Librarians and Blogger’s Reviews

School Library Monthly
Southbury Library
BCPL Online Between the Covers
BCPL
Irondequoit Library
Muse JHU
Bulletin of the Center of Children’s Books
SAC Library
mstamireads


From Teen Readers

Portsmouth Teen Book Review
MRRL


From Those Putting Together Mock Newbery Award Lists:

Anderson’s Book Shop, Naperville, IL

From the blog “For Those About to Mock”
A Mock Newbery Blog. We’re tastier then mock apple pie!
Contenders
Breathing Room

…The novel infuses small scenes and brief moments with pathos and significance. Because so much of what Evvy and the other girls at Loon Lake have to endure is unbearably banal -- lying motionless in bed, not being allowed to talk, having no distractions at all from the white walls and the thoughts in one's head -- even the slightest change is exciting and meaningful. The way that the relationships between
Evvy and her roommates grow and develop is beautifully handled with almost no excess words…

It's a quiet book, but a challenging one.

But it rewards those challenges. It's of high literary quality, particularly when it comes to its characters, its setting, and its themes. It's a masterful meditation on a time, a place, and a group of people that history has largely forgotten -- one that both captures their lives and universalizes their experiences, in the tradition of Willa Cather or Scott O'Dell.

--Sam Eddington

More Mock Newbery Madness:

The Bexley Schools
North Castle LCC
OLIS



From Follett Publishing which included the book in the catalog

The Titlewave Books of Follett Publishing

Breathing Room
Marsha Hayles • IL 5-8
Set in 1940 at a time of political unrest throughout 
the U.S. and Europe, this thought-provoking novel 
sheds light on a much-feared worldwide illness. 
Hundreds of thousands of people died each year 
of TB and many ill children were sent away to 
sanatoriums to hopefully recover. This is a masterful 
novel - both eloquent and moving - that gives voice 
to those who fought hard to overcome the illness.
#0320WX8 2012 $16.24 HRD


On-Line Reviews

From Girl’s Life On-Line Site

What if you were stuck in a sanatorium, deprived of your family, and had to spend your days in bed battling a deadly disease? That’s exactly what 13-year-old Evvy Hoffmeister has to go through in Marsha Hayles’ first novel, Breathing Room.
 
Stricken with Tuberculosis, Evvy is confined to Loon Lake Sanatorium where she is allowed absolutely no visitors due to her contagious condition. She’s suddenly thrust into an overwhelming and strict schedule, planning her days from 7 a.m. to lights out at 9. The stern nurse warns her not to even talk, as that will damage her weak and infected lungs.
 
During her stay, Evvy meets fellow TB patients: dramatic and self-obsessed Pearl, shy but sweet Sarah and blunt Dena, who provides Evvy with the terrible truth, “People die at Loon Lake all the time.”
 
While Evvy deals with her day-to-day occurrences at the hospital, she writes back and forth to her family members, providing readers with a clear understanding of her sweet relationships with her twin brother Abe, her father and cold, distant mother. Through writing, Evvy finds a passion for poetry—a passion she uses to express her emotions and absorb what’s going on around her, from disappointments to deaths.
 
With quiet strength and a glimmer of hope for recovery, Evvy does her best to summon up courage to make it through her hospitalization. She learns to understand the girls at Loon Lake and how easily a life can be taken away.
 
Breathing Room’s short chapters make you want to keep reading, and the added bonus of illustrations make the story come to life. Marsha Hayles’ novel gives a glimpse into the much-feared illnesses prevalent in the 1940s, and how a sickness could deeply impact the lives of many.
 
Read about Evvy’s moving story in Breathing Room (out now!). Then come back and let us know your thoughts.

What’s one way you try to cheer up a sick friend? Blog about it, babes.








From The Tri State Young Adult Review, a group that represents public schools, public libraries, and private schools in the Tri-State area of PA, DE, and NJ.

…The outside world is brought into the novel with historical newspaper clippings about the Dionne quints and the war in Europe, as well as photos of items found in TB hospitals in the 1940s. Set in an era of American history that is not often covered in fiction books, this novel seems like a diary of real events.

Evvy will stay with the reader long after the book has been finished. It is also a great read-aloud that will have listeners begging for the reader to continue. There is a detailed historical afterword as well as explanations of the photos in the book, which provide accurate historical information to supplement the novel.
This one is strongly recommended for middle- and high-school libraries needing strong historical novels based on fact about the TB epidemic in the United States in the 1940s. With excellent narration, character development and a plot that zips right along, this one is a winner.

Historical fiction, Tuberculosis – Fiction


Standard Reviews 


From Kirkus Reviews

Confined to a tuberculosis sanatorium in rural Minnesota, 13 year-old Evelyn Hoffmeister develops inner strength as she copes with loneliness, loss and the insidious disease that threatens her life.
In May 1940, Evvy’s father leaves her at Loon Lake Sanatorium, where she’s assigned to a ward with other teenage tuberculosis patients. Isolated from her family, Evvy quickly learns to follow Loon Lake’s strict regimen of bed rest, diet and treatment, with no talking or visitors. Frightened and overwhelmed, Evvy gradually adapts to the sterile routine and discovers her fellow patients: talkative, fashionable Pearl; kindhearted Beverly; gruff Dena; and shy Sarah, a Jewish girl who becomes her best friend. As time slowly passes, Evvy realizes some patients improve and leave, while others die, sometimes unexpectedly. Speaking first as an observer and later as an engaged participant and survivor, Evvy tells the story of her year at Loon Lake. By describing her feelings, fears and tentative hope, she offers an inside peek at the lives of tuberculosis patients in the pre–World War II era, when there was no real cure for the disease. Period photographs of equipment, posters, medical treatments and hospital facilities relating to tuberculosis add verisimilitude.
A quiet, sober story of a genuine heroine who survives a devastating disease with grace. (photographs; author’s note; notes on photographs)(Historical fiction. 10-14) 


From The Horn Book

Breathing Room
by Marsha Hayles
Intermediate, Middle School    Ottaviano/Holt    244 pp.
6/12    978-0-8050-8961-5    $17.99    g
“A little mystery was better than a lot of boring,” thinks thirteen year-old Evvy Hoffmeister when in May 1940 she is sent to Loon Lake Sanatorium to recover from tuberculosis. This philosophy takes Hayles’s first novel far, making a perfect read for those not yet ready for Martha Brooks’s emotionally dense Queen of Hearts (rev. 7/11). Although Evvy is at first horribly lonely in the sanatorium, her natural inquisitiveness gradually overcomes her fear and isolation, creating an evenly paced story in which Evvy learns about people and about herself against the backdrop of sanatorium life. While daily life seems to move slowly, Hayles reminds us that change is constant. The war in Europe casts its shadow: Evvy’s roommate Sarah hides her Jewish roots, Evvy herself faces cruel comments about her German name, and the inmates argue about whether America should join the war. Their most immediate concern, however, is getting discharged rather than “going home” (i.e., dying of the disease). Hayles’s commitment to covering the whole range of possible backgrounds, treatments, and fates for the sanatorium patients (one undergoes a thoracoplasty; another dies of a massive hemorrhage; in a third, TB spreads to her brain; etc.) makes the story seem somewhat contrived, but Hayles succeeds admirably in showing, rather than telling, Evvy’s character and growth. The title Breathing Room becomes all the more apt as Evvy both wins back her lungs and becomes her own person. ariel baker-gibbs


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…The unique setting provides a backdrop to a well-crafted, believable story complete with happy moments and camaraderie interspersed with a daily reality of anxiety and loss. Despite a well-founded fear of how the disease could cut short her future, Evie evokes a completely normal-sounding teen trying to make sense of the world. Photos and other illustrations enhance the narrative. (Full Review HERE)

— Anne O’Malley

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Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books

Vol. 66, Number 2, October 2012


The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

Hayles, Marsha Breathing Room. Ottaviano/Holt, 2012 244p illus. with photographs ISBN 978-0-8050-8961-5 $16.99 R Gr. 4-7 Evvy and her twin brother have always been so close that it’s difficult to comprehend why she has been stricken with tuberculosis while Abe has been spared. Now she’s at Loon Lake Sanatorium, on a regimen of enforced rest and near-immobility, protected from learning any excitement-inducing news from either home or the nation, which teeters at the brink of entry into World War II. The many readers engrossed by Peg Kehret’s autobiographical Small Steps (BCCB 11/96) will find strong and understandable similarities between Kehret’s actual experience with disabling illness and Evvy’s fictional experiences. Restricted to a room shared with other girls with little to do and much to worry about, undergoing treatments now considered ineffective (e.g., intentional lung collapse), and facing seemingly arbitrary outcomes of recovery or death, roommates engage in interpersonal dramas that become the focus of their event-starved lives. There will be considerable alignment of interest and reading levels between this title and Jim Murphy’s Invisible Microbe (BCCB 9/12), and language arts and science teachers may want to consider a collaborative fiction/nonfiction reading activity. Most readers, though, won’t need prodding to immerse themselves in Evvy’s medical travails. Notes on the historical chapter illustrations are included. EB

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Honors and Awards

Named one of Bank Street’s Best Children’s Books for 2013! 

Nominee for the Utah Beehive Children's Book Award for 2015

On the Pennsylvania Young Reader’s Choice Awards Program Master List for 2014-2015

On the South Carolina Book Junior Book Award List for 2014-2015

Best-of-the-Year Book 2013http://www.education.wisc.edu/ccbc/Choices%202013%20citations.pdfshapeimage_23_link_0
From A Reader 
Who Spent Time in a Sanatorium…


	“In 1959, at the age of 14, I was admitted to a TB Sanitarium in rural Illinois. Unlike Evvy, I wasn't contagious, and showed no symptoms at all, other than a dime-sized spot on my right lung. But state law mandated that I remain there for a minimum of six months. Since no one would tell me what was happening, it was, in many ways, a traumatic experience. Streptomycin, PAS and INH were in use at the time, but the rigid rules of the institution were still turn-of-the-century. 
	You did a superb job in Breathing Room of capturing the experience: the fear, the loneliness, the cold indifference of one nurse and the kindness of another, and the deep bonds between patients, all of which I experienced. I wish I’d had this book to read years ago when I was confined to bed. Even now so many years later reading it moved me to tears.”
—Sandy Robertson, 
author of the forthcoming book 
Invincible Summer 
about her treatment and 
experiences recovering 
from tuberculosis
From A Reader 
Who Spent Time in a Sanatorium…


	“In 1959, at the age of 14, I was admitted to a TB Sanitarium in rural Illinois. Unlike Evvy, I wasn't contagious, and showed no symptoms at all, other than a dime-sized spot on my right lung. But state law mandated that I remain there for a minimum of six months. Since no one would tell me what was happening, it was, in many ways, a traumatic experience. Streptomycin, PAS and INH were in use at the time, but the rigid rules of the institution were still turn-of-the-century. 
	You did a superb job in Breathing Room of capturing the experience: the fear, the loneliness, the cold indifference of one nurse and the kindness of another, and the deep bonds between patients, all of which I experienced. I wish I’d had this book to read years ago when I was confined to bed. Even now so many years later reading it moved me to tears.”
—Sandy Robertson, 
author of the forthcoming book 
Invincible Summer 
about her treatment and 
experiences recovering 
from tuberculosis
From A Reader 
Who Spent Time in a Sanatorium…


	“In 1959, at the age of 14, I was admitted to a TB Sanitarium in rural Illinois. Unlike Evvy, I wasn't contagious, and showed no symptoms at all, other than a dime-sized spot on my right lung. But state law mandated that I remain there for a minimum of six months. Since no one would tell me what was happening, it was, in many ways, a traumatic experience. Streptomycin, PAS and INH were in use at the time, but the rigid rules of the institution were still turn-of-the-century. 
	You did a superb job in Breathing Room of capturing the experience: the fear, the loneliness, the cold indifference of one nurse and the kindness of another, and the deep bonds between patients, all of which I experienced. I wish I’d had this book to read years ago when I was confined to bed. Even now so many years later reading it moved me to tears.”
—Sandy Robertson, 
author of the forthcoming book 
Invincible Summer 
about her treatment and 
experiences recovering 
from tuberculosis
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