Dragons, Birds and Gorillas…BOB Matches 7 & 8

One right, one wrong. Can you curse a curse? I REALLY wanted Ivan to be the title to break the Newbery Curse!

“After all, birds are real dragons, aren’t they?” –Marie Lu, on Seraphina vs. Moonbird

Props to Marie Lu for making me want to go back to both of these books for a re-read. Seraphina was a title that everyone at my bookstore was buzzing about before the blogs and awards committees discovered it. I read the beginning, got bogged down in some info-dumping, skimmed more of it and then said “I’ll get to it later.” I need to give it a much closer read, clearly. Philip Hoose is one of my absolute favorite non-fiction authors; I read his book We Were There Too! aloud to my third graders every year and I count meeting meet and Claudette Colvin as one of my top National Book Festival thrills ever. Moonbird has been a hard book to find, and we didn’t have it at the bookstore, but I finally got ahold of it at the DC library this week, so it is next on my list.

“What does a radical self-educated bookseller have to do with a depressed 35 year-old strip mall gorilla?”

-Catherine Gilbert Murdock on No Crystal Stair vs. The One and Only Ivan

NOOOOOOO! Ok, I was sad about this one. I read No Crystal Stair twice, and never got nearly as into it as most of the other books in this battle. Like a few other commenters over at Heavy Medal, I thought that the voices blended into each other and the lack of structured plot (as opposed to other fiction and non-fiction in the battle, Splendors and Glooms or Bomb) meant that it failed to win my heart the same way that Ivan did. I’ve never tried to hand-sell a book by using the description “This is the new Charlotte’s Web” but that’s what I’ve been doing. I’m sorry to see Ivan go, but I will be curious to see how No Crystal Stair fares against Seraphina. Let the battles continue!