Clare Vanderpool created a terrific cast of characters here in a memorable town called Manifest. I genuinely loved this book, but I felt a tiny bit as if it was trying too hard–too hard to wedge in lots of history–too hard to make the place into a memorable one.
To be honest, perhaps my criticism comes from envy. Here’s a book set in 1936, and I didn’t discover it until this year. I wrote the first many drafts of my book set in 1936 before I knew there were so many stories set in that exact year (see previous post about this topic). There are many, many things to exalt this book, and obviously many people agree: it’s a Newbery, for cryin’ out loud.
Abilene–a delightful protagonist name–discovers her father’s story through digging up the history of Manifest. That makes for a dual story line–1936 and 1918 when her father was a boy. Abilene discovers a box of memorabilia that she’s convinced (but at first, not positive) belonged to her father. Her delightfully colorful neighbor–the Diviner, or “The Hungarian Woman” weaves all the artifacts into the 1918 story.
The voice is delightful. We can hear and see Abilene without a moment’s problem. It’s a rollicking good story, and I was completely pulled into it.
I shouldn’t have read this one and A Year Down Yonder back-to-back. The parallels between the two disturbed me. Both female narrators took a hand at writing newspaper columns as youngsters. Both became more serious reporters when they grew older. Both have absent parents and are in the custody of a gruffish older person who raised one of their parents. Both have a mentor who is their key to the past and becomes someone each trusts unconditionally.
In Moon Over Manifest, all the bits of the plot weave together neatly. Almost too neatly. And so much is woven in that as one reader said to me, it’s as if it was written with the prize in mind. There are so many dangling strings early in this book that it certainly keeps you reading to find resolution-maybe, maybe almost too many. But that’s me, and the Newbery committee didn’t think so, so who am I?
(SPOILER ALERT if you’re going to read this book): I feel as if there’s a lot of little pieces at the resolution of this plot that are almost too conveniently fixed. The most glaring being a kid about to be murdered is saved when his attacker just happens to step in a trap and get his foot cut off. I mean, really. If we’d known about traps before that, I’d buy it. But it was the first noticeable mention of trapping or traps belonging to the the dude we see slinking in the woods. The town solution to their mounting problem is ingenius, and of course lets the protagonist of the 1918 plot thread be the hero; however, the rich dude causing all the problems just folds and leaves when he’s defeated. I didn’t buy it. He had much to lose and was too selfish and greedy to give up like he did. Another thing that bugged me was that there was no mention of Kansas having its own prohibition laws. Nationally, prohibition was repealed in 1933; this story was set in 1936. It took me awhile to figure out why prohibition was still figuring in to the plot, until I went back and saw “Kansas” in the title of the first chapter/section, and realized they were running their own show before and after national prohibition. That’s just me, however, because I have worked so hard to create–and now to sell–my novel set in this time period.
I’ve got a murder mystery, and I don’t feel as if I relied on gimmicks to pull it all off. Some of the same historical details showed up in this story that I have woven into mine, which made me cringe at first. However, if you see a newspaper from that year, that’s what we’ll come up with–and that’s what we did.
Oh, well. Such is the publishing world. I still like this book a great deal. Does it deserve a Newbery? Maybe, probably but it’s not the resounding winner in my heart that some of the others are.
Vanderpool, Clare. Moon over Manifest. Delacorte Press (an imprint of Random House Children’s Books), 2011.
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