Wiles heads north from her familiar Mississippi terrain (Each Little Bird That Sings) for this “documentary novel” set in Maryland during the Cuban missile crisis. Eleven-year-old Franny, a middle child, is in the thick of it—her father (like Wiles’s was) is a pilot stationed at Andrews Air Force Base. Wiles palpably recreates the fear kids felt when air-raid sirens and duck-and-cover drills were routine, and when watching President Kennedy’s televised speech announcing the presence of missiles in Cuba was an extra-credit assignment. Home life offers scant refuge. Franny’s beloved older sister is keeping secrets and regularly disappearing; her mother’s ordered household is upended by the increasingly erratic behavior of Uncle Otts (a WWI veteran); and Franny’s relationship with her best friend Margie is on the brink as both vie for the same boy’s attention. Interwoven with Franny’s first-person, present-tense narration are period photographs, newspaper clippings, excerpts from informational pamphlets (how to build a bomb shelter), advertisements, song lyrics, and short biographical vignettes written in past tense about important figures of the cold war/civil rights era—Harry S. Truman, Fannie Lou Hamer, Pete Seeger. The back-and-forth is occasionally dizzying, but the striking design and heavy emphasis on primary source material may draw in graphic novel fans. Culminating with Franny’s revelation that “It’s not the calamity that’s the hard part. It’s figuring out how to love one another through it,” this story is sure to strike a chord with those living through tough times today. Ages 9–12. (May)
Gr 5–8—It's 1962, the height of the Cold War, and Franny Chapman and her family live in Camp Springs, Maryland. It's near her father's work as a pilot at Andrews Air Force Base and unnervingly close to Washington, DC. It's a turbulent time when the threat of a nuclear war is all too real and the Civil Rights Movement is disturbing the status quo. Listeners are immersed in the era through the words of 11-year-old Franny in Deborah Wiles's novel (Scholastic, 2010), compellingly performed by Emma Galvin. Franny's life is filled with concerns, triumphs, disasters, family, and friends, and it is all made real in Galvin's nuanced and credible reading. Commercials, clips of speeches by President Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., news broadcasts, song lyrics, and more are interspersed to further bring the era to life and augment the emotional turbulence. Franny shares what she learns in school through her research for reports (e.g., background on Pete Seeger and Fannie Lou Hamer), which takes her out of character. Younger students may need additional background to make sense of the period inserts, but Franny's experiences and emotions will resonate with listeners. This piece of historical fiction is the first title in a projected trilogy.—Maria Salvadore, formerly Washington DC Public Library
The audio format strengthens the setting of the first book in Wiles’s Sixties Trilogy. Emma Galvin narrates the convincing first-person story of 11-year-old “Army brat” Franny. Galvin expresses both Franny’s fierce exterior and her inner fears concerning her shell-shocked uncle, her secretive sister, and her fading friendship with her best friend, as well as the threat of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Additional strength comes from the production’s periodic clips, which deftly portray the era: a recording of a Khrushchev speech, a static-filled BBC report, cartoon character quotes, bits of sixties songs, and the ticking of a movie projector as an announcer provides directions for how to “duck and cover.” These evocative auditory montages add to the authenticity of the setting and serve as social commentary that seems almost as important as the novel’s characters. S.W. 2012 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine
The audio format strengthens the setting of the first book in Wiles’s Sixties Trilogy. Emma Galvin narrates the convincing first-person story of 11-year-old “Army brat” Franny. Galvin expresses both Franny’s fierce exterior and her inner fears concerning her shell-shocked uncle, her secretive sister, and her fading friendship with her best friend, as well as the threat of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Additional strength comes from the production’s periodic clips, which deftly portray the era: a recording of a Khrushchev speech, a static-filled BBC report, cartoon character quotes, bits of sixties songs, and the ticking of a movie projector as an announcer provides directions for how to “duck and cover.” These evocative auditory montages add to the authenticity of the setting and serve as social commentary that seems almost as important as the novel’s characters. S.W. 2012 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine
Just as 11-year-old Franny Chapman squabbles with her once-best friend in their neighborhood near Andrews Air Force Base, outside of Washington, D.C., President Kennedy and Chairman Khrushchev are also at odds. Franny's spot-on "Heavens to Murgatroyd" dialogue captures the trepidation as the world holds its breath during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Adding to the pressure are her college-student, activist older sister, who may be a spy, her aspiring-astronaut younger brother, who refuses to eat, her steely, chain-smoking mother, who has inexplicably burst into tears, her often-absent pilot father, now spending long days on base, and her PTSD-suffering, World War I-veteran Uncle Otts, who's digging up the front yard to build a bomb shelter. Wiles's "documentary novel," based on her own childhood memories and the first in The Sixties Project trilogy, has a striking scrapbook feel, with ingeniously selected and placed period photographs, cartoons, essays, song lyrics, quotations, advertisements and "duck and cover" instructions interspersed through the narrative. References to duct tape (then newly invented), McDonald's and other pop culture lend authenticity to this phenomenal story of the beginnings of radical change in America. (historical note, author's note, bibliography) (Historical fiction. 10-13)
