BY

GARY D. SCHMIDT

published by Clarion, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Thank you so much for many wonderful comments, whether you commented daily or just once or twice to let us know your thoughts on specific titles and matches.  The winners of the 2012 BoB Giveaways are drawn from more than 100 names.  We will contact each winner via email to arrange for prize delivery.  Congratulations!

• Heidi wins a set of Gerald Morris’ series The Knights’ Tales.
• Sondy wins a set of the 43 Old Cemetery Road series by Kate and Sarah Klise.
• Elissa wins a set of Sy Montgomery’s nonfiction books including her latest, a biography of Temple Grandin.
• Steffaney Smith wins a Just Grace tote bag with all 8 series books and bookmarks.
• Maisie Mac wins the Grave Mercy pack – Grave Mercy t-shirt, bookmarks, buttons, and book.

(Provided by our sponsor Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.)

• Indigo wins an autographed copy of Inside Out and Back Again.
• DavidB wins an autographed copy of Inside Out and Back Again.
• Chelle wins an autographed copy of Inside Out and Back Again.
• Genevieve wins an autographed copy of Heart and Soul.
• Moe wins an autographed copy of Heart and Soul.

(Provided by our sponsor HarperCollins.)

Mark Tuchman, SLJ’s Creative Director

Mark has been working at SLJ for the last ten years and recently collected his design work here:  http://marktuchman.wordpress.com.  His prior freelance work illustrating for newspapers and magazines such as Glamour, NY Newsday, The Daily News, Scholastic, Black Enterprise and Seventeen can be viewed here: www.marktuchman.com.

We couldn’t thank Mark enough for giving us the pleasure of receiving the graphics for the Match posts and sharing them with all the BoB fans.  We feel it a fitting tribute to Mark’s talents and dedication by exhibiting a selection of his BoB designs for the past four years.  Please enjoy!

2009 Battle Brackets:

2009 Match Design (based on crude design by the Battle Commander):

Peanut Gallery Banner:

2009 winner The Hunger Games on the top and third tiers of the winners podium:

2010 Early Brackets:

Victory Tour of 2009 BoB winner Hunger Games to 2010 Contenders:

2010 Boxing Ring Theme Match Graphic:

Confetti fluttering around Match winner (2010):

2010 Undead:

2010 Celebration of BoB winner Marching for Freedom 

2011 Pre-Battle Buzz:

2011 BoB Early Brackets:

2011 Match design — every “book” contender holds a weapon specific to the content of the book.  (Round 2)

2011 Undead winner: Conspiracy of Kings digging itself out of the grave.

Peaceful Gathering of all contenders at the end of 2011 Battle, holding hands and abandoning all weapons in celebration of the much loved Ring of Solomon.

Stickers for 2012 additions:

2012 Brackets:

2012 Match Designs:

(note the COIN under Chime?)

2012 Undead: Okay for Now, lifted from the land of the dead by birds wearing Comedy/Tragedy Drama Masks:

And of course, yesterday’s Finale Group Photo with all contenders giving thumbs up in good cheer!

Judged by
Jonathan Stroud

When those fine people at School Library Journal asked me to judge the conclusion of this year’s Battle of the Kids’ Books, I knew at once it was a great honour. What I didn’t know, exactly, was what a “Big Kahuna” actually was. To me it conjured an image of a patriarchal sort of cove, wearing an impressive white beard, a set of mercifully long robes and a pair of leather sandals. Probably sitting resplendent on some kind of throne. Well, I did the best I could. The beard is false, the robes are itchy, and instead of a throne I’ve got a fold-up picnic chair, but that’s all incidental. What matters is what I’ve been reading. Three superb books, the hard-won finalists of a magnificent competition.

Here’s something I discovered right off. It doesn’t matter how big your beard is, sitting in judgement is a tricky job.

Or at least it is when each of the books is so individually excellent and tonally distinctive. And when their subject matter is so apparently disparate: love and sex in the shadow of the Cuban Missile Crisis; enduring the unimaginable horrors of Stalinist persecutions; the life of a kid growing up in Vietnam-era small-town America. How do you adjudicate something like that?

Well, for a start you look for parallels, and before long you notice that this year’s competition has thrown up a couple of definite themes. The first, clearly, is how big stuff, in the shape of global events, plays out upon our little lives. We’re talking about the fragility of the individual, the ease with which we might be crushed or tossed aside. We’re also talking about our response to that knowledge; and, thrillingly, each one of our finalists stands up like a Tiananmen Square protester before the oncoming tank of history, eyes it straight down the barrel and, while acknowledging its brutal strength, still finds cause for hope.

Where does that hope reside? In the redemptive power of art.

Three books, three protagonists. And each one of our heroes finds the act of drawing to be the crucial means of self-expression and self definition. It’s both a defense against the world, and a way of engaging with it. A window and a shield. It helps them transcend the limitations of their lives and, if not actually escape, then at the very least endure.

First up: Mal Peet’s Life: An Exploded Diagram. Reading this, I couldn’t help but marvel that we Brits ever manage to procreate at all. We’re in the dour, phlegmatic flatlands of Norfolk, in the grim, grey years following the Second World War. It’s all rationing, resentment, religious mania, sexual repression. Luckily our guide, Clem Ackroyd, has an eye for the telling detail that renders everything bright like crystal. He ought to. His favourite painter is Juan Sánchez Cotán, whose still lives are so naturalistic they acquire supernatural beauty. Fruit and vegetables sit on a ledge; behind is blackness. Clem observes that “those humble and edible objects, have their backs to that void. They bathe in the brevity of light, casting their modest shadows onto the stone. They say, they insist, that they briefly exist… ‘Look how commonplace and how beautiful we are.’”

This principle informs the book, which is full of iridescent imagery, bright words scattered about like seeds, illuminating the shabby and numinous alike. “Washing blew on the line… her mother’s bloomers ballooned by the wind, their elasticated leg holes pouting.” “Sun, in beams as clearly defined as searchlights, straked the sky.”

In Clem’s emotionally costive childhood, the elasticated bloomers side of things very much rules; but here comes the sun, in the exotically part-French-Canadian form of Frankie, rich, beautiful and smelling of sweat, strawberries “and something like vanilla ice cream.” Clem discovers he has a sweet tooth, and soon he’s making tender, ecstatic sketches of Frankie’s half-naked form during their barn-loft trysts. In those moments he allows himself to believe “that instead of being in history he was in love,” but the big stuff is all around him, and is closing in fast. At first, mind you, it seems it might give Clem a helping hand: the Kennedy-Khrushchev crisis provides the very world-ending excuse he needs to persuade Frankie to finally agree to _____. (It’s no good. I’m simply too British to spell it out. Insert euphemism of your choice here.) And sure enough, this works out nicely – for a few minutes anyway, before the cruel arbitrariness of history reasserts itself, and Clem and Frankie are, literally, torn apart.

Clem’s a survivor, and he doesn’t give up on art. He goes on to be an illustrator, doing ”hyper-realistic spreads” of cars and spacecraft. But something’s been lost from those fragile, lust-wracked drawings made in the barn’s half-darkness, and joy is confined to memory. We’re left with the glittering surface consolations of life’s transient beauty, and of Mal Peet’s mastery of words.

Downbeat as the English 1950s might well have been, they didn’t really hold a candle to 1940s Lithuania, where Ruta Sepetys’ extraordinary Between Shades of Gray begins. It’s got wide-screen maps at the front, the better to ram home the unimaginable distances Lina Vilkas and her family – and countless other victims of Stalin’s ethnic purges – were required to travel, while undergoing appalling privation. Altai Labor Camp; Biysk; Yakutsk; Trofimovsk… you don’t need a degree in geography to guess these places are pretty grim; when combined with the hideous cruelty of the NKVD it’s incredible anyone survived at all. Lina is a fictional character, but her experiences are those of real people, and the clear authenticity of the account chills you like a Siberian wind. It’s a measure of the writer’s skill that what could quickly numb us with its horrors instantly acquires the remorseless grip and momentum of the best of thrillers. The opening chapters, where Lina, her brother Jonas, and her mother, Elena, are arrested by the Russians, are brilliantly judged. It’s all over in a handful of pages, as swift, brutal and abrupt as the act itself. The little boy readies his school bag instead of a suitcase, not guessing this is the end of childhood; if he ever returns, it will be as a grown man.

This is Sánchez Cotán’s void reaching out to engulf us, and now only the strongest moral flames will remain alight. One of these is Elena Vilkas, who has a “beautiful spirit,” and whose “cup overflowed with love for everyone and everything around her, even the enemy.” Her radiance helps protect Lina, even in the darkest places; but Lina has another secret weapon too. She is drawing.

Before the purges began, Lina was rather taken with the work of Edvard Munch. She responds to his virtuosity, to his raw depictions of pain, decay and death. As she breezily informs her parents:

“He said ‘From my rotting body flowers shall grow, and I am in them and that is eternity.’ Isn’t that beautiful?”

Papa smiled at me: “You’re beautiful because you see it that way.”

When death really comes calling, all trace of adolescent morbidity falls away. Here in the camps, art has a proper job to do. Secretly Lina records daily events in all their vileness: it is a testament of what is being done to them. She also draws coded messages for her father – lost somewhere in Russia’s vastness – and gives them to others to be passed on, hand to hand, in the hope they will one day reach him. She doesn’t know if her father is alive; if he ever gets the messages, he won’t know if she survives. The importance is all in the passing down – in keeping the message alive. This is art devolving into its most primal form: a defiant statement of existence. I am not – I was not – nothing. I reject the void.

Ruta Sepetys has passed the message on to us, sketching the incomprehensible in plain, clear lines. She shows us love, hope and tenderness flourishing in hell, and in doing so has created an unputdownable book. Recommend this. Hand it on in turn.

I don’t know about you, but I reckon book characters, like real people, fall broadly into two classes. “Radiators” and “Drains.” “Radiators” emit warmth and light – they nourish and inspire. You’re re-energised by their presence. “Drains” subtly draw energy from you, suck out your life force, like coke being drawn through a straw.

Doug Swieteck in Gary D. Schmidt’s Okay For Now is most definitely a radiator. When he comes to Marysville, in 1969, the odds are stacked against him. His nameless father’s lost to drink and truculent self-pity; one brother’s a miserable bully, the other lies absent, and terribly injured, out in Vietnam. But all’s not lost. Doug’s got his mother (“You think Elizabeth Taylor can smile? If you saw my mother’s smile you wouldn’t even let Elizabeth Taylor in the same room.”), and she’s a soul-cousin to Elena Vilkas, radiant and enduring. Even better, he’s got his own nature. Doug’s honest, brave, witty and generous, and if he wins over the whole town by the end of the book he won over this reader within a couple of pages. Probably about the time he first uses the word “chump.”

Doug’s narrative voice is a thing of wonder. It’s perfectly balanced, attuned both to the comic and the sublime. Here’s him contemplating Fall:

The trees were reddening and yellowing. You could see the color moving like a slow tide down the hills that rose on both sides of stupid Maryville…. Except the trees around The Dump [his house]. Their leaves turned brown and dropped.

Terrific.

When all’s said and done, this is friendship talking. Doug’s right there with you, and you want to go out and throw horseshoes with him, or share a cold coke with ice coming down the sides.

Which isn’t to say Doug doesn’t have a favourite artist too. He does. It’s John James Audubon, whose Birds of America sits in Marysville library, minus some pages they’ve sliced out and sold off to make ends meet, a neat metaphor for Doug’s messed-up life, and of course for the whole beautiful, wounded USA.

Enraptured by the art, Doug begins to draw himself out of a bad place. And we quickly find that Audubon’s birds not only have the realistic surface perfection of a Sánchez Cotán’s painting, but also the emotional intensity of a Munch. Take the black-backed gull with a broken wing: “His head was pulled far back, like he was taking one last look at the sky that he would never fly in again. And his round eye told you he knew that everything was ruined forever.”

Like Clem, like Lina, Doug learns, through art, to engage with life: it’s a slow, dedicated commitment to embracing the pain as well as the joys. So he looks at his mother, “[watching] her smile and wondering how I could ever draw it, it was that beautiful.” And he looks on too when his mother greets his broken brother, legless and almost blind: “She held Lucas’ face in both her hands. Her blue coat was spread out, and it covered them both like wide wings.”

Doug looks. And, because of the generosity of his nature, he finds hope out there, even in the void. This commitment to life is very attractive. By the end, everyone’s with him. I’m not sure I believe the world could ever be quite this accommodating, even to such a remarkable boy as Doug, but I sure as heck would like it to be so. (Actually Gary D. Schmidt knows we can’t have everything, and he takes care to leave one really BIG bit of the jigsaw just out of position as the book closes. We think it’ll end all right, but we don’t know. All of us have to keep the faith.)

Okay, it’s time for the Big Kahuna to unhook his beard, hitch up his robes (not too high), and steal away, leaving three fine books behind him on the picnic chair. They’re all first-rate, but for its humour, its poignancy, for its serious heart and lightness of touch, above all for the continual joy it gave me, my choice for this year’s winning book is Gary D. Schmidt’s Okay For Now.

Terrific.

– Judge Jonathan Stroud

Terrific, indeed! But wait! What of the rumors that Bartimaeus would co-opt this decision? I had hoped that he would somehow worm his way into the seventh plane and pluck his buddy Brimstone into an already crowded final round. Ah, well. Nevertheless, this is sure to be an extremely popular decision, and it harkens back to the very first year of the BOB when fan favorite THE HUNGER GAMES won the title. In the fantasy scenario in which—ahem—I judge every round and determine the Undead winner, I had AMELIA LOST vs. DAUGHTER OF SMOKE & BONE vs. LIFE: AN EXPLODED DIAGRAM. So it stands to reason that I, like RGN, would have picked LIFE: AN EXPLODED DIAGRAM. But I am not unhappy with OKAY FOR NOW and am quite pleased to see this accolade go on Gary’s fireplace mantel next to the National Book Award finalist medallion necklace thingy; the Odyssey Honor trophy hardware goes to the publisher, I believe. Like many of you, I have really enjoyed the addition of the kid commentators this year, and find it interesting that both of them favored one of the YA titles over the juvenile titles. Take note, Heavy Medalers, that we should never, ever underestimate a child audience. Many thanks to all our judges, especially to our Big Kahuna, and to all of our followers. See you next year!

– Commentator Jonathan Hunt

Please join us in congratulating
OKAY FOR NOW by Gary D. Schmidt
for winning the
2012 Battle of the Kids’ Books.

CLICK HERE
to download a bigger version of the 2012 BoB Finale Poster for display!

CLICK HERE
to download a similar poster with caption listing all 2012 contenders. 

Posts of the Week 

• The Book Nut’s Weekly Roundup #2, and Quarterfinal Roundup.
• Emily Brown weighs in and makes an interesting suggestion:

So I’m enjoying the Battle of the Kids Books, but in comparing it to the Morning News Tournament of Books, I do find it lacking in the commentary department. The judges give you their experience of the book, so I’d like the commentators to connect the decisions to trends and issues in the field of kidlit … instead of just saying whether they agree or disagree.

• Liz B on Chime v Smoke, Drawing v  Again, Diagram v Wonderstruck, Gray v Chime, Memory v Life, and Timothy Rising from the Dead.
• Bookshelves of doom is “YESSSSSSSSSS!” for her champion.
• Brandy’s thoughts on the final four and the finalists.
• Reads for Keeps’ Round 3 Inklings.
• Sondy’s chanting Go, Zombie, Go!
• A Spectator’s Commentary, Week 3.
• And here’s one …SLJBotB Commentary….Better Late Than Never!

Tweets of the Week 

After two consecutive years of blowouts, this year was much more competitive. That’s not to say OKAY FOR NOW didn’t jump out to a healthy lead and maintain it throughout, but that healthy lead was often a single digit number.  CHIME and DAUGHTER OF SMOKE & BONE trailed early, then CHIME pulled away for a clear second place until an eleventh hour push by WONDERSTRUCK.  Meanwhile, A MONSTER CALLS joined DAUGHTER OF SMOKE & BONE in that third tier. Undead winner OKAY FOR NOW will make lots of people happy and it should be a real threat to win the whole thing.  It’s also the only viable juvenile option in the final round as both BETWEEN SHADES OF GRAY and LIFE: AN EXPLODED DIAGRAM are more YA.

– Commentator Jonathan Hunt

AND NOW

The two official Kid Commentators want to share with everyone what THEY
think should win this year’s top BoB Prize. Do you agree with their picks?

Okay For Now, Between Shades of Gray, and Life: An Exploded Diagram. Three fantastic novels have all conquered their competitors, survived in a rather brutal battle, and have made it to the final round of the 2012 Battle of the Kids’ Books. Which for any book, picture or prose, is the highest honor one could be awarded. These three books will fight in the ultimate brawl of the battle until one book alone departs from the battle victorious. This scrimmage goes by many names, but is officially called the Big Kahuna Round.

Two-time Newbery Honor winner Gary D. Schmidt crafts an incredibly creative and unique story about the perils of being a young boy moving to a new town with a temperamental and often drunk father. Schmidt creates Doug’s story with humor, sarcasm, and wit with a terrifically brilliant ending which allows the reader to choose Doug’s conclusion. Positively terrific.

Life: An Exploded Diagram is a historical fiction masterpiece that wins hearts over with its incredibly astute and clever characters as well as its fabulously informative history of the Cuban Missile Crisis (one of my favorite subjects.) Of course it does have its unnecessary moments where it drags on quite a bit, as all books tend to do at certain points (with the exception of Philip Pullman’s works.)

Between Shades of Gray, one of my personal favorites, tells the tragic and true story of a young Lithuanian girl living at the time of World War II. Ruta Sepetys tells in horrifying detail of the perils and obstacles Lina has to overcome, until she is free at last. This work of historical fiction is exceptional, and I would recommend it to all lovers of this genre of books.

This final match of the 2012 Battle of the Books has been incredibly difficult and troublesome to conjure up a conclusion for, especially because I am a lover of all books in the competition. It was a very close round, and although I am a big fan of Life and Okay for Now, I have to go with Between Shades of Gray, for its detailed, clear, and clever writing.

As a big fan of Jonathan Stroud, I am anxious to see which book he picks for the ultimate victor of this year’s Battle of the Kids’ Books.

– Kid Commentator GI

All of the books in the final three comment on life in a meaningful way somehow. Most books do. Some are just more obvious. Take Mal Peet’s LIFE: AN EXPLODED DIAGRAM. Just from the title, you can see that it will analyze life. The clever part is the relevance to the story itself: explosion. Throughout the book, you see that nukes will (or won’t) detonate and mines can erupt – it’s part of life. Peet asks: Why should one’s world have to fall apart? What happens when it does? He tells us: Life continues, and then the world explodes again.

Less apparent is BETWEEN SHADES OF GREY. Ruta Sepetys describes in brutal detail a horrible condition in life – that of the Lithuanian people, and in a more general sense, all oppressed people. Her book is an emotional plea for life to be good, for people to hope. The title conveys this: However dark the situation, there is still some “white.” It also might be a more general reference to the Lithuanian people stuck between all this war (Hitler, Stalin, etc.).

In OKAY FOR NOW, Gary Schmidt demonstrates one of the most important processes in life: maturation. In lyrical writing, Schmidt also shows life through Doug’s perspective. And at the end of the book, Doug is “okay for now.” What could be more like life than that? But I can’t just judge these books on their messages. What about their presentation – their writing and characters and all the other stuff that makes a book good?

BETWEEN SHADES OF GRAY is the most interesting case. Sepetys tells of the Lithuanians’ survival with no respite:

“Have you ever wondered what a human life is worth? That morning, my brother’s was worth a pocketwatch.”
“We were about to become cigarettes.”
“Davai.”

Endlessly grueling and biting. Three hundred and thirty-eight pages of this stuff. If any books in this battle aren’t for kids (like many say of LIFE), BETWEEN SHADES OF GRAY is one of them. It should be sent to the Oval Office straight away, as well as to all the other world leaders.

And that’s also a compliment. It’s a really, really important book. Despite the harshness of the book, Lithuania’s story is extremely emotional and hopeful. The perserverance of the Lithuanian people (as expressed in Lina and her mother) to withstand whatever life throws at them is astounding. I felt for all of them with a full heart – as well as for Kretzky, the Soviet guard. So this story gives hope. It hurls you all these horrible descriptions, and at the end you have hope! Truly a work of art.

LIFE: AN EXPLODED DIAGRAM is not hopeful. It’s purely an analysis of life. And what a beautiful one it is!

The writing: “History is the heavy traffic that prevents us from crossing the road.” Deep, metaphoric, and stunning. More like this, with great detail using similes. It’s a joy to read.

The characters: George Mortimer: “Uppity posh foreign crumpet.” Ha! You can tell a lot from that. Peet implies that despite a negative portrayal of a character (ex. George Mortimer), it’s just part of life. Note the humor.

The setting: “Washing blew on the line: tea towels, Ruth’s yellowish vests, her mother’s bloomers ballooned by the wind, their elasticated leg holes pouting.” Detailed, with exquisite metaphors. The plot is near-perfect, a series of “explosions” in Clem and Frankie’s life. The background is definitely very interesting, as is the history. It’s helped, of course, by Peet’s witty, brilliant writing, and an excellent sense of humor. In the whole book, and especially in the ending, Mal Peet paints life as it is; mistakes are repeated, and war will always happen. Inside the book, though, is a subtle plea: Why must humans continue this?

This has already been talked about before, but LIFE: AN EXPLODED DIAGRAM is really a YA book. With Clem, you see a typical teenager. When we get to Frankie and Clem’s romance, the YA-ness of the book increases. Despite this, from most other perspectives, Mal Peet’s book is also adult. But don’t teens love quality in a book, and adultness? Add it all up, and LIFE: AN EXPLODED DIAGRAM is a really powerful and spectacular commentary on life.

And what of OKAY FOR NOW? It’s not really hopeful or sad. All you know is that at the end, things are “okay for now.” Anyways, Doug’s story is an almost perfect rendition of growing up.

The writing: “Joe Pepitone once gave me his baseball cap.” Like that’s the biggest thing in the world. Schmidt expertly captures the eighth grade mind through first person narration, and Doug’s view on the world is pretty funny. Mixed in with a bunch of metaphors for Doug’s state-of-being, such as Arctic Terns, the writing is the best it could possibly be for such a story.

The characters: Doug’s father: “My father’s hands are quick. That’s the kind of guy he is.” Once again, with Doug’s snappy narration and POV.

The setting: “Here are the stats for stupid Marysville:” Doug’s thoughts abound everywhere in this book. Witty. Doug’s life twists and turns as he adjusts to Marysville, and whenever it does, I sympathize with him. It’s exactly like a middle-schooler’s life. To all the kids out there, Schmidt says that everything’s going to be okay. Brilliant!

So here we have three great books. Despite its importance, I think BETWEEN SHADES OF GRAY is too horrifying a work of art. OKAY FOR NOW was terrific. For me, though, LIFE: AN EXPLODED DIAGRAM wins the prize (such superb writing!).

– Kid Commentator RGN

Judged by
Ron Koertge

Pen vs. Brush

I drop two books on the table in the Turf Club. No big surprise. Bobby and I are always bringing things to read. We’re at the races four days a week, but we’re not degenerate gamblers. Sometimes an hour goes by before there’s something worth betting.

 Sammy, another regular, picks the books up. Weighs them. The cover of Mal Peet’s Life: An Exploded Diagram features a lethal-looking rocket. On Allen’s Say’s Drawing from Memory, a dreamy boy in a blue sweater and blue socks appears to be flying.

“What’s the deal?” Sam asks.

“I have to decide between them,” I tell him. “It’s like a match race.”

“Doesn’t seem fair. One of them is thin like a pizza; the other’s fat like a sandwich.”

“Mal Peet’s book starts during WWII and goes to 2001. That’s more like a five-course meal.”

“And the other one?”

“Allen Say’s life in 62 pages.”

Sam flips through Drawing from Memory. “It’s got pictures,” he says. “Has the other one got pictures?”

I shake my head.

Sam says, “Doesn’t sound fair to me.”

“They’re both really good.”

Sammy grunts. “So, do you like anybody in the first race?”

Just then Bob shows up. He drops his copy of Daily Racing Form, picks up Life: An Exploded Diagram and flips through it. “Bold historical sweep, epic in scale with keen insight into the human condition?”

“Very funny, but, actually, yes. You can say that about a lot of books, though. I like this one because I’m crazy about Clem and Frankie.”

“And they are?”

So I quickly tell my friends about Clem, a working class boy from Norfolk, and Frankie, a rich girl. Clem’s father works for Frankie’s father, so when the two kids fall in love and meet secretly they’re playing with fire. If they’re discovered, Clem’s father is out of a job and Clem will never see Frankie again.

I finish with this, “And that’s all set against the Cuban Missile Crisis. So Clem’s and Frankie’s world is liable to explode and so is the real world.”

Sam stands to watch the post parade. “And this is for kids? It sounds pretty grown-up. And God knows, it’s long!”

I tell him, “Don’t underestimate kids these days, but anybody could read Mal Peet’s novel.”

“What about the other one?” asks Bob.

“I’ll tell you later. That grey filly looks live to me.”

Somewhere in the middle of the afternoon I come back to the table with some drinks and Bob is flipping through Drawing from Memory.

He says, “This is very nice.”

“Isn’t it? Memoir, graphic novel, watercolors, cartoons, photos: you name it, it’s in there.”

“This guy can really draw.”

“And the book is flat-out inspirational. Say’s father pretty much gave up on his son when Allen only wanted to be an artist.”

“Wanted only to be an artist.”

“Spoken like a former English teacher. OK, so all he wanted to do was draw. He’s shunted off on his cranky grandmother who says if he can pass an exam to get into a middle school, she’ll let him live in an apartment by himself.”

“How old is this kid?”

“Twelve.”

Bob puts the book down. “Thanks a lot, Dad.”

“And the only time the father is in the book….” I stop for a minute and flip to page nine, “… is right here and he’s got his back to everything. His son, his wife and the reader. I, love that! So, anyway, Allen studies, passes the exam, and gets this cool place to live.” I tap the cover. “That’s how he felt when he moved in. Like he was floating on air.”

“But he’s 12.”

“Right. And all alone. Here’s the good news. He finds a mentor, this famous cartoonist named Noro Shinpei who takes Allen on as a student.”

“So a happy ending, right?”

I hold up Life: An Exploded Diagram. “This one is like a wave that washes over you and threatens to carry you away.” Then I hold up Drawing from Memory. “This one is like a deep well. Not much shows on the surface but it’s cold down there. Allen Say has a pretty light touch, but I thought the book was melancholy as hell.”

Sam returns, thanks me for the drink, then asks, “Can I take these books of yours home?”

“Sure, if you want to.”

He stacks them by his coffee. “Whatever it takes to get you guys to remember what we’re here for. Gambling, OK?”

Sam wanders off to bet. Bob says, “No offense, Ronnie. I like Sam and he knows a good horse when he sees one, but he’s no literary critic.”

“But I’m not a critic this time, either, not if critic means don’t-read-this-book. I’m a reviewer. I want everybody to read both of them.”

“But you have to pick one.”

The next day, Bob and I are working our way through the opening races.

“Have you decided yet?” he asks.

“The first is 30 minutes away.”

“You know what I mean.”

I shake my head. “Allen Say’s book is what ‘s called a real visual experience. But , man, as far as the story goes he is really reined in. How did he eat? Did he go shopping and cook for himself? Was the only friend he had another cartoonist who worked for Noro Shinpei? In Mal Peet’s novel I know a lot about everybody. But it’s also got rich girl/poor boy and sadists in the boarding school.”

“That again.”

“Exactly.”

“What does Sam say?”

I point toward the saddling paddock. ‘Here he comes. Let’s ask him.”

Sam drops the books in front of me. “No way,” he says, “are kids going to trudge through the first part of Life. What do they care about Clem’s parents and how they met and all that stuff.” He waves Drawing from Memory at me. “This one really got to me. With my old man it was his way or the highway. Forget what I wanted or was good at. OK, the Peet novel is a page-turner. I’ll give it that. But Say’s book is like a GPS for your soul: just pay attention to the little voice inside.”

Bob puts arm around Sam’s shoulder. “You’ve risen to new heights of eloquence, my friend.”

Sam shrugs the arm away. “Well, that’s my two cents, for what it’s worth.”

Off and on all day, I think about what Sam said. I know exactly what he means and even agree with him, but Drawing from Memory doesn’t stay with me like the funny and touching Life: An Exploded Diagram. So I just don’t know yet. I’m glad to have horses to distract me.

About 4:30 I head for the parking lot. My friends always stay for the last race, but I don’t like to fight traffic. As I walk, I think how much I admire Allen Say’s talent and how glad I am that his life turned out so well. But I don’t feel close to him. I like to really know the characters in books. I like to ride around in cars with them, eat dinner with them, sleep in their spare rooms and poke around in their medicine cabinets.

That’s how it was with Clem and Frankie , Clem’s baffled, unhappy father and his frustrated mom. I ate dinner with them and listened to them talk. I went to the beach with Clem and Frankie and got sand in my shoes. I was with Clem on that terrible day in November.

I lean on my car and listen. The announcer’s voice drifts out over the grandstand and the roofs of 2,000 cars, then quickens as the horses turn for home and two of them draw away from the field to run neck-and-neck toward the wire.

It’s a close call But the winner is Life: An Exploded Diagram.

– Judge Ron Koertge

And the Winner of this match is……
LIFE: AN EXPLODED DIAGRAM

Oh, well done, Ron! In terms of creativity, this decision ranks up there with Adam Rex and Barry Lyga from last season. If any match represents the complete absurdity of judging apples and oranges, perhaps it is this one which features both the “youngest” book in our field and the “oldest” one. Unlike the previous match, I had always hoped to see DRAWING FROM MEMORY and LIFE: AN EXPLODED DIAGRAM square off in this round (with apologies to Gary Schmidt). But be careful what you wish for, eh? Now that it’s here I am loathe to pick a winner, but I would ultimately pick LIFE: AN EXPLODED DIAGRAM, too. And I’m picking LIFE: AN EXPLODED DIAGRAM to beat BETWEEN SHADES OF GRAY. But then there’s the matter of the Undead Poll winner. Any guesses? I wouldn’t mind seeing a juvenile book to counterbalance this pair of YA titles. I also think at some point our Undead Poll winner will actually win. Could this be the year?

– Commentator Jonathan Hunt

With both books very close to my heart, I knew that I would have difficulty coming up with a conclusion to this match. With the competitors so different in general, pictures vs. prose, there would be a lot of discussion and arguments about this battle. Drawing From Memory is a fantastic picture book, graphic novel, and autobiography all in one, while Life: An Exploded Diagram is the exact opposite, a historical fiction novel that stands at 416 pages. While Drawing From Memory stays consistant in its fast paced charm, Life often drags on in its plot, especially in the beginning. Although its characters are lovable and a perfect fit for the book, overall I must say that it was more historical than fiction. Despite Mr. Koertge’s fabulously witty and respectable commentary, I believe that the better book in this match is Drawing From Memory. As much as I loved learning about the Cuban Missile Crisis in Life: An Exploded Diagram, it did not compare to Allen Say’s illustrious masterpiece.

– Kid Commentator GI

Judged by
Maggie Stiefvater

When I first agreed to be a judge for this, I thought it would be straightforward, but just in case, I immediately read up on previous battles. Strangely, many of the judges said things like “this was harder than I expected” or “unexpectedly complicated!” But the idea seemed simple. You read two books, and you like one of them better. You explain your thoughts in a coherent way, and then you retreat to your kitchen to make cookie dough.

But then it was my turn. And it turned out that I had read both of the about-to-battle books. I know that you’re thinking, yahtzee! Her job’s already done! Only it wasn’t. Because even though I’d read both of them (Between Shades of Gray on a plane from Chicago to Boston, and Chime while sitting on my sofa with a runny nose), I hadn’t been in a judging mindset when I did. I was just doing what readers do. You know. Reading. Moreover, my reading environment could have biased my feelings toward them. Everyone knows that having a runny nose is better than sitting in the middle seat of an airplane next to a man who’s just had tacos before take off. HOW COULD I TRUST MY PREVIOUS JUDGMENT? The simple answer: I couldn’t. So I read them again.

I picked Chime to read first, for reasons I’ll explain later. It’s a vaguely historical, first-person fantasy novel that put me in mind of Madapple. Did any of you guys read that? Like Madapple, the narrator of Chime is an unreliable one, and like Madapple, the timing/pacing felt rather dreamlike. I could tell you what Chime is supposed to be about: a minister’s daughter, Briony, who believes herself to be a damnable witch guilty of multiple crimes, including consorting with swamp spirits, burning down her family’s library, and crippling her stepmother’s body and her twin sister’s mind.

But I’ll tell you what it’s really about: Briony. Just Briony. It is a “voice-y” first person sort of novel, which means we get Briony’s opinions of life in a very stream-of-consciousness way. And she has a lot of them. Thoughts on how the villagers have an idealized view of her family. How she hates herself. How lovely London must be; how she will never see it. How she hates herself. How Eldric, the new boy in town, is shiftless but likable. How she hates herself. How she wishes she could stop pretending that she can’t see the vaguely fey creatures that inhabit their swamp. How she ha— you get the idea. Briony has a long way to go as far as accepting herself, and that character arc is what Chime is all about.

Once I had Chime firmly in my mind again, I picked up Between Shades of Gray. I’d been putting off rereading this one because, like I said about it on my blog, “Even though I found this novel exceptionally well-written, it was not a pleasure to read.” Ostensibly, it is a first-person novel that tells the story of just one of many Lithuanian families who were displaced to Siberian work camps during World War II. In reality, it is about… just that. Not many Americans are aware of this version of the war, and the reveal of the horrors the Lithuanian prisoners endured is the most breath-taking part of the novel.

From the first page of Between Shades of Gray, the reader knows what they’re getting into. Officers arrive to take 15-year-old Lina and her family from their house; Lina says “They took me in my nightgown.” When Lina’s mother realizes what is about to happen, she encourages her two children to pack bags full of essentials and then begins to smash all of her fine china. Lina asks, “Mother, why are you breaking your beautiful things?” And her mother says, “Because I love them so much.”

Lina’s mother was my favorite character in the book. She remains the person we all hope we can be in a disaster: kind, resilient, ultimately decent. Lina, on the other hand, is a fairly passive character. Unlike Briony from Chime, who changes hugely from beginning to end, Lina is mostly the vehicle for the story of the prison camp. If Chime is actually about Briony, Between of Shades of Gray is actually about Lithuania. In some ways, I felt as if Lina’s true purpose in the story was to represent Lithuania itself. She is an artistic, proud, educated girl who maintains her sense of national pride even as her dignity is stripped away. In the end, she has, like Lithuania, permanently lost a certain sort of innocence.

Ultimately, these two books both have their own sort of power. Chime’s is a personal sort: showing just how much damage we can do to ourselves. And Between Shades of Gray is about collective power: how filling yourself up with personal identity can be armor against everything but death, which is only the most obvious of enemies.

Between Shades of Gray wrecked me and changed the way I looked at things, not just the first time I read it, but also the second. Not many novels can accomplish that. And when they do, they definitely get my vote to go to the next round of Battle of the Books.

Now I’m going to go make cookie dough.

– Judge Maggie Stiefvater

And the Winner of this match is……
BETWEEN SHADES OF GRAY

While I like both of these books very much, I had always hoped we’d see AMELIA LOST vs. DAUGHTER OF SMOKE & BONE in this round. Ah, well. I’m a bit surprised by this decision because I always figured the winner of CHIME vs. DAUGHTER OF SMOKE & BONE had a free pass to the finals because Maggie writes those kinds of books, too. It just goes to show—yet again—that that kind of logic is not only flawed, but inconsistent. MADAPPLE? Yep, read, remembered, and loved—not least of all for its striking cover, something I would have wished for both CHIME and BETWEEN SHADES OF GRAY. Neither their hardcover or paperback covers really do justice to these books. BETWEEN SHADES OF GRAY has surprised me in consecutive rounds and becomes the first book to make it to the finals where it will face either DRAWING FROM MEMORY or LIFE: AN EXPLODED DIAGRAM—and the winner of the Undead Poll.

– Commentator Jonathan Hunt

Ms. Stiefvater provides excellent insights into the powers of both Between Shades of Grey and Chime, and in an extremely conversational way. These “powers,” Briony’s hatred and the Lithuanian power of identity, along with the love that drives them, create both the themes and the characters in the book.  Sure, I didn’t like Chime, but Briony’s character of self-hatred and love was almost perfectly made. The pride of the Lithuanians is a great contrast to Sepetys’s harsh writing, and also makes the story just a little bit hopeful. (Billingsley’s book is not hopeful, because of Briony’s self-hatred that continues even when everything ends up being okay.)  Because of this conveyance of hope through emotional writing, I am very happy that Between Shades of Gray is in the final.

– Kid Commentator RGN

Judged by
Chris Lynch

School Library Journal, being the efficient operation that it is, had all four of the books from the previous round in this bracket sent to me before I got started. All four were still in play, and they want the judges to be able to get right out of the blocks when the time comes. My first reaction when all four had arrived was:

My goodness, there’s a lot of talent in the room.

Shortly thereafter, though, I got the word that two of the titles had been eliminated and I didn’t need to feel quite as intimidated and overwhelmed. My new feeling was:

My goodness, there’s a lot of talent in the room.

The two titles I had to judge were Brian Selznick’s WONDERSTRUCK and Mal Peet’s LIFE: AN EXPLODED DIAGRAM.

WONDERSTRUCK was the first one to emerge from the first round, and so we’ll start there. My lovely missus, who is an artist, checked out what I was up to, examining Selznick’s work in particular. We have a running gag in my house about being jealous of creative artists who are gifted with both lavish and varied talents. She spent a bit of time with both the text and the artwork of WONDERSTRUCK.

“So, you gonna hate him?” she says.
“Well, I’m gonna try,” I says.

Happy to report that I failed miserably in this attempt. Combining two narratives in two formats (prose and pictures), beginning in two eras (1970s and 1920s) in two very different locales (Gunflint Lake, Minnesota, and Hoboken, New Jersey), Mr. Selznick manages to blend these elements into something that manages to be both charming and compelling. Ben’s story in prose leads the way in the early going as we try to pick up the thread of Rose’s story in 1927. Reasonably enough, the pictures take more time to accumulate as narrative, but they steadily gain in power and wind up having at least as much impact as the words. The drawings are black-and-white, and at the same time, luminous.

The book shares with LIFE: AN EXPLODED DIAGRAM an almost effortless feel for the flow of family history, and a gift for making it matter to the reader. Without wanting to give away too much here, Rose sets out on a quest 50 years ahead of Ben, but ultimately they are on a path to meet each other over the barriers of time and geography and emotional upheavals. There are decisions that have been made by characters seeking to protect themselves or their loved ones which reverberate down the years and invite the reader to jump in and debate the whys of it all—just like we were part of the family. We can get mad at them sometimes (I did), but it would take a hardened heart not to care about them. The pages practically turned themselves as the questions accumulated about Ben’s roots and the identities of the cast of characters who pass through both his and Rose’s lives.

By the time we got to the Queens Museum of Art, this reader was utterly and equally entranced by both the pictures and the words. When the lad, both orphaned and deafened, finally connects with Rose (deaf, as well), and with all his lineage of people, it’s a deeply satisfying result.

There is, I understand, a certain randomness to the assembly of the brackets in this competition. And these two books certainly look wildly different at first glance (OK, later they do, too), but one definitely segues nicely into the other in terms of their attention to the family tree. At least, the family tree reaching back to the early 20th century.

The view from here says it is impossible to discuss LIFE: AN EXPLODED DIAGRAM without addressing the question of whether it is a YA book.

So there. We’ve discussed it.

OK, let’s say this: If you wanted to be picky about it, you might say that the story really hits YA stride when our boy, Clem Ackroyd, moves to the council estate and then onto the secondary school. Before that he’s not really the center, and it amounts to a sort of 75 page preamble.

But what a bleddy brilliant preamble. (It could take a while to get Norfolk out of my head.)

The manner in which Peet delivers the basics of the family history plays with the rules of narration in a way that should be more troubling than it is. Third person omniscient, first person, back and forth in time starting with the moment of the labor that produced Clem himself and then going back to tell us about his grandmother’s childhood, could all disorient a person. And yet, there it was, mocking narrative convention, calling attention to itself…

And pulling it off.

If I may echo the Clinton war room motto: It’s the writing, stupid.

There is just so much excellent writing in this book, that it not only makes one inclined to forgive transgressions, it makes one inclined to enjoy them.

The history of modern Britain, as it pertained to the regular Joe and Joan of rural Norfolk, is delivered with precision, exquisitely judged detail, and above all sly, delicious humor. “Also in the year 1956, a rockabilly American singer called Carl Perkins released a song called `Blue Suede Shoes.’ Being about fashionable footwear, it left the people of Norfolk largely unmoved.”

It is a very quotable book.

On the disappointing Britain that Clem’s father found on returning from WWII: “They’d fought—he’d fought—for sex. To capture the brothels of Benghazi and Tripoli from the Italians, the Germans. Then take the tricks learned there home to the wives and girlfriends who were starving for it. Unless the ruddy Yanks had been there first.”

And Peet is just as sharp in turning these observations to characterization. Clem’s father, George again, sizing up a man critically: “Even from across the desk, his breath was rank. He had thin colorless hair greased over the top of his head, and he did not convincingly occupy his clothes.”

By the time we get to the central cross-classes relationship between Clem and the landowner’s daughter, Frankie, we are in familiar YA territory in the best possible sense. The sexual charge, the fear and frustration and tenderness between them is palpable. Alternating between the very real details of this fraught relationship (discovery will mean chaos for both families in a very class-conscious time and place), and the bigger global mayhem of the Cold War, the author unfurls one sure and convincing scene after another.

I was uncertain, for a while, how I felt about the straightforward and very insider-ish narration employed in the chapters on the Cuban Missile Crisis. As someone who is fairly familiar with the information the book provides on this subject, I kept wondering, can I skip ahead a bit here? How ’bout here?

It is to the book’s credit that, time and again, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It was, regardless of what I thought I already knew, compelling stuff, winningly rendered. And then I thought about the adolescents who are most likely new to much of that material, and I realized this book is really firing on a lot of different levels.

So, the outcome. It was a privilege to be asked to weigh in on both of these fine books. But despite the wonder undeniably struck by Brian Selznick, I have to go with Mal Peet on the strength of yer bleddy brilliant writing.

It really is going to take some time to get Norfolk out of the system.

– Judge Chris Lynch

And the Winner of this match is……
LIFE: AN EXPLODED DIAGRAM

Yes! I’m quite pleased with this decision. I love WONDERSTRUCK, but I think LIFE is one of the more underrated books of the year. My only disappointment with WONDERSTRUCK bowing out here is that its loss robs DRAWING FROM MEMORY of yet another chance to go head-to-head with a words-and-pictures kind of book. I mean, first HEART AND SOUL narrowly misses its path, and now WONDERSTRUCK. On the other hand, LIFE: AN EXPLODED DIAGRAM has racked up back-to-back raves, first from Lauren Myracle and now from Chris Lynch, despite the questionable teen appeal of the book. It’s starting to remind me of THE RING OF SOLOMON last year, when many of the judges were surprised by how much they loved the book, despite the fact that they didn’t normally read in the fantasy genre.

A harbinger of things to come, perhaps?

– Commentator Jonathan Hunt

With many of the previous matches, the two books competing against each other were quite similar in their genres and writing styles. This made for very interesting battles, but I was quite pleased when I learned that Wonderstruck would face Life: An Exploded Diagram in the final match of Round 2. Comparing prose and pictures is often a difficult feat, and I found it quite hard to do. With Wonderstruck’s  undeniable charm and phenomenal illustrations, I am in denial that the novel did not leave the match victorious. Then I realized what Selznick’s fantastical work of art was going up against, and the odds were not in its favor. Life: An Exploded Diagram is an incredibly brilliant historical piece, and I enjoyed it immensely. Last year, I was a devoted supporter to Countdown, a novel that touched upon the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I was instantly fascinated by the subject. I was very content when I learned that there would be another book in this year’s BoB that would discuss the subject in detail. After reading the novel, I was instantaneously transfixed by the author’s witty, brilliant writing style. As much as I enjoyed Wonderstruck, Life: An Exploded Diagram deserves to continue on to Round 3.

– Kid Commentator GI

Judged by
Jewell Parker Rhodes

Memory & Resilience: Inside Out & Back Again and Drawing from Memory

Oh, my! What a terrific, imaginative battle! Both books completely captivated me—evoking foreign landscapes, traumatic wars, immigration, and the extraordinary resilience of youth. With such similarities between Inside Out & Back Again by Thanhha Lai and Drawing from Memory by Allen Say, I simply wanted to throw my hands up and declare a “truce.”

And, yet, Inside Out & Back Again and Drawing from Memory, both by award-winning authors, are so distinctively different in point of view, tone, and narrative approach, that I felt awe. Two champions battling with finesse!

Both tales are rooted in biography. Lai fictionalizes her childhood. Say creates a visual and literary memoir.

Sifting through personal experience to create art is never easy. The possible pitfalls are many: emotional indulgence, inability to empathize with perspectives beyond the central character, and, most importantly, the failure to elevate memories to art, imbued with human truths for a new generation. Both authors brilliantly outflank these problems.

Inside Out & Back Again tells the story of Hà, a 10-year-old Vietnamese girl, who flees with her family during the fall of Saigon to foreign Alabama. “No one would believe me but at times I would choose wartime in Saigon over peacetime in Alabama,” says Hà. Through layered, complex characterization, Lai breathes life into the dramatic journey of a child becoming a young woman and her equally compelling journey as a refugee finding a new home.

Told in first-person, lyrical verse, Hà’s voice is endearing, rooted in concrete details. The chapter PAPAYA TREE begins with: “It grew from a seed/I flicked into/the back garden. / A seed like/ a fish eye, slippery/shiny/black.” and ends with “I vow/to rise first every morning/to stare at the dew/on the green fruit/shaped like a lightbulb. / I will be the first/ to witness its ripening.” Such glorious imagery! Not an unnecessary word! Symbolically, the papaya represents the tragic loss of Hà’s homeland and Saigon’s fall. Hà will not witness the fruit’s “ripening” but she will bear witness to her own growth as she acclimates to a new culture. The papaya tree will be replaced with a willow tree where Hà digs a hole and screams, “I hate everyone!!!! Lilting, tonal Vietnamese will be replaced with confounding, consonant English. Stunningly, it’s Lai’s precise language and characterization, which creates emotional restraint and makes an unbearably sad story, readable. Tragedy becomes triumph and I want Hà to tell me her story all over again.

Drawing from Memory is a full-fledged imaginative assault. Part memoir, historical narrative, graphic novel, Say uses drawings, photographs, and prose to express his journey from young boy to master artist, and how he immigrated to America and learned to “write a story… in the language of the people who were bombing” Japan.

At 12, living on his own, Say apprenticed himself to the great cartoonist Noro Shinpei. Unlike Say’s father who disapproved of his artistry, Shinpei becomes Say’s sensei and “spiritual father.”

Amazingly, through drawings and words, Say creates multiple levels of narrative drive. There are prose and cartoon stories within stories, excursions of technique that deepen the story’s emotional resonance. Tokida, a fellow apprentice, left home at 15 and walked 350 miles from Osaka to Tokyo, to pursue his cartoonist dream. Tokida’s tale, told in color and black-and-white drawings, inspires the younger Say and amplifies the book’s main narrative. Beyond tales within tales, Drawing from Memory abounds with other “sub-plots” (a most inadequate word!) in which pictures speak, layering and extending theme. There is SO MUCH in this small book that it easily could’ve become chaotic. Instead, every aspect is integrated and vibrant.

Near the end of Drawing from Memory, there is a page of black-and-white, light-filled, and over-exposed photographs of Say with his sister, fellow cartoonists, and schoolmates. At the bottom, centered, is a picture of Say’s youthful mother. His caption is: “MY MOTHER HAD A PRETTY SMILE.” It’s heartbreaking. Why? Because Say’s mother is a memory. Because on pages one and two, he draws a picture of his fishing village home. There’s a photo of the toddler, Say standing on a brick sea wall while his mother holds him tight. A school photo. A drawing of Japan surrounded by water. Say writes, “Mother constantly worried that I might drown in the sea. She tried to keep me at home.” Nonetheless, the smiling young woman encouraged her child to go, to leave home for middle school, to leave Japan for a land far away, across the sea, so he could pursue his artistic dreams.

Drawing from Memory is like a treasure trove, able to give pleasure to readers of all ages.

Two worthy opponents. Which should I choose?

The battle is won by Drawing from Memory. Deceptively simple in its parts, these parts create a more ambitious, richly layered, and unique tale. Say’s artistry can be experienced so successfully in so many ways!

Drawing from Memory can’t be told any way other than how it is!

– Judge Jewell Parker Rhodes

And the Winner of this match is……
DRAWING FROM MEMORY

It’s always interesting to see how themes emerge organically between later matches, and this one is a perfect example. Both books feature immigrants, Ha coming from Vietnam in the wake of the Vietnam War, and Allen Say coming from Japan following World War II, with both characters also finding their voice, Ha gradually acquiring a facility with the English language allowing her natural intelligence to shine forth and Allen Say finding his vocation as an artist. While I’m a fan of INSIDE OUT & BACK AGAIN, I’m not driving the bandwagon, but then I only read it once, so I think my opinion of the book would probably only improve on subsequent readings. Nevertheless, I, too, would advance DRAWING FROM MEMORY here. It is the last remaining member of Team Nonfiction, after all. Looking ahead, I wonder if Chris will advance WONDERSTRUCK so we can see how these two heavily illustrated books fare against each other in another apple vs. apple battle.

– Commentator Jonathan Hunt

In a situation similar to the previous match, both books are competing in the same genre with congruous creativity, description, and tales of far away lands and the desperate means of getting there. Although the books are quite similar, there is no mistaking the individuality and uniqueness to each book. Inside Out and Back Again was a masterpiece of beautiful literature and a rich story told through verses. The style of writing was pleasantly different than most of the other works in this competition, and stood out as a fantastic work of historical fiction among the sixteen books competing. Drawing from Memory is a true and heartwarming story about the great measures one man took to follow his dreams. What really stood out for me in this piece was the author’s visualizations. The book came to life through the magnificent pictures that the artist created, and it took the story to a whole new level. I will have to agree with Judge Jewell Parker Rhodes on calling it a truce. However, in these battles one book must triumph over the other, and for me, that book is Inside Out and Back Again. Although I do have a high respect for the judges’ decisions, after reading Inside Out and Back Again for the second time I was able to appreciate the descriptive literature more so than the first time, getting a fuller and more complete experience of the book.

– Kid Commentator GI