The word "parent" is not just a noun. It's also a verb.
At the center of the novel is the relationship between Beetle and Kat, caught in a will-they or won’t-they scenario. These are funny, assertive, girls who, like most kids their age, engage their feelings before their minds–resulting in avoidable, but true-to-life situations.
So why am I so thoroughly disappointed in this book? It comes down to a few choices made to erase Anthony’s racism in the supplemental materials included in the back of the book.
While it is actively noted that Anthony and her friend/fellow activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton started the suffrage movement in conjunction with their involvement in the abolition movement, there is no mention of the subsequent rift between the two movements over Anthony’s bitterness that the Fifteenth Amendment was making greater headway than women’s suffrage. No mention of the racist speeches Anthony made, or her chosen alliances with George Train (“Woman first and negro last.”), or avowed white supremacists like Belle Kearney.
I would steer the book away from Middle Grade readers and put it squarely in the hands of a Young Adult audience and above. The themes are strong, the writing is strong, and although very funny at times, things can get pretty intense:
Succinctly, this story is about the journey our biracial heroine embarks on with her sister and two friends across a mysterious grass-forest that springs up on the family property, just as Wela (Yolanda’s Grandmother) needs to make it to a special tree to set things right.
In Jorge Argueta’s haunting novel in verse, Caravan to the North: Misael’s Long Walk, Misael and his family can no longer live in their home, El Salvador, which they love.
Character development, for example, is strong– and Higuera manages to find just the right balance between two internally competing cultures within our heroine not only by using humor, but also through a strong balance of both ethos and pathos.
Margarita and her family move from New Mexico to Fort Steele Wyoming, where her father has been able to secure a job working on the railroad. Leaving the life she has known for all of her ten years behind, she embarks on a new adventure where she tries to make new friends, navigates growing up and faces discrimination, while at the same time remains true to her Hispanic Heritage.
The tennis great Arthur Ashe said, “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” It is a perfect life lesson to be sure, and I wish I had that quote as motto when I was coaching soccer, both for myself and for my kids. But tennis, better than any other sport I know, reliably rewards that mindset.
In all the team sports (and most of life), kids like me struggle with the sensation of being out of place. Putting a team together, in baseball, softball football and soccer almost always results in participants who at least half the time feel inadequate. A few will revel in stardom, and now and again someone like my Romanian team member, a soccer savant, will appear in a league that offers no challenge at all.
If you’re like me, all discussions of sports begin with trauma. Growing up, I was that cliché, the pudgy kid picked last for every team. My signature sports moment came around fifth grade when the little league team I played on (as the kid in left field who couldn’t catch a fly ball) designated me to be traded to the first-place team. If you’re an athlete, this might strike you as good news. But our league had a practice of making the teams more competitive at midseason by trading the worst player from the last place team (my team) for the best player from the first-place team. Imagine the ignominy of meeting your new teammates: “Hi, I’m here to ruin your chances.”