Spoiler-free summary: Momo is a Tibetan girl who receives a special Lhasa terrier, and along with it, a prophecy that the dog will lead her to adventures and fortune. One day, a group of traveling merchants steal her dog, so she decides to chase them down the Great Trade Route towards India. An interesting peek into Tibet and India at this specific moment in time driven by a serviceable adventure plot.
Discussion: I thought there was a chance I had read this as a kid, but now I’m thinking I was just confusing Louise Rankin for Ellen Raskin, the Newbery winner for The Westing Game. Definitely don’t remember the book itself.
Older Newbery books set in foreign countries can be dicey: to what extent does the author know about the culture they’re writing about, how hard are they going to lean into stereotypes, how comedic are they going to play the differences between our culture and theirs? This book seems to avoid obvious cringe moments like that, though, and apparently Louise Rankin spent some years living in India and Tibet, so she did have some firsthand knowledge of what she was writing about.
So, the setting here is the selling point of the book, especially the earlier chapters in Tibet. It sounds like it’d be really fun to experience a walk down the trade route, spending nights in the various small towns that dot the road. The train rides and Calcutta were less interesting to me — okay, they’re crowded, and have people from all over Asia living there, but that’s probably still the case today. The plot itself, of Momo going after her dog, seems secondary to showing off these different places. You can assume in a book like this that there’s going to be a happy ending, and doubly so when it’s been foretold (and the foretelling repeatedly mentioned). The actual ending here is so over-the-top happy that we even get an incredibly happy ending for a character who appeared for three pages in the middle of the book.
One nitpick, and knowing that the plot is secondary, but I did think it was weird that the trading party who stole her dog was so far ahead of Momo the whole time. How fast are mules? Especially when she kept talking about how treacherous the footing was for them, and how she was racing the entire time — the second page of the book says Tibetan kids can cover 40 or 50 miles a day like it’s nothing!
My next book is the first picture book on my list, and a Caldecott winner, no less: Kwame Alexander’s The Undefeated, illustrated by Kadir Nelson.
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