Module 9 - The Face on the Milk Carton

Bibliographic Information

            Cooney, C. B. (1990). The face on the milk carton. New York: Detacorte Press.

Summary

This is a story about a fifteen year old girl named Janie Johnson.  She had what they called “fabulous red hair with curls glinting gold.”  She was an only child and had always wondered where her red hair came from, since her mom and dad didn’t look like her. 

She would soon start driving lessons, and needed her birth certificate to complete her application.  Every time she asked her mother about it, she was told it was in the safety deposit box at the bank.  Her mother was always too busy to get it for her.  Janie noticed that there were no pictures of her anywhere in the house from birth until she was about three years old.  She asked her mom and dad about it, but they said they had no camera.  She thought that was strange because every store in their town had a photography studio.  She wondered why they didn’t take her for pictures. 

One day when she was eating lunch at school, she noticed a picture on her friend’s milk carton of a missing child.  She spoke out loud that the little girl looked just like her.  No one seemed to notice, so she took the carton, flattened it, and put it in her notebook.  Janie kept looking at it and wondering why it seemed so familiar to her.  She had daydreams, or what she called “day mares” about the pretty polka-dot dress that the girl was wearing in the picture.  She could see a set of twins in high chairs, and other children running around a large kitchen in her mind.  Why had she never thought about these people before? 

The name on the carton was Jennie Spring from a small town in New Jersey.  A phone number was listed on the carton, and several times Janie called the number, but got scared and hung up.  She loved her parents and her home, and didn’t want to believe that she was someone other than Janie Johnson. 

One day she talked her friend Reeve into skipping school and driving her over to the small town in New Jersey.  They found a phone booth and looked up the name of Spring in the phone book.  Since it was a small town, there was only one listed.  They got the address and went by the house just as the school bus stopped in front.  Out of the bus came four children toward the house with bright red hair.  Janie also saw the twins.  Reeve told her it could be a coincidence that they all had red hair, but she was still upset, and they decided to go home.

After that day, Janie looked for more clues.  She loved her parents and she knew they loved her, but she could not keep from remembering little bits of things she knew were real.  She went up into the attic while her parents were gone one day.  In the corner, she found an old trunk with a rusty lock.  It broke when she tried to open it.  She was very surprised when she looked in the trunk.  There were pictures of a little girl named Hannah.  She looked through all of the things in the trunk, and noticed there was something wrapped in tissue at the bottom of the trunk.  She pulled it out.  It was the polka-dot dress like the one in the picture.  That evening she asked her mom and dad about who she was, and who Hannah was.  At first, they just sat and looked at her, and then her mother told her that Hannah was their daughter, and that she was actually their granddaughter.  Her mom told her that Hannah had ran away several years ago, and joined a religious cult called Hare Krishnia.  They tried everything to keep her out, but even the police could not keep Hannah from returning to the cult. 

One day Hannah showed up at the door with a little girl by her side.  She told her parents that the little girl was hers and that the father was a leader of the cult.  Hannah wanted her to be protected even if she could not save herself.  Her parents took the little girl and moved away, so that the cult would never be able to find the little girl.  The little girl was Janie.  The mother told Janie that they lost contact with Hannah and raised her as their own child, protecting her as best as they knew how.

Janie had mixed feelings about this, but was relieved to know that the people that raised her were not kidnappers.  Still, she kept in the back of her mind the memories of the picture and the polka-dot dress.

Her friend Reeve told his sister who was a pre-law student about this odd situation of Janie and her parents.  His sister told Janie to check out the kidnapping in the library archives of old newspapers.  She soon discovered that Hannah was probably the one who kidnapped her.  She actually remembered a nice girl who bought her an ice cream at a malt shop when she was three.  Because she was so nice, Janie left with her.  Janie told her parents about this, and they decided they would contact the family in New Jersey.  Janie knew she always be their daughter, but she wanted to reach out to the family she was kidnapped from.

Impressions

I enjoyed this book.  It kept me interested until the end.  The story line was easy to follow and the characters seemed real.  I felt sad about some of the parts, and happy about others.  Overall, I would recommend this book for an interesting read.

Review

One brief glance at a face on a milk carton turns 15-year-old Janie's life upside-down. For there, looking out from the picture of a missing child, is the face of Janie as she was 12 years ago. Was she kidnapped by her own parents? But who are her real parents and who is she? Follow Janie as she struggles to learn the truth of her identity and regain control of her life without destroying the lives of those she loves.

S., K. (n.d.). [Review of The Face on the Milk Carton]. Charlotte Mecklenburg Library. Retrieved from http://www.plcmc.lib.nc.us/readers_club/reviews/tresults.asp?id=1054

Library Use

This mystery book along with others can be used in the library for discussing qualities of mystery books, and what makes them interesting to readers.  Students can then create their own mystery stories with partners or in groups and have classmates read their creations.   

Module 8 - Savvy

Bibliographic Information

            Law, I. (2008). Savvy. New York: The Penguin Group.

Summary

This story is about a young woman named Mississippi Beaumont.  It starts three days before her thirteenth birthday.  Birthday number thirteen is a big deal in her family because at that age, her family members discover what their savvy (magical power) is going to be.  The young ladies in her family usually get a gentle savvy, but the boys seem to have a propensity towards violent savvy.   The children in her family are removed from public school right before this thirteenth birthday and usually spend the next year, or more, learning how to control their savvy.

Right before Mississippi’s (nickname Mibs) birthday, her father was badly hurt in a car accident and was admitted to a hospital in Salina, Kansas which was roughly sixty miles from their town.  The preacher’s wife was concerned that Mibs’ mom and older brother went to Salina to take care of the father in the hospital and left the other four children home alone.  When the preacher’s wife discovers that Mibs’ birthday is the next day, she arranges a huge birthday party at the church building and has even invited girls from Mibs’ school who have harassed and made fun of Mibs for years.  Mibs wakes up the morning of her birthday and inadvertently thinks that her savvy is being able to awaken dead things because the family has thought that the youngest brother’s turtle was dead, but on Mibs’ birthday it comes back to life.  Mibs’ plan is to use this savvy to go to Salina and wake her Daddy up from his coma.  However, at her birthday party, she faints when the preacher’s daughter’s tattoo starts “talking” to her.  The angel tattoo, which had a devil’s pointy tail, raised and turned its head, twirled its tail and spoke to Mibs.

Mibs runs out on her party and decides to hide in a traveling bible bus because she notices that the bible bus is from Salina and reasons that the owner of the bus will be returning to Salina.  She never thought of the possibility that the bible salesman may also be going the other direction.  Her older brother, Fish and the preacher’s son and daughter also get on the bus with her.  Once the bus gets under way they realize that her youngest brother Samson is also on the bus with them.

The bus ends up turning the wrong way and does not take them toward Salina, but north into Nebraska.  Mibs starts hearing more voices in her head and realizes that the bible salesman/bus driver has two tattoos on his arms, and they are arguing with each other.

On the delivery route, the group helps a woman whose car broke down on the side of the road, and she also joins them on the bus.  They take the waitress, Lill, to her restaurant, but Lill gets fired for being late to work, so Lill ends up traveling with them.

As the bus travels down the road, Mibs ruminates on all the members of her family and their various savvies.  Her grandmother collected radio waves into jars.  The family could crack open various empty-looking fruit jars and would be able to listen to old radio broadcasts.  Her grandfather could move land, and he had added extra acreage to the family farm.  Her mother’s savvy was that she was perfect and never did anything wrong.  Her older brother Rocket had electric powers and could start engines, but could also blow out light bulbs and fuses throughout towns.  Her brother Fish, who was only one year older than her, could make storms and winds occur, even inside of buildings.  Mibs could hear what people were thinking if they had a tattoo, but she later found out that she could do it with any kind of ink on the skin.

The bus driver/bible salesman took the children to his home to pay his girlfriend’s brother for the bibles.  She got upset with him and locked the youngest boy Samson into a hollow spot in her wall.  No one could find Samson, so Mibs had to use her savvy and draw on this woman’s body in order to read her mind and help her brother escape from within the wall.

After several days of delay, the bible salesman, Lill the ex-waitress, and all of the children make it to the hospital in Salina.  Mibs does not have any luck in getting her father to wake up in the beginning, but she starts talking to the mermaid tattoo on her father’s arm.  The mermaid tattoo finally starts talking back, and then Mibs’ dad wakes up from his coma. 

He takes a long time to recuperate from his head injury.  The book ends on Mibs’ fourteenth birthday.  We learn that her father still has problems remembering things because of his head injury in the car accident.  Her older brother Rocket leaves the family and goes to live on an uncle’s ranch.  Since the uncle lives in the middle of Wyoming, it is less likely that he will be able to cause a lot of electrical damage when his savvy gets out of control.

Impressions

This was a fun book to read.  The author is very upbeat throughout the story.  There was a lot of humor.  Ingrid Law explains the trauma of adolescents well.  She goes into detail about how the older girls won’t have anything to do with Mibs unless her handsome brother Rocket enters the room, and suddenly these hateful snobby girls act like goodness and angels trying to get Rocket’s attention.

The only part of the story that bothered me was the way the tattoos spoke about the bus driver.  He was such a kind man and even though he was a bit weak, those two tattoos spoke terribly of him.  The fact that younger brother Samson hid all of the time, and hardly ever spoke was a concern too.  Without Mibs going to school with him, the little boy would probably be picked on by the older kids.  The book ends leaving the reader with the impression that there will be a sequence novel that will tell about Samson and his savvy.

Review

Mibs can’t wait for her 13th birthday, when her special gift, or “savvy,” will awaken. Everyone in her family—except beloved Papa, who married in—has one, from Grandpa Bomba’s ability to move mountains (literally) to Great Aunt Jules’s time-traveling sneezes. What will hers be? Not what she wants, it turns out, but definitely what she needs when the news that a highway accident has sent her father to the ICU impels her to head for the hospital aboard a Bible salesman’s old bus. Sending her young cast on a zigzag odyssey through the “Kansaska-Nebransas” heartland, Law displays both a fertile imagination (Mibs’ savvy is telepathy, but it comes with a truly oddball caveat) and a dab hand for likable, colorful characters. There are no serious villains here, only challenges to be met, friendships to be made and some growing up to do on the road to a two-hanky climax. A film is already in development, and if it lives up to this marvel-laden debut, it’ll be well worth seeing. (Fantasy. 10-13)

(2008, April 1). [Review of Savvy]. Kirkus Reviews. Retrieved from http://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/childrens-books/ingrid-law-2/savvy/?spdy=2008#review

Library Use

This book can be used to discuss qualities of fantasy books.  This genre can be considered very broad, and people and lands from wild imaginations can come to life in a fantasy novel.  Savvy can be compared to other fantasy novels, such as Harry Potter or The Chronicles of Narnia.  Students can work in partners or groups to create their own fantasy stories and share them with classmates.

Module 7 - If I Stay

Bibliographic Information

Forman, G. (2009). If I stay. New York: Penguin Group.

Summary

This story starts out as a normal day for Mia and her family.  Mia is a 17 year old girl who is a very gifted musician about to be accepted into Julliard.  She is facing the decision whether to use her talent and follow her dreams or stay at home with her parents and be close to her boyfriend Adam.  Adam is also a talented musician, but his love is not for classical music like Mia.  His music takes him traveling to rock concerts all over the country.

Mia has a little brother named Teddy that she adores.  Teddy is much younger and loves his sister.  Mia’s father is an ex-punk rocker who is now a teacher.  Her mother is a feisty travel agent who is very involved in Mia’s life.  She encourages Mia to use her talent.  They are a very happy family.

On this normal day, school is cancelled due to snow.  Mia’s mother takes off work, and they decide to have a family outing.  In a single moment on the Oregon road wet with snow, an accident changes everything.  Mia is stunned to see her parents were killed on impact.  She finds herself watching as her own damaged body is taken away from the wreck in an ambulance.

The rest of the story is an account of the 24 hours after the accident.  Mia is somehow able to see her own surgeries and watch the doctors and nurses working so hard to save her life.  She doesn’t feel anything, but is sad as she witnesses expressions of grief in her grandparents’ and friends’ eyes.  She starts to remember all the wonderful things in her life.  Good memories and the good things her parents did for her.  She finally realizes that her brother Teddy has also died in the accident.  She doesn’t know if she wants to continue living without her family.

Finally, her boyfriend Adam gets to the hospital.  She sees how hard it is on him not to be allowed to see her in the ICU because he’s not a family member.  After a while a nurse lets Adam see her.  She watched from a corner and sees the love he has for her.  Mia must make a decision.  “Should I stay?”  She didn’t know if she could go on without her family.

At the end of the story, Mia goes back into her injured body with a strong will to live and face the future even if it’s without her family.  She knows that would be what her family would want for her.

Impressions

This was not my favorite book to read.  No one would ever want to be in Mia’s situation and be forced with the decision to continue to live without your family or to let go and die.  I felt there was a reason she was allowed to be outside of her body and view what was going on.  She realized she still had important things in her life to live for, but it was not a “feel good” story.  I thought it was interesting how the author wrote the events as seen through Mia’s eyes.  If is recommended for older readers because of some of the content which related to trauma and sex.  

Reviews

The last normal moment that Mia, a talented cellist, can remember is being in the car with her family. Then she is standing outside her body beside their mangled Buick and her parents' corpses, watching herself and her little brother being tended by paramedics. As she ponders her state ("Am I dead? I actually have to ask myself this"), Mia is whisked away to a hospital, where, her body in a coma, she reflects on the past and tries to decide whether to fight to live. Via Mia's thoughts and flashbacks, Forman (Sisters in Sanity) expertly explores the teenager's life, her passion for classical music and her strong relationships with her family, friends and boyfriend, Adam. Mia's singular perspective (which will recall Alice Sebold's adult novel, The Lovely Bones) also allows for powerful portraits of her friends and family as they cope: "Please don't die. If you die, there's going to be one of those cheesy Princess Diana memorials at school," prays Mia's friend Kim. "I know you'd hate that kind of thing." Intensely moving, the novel will force readers to take stock of their lives and the people and things that make them worth living.

(2009, March 2). [Review of If I Stay]. Publishers Weekly. Retrieved from

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/reviews/search/index.html

The Lovely Bones meets It’s a Wonderful Life. Mia has a big decision to make. One snowy day, her family is killed in a catastrophic accident, while she is thrown from the car and left in a coma. Now it’s up to her. Should she stay here or move on, leaving the pain and struggle of life as an orphan? Mia’s spirit hovers in the critical care unit as she sorts through her feelings about her family, her music, her boyfriend, and her best friend, Kim. Death would mean the end of hard decisions but also the end of love.
Why It Is for Us: Mia’s decision is not an easy one. If she moves on, she will join her loving family in whatever comes after but will miss out on life. If she stays, there's so much to enjoy, but she’ll face grief and an uncertain future. This honest yet affirming story confronts the truth that all life is a struggle. Every reader who’s ever wanted to avoid a painful decision will be compelled by the choice Mia must make.

Benedetti, Angelina. (1997). 13 going on 35: Summer reading. Library Journal. Retrieved from http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviewsgenrefiction/855190-280/35_going_on_13_summer.html.csp

Library Use

This book could be used by special reading groups dealing with traumatic incidents in their own lives.  It is realistic fiction that brings up unique emotions a lot of people aren’t comfortable with and will all feel at some point in life, but maybe not quite to this extent.  It could also be recommended for counselor use by the librarian for specific students needed something to relate to in regards to their own personal experiences.

Book Trailer by Diana Pemberton

Module 7 - SLOB

Bibliographic Information

Potter, E. (2009). SLOB. New York: Penguin Young Readers Group.

Summary

The main character of this story, Owen Birnbaum, is an overweight, extremely smart twelve year old.  He discusses the difficulties he is having in school with both being overweight, and being a brain.  He uses a lot of humor when describing himself, but the reader can still feel his suffering with all of the teasing and harassment that he is enduring.

The coach is merciless and ridicules any student that is not athletically inclined.  The coach gives instructions to the non-athletic boys that are impossible to do and because Owen knows the laws of physics, he knows the coach is setting the boys up for failure.  When Owen refuses to follow the coach’s instructions on how to do a somersault, the coach takes straps and buckles and straps Owen’s torso like a dog halter with the coach holding the leash end.  For ten minutes the coach drags and yanks Owen all across the floor.  Owen does not report the incident with the coach because he feels it would just make his life even more miserable.

Owen meets a new student, Mason Rigg, who has severe scarring on one side of his face.  Mason always eats lunch by himself because the children at the school have very scary assumptions about how Mason got his scarring.  Owen befriends Mason and is told that all of the scarring came from Mason having an epileptic seizure while he was in the shower.  During the seizure, his elbow turned off the cold water, so he scalded the side of his face with hot water throughout the whole seizure.

We soon find out the Owen is trying to make an invention, called Nemesis, which will bounce a radio telescope off a star and can be programmed to a surveillance camera from previous years.  His parents were murdered almost two years ago, and Owen wants to find the culprit.  He doesn’t actually want to see his parent’s death; he just wants to see who leaves his parents deli on that date and time.

Owen’s weight gain all started shortly after his parent’s death.  He partially holds himself accountable.  He was downstairs in the basement with his sister when he overheard gunshots and yelling, but instead of going upstairs, he held his sister’s mouth closed and held her in place.  This probably saved his and his sister’s life, but he feels guilt that he did not go up and help his parents.

The title SLOB is because of the deli.  Most children want to have the last words of their parents be something very inspirational, but Owen cherishes and saves a piece of paper that has the word SLOB written on it.  It was his mother’s very last note to him.  The letters SLOB stand for salami on an onion bagel.

Owen thinks his machine is working and thinks he will soon find out who the murderer is when he realizes that his sister has played a trick on him.  She did not do it deliberately, but she made him think Nemesis was working just because it seemed to bring him out of his depression and got him interested in something.

The book ends three months after he finds out that Nemesis won’t show him his parents’ murderers.  He has a new friend (Mason), he recently lost a considerable amount of weight, and the coach gets in trouble for his actions with the non-athletic students.

Impressions

This book had so much humor.  It accurately shows all of the “clicks” (jocks, brains, etc) that are formed in the middle school years.  The coach is a horrible, horrible person, but Owen is able to overcome all of the coach’s bullying and figures out that he is much smarter than this man.  We find in the end that Owen is not obsessing so much over his parents’ death and his inability to help them, and that he is starting to be happy with his new mom (the 911 operator that helped him on the night of the murders).  I was very surprised when he took the SLOB note, tore it up, and threw it into the river with a prayer that the murderer would become a better person.  I really thought that he would keep this last little memento of his mother forever.

Reviews

Owen is the fattest-and smartest-seventh grader in his New York City school. When he's not ducking the school bully or trying to survive the world's most sadistic P.E. teacher, he invents things. Currently Owen has two projects-a TV that will show events in the past and a trap to catch the thief who keeps stealing the Oreos from his lunchbox. There's a lot of middle school banter and adolescent dialogue. However, what begins as a lighthearted adventure gradually takes on a darker tone. Owen calls his invention Nemesis and insists that it needs to reach exactly two years back. As the story evolves, readers learn that there are places in town where he feels distinctly uncomfortable, and that he treasures a note that says only "SLOB." Step by step, Owen reveals the tragedy behind his concerns. Two years earlier, he was hiding in the basement of the family store, listening as his parents were killed by an intruder. Adopted by the 911 operator who took his call after the murders, he dreams of identifying the perpetrator. Although Nemesis fails to solve the crime, Owen is finally able to find closure, with help from his sister, their friends, and, surprisingly, from the dreaded bully himself. A sensitive, touching, and sometimes heartbreakingly funny picture of middle school life.

Knight, Elaine E. (2009, July 1). [Review of SLOB]. School Library Journal. Retrieved from http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6668068.html

An intriguingly offbeat mystery concerning the theft of cookies from a boy's lunch, at turns humorous, suspenseful and poignant. Intelligent Owen is the fattest kid in his middle school, having packed on the pounds after a major upheaval in his life caused him to begin turning to food as a source of comfort. His younger sister, who has joined up with a group at school called Girls Who Are Boys (GWAB) and taken to insisting that others call her Jeremy, coped by growing tougher. Owen, on the other hand, has become an object of ridicule due to his weight. While the Oreo heist provides the main premise for Owen to engage with other kids at school, there are a number of secondary mysteries crafted alongside it, each of them raising unexpected questions that are neatly wrapped up by the novel's end. While some readers may balk at some of its more convenient coincidences, fans of Jerry Spinelli and others of his ilk may especially enjoy it and will be held rapt.

(2009, April 15). [Review of SLOB]. Kirkus Reviews. Retrieved from http://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/childrens-books/ellen-potter/slob/

Library Use

Librarians could use this book for promoting realistic fiction.  I think it’s a great example of real life issues common and not-so-common in middle school.  I think it would also work for a boy’s book discussion.  With the main character being a boy, they might relate to him well.