Book Review: “Dot to Dot,” by Kit Bakke
Kit Bakke adeptly follows the mercurial moods and dawning insights of the book’s twelve-year-old protagonist, Dot, on her journey through grief. This is a banquet table of a book, filled with real and imagined heroes, would be friends, irritating family, cherished memories, new experiences, and leaps through time. The loss of her mother (no pulled punches here, it is the first thing we learn about Dot’s life) so overwhelms Dot that she can only begin to emerge through the kind, but weird, ministrations of an aunt she doesn’t yet know loves her.
Dot’s journey is in one sense the classic quest or hero’s journey, but turned on its head: Dot doesn’t set out on her journey to find a specific key so much as she is dragged on a journey by her Aunt Tab–to England. The objective is only for Dot to begin to live life AT (as she refers to her life after truck that hits her mother). The talisman, a silk quilt left to Dot by her mother reminds: “Be Daring, Be Inventive, Be Loyal,” and these prove to be indispensible instructions as she negotiates her way through a series of encounters, some fantastical, all of which move her along the road to maturity.
Strong, idiosyncratic women are Dot’s guides: her late mother, Thea; quirky Aunt Tab; and her namesakes, Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Wollenstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (whom she actually sees and hears). True to the best children’s novels we are treated to a plethora of clues that must be solved and secrets that must be uncovered along the way. Add to this the wonder of a first plane ride, discovering a new country (both past and present England), meeting famous authors, Tarot readings, and hatching plans to run away to Italy—if you’ve ever known a twelve-year-old girl (or been one), you know that this is the kind of imaginary fodder they live for.
I remember reading an interview with an author of YA books in which the author said the important, or maybe he said vital, element to writing a successful novel for a young audience is to show respect for the young reader. I kept harkening back to this statement as I read Dot to Dot. Bakke doesn’t insinuate “moral lessons” into the book, delivered so as to conk the young reader over the head. Instead, we follow Dot as she draws her own conclusions. Kids are smarter, deeper, and more mentally agile than many middle grade and YA novels give them credit for. Bakke respects her readers and knows how far to make them stretch; she delivers the goods without condescension and with plenty of invention and charm.
Dot is a thinking girl, thoughtful, practical, and dreamy at the same time, as we see here: “…Dot came to a couple of conclusions about her practice runaway. First, it hadn’t gone too well. It was possible that reading Frankenstein wasn’t the best preparation for a walk in the woods…it was also possible that she shouldn’t plan to run away without a GPS…Overshadowing it all, though, was the second thought: If she had truly met Jane Austen, back from the dead in a much nicer way than Victor Frankenstein’s Monster, why wouldn’t it be possible for her mother to come back, too?” Life is not easy to negotiate, but we feel certain Dot is beginning to find her way.
Bakke’s also written Miss Alcott’s E-Mail, which I’ve got on my nightstand’s to-read-next pile.
August 19th, 2011 at 10:01 pm
[...] her second book, Dot to Dot, a novel for “middle-grade” (roughly ages 8-12) readers. Yellow Wallpaper praises it as “a banquet table of a book, filled with real and imagined heroes, would be friends, [...]