WELCOME

WELCOME! For the last 17 years, about once a month, usually on a Thursday evening, a group of writers, illustrators, teachers and librarians meets in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles to discuss children's books. Usually we talk about one picture book and one middle grade or YA novel. After the meeting, Sandy Schuckett, a retired LAUSD librarian, summarizes our discussion. Here are her reports of our thoughts about the books we have read. We'd love to have your comments too!
Thanks to Nancy Hayashi for our wonderful title art! NOTE: We are changing to a new schedule. Our meetings will now be quarterly and during the afternoon. Our group has been meeting since 2007. It was organized under the auspices of the Children's Literature Council of Southern California (CLCSC).

Thursday, August 15, 2019

DIG by A.S. King and THE CURIOUS GARDEN by Peter Brown



We had a beautiful array of delicious snacks at our last meeting, and we began our discussion with our novel, Dig by A.S. King. We had a variety of opinions on this somewhat complicated (at first) story. A few readers said that they didn't really 'care' about any of the main characters, four teenagers, only two of whose actual names we learned near the end, who each let us into their thoughts and various aspects of their lives in somewhat dysfunctional family situations. But most of us kept reading, partly because there was some really terrific writing, and because we got swept into their lives and the way they finally realized that they were cousins, the grandchildren of a pretty selfish and obnoxious couple, Marla & Gottfried, who were the reason they, and their parents, were all estranged and separated from one another. We had mixed feelings about "the Freak," who was actually a ghost/spirit of a fifth cousin, a girl who had been killed several years earlier, and who kept appearing and actually knew everything about what they all needed. We all agreed that there were some excellent plot developments as the story unfolded, but we also agreed that parts of the book were quite 'preachy,' and that these teenagers were 'mouthpieces' for the author's point of view regarding racism, white privilege, urban development, and finding one's own 'self'. We felt that young people would probably enjoy this book though, and might also feel empowered after reading it, since these teenagers figured out a way to unite and become a family of people who cared about each other, even given some of the dire circumstances of their lives.

We were pretty unanimously un-thrilled by our picture book, The Curious Garden by Peter Brown. We appreciated that it tried to tell the story of a little boy who went up a creepy stairway to an abandoned rail line, and magically made beautiful plants and trees take over what looked like a wasteland. But we just couldn't relate to the fact that it was The Garden that was curious, which is why it kept spreading farther and farther out from its source until it covered everything in sight. We weren't huge fans of most of the illustrations, although we did like a few of them, especially the ones that showed other kids helping the little boy, and the 'before-and-after' double-paged spreads of the area, which showed how ugly smokestacks and tracks and rocks and dirt had blossomed into beautiful areas by the end of the story. We realized that the author/illustrator had been inspired by the High Line in New York City, which had been re-purposed from a long-abandoned elevated rail line into a vibrant green space, and we thought it was an admirable subject for a picture book, but that it could have been told in a much better way.

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