Two Portland-area authors show that being a children’s librarian can give you a leg up on writing books for children.

“Sparrow Being Sparrow”
By Gail Donovan
Illustrated by Elysia Case
Atheneum, 178 pages
$17.99
Ages 7-10

Gail Donovan clearly has a soft spot for difficult kids, especially those who get into trouble for being over-active, over-talkative, over-impulsive. Her middle-grade novels generally try to turn such perceived problems into assets. In her last book, “Finchosaurus,” for example, the young hero was a super-fidgety and slightly obsessive daydreamer whose obsession helped solve a mystery.

“Sparrow Being Sparrow” is classic Donovan. Sparrow Robinson is an irrepressibly high-spirited fourth grader; the book’s title reflects the way her long-suffering parents describe her enthusiastic outbursts. They are trying their hardest to teach her impulse control, because, as the author notes, “when Sparrow got excited, things tended to go wrong.” She knocks over chairs in her excitement to help a needy person get a bus ticket home. She decks an elderly neighbor – in a burst of happy “butterfly dancing”– and the woman ends up in the hospital with a broken hip, leaving among other things a houseful of cats unattended.

“Don’t get carried away,” her parents keep cautioning her. But she wants to get carried away. Grown-ups, she says, never get carried away. “They just plod along.” Hard to argue with that.

Much of the wit in the book comes from the fact that Sparrow is totally wise to her parents’ efforts to control her behavior. She drily observes their “strategies” and “positive parenting” methods that clearly come out of a book. Her mom uses expressions like “Let’s put a pin in this,” which Sparrow sees right through. It’s the “‘not-engaging’ strategy. Otherwise known as ignoring Sparrow.” For her part she’s supposed to show she is “listening and responding.” All so they can “fix” her. Fix all the “too much” stuff. The “too much drama. Too much shouting…too much running and climbing and dancing.”

Her impulsiveness does in fact get her in trouble at school, where she blurts out a lie – that she has seven cats, when in fact she is just cat-sitting for her hospitalized neighbor. But Donovan makes sure this same impulsiveness helps Sparrow solve the problem at the core of the book – not how to fix Sparrow but how to find homes for those cats.

Writing for the younger end of the middle-grade age group, Donovan (who is a librarian at Portland Public Library) has mastered the art of light-hearted, realistic fiction, humorously told and with a gentle lesson attached. Learn to live with your circumstances, embrace differences, tell the truth. And when life gives you lemons, start a lemonade stand at the end of your driveway.

“Princess of the Wild Sea”
by Megan Frazer Blakemore
Bloomsbury, 256 pages
$17.99 
Ages 8-11

What exactly is a hero?

Over the years, the answer has, thankfully, changed, at least in books and movies for children. From the Disney “prince-to-the-rescue-and-future-husband” trope of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty we have progressed to the “girl warrior” heroine of Mulan and Hunger Games. In “Princess of the Wild Sea,” Maine author Megan Frazer Blakemore offers her own refreshingly creative perspective.

Her plot is a twist on those familiar Grimm fairy tales. Princess Harbor Rose of Lapistyr is cursed at birth by one of her many magic-wielding aunts: before she turns 13 she will prick her finger and die, along with all her kingdom – or something like that. (Like any self-respecting curse, it’s subject to interpretation.) A second –benevolent – aunt countermands the curse: she will not die but only sleep, until “a hero rises” to save the day.

Harbor’s entourage (minus the father that she idolizes) flees to a place called Small Island, where they hope to keep her safe. But how do you hide from a curse?

The island is a matriarchal world, imbued with gentle magic. One aunt is a Feeler, one a Healer, one a Seer, one a Protector, and one can make colors change. Twelve-year-old Harbor, the only child on the island, is waiting anxiously for “her own magic to develop,” while avoiding like the plague anything that might prick her. (The sexual undertones are inescapable.) Studying to be a princess she has etiquette lessons, visits the library, gathers flowers, makes tinctures and jams.

It’s a bit slow and things plod along like this for an awfully long time – the first quarter of the book – until the story finally hits its stride with the inevitable pricking of the finger and the arrival of the boy, Peter. He washes ashore from The Somewhere Else (in this case Kansas but minus a dog named Toto). Peter is hailed as the prophesied hero who will save them from the horrifying zombie-like Frost army that is looming offshore.

The astute reader will have noticed the two elements that Blakemore has a great deal of fun with in this story, and that make it so deeply enjoyable to read. First, as a middle school librarian steeped in children’s books, she cannot resist playfully weaving in references to other books. In addition to the ones mentioned, there are winks to “Hansel and Gretel,” Narnia, “Little Red Riding Hood,” etc. Even “Blueberries for Sal” gets a nod.

Secondly, she takes the tropes of time travel and stranger-in-a-strange land and flips them on their head. Instead of following the modern-day child through a portal into, say, Narnia or Oz, she does the reverse. The reader, ensconced in Narnia or Oz, experiences the arrival of the alien being. Thus Peter, who lives in contemporary Kansas, arrives in this ancient Kingdom and, faced with Harbor’s fairy-style aunts, spews lines like “My aunt smells of Pine-Sol.” Say what? Or when Harbor’s father neglects her birthday, Peter tells her that “just sucks.” “Pardon me?” replies ever-polite Harbor.

Blakemore plays with settings, too. The story is set in Maine but not Maine, in the real world and the fantasy world, in ancient times and also the present and the recent past. The universes all exist at the same time, overlapped like layers of tracing paper. The effect is both amusing and jarring. One exile from the Kingdom of Lapistyr, for example, starts telling the (true) story of the wreck of the circus ship Royal Tar off Eastport and Deer Isle – “places that probably never existed” deadpans the author. These overlapping worlds will enchant some readers and confuse others.

Don’t ask me to explain the rest of the plot; it’s fabulously complicated, layer upon layer of it. Suffice it to say, Peter turns out to be not much of a hero. Bullied at school, wracked by fears, and only good at pretend fighting, he is less a savior than someone in need of saving.

When Peter’s prince-to-the-rescue turns out to be a dud, Harbor pivots to the other traditional savior: her father. He’s “big, bold, brave and heroic,” she tells herself. “He will know what to do. He will fix everything.” But alas, he too has feet of clay, or worse. Not only is he a no-show, it turns out he’s responsible for the whole mess they are now in.

Harbor is forced to come into her own. “Safety was not coming,” she realizes. In other words, she had to be the hero of her own tale. But what does that take?

Today’s heroines are often required to be tough warriors – better at being a boy than a boy. Harbor wields a bow (badly) and a sword (decently). But when the chips are down, it is her cool head, insight and perseverance that win the day. Not coincidentally, these qualities are gifts her aunts bestowed on her for her twelfth birthday – along with a few more freckles. (Girls with freckles are always spunky.) Heroes, at least according to Blakemore, turn out to possess not so much physical bravery as moral bravery. Like Harbor, who “does what’s right, even when it’s hard.”

And, not only does she not need a rescuer, she’s not remotely interested in romance. In a nice takedown of the old Disney-style romantic cliché, Harbor tells Peter that, unlike Sleeping Beauty, she “would not like someone to kiss me while I was sleeping, without asking.” Harbor is indeed a thoroughly modern and engaging heroine.

Amy MacDonald is a freelance writer and children’s author. She lives in Portland and may be reached at Amy@AmyMacDonald.com.

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