Karen Harrington (1)Critiques

While the story seems to be wrapped up a little too neatly at the end, Sarah is a character I enjoyed getting to know better.

When Sarah Nelson was two years old her mother tried to drown her. Luckily the drowning didn’t take, unfortunately, her twin brother Simon wasn’t so lucky. In Sure Signs of Crazy we spend Sarah’s twelfth summer with her.

Sarah’s mother is now in a hospital for the criminally insane. Sarah lives with her father, and this summer he is letting her stay at home instead of shipping her off to her grandparents. Sarah and her father have moved around a lot, always trying to avoid being recognized. They both have their scars from their traumatic past, her father drinks too much and Sarah is constantly worried that she too will go crazy one day. Sarah is a very bright girl, and one of her hobbies is to collect her favorite words and find places to use them and she writes engaging letters to Atticus Finch, the father from To Kill A Mockingbird. This summer will be pivotal in Sarah’s life as she experiences her first big crush, becomes a woman, finds the courage to tell her alcoholic father how she really feels, and takes some big steps toward understanding what happened to her family ten years ago.

The book is aimed at eleven to thirteen year old children so is simplified somewhat but the author is well able to express the difficulties that Sarah encounters in a way that is understandable. Sarah is a wonderful character, she is smart, observant yet still naive. As the book is aimed at children, one can’t help but applaud how the author manages to explore how Sarah works through her anger and fears. Sure Signs of Crazy is full of empathy and humor, resulting in an engaging and hopeful story.

A sweet story of courage, friendship, and finding one’s voice. Middle school student Wayne survives an airplane crash and loses his ability to speak. He realizes how much he doesn’t say and the importance of what needs to be talked about as he navigates his grief, adolescence, and difficult relationship with his father and grandfather.

children's middlegrade fiction/school stories. This story about fitting in and standing up to fears has a more diverse cast than usual (a Muslim girl, a formerly-fat Hispanic, an agoraphobic mom; the main character is red-haired). For some reason the girl is obsessed with visiting France, which makes as much sense as anything kids get obsessed with, but it feels a little trite. I also didn't care for the dad-in-hospital-after-falling-out-of-tree-concussion subplot, having known way too many kids who have lost parents to various illnesses, but that could just be me.

children's realistic fiction; 12 year old's dysfunctional family drama (PG-13--probably 6th grade and up). I liked Sarah's voice/character a lot but got a bit tired at the end waiting for her to wrap things up (possibly because I'd read another book in between, right before I tried to finish this one, and had lost momentum/train of thought). Nice sprinkling of more challenging vocabulary words (though the definitions weren't always included, as with "infractions"). There were several funny moments that made me laugh out loud, too.

Love, love, love this book! Sarah's love of words, her highlighting the dictionary, and her letters to Atticus Finch make me wish she was my friend.

This is a book read in one sitting! Mysti enters seventh grade without her previous best friend Anibal Gomez. Originally overweight and the brunt of nastiness from school mates, Anibal decides to lose weight and become a "hipster." To do so, he believes he needs to drop his one and only friend Mysti, so that he can be part of the in crowd.

Now, all is fair in making fun of Mysti. Cruelty is now his go to thing to do. Making fun of and sharing her personal secrets deems him as better than he previously was. It hurts Mysti BIG time.

Now, Mysti has no friends and has no idea where to sit at the lunch table. Added to the pain of rejection, her father falls from a tree resulting in serious repercussions. Previously, her dad held the family together and took care of the needs of Mysti's agoraphobic mother who refuses to leave the house.

As the food supply dwindles and Mysti's father's stay at the hospital is much longer than anticipated, Mysti must take charge of how to get food. Prompted by listening to the sounds of her dog's empty stomach, she learns to walk to the grocery store for dog food and other needed items.

When she walked in a rain storm, wearing a bright orange coat, Anibal Gomez notices Mysti's soaking by a passing car. This, he deems is worthy of a poster distributed to his new friends enabling him to laugh and make supreme fun of Mysti.

Through it all, Mysti finds another friend, gains courage to enter a talent show and finds transportation to visit her father in the hospital.

This book is a treasure and highlights why I enjoy YA books.

Four and 1/2 stars. Highly recommended.½

Middle school is such a hard part of life.

Moving book about a young girl dealing with loss. Would recommend for 11 and up, or very mature 10 year old due to morbid subject matter.

This is a pretty interesting book, although this book has many characters and is a little confusing. I had to read it a couple of times to get it. Mysti (the main character of the book) is a red-haired girl who is a little different from other people and wishes she were a character in a book (what a coincidence).½

http://tinyurl.com/y8jp49ww

Surely, there are less blatantly obvious set-ups in YA fiction?

You know right away (so there's no spoiler here) that Sarah's mother is in a mental institution because she tried to drown her and her twin brother when they were small. Everything leads from there, as you would expect it to - obvious confusion about not having her mother in her life, wondering who her mother really is, angry at her father for essentially being the only one left, etc. etc.

But the confusing part about this novel is that Sarah is just super-duper more intelligent than anyone. She asks mind-bendingly advanced questions and has an emotional presence of someone in their thirties. At twelve. It's too unbelievable. I can understand crafting a character that has some smarts, but all of them?

The tale didn't resonate with me, then, and the obvious ending - where Sarah is less than emotionally resilient in order to effect the plot - was also not believable. A pity, since I think Harrington has the chops to create something far more plausible.

This is a coming-of-age, realistic fiction novel in which I laughed and I cried.

The novel begins “Before.” Wayne is eating lunch with his uncle, who seems to be a great influence for Wayne. When his uncle returns to the military from his short leave, he dies. He’s lost a man that he can talk to and be close to, leaving an emptiness in the family. In response, Wayne, his grandfather, and his mother travel to Arlington National Cemetery for his funeral. His grandfather want to grieve alone, so he chooses to drive back to Texas, leaving Wayne and his mother to fly home. The back of the plane comes off, making the plane crash. Wayne and his mother survive.

The real story is the “After” sections. After his uncle dies. After the plane crashes. After he loses his voice from an injury in the crash. Wayne has always talked a lot to cover feeling awkward in social situations. In fact, he has a fool-proof method--he tells all kinds of facts that he thinks people will find interesting, which many are. Now he can’t speak, so he’s left with awkward. In addition, his grandfather moves in because his mother can’t drive due to her injury and they’ll need help at home. Wayne isn’t particularly close to his grandfather, who is ex-military. He talks about serving and he’s got a drill sargeant way about him. Wayne isn’t interested in going into the family business--aka, the military. His grandfather can be rather demanding, and Wayne can’t argue because he can’t speak; and, even if he could speak, he can’t argue with his grandfather’s strong personality. Wayne also has a father who is mean. In the midst of all of this, Wayne wants to woo a girl at school.

I really liked watching Wayne deal with the realities of life, which can be overwhelming, painful, and sad, although this novel isn’t any of these adjectives. I laughed a great deal because Wayne is funny. If you like books like Wonder, and Snicker of Magic, you’ll like this novel as well.

MIDDLE GRADE FICTION
Karen Harrington
Mayday
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 978-0-316-29801-8, hardcover (also available as an ebook), 352 pgs, $16.99
May 24, 2016

Twelve-year-old Wayne Kovok is an anxious seventh-grader who uses facts (Did you know that chickens can run up to nine miles an hour?) to protect himself from awkward silences and uncomfortable emotions. “A fact is like a shield,” Wayne says, “You can hide behind it. Then you can make a run for it if you need to. Or make someone laugh so that they aren’t laughing at you. Or distract your mom if she is sad.” Wayne’s life is pretty normal—Spanish homework and does Sandy Showalter really like me?—until his Uncle Reed is killed in action in Iraq.

As Wayne and his mother are flying home from Arlington National Cemetery with Uncle Reed’s burial flag (“There was a waiting list for the honored dead,” Wayne observes. “That might be one of the saddest facts I’d ever heard.”), an unseasonal storm forces their plane into an emergency landing. Author Karen Harrington’s imagery is vivid as the plane begins to fall. Wayne’s mother has been cradling Uncle Reed’s burial flag when a hole is ripped in the side of the plane and the flag “unfurled and sailed up into the fuselage like a patriotic kite.” Wayne and his mother survive but many passengers do not. Wayne leaves the hospital with one eyebrow, a large “L”-shaped (“the sign of a loser”) wound stitched together across his face, and a throat injury. The boy who uses his voice to protect, distract, and fill, now has none.

Harrington’s characters are diverse and genuine. There’s Grandpa, a retired army drill sergeant, who moves in with Wayne and his mom to help out during their recovery, quoting Napoleon and issuing commands. Wayne’s mother, who loves Jane Austen movie adaptations and has named their dog Mr. Darcy, shaves off an eyebrow “in solidarity.” Denny, Wayne’s new friend from voice therapy, is preparing for his bar mitzvah, which means he has to read a portion of the Torah aloud to the congregation at their synagogue, which is unfortunate because Denny stutters. But, boy, can he sing—think Mel Tillis.

Mayday is the story of how Wayne learns to deal with unavoidable silences and difficult emotions while his vocal cords heal, making decisions and realizing his own agency, and learning “the economy of the shrug.” Wayne’s first-person narrative is by turns funny and sweet, anguished and melancholy, but always smart and perceptive. The plot is simple, though it deals deftly and sensitively with some of the toughest issues a family can face and Wayne sometimes feels like “the rope in a tug of war. The rope never wins. It just gets pulled.” The pace moves along at a good clip, guaranteed to retain the attention of younger readers.

Mayday compares favorably with the classics from Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume. “I just needed the flag to be found,” Wayne reflects, “Grandpa to move back to his house, my face and neck to heal, my dad to stop messing with me, and Mom to keep smiling and make spaghetti every Tuesday.”

Originally published in Lone Star Literary Life.

This book is full of interesting characters who are trying to survive being different in 7th grade. The main character is struggling with family problems and a best friend who has turned into a bully. I loved the voice- phrases like "he is a run on sentence with a mouth" made me laugh.

Mysti's best friend has decided to go for popularity over friendship, as 7th grade starts. At the same time, life with an agoraphobic mother changes drastically when her father ends up in the hospital. Mysti learns the real meaning of courage as she overcomes her difficulties and holds on to her dreams. Author Karen Harrington grew up with an agoraphobic mother and talks about it in her author's note at the end of the book. A wonderful story of resiliency.

Quick Summary: Mysti Murphy imagines herself in a book because her life is so crazy. Her mother is afraid to leave their home and her best friend dropped her in a social climbing experiment. When her father has an accident, her whole world changes in a moment.

What I liked: I loved the way Mysti envisioned both herself and the world around her as part of a story, since I often do that, too. Although I hated the way it made Mysti feel, I liked the descriptions of Anibal’s actions and her reactions and feelings when Anibal trashed her in front of others. I felt Mysti’s struggles as she pushes herself to do things she has never done before.

What I did not like: I did not like how loyal Mysti was when Anibal dumped her for others. It really frustrated me for Mysti to continue to believe that Anibal was her friend when he obviously was not.

The bottom line: I think that many kids will identify with Mysti as they have either received or seen similar behavior from their peers. Agoraphobia is a highly interesting subject and seeing Mysti grow and push herself to overcome her mother’s problems if uplifting.

Status in my library - I will definitely order a copy for my library.

Rating >
Overall - 5
Creativity - 4
Characters - 5
Engrossing - 5
Writing - 5
Appropriate length to tell the story - 5

Content>
Language - none
Sexuality - none
Violence - none
Drugs/alcohol - none

An incredibly sad, touching story about young 12-year-old Sarah whose mother kills her twin brother when they were two years old. Sarah escapes by writing to Atticus, the character from TKAM, as she seems him as a kind of father figure. What is lacking is an in-depth understanding or explanation as to why the mother did what she did -- simply labeling her "crazy" or "mentally ill" is too vague.

Courage for Beginners by Karen Harrington is a realistic fiction novel about a girl who tries to be courageous in the midst of adversity.

Mysti Murphy starts the 7th grade without her best friend because he decides to do a social experiment. They were "losers" the previous years and he decides that he'll be a hipster; part of this experiment is that Mysti not talk to him. He ends up bullying Mysti and becoming a jerk. Mysti is now on her own. She sits at the "loser" lunch table and meets two very interesting people, Wayne and Rama, who become her school friends. Wayne is full of facts and seems to enjoy learning and has a joy towards life. Rama wears a scarf over her head because I assume she is Muslim. Rama is smart and tries to get Mysti to see her former best friend in a realistic light.

Life at home is not so great. Mysti's dad takes a bad fall and has to spend months in the hospital. Mysti's mother is an agoraphobic, meaning she never leaves the home. Food becomes scarce because dad can't run all of the errands and Mysti's mother can't leave the house. Mysti has to find a way to feed her family and her dog.

Mysti is angry with her mother because she doesn't get help for her condition and her dad is at the hospital alone. What bothered me is that Mysti doesn't tell anyone about her struggles yet blames her mother for not telling about her problems. Mysti also doesn't act like a 7th grader to me; she seems younger. She does learn that her boundaries can extend beyond school and home as she faces her fears in order to keep the family fed. There's really not a rosy ending to the novel. It's actually very realistic in that things don't change much and yet their lives change drastically with the absence of their father. As in real life, you lose friends to popularity and gain other friends who show you that the former friend never was really a friend.½

I bought this novel - in hardback, even though I have limited space left on my shelves! - because of the connection with To Kill A Mockingbird, and despite taking too long in getting around to actually read the thing, I am so glad I did. Waiting until I was in the right mood to re-read Mockingbird also means that I was better able to appreciate just how well Karen Harrington balances source and inspiration in her story, having her twelve year old narrator write beautiful letters to 'Atticus' while mirroring the spirit of Scout's journey of discovery.

Books like this, aimed at 'young readers', almost make me wish I was growing up twenty years later, although adults can take just as much as pre-teens from this multi-layered and honestly written novel. Any story that can make me laugh and cry within the space of a few hours is worth keeping, and Sarah's emotive narration had a powerful effect on me. I don't think you need to have survived a troubled childhood to identify with a girl whose conflicting feelings make her doubt her own sanity, but I have definitely been on the same wavelength: 'It's funny how you don't know you are a bunch of pieces until someone hugs you together'.

Yes, all the regular character types found in YA novels are featured - the loving but dysfunctional family, the cute and quirky first crush (bonus points for making Finn an etymology student, though) - but putting them together in the right order is what raises this above most teen literature. Katherine Reay's Dear Mr Knightley, for example, is similar in content and direction, but writing to a beloved fictional character is fitting for Sarah, and works really well in terms of characterisation and plot development. And what could have seemed contrived and callous - using mental illness and alcohol abuse to make Sarah a troubled teen - actually flows really well to form a heartbreaking but also genuinely inspiring reflection of Harper Lee's classic.

I'm a sucker for this kind of cover: it just pops and catches your attention. Luckily, the writing and story within delivered. 12 year old Sarah Nelson has a sad, complicated past and yet in spite (or despite) her unwanted noteriety and anguish, she wants to write about what something other than all her troubles. Moving to a new town, making some new friends, and developing her first crush make her summer one of discoveries, acceptance, and both funny and bittersweet moments alike. I think kids will love this story: hand to readers who loved See You at Harry's (Jo Knowles).

I really enjoyed this book and am embarrassed it took 6 months to get around to reading it. The narrator is a bit old for her age, but it's plausible as she has a dad who is a professor and has also gone through hard life circumstances. Next time someone says "someday, you'll understand" I'm totally using her comeback - ºIt is a linguistic cop-out for people who don't have an answer or don't want to answer." She spends the summer trying to make her life exactly what she wants it to be, with negative and positive consequences. Even though it has a girl protagonist, I think some boys would appreciate it. Cautionary tales include her dad overindulging too often (I love the way she tries to fix that!), as well as no means no, but in a middle school appropriate way. Also- she has a special affection for defining words.

Mentioned as a valid possibility for an award, I found this mentioned on a Mock-Newbery site.

Touched so very much by this book, it is difficult to write a review.

Dealing with very difficult subjects, I give this a solid five stars.

Written from the perspective of 12 year old Sarah Nelson, page after page I smiled, and I cried as I found wonderful passages that were spot on and went back and re read them time and again.

And, while I wanted to know how the book ended, I hated it when the last pages were near. The emotional turmoil of a young woman who experienced what, thankfully, many will not, was written with breath taking clarity and soul searching angst.

Sarah was a twin. When her mother tried to drown she and her brother at two years of age, she survived, Simon did not. Found guilty and institutionalized, Sarah's mother sends two communications each year. The birthday card of year 12 sets in motion a journey that is poignant beyond words. She's spent years wondering, worrying if she is crazy like her mother.

Living with her father, who no doubt loves her and tries the best he can, when ever there is an anniversary, a tv program, or a newspaper story about the tragedy, he resorts to alcohol, until the days blur by and memories are all that are needed to pull out the bottle, leaving Sarah angry and left to fend by herself.

Whenever people learn of the travesty, Sarah's father moves. Landing in yet one more small town community, Sarah once again learns what to and what not to say, how to avoid conversations about parents, and how to lie about events that were not her fault, yet somehow she feels responsible. At the end of the semester, knowing that the when she returns in the fall she must write about her family and compile a family tree, causes severe dread and obsession.

An avid book reader and lover of words, when Sarah finds [To Kill a Mockingbird], the book resonates. Writing letters in her diary to Atticus Finch, she longs for a father as honest and courageous as he.

It is through these letters that we see the sadness and longing of Sarah for a normal father and a mother who might buy her dresses, put notes in her lunch box and love her.

Outstanding! A Must Read!!

Sarah, a twelve-year-old girl is unlike any other preteen; for example: she spends her time writing letters to Atticus Finch and her best friend is a plant. Some might call her crazy, but it isn’t until she sets out for an investigation of her family secret when the unexpected and extraordinary happens. Great for text-to-self connections based on growing up; writing prompts; character analysis; perspective writing: putting yourself in Sarah’s shoes etc.

The heroine's mother tried to drown her as a baby. She successfully drowned her twin brother and is currently in custody in a mental health facility. Her dad moves her around a lot. Once people in one community make the connection to the crime, they pull up stakes and move away to start over somewhere else. In order to cope her father drinks heavily.

As part of a summer assignment she writes letters to Atticus Finch. Through this she comes to terms with what has happened in her life.

Children's books have ventured into ground once held only by the occasional teen read. Poverty. Alcoholic parents. Dwarfism. Issues that were once taboo for younger, sensitive readers.

I was one of those sensitive readers. I still am. I've had to put away a lot of books that are too difficult to read.

After i read the blurb on the back, I was very worried that I'd have to set aside this book.

No fears. Yes, it is a difficult subject (the main character's mother drowned her son and tried to drown her daughter). But it is perfectly explored, with all the thoughts and questions you might expect from a young girl.

I liked this story very much.