middle grade fiction | Rosanne Parry

Middle Grade Monday Review for See You at Harry’s by Jo Knowles

What it’s about

Twelve-year-old Fern feels invisible. It seems as though everyone in her family has better things to do than pay attention to her: Mom (when she’s not meditating) helps Dad run the family restaurant; Sarah is taking a gap year after high school; and Holden pretends that Mom and Dad and everyone else doesn’t know he’s gay, even as he fends off bullies at school. Then there’s Charlie: three years old, a “surprise” baby, the center of everyone’s world. He’s devoted to Fern, but he’s annoying, too, always getting his way, always dirty, always commanding attention. If it wasn’t for Ran, Fern’s calm and positive best friend, there’d be nowhere to turn. Ran’s mantra, “All will be well,” is soothing in a way that nothing else seems to be. And when Ran says it, Fern can almost believe it’s true. But then tragedy strikes- and Fern feels not only more alone than ever, but also responsible for the accident that has wrenched her family apart. All will not be well. Or at least all will never be the same.

Three things I liked about this book

1. Loved seeing a larger family in a story. It’s seldom that you see a family of more than 2 or 3 kids, so it was nice to see 4 kids in a realistically chaotic household.

2. I also enjoyed reading about siblings who are not deep in conflict or preoccupied with petty bickering. Fern has the normal amount of friction with siblings that you’d find in a family of this size, but she clearly loves her brothers and sister and when trouble comes they form an alliance which is good for everybody even their beleaguered parents.

3. I also enjoyed seeing a story where the gay character is not the viewpoint character but the sibling and he has a happy resolution. The story makes it pretty clear that gay bashing is more common in the parent’s generation and that plenty of high school kids meet their gay classmates with genuine warmth and friendship.

Something to think about as a writer: There are two major plot threads here, the one with the baby brother Charlie (I’m avoiding spoilers here) and the one with the gay older brother Holden. Of the two I like the Holden thread better. Which made me wonder if the story would have been okay without the Charlie thread. It’s a tough balance to get enough but not too much happening in a story. I’m always asking myself in my writing, do I really need all these characters? Could I make it a little tighter? And yet perhaps without the Charlie thread the story would not have felt substantial enough.

So what do you think readers? How do you know when you have enough “stuff” to carry a whole novel? How do you know when you have too much?

Calvin Coconut Kung Fooey

Calvin Coconut is a series by Graham Salisbury. It’s set in the Hawaii of Graham’s childhood and stars a big-hearted fourth grader with a talent for finding trouble. Kung Fooey is the 5th book in the series. It’s a friendship story about the new kid in class, Benny Obi who knows kung fu but doesn’t know how to handle the local bully.

Three things to like as a reader

1. If you are looking for a contemporary story with characters from a variety of cultural backgrounds where race is not the issue or the point of the story then these are your books.

2. There’s no denying middle grade readers have a taste for the grotesque. Sometimes a book for MG readers goes a little overboard with it, but Kung Fooey strikes a good balance, there’s a scene with the new kid eating bugs which is described in enough detail to make a reader squirm or a whole class audience go, “Eww!” But it’s not so vivid that you’d be uncomfortable reading it out loud or sharing with a tender-hearted reader.

3. Plenty of books take on the topic of bullying. This one is written with a better understanding of the group dynamic among boys than most, and doesn’t shoot for an unrealistically happy ending.

Something to think about as a writer

Dialect and slang are hard to write and Sandy does a great job here of adding enough local idiom to make the characters lively and authentic on the page but not so much that it is difficult to read. I’m going to go back and take a much closer look at how he uses non-language words in dialog to give it the right pacing and also how he uses turn of phrase to communicate something about culture.

How I came across this book

Sandy is another Portland writer. He gave this book to my daughter who does martial arts at a book event he held at a Moonstruck Chocolate Shop. Sandy sometimes writes at his local Moonstruck in Lake Oswego and I sometimes write at my local Moonstuck in Beaverton. On a dreary Portland afternoon it’s hard to beat a cup of their cocoa and a cosy quiet cafe to work in. Sandy is published by Random House as am I, and he’s been a generous colleague for more than a decade. I make no pretense of objectivity in my book reviews.