someplace new and exciting and this book has that in spades! The backstage look at Broadway as a child performer was fun and fresh and eye-opening. Even if you’ve never been in a show or wanted to perform there’s something appealing, and I think fairly universal, in the summer-campy, we’re-all-in-this-together vibe that Federle presents in this story.

2. For kids who do love the theater and are acting, singing, or dancing in community shows I think they’ll find a kindred spirit in Nate, who is such an appealing blend of strengths (memory for lines, heart, team spirit) and weaknesses (perhaps not the best dancer on the set). The arts are so often the red-headed stepchild of after school sports, it’s nice to have a book that celebrates theater with such unabashed joy.

3. The crush in a middle grade book is so tricky to get just right because middle grade kids are all over the map about romance, from deeply repelled to just as deeply intrigued. Nate hits the sweet spot with a story that manages to capture the intrigue of secret admirer notes and the slightly befuddled, what-just-happened-there of a first kiss without ever heading into territory that seemed to be icky or off-putting to the middle grade sensibility. Kids who are ready for a first kiss in a book will love this. Kids who aren’t quite ready for that probably won’t be grossed out.

Something for a writer to think about

Tim Federle has done something fairly amazing here. He’s got a story with a boy’s first kiss with another boy and yet it’s not a coming out story, not really even a story about being gay. The driving conflict in the story has everything to do with the show and orientation is not the contentious issue. Which seems exactly where the middle grade sensibility is with LGBT issues. The characters aren’t brimming over with anxiety about being gay because most kids in 4th to 8th grade are not at all concerned with the issues that drive such passion from older generations. It refreshing to see in print and I hope we see a lot more of it.

Likewise Federle has written a story with a kid who is a little self conscious about his body size without it being a book about a fat kid who needs to get thin. Nobody’s plaguing this kid to lose weight (although they’d like him to be a better dancer). He, in fact, doesn’t get in shape over the course of the story. His eventual triumph is based on his generous spirit, his ability to memorize other people’s parts, and his willingness to perform open heartedly. Qualities which have nothing to do with body type. Again, refreshing and well worth emulating! It’s got a razzle-dazzle cover, but this book is far more subtle than first meets the eye.

How I found this book

Unlike many of my reviews, I’ve never met the author. There are many theater-loving young people in my life which is why I picked it up at my public library and why I’ll be recommending it to lots of singing, dancing and acting kids I know.

Learning to Love your Book-alikes

When my very first book Heart of a Shepherd came out back in 2009 I met Suzanne Morgan Williams from the Class of 2K9 marketing group whose book Bull Rider was astonishingly similar to mine. It was all the more surprising because they were western stories about ranching families with family members deployed to the Middle East. Not exactly the most crowded genre. It was very tempting to think of this as a disaster, a head to head competition, a diminishment of what I had worked so hard on. But my husband pointed out that selling a book is not like selling a car. It’s not like a person buys a book and then doesn’t need another for 5 to 10 years. A very helpful perspective. The beauty of the book business is that the more people read good books the more they want new good books.

And the really terrific thing was getting to know Suzanne and working together to promote our books because we’ve found that if a reader likes one of our stories, they will probably like the other. They aren’t identical books after all. The main character in Suzanne’s story is a little bit older. Heart of a Shepherd is about the experience of having a deployed parent. Bull Rider is about the experience of having a brother return from war with a traumatic brain injury. We’ve done joint book store appearances, spoken together on panels and in workshops at writers conferences, and even sold our books together at the Reno Rodeo. And much to our mutual delight these books have flourished side by side.

But I’ve also known people who’ve worked for months, years even, and seen a book published which is very similar to their own manuscript, and then decided to drop their own project completely. It’s such a shame because there is often plenty of room for multiple

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books on a topic. I think of them as “book-alikes” and in some ways they can be an asset to your own work. If somebody has written a book similar to mine then it’s a great strategy to encourage my book to be grouped in with a similar book. Often teachers are looking for several books from a historical era so that there will be something to suit every reading level in her class. Many bookstores prefer to host multi-author events. The picture to the right is myself and Elizabeth Rusch (dressed as Nannerl Mozart) and Virginia Euwer Wolff. We are doing an event which drew dozens of vocal and instrumental performers and lots of families to a community center to celebrate our three music-themed books: Virginia’s Mozart Season, an absolute classic YA story of a girl preparing for a music competition, Liz’s picture book biography For the Love of Music about Mozart’s big sister, and my middle grade novel Second Fiddle.

I’ve learned to love my Book-Alikes over the years and have become good friends of people whose books are similar to mine. And in celebration of that here are four books who like my story Written in Stone are set in America in the early part of the 20th century. They are Crossing Stones by Helen Frost, A Whistle in the Dark by Sue Hill Long, Born of Illusion by Teri Brown and In the Shadow of Blackbirds by Cat Winters.

About the Lelooska Foundation

In her review of Written in Stone Debbie Reese took issue with the work of Chief Lelooska. To be clear, Lelooska is not in the story and is mentioned only briefly in the author’s note. Lelooska himself died in the late 1990s and his work is carried on by the Lelooska Foundation. Here is a link to more information about him and the Lelooska Foundation, for those who maybe following the conversation and be unfamiliar with the work of this author, illustrator, carver, linguist and historian. And here is a picture of Chief Lelooska in his traditional regalia.

I’m well aware, as Debbie has mentioned, that Lelooska was adopted into one of the bands of the Kwakwaka’wakw (also known as the Kwakiutl) tribe of British Columbia. Not everyone enjoys his art and not everyone likes the living history programs that he has provided in Washington for almost 40 years. I’m not interested in changing Debbie’s mind on this point. However hers is not the only opinion on the topic. Native Americans are not monolithic in their views and some of them are very much in favor of sharing their traditional arts with the wider community.

Among the tribes of the Pacific northwest, the right to tell a traditional story with its accompanying song, dance, and regalia is conferred in a potlatch. Lelooska’s right to share the stories he does was given to him by Chief James Aul Sewide and witnessed and agreed to by all the tribal members and neighboring tribes present at the potlatch. If they did not wish for Don Smith to become Chief Lelooska they could have chosen not to come to the potlatch. But they came, which is all the evidence I need to determine that he is doing this work fairly and in keeping with the traditions of the Kwakwaka’wakw. The tribe had the opportunity to deny the Lelooska Foundation the right to perform their living history programs after Lelooska died. But they came to the potlatch for his brother Tsungani and again conferred on him the ownership of the stories his family continues to present to the public.

I received an email just last week from the head of the planning team who was hired by the Quinault to relocate the village of Taholah out of the tsunami inundation zone. My book was recommended to him by somebody from the tribe as a vehicle for understanding them better. He’s aware of the weight of this project, to move a village site more than a thousand years old. He and his team want to make sure that what they design really serves the tribe well. Simply sticking in some local art at the end of the process isn’t what they want. They want to really think through with the community what their village needs in order to be a home to them. And so the book is a vehicle for thinking and talking about what the land and ocean and river and lake means to the community. Not because it’s a perfect representation of Quinault and Makah culture, they already have non-fiction materials aplenty for that purpose. It does what fiction does best, it invites reflection and conversation.

The bottom line for me is that each tribe gets to decide for themselves what is an acceptable representation of their culture. One of the reasons I chose the Quinault and Makah rather than one of the many smaller tribes in the area, is that they are well-accustomed to speaking up for themselves at a national and international level. If something about my book bothers them, I’m confident they will say so publicly. So far they’ve had no criticism of the book. The community in Taholah has invited me to come and celebrate it with them later this spring. The curator of their historical collection recommends the book to people who are interested in learning more about that tribe. That is all the endorsement I need.

Petroglyphs and other made up elements of Written in Stone

Debbie Reese in her review of Written in Stone asked me about the petroglyphs in the story and why I invented them rather than using actual petroglyphs from the village of Ozette, where my story is placed.

In the story the petroglyphs play a key role in helping Pearl uncover and claim her vocation as a writer and historian for her tribe. The ownership of artwork is a matter I take very seriously and to use an actual rock carving done by a Makah artist and put it in my book with no way of asking permission or compensating that artist fairly for his work would simply be wrong. So instead I invented a group of rock carvings based the carving style and technique I’ve seen while hiking in this area but copying none of them. To my thinking this is the more just course. Taking what’s

written_in_stone260 not mine is wrong. Making things up is what a fiction writer does. When the cover team was meeting I sent them a bunch of photographs of the Olympic Peninsula so they could get a feel for the ecosystem. The pictures included one of a petroglyph which is on public land and which commonly appears in works of non-fiction. I was so happy to see Richard Tuschman, the cover artist, incorporate a few petroglyphs on the cover–inventing an element in the style of this art but not stealing what’s not his to copy.

The other major plot element which is made up is the natural gas vent at Shipwreck Cove and the stories the tribe uses to keep children away from a dangerous place. The accusation that I’ve made up stories that don’t exist is dead wrong. I’ve told no stories belonging to the Quinault or Makah, real or made up. I have pointed out something that is distinctive and interesting about their culture though. These tribes use monster stories to keep their children away from danger without having to hover over them constantly. I was struck by how much freedom young people in the community had during my time in Taholah. They walked all over town freely and without immediate supervision but still under the watchful care of the entire community. Places that might be dangerous, such as the ocean with it’s powerful undertow and the dump which attracts bears, were bounded about, not with fences, but with scary stories that kept kids from wandering into harm’s way. If there was a natural gas vent near the town (and there might be, there were places I was asked not to go myself when I lived there) then certainly there would be stories to warn children away.

As I say in the authors note the cove and its contents are my invention. Whether or not petroleum is present on the Quinault or Makah reservations is something you’d have to ask them about. Each tribe has a natural resources department and they are the ones to speak (or decline to speak) about their reservation lands. Natural gas is present all over the non-reservation areas of the Olympic Peninsula but it’s not abundant enough that anyone has drilled for it so far. Wildcatting in search of oil and natural gas was very common in the 1920s, and business men with an eye to a quick profit were often unscrupulous in acquiring mineral rights to land. This is not only an injustice directed toward Native Americans. Many white farmers and ranchers fell victim to their swindles as well. And frankly, I’m tired of stories that cast the Indian as the hapless victim. I wanted a story where the Native American kid won and did so, not in some wildly unrealistic battle or singlehanded act of heroism, but in the manner that most of life’s battles are won: with words, and community, and the hard work of many years.

Pirates and Indians: a conversation about Written in Stone

I’ve been having an ongoing conversation with Debbie Reese on her blog about Written in Stone. She did a review of the book and brought up lots of good questions which I’ve been gradually answering here and also in the comment section of her blog. I’d really encourage you to head over there an take a look. The link is highlighted above.

Debbie mentioned in her review that the bit about a child playing pirates and indians took her by surprise and she wondered if there was a story there. So here are my thoughts on that.

The word or phrase that pulls the reader out of the story is sometimes a flaw in in the author’s word choices and sometimes the inevitable result of what the reader brings to the page, but sometimes it is the intention of the author to invite a reader to pause outside of the story for a moment and reflect. Such is the case with the pirates and indians remark in Written in Stone. The reader is naturally expecting the phrase cowboys and indians so the pirate reference invites the observation that there no cowboys in this story and no horses.

Most Americans associate horses and teepees with Native Americans but that’s a very narrow picture of the more than 500 nations that reside here. The Quinault and Makah have never been horse cultures. The Olympic Peninsula gets 15 feet of rain a year. It’s part of the only temperate rainforest in North America.It’s very difficult to keep horses alive in such a wet climate and there’s nothing that grows natively for them to eat. These tribes are a maritime culture, two of the many tribes of the Pacific who make ocean going canoes. Their navigational skills are impressive. Historically they traveled as far north as Alaska and up the Columbia to Celilo Falls. Extensive canoe journeys are still made regularly. Most recently the Quinaults hosted an event which gathered hundreds of people from the native cultures of the Pacific who traveled to Taholah by canoe.

Written in Stone by Rosanne Parry

I am so pleased my cover artist Richard Tuschman chose a canoe for the cover of this book. I’m also thrilled that Random House paid attention to the lack of children of color on book covers in general and made sure Pearl appeared–not in silhouette–on the cover of this one.

There is a story about a contact between Spanish Pirates and the Quinaults which predates their contact with English speaking settlers. As the story goes the Quinaults resisted the pirates so fiercely at see that the Spanish fled and no Spanish ship ever landed on their shores again. It’s impossible to verify an event this old, but as used in the story as a passing reference, it doesn’t matter. The Spanish did travel in these waters. The Quinaults had experience fighting at sea. If it didn’t happen, it could have which is evidence enough for a work of fiction. If you’d like to learn a little bit more about the Quinault Canoe Society here is a link to their Facebook page.

The larger purpose of the reference though is to invite a conversation about what makes this ecosystem and this tribe and this culture different from other Native American tribes with which my reader may be more familiar. In my opinion the conversation that happens because of a book is far more important than anything that’s actually in the book. Which I why I’m grateful for the conversation Debbie and I are having about this Written in Stone.