Chapter Book Review - The View from Saturday

Here is another review I did in my earlier days. This book is on my top five list of Newbery Medal winner favorites.

Konigsburg, E. L., The View from Saturday, 1996, Atheneum, Newbery Medal Winner 1997

Summary: Noah, Nadia, Ethan, Julian, and Mrs. Olinski all share something in common besides the sixth grade. The story starts off at the state championship academic bowl where no sixth graders had ever been. How Noah, Nadia, Ethan, and Julian became the team is a question their teacher Mrs. Olinski can’t answer at first. As the competition plays out, we meet each member of the team through flashbacks brought about by the bowl questions. Their journeys are told in the order of how each one crosses the path of the next character. First is Noah’s wedding attendance that becomes the backdrop to an intricate web that will tie all the characters’ journeys together. We come to know Julian last and find Saturday tea brings about more than friendship and the formation of “The Souls”. Mrs. Olinski’s journey is sprinkled throughout the story, but concludes with the team’s success. The author includes a dash of growing pains, a pinch of school bullies, a touch of symbolism, and cup of kindness that rounds out this endearing story of choices and friendship.

About the Author: Elaine Lobl Konigsburg was born in New York City in 1930, but spent her youth in Pennsylvania and Ohio and now resides in Florida. In 1952 she married her husband, a psychologist, after receiving a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and she began to teach science at a private girls’ school. In 1962 she gave up teaching and began to study art and devote more time to her three children. Using familiar life events she then began to write. Her first two books published in 1967 both became 1968 Newbery winners. The first book won Honor and the second won the Medal.

Since then Konigsburg has written sixteen more books of which many have received awards including another Newbery Medal and two books were made into movies. One of these was the book From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, which was produced twice. Once in 1973 for the theatre that starred Ingrid Bergman as Mrs. Frankweiler and again in 1995 for television that stared Lauren Bacall as Mrs. Frankweiler.

A book, a cup of tea, and any day of the week is all you need to read.