by Clare Vanderpool
Written in a mature child's folksy but intelligent voice, Moon Over Manifest is a sweet little story. In the end, Abby learns who she is and how she fits into her world, and the characters Vanderpool writes are perfectly lovely. This was slow reading for me, but only because I was so extraordinarily...
It must be a mixed blessing winning a Newbery Award for your first novel, like Clare Vanderpool did with this one in 2011. I imagine it is very possible she'll grow as an artist and craftsperson and write better books that will probably have no chance to win. Another downside is that some readers wi...
I'm not a fan of the ingenuous, folksy narrator. I'm not particularly enamored of the rural Depression setting, as it's been done so many times as to be stale. The ways of the Newbery committee are often opaque to me. All of which is to say that I didn't expect to love this book, but I didn't expect...
An outstanding work of historical fiction set in a small town Kansas and alternating between 1918 and 1936. An impressive debut novel.
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