Soldier Bear
Wednesday, March 14
by Bibi Dumon Tak
spot illustrations by Philip Hopman
translated from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson
Eerdmans Books edition 2011
A cgarette-eating, beer-drinking, ammunition-carrying bear? Only warfare could create a story so improbable.
During World War II as Russia and Germany fight to claim Poland for their own the citizens caught in the middle are taken as prisoners in their own country, forced to flee to neighboring Iran. Among these escaped expatriates are Stanislav and Peter, a pair of inseparable friends who agree to join the British in the fight to help reclaim their homeland. One day while stopped along the road they spy a starving young boy with nothing to trade the soldiers but a small sack containing a bear cub. A cute little bear cub, who so totally entrances Peter that he trades a pocket knife, some cash, and tin of meat for it. None of the soldiers of the 2nd Polish Corps would imagine that this cute little pet would become not just a mascot but a source of comfort and a valuable comrade in the fight.
Once weened from milk the bear they named Voytek, "smiling warrior" in Polish, quickly adapts to his surroundings and behave much like a small child in the camp. Voytek prefers to sleep with Peter instead of his little makeshift bed, he bothers the cook for scraps, and learns how to give himself showers in the heat of the Palestinian desert where they are based before moving closer to the front. When scolded or scared Voytek covers his eyes with his paws and rocks back and forth, and when the soldiers become melancholy he knows to stand on his hind legs and place a reassuring arm on a man's shoulders. Raised around men Voytek learns how to behave as a man, as much as a bear can without betraying his nature. Granted, the soldiers introduce the bear to beer, which he loves and can be bribed with, and he mimics the soldiers smoking by stealing their lit cigarettes and eating them, but he also pitches in and carries ammunition when its time to work, earning Voytek an official designation as a Private in the 2nd Polish Corps.
There is something decidedly old school about Soldier Bear, an innocent absurdity that feeds into the wartime images we have of people doing and performing extraordinary tasks in the face of adversity. The connection with nature, a bear in this case, in the face of something as unnatural as life during wartime keeps the men of the 2nd Polish Corps grounded. All around them humanity is focused on so much destruction and yet here are soldiers chasing a bear, two dogs, and a monkey that they have also adopted around the camp as they wreak havoc. And when a winter snow quiets the war it is the animals who remind the soldiers about the joys of life by frolicking and starting a snowball fight that involves the entire camp. Ironic, that the link these men have to their humanity comes from the antics of a bear who was raised by soldiers in adversity.
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| photo from the Polish Institute, not from the book |
In thinking about it after the fact, the story is remarkable, but completely sidesteps the moral implications of these soldiers deciding to take care of a bear cub over the boy who owned him. A bear cub in the wild without its mother probably wouldn't have survived – indeed, I suspect the only reason the boy has the cub in the first place is because something happened to the bear's mother – but what about the boy, and what of his mother? Why not take the boy as a mascot, feed him and make him an honorary soldier? Is it not entirely possible that Peter and his friends saved the bear at the expense of the boy's own life?
Nonetheless, Soldier Bear was this year's winner of the Mildred L. Batchelder Award for “the most outstanding children’s book originally published in a language other than English in a country other than the United States, and subsequently translated into English for publication in the United States.” A worthy winner, to be sure, but there is nothing "foreign" about the reading experience.
[This review is also cross-posted over at Guys Lit Wire today, your home for books of interest to guys, by some of the best bloggers in the business.]
Labels: 11, ALA, batchelder award, bibi dumon tak, eerdmans, GuysLitWire, laura watkinson, non-fiction, poland, war, ww2
posted by david elzey @ 8:48 AM,
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Zita the Spacegirl
Tuesday, February 14
First Second 2011
Sucked into a portal through another dimension, Zita must rescue her friend and find a way home before the world she is on is destroyed. Oh, but it's so much more fun then all that!
Winner of this year's Cybil Award for Best Middle Grade Graphic Novel.
While playing one day Zita and her friend Joseph discover a small crater with a small device at it's center, a device with an irresistible red button to push. Joseph the worrywart thinks they should report their discovery but Zita's all for adventure and with a mighty THOOM! a portal opens before them. Before they have any time to react a gob of tentacles emerge from the portal, grab Joseph, and then the portal closes. Collecting herself from fear and guilt, Zita decides she must rescue Joseph, and with another push of the button...
Zita lands in a parallel world where the inhabitants are either trying to escape or prepare for the destruction of the planet within three days. The clock is ticking, Zita has to find her friend then find her way home, but not without a sci-fi heroes journey that includes magicians, robots, giant rats, and some monstery looking aliens, all of varying temperaments and trustworthiness. in the end when all the threads come together it looks like either Zita or Joseph can return through the portal but not both. Adventurous Zita understand that if one of them is likely to find an alternate way home it will be her, and with that resolved and a small band of new friends Zita is poised to begin a series of new adventures.
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| click to enbiggen |
Zita the Spacegirl is, honestly, the most satisfying middle grade graphic novel in the past year. I might not have read everything, and I might be forgetting something along the way that could have held its own against Zita, but if anything else was that good you'd think I'd remember. Is it Shakespeare? Heck nah. Is it fun? Yup. Perhaps not at the same level as Jeff Smith's Bone series, but in that general ballpark in terms of visual fluency and story pacing. If Hatke can manage to tease a mythology out of this parallel world and give Zita a sense of destiny and depth then I'll be really excited to see how the story plays out in future editions.
Of the other finalists in the Cybils graphic novel category Zita the Spacegirl was the best paced, most engaging, and free of the problems that sank its co-nominees. From my perspective Dan Santant's Sidekicks felt slight (and sadly predictable) by comparison, Selznick's Wonderstruck and the collection Nursery Rhyme Comics both suffered from inappropriate categorization that might have made them winners elsewhere (middle grade fiction on the former, picture book for the latter), and Barry Deutsch's Hereville includes some unique problems that deserves a review all its own.
Something that came up when the judges were deciding on how to word this selection for the Cybils was whether or not to mention the book's boy-friendliness. I was against saying anything official for the award because it wasn't really a criteria for discussion nor was it a deciding factor. While I do believe that there are things writers can do to make books more boy-friendly I am also firmly in the camp that believes boys can, and should, be encouraged to read everything no mater the gender of the main character. Some books, like Zita the Spacegirl, make this an easier proposition however.
posted by david elzey @ 12:05 PM,
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Me... Jane
Tuesday, February 7
Little Brown 2011
A picture book biography that's more picture book than biography. And that's not a bad thing.
A little girl named Jane is given a stuffed chimpanzee which she names Jubilee. She treasure Jubilee and takes him with her wherever her boundless curiosity leads. Together they climb trees and observe chickens and take a full interest in all the natural sciences a girl can explore in her own yard. Through the books she reads she dreams of far away places and helping animals in the jungles. And at the end of the day when she tucks Jubilee into bed with her she dreams all these things, and when she wakes up she is Dr. Jane Goodall, living among the primates of Africa, her dream come true.
While there are biographies for all ages I would propose that the trickiest is the picture book biography. There is an old tradition of birth-to-death biography that attempts to use childhood as a sort of blueprint for explaining how events shaped the subject as an adult but this isn't without problems. Occasionally a subject's life doesn't have a cohesive progression where life elements can be tied together to tell a story. This will lead to a loose buffet of events that forward a narrative agenda but do disservice to the overall accuracy. Another approach is to appeal to the younger reader through telling the subject's story of who they were as young people, assuming a reader will automatically be more interested in the character of the subject by seeing them as youngsters. The problem with this slice-of-life approach is that the facts need to be molded to match the perception of the adult as a subject. A middle grade biography of Ben Franklin might include his industry, his bent toward invention, and the cruelty he experienced as a journeyman working for his older brother while neatly skirting the issue of his being a runaway or attempting to steal his best friend's girl because these muddy our preconceptions of how a founding father should have behaved.
Huh, how did I get all the way up here on this soap box?
In Me... Jane what we get, technically, is a slice-of-life biography of a girl who loves zoology. McDonnell captures Jane's carefree childhood in a way that is free of period detail which makes it feel universal. There are subtle clues that Jane's story reflects back to an older time – broken text (Old Bookman?) printed over faint images from the 19th and early 20th century books Jane would have read – but the effect is almost too subtle to register. It give the story a different feel but not necessarily a sense of events taking place at an earlier time. This isn't really a problem, just not as effective as I think it was intended.
In the end the two things I'm going to take away from this book will be McDonnell's depiction of Jubilee and the ending where the story jumps from young Jane going to bed to dream and the reality of her dream come true. There is a certain talent required to make a stuffed animal come to life in a drawing which I don't think every artist or illustrator can do. I don't know if this will somehow revoke my MFA but Winnie the Pooh and all his friends always looks to me like a diorama of paper doll cutouts. I don't care how old you are, if you want to buy into the stuffed animal as a living, breathing creature then you have to find a way to convey that sense of life while remaining true to the nature of an expressionless doll. I've always loved, for example, how Bill Waterson managed to draw Calvin's companion Hobbes as both a lifeless toy and a vibrant tiger. Waterson's conceit was that we could see both the adult and the child's view of Hobbes, how that tiger knew when to play possum and how to deliver a punchline when no one else was around to hear it. McDonnell, on the other hand, finds ways to pose Jubilee that he appears to exhibit expressions and life without defying the physical laws that make up a stuffed chimp. Jubilee's permanent smile can appear focused, inquisitive, and expressive simply by the way he is placed within the scene. He becomes more than a companion, he becomes a reflection of Jane's innocence and wonder, and is really a brilliant little detail I think a lot of young illustrators could learn from.
The ending, the jump from young Jane to contemporary Jane, wakes us from her illustrated childhood to a full color photo which, in doing, wakes us from the dreamtime of Jane's childhood dream into a "dreams come true" reality. It's an effective, judicious use of a single photo to underscore the link between childhood and adulthood without belaboring the point. In doing so McDonnell also manages to take a slice-of-life biography and turn it, with two flips of a page, into a near-full-life story by simply suggesting that the details between point A and B are inconsequential. And they are, as they should be, to a picture book audience.
Although I'm late to the party on this review, I understand now why people were abuzz when this came out.
Labels: 11, biography, jane goodall, little brown, patrick mcdonnell, picture book
posted by david elzey @ 3:39 PM,
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Blackout
Friday, February 3
Disney / Hyperion 2011
On a hot summer night New York City encounters a blackout, bringing out the best in people. A far cry from the blackouts a few decades back!
All the little girl (or long-haired boy) wants to do is play a board game with her family. His/her sister is too busy talking on the phone. His/her dad is up to his elbows in oven mitts in the kitchen. His/her mom is on the computer, all of them too busy for a game. Then the lights go out, everywhere. Without electricity the boy/girl is frightened but soon realizes there is nothing to be afraid of. They head to the roof where they discover the stars, almost always obscured by city light, as well as people bringing their hot summer lives to the rooftops. They head down to the streets where others are taking advantage of free ice cream and opened fire hydrants. In a single moment the city is turned from sweltering misery into a massive block party.
When the lights come back on everyone returns to their normal lives, but not everyone: keeping the spirit of the blackout alive the little boy/girl's family leaves the lights off and plays a board game together by candlelight.
There is a grand tradition in picture books to address and capitalize on childhood fears. Being afraid of the dark is common, but by focusing on a blackout this fear becomes much larger. After all, a child afraid of the dark can be placated by a nightlight or an open door with hallway light streaming through. But to have an entire metropolitan area go to totally dark could seem like the end of the world. Rocco minimizes the fear by highlighting all the better parts of what can happen in this scenario -- after all, if a blackout meant the neighborhood ice cream shop starts giving away ice cream, as happens here, how bad could things be? In fact, given the positive experience I could see some readers anxiously awaiting summer for the hope of free ice cream and game night with the family. Also, if the book gives some parents pause in considering the need for an emergency kit, all the better to be prepared.
As with a true blackout there is also a sense of out-of-sight, out-of-mind involved here. The particular block in Brooklyn depicted here will likely enjoy a much better blackout experience than those neighborhoods that might be more economically depressed. But then, with the blackout, who would know? Televisions wouldn't be transmitting reports and aside from a few battery powered radios (do people own radios anymore?) the blackout people experienced would be the only blackout people would know.
I don't fault Rocco for giving us a rosy picture of a blackout, or for the message that younger readers should not be scared of such things. My only hope would be that it doesn't take this book, or a similar event, to trigger a family to consider more quality time or better appreciate the stars obscured overhead.
Labels: 11, disney, electricity, hyperion, joe rocco, nyc, picture book
posted by david elzey @ 8:17 AM,
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Worlds Afire
Wednesday, February 1
Candlewick 2004
A circus tent. A catastrophic fire. The voices of those who were there, victim and witness, their stories in verse.
On the afternoon of July 6, 1944 a fire broke out at the Ringling Brother's Circus while in performance in Hartford, Connecticut. The tent canvas had been waterproofed with paraffin and gasoline, a combination that turned the entire circus effectively into "one huge candle / just waiting for a light." No one knows how it began but once the tent caught fire it was only a matter of moments before it was engulfed in flame. 500 were injured and 167 people died, and Janeczko has chosen to let the voices of the people involved tell the story from their own perspective.
Janeczko leaves it up to the reader to pick up the clues within each poem to guess who survived. The poems are separated by three parts, or acts if you will. Part 1 gives us what people were thinking and doing just before the circus. Some were excited kids, some were circus performers getting everything ready, and piece by piece, line by line, we get little details that anticipate the disaster to come. Part 2 deals with the disaster itself. What it was like to be dealing with large cats when the fire broke out and people were running everywhere. What it looked like from under the bleachers by a kid who was collecting the change that fell out of people's pockets, how he was able to cut a hole in the side of the tent with a pocket knife and escape. Part 3 covers the sober aftermath as survivors and townspeople come to grips with the horror. A soldier anxious for active duty overseas finds working morgue detail more gruesome than the war he is about to head into.
With an economy of image and detail Janeczko delivers a portrait as alluring and ephemeral as a flickering flame. There's a very Spoon River Anthology feel to the book, with its ghostly echoes of people from the past reliving a single day – a single, horrific day – in the gentle breeze of a summer day that changed, defined, or took their lives.
Labels: 04, candlewick, circus, disaster, fire, history, paul janeczko, poems, poetry
posted by david elzey @ 8:24 PM,
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Going Underground
Wednesday, January 25
Bloomsbury 2011
Three years after a school incident turns him into a felon, can Del find love and a life outside the graveyard where he works?
Yeah, I said graveyard.
Del is seventeen, and digging graves isn't just the only job he can find that doesn't do background checks, but it gives him plenty of time to think about how he got here. With a parole officer checking to make sure he tries to get into a college, and a therapist helping him sort out his issues, you would think Del was a hellion who had gone on a murderous spree.
His crime: sexting with his girlfriend when they were fourteen.
At the time of the original incident Del was a straight-A kid, an athlete, with a good future ahead of him. And when he and his girlfriend sent each other pictures of themselves naked they thought, well, they thought they were being responsible by doing that instead of having sex. Turns out they probably should have had sex, because according to the law his girlfriend was under the age of consent (a few weeks shy of her fourteenth birthday) and that made what Del did a sex crime. As in, sex offender. As in, on your permanent record for decades.
For three years since Del, more than any of his friends, have had to deal with the taint of this offense. Del wasn't the only one participating in sexting. At an overnight event on school grounds Del and his friends were talking about the images their girlfriends had sent them when they had their cell phones confiscated. The teachers who took the phones saw the images and, by law, reported what they found to the police. The next thing they knew they were at the police station being questioned. Despite Del's parents, and his girlfreind's parents, refusal to press charges in favor of dealing with it themselves it was the local DA who was going to use this case, and Del, as an example. In the fallout, his girlfreind's parents decided to move away from the town in protest, Del's friends kept their distance, and Del was reduced to the pariah status of a predatory sex offender.
And, again, all because the kids thought they were being responsible by sending each other naked photos of themselves instead of having sex.
Del does manage to find a new girlfriend who doesn't think what he did was wrong, and he does manage to find a college willing to take a chance on a kid willing to be frank and open about his situation, but the central questions about whether what Del and the other kids was right or wrong is one the reader can mull over and discuss with friends.
Vaught's style is breezy and unobtrusive, it gets the job done without being preachy and without fully taking the stand that what Del did was okay. The story does lean toward the idea that prosecuting minors as sex offenders is harsh and underscores how much damage can be done to teens in an effort to "crack down" on bad behavior through excessive legislation. It would probably make a good stating point for a lively classroom discussion, though in places where it would probably be beneficial the book will no doubt be offensive to some adults and get a school or teacher in trouble for using it as a legitimate classroom tool.
Labels: 11, bloomsbury, cell phones, middle grade, sexting, susan vaught, teen, text messages, YA
posted by david elzey @ 8:37 AM,
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Guantanamo Boy
Monday, January 23
Albert Whitman 2011
On a family vacation to Pakistan sis months after 9/11 a teen boy is picked up as an enemy combatant and taken to Guantanamo Bay where he is tortured, all the while wondering how he got there...
This is one of those stories you want to like, want to be able to recommend, have a hard time not putting too many eggs into your basket of hope, because it's a solid idea that just dies on the page.
Khalid is a typical Pakistani-British teen boy. Okay, maybe not entirely typical, he does seem a bit naive, but down the road he's just one of his mates when it comes to soccer and all. And like many a teen boy everywhere he's very much into online gaming, particularly with his worldly cousin Tariq. When Khalid's grandmother dies his parents decide they are going to visit the family in Pakistan during Easter break. Form there it's a drawn out hop, skip, and a jump before Khalid finds himself in a wrong-place-wrong-time situation and he's in Gitmo wondering why and how he got there.
This book was a slog unlike any I've endured in some time. If I didn't already agree with the politics of the detention center at Guantanamo – or rather, if I didn't agree that Gitmo was and is a terrible violation of human rights with little to justify it – I couldn't have managed past the first chapter. Written in a stilted and distancing first-person, with characters that fall flat and a plot that has to be sifted from the silt of information this book is crammed with, I kept hoping that soon, soon, it would turn a corner and pry my eyelids open. I know there's a good, and important, book in here somewhere, but it would take a team of gifted surgeons to find it.
So this story is out there, still, waiting for someone to tell it so that young readers can see what's really been going on in the name of The War on Terror. This book simply isn't it though.
Labels: 11, anna perera, guantanamo, terrorism, war, whitman, YA
posted by david elzey @ 8:38 AM,
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