Debbie made a plea back in Fall Favorites for ZANE AND THE HURRICANE, which I’m seeing on many Mock Newbery lists. But we have to talk about it alongside Julie Lamana’s UPSIDE DOWN IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE, which is essentially the same story:  Katrina. Stranded in the Lower Ninth. Dog escaping causes trouble. Rescue. Coincidence. Resolution.   Lamana is a first time author, so maybe that’s why her title is getting less play than Newbery-Honoree Philbrick’s?  I found hers remarkably better, more believable, and the only one of the pair that I’d consider for my own Newbery contenders list.

Lamana’s work unfolds slowly, with rich detail in setting and character building, as Armani Curtis find her long-awaited tenth birthday being overshadowed by the approaching hurricane.  The resulting disaster is told in harrowing depth, with high drama that suits the intended ten-year-old audience well.   Lamana is writing from outside her culture, but I find her voice nuanced and authentic, and her prose very skillful. The only place, in fact, that I start not to buy her truth is as the otherwise-believable Boman kids evolve into an obvious plot device.   The plot coincidences that bother others I find I’m willing to buy (I don’t think there’s a way to write a happy-ending Katrina story without a couple of coincidences), but the Bomans are what made me sag a little in what I thought was going to be an all-out enthusiastic push for this first-time author for Newbery.  Regardless, her craft in dialogue, setting, and character outshine many other contenders.

Not so, to my ear, Philbrick’s.  I’m sure it suffered unfairly by my reading it second, but ZANE AND THE HURRICANE provides us scant character building, and the stilted dialogue right at the beginning goes to great lengths to point out the complexities of Zane’s multiracial attributes in a way that started to feel exoticized.   The introduction of Malvina and Mr. Tru and their awkwardly rendered way of speaking only heightens this.   I tried to push past this to enjoy what is a finely quick-paced and thrilling plot, but the dialogue and characters kept getting in the way, and so I found I was not willing to buy the tremendous coincidence that zips the story to happy ending.   I know that sounds harsh, and I don’t discount Philbrick’s skill in writing engaging plots with well-reserached settings, but examining this in the light of the Newbery criteria, I just can’t get past what I see as enormous flaws.  That said, I felt very similarly about THE MOSTLY TRUE ADVENTURES OF HOMER P. FIGG, which went on to win a Newbery Honor.