October Mourning: A song for Matthew Shepard

On Sunday, October 11, 1998, the author Leslea Newman was scheduled to be the keynote speaker at the University of Wyoming's Gay Awareness Week. Matthew Shepard died the next day, as a result of the brutal beating he had sustained six days before.
Newman's incredible collection of poems, October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard, brings back the outrage, horror, and the tragedy of that night through a myriad of voices. The fence that held Matthew as he hung, tied, through the long night. The stars looking down on him, mothers, fathers, townspeople, so many voices all focused on this one, horrific event and the guilt and pain that resulted.
Deeply, deeply moving, this is a stunning collection, and a beautiful tribute to a dark event. As sad as it is (I cried more than once) the focus is on tolerance and growth. Teens who were too young at the time would be well served by reading this book.

My food rating is the Passover meal. This solemn, ritual feast commemorates an important event. The bitter herbs are especially appropriate to the story of Matthew Shepard.

5 stars.

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The Wind Eye, by Robert Westall, for Timeslip Tuesday

This week's Timeslip Tuesday book is an older English one-- The Wind Eye , by Robert Westall (upper MG/YA 1976, still in print). Westall's work ranges from picture books to adult, often exploring how the past hits the present in dark and mysterious ways. Which is what happens in The Wind Eye.... It begins when a family, comprising a mother and her teenaged son married to a father with two daughters (one a young teen and one a little girl), setting off to the northeast coast of England to stay in the old house the father has just inherited. They are not a happy family. The kids get along fine, but the parents are not getting on well at all. And then the past and the present collide. St. Cuthbert still is a real person to the people of this part of the Northumberland coast, and he becomes so to the kids as well when they find a boat that travels back to his time, taking them out to the island that was his retreat from the world. Along the way, there's...

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Conjured

by Sarah Beth Durst Eve is a girl placed in a special witness protection program that concentrates on people like her who can do magic. They protect her and other strong magic-weilders from a mysterious serial killer who has been targeting people like them. However, Eve cannot use her magic without blacking out and having visions of the Magician and the Storyteller, and she has no memory of her life before the witness protection, except for a few flashes here and there. Often, when she blacks out, she'll lose days, weeks, or even months of her memories. All she knows is that she is very important to the people trying to catch the serial killer, and they need her to remember her past. The plot developed slowly, but not in a bad way. It took a while to figure out what was going on, but figuring it out was interesting. The memory loss was done pretty well, and the characters were consistent and distinct. Three of the characters - Aiden, Topher, and...

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The Owls Have Come to Take Us Away, by Ronald L. Smith (review and interview)

I first had the pleasure of meeting Ronald L. Smith at Kidlitcon back in 2015 (PSA--come to Kidlitcon 2020 in Ann Arbor next March!). His first middle grade book, Hoodoo, a tale of supernatural horror in the south, had just been published, and I enjoyed it very much ( my review ). I likewise enjoyed The Mesmerist (2017), about kids fighting evil in 19th century London ( my review ). I never reviewed Black Panther: the Young Prince (2018)….someday I will. So in any event, I was very excited about his most recent book, The Owls Have Come to Take Us Away (Clarion Books, February 2019). This is the story of an air force kid, Simon, son of a black mom and a white dad, who's obsessed with aliens. He's convinced owl-like aliens have arrived, watching and experimenting on humans. His family has no time or patience for aliens, so Simon is alone with his fears of the Grays, as he calls them. When something very strange happens on a camping trip with hi...

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