For two young girls - in the Jim Crow South and on an island in Lake Erie - the world changes suddenly and irrevocably. STELLA BY STARLIGHT By Sharon M. Draper 320 pp. Atheneum Books. $16.99. (Middle grade; ages 9 to 13) MOONPENNY ISLAND By Trida Springstubb Illustrated by Gilbert Ford 292 pp. Balzer & Bray/ HarperCollins Publishers. $16.99. (Middle grade; ages 8 to 12) CHILDHOOD MAY BE the easiest time to go to bed as one person and wake up feeling like someone else. In two new middlegrade novels, young heroines discover that adults are not always truthful, and that the world is more dangerous than anyone has been letting on. They're lifechanging realizations, for sure, and in both books they present an opportunity to find a moral compass. Inspired by the journal of her grandmother, who had to leave school in fifth grade to help on the family farm, Sharon M. Draper, the author of many young adult books, including "Out of My Mind," sets "Stella by Starlight" in the South of the early 1930s. The line of segregation cuts through all aspects of life in Bumblebee, N.C., from inequitable schooling to inadequate health care to the denial of voting rights. At the center of the novel is a young storyteller named Stella Mills, who ventures outside at night to write, wrestling words onto the pages of her secret notebook. Stella, who is African-American, witnesses a frightening event involving the Ku Klux Klan. Draper conveys a full, rich picture of Stella's world, beginning with the importance of religion in the fabric of a rural, black Southern community. After decades of injustice and terror under Jim Crow laws, it is the local pastor who encourages his flock to stand up and be counted. "I will be at the voter registration office at 9 a.m. when it opens," he tells the congregation. "Anybody who wants to come with me is welcome. I am a man. Amen. Amen." Stella is at her father's side when he makes the trip. While she has gotten a front-row view of prejudice, she has the common sense to do the right thing later, becoming the unlikely savior of the daughter of the town's chief bigot. Poisonous snakes hide in tall grass in bright sunlight, and deadly creatures on two feet put on white cloaks and burn crosses in the night. An eagle can be seen in the blue sky of day, but also in the form of a brave 11-year-old African-American boy, an aspiring Olympian, who runs in the dark on the track of the off-limits white high school. Yet it's not single acts of heroism but the solidarity of the community, people's ability to come together both in times of need and to celebrate occasions for joy, that is most moving and inspiring. In honoring those like Stella and her family who went before us, Draper has written a novel that soars. A FAR LESS DIRE but still potent societal division runs through "Moonpenny Island." The people who stay on islands after the summer vacationers leave are made of different stuff. Why is an island a paradise for some and a prison for others? One thing becomes certain for Flor, the 11-year-old at the center of this story: No place is too small for secrets. In her latest middle-grade novel, Tricia Springstubb has found just the right mix of intrigue, sorrow and compassion. Like the island, many of the residents of this charming, claustrophobic place - a craggy piece of land that juts up in the middle of a great lake - seem made of rock, immovable and filled with frozen life. "Moonpenny School is too small to have a real principal, so Mrs. Defoe is in charge," we learn. "Her entire wardrobe is some shade of mud." Flor's father is the only member of the police force. But her mother, who is Latina, is a transplant to the island. Change comes when Flor's mother leaves to care for her sick grandmother, just as her best friend, Sylvie, also goes away under mysterious circumstances. New visitors arrive, a scientist and his daughter, Jasper, who is missing part of her arm. They have come looking for fossils, signs of ancient life buried in the rock. "Moonpenny Island" is, at its core, about adaptation. How do people, like other organisms, change in order to survive? As Flor wonders, "will future humans be able to see stuff we can't?" But what if evolution sent you backward? And can confinement possibly make a person bigger or better? As in all wellwritten children's books, these are questions not just for a young person, but for all of us. ? HOLLY GOLDBERG SLOAN'S books include the novel "Counting by 7s." |