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Why did Apelt choose Feral hogs to play the villains?

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Why did Apelt choose Feral hogs to play the villains?

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According to the author, feral hogs played the villains in the story because they have caused a lot of damage in Texas in real life, since she is from Texas herself, Houston.

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Is there a such thing as Alligator Wrestlers? 

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Is there a such thing as Alligator Wrestlers? 

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Alligator Wrestling is actually a thing. I'm quite surprised.

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What was important about the Ivory-billed Woodpecker?

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What was important about the Ivory-billed Woodpecker?

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What was important about the Ivory-billed Woodpecker is that the bird as of today is more than likely extinct. The Author wanted to raise awareness of caring for our animals habitats by including this bird throughout the story.

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According to research, Sugarcane is really hard to come by, therefore there isn't really a sugarcane pie store where you can buy pies made out of sugarcane, but if you do find a bottle of sugarcane syrup, there is many recipes you can make like the one below me. Cane Syrup Cupcakes!

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Any good Southern cook has a supply of sweetening syrups that would put Willy Wonka to shame. Corn syrup, light and dark, and generally known by its brand name Karo (pronounced KAY-Ro). Molasses, regular and blackstrap. Sorghum. Cane syrup. Maybe even maple syrup, though that smacks somewhat of the Yankee. I use them all. Corn syrup for chess pie and pecan pie, molasses in cookies, sorghum with beans. And all are good drizzled over fresh biscuits. They each have a subtly different taste, from pure sweetness to rich complexity. But for me, cane syrup has a distinctly Southern taste.

Cane syrup is made from a sugar cane breed, ribbon cane, that grows in the South. Sorghum is made from sorghum grass, molasses from sugar cane, but by a different process, and corn syrup is, of course, made from corn. Real cane syrup can be hard to come by. It's generally found at country stores, farm shops and roadside stands. A few years ago, I was thrilled to find some cane syrup at Boomland, an emporium of country products on the way to a friend's grandmother's house in the boot heel of Missouri. On the shelf next to the homemade fig preserves, pickled watermelon rind and chow chow, across from the country ham slices and thick bacon, I found the elusive jar of ribbon cane syrup. I brought it home and went on a little cane syrup spree, stirring it into my baked beans, baking cookies, Acadian gateau de sirop, drizzling over biscuits and pancakes. The next time my friend was heading to see her grandmother, I asked her if she wouldn't mind picking up a jar of the cane syrup for me. In her generous way, she returned with half a case of jars. That really set me on the path to discovery - all the many ways to use cane syrup.

I now find Louisiana's Steen cane syrup at the local produce market, so cane syrup never has to be an imported item anymore. And like everything else, I have no doubt it can be bought online. These simple cakes, with their crumble topping, really feature the flavor of cane syrup. You'll be impressed by how such a simple recipe can produce such a nuanced flavor.
Cane Syrup Cupcakes If you really can't find cane syrup, you can use molasses (not blackstrap) instead.
4 cups all-purpose flour

2 cups light brown sugar, packed

¼ teaspoon salt

1 cup cold butter, cut into cubes

2 teaspoon baking soda

2 cups boiling water

1 cup cane syrup

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line two 12-cup muffin tins with paper liners or spray well with non-stick spray.

Combine the flour, brown sugar and salt in the large bowl of a stand mixer. Add the butter and mix until the mixture is crumbly. Set aside one cup of this mixture for the topping. Add the baking soda to the remaining mixture and combine thoroughly. Beat in the boiling water and the cane syrup until just blended.

Fill the muffin cups two-thirds full. Sprinkle the reserved topping mix over the cupcakes, spreading out evenly.

Bake the cupcakes for 20 - 25 minutes until a tester inserted in the middle comes out clean. Cool in the pans for 10 minutes, then remove to wire racks to cool completely.
Makes 24 cupcakes

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Any good Southern cook has a supply of sweetening syrups that would put Willy Wonka to shame. Corn syrup, light and dark, and generally known by its brand name Karo (pronounced KAY-Ro). Molasses, regular and blackstrap. Sorghum. Cane syrup. Maybe even maple syrup, though that smacks somewhat of the Yankee.

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The Author always wanted to write about raccoons. She did not know why but something about them made them interesting to her

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The Author has always been interested in abandoned cars and cars in general since she was born in one.

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I was born on July 6, 1954 in Fayetteville, North Carolina. My father, Bill Cowgill, was stationed in the Army there, a member of the 82nd Airborne. He and my mother, Patricia, were both still teenagers when I made my fortuitous appearance. By fortuitous I mean that I couldn't wait to get to the hospital and was born instead in the front seat of my father's Ford. Waiting is still not my strong suit!

We only lived in North Carolina for a short time and then moved to El Paso, TX and finally to Houston. Both of my younger sisters, Patti and B.J., were born there, and Houston is where we grew up.

In our house on Mayo Avenue, we had a garage with unfinished sheet rock on the inside walls. On one side of the garage was my dad's work bench where he kept all his tools. But the other side was just a big blank wall. My mother divided it into three sections. As soon as my sisters and I could hold crayons, we were allowed to express ourselves on that wall in any color or form that we wished.

If you stood back and looked at the wall, it was like a record of my growing up. Down at the bottom was just a lot of scribbling, but as I grew, the drawing took on new and clearer forms. You could tell the drawings that were done when I was happy from the ones I did when I was sad or angry. The garage wall was a perfect place for expression. Once I started actually writing, on paper, I no longer needed the wall. But I still think of it as the place where my earliest writing took place. It was like my first journal, a record of my feelings and experiences.

I still keep a journal. Like the garage wall, it's a place for catching all my thoughts, and sometimes my dreams. It's often the first place that the idea for a new story or poem occurs. Because I don't have any particular rules about writing in my journal, sometimes I'm surprised by what shows up!

Most of my books and poems come directly from my own life because that's what I know best and feel most strongly about.

I used to think that a real writer had to have lots of exciting, maybe even dangerous, adventures in order to have something meaningful to write about. Now I know that the best writing is about the people, places, pets, and objects that surround us and that we meet every day. I've discovered that writing about them is the absolute best way to really know them and in the process to come to know ourselves a little better. I now know that writing is really a way of seeing. I'd like to encourage you to get out your old journal or start a new one and see what shows up.

Even better, find a bare garage wall and go for it.

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I was born on July 6, 1954 in Fayetteville, North Carolina. My father, Bill Cowgill, was stationed in the Army there, a member of the 82nd Airborne. He and my mother, Patricia, were both still teenagers when I made my fortuitous appearance.

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True Blue Scouts vs. A Thing About Luck

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JUDGE - KATHERINE MARSH

The Thing About Luck
by Cynthia Kadohata
Atheneum Books for Young Readers

The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp
by Kathy Appelt
Atheneum Books for Young Readers

Sugar and wheat: two staples of the American diet; two unlikely subjects for children's books. And yet sugar and wheat, or sugar versus wheat, is one way to think about the battle between Kathi Appelt's The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp and Cynthia Kadohata's The Thing About Luck.

At this point, it is traditional for judges to offer a few words about the folly of comparing books. How, after all, can one compare a work of fantasy (like Scouts) to one of contemporary realism (like Luck)? A quiet, coming-of-age tale (like Luck) to a humorous, talking-animal yarn (like Scouts)? An omniscient storyteller ( Scouts) to a first-person narrator ( Luck)?

But let's be honest: as critical readers, we do. And I'm going to be bold enough, judgey enough, to suggest that there is a universal metric. It's called the punch in the gut. The punch can come from reading a description of something you understand, deeply, but had never quite put into words; it can come from strands of a plot coming together in a way that seems both surprising and inevitable; it can come from a moment of wonder or laughter-the mouth wide open, that is the natural state of childhood and of love. Tastes are subjective, books as different as the people who write them. But as years pass, there are books we forget and books that leave the indelible mark of the gut punch, whether they're about talking spiders or girls left to fend for themselves on abandoned islands or boys being raised by graveyards.

Which brings us back to sugar versus wheat. Which would you pick first? Yeah, me too-sugar. Scouts, set in Texas, interweaves the stories of the animals of the Sugar Man Swamp-namely the raccoon brothers and eponymous scouts, Bingo and J'miah-with the story of the swamp's human caretakers-namely 12-year old Chap Brayburn who recently lost his beloved grandfather, Audie. As the swamp comes under threat, the human and animal stories clarify each other and intertwine, but, in a satisfying way, never completely merge.

Appelt's brand of storytelling-with its big 'ole voice talking right at you and alternating characters and plot strands-is becoming a lost art and with reason. It's hard to do well. The book's folksy voice, the type you want to read aloud, goes a long way toward holding together a bursting-at-the-seams story, which manages to work in everything from the history of the Good Lord Bird to the DeSoto automobile to muscovado sugar. Appelt particularly shines when describing animals-both as a naturalist and a humorist. Just take her description of Sweetums, Chap's cat, after Chap mistakes the creature's anxiety over an impending environmental threat for fear of a thunderstorm:

Hmmph! Is there anything worse to a cat than being ridiculed? We think not. Sweetums jumped out of Chap's arms and headed for the bedroom, where he dodged underneath the bed and started grooming himself.

Indeed!

As that first person plural demonstrates, Appelt never leaves the reader guessing how to feel about a character. There are heroes to root for. There are villains, both human and animal, to hiss and boo. The moral universe of Scouts is as simple and comforting as the sugar pies that play a pivotal role in the plot. But this is not a criticism: there needs to be plenty of space on library shelves for stories that reinforce children's innate sense of morality and justice-especially the youngest readers'.

But a slightly older reader can appreciate a more complex carbohydrate, which brings us to wheat. Luck, set in the agricultural belt of the Midwest, is the story of twelve-year old Summer and the harvest season she spends on the road with her grandparents and younger brother while her parents tend to elderly relatives in Japan. Compared to the sugar-rush of Scouts, Luck is as quiet and mundane as the fields of grain at the center of it. Summer and her prickly grandmother Obaachan fight; Summer falls (briefly) in love; Summer worries about her little brother's inability to make friends. Not much happens and yet-in an extraordinary feat of capturing the small moments in which we grow up-everything happens. Summer comes to terms with the complexity of the people who love her and takes a risk that allows her to glimpse her adult self.

Luck is filled with nearly as much informative minutiae as Scouts although most of it revolves around a single subject: harvesting wheat. I never thought I would find the mechanics of combines so captivating or the timing of a harvest so full of dramatic tension but Kadohata draws us into chores and routines that paint a world. (In this way, Luck reminded me of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, which I loved as a kid for their depiction of farm work and its trials and rhythms.)

But what Kadohata does most masterfully of all is bring to life the people who occupy this world. In an age in which we tend to pathologize unusual children, Kadohata's portrait of Summer's socially-challenged younger brother Jaz captures his unique range of gifts and deficits rather than resorting to an easy label. Anyone who has grown up in an immigrant family will recognize Jiichan, Summer's grandfather, with his tireless work ethic and philosophical appreciation for stories and life. But the most extraordinary character of all is Obaachan, Summer's grandmother. A traditionalist, Obaachan believes in arranged marriage and the healing powers of Japanese salty plums, but loves America's Funniest Home Videos and Bruce Springsteen. She constantly shoots off zingers at Summer's expense ("You look like Yoko Ono, 1969," she tells her on a particularly bad hair day) but quietly sacrifices herself for her family at every turn, leaving her granddaughter puzzled as to who she really is. As Summer explains, "It seemed like there were two Obaachans-the good one and the bad one."

Luck is a more complex story than Scouts. But that's not why it's my winner. A book must -more than anything else-make you care about its characters, be they real or fantastical, funny or serious, good or bad or both. Kadohata has drawn Summer and her family in such emotionally rich detail that I found myself racing through the story just to find out what happened to them. By contrast, while Appelt's animal characters leapt off the page, for me, her human characters lay flatter. As a result, while I enjoyed the story, I wasn't turning the pages with the same urgency. And when I got to the end, I didn't feel the same gut punch that I felt when I read the following passage (don't worry, no spoilers here). It takes place-appropriately enough for this battle's final note-in a field of wheat:

"Thunder, help me. I'm scared," I said, looking at him. He lifted his head curiously, then sat up and placed a paw on my leg.

I suddenly burst into sobs, and the next thing I knew, I wasn't sobbing because I was scared, but because my grandparents worked so hard and because Jaz couldn't make a friend at school and because I knew how desperately my parents wished for their own business, and I doubted they would ever get that wish.

I squeezed onto the floor and hugged Thunder to me. As I hugged him something unfamiliar welled up inside me. Maybe it was courage. I mean, this was my world, the black sky and the stars and the wheat. I knew this world backward and forward and upside down. I got back into my seat and looked around at the wheat. Something started to happen: The dust of my personality started to settle and my fear left me.

These two books really could not have been more different, and yet somehow opposites in this match did attract and made for a surprisingly interesting match. The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp was quite evidently a children's book from start to finish, while The Thing About Luck could be enjoyed by a broad variety of ages, which is what makes it the victor of this match in my book. I strongly agree with Ms. Marsh in that for me, I have to really fall in love with the characters of a book to love the book itself. However, the strength and hilarity of Bingo and J'miah was enough for me to overlook the weak, secondary human characters. From a glance, the storyline of The Thing About Luck may seem a bit simpler than the action packed, fantastical adventure of two raccoons on a mission to save the swamp. But if one were to delve a bit deeper into the world of Summer, Jaz, and their two crazy, love able grandparents, they would find something much more interesting entirely. They would find a truly amazing story about a young girl trying to find herself while simultaneously helping her family survive another season, and it's a story that every reader that has been a teenager can resonate with. Emphasis on the teenager, as I believe that anyone who has not yet experienced a crisis of identity will be unable to appreciate the novel to its fullest.

- Kid Commentator GI

Ms. Marsh, who wrote last year's contender Jepp, Who Defied the Stars, perfectly captures the magic of The Thing About Luck. In the wheat fields, "Not much happens and yet-in an extraordinary feat of capturing the small moments in which we grow up-everything happens." I did love Appelt's sugar pies, but Kadohata's wheat was richer and fuller; I, too, really got that "gut punch." (I actually think the characters in True Blue Scouts were meaningful, if clear-cut, but Obaa-chan was definitely masterfully done.) That's why I want Luck to win the battle. But, as I said yesterday, we have four distinguished contenders, and the Undead Book will throw a wrench into the mix. Predictions? There's still hope for my dream final, The Thing About Luck, Rose Under Fire (somehow beat Eleanor & Park!), and I'm still undecided in the first match. Also, a nod to Ms. Marsh: sugar vs. wheat! I think apples and oranges is getting a bit old.

- Kid Commentator RGN

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Round 2, Match 4: The Thing About Luck vs The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp

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JUDGE - KATHERINE MARSH The Thing About Luck by Cynthia Kadohata Atheneum Books for Young Readers The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp by Kathy Appelt Atheneum Books for Young Readers Sugar and wheat: two staples of the American diet; two unlikely subjects for children's books.

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I wonder what is the purpose of the red star in the book?