The View from Saturday

"So, when he asked her how she had chosen the four members of her academic team, Mrs. Olinski knitted her brow and answered with hushed seriousness. "In the interest of diversity," she said, "I chose a brunette, a redhead, a blond, and a kid with hair as black as print on paper."
Dr. Rohmer was not amused. He gave Mrs. Olinski a capsule lecture on what multiculturalism really means.
"Oh," she said, "then we're still safe, Dr. Rohmer. You can tell the taxpayers that the Epiphany Middle School team has one Jew, one half-Jew, a WASP, and an Indian." (PG. 22)

YA--Newbery Medal winner

On my library search through the YA aisle I have been looking at the spines for the sticker that says Newbery winner. So I grabbed this title without taking out my cellphone and opening up my Goodreads app.

I did not enjoy this novel for a few reasons. My main reason was the lack of diversity from the author. The top quote was distasteful as a reader. It was obvious the author only wanted to talk about Jewish characters while the others that were not had disrespectful names like WASP (had to Google this term) or Indian, but no one asked what nationality he was as he had an English accent. But I kept reading because it was a short book.

Then the nooses came out. The 6th graders are in a competition and a teacher from another school tells Mrs. Olinski they will be hung and she corrects his use of the word to hanged. When the kids win that part of the competition the other classmates come out with nooses as a "joke" to the other school. It was weird. I don't see how a noose in any situation is funny. Mrs. Olinski, being a fabulous teacher, doesn't go out of her way to correct the behavior of the kids. Then the noose shirts are made to support the school. I don't get it.

Overall, the story was about kids and what brings them together. I didn't connect with the characters and I didn't care very much for the story line, but I am not the target audience, in all fairness. I just believe when a book, no matter the age, should be able to connect with all ages.

The Newbery Medal Association makes me rethink what I'm reading. I'm sure there were better books that year but no one ever remembers 2nd or 3rd place.

A couple weeks ago when E.L. Konigsburg passed away, I promised myself that I would re-read The View from Saturday. But the days have been flying by in a whirl of rehearsals and resumes and everything, so it wasn't until yesterday that I finally sat myself down with a slow cup of tea--just like Mrs. Olinski at Sillington House!--and got down to it.

The book is much as I remembered it--a little slow, but ultimately very rewarding and interesting, with four unbelievably precocious 12-year-olds at its center. I remember thinking when I first read The View from Saturday that no sixth graders talked the way Noah, Nadia, Ethan and Julian did, and I still think that, but I noticed this time through that each of the students really does have a unique way of speaking, and for that I applaud Ms. Konigsburg. I especially like that Nadia never uses contractions, and that Noah begins half of his sentences by saying "Fact."

What I like best about this book is how each of the members of Mrs. Olinski's academic bowl team--calling themselves The Souls--is able to answer questions in the final round based on their experiences, rather than their studying and practicing. Noah knows that "calligraphy" means "beautiful writing" because of the time he spent at Century Village, when he learned to write from former bookkeeper Tilly Nachman. Nadia knows about the Sargasso Sea because of the turtle walks she went on with her grandfather and his wife. Ethan knows at least one of the famous women in the question he answers--Elizabeth Cady Stanton--because of his own family history, and Julian supplies the acronyms "posh" and "tip" from his British heritage and his life on board a cruise ship.

This progression suggests to me that Mrs. Olinski, who never really knows why she chose her bowl team, chose them because of who they were and where they had been, rather than what they KNEW, to say nothing of how they connected to each other. Would Noah have known the answer to the calligraphy question if Nadia's grandfather and Ethan's grandmother hadn't gotten married, for example? As I've grown up, it's been my experience that the vast majority of the knowledge I've acquired hasn't been in school and hasn't been deliberately learnt; instead, I've picked it up along the way without necessarily meaning to, and have been surprised to find that I knew it. Even if it seems improbable that the kids would have been asked questions pertaining so closely to their lives, Ms. Konigsburg's point rings true to me.

It was really good. This book has been sitting in my bedroom bookshelf for a very long time, untouched and unread. It was probably a gift from my grandmother, who used to go to Half-Priced Books, garage sales, and library for-sale sections because she knew how much I loved to read. She doesn't do that very much anymore, but around 50% of my library is because of her. This book was a product from one of those gifts. I never read it when I was younger, as I was a firm believer in judging a book by it's cover. Simply, I did not like this cover (though, I do now). I also knew not what the Newberry Honor was, so I had no interest in picking it up. Fast forward to now, with me reading it long overdue.

The story-telling aspect of this was amazing. The strength and main focus of this novel was the characters; if the characters had been less important in the development of the story, this book would have been very weak. I also found the format of telling the story of the Academic Decathlon team through it's members talking not of the Academic Decathlon surprising, yet it paid off. I was bored in the beginning, but as I got invested in each person (especially Julian, my favorite character) the book's subtlety began to excite me. I think this is the kind of book that gets better with every re-read.

As a testament to how awesome this book is, any time I carry it around the school, a bunch of kids will run up to me and say, "That book was so awesome! The answers are in the back" and then run away.

I still don't see what all the fuss is with Konigsburg. Judging from the back-of-the-book synopsis, this novel should tick all the boxes for me: academic teams (I was one of *those* kids), a scrappy group of outsiders who become friends (ditto), and lots of little synchronous details which might be random but maybe fate? Despite this, I found the characters shallow (with the exception of Julian), Konigsburg's tone cloying, and the denouement extremely disappointing. In addition, I thought Konigsburg mishandled the portrayal of Mrs. Olinski's mobility impairment. Overall, this was a remarkably forgettable Newbery winner.

OK. I'm rewriting this because the first one didn't save! Incidentally, while reading I didn't notice that it's the same author as one of my absolute favorite books as a kid, The Mixed up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler!

Overall I liked this book. The characters are vivid and mostly believable. The situations the author puts them in left me laughing out loud at numerous points. I also liked many of the book's messages, such as: a gathering of oddballs is a glorious thing, kindness matters, sometimes kids are more mature than adults, and "tea is always at four." It is also filled with interesting informational tidbits, like that the word "tip" is actually an acronym for "to insure promptness."

The structure was also interesting. By this I mean not the beginning when a team of four students (self-named "The Souls") has almost won the championship in an academic competition and then going back into their lives and tracing how they became a team and finally won, though this is good, too, and not laid out in a mechanical fashion. What I rather mean is that although we are not surprised when the third-person narration shifts from a focus on (and insight into the thoughts of) one child character to the next, we ARE surprised when we finally peer into the mind of their teacher and we realize that the book is as much about her as it is about these four young people. Given the fact that she has just returned to teacher after a long hiatus following her becoming paralyzed following a car accident, and is struggling to find her place in the world in much the same manner as the students, this structure helps lend weight to the book.

What was difficult for me was to envision for whom among my students this book might be appropriate. Although I think many English language learners might find its themes interesting, particularly given that one of the students is something of an oddball because he is not typically American (his father is Indian and he was raised on a cruise ship; he speaks with a British accent and wears shorts and knee socks to school). However, to understand the humor in the book requires a certain cultural familiarity. I haven't been to Florida but could SEE the Jewish retirees, and that's part of what made me laugh aloud. With the exception of a limited few, my native or close-to-native English speaking students, on the other hand, would not likely be attracted either to the academic competition plotline or the rural and mostly white world depicted in the book. I would recommend the book to my daughter in 10 years, but I feel uncomfortable thinking about the fact that this might mean that this book is really white and middle class and that no urban kids of color would ever want to read such a book. Food for thought, anyway.

For BTR folks:

Snapshot: See above.

Hook: Funny, about outsiders, rich characters, plot that pulls you along. And not too difficult reading despite this depth.

Challenges: Narrative structure! The switching of narrative perspective would be difficult for readers unaccustomed to it, as would the time progression. The characters are connected in multiple ways, too, which requires attentiveness to figure out. And, as mentioned, for ELLs many cultural references would require explanation.

Student in mind: As I said above, none that I have currently. But I would recommend it to more advanced ELLs or any "outsider." OK, so maybe Shaina?

Conference notes: Given the challenges mentioned above, I would check in frequently to ask "Who's speaking?" and "What's his or her relationship with the other characters you've been introduced to so far?" In addition, because the way that those characters' self-perception and relationship with others changes over the book is what makes it such an interesting read, I would definitely ask about that.

Level: Middle school, for an eager reader, but not so juvenile as to preclude use for h.s. students. Not a text I would choose as a class text, but a good one for a literature circle, since it would provoke interesting discussion about the social pressures of schools.

This was a Newberry book but the characters and situations didn't ring true so I don't think it is valuable to kids or they would enjoy it. It was a little boring and predictable.

I was quite enjoying this, but the character of Mr. Singh bothered me, and the behavior of Mrs. Olinski, at the end of the book, made no sense. Mr. Singh comes off a little too strongly as the mysterious, wise Asian, somehow privy to the whole internal truth of the various character's stories, despite being almost a non-entity the whole of the novel. Mrs. Olinski even has thoughts to that effect when talking to him "I had never told anyone ______" How did he know? How, indeed. Considering that tolerance is one of the minor themes of the book, the stereotype really stood out, in a bad way.

And then there is Mrs. Olinski's bizarre near-breakdown over the colour turquoise. I read that section three times, to see if I was missing something to explain her level of overreaction (fashion-rage?) during what should be a reunion with an old colleague. Could not find it.