50books_poc | 7, 8, and 9: The Three Little Reviews and the Big Bad Reviewer

Lensey Namioka’s The Samurai and the Long-Nosed Foreigners is one of a series of mystery books about a samurai duo that I loved when I was thirteen. Somehow – I’m not sure how; I would have loved the Portuguese angle – I missed this one back then.

The book is a lot of fun. The mystery has just the right pace, and the characters are well-sketched if not particularly deep. On the sentence level, the writing is clunky enough that it makes me wince in places, although I know I didn’t notice this when I was reading the other Zenta and Matsuzo books when I was twelve.

I think kids would love this book, but adults would probably like it only if they have some nostalgic affection for Namioka’s work, like I do.

I love Gary Soto’s poem Oranges, so I had great expectations for this book. I was gravely disappointed; it doesn’t have any of the beauty, subtlety, or emotional depth of Oranges.

In fact, the only good thing I can say about this book is that it reminded me how much I love Oranges, and that I ought to look up some of Soto’s poetry. The book itself is shoddy; Soto is clearly phoning it in. He repeatedly cuts away in the middle of the exciting scenes, only to relate the outcome after the fact, in the blandest way imaginable. It’s infuriating; it violates every tenet of decent story-telling that I can think of.

This book, I loved. There are some minor quibbles I could make about Nikki Grimes’ Jazmin’s Notebook (the main one being that the historical setting has all the depth of a kiddie pool), but I adored it so much that I’m going to leave it at that parenthetical statement.

By far the biggest draw in the book is Jazmin herself, who is the first person narrator (indeed, the book is ostensibly her notebook). Her voice is lively and intelligent, clever with language, insightful enough about other people to keep the friends and neighbors that she mentions interesting without seeming unreasonably astute for a fourteen-year-old girl. She sparkles; I was so sorry to reach the end and realize she didn’t have any more room to sparkle.

The book is short, just over a hundred pages, and the plot is thin; the book is more a description of Jazmin’s universe than a narrative. It reminds me of The House on Mango Street – in fact, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Grimes had been inspired by Cisneros.

The inclusion of poetry in the narrative also pleased me. The poems’ quality is wobbly, but as they’re quite short and supposedly written by a fourteen-year-old it isn’t a problem; and some of the poems I liked a lot: beautiful imagery, a sense of rhythm uncommon in free verse.

It’s a lovely book. Highly recommended, with one caveat: there is a non-graphic description of a failed sexual assault, which probably makes the book inappropriate for kids under eleven (at the very least).