Inside Out and Back Again, by Thanhha Lai

When I was in sixth or seventh grade, my family sponsored a family of refugees from Laos. If I remember correctly, there were two parents and three children (two boys and a girl?). This, added to our family of two parents and three daughters, made for a crowded house for a week or so until our church found an apartment or house for them. We had such a good time, though! I had a great deal of fun teaching the children English words using Richard Scarry's well-labeled picture books. Looking back, I see my incredible selfishness in not asking them what the words would be in Lao or French. I remember being concerned that they were missing home, but I had only the vaguest idea of what a refugee was or why they were in the United States.

Reading Inside Out and Back Again makes me long for the ability to go back in time to show that family true listening compassion instead of just bold eagerness. Kim Ha (in Asian fashion, the family name is first, the given name is second) is ten years old when her family is uprooted from her life in war-torn Viet Nam and taken to Alabama. She and her three brothers and her mother are able to stay together. Only her oldest brother--an engineering student at college before they left Viet Nam--speaks English with any fluency, but Ha must go to school anyway. There she is bullied and harassed by some of the students and ignored by most of the rest. A few brave souls befriend her, and she begins to feel smart again.

This novel in poetic prose really brought home to me how hard it must be to move to a new country. No matter how smart you are, no matter how educated, moving to a place where you can't even ask how to get to the grocery store reduces you to stupidity in the eyes of your new neighbors. Ha's experiences are based on the author's own life when she moved from Viet Nam to Alabama in 1975, and the style of her writing is so free of the extraneous as to be abrupt in places, but sometimes our emotions and our thoughts are abrupt. In an interview with Publishers Weekly (June 20, 2011), Lai says the writing style is "meant to reflect in English what it's like to think in Vietnamese."

Touch Blue, by Cynthia Lord

Faced with losing their school due to lack of sufficient students, the residents of the island town of Bethsaida, Maine, concoct the idea of taking in foster children to boost their school-age population. The family of Tess Brooks has agreed to foster thirteen-year-old Aaron, who was separated from his alcoholic mother at the age of five. His grandmother raised him for six years, but then she died, leaving him to foster care. In the last two years, he's been in two different homes. Tess is worried he won't like them or that they won't like him, and her days of living on the island will be over.

Her interactions with trumpet-playing Aaron change her focus. She realizes that children like Aaron have lost far more than she would if she had to move to the mainland. Instead of wanting him to stay for the sake of her home and school, she begins to want to help him find the life he wants, even if it is with his mother or a different foster family.

Cynthia Lord has written Tess's voice so clearly, we readily believe her change of heart and mind over the two months the story covers. We see her superstitious mind become more rational, feel her anxiety turn into compassion.

Little Joe, by Sandra Neil Wallace

All over the country, children raise animals for showing at county and state fairs. For some, this simply means they compete, win ribbons (or not), and take their animals home to try again next year. For others, the competition is a means of advertising their animals' qualities in order to get top dollar in a sale which occurs before the fair is even over.

Imagine you are a nine-year-old boy. Your first show animal is an Angus bull which you helped to pull into the world when he got stuck on the way out of his mama. You spend nine months nurturing the bull, watching him grow from a gangly new-born into a nine-hundred-plus pound animal who trusts you and follows you around. You know that in the fall, you will be showing him, hoping for the blue ribbon, but dreading the inevitable separation as he is sold for beef or breeding. Either way, he won't be yours anymore.

Eli Stegner is nine years old. His father gives him the bull calf born on Christmas Eve to be his first show animal. As the months pass, Eli learns how to break Little Joe to halter, how to feed him for health and for bulk, and how to train him for the show ring. Along the way, he has to deal with his "hardened up" father, an obnoxious neighbor, and a know-it-all little sister.

Debut author Wallace has given us a novel full of wonder and heartache, but with enough of the distraction a real nine-year-old boy would encounter that we are not in dread as the end approaches. That end leaves a few dangling ends and questions, but I am not certain middle-grade readers will even notice them.

Belly Up, by Stuart Gibbs

Theodore Roosevelt Fitzroy has had a great life so far. The only child of a primate biologist and a wildlife photographer, Teddy spent the first ten years of his life in Africa. His mother studied the gorillas of the Congo and his father photographed them. When civil war broke out, the family came back to the United States and found themselves working for and living at FunJungle, a new state-of-the-art zoo/conservation facility.

When the zoo's hippo mascot is discovered dead in its pool, bored and curious Teddy sneaks in to observe the autopsy. Unseen by the veterinarian and the zoo's administrator, he learns that the hippo's death is no accident and that the zoo is going to cover it up in the interest of preserving its image and bottom line. Teddy determines to investigate the hippo's death himself, but quickly realizes that there are those in the zoo who will do anything to protect their own secrets.

Written from the perspective of a twelve-year-old boy, introspection is kept to a low level while the action clips along at a good pace with an occasional lull to allow the reader to catch his/her breath and see if any clues are to be had in the text. Stuart Gibbs has put forth a good debut novel which conveys enough in its descriptions to make the reader pant along with Teddy in the Texas heat. Please beware there are a couple of instances with mild cuss words (a**, h***).

After an extended hiatus...

I took a break from Noshing last year to concentrate on my graduate school studies. I am going to try to combine the two this year, and to that end, have begun reading books from the South Carolina Book Awards Nominees lists for 2012-2013. I have included a link to the PDF file at the South Carolina Association of School Librarians website for those who would like to Nosh along with me!