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BUFFALO BOOKS
Halpern and Cochrane’s kid-lit successes
By Christopher Schobert
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Dormia authors Peter Kujawinski
and Jake Halpern
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Dormia images courtesy of Houghton-Mifflin
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The Girl Who Threw Butterflies
author Mick Cochrane
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Images courtesy of Alfred A. Knopf.
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The greatest publishing phenomenon of the past decade remains the success of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter opuses. Sure, other serial sagas have appealed to cross-generational, cross-cultural audiences, but there’s one important fact that separates Rowling’s creation from its obvious successor, Stephenie Meyers’s Twilight saga: the Potter books are actually good. Stephen King hit upon this crucial difference, and unleashed a vampire fatwa (vamp-wa?) from the Edward Cullen-ites.
Two of the finest writers to recently emerge from WNY—Jake Halpern and Mick Cochrane—are responsible for a pair of new contributions to the kid-lit genre that land solidly in the Rowling camp in terms of quality.
Buffalo-born Halpern (now based in New Mexico) and co-writer Peter Kujawinski have collaborated on the fantasy epic Dormia, and they’re quite a team. Halpern’s track record as a young writer is stunning. A contributor to the New Yorker and NPR’s All Things Considered, Halpern provided a fascinating treat in Fame Junkies—an insightful study of our addiction to fame, through everything from casting-session cattle-calls to a hardcore Rod Stewart obsessive. Kujawinski, meanwhile, is a fiction writer and journalist who has worked as a diplomat in Paris, and he and Halpern wrote the book through long-distance correspondence.
Guess what? However it came to pass, Dormia is wonderful. Alfonso Perplexon is a twelve-year-old in ominously-named World’s End, Minnesota, who suffers from a rare sleep syndrome—we discover just how rare, among other freakish aspects of Alfonso’s surroundings, later in the novel. He is visited by a “tall, gaunt man … dressed in sheepskin boots, a wide-brimmed hat, and a heavy fur cloak” who identifies himself as the boy’s Uncle Hill. Thus begins a journey into the hidden kingdom of Dormia, where a single bloom “becomes a founding tree of Dormia.”
It’s an epic, 500-page tale—the first of a planned trilogy—and should please kids and adults. Even the book’s website—www.worldofdormia.com—is a treat, featuring maps, music, and some wild interactivity. Read now, before the likely film is announced.
Canisius professor Mick Cochrane’s The Girl Who Threw Butterflies is less complex, but a bit more emotionally affecting. And that’s no surprise, as Cochrane has written two strong novels in recent years: Flesh Wounds and Sport. Interestingly, Butterflies is his first Buffalo-set novel, and a Buffalo Bisons cap even makes the text.
His protagonist, an eighth-grader named Molly, is an appropriately complex young heroine, saddled with a recently deceased father and a depressed mother. Joining her school baseball team, however, helps change her life. Cochrane is clearly compelled by the power of America’s pastime, and he puts it into words beautifully. Here, Molly’s coach, Morales, talks about the game: “‘Baseball is all about doing the little things right,’ he said. ‘That’s what we’re going to work on.’ Molly liked the way he talked … She liked his message, too. She wanted to believe that little things could make a big difference. It was corny, but when Morales said it, it sounded true.” Cochrane knows how a coach can truly impact the young—in a good way—and has crafted an appealing story about the knuckleball, adolescence, and how to move on from the perils of youth. It’s a fine book—surely one to be enjoyed more by teenagers—but not entirely unlovable for those who’ve never heard of Heidi and Spencer, either. And how can one not enjoy a book that opens with a quote from Pittsburgh Pirates great Willie Stargell: “Throwing a knuckleball for a strike is like throwing a butterfly with hiccups across the street into your neighbor’s mailbox.”
Two major publishers are behind these books—Houghton-Mifflin (Dormia) and Alfred A. Knopf (Butterflies)—and hopefully they’ll get a strong national push. Kudos to Halpern and Cochrane for not just writing well, but receiving national attention. Buy their books for your kids with confidence, then read them yourself.
Associate editor Christopher Schobert has read every Harry Potter book. He’s twenty-nine. You got a problem with that?
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