Not a Newbery book, but it might as well be

[sholio]

(In reference to the frequent depressingness of Newbery books for kids.)

This book was one of my many used-bookstore acquisitions from Tucson, which I read on the plane coming home. I would like to preface this by saying that I really did enjoy the book and it was an entertaining airplane read. However, it really was not what I was expecting, to an almost hilarious degree.

Let me begin by showing you the front cover and back cover copy, which was all I knew about it going in.




Sounds cute and fun! Kids heartwarmingly make friends with an elderly hermit and rescue whales!

While technically these things do appear in the book, the back cover leaves out a few things. Like, say, 90% of the book.

Spoiler-ish poll under the cut.

Poll #21514

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 61

View Respondents

Guess what this book is actually about! (Check all that apply; at least 2 of these are true.)

View Answers

The 10-year-old heroine dying of cancer.
8 (13.1%)

The heroine and her mother's slide into poverty, widowhood, and starvation after her dad enlists in WWI.
39 (63.9%)

The heroine dealing with the drowning death of her same-age best friend.
38 (62.3%)

The heroine heartwarmingly making friends with an elderly hermit who then kills himself.
46 (75.4%)

The narwhals on the cover:

View Answers

are metaphorical; they're a metaphor for war and man's inhumanity to man.
2 (3.3%)

exist, but are brutally massacred by the villagers for their horns until the beach is running with blood.
9 (14.8%)

At least some of both A and B.
50 (82.0%)

This book also includes:

View Answers

Descriptions of starving villagers having to eat their pet dogs to survive.
1 (1.7%)

Teenagers attempting to murder a harmless elderly man because they think he's a German spy.
10 (16.7%)

The heroine accidentally faking her own death and convincing her recently widowed mother that she's just lost her daughter too.
0 (0.0%)

All of the above.
49 (81.7%)

It actually is not a particularly depressing book, all the above aside; it is, on the whole, a fairly optimistic book. It's just not the book I was expecting.

ETA: Extensive book spoilers in comments, btw.

Comments

[sovay]

Guess what this book is actually about! (Check all that apply; at least 2 of these are true.)

Oh, jeez. I have tried to select a mix of "not total grimdark" and "many children's books seem unclear on the distinction between heartwarming and heartrending."

[sholio]

You're dead on with the first two questions, but not quite pessimistic enough on the last one.

[sovay]

You're dead on with the first two questions, but not quite pessimistic enough on the last one.

All of the above, huh?

[sholio]

Yep. Although, to be fair, the eating-dogs-to-survive part is something we're told about in someone else's flashback, not something the heroine actually experiences.

[sovay]

Yep.

How does the heroine accidentally fake her own death? Is this one of those "kids take boat out, boat returns sans kids, everyone leaps to reasonable-for-fishing-community-already-seeing-a-shedload-of-bad-luck conclusions" situations, or is it weirder in keeping with the general air of metaphor?

[sholio]

It's the first one. Which is a perfectly reasonable plot twist in a book about a couple of adventurous kids set on an island; it's just that it happened to occur in the middle of a cavalcade of absolutely horrendous stuff happening to this family, which included Dad being declared dead in the war and the mom becoming bedridden with something vaguely pneumonia-like due to working herself to exhaustion trying to keep the family from starving to death.

[sovay]

which included Dad being declared dead in the war and the mom becoming bedridden with something vaguely pneumonia-like due to working herself to exhaustion trying to keep the family from starving to death.

. . . Is Dad not actually dead?

[conuly]

When I saw that was an option, I knew that had to be it.

[sovay]

When I saw that was an option, I knew that had to be it.

I was trying not to overdetermine, in case the precise level of heartrending was a fakeout. (Also, in a WWI story with an elderly hermit, I was pretty confident about the German spy misapprehension.)

[sholio]

He's actually not! (A twist which I did see coming, but was then blindsided by the completely out-of-left-field suicide.)

In general, this wasn't a terribly sad book; it was just a way heavier book than I was expecting, starting with how most of it is about the characters coping with WWI, which isn't even hinted at in the back cover copy.

[sovay]

starting with how most of it is about the characters coping with WWI, which isn't even hinted at in the back cover copy.

I noticed that! You'd think most historical novels would tell you.

[sholio]

Yeah, the historical setting threw me A LOT. There are no obvious time cues in the early part of the book, at least nothing I picked up on, and it was written in the 80s, so there wouldn't be computers and cell phones yet. I just assumed it was meant to be contemporary, or at most a decade or two earlier; then the earliest mentions of the war made me go "oh, okay, it's WWII" until someone mentioned the actual date (1914) and ... oh.

The WWI setting is fairly unique; you don't see that a whole lot in kids' books.

[sovay]

I just assumed it was meant to be contemporary, or at most a decade or two earlier; then the earliest mentions of the war made me go "oh, okay, it's WWII" until someone mentioned the actual date (1914) and ... oh.

I had that happen last week! I was reading a secondhand copy of Eilís Dillon's The Island of Ghosts (1990) in a used book store and from the general attitudes and technology I thought it was set in the first half of the twentieth century until a Concorde went overhead. I had to leave it a third of the way through, but I'm still not sure if the setting was meant to be contemporary to publication or just sometime after the invention of the Concorde.

The WWI setting is fairly unique; you don't see that a whole lot in kids' books.

I've read some; I agree it's a less common setting than WWII; I feel like the chances are increased with Michael Morpurgo.

[lilacsigil]

Learning it's set in WWI, "Yum, yum, whales for dinner" would have been high on my list of probabilities!

[ratcreature]

I find the idea that you could set a book during WWI without it being obvious that it is WWI really weird. But then I guess I'm used to WWI books set in Germany or at least somewhere in Europe. I really enjoyed some YA on WWI, but you really couldn't miss the setting, even though it wasn't set during battles or anything.

[kore]

Yeah, that description did not make me think of WWI!

[kore]

The WWI setting is fairly unique; you don't see that a whole lot in kids' books.

The only one I can remember is Charlotte Sometimes, and maybe some of the later Anne of GG books?

[lunabee34]

That is wild!

[thedivinegoat]

I've not read Why the Whales came, but being familiar with his other works, I can make a fair guess. (My twins have just done Private Peaceful at school and loved it, proving in some cases they have very different taste to me)

[sheron]

You saw a dying whale on the cover and didn't think to expect exactly the book that it was? XD

Because as soon as I saw that cover that was *exactly* what I was picturing.... I actually pictured something worse.

[trobadora]

Ha, I scrolled down to see if there was an "all of the above" option, and there was! OMG.

[copperfyre]

I have read this book so I think participating in the poll is probably cheating. Michael Morpurgo writes incredibly sad children's books (and a lot of them are WWI related, now I think about it, he wrote War Horse, which is probably his most famous) with misleadingly cute covers and summaries and then 'holy shit' story lines. A lot of them do still manage to be pretty optimistic, though.

This is reminding me how much I like this book, I should track it down.

[rachelmanija]

Okay so I want more details. Does the hermit commit suicide because of the German spy thing? Does she find the body? Do any narwhals escape? Why are they massacred for their horns specifically when everyone's starving?

[rydra_wong]

I would just like to compliment you on your choice of icon here.

[sholio]

The suicide was particular WTF because he just randomly decides to kill himself after the German spy thing was resolved and the town was halfway to accepting him rather than treating him as an outcast. It was sort of like the author went "woops, there's a loose end, better tie that one up" and the hermit goes off to drown himself. There was no body. Maybe he's alive! He can come back in the sequel!

The whale thing - okay, I was heavily simplifying in the poll. There are two beached-whale incidents in the book. Incident #1 involved the beached pod of whales all being massacred for cash, leading to everyone who had been involved in the whale massacre dying in various terrible ways (this is where eating dogs to survive comes in, as well) and a rumor that the island of the whale-killers -- the neighboring island to the heroine's island -- was cursed. Incident #2 involved a single beached whale who was rescued by the kids and the villagers, thereby lifting the curse.