Saturday, March 12, 2011

LAR'S LIBRARY: MY REVIEW OF CLARE VANDERPOOL'S "MOON OVER MANIFEST"

MOON OVER MANIFEST. By Clare Vanderpool. Random House Children's Books, 2010. 368 pages.

A nice safe choice for the Newbery people, but not one that knocked my socks off.

The best historical novels, of course, trick you into learning about their periods. The reader never notices he’s sitting still for a history seminar, but is swept up in a story that happens in history. Vanderpool’s intention to teach World War I, the Spanish Flu pandemic, the Great Depression, is quite transparent.

Not to mention her desire to impart a feel-good messages about diversity (that is, the diversity of European immigrants in a Kansas town), and self-confidence. You know the bad guys are going to lose because, well, they’re bad. And they’re in the Ku Klux Klan

The structure of the novel makes for some snags in the stream, as well. There are four narrators, the delightfully feisty Abilene Tucker, 12-years-old and making do without family as a new resident of Manifest, Kansas, the author of a somewhat hokey homespun newspaper column, the doughboy scribe behind a trove of letters Abilene comes across, and a Hungarian fortune teller.

If that isn’t enough stutter-stop narration for you, you also have to keep switching back and forth between two time frames, 1918 and 1936.

Too bad, because Vanderpool has some strong characters, a fascinating little window into an unsung time and place, and a nice bit of mystery regarding Abilene’s father.

I especially liked the cousins who quickly become Abilene’s buddies, the spunky Lettie and Ruthanne, and wished I could have followed more closely on the three girls’ heels as they kick up the dust in the streets of Manifest. In the 1918 flashbacks, a boy called Jinx is also a strong and complex character.

The adults, with the exception of Abilene’s caretaker, Shady Howard, both a man of the cloth and the bottle, are one-dimensional and predictable. Like a nun named Sister Redempta, and those guys wearing hoods.

If I’d come to Moon Over Manifest as an unheralded debut novel, I might have been more forgiving of its flaws. I expected more from the Newbery Award winner, especially in a year with so many great chapter books, and for that matter a fantastic non-fiction book about World War I, Russell Freedman’s The War to End All Wars.

No comments:

Post a Comment