Helen Frost.  Diamond Willow.  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.  111 pages.  Age 9 to 12.

What makes a poem?  At least 50% of the time, I think it comes down to line breaks.  Diamond Willow has plenty of those.  To see a picture of a diamond willow stick (Frost has one on her website) is inspiring, and may put you at ease about the shape of the “poems”—diamond-like, but not diamonds exactly—as well as the boldfaced nuggets within.  The physical layout of the text becomes an integral part of the story, much more noteworthy than the words themselves, and it makes for a fast read.

Willow perceives herself as having a set of related problems:  she’s ordinary, unpopular, and competes with sled dogs for her father’s affection.  She bargains with her parents to “mush the dogs out” on her own so she can bask in her grandparents’ unconditional love, but an accident on the return trip leaves their best dog blinded.  Of course her parents’ love is also unconditional, and remembering this allows her to take sizable risks later in the novel, fighting one ill-conceived plan with another in an effort to save the injured dog from being euthanized.

Frost occasionally breaks from Willow’s narration for a non-verse observation from an animal inhabited by one of the characters’ ancestors.  She does so boldly—hearing from these characters directly asserts the reality of their existence, rather than being spiritually suggestive.  I think weaving differing viewpoints into the story works well, but the animal-people give me a feeling of unease.  There’s an author’s note devoted to the diamond willow sticks, and I think the animal incarnates deserve at least an end note.  Is this an aspect of Athabaskan beliefs, or does it just seem like something indigenous North American peoples would believe?

As an experiment, I tried to create a condensed/abridged version by reading only the boldfaced words, typically between 2 and 8 words per page.  Reading these bits alone will give you the gist of it, but more the emotions at play than any clues about plot, or even characterization.  There was a bit of leading on page 20, though:  “Sometimes I feel like two people.”  One might not notice it the first read through, but if you look closer you see that it has nothing to do with the rest of the words on that page.  There’s an interesting twist in the story that I don’t think anyone would predict, but the dog’s “human” personality—and her memories of the life of a fetus—seem to trivialize the revelation and what it could mean to Willow.

other reviews:
A Fuse #8 Production | The Reading Zone | A Year of Reading