ONE BIG OPEN SKY — Review & Giveaway

Thought for the Day:

“You write in order to change the world … if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.”

~ James Baldwin ~

Gifts for My Writer Friends:

Getting the new year off to a good writing start can be tricky. HERE Randy Ingermanson has some good thoughts about committing to your writing — Every Yes is a Thousand Noes.

We all get off the writing path sometimes. Getting back to it is HARD, but Nathan Bransford has a great post HERE that will help you find your way back.

Emma Walton Hamilton has great posts for picture book writers, but they often are simply good advice for writers. I see posts about using strong specific verbs, but finding the best concrete nouns is also important for telling the story you want to tell. HERE Emma will help you Strengthen Your Story with Concrete Nouns.

Happy New Year to all of you. I hope you had a wonderful holiday season. I had a wonderful trip to Florida and very much enjoyed seeing ONCE at the beautiful Maltz Theatre in Jupiter. The cast was magnificent. But what started out so great ended up not so great. American Airlines did fine on the first leg of our trip back (Maggie came home with me for Christmas), but our layover in Dallas Ft. Worth was delayed and delayed and delayed and delayed and our gate was changed four times and ultimately the flight was canceled. It is a good thing Maggie was with me, or I might have lost my mind. She coolly got on line for the ticket agent and got us another flight. We were supposed to be home at 7:30 pm and got home at 2:00 am. And two days later, I started coughing. I came down with full-blown flu, and Maggie came down with it a couple days later. I masked while on the plane, but not in the airport. I’ll know better next time. Despite all that, we had lovely family time and a great Christmas. And I stopped coughing a few days ago.

I always try to read Jennifer Bonhoff’s blog. She has such interesting content. If you don’t know Jennifer, you really should. She writes mostly MG historical fiction, and it’s very good. She has a new book, IN THE SHADOW OF SUNRISE, coming out this spring I can’t wait to get my hands on. You can see her blog HERE and her website HERE. Anyway, a while back I won a copy of ONE BIG OPEN SKY, on her blog. There has been a lot of buzz about Lesa Cline-Ransome‘s new book, and with good reason.

Young Lettie is quite comfortable in Mississippi where all her extended family lives and where she has lived her whole life. But her father, Thomas, grew up a slave and had his family sold away piece by piece. Now he wants to take his wife, Sylvia, and Lettie and her two younger brothers to Nebraska where they can get some land of their own and build a new life. They join a small wagon train of other African-Americans. It is an arduous journey, and the small group cannot use services (such as ferries to cross rivers) that white pioneers are able to use. Their group loses some people to illness and accidents, including Thomas, but they do pick up a young teacher, Philomena, along the way. She has a job waiting for her in Nebraska. They don’t have much, and supplies very expensive at the towns along the way.

Cline-Ransome has chosen to tell this story in free verse from the viewpoints of Lettie, Sylvia, and Philomena, although most of it is Lettie’s. The characters are well-developed and the story is certainly compelling. There are difficult issues represented, and this might be more appropriate for older middle-grade readers. It deserves readership well beyond the intended middle-grade audience. The writing is lovely and readers will be engaged all the way through. This is a great way for young people (and the rest of us) to learn some important history that hasn’t been written about nearly enough. And isn’t that an inviting cover? I love it.

I have a gently-read ARC of this book to give to one of you. All you need to do is be a follower (it’s free and easy — see the top, right corner of the post) with a US Address, and leave a comment. If you share the link to this post on social media, please let me know in your comment, and you will get an extra chance. And please don’t forget to check for other Marvelous Middle-Grade Monday posts at Greg Pattridge’s blog HERE.