Breathing Room by Marsha Hayles

Breathing Room is another Beehive Award Nominee that I picked up alongside Skinny and Paperboy. This children's novel tells the story of Evvy, a 13-year-old girl battling tuberculosis in 1940. As was customary at the time, Evvy is sent to a sanatorium where she rooms with several other girls battling the same, terrible disease. Evvy experiences pain, heartache and loss as she battles her own disease and watches those around her suffer as well. Her hopeful attitude carries her through as she makes dear friends and tries to heal enough to return home.

It's fascinating to me to read about how doctors used to try to treat various illnesses. They were often working blind, and so much of it was guesswork. I think we take medical technology advances for granted. When my oldest daughter was only 6 weeks old, she was hospitalized with an infection that led to a diagnosis of a kidney issue. After a 10 month battle with repeated infections, she had surgery to correct the problem. Many times in those 10 months, I thought about the fact that just 50 or 100 years ago, she would have died.

There are so many curable diseases now. Tuberculosis is one of those. We have vaccines to prevent it, and doctors know exactly how to treat it if you do contract it. But in 1940, it was dangerous enough to send small children to sanatoriums hundreds of miles from home, to be cared for by stranger, alongside other dying children. As a mother, I can't imagine sending my child a place like that. But it was necessary for survival back then. I found Evvy to be an admirable character, full of compassion, determination and, above all, bravery. In a time when she could have just worried about herself, she looked to help others. Amid bizarre, painful treatments, she found reasons to have hope. That's more people twice or three times her age could often do.

I thought this was a good quick, but insightful, read. Although the subject matter is a little heavy for a kids' book, I would read this with a 9 or 10 year old. I think it could provide for really good discussions about disease, death, and the amazing medical advances we've had in the last 75 years.

Overall Rating: 3 stars

Content Warnings: Heavy subject matter for young children.

Target Audience: Upper elementary/middle school kids.

Paperboy by Vince Vawter

This was the February pick for my neighborhood book club. It's another one off the Beehive Award Nominees table, and it was also a Newbery Honor book for 2014. Using his own life experience with a severe stutter, Vawter creates a simple story about a stuttering 11-year-old boy growing up in Memphis in 1959. The main character (whose name you don't learn until the end of the book) takes over his friend's paper route while he's out of town one summer. He meets some interesting neighborhood characters along the way and allows his naive innocence to put him in danger's way. 

One of my first thoughts about this book was how different our world was back then. The boy is put in some pretty sketchy situations that would make any mom nervous, from flirtatious older women to strangers inviting him in and a downright dangerous homeless man. I found myself distracted a bit by the minor characters and the problems they brought to the table that were never resolved. The author hinted at a lot of possible story lines with different characters, but most of them never came to fruition. The paperboy himself was forgettable and seemed a little too naive to me.

One member of my book club listened to the audiobook version of Paperboy and said the author's note at the end was very interesting to listen to. Vawter still has a bit of a speech impediment, which was audible in the small section he read aloud at the end. 

I do think this could make an good pick for a 4th-6th grade boy. Sometimes it's hard to find good "boy" reads in that age range. It has a wide variety of characters and introduces a different era of the not-too-distant past that they may not be familiar with. That being said, I didn't think it was great, and I certainly didn't think it deserved a Newbery Honor. When I was in elementary school, the Newbery Award was reserved for the best of the best. It seems these days, many of the Newbery books are just so-so, including this selection.

Overall Rating: 3 stars

Content Warnings: There are a couple scenes of adult drunkenness and hints of domestic violence.

Target Audience: Upper elementary to middle school boys

Wonder by R.J. Palacio

After hearing many friends rave about Wonder, I finally picked it up when my book club read it last fall. It started out pretty rough for me. It's the fictional story of a young boy with a severe facial deformity. The story begins as he prepares to enter school for the first time, in 5th grade. And here we reach my first hang-up with the story. Why in the world would parents who have kept their child out of school his entire life choose to have him start in middle school??? I was a normal kid and felt like I got eaten alive in middle school. This poor kid has a facial deformity that makes him look like a monster, and his parents decide to throw him in the lions' den of middle school.

After about 100 pages of reading about this poor boy get picked on and stared at, I looked at how much of the book was left and set it down. A few days later, I realized I really needed to finish it before book club, so I picked it back up. Shortly after my re-entry in the story, a new narrator picked up. Hallelujah! I didn't realize (until this point) the story is actually told from many perspectives: first, August himself, then his family members and friends. Once the narrators started shifting, I actually enjoyed the story. Instead of just seeing one, very painful point of view, I started to see the whole picture.

This book is all about character development. August himself grows by leaps and bounds. But the real story of change is in the people around him as they learn to live alongside this little "Wonder". I still think this is a very strange topic for an author to pick for a fictional story, but Palacio does a great job of revealing the good, the bad and the ugly of human character from a child's perspective.

Overall Rating: 3 stars

Content Warnings: Many people in the book, both kids and adults, say rude, hurtful and downright nasty things to August. It wouldn't be appropriate for very young children, but I think there are things in the story that are great conversation starters for older elementary kids. I know some 5th grade teachers use this as a read-aloud, which I think is a great starting age for this one.

Target Audience: upper-elementary to middle school kids and their parents