cyphomandra asked about Newbery novels in verse, and friends, I have THOUGHTS. I have OPINIONS. Or actually I have neither of those things, I just have FEELINGS, feelings first engendered decades ago when I first read Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust, which despite the lapse of time have yet to subside.

Out of the Dust won the Newbery Medal in 1998. It is about a girl named Billie Jo, so named because her dad really wanted a boy and apparently wanted his daughter to be reminded twenty times a day that she was a disappointment. It’s the Great Depression, and they live on a miserable Dust Bowl farm where Billie Jo’s only source of solace is playing her piano.

But then ONE DAY, someone leaves a can of kerosene on the stove. This kerosene catches fire, so Billie Jo grabs it with her bare hands to throw out the door! But she reaches the door just as her pregnant mother is about to enter, and thus accidentally hurls flaming kerosene all over her!

The mother dies a slow and agonizing death of her wounds. The baby IIRC is stillborn, but I can’t recall the details of this point because I was too busy obsessing over all the neighbors coming to Billie Jo’s dying mother’s bedside murmuring “Billie Jo threw the kerosene.”

Billie Jo’s mother is dead. Billie Jo can no longer play the piano because her hands are horribly scarred from the kerosene. Billie Jo jumps a train to get out of Oklahoma, presumably to escape to a place where no one knows “Billie Jo threw the kerosene.” But in the end she comes home, and there is I believe an attempt at a vaguely hopeful ending (Billie Jo is perhaps attempting to play the piano again?) but it is TOO LITTLE TOO LATE.

This was my first novel in verse. It was, I believe, also the Newbery’s first foray into novels in verse. (There are earlier collections of poetry, like A Visit to William Blake’s Inn and Joyful Noise, but a poetry collection is a different beast.) It has given me an abiding aversion to novels in verse, a prejudice that has proven ineradicable even though I loved Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out and Back Again (Newbery Honor 2012) so much that I’ve read all of Lai’s other work, AND ALSO loved Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming (Newbery Honor 2015) so much that I’ve been making a game stab at reading all her work as well, although as she has published approximately 500 books I haven’t managed it yet.

As I contemplated this fact, I wondered woefully if I would never learn to let go of this prejudice. But then I started totting up the other Newbery novels in verse.

Once Out of the Dust opened the sluice gates, an inundation of Newbery verse novels followed. Well, okay, more of a trickle, but if you are averse to verse novels it feels like quite a lot.

2002: Marilyn Nelson, Carver: A Life in Poems, actually a biography and not a novel, but includes a particularly scarring poem about lynching.

2009: Margarita Engle’s The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba’s Struggle for Freedom. You know how a lot of the earlier Newbery books were exciting adventure stories about the battle for freedom? This is not an exciting adventure story. This is a long, slow, bloody trek of misery to freedom.

2015. Kwame Alexander’s The Crossover. Dead father.

2018. Jason Reynolds’ Long Way Down. Dead brother.

2020. Jasmine Warga’s Other Words for Home. Refugees. Actually not super depressing, though.

2022. Rajani LaRocca’s Red, White and Whole. Dead mother.

2025. Lesa Cline-Ransom One Big Open Sky. Dead father.

So actually I think the numbers are on my side here. Newbery novels in verse have a 70% chance of being miserable! It is right and proper that I approach them with crushing dread.

In the afterward to Max in the Land of Lies, Adam Gidwitz mentioned Melita Maschmann’s Account Rendered: A Dossier of My Former Self as one of the most important sources for the book, and also a book that he would urge everyone to read. Of course I had to try it, especially given that Gidwitz’s Melita Maschmann is one of the most likable characters in Max in the Land of Lies, for all that she is a true believer Nazi who, moreover, gets only very limited pagetime.

Now I realize some people may object to the idea of a likeable Nazi true believer, but I believe in order to understand evil one of the things we have to let go of is the belief that there’s any clear relationship between likability and goodness. If you will excuse a digression into quadrant theory, likability and goodness are two separate axes, and most of us are happiest with the “likable and good” quadrant and the “unlikable and bad” quadrant. Neither of these create cognitive dissonance. We want the people whom we like to be good and the people we hate to be bad.

But “unlikable and good” and “likable and bad” can both be a torment. You know that you should like so-and-so, because they’re so useful and helpful and have all the right opinions, but really you would climb out a window rather than spend an hour alone with them because they just grate on you. Or, you like so-and-so a lot, because they’re so funny and charming, and when other people say they’ve done bad things it’s probably lies, or jealousy, or a failure to understand the complexity of their character, or… oh God what if they are bad. You like them so much and they’re bad?? What does that say about you??? NO the accusations of badness are LIES.

(Or else, you insist that you never really liked them THAT much, like my friend with the Harry Potter tattoo who insists she was never THAT into Harry Potter.)

So: Melita Maschmann, likable Nazi true believer, who very slowly after the war began to look back on her former self and say, “What the fuck was I thinking?” This book, written in the form of a letter to her former best friend, a Jewish girl who had to flee Germany, is Maschmann’s attempt to figure out what, in fact, she was thinking.

The idea of the book as a letter is sometimes slightly alarming (can you imagine handing someone a book-length manuscript and saying “This is why I was a world-historically bad friend”?), but as a literary device it’s useful, because it gives Maschmann an imaginary interlocutor to pull her up short whenever she reaches a particularly “But didn’t this make you rethink your choices?” moment. Kristallnacht? The starving Poles when you were first posted to Poland? The time the local German army didn’t have enough troops to evict the Poles from their village to make way for German settlers, so you had to help? Maybe the time that you drove a truck around stealing furniture from the local Poles to give it to a German family that had settled in one of these newly emptied villages?

This last in particular was not merely wrong but also illegal even at the time, but rather oddly it’s also the only one that Maschmann didn’t have a single qualm about when she did it. The rest of these events did give her pause, but at the end of the day there’s a vast gulf between being taken aback and actually rethinking the ideology that has shaped your entire life.

Maschmann turned to National Socialism because she was an idealist who loved the idea of the National Community that cuts across classes and binds everyone together and fixes the poverty and shame that have crippled her country since the Great War. It was a way of rebelling against her parents that nonetheless embraced many of their beliefs: not only the sense that democracy had failed, but also the belief that violent competition among countries is inevitable, so although you might flinch from things you saw while invading Poland, if you didn’t invade Poland then Poland would assuredly invade you.

By this point you, my imaginary interlocutor, may well be asking, “But what part of this is likable, you monster?” Well, part of it is the fact that Maschmann had the strength of character to look back afterward and try to make sense of what she had done. This is something that most human beings seem to find almost impossible even when there aren’t war crimes involved.

Her account is clear-eyed, both in the sense of sheer observation - there’s tons of interesting detail here about life on the ground during the invasion of Poland, for instance - and in the sense that she’s trying to look at these events squarely, to explain without justifying, to say “this is what we were thinking” and hope that this might help turn other people aside if they find themselves straying into a similar path.

But even in Maschmann’s younger self, there are many appealing qualities. She was an indefatigable worker with a yearning to help people, an idealist who latched onto absolutely the wrong ideal. If she had latched onto a different ideal –

Well, the twentieth century was not short on ideals that led to mass destruction, so if Maschmann chose a different ideal, she might have been just as destructive in a different direction. Why do I find something so appealing about idealists, when ideology is used to create and justify so much suffering?