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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Richie's Picks: OPERATION REDWOOD, May 9, 2009
This review is from: Operation Redwood (Hardcover)
"We need wilderness preserved -- as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds -- because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The remainder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it. It is good for us when we are young, because of the incomparable sanity it can bring briefly, as vacation and rest, into our insane lives. It is important to us when we are old simply because it is there -- important, that is, simply as idea."
-- Wallace Stegner, 1961
"The computer beeped. Julian glanced at the screen, and saw a message so astonishing that he sprayed ginger ale out his nose and all across his uncle's computer screen.
"The subject of the newest e-mail read: 'SIBLEY CARTER IS A MORON AND A WORLD CLASS JERK!!!'"
Susannah T. French, environmental lawyer-turned-first-time children's book author and Left Coast member of the "Class of 2K9," cites Elaine Konigsburg and Jean Craighead George amongst her own childhood reading influences. In OPERATION REDWOOD -- which takes place in my neck of the woods -- French employs the cleverness of Konigsburg and the reverence of George in a hijinx-laden activist tale of two boys and a girl who plot to protect a privately-owned grove of old growth redwoods from being clear cut by a corporation.
"'Today, experts estimate that about 4 percent of the original redwood forest remains.'
"Julian frowned. He pictured ninety-six giant trunks lying on the forest floor and only four trees left standing. That couldn't be right."
Julian Carter-Li has been having a truly miserable time of things since his mother departed San Francisco on her grant-underwritten photography trip to China. Julian has been stuck in the nightmarish care of his wealthy paternal aunt and uncle -- a very Dursley-ish duo. (His aunt employs a point system to supposedly motivate his behavior with incentives. He is now at NEGATIVE twenty-something and sinking fast.) And so it is that on a long afternoon and evening when he is under the weather and left alone, to wait for hours and hours in Uncle Sibley's corporate office, that Julian stumbles upon the insulting, aforementioned, UNOPENED e-mail on his uncle's computer. Opening (and then deleting) the email, Julian learns that his uncle is planning to clear-cut some place called Big Tree Grove.
When Julian and his best bud Danny Lopez decide to reply to the insulting email, they learn that the author is Robin Elder, a girl living a couple of hours north of San Francisco, who will be personally impacted -- devastated by the loss of her family's Eden -- if Uncle Sibley's plan is successful. As the e-mails begin flying back and forth, Julian and Danny decide to secretly join forces with Robin to attempt the impossible.
"He tried to imagine how the land might have looked five hundred years earlier, when the Miwok Indians lived there."
I can remember how, as a teenager, I would sometimes play the game that Julian plays -- imagining what a place looked like before developments and strip malls and the asphalt roads that connect one strip mall to the next. Of course, at my age I don't have to imagine. I am quite aware of the changes -- for the worse -- that have, in my own lifetime, taken place.
Shouldn't we be asking ourselves -- assuming that it is not already too late -- whether or not it matters that such species as the Black rhinoceros, the Bactrian camel, the Giant panda, or the Blue whale still roam the Earth when humanity reaches the future inhabited by our children's children's children. Does it matter whether or not our descendents have the opportunities I have had to stroll through groves of trees that seem to reach to the sky and that date back to Columbus and the Magna Carta and Kublai Khan? Whether one is young or old, such questions can so easily fall between the cracks amongst the day-to-day demands of living our lives.
OPERATION REDWOOD will surely get some kids wondering how much of Earth's fragile beauty and diversity future generations will be required to experience as no more than a figment of the imagination. Hopefully Julian, Danny, and Robin's take-charge, good-hearted activism will rub off on readers and have them thinking about speaking their own minds when they are faced with the destruction of their natural inheritance.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Courtesy of Teens Read Too, April 7, 2009
This review is from: Operation Redwood (Hardcover)
In OPERATION REDWOOD, four young kids take on big business to save a forest full of giant redwood trees.
Debut author S. Terrell French has written an adventure filled with creative ideas, spunky ambition, and a love of the environment.
Julian Carter-Li is staying with his uncle and aunt while his mother travels to China to photograph Buddhist temples. Things are not going well. Julian doesn't seem to be able to do anything according to the strict rules his aunt has established, and his uncle seems constantly disappointed in him. In fact, while alone in his uncle's fancy office, Julian stumbles across an extremely insulting email. It appears that his uncle believes Julian is unruly and "sullen" just like his late father. Julian can't believe what he is reading.
Another email that attracts Julian's attention is from a young girl complaining that IPX, his uncle's company, is planning to destroy an area of redwood forest known as Big Tree Grove. Although he has never met this girl named Robin, Julian can relate to her anger that a huge company like IPX, that already has more money than he can imagine, would want to destroy something as important and historical as the redwoods just to make more money selling lumber.
Julian keeps the emails he reads a secret until he hears his aunt's plans to send him off to Math Camp for the summer. He appeals to his friend, Danny, for help. When he tells Danny about the emails, Danny begins to concoct a plan that would keep Julian from spending his summer doing math calculations and instead possibly saving the redwoods.
What follows is a daring adventure. Julian and Danny scheme to get Julian out of the city and off to Big Tree Grove where he can help Robin protect her old-growth forest. They may be just a few young kids, but they have big ideas. Even when their plans seem to be wrecked by Julian's annoying and interfering aunt, they manage to use creativity and determination to keep their eye on the goal.
OPERATION REDWOOD provides excellent reinforcement for conservation lessons and the importance of preserving our natural habitats. It would work for readers in the 8-13 age group for independent reading or as a great classroom read-aloud.
Reviewed by: Sally Kruger, aka "Readingjunky"
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Mission Somewhat Possible, September 1, 2009
This review is from: Operation Redwood (Hardcover)
I wonder if contemporary children's authors ever look at the writers of the past and think to themselves, "It was easier then. You could get away with so much more." Morality, at least in retrospect, was so clear cut and uncomplicated in the books of the past. You could have a kid defeat a great big villain with relative simplicity and folks wouldn't object at all. Or maybe not. That's how we think of old children's books... as simple. But when you try to sit down and think of all the realistic novels of the past, their conclusions are never as free and easy as all that. I'm mentioning all this because I just finished, Operation Redwood, one of the finest children's novels of the year, and while reading the book I kept thinking about how author S. Terrell French never cheats her readers. She is constantly covering her tracks and making this a strangely realistic middle grade novel, albeit one about kids trying to take down a big business. It's a first novel on the author's part, but French has crafted an interesting, intelligent, and ultimately satisfying debut that will undoubtedly garner more than a few fans. A book that shows us that doing the moral thing is a complicated business.
Let's say you're sick and your uncle Sibley Carter (with whom you've been staying while your mom works in China) has left you in his office for hours and hours. You are Julian Carter-Li and after your nap you're bored. You sit in your uncle's chair and there, right before your eyes, is an email in his in-box with your name on it. And after that? A message with the subject of "Sibley Carter is a moron and a world-class jerk." It has begun. Prying where his eyes should not be, Julian learns that his uncle intends to destroy a patch of ancient redwoods and that the plucky girl who lives near them needs Julian's help to stop the destruction. But what can a couple of kids really do? How about faux emails, daring escapes, a sit-in, and other plans? One thing's for certain. After this summer, Julian's life will never be the same again.
I think what I love about this book is how firmly it is rooted in reality. Not that I think this kind of story could actually happen in the real world, mind. But French has a wonderful sense of inserting real elements into a story when you least expect them. Kids (and adults) will walk into this book with a certain set of assumptions. So when they find that the child protagonists have clever plans that sometimes work and, more often than not do NOT work, that's going to be a little shocking. Also shocking? Your hero runs away, gets to a beautiful place where you believe the rest of the book will take place, and then long before you're even halfway through the novel his aunt comes and whisks him far far away. Whoa. It's like the cover and the concept of the book were leading you astray. They're not, but it feels that way for a second, and you become more wrapped up in the reading as a result.
Over and over again I noticed Ms. French was refusing to leave loose ends dangling or logical plot points flailing. How did Robin get Julian's uncle's personal email? "My brother's taking a journalism course, and he was telling us how a lot of people, even big CEOs, read their own e-mail and their addresses are just their names and their company web addresses." Pretty good explanation, eh? The book's chock full of them. Either it was workshopped within an inch of its life, or Ms. French understands how to have things make sense.
Someone (perhaps the author Mitali Perkins) once wondered why it is that authors of middle grade and YA fiction feel the need to compare their characters' eyes or skin to food when making it clear that those characters aren't white. "Her coffee colored skin." "His almond shaped eyes." Well Ms. French isn't falling into that trap, no sir. If she wants to making it clear that Julian has Chinese ancestry then there's his last name to consider (Carter-Li) and his eyes, which are mentioned as being "upturned" at one point. Race plays an interesting part in the book, then. In this day and age, racism has grown subtle. People use code words to cover up how they really feel. And in this particular novel, you've the distinct impression that Julian's aunt resents him, not just because he's been "imposed" upon them, but also because his mother was Asian. But of course she never actually SAYS any of this. It's far less obvious than that. And more realistic too.
They say to "show don't tell" when you're writing, so I was constantly amazed at how much bubbles beneath the surface of this book. Julian almost turns Robin's dad into a kind of surrogate father, but the text never has him figure this out or say as much. It just happens. And since we're getting everything from Julian's perspective, he has a view of his life that doesn't look too far beneath the surface of things. His aunt and uncle are constantly insulting his mother, so Julian naturally wishes to defend her from them. On the other hand, French makes it pretty clear that this woman is not exactly going to win the World's Best Parent of the Year Award anytime soon. She hears that her son ran away from home and his aunt and uncle are kicking him out... but does she shorten her assignment in China a little? She does not, the greedy thing. At one point Julian's grandmother speculates that maybe she was too busy a parent and should have given his mother more attention at home. Maybe that's why she's so flighty. Whatever the reason, Julian's just a bit too young to resent his mom's meanderings, but give him a couple years. Full-fledged teenagerhood is just around the corner.
At its core, this book is basically a big eco-friendly morality lesson, and that's tricky. More than once (and I think French acknowledges this) you find yourself wondering if it's worth saving the trees if Julian or Robin end up disappointing her dad in some way. It's strange, but she keeps the plot on such a down-to-earth level that that's where your mind goes. Generally realistic middle grade novels where kids have to defeat evil corporations who are about to harm the earth ( Hoot and the like) don't spend a lot of time tying the book into real life. French does. When Julian says, "In school we're always studying the rain forests in Brazil and Africa. And people are always trying to get you to sign petitions to save the rain forest and buy special rain-forest nuts. And we never learned anything about people cutting down redwoods in California," I think a lot of kids are going to agree with that. We give our students the impression that disasters of this sort happen on other continents and to other people. So to hear that "national forests aren't like parks. They log there all the time," that kind of statement will probably surprise as many adults as it does children. The Author's Note at the back clarifies exactly what in this story is true and what's happening today. It makes it a little more real, and doesn't feel preachy in the process either. The book is a screed to some extent, but one you don't mind reading.
I won't tell you what it is, but this book manages to pull off a surprise reveal at the end that I'd bet a good 85% of adults reading the book won't see coming. In many ways this book makes for a natural companion to Jill Wolfson's middle grade novel Home, and Other Big, Fat Lies where kids want to protect trees from logging, but understand that the local economy relies on them. In a lot of ways, French's novel isn't as complex in terms of the logging economy, but it makes up for that by weaving a true emotional journey full of adventure, friendship, complex morality, trust, lies, and discovery. You believe in this book and you believe in the characters.
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