Genre 6: Fantasy

Bibliography

Appelt, Kathi.  The Underneath.  New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers. 2008.  ISBN:  978-1-4169-5058-5.

Summary

Three stories intertwine as all of the respective characters and spirits cross paths.  In the first, a pregnant calico cat is abandoned in the woods on a stormy night.  In the distance, an old hound dog sings the blues in a most plaintiff, mournful voice.  The cat follows his song to find the hound and is led to a dilapidated house, where an aura of death and foreboding hangs.  Ranger is chained to the porch as eternal punishment for one failed hunt.  The cat sidles up to him, sympathizing with the agony that he sings about.  They stay safe in “the Underneath”, a place under the porch, with Ranger adopting the calico cat and kittens as his family.  They name them Puck and Sabine and implore them never to leave the Underneath.  Puck wanders out from under the porch, is caught – along with his mother – by the sadistic inhabitant of the leaning, and thrown into the pond.  

While the calico mother drowns, Puck survives and is driven by his promise to free Ranger and leave the Underneath forever.  The abominable man in the crooked house is called Gar Face.  As a boy, he lived with his father, an abusive alcoholic.  The boy reveled in torturing and killing animals. His father struck him in the jaw and knocked it out of place irreparably, giving him his ominous name. Gar Face retreated from Houston into the woods of East Texas, which is inhabited by the spirits of the Caddo tribe and magical animals. Grandmother Moccasin is half snake, half human. 

She lived in human form, had a husband who betrayed her and daughter who left her to be a human and marry.  After deceiving her daughter into returning to animal form and leaving a string of death in her wake from the betrayal, she was trapped in a decorative jar beneath the roots of a tree.  All of their worlds interact, then collide in a strange twist of faith when the once vengeful old snake emancipates the makeshift family from the evil Gar Face.  

Critical Analysis

The Underneath can be considered high fiction because it involves a completely alternate, ancient universe and mythical powers “to wield or escape” (Vardell 210).  Because there is such profound sadness and loss throughout this novel, I would recommend it only for 8^th graders and up; to be quite honest, I do not think juvenile fiction is the appropriate classification. Readers will be quickly endeared to the poor calico cat, with her gentle, motherly manner that extends even to Ranger.  They will adore the blues-singing hound and share in his joy of finding love after being beaten and chained for so very long.  Puck’s playful, impish ways are balanced by meek, intuitive huntress Sabine.  Students will find Gar Face and Grandmother Moccasin every bit as loathsome as the rag-tag animal pack is lovable.  Grandmother is so selfish and caustic that it literally courses through her pores in venom, and Gar Face is just a savage of the lowest order – who drowns a mommy cat, abuses a faithful pet, and uses other domestic animals for bait? The setting is the East Texas woods, territory of the ancient Caddo Indians.  

The scene is created with detailed descriptions of the Tartine Bayous, the wise trees who see and feel all, and the enchanted animals and therianthropes who live there.  The magical animals have the ability to assume a human body, with the understanding that once they trade their flesh back in – “don their animal forms” – they may not become human again.  The animals communicate, calling one another brother and sister, and the primal spirit that infuses them all moves upon some beasts and trees to help others in distress.  Themes include:  love that conquers all, the power of hope, history’s grip on the present, and respect for nature and the spirit world.  Sadly, there is an overall tone of grief and injustice, with little retribution for wrongs committed. Appelt uses intrigue and suspense liberally, introducing main characters and history first frame-by-frame, often with a warning, then switching between each of them.  Her style is elaborate, poetic in its refrains, with dialect from an obviously ancient time.  There is a lot of repetition on words and phrases for emphasis and poetic quality.

Awards and Reviews

• 2008 National Book Award Finalist
• 2009 Newberry Honor
• 2009 American Library Association Notable Books for Children Award
• Booksense and New York Times Bestseller

School Library Journal:  Three separate but eventually entwined stories are told piecemeal. There is the tale of an abandoned, pregnant calico cat who finds shelter and friendship with the bloodhound, Ranger. He is the abused and neglected pet of Gar Face, a broken-jawed recluse who lives in the Texas bayou, where he fled 25 years previously to escape an abusive father. And finally there is the story of Grandmother Moccasin, a shape-shifting water snake who has lain dormant in a jar for a thousand years, buried beneath a loblolly pine tree. The threads are brought together when Puck, one of the newborn kittens, breaks the rule of straying from the safety of The Underneath, the sliver of space beneath Gar Face's porch where Ranger is chained and the cats live. The pace of this book is meandering, and there is a clear effort by the dominant third-person narrator to create a lyrical, ancient tone. However, the constant shift of focus from one story line to the next is distracting and often leads to lost threads. Small's black-and-white illustrations add a certain languid moodiness to the text. Themes of betrayal, hope, and love are reflected in the three stories, but this is a leisurely, often discouraging journey to what is ultimately an appropriate ending.

Connections

The Caddo tribe plays a tremendous role in The Underneath, making it an easy segue into a research project and/or spin-off of a History unit on Native American culture and beliefs.  Students can split into groups and choose among several tribes to investigate.  Items for considering:  habitat, style of dress, cash crops and primary game, enemies, and deities.  This would also be a stellar opportunity for artwork.  Students can create pieces of pottery or “cave drawings” make a presentation on meanings and relationship to a certain tribe.  As for related literature, Shiloh, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian would be good choices. 

 Bibliography

Green, John. The Fault in Our Stars. New York: Penguin Books, 2014.

Summary

This story follows the life of the main character, teenager Hazel Grace Lancaster, who has cancer.  Not only is Hazel grappling with the fact that she's going to die, she's also agonizing over how her parents will cope with her death.  In the midst of her life's trials, she meets a boy named Augustus Waters, with whom she makes an instant connection.  Just like Hazel, Augustus was diagnosed with cancer and lost his leg as result.  He now wears a prosthetic one, and has a better much better chance of survival than Hazel does.

Their friendship grows as they share their favorite books with each other,  Both Hazel and Augustus make a personal connection with Anna, the main character of An Imperial Affliction, which is Hazel's favorite book.  Anna also has cancer, and both Hazel and Augustus are on pins and needles to find out how the story ends, since the author abruptly ends the book without writing a conclusion.

In a miraculous twist of fate, Hazel and Augustus get the opportunity to go to Amsterdam to meet the author of the book, Peter Van Houten.  It is there that Hazel learns that the cancer has spread throughout Augustus' body.  The two spend Augustus' last days spending quality time together. 

Awards and Reviews

The New York Times Best Seller List, January 2012

"At 16, Hazel Grace Lancaster, a three-year stage IV–cancer survivor, is clinically depressed. To help her deal with this, her doctor sends her to a weekly support group where she meets Augustus Waters, a fellow cancer survivor, and the two fall in love. Both kids are preternaturally intelligent, and Hazel is fascinated with a novel about cancer called An Imperial Affliction. Most particularly, she longs to know what happened to its characters after an ambiguous ending. To find out, the enterprising Augustus makes it possible for them to travel to Amsterdam, where Imperial’s author, an expatriate American, lives. What happens when they meet him must be left to readers to discover. Suffice it to say, it is significant. Writing about kids with cancer is an invitation to sentimentality and pathos—or worse, in unskilled hands, bathos. Happily, Green is able to transcend such pitfalls in his best and most ambitious novel to date. Beautifully conceived and executed, this story artfully examines the largest possible considerations—life, love, and death—with sensitivity, intelligence, honesty, and integrity. In the process, Green shows his readers what it is like to live with cancer, sometimes no more than a breath or a heartbeat away from death. But it is life that Green spiritedly celebrates here, even while acknowledging its pain. In its every aspect, this novel is a triumph." -Booklist

"He’s in remission from the osteosarcoma that took one of his legs. She’s fighting the brown fluid in her lungs caused by tumors. Both know that their time is limited.  Sparks fly when Hazel Grace Lancaster spies Augustus “Gus” Waters checking her out across the room in a group-therapy session for teens living with cancer. He’s a gorgeous, confident, intelligent amputee who always loses video games because he tries to save everyone. She’s smart, snarky and 16; she goes to community college and jokingly calls Peter Van Houten, the author of her favorite book, An Imperial Affliction, her only friend besides her parents. He asks her over, and they swap novels. He agrees to read the Van Houten and she agrees to read his—based on his favorite bloodbath-filled video game. The two become connected at the hip, and what follows is a smartly crafted intellectual explosion of a romance. From their trip to Amsterdam to meet the reclusive Van Houten to their hilariously flirty repartee, readers will swoon on nearly every page. Green’s signature style shines: His carefully structured dialogue and razor-sharp characters brim with genuine intellect, humor and desire. He takes on Big Questions that might feel heavy-handed in the words of any other author: What do oblivion and living mean? Then he deftly parries them with humor: “My nostalgia is so extreme that I am capable of missing a swing my butt never actually touched.” Dog-earing of pages will no doubt ensue.  Green seamlessly bridges the gap between the present and the existential, and readers will need more than one box of tissues to make it through Hazel and Gus’ poignant journey." -Kirkus

Connections
Looking for Alaska
An Abundance of Katherines
Paper Towns
Let it Snow:  Three Holiday Romances

Bibliography

Krosoczka, Jarrett J.  Lunch Lady and the Cyborg Substitute.  New York:  Alfred A. Knopf. 2009.  ISBN:  978-0-375084683-0.

Summary

Nerdy Hector, cool Terrance, and spunky Dee are three friends who are curious about what their lunch lady does after the apron and oven mitts come off at the end of the day.  Their imaginations run the gamut from her owning a bevy of cats to secretly saving the universe.  A strange new substitute, Mr. Pasteur, informs them at lunch that beloved teacher Mr. O’Connell will be out indefinitely.  As he has never missed a day in 20 years, Lunch Lady is instantly suspicious.  With the help of sidekick Betty and some spy equipment cleverly disguised as kitchenware, they gather enough evidence to warrant that Lunch Lady follow him home after school.   Meanwhile, the trio follows her, as well.  They all arrive at a warehouse, where they discover that reviled teacher Mr. Edison is replacing all of the popular teachers with cyborgs so that he can become the favorite and win Teacher of the Year.  Lunch Lady uses crime fighting tools that look like various foods to defeat Edison’s robot clan.  He is thrown into jail, Mr. O’Connell returns to school, and the kids agree to keep Lunch Lady’s other day job a secret.  In a cliff-hanger, Edison gives cyborg sub Pasteur further orders via jail phone, and Hector finally bucks Milmoe the bully.

Critical Analysis

Lunch Lady meets the criteria for a low fiction series – it is comical, light, the lunch lady’s superpowers are regarded almost as normal/expected, and there is a large fan base ready to devour each subsequent helping of what the Lunch Lady is serving (Vardell 209; 211).  Young readers (3^rd grade and up) will relate to the curious trio, as they themselves have probably questioned the mundane, assigning alternate identities to the seemingly boring adults in their lives.  Girls will silently fist bump for Dee, who is the de facto leader of the pack, always with the plan of action and the guts to stand up to Melmoe the bully.  They will also root for Hector, who refuses to give up his lunch money at the end, while Terrance is the easy-breezy balance of the two extremes.  Their comraderie with Lunch Lady is also a refreshing twist – she does not thrust stomach churning fare on them or chide them for their curiosity; she is just plain cool, like teens and tweens are always imploring adults to be.  With Mr. Edison, this graphic novel brings the stuffy, academic side of schools down to earth by showing that popularity is important and everyone, even a teacher, wants to be liked. The lunchroom setting is perfect for a fantasy novel, as kids spend the bulk of their time in school.  The genius thing about Krosoczka’s choice of venue is that no one ever expects exciting, supernatural happenings in the dullest place and starring dullest person.  The author makes excellent use of everyday cafeteria utensils and foods, transforming them into weaponry:  fishstick nunchucks, a hairnet net for trapping villains, lunch tray laptop, spatu-copter, and a lab in the boiler room where it all goes down.  Some lessons we learn include standing up for oneself and one’s convictions, the dangers of greed, the redemptive powers of being curious, and the power of innovation. The style is very informal, with fairly large writing, sparse and simple words, and the distinctive black and white with yellow accented illustrations that the series is famous for. 

Awards and Reviews

• 2009 Kid’s Indie Next List “Inspired Recommendations for Kids from Indie Booksellers” Award
• 2010 Cooperative Children’s Book Center Choices Award
• IRA Children’s Choices Award
• 2011 Flickr Tale Children’s Book Award Nominee

Kirkus Review, 5/20/2010:  Classmates Hector, Dee and Terrence have always wondered about the Lunch Lady: What does she do when she’s not making chicken-patty pizza? Tending to her many cats? Taking care of her family? After some amateur sleuthing, the kids discover that their Lunch Lady is out fighting the forces of evil, of course, with her trusty sidekick, Betty. This dynamic duo uncovers a nefarious plot hatched by a villainous teacher to overrun the school with cyborg substitutes. Backed up by Betty’s ingenious arsenal of amalgamated cafeteria utensils including Spatu-copter, Chicken Nugget Bombs and Lunch Tray Laptop, the two are on the case. This graphic novel alternates between boxy, regular panels and full-page spreads, keeping readers’ visual interest piqued. Filled with goofy puns and grayscale art with cheery yellow accents, this is a delightfully fun escapist read. 

Connections

In elementary school, I had a music teacher who would make us sing the lamest songs and confine us to very traditional, classic choir standards.  I would fantasize about making a video game in which he trapped kids in music staffs, accosted them with musical notes, and sang to them until they simultaneously combusted.  Glad to see I was not alone in my musings!  I am sure that like me, kids have taken common places and plagues and turned them into something fantastical, hence a creative writing project would be ideal.  In clusters of 3-4, students can create a comic, video game, or play in which they transform a regular place into something theatrical.  I would urge them to experiment with settings and characters – consider the coach, sanitation worker, or bus driver.  They can also be “Betty” by devising their own secret cafeteria weapon, drawing a picture, and writing a detailed description of how it would be operated and its main functions.