Hitch by Jeanette Ingold

Double whammy.

Good book. Good boy book.

Mind you, I know it’s a good book because my tween girls both read it and gave it the thumbs up. I am especially appreciative when I come across books that have strong male characters who are worthy of learning with as you follow their story .

This is set in the Depression and we see it through the eyes of Moss, a young man who joins Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps. Moss stumbles upon the Corps while looking for his father who has left his family ostensibly looking for work but ending up drinking his pay and walking out on his job. Pride seems to get in the way of more than a few weak men Moss knows, and he faces far-reaching choices about which role models he will follow and whose advice he takes.

It’s a coming-of-age novel worthy of your time. Moss becomes a man of character who perseveres in doing what’s right even when it is not recognized or rewarded. The two girls he has an interest in are also upright and worthy of emulating. The story is engaging and believable, and I learned a lot about the CCC.

It is, in fact, hard NOT to cheer for the CCC and the work the men did to help the country while receiving food and money vital for their families. Still, I have questions about the role of government involvement in economic recovery, and while that was not an issue addressed in this book, it’s worth exploring. We found the book a springboard for such research and discussion.

Good storytelling; good history lessons; good moral lessons. You stand a good chance of liking this one!

SAFETY RATING: 3 Flags

Historical Fiction: Great Depression; 1930's

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Alabama Moon by Watt Key

This one drew me in, I must say. It’s one of those survivalist-living-off-the-land while-escaping-the-bad-policeman adventures.

Moon and his father have been living off the land in as-near isolation as a paranoid, anti-government survivalist can. Moon has never seen another human being in his 10 years than the storekeeper who trades fur/food with his dad. He does have a vague memory of his mother who died when he was very young.

After his father breaks his leg and dies of a subsequent infection, Moon is left completely alone. His only endowments from his father are: exceptional survival skills, an old gun, traps, a wheelbarrow, and the advice to head for Alaska and find more people like themselves who are hiding from the government.

As soon as the shopkeeper realizes that Moon’s father is dead, he contacts the local law enforcement, but Moon escapes. Though this sets him on edge, he is lonely enough to venture close to a lawyer who lives nearby. Moon is brought into a boys’ home, but first he meets a local officer who is a petty, violent man. He hates Moon after Moon gets the better of him, and when Moon escapes from the boys’ home, he is hot on his trail for revenge.

Moon manages to evade him, make friends with 2 boys who have escaped the home with him, and evades capture until one of his friends gets sick. Now that Moon has forged his first friendship, he is vulnerable, and he brings his friend in for help.

His other new friend helps Moon keep hidden, but Moon eventually has to deal with the hated law officer, the death of his sick friend, and the conflict he has between his yearning for community and family and what his father taught him. Decent adults help him through. He even finds family in the end.

There is some minor language (dumbas*) which is tame, esp. for the setting in the boys’ home. There is an antagonistic relationship between the police officer and Moon in which he physically hurts Moon and acts mentally unstable. It’s counter-balanced by decent authority figures. Moon fights people but only when he is defending himself and never because he really wants to.

The community Moon yearns for is realized in the hopeful ending where he reunites with family. There is no sense of the Trinitarian relationship of love that this points to. You’ll have to fill in the blanks. Moon, per his father’s advice, tries to communicate with his father by writing letters and burning them. He remains extraordinarily lonesome until he finds friends and family.

We never get the full story on Moon's father's reasons for his extreme behavior, just that he was in Vietnam and came back changed...

SAFETY RATING: 2.5 Flags

See Catechism of the Catholic Church: Family as image of unity of Trinity 2205

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The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne

It's easier to explore war when it is about battles far away in the past. Wars that are uncomfortably close, like WWII, can be much more sobering to face. Which is as it should be. Author John Boyne recognizes this and leads an expedition into the Heart of Darkness that skirts the outer boundaries of the horror of the Holocaust at a level appropriate to the mid-older tween crowd.

Nine-year old Bruno is the son of a prominent Nazi soldier who becomes the commandant for the camp of Auschwitz. Through Bruno's eyes: "The Fury" sends his family to "Out-with," where Bruno spies people in striped pajamas behind a fence and cannot comprehend why they are separated and what their life is like. Even as he befriends a boy name Shmuel, who talks to him through the fence, Bruno is strikingly innocent, almost to the point of disbelief. Unless, of course, you recognize the remarkable capacity for human beings to blind themselves to evil right in front of them.

More than his innocence, Bruno is a narrator of innate virtues: he tries to be honest with himself, not to judge others by their appearance, is polite. He is the way we all like to see ourselves: essentially good. But while he can excuse himself since he is a child, for the rest of us, our virtue often takes a backseat to our complacency. Evil often creeps in on soft feet and under disguise, and when it becomes noisier and pokes its head out, our instinct is to ignore it and hope it will go away. Which Boyne's novel points out by contrasting Bruno's ignorance to the reality of his time and place. Boy in the Striped Pajamas is not meant to make the Holocaust a distant battle but everyman's battle today as well.

In keeping with a post-modern audience, the book finds no answer to evil, it presents the narrative which poses the questions.

Most people find the ending, when Bruno slips under the fence, joins Shmuel, and sees the concentration camp face-to-face unto death, the key part of the book. But I found the key far before the climax, when Bruno first arrived at "Out-With." He describes it as the loneliest place on earth. Hell is not hell because of earthly death or a dearth of material things. Hell is the starkest loneliness because it is without God. And the answer to evil is not virtue, it is not even the fight against it. The only answer to evil is God. And that's either good enough, or not. It's an answer that might make you fight; it might make you virtuous, but the point is, it is not you. It's God.

Not that the book says this, but as you can see, it gets you thinking, as it intends.

The serious nature of the topic is the only safety warning I found significant, other than a good teaching moment I found early in the book. Bruno refers to 3 of his friends in Berlin and fondly remembers their playing together trying to "create chaos." I would challenge the vision that the goal of boys playing is to create chaos. Thanks to the fall, I'm sure they are tempted to create chaos. But I'd challenge them to the goal of taming chaos, beginning with their own soul and extending to the world. Seems in fitting with the theme of the novel, too.

SAFETY RATING: 3 Flags

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The Last Book in the Universe by Rodman Philbrick

This is a compelling read. It’s likely to get the attention of reluctant readers.

The protagonist is a young boy named Spaz (due to his epilepsy) who is surviving in one of the Urbs (suburbs) of Eden. Eden is the place on Earth where grass still grows and beauty still reigns after the Big Shake that destroyed most of the rest of the planet. Eden is populated by the Proovs: genetically improved human beings.

All the non-proovs live in controlled areas where life is cheap and those lucky enough to survive must answer to the current boss.

Spaz must answer his boss’s command to rob an old man living in the stacks. These are boxes stacked up in the destroyed cities. This man is old enough to have some memories of the time before The Shake, and he offers the boy all his valuables except the one that is valuable only to him: the last book in the universe. In a world where you can access a brain probe to go straight into your brain and excite you with the most vivid of images, books are no longer desired commodities.

The boy leaves with the last of the man’s worldly goods. He eventually comes back to steal the book, but instead events lead to his teaming up with the old man to cross forbidden territories to visit his sister who is dying of leukemia. Assisted by a proov, they make it to his sister and take her to Eden for help. Eden is forbidden to any “normals,” but their odyssey opens a window to potentially change that in the future.

The book is dark, and that is in perfect keeping with its apocalyptic theme. There is a sense of menace and there is non-gratuitous violence that is necessary in a world where order is barely kept, resources are scarce, and thugs are in charge. It is bleak but not hopeless.

The book makes an error I find endemic in post-modern times: it addresses the wrong question. While it takes on the ethical issue of treating the normal human beings as sub-worthy compared to the proovs, there never appears a question as to the moral problem of genetically-engineering human beings into a master race.

The above problem could be addressed with parental discussion, but I must give a serious warning about one thing. One of the characters addresses the question to Spaz if he and his sister were luv mates and is that maybe why his adoptive family kicked him out of their home? Spaz points out that while he and his sister are not blood-related, no way were they “luv mates” because he considers her a sister. Considering the horrible damage incest wreaks, why assault the innocent with the notion? This is an adult topic and disturbing young tweens with the idea was not necessary to the story.

SAFETY RATING: 1 Vatican Flag

See Catechism of the Catholic Church: 2293; 2294

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The Last Thing I Remember by Andrew Klavan

This book is one of my finds-of-the-year. (The Dickasons found it for me). Thanks, guys.

Now others can be thankful because another boy-friendly book has arrived on the scene: adventure, chase, bad guys, and karate heroes. My girls and I ate it up. The author is friendly to religion and loves his country. He might want to start writing college texts. Never mind; he’s too talented.

Our 17 yr. old hero goes to bed in his cozy home and wakes up strapped into a chair where it becomes quickly clear that he has been a victim of torture. How something can happen this rapidly is explained by memory loss: one year of his life is lost in his brain.

But he manages to escape, get to the good guys, only to find that they consider him a murderer. He was convicted of the murder of his former best friend. He has to dodge the clutches of the cops to clear his good name, only to find that in addition to the good guys being after him, so are the terrorists who were originally torturing him. In fact, confronting one of them face-to-face, he finds that at least a few terrorists consider him to be one of them!

In all the mayhem, there is some degree of violence. I still give it a solid safety rating because it is not gratuitous or graphic. It’s subdued considering the context and age-appropriate unless your child has never played a video game or seen much television. I would consider the ax-scene in Where the Red Fern Grows to be more disturbing than the blood-involved scenes in here.

SAFETY RATING: 3 Flags

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Al Capone Does My Shirts by Gennifer Choldenko

I was mostly charmed by this one. That’s despite starting out skeptical since I sent the last book I read by this author to the DaVinci pile.

Moose, a 7th-grader, and his family have moved to Alcatraz Island where his father works as an electrician and guard. While the setting is based on Alcatraz, the story revolves around the struggles of Moose and his family coping in 1935 with an autistic sister/child.

How they receive a little help in the end from Al Capone is a cute touch to a sometimes serious, sometimes funny, always historically-fascinating story.

Cautions: There is mention of the criminals locked up as murderers, rapists, thieves, etc.
Al Capone’s crimes are listed (without detail) but include the beating of traitors to death with a baseball bat.
One time there is a casual, “Oh Go_.”
Also, Moose’s 16 yr. old autistic sister had contact alone with a prisoner. While nothing about the encounter indicated any wrongdoing, Moose was worried because the warden had warned him the men hadn’t been around women in years. Later, the warden’s daughter makes a flippant comment about his sister possibly being pregnant which infuriates Moose. Reading level is mid-tweens. Content-level: older tweens.

SAFETY RATING: 2 Vatican Flags

Historical Fiction: 1935; Great Depression; America; Alcatraz

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Pool Boy by Michael Simmons

I liked this character-study.

Not because he was a Pollyanna or Heidi-type, but because he was an honest picture of an indulged teen. Who, darn it all, was obnoxiously endearing.

Bret’s father is arrested for insider-trading. Bret’s rich world is more than shaken. In addition to losing all his perks (like a $5,000 stereo for his birthday), he has to get used to a father in jail, the loss of his Beverly-Hills-style home, and adjustment to menial labor.

His new job flipping burgers doesn’t work out so well, but his job cleaning pools, including the one at his old home, works out in ways that he does not expect. The old man that hires him fills in as a mentor and helps teach Bret to get past his rich-boy syndrome.

His pool-boss, Alfie,is a man who, in a typically real-life complication, was not the best of father-figures himself. He deserted his daughter and wife and only showed up intermittently in his daughter’s life, much as he loved her. He counsels Bret to forgive his father, and he makes a profound impact on him in the short time they work together.

Bret is an obnoxious boy. He is a character who is uncomfortably what we could all be like if we grew up like him. In the end, he pieces together some life-lessons that are worth learning via the love of Alfie.

For older tweens, there are no issues that should pose a problem. I dropped a flag because of language, but I didn't find it insurmountable myself.

Bret uses language like: wise-as_ and dumbas_ , (much preferable to the "F" word and the Lord's name in vain) and he refers to a teacher as a dic_wa_ several times. It is not gratuitous. Rather, it's in keeping with the illustration of his obnoxious character points. His mother and sister are better models of dealing with adversity, something Bret acknowledges (which illustrates one of the redeeming aspects of his character.)

Bret, being a jerk, is hard on his father and completely dimissive of him and disrespectful after his father’s arrest.

The fact that he is challenged to forgive his father by a man who needs his own forgiveness as a father is a complicated, human, and teaching kind of moment.

And while Bret does not approach life with any overt Christian hope or charity, he does connect in the end to the universal value of love and forgiveness by teaming up with the daughter of the man whom he has loved as a father figure.

SAFETY RATING: 2 Flags

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Quantum Prophecy: The Awakening by Michael Carroll

Someone has watched The Incredibles and turned it into a novel. Great movie… mostly great book.

From the start, we jump into a comic-book-in-novel form: a huge battle rages amongst the superheroes and the villains. Ragnorak, a villain, wields a vehicle designed to strip the superheroes of their powers...

The battle ends in what becomes known 10 years later as the Day of Mystery. Because at the conclusion of the battle, all superheroes and villains disappeared. No one knows why. But countries around the world still celebrate the efforts of superhumans who fought for the innocent against the forces of evil.

Flash-forward. The superheroes did not all die that day. All who survived did lose their powers. But then they had children….

As Danny and his friend Colin grow into their powers and discover they are the offspring of ex-superhumans, they are kidnapped, and here things get complicated (and interesting).

(None of this gets entirely sorted out since this book is the first of a series…)

Danny’s father is Quantum, a former superhero. Quantum had the gift of prophecy and had a vision of Danny leading an army that would destroy most of the world. In order to avoid this, Facade poses as Danny’s father while Quantum is imprisoned, and powerful men collaborate to avoid the culmination fo this prophecy whilst simultaneously setting events in motion that look like they will trigger the fulfillment of this prophecy.

The author gets it right in some ways, so it’s a disappointment the times he strays. The good guys get that you can’t make an -ends-justify-the-means moral argument. The former good guy that chooses to violate this principle ends up appropriately as a bad guy. (Though, I should add, it is purposely confusing in this first of the series about who is good/bad and what their motive and purposes are. This is part of the development of climax, and I can’t say for sure where it’s going, although the moral message is accurate thus far.)


There is a bummer of a casual use of God’s name (about 3 times). There is a couple of girls who are known as DDG (drop-dead gorgeous) who tease the boy character being naked (not that he was; she was joking about it. Then she joked about seeing a tattoo on another character’s derriere. She would have been so much more attractive if she had been drop-dead modest and ladylike, too. Instead the author sets her up as kind of exciting. There is a reference to a party where the adults drank too much. And there is a time when a guard is lecturing a superhero about morality (he’s wrong, but he’s a bad guy), and she likens tuning him out to what she does with her mother’s “ranting.”

If the author keeps the good/bad distinct as they should be and doesn’t mix it all up in future novels in order to be “modern,” it could be a great series if you read it aloud to the younger tweens and skipped certain parts.

SAFETY RATING: 2 Flags

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The Schwa was Here by Neal Shusterman

The odd, quirky premise of this book reflects the odd and quirky sense of humor of the author. His humor is just one of the reasons I particularly liked this story. This author hits all the right notes.

Calvin Schwa has a strange quality of being invisible-ish. He kind of blends in with his environment and tends to be unnoticed. He could leave his hand up the entire class period and never be called on because his teacher just didn’t see him.

“The Schwa” meets up with Anthony, and they in turn meet up with an eccentric old man and his blind granddaughter whom both Anthony and the Schwa fall for They find their way through this and two personal traumas: Calvin’s mom disappeared when he was five, and the old man is agoraphobic. Only a fine author could weave this all into a believable, consistently funny, appealing tale. Shusterman soared. I certainly won’t forget the supposedly forgettable Calvin Schwa.

There’s mild adolescent language and humor throughout. Things like: the “middle finger syndrome,” the words ‘butt’ and ‘piss,’ two minor making-out and “being felt” jokes.
It turns out that Calvin’s mom left him because she was depressed and unhappy. That is resolved about as well as it can be. He does find her, confront her, and receive her apology. For mid-older tweens, I found it a great read.

I haven't read any other books by this author, and I didn't like the covers of his books on his website, so if anyone else reads his others, please let us know...

Safety Rating: 2 Vatican Flags

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Ranger's Apprentice by John Flanagan

Fell beasts. Kingdoms. Battles. Rangers.

Not Tolkien, but a story for Tolkien fans. Or just fans of good story-telling. Light on romance, heavy on battling, this is a terrific boy-book. Of course, my 13 yr. old girl liked it enough to read it in a day.

Confession: so did I, (and my housework reflects it). I enjoyed the entire wholesome book and had to see how it ended. Even though the ending was a set-up for the sequel.

Will is a ward who was dropped off at the local castle as an orphaned infant. All he knows of his family is that his father died a hero and his mother died after childbirth. Raised amongst a group of wards, he had a decent life for an orphan.

His destiny was determined on choosing day, a day that apprentices are picked to train for future roles in the kingdom. Will hopes to become a knight-in-training as he believes his father once was. Instead of being chosen for Battle-school, he is offered the chance to become a Ranger, essentially a spy and scout with ninja-like training. In the end, through acts of heroism on his part, he earns the chance to attend Battle school. By this point, the Rangers have won the reader over, and you hope they’ve won Will over, too and that he'll continue his apprenticeship with them.

I knew this would be a fine book when the orphaned boys were properly cared for by the local baron. I was further impressed when Will won his acceptance to apprenticeship less by his skill than by proof of his character when he withstood the temptation to lie.

One hel_ and one dam_ do not undermine the book’s safe rating, in my opinion, especially when they were rare and only in the context of the extremity of battle.


Safety Rating: 3 Vatican Flags; High-Readability

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Freak the Mighty by W.R. Philbrick

Freak is Kevin, a small, gifted boy with a birth defect that crippled him. Maxwell is a giant of a boy who is not particularly bright. Together, they make a striking pair of friends who dub themselves “Freak the Mighty.”

Neither really had a friend until Freak moves into Max’s neighborhood. Freak gains freedom of movement by riding on Max’s shoulders, and Max claims that Freak gives him a brain. This may be true, but Freak did not give Maxwell a heart. Max’s size and slow ways mask the heart of a gentle giant and true friend.

Now, the most memorable death of all book characters to me, remains Old Dan’s and Little Ann’s in Where the Red Fern Grows. The death of Freak runs a close second. It’s not just because you get so attached to his character but because you get as attached to Maxwell whom he leaves behind. Just as the boy in Red Fern will never hunt the same way again, the twosome that made Freak the Mighty can never hunt treasure, slay dragons, or beat gangs again. It’s a keen, sharp loss. And a wonderful read.

Remember that as I list all potential problems in a book, it sounds worse than reading it in context… Maxwell is fond of saying “but_head. Oh my Go_ is used several times. Freak refers to his ex-neighbors as “drug-fiends.” Also, on the 4th of July, Maxwell makes reference to all the drunk dads celebrating.

There is a climatic section of the book when Maxwell is kidnapped by his father after his father is paroled. Maxwell and his father are helped by another woman and man. When the woman tries to come to Max’s aid, the father gets angry and starts choking her. Max flashes back to when he was 4 and remembers his father strangling his mother. He yells at his father who turns on him and starts to choke him. At this point, Freak rescues Max in a most melodramatic moment. None of this is ever bloody or grotesque, but it’s intense. It makes for riveting reading, just be aware the topic may veer too close to adult material for your tween. For sheer readability, I’d give the book 3 Flags.

Safety Rating: 2 Vatican Flags; High Readability

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