The Extraordinary Mark Twain by Barbara Kerley

Barbara Kerley took a unique approach when she wrote The Extraordinary Mark Twain (According to Susy). She found in Mark Twain’s autobiography mentions of his daughter, Susy, and the diary she kept that included a biographer’s keen perception of her very own Papa. Susy decided so many people only saw her father as the humorist when she felt “I never saw a man with so much variety of feeling as Papa has” (Kerley). So with the honesty and determination of a 13-year old girl, Susy wanted to “set the record straight” (Kerley).

Susy detailed their daily lives and the habits of her father, such things as his penchant to talk to cats, how the need to write would strike him at all hours of the day and night and he would answer that call, and how, with his family, he was more serious person discussing important events and happenings with earnest frankness.  Twain himself treasured his daughter’s biography of him, using passages in his autobiography, and stated “I have had no compliment, no praise, no tribute from any source, that was so precious to me as this one was and still is. As I read it now, after all these many years, it is still a king’s message to me” (Kerley).

Excerpts from Susy’s diary are set a part against the page with a small Journal that opens up and is presented in cursive type face to show these are Susy’s direct thoughts and words. She knew her father well, and had no issue painting the positive sides of his personality as well as the negative. “Susy’s manuscript and snippets of wisdom and mirth from Twain’s copious oeuvre as fodder for her story. The child’s journal entries, reproduced in flowing handwritten, smaller folio inserts, add a dynamic and lovely pacing to the narrative, which includes little-known facts about Twain’s work. The text flawlessly segues into Susy’s carefully recorded, sometimes misspelled, details of his character, intimate life, and work routine during his most prolific years” (Paulsen-Yarovoy). These pop-out journals help to accent the beautiful illustrations  by Edwin Fotheringham that fill the pages. They depict Twain writing furiously, riding a donkey located on his sister-in-law’s farm, and cats. Cats can be found on every page to note in an undirect way Twain’s affection for the creatures.

The author has included a series of author’s notes, one on Twain himself that discusses his writer career and then a section on Susy that talks about why the author was drawn to this biography and what became of Susy. She passed away at the age of 24 and took a bit of Twain’s soul with her. He wrote to a friend, “I did not know that she could go away and take our lives with her, yet leave our dull bodies behind . . . My fortune is gone. I am a pauper” (Kerley). Such powerful words that help back up the serious notes of Twain’s nature Susy chronicled in her year-long biography.

Also included in the book is a selected time line of Mark Twain’s life and a page-long guide to writing your very own biography. There is also a careful citation that includes all the excerpts from Susy’s diary and a listing of what was taken from Twain’s autobiography and where these items are located, in Albert and Shirley Smalls Special Collections at the University of Virginia. This careful citation listing helps add credibility to Kerly’s research and her passion for writing this version of Mark Twain’s life as seen by someone who knew him and loved him better than most. The prose and the layout of the book with the wonderful illustrations help make the story interesting, and the insights from Susy give the biography more heart than many. It also helps show why this book so many awards and nominations:

2010 CYBLIS Non-Fiction Picture Book Award; Best Children’s Books 2010 – Publisher’s Weekly; Best Books 2010 – School Library Journal; Best Books for Children and Teens 2010 – Kirkus Reviews; Best of 2010 Books for Young Readers – Washington Post; A Junior Library Guild selection; 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing – New York Public Library; Eureka! Nonfiction Children’s Books Gold Award – California Reading Association; Oregon Spirit Book Award for Nonfiction – OCTE; Oregon Book Award Finalist; NCTE Orbis Pictus Recommended Book – and many, many more.

View the complete list at www.barbarakerley.com/site/the_extraordinary_mark_twin.html

Kerley, Barbara. The Extraordinary Mark Twain (According to Susy). Scholastic. 2010.

Kerley, Barbara. “The Extraordinary Mark Twin.” Website. www.barbarakerley.com/site/the_extraordinary_mark_twin.html 

Accessed 30 October, 2017.

Paulsen-Yarovoy, Sara. “The Extraordinary Mark Twain – Book Review”. School Library Journal. (2010).

https://ipage.ingramcontent.com/ipage/servlet/ibg.common.titledetail.pd1000?queryString=H4sIAAAAAAAAABXKQQuCQBDF8a-yvLMHvc5RgogoOthJRAacaHFzZXfCNPrujbff__G-yAPowSFLgRwjSNPbOCsIdYwjzHkDVWVpCraerscL9rP5dq8PzR4zqG2rAuazrEtMQ994DWKtT3Hy0cQ2-onT6l6cRqcL-wld9_sDmnvWiYMAAAA&R=10179038&dNo=5 Accessed 30 October, 2017

 

There is a great deal of mystery that surrounds the out-of-control blaze on October 8, 1861 that raged for three days in Chicago, Illinois. The fire decimated the city and left 100,000 people homeless, and yet some of the details are still wreathed in the “need to blame” sentiment of the population at large without looking at the facts and seeking the truth. Jim Murphy in his book, The Great Fire, pulled the truth of the story and used a cinematic approach to telling the occurrence from information he gleaned from newspapers and books that were written during and shortly after the devastating fire. He does not shy away from the truth, discussing the mishandling of the fire alarms by a man that kept sending the fire fighters to the wrong address, to make out the inconsistencies in the newspapers blaming the family whose barn was the epicenter, and giving harrowing details of families separated from one another and their desperate need to find one another safe.

Photographs taken during the fire and the days of clean-up and exploration are mixed with illustrations found in newspapers, such as the Chicago Tribune, from the same time frame. Murphy included a map of the Chicago streets showing the area of the city that had burned the day before the big blaze, and then repeated the maps with the further reach of the fire until the final map shows the miles of city the burned. Murphy is also quick to point out details about why the fire spread so quickly – the prairie wind, the wooden buildings and streets, the loss of water due to damage by the fire – and he is also quick to highlight some of the acts of kindness the blaze awakened in people. Strangers opening their homes, cities sending their own firefighters and engines to help fight the fire, and the millions of dollars of donations the United States raised to help Chicago and its citizens in the aftermath.

Murphy’s treatment of the history and the facts only deepens the depth of emotion and the harrowing fear, exhaustion, and hopelessness many of the character succumbed to as the days continued to burn. Booklist said, “The Great Fire” will automatically draw readers with its fiery cover and illustrations of disaster, but the text will keep them reading” (1995). I couldn’t agree more. Matching the precise prose with the revealing maps spotlights this tragedy in a way many such events don’t possess.

The book was met with much critical acclaim, including:

·          Newbery Honor (1996)

·         ALA Best Books for Young Adults (1996)

·         A Horn Book Fanfare Best Book (1996)

·         BCCB Blue Ribbon Book (1995)

·         Jefferson Cup (1996). (Wikipedia, 2017)

 

Booklist. “The Great Fire – Book Review”. (1995) https://ipage.ingramcontent.com/ipage/servlet/ibg.common.titledetail.pd1000?ttl_id=292612

Accessed 28 October, 2017

Wikipedia. “The Great Fire”. (2017). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Fire_(children%27s_novel) Accessed 28 October, 2017