On Spirals and Rebecca Stead's The List of Things That Will Not Change

Rebecca Stead is one of those magic-filled authors, one you can rely on to surprise, delight, and enchant you. She is also a writer that reliably surprises, delights, and enchants young readers. This might seem to go without saying, but in reality, it is no small task. Librarians and teachers know how often it happens that what the adult in the room thinks is wonderful, the child is decidedly less interested in. The List of Things That Will Not Change is one of those titles that meets both adult and child reader right where they are.

The List of Things That Will Not Change is about Bea, a girl working through all the layers of her past (primarily her parents' super-amicable divorce) as well as her present and future (her father's remarriage to his boyfriend, Jesse).

Or it's about only children and siblings and cousins and uncles and aunts and the ways families build each other and destroy each other in countless ways.

Or it's about identity and uncertainty and the adolescent fear that maybe the bad part of us is the only "real" part of us.

Or it's about love in all its magnificent forms and bravery and happiness balloons.

Like a spiral that extends downward and outward, expanding to fill whatever space it inhabits, this book is much more than it might seem at first glance. Just like life, it is "about" all the things, and we are all the better when we handle them with care.

The List of Things That Will Not Change will be released on April 7, 2020. Preorder today from bookshop.org or your favorite independent bookseller.

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The 2021 Newbery Medal selection committee spends the whole year considering titles. As always, I will be reading and reviewing along with the committee, keeping one eye on today's young readers and the other eye on each book's prospects. After each review, I'll offer my one-sentence take (OST) on medal-worthiness.

OST: This book will be a strong contender.

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The best books spark the best conversations! If you have thoughts to share, please feel free to email me at sarabethwest52@gmail.com. I promise a reply.

Every Wednesday, I send out something of a hodgepodge of ideas, a gathering of thoughts on books, culture, and unexpected moments of joy. Sign up here to stay in the loop!

On Survival and Jenny Offill's Weather

There is a species of moth in Madagascar that drinks the tears of sleeping birds.

Banana slugs are hermaphrodites who mate up to three times a day.

Democritus wrote seventy books. Only fragments survive.

Jenny Offill's book Weather is a near-constant outpouring of these moments: unrelated facts, brief email exchanges, even jokes. Weather also opens the door on Lizzie's life with her husband, Ben, their son, Eli, and her recovering addict brother, Henry. She's a librarian, he's in tech, Henry writes greeting card poems. They live in the city. Their names and occupations are there, of course, but they can feel somehow irrelevant. They exist between and around and perhaps even through the fragments that make up Jenny Offill's now-signature style.

Their stories matter, of course, but it is the fragments that survive.

As on 9/11 when paper scraps swirled in the air, what survives after the big event are the fragments of institutional daily operations, the turned down corner of the page, the Target receipt. It is merely ephemera; it is what remains.

Could the fragments be the whole? How we spend our days is how we spend our lives, is it not? In fact, the fragments are the weather. That it drizzled a little this afternoon but was much warmer this morning than expected. The way I can't seem to remember if we've always had new grass in November, or if that was just this year. The different ways spring starts to make itself known in different parts of the world. These moments are that old postcard tucked in your book when you got too tired to keep reading. You could see it every day and never really pay attention.

The weather is always changing. The climate, on the other hand, is supposed to be the water in our fishbowl. We're not supposed to even know what it is, but these days, it can feel like it's sloshing so violently we might soon be thrown over the edge. Lizzie feels this uncertainty, and like most of us, she swings between the weather and the climate - from the daily urgencies of school pick-up and work emails to the question of where might be the safest place to move when New York (its weather? its climate?) becomes unlivable. Offill doesn't privilege the existential threat, however; the ephemera is just as critical. Lizzie, worried about her self-destructive brother, stays on the phone trying anything to get him "to commit to the next day, the next hour, the next minute even." The addict and the planet might ultimately be doomed, but we still cling to the fragments that will survive.

So, maybe the water is agitated, and maybe despite (or because of) that, our job is to pay attention. To tell ourselves This is Water and finger the gum wrapper still in the pocket of last season's jacket and to show up and do what we can, each of us trying for the next day, the next hour, the next minute even.

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Weather is one of 16 longlisted titles being considered for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction. For the full list, click here. The shortlist of 6 will be announced on April 22. The prize is announced on June 3. For other reviewed titles on the longlist, see below:

• The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

• Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson

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The best books spark the best conversations! If you have thoughts to share, please feel free to email me at sarabethwest52@gmail.com. I promise a reply.

Every Wednesday, I send out something of a hodgepodge of ideas, a gathering of thoughts on books, culture, and unexpected moments of joy. Sign up here to stay in the loop!