"Moon Over Manifest" by Clare Vanderpool

First-time author Clare Vanderpool has won the lottery. Watching this book rocket to the top 10 of Amazon's sales in the 24 hours after the Newbery was announced was, as always, fun. After a brief dalliance with "cool" when they awarded the annual award to Neil Gaiman's "Graveyard Book" two years ago and the somewhat trippy "When You Reach Me" by Rebecca Stead last year, this year's award committee returned to the Newbery safe-zone ... an historical novel with strong literary underpinnings that was on no one's radar. Keeping with the trend of focusing on the 1910s (is this a 100 year thing?), "Moon Over Manifest" tells a story in two times -- 1936 and 1917/18. When I was growing up, historical fiction was often set in the American Revolution, the Civil War or the Great Depression. This recent attention on America at the time of WWI and the Spanish Influenza is interesting for no other reason than I don't know much about it. Most notably, I enjoyed the 1914 novel "Hattie Big Sky" by Kirby Larson. This book has many similar themes -- the struggle the nation had with the influx of immigrants at the turn of the last century, the building of community in the burgeoning towns of the plains states, the loss of the (very) young men who served the nation in the war -- but it is told from a younger perspective and is much more dense, combining the perspective of the Depression-era present with this colorful decade as a girl searches for her father's presence in a town "with a past." Abilene, our main character, is the kind of plucky 12 year-old that one thinks of in these kinds of books. She is engaging and well-drawn, as are all the characters (although I would skip the unnecessary character list at the beginning). A weighty tome at more than 350 pages, it was an engaging read that I read in one (albeit long) sitting. Mostly realistic and not dark, with a solid mystery or two and just a dash of humor, the story had a nice flow given its time-jumps. Like "Hattie Big Sky," the additional historical information provided at the end of the book is interesting and the titles listed as reference sources are good picks. The only real challenge of this title is the problem with many of the Newbery picks. Other than librarians and English teachers, who will read it? The protagonist is too young to be of interest to older readers and the text too high for many younger ones. I can see it being of interest to those library types who love to read pretty much every Newbery (check out this blog, a friend of a friend: http://lauramitolife.blogspot.com/) but I don't see it as being widely popular, historical fiction being on the wane in general among our wired teens. But then, the Newbery committee, much like the Oscar committee, prides itself on saying their selections aren't about popularity, they are about "quality." I wonder why those two things have to be mutually exclusive. In any case, the book is good, and worth the read, even if it isn't "your kind of thing."