The Canning Season

by Polly Horvath
PRMS hardcover 196 pages
genre: YA coming-of-age

Horvath has a very unusual style and sensibility. I read this to try to decide about keeping it in the collection or not. Not.

pg 39 - Tilly and old age . . . this is not part of most middle schoolers' life experiences! "Sleep, Tilly said, came to the old like the transition, the hallway between life and death. You needed less food and wandered more through the corridors of dreams." This resonates for me as a reader because of my elderly parents and the decline I see in their physical states . . . but I'm more than 30 years older than my students!

pg. 272 - Not sure why I marked this part. Hutch and Ratchet's mom are visiting Ratchet at her elderly aunts' house. They are talking about Hutch being an aerobic dance champion. Tilly's response to listening to all this conversation makes her think that there are just too many things in the world. "How do people keep up with it all, she thought. How do they have lives with all this clutter in the way?" Yep. I can relate to that.

pg 184 - Tilly's death. I cried. But again, this is more where I'm at in my life. Even middle schoolers who have had a parent or grandparent die . . . this is just not a book that I think will speak to my students.

The underlying story of Ratchet and her mother's dumping her on elderly aunts is an interesting one, but odd in so many ways - the bears, the canning, the doctor, the orphanage down the road, . . . bye, book.