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."

[lilacsigil]

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

[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?

[indywind]

Noticing it's by Michael Morpurgo (of War Horse) fame tipped me off that it might (a) be about WWI, (b) lean more toward depressing than heartwarming, (c) have kind of random, wandering thrown-together plot.

All of those things are likewise true of War Horse, btw.

[recessional]

The Apple (Scholastic) edition covers were ATROCIOUS for this shit. The currently-issued edition explicitly plays up who the author is, that its a historical, and has a rather more meaningfully descriptive blurb.

[frith_in_thorns]

I am finding this really funny because this is one of the books which practically everyone in the UK reads about age 9.

Micheal Morpurgo is one of our great authors of Issue Books. They're very good! They are all very specifically written as Issue Books. I have never seen one in such non-Issue Book packaging, tbh!

[summerstorm]

I was guessing sort of randomly till I got to the last question and was so horrified I had to go with the bit I found the least awful. Which I assume is not what happened. Or at least not the only thing.

Jesus christ.

[winter_elf]

*facepalm* that's what I get typing on my tablet - leave off the important part: (edited)

Book was a hardcover picture book - front cover of a cute cat, back cover description was something like "X finds a new home"


What it was was a story about a cat who was abandoned when owner moved, locked in an apartment. The landlord took =SIX= months to check in to clean...so "cute" pictures of starving cat, eating seads and clawing wall to drink from leaking pipe. Wanting love. Horrified landlord finally rescues, takes to vet. But cat can barely eat now and sensitive stomach and landlord nurses it to somewhat health. I threw it across the room and was like to bookstore friend 'did you read this??????!!!!!' Still trying to block it from my memory