jack the castaway

by Lisa Doan
Darby Creek / Lerner  2014

Smart kid, dumb parents, and a menacing whale shark! What more could a kid want from a book? 


Jack is a sheltered kid on the cusp of puberty living with his Aunt Julia safely in Pennsylvania. Or at least he was living safely until his Aunt met with misfortune and Jack was forced to call his world-traveling parents home from their latest scheme, panning for gold in the Amazon. Jack's parents are everything Jack isn't: reckless, thoughtless, careless dreamers with no grounding in reality. Since abandoning Jack with his Aunt they have gone from one dead-end business to another but now they are forced back to raise a son who has more sense than they do collectively.

So begins Lisa Doan's Jack the Castaway, the first in a series aimed squarely at the emerging, struggling, or reluctant middle grade reader looking for an adventure series with humor and a sturdy story. Playing off the trope of kids being smarter than the adults that surround them, Doan has amped up this discord by giving Jack all the typical traits of a worry-wort adult and made his parents the equivalent of hyperactive teens. Where his parents wouldn't never even think of making a list or a plan before setting out on an adventure, Jack prefers the logical order of his life and would rather spend his time in school. Reunited as a family, Jack's parents think it only natural to bring their risk-adverse son with them to a tropical island where they intend to open a snorkeling enterprise, despite having no experience. But before long Jack finds himself alone on the water, then shipwrecked on a tropical island and... is that a shark keeping watch on him from the shore?

There are many ways a story like this could go wrong, but Doan keeps a fine balance between humor and adventure, particularly when dealing with Jack's brief experience alone on a tropical island. Where many readers might find the prospect of being alone to do nothing, away from the school and responsibilities that Jack craves, it's Jack's practicality that allows him to stay calm and survive. Where Jack errs on the side of caution the reader is allowed to guess that he is overreacting, removing any real danger that would otherwise make the story too dark.

And while I wouldn't say I was much like Jack when I was young I will confess that he and I share a certain blood-chilling close encounter with a large, benign sea creature. Both Jack and I survived to laugh about it in retrospect.

There's a lot of summer reading out there that kids are having foisted on them, and while much of it is good I strongly believe that there's room for lighter, well-crafted fare. I realize this might skew a bit younger than most of what lands on Guys Lit Wire but sometimes boys need to catch the reading bug at a younger age to ensure they continue into the goods we reviewers dig up for the older teens. Put Jack the Castaway in the back seat on a long road trip and see if it isn't devoured in one single gulp.


This review also appeared at Guys Lit Wire, in case you thought you saw it somewhere else.

Also, as a matter of full disclosure, I received a review copy of this book from the author who, like myself, is a graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts' Writing for Children and Young Adults program. If you find this troubling, email me, I'll be more than happy to put your mind at ease. 
~d.e.

Legends of Zita the Spacegirl

by Ben Hatke 
First Second 2012 

Out titular (and accidental) heroine returns for continuing adventures as her fame sucks her further and further from ever returning to Earth. Bad for her is good for readers... 

A robot crawls out of its recalled packaging and imprints on the first being it sees: a poster of Zita advertising her tour of various planets as savior of Scriptorious. Finding a mop and fashioning a costume the robot not only begins to look like Zita but starts to adopt aspects of her personality, as witnessed while she is dragged out to sign autographs. Escaping her fans Zita crosses paths with her robot doppelganger and concocts one of the oldest bad ideas in the history of bad ideas: trading places with the robot in exchange for some freedom.

Naturally, this goes terribly wrong.

As Robot Zita learns and adapts and adopts more of Zita's personality it comes to believe it really is Zita, heroic spacegirl. While Zita is away a pair of Lumponian Ambassadors arrive looking for Zita to save their planet from a deadly attack by star hearts. While Zita's minder ponders the situation Robot Zita agrees to save Lumponia and away they leave... without Zita the Spacegirl! Zita and her sidekick Pizzicato the Mouse now must catch up with their friends and save the day, oh, and also do something about that pesky identity-stealing Robot Zita. And after a battle with the Queen of Star Hearts...

...To Be Continued.

The incredibly fast-paced adventure that began with the first Zita the Spacegirl continues here, with so much detail unexplained beyond the illustrations. What I mean is, it is up to the reader to fill in details that can be gleaned from the illustrations, as well they should. Seriously, nothing bogs down world-building faster than explaining why otherwordly creatures look and act the way they do, better to simply let them be (as Hatke does here) and let the reader back-fill whatever they need to know.

Though not as deep in mythology as Jeff Smith's Bone series, the Zita books have an accomplished sense of knowing where they are headed and a deft humor that makes them a joy to read and reread. Rereading will be crucial as details about characters and situations from the first book are left for the reader to recall on their own, just as they will need to consult this volume when the third Zita book comes out. Again, this is not a bad thing, as the books are simply good fun.

Or are they? I think their simplicity and the fast pacing is a sort of slight-of-hand for a non-Aristotlean (or Homeric if you prefer) narrative form.

While it's true that Zita has an overarching goal/desire – she wants to get home – everything that comes her way just piles on as one-damn-thing-after-another. Some narrative purists hate this sort of thing, but it allows for a more organic possibility in storytelling as real life rarely conforms to a Freitag Pyramid. Things do simply happen to Zita while she's in the middle of dealing with something else that's been thrown her way, but Odysseus had the same problems, and with no less freaky creatures to confront. 

So while I welcome (sort of) the continuing adventures of Zita the way I might if reading the Odyssey in serial form, trusting that she'll eventually make her way home, my one quibble is the "To Be Continued" that ends the book. The cliffhanger ending has never really worked for me in any narrative medium, and while I recognize the ending her comes at a good point I hate the feeling like I only got half the story. We could argue this point about sequels and series – you and I fair reader – but sometimes the story ends at a natural point and feels complete and sometimes the cliffhanger aggravates. It's a quibble and doesn't really ruin the fun of Legends of Zita the Spacegirl in the slightest.

The Hero of Little Street

by Gregory Rogers  
Allen & Unwin, Austrailia 2009
Roaring Brook, US 2012

The Boy, who previously met the Bard and the Bear and battled a Midsummer Knight, takes "readers" on another adventure, this time through the world of Vermeer.

The Boy, out titular hero, is kicking around when a soccer ball appears. One swift kick and the ball lands in a fountain, and the bully boys who were previously playing with the ball are none too happy. They chase the Boy to take refuge in an art museum where he finds himself joined by a dog from one painting, helps a musician in another painting, and is let out into the world of Flemish masters through Vermeer's "Little Street." When his canine companion is taken from him the Boy tracks him down to a basement butchery where hundreds of dogs have been captured and caged. After making a daring escape the Boy and the dogs return to the "real" world where they meet up with the bully boys again. The Boy gets the last laugh as the newly freed dogs chase the bullies down as a favor to their new master, and the Boy continues on to another day and another adventure.  

click image to enlarge

That Rogers does all this without words in a comic-framed format is only half the marvel, his real strength comes in the ability to make the real and the fantasy imaginings slip fluidly in and out. When the dog slips out of Jan Van Eyck "The Arnolfini Wedding" the reader doesn't question it any more than the Boy does, it simply happened and is part of the world. As it is the world Roger's Boy inhabits has the feel of another time and place where time and technology play no part. It adds a sense of timelessness about the whole affair, a story of a boy and a chase and a series of adventures.

And it was while thinking about the story in this light that I realized this is where picture books are more liberal than their wordier counterparts up the literacy line. A picture book has the advantage of being like a short story where there may be a one-up change in the main character's position of predicament from the beginning of the story, but no need for there to be the sort of emotional or plot development necessary for traditional narratives.  I mean, I suppose I could find a three act narrative in The Hero of Little Street – act one: hero chased by bullies; act two: in the museum world; act three: return of the hero triumphant – but in the end it feels more like a cumulative series of adventures in the mode of the Odyssey. Four of five more of these Boy books by Rogers and they could be bundled together into an epic tale of their own.

you probably want to see this bigger, too

The last lingering element that was hard to place was Rogers visual language. It is a comic format but something keeps me from calling it a graphic novel. It isn't simply length, there's something that taps into something I couldn't place for a long time until I studied the poses of the characters, their lines of action while standing still, their contrapposto if you will. One thing computers haven't managed yet is the ability to search for sense connections beyond words, those memory senses of image and smell and touch that can't be entered as a search term. In the end I finally made the connection: Sergio Aragones, the "marginal" artist from MAD magazine whose linguine-legged people and wordless comics are echoed in Rogers' storytelling. The actual influence may not be there at all, but the fluidity of moving through these visual ideas is there, it's a shared vocabulary of images. I think if you know both artists works it's easy to see the connection, even if they are only distant cousins half a world apart.

As a final thought, based on a conversation I had yesterday, one of the great things about picture books like this without words is that it allows "readers" to provide their own dialog, their own interpretation of the story. It's malleable or it can become firmly fixed, but in keeping with the "picture worth a thousand words" Rogers books contain millions of words... but no text.

Around the World

by Matt Phelan
Candlewick  2011

Three remarkable journeys made by a trio of intrepid adventurers – Thomas Stevens, Nellie Bly, and Joshua Slocum – on the eve of the 20th century, rendered in graphic novel format.  

As a prologue, we begin with the wager that sets up Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days. It seems an impossible (and almost arbitrary) goal to set, but fantastical enough to build an entire narrative around. Obviously Verne chose the time limit based on what was possible back in 1872 but it was enough to fire the imaginations of many a would-be adventurers. With this as a backdrop Phelan proceeds to take us on three journeys whose reasons and purpose were as unique as the people who ventured out.

First up is Thomas Stevens, a Colorado miner who's destiny is changed the moment he first sees a high-wheel bicycle. Sensing that bikes are "the future," and with no desire to spend his life in a mine, he decides to do what no one has ever done before; he intends to circle the globe atop a one of these unusual bikes. He isn't determined to break any records – how could he at something no one has ever done before – but does it almost in the spirit that has driven many to adventure: because it is there to be done. Stevens' journey is a travelogue with only a few minor hitches along the way.

Next up is Nellie Bly, intrepid girl reporter, who previously feigned insanity in order to be admitted to an asylum and report back the abuses she found to her newspaper, The New York World. Her hook is that she's confident she can beat Phileas Fogg's fictional record of 80 days and do the trek in 74 days. Traveling light, Bly's adventures hit occasional bumps along the way including a necessary audience with Jules Verne and the news along the way that another newspaper has sent a female reporter to beat her to the record. In the end she not only succeeds but beats her own goal by making the trip in 72 days.

Finally we come to Joshua Slocum, a retired naval officer looking to sail around the world alone on a 36-foot boat. A quiet man who keeps his intentions to himself, he sets a course east toward the Mediterranean only to discover the threat of pirates which sends his course westward around the world. Along the way he stops to visit the grave marker of his first wife and fellow adventurer who died in Argentina some years earlier. Then come the treacherous waters of the cape, becalmed seas, and a lot of time for Slocum and his thoughts. He returns to port as quietly as when he left and eventually publishes his journal of the trip. Then, almost 15 years later, he returns to the boat and sails away, never to be heard from again.

Phelan notes at the end that while he had intended to illustrate simply the narratives of their adventures he realized there were inward as well as outward journeys taking place. Everyone has their reasons and they aren't always as clear as a simple wager against time. Phelan also admits to having to read between the lines and though I don't fault him for the conjecture there were times I wish he made his interpretations a little more clear.

It is easy to understand why a miner might want to achieve something other than a life underground, but what drove Stevens to such a leap as to see the bicycle as the future, much less believe he had the stamina and determination to undertake a trip around the world? With Bly, perhaps the best documented story of the bunch, it is easier to see that she was an active part of the women's sufferage movement, but what were the personal reasons driving her in all she did? And with Slocum we see what is, perhaps, the most melancholy adventure ever presented as it appears he has undergone the trip because he feels some lasting guilt or remorse over the loss of his first wife. That his second wife "refused" to take this trip with him may be something of a ruse: he offered her passage knowing she would refuse, she refused knowing he was still obsessed with his first wife. But did Slocum say all this in his ship's diary, or is this the result of Phelan's line reading?

In fact, Phelan has forced the reader to read between the lines (or panels in the case of this graphic novel) and ask "Why that choice, why that decision, why that reaction?" Though I hardly would have wanted him to put words in their mouths I think its still possible to let us know how and why these adventurers chose to behave as they did. We're working in pictures here, its just as easy to show us some of this conjecture just as it is to draw a representation of an ocean liner without having to research the exact ship they might have taken, to choose a color and pattern of clothing of the era whether or not they cut and style were 100% accurate. In that, Slocum's story is the closest to showing us what's driving him, but damn, is it depressing.

While I like Phelan's loose gestural stylings, I found large sections of Around the World that looked more like dummy sketches than finished work. I can appreciate the amount of work involved in coming up with hundreds of pages of illustration for a graphic undertaking this size, but with many panels featuring only the subject surrounded by a light color wash there isn't a sense of time or place in the panels, which not only flatten out the images but the story as well. They suggest more than they depict, and with an historical narrative this would be the equivalent of a steampunk story without any of the greasy-geary details that bring the world to life. There is minimalism, and then there's minimalist illustrations that leave me feeling like I would have been better of with just the text. Around the World sits right there on the fence tottering toward a text-only narrative.

On the plus side, the book did leave me hungering and wondering about all the other trips undertaken in order to beat records and prove something. For every attempt there had to be at least one failure. Around the World makes me curious about those who tried and failed, which all things considered, is rather fitting curiosity to be left with.

The Adventures of Sir Gawain the True

by Gerald Morris
Houghton Mifflin  2011

King Arthur's undefeated knight learns some lessons about making (and keeping) promises and the values of courtesy and friendship in the most satisfying book yet in The Knights' Tales series.   

Sir Gawain is a great knight, an undefeated champion when it comes to battle. He is also more than a little self-absorbed and quite rude about it. Upon saving a damsel from distress he is more interested in discussing his tricky battle moves than in receiving thanks for his efforts, unwilling to take a kiss or a gift for his efforts, too full of himself even bother asking the lady for her name. Having discharged his duty he doesn't even to think to see if the lady requires a ride home after the ordeal. Returning to Camelot, Arthur is quick to point out his rudeness, as Arthur is keen on having his knights be courteous above all things, and the matter is left as a lesson for the future.

At a Christmas celebration Arthur's court is visited by a strange guest, The Green Knight, who engages Gawain in an unusual contest: the knights will exchange blows, one at a time, until a winner is decided. Gawain is allowed to go first and is instructed by the Green Knight to take his axe and lop off his head. With one blow Gawain lops off the head of the Green Knight's who, to everyones surprise, merely picks up his head and reattaches it to his body. Now it is his turn, but the Green Knight isn't in any hurry. Instead, he gives Gawain a year to live and then, the following New Years, he must report to the Green Knight's castle to receive his killing blow to the neck.

What follows feels at first like a series of random events that turn out to be anything but random. Arthur and his knights set out to find Merlin to find a solution. Surly the Green Knight was some sort of sorcerer and could be defeated without Gawain having to lose his life. Along the way they meet a dwarf, Spinagras, caretaker of the woods, who tells them of a local nobleman, Gologras, who refuses to vow allegiance to Arthur. This, couple with a lot of talk of vows and promises leads to a tournament of battle which itself becomes an exercise in futility for all involved. Finally they learn that Merlin is not to be found and return to Camelot.

Finally a year passes and Gawain makes his way to the Green Knight to honor his vow. Spinagras leads him to a huntsman named Bredbaddle who, it turns out, is married to the damsel he rescued at the beginning of the book. In very short order everything that has happened before, every lesson and friendship and strange circumstance, comes into play proving that it all wasn't just killing time between visits with the Green Knight. Only courtesy and friendship can save Gawain from a beheading from the Green Knight who, it turns out through a trick of sorcery, is someone he has befriended along the way.

This is the third in Morris' The Knights' Tales series and a gem of a middle grade book. Morris's breezy tone is light and occasionally conversational – the subtle breaking of the fourth wall to explain to the reader that descriptions of certain battles have been left out because they are tedious points out, rightly, that most descriptions take longer to relate than to watch and drag down a story. Which might seem counter intuitive to a story about knights who do, indeed, have frequent battles, but Morris is smart and sparing in his choices, and the battles that are described arrive only when relevant to reveal plot and character. They are also humorously absurd, again undercutting the glory of violence while at the same time providing action and lift to the story.

If I had any complaint it's that one book a year (or so) just isn't fast enough. I don't wish to hurry Morris along, because clearly the time and care he is taking with these books is certainly worth it, but if I were a middle grade reader I would want to plow through these one after another, and I could wait maybe nine months between titles, but I want them all now.

And while I know I'm either barking in the wind or preaching to the choir here, Morris manages more in his 120 pages than many middle grade books twice this length. I don't tend to think of myself as having a short attention span – I'm a slow reader, but not a quickly bored reader – but I find that smaller books and smaller chapters are easier to hold in the brain than stories, plots, and characters that become unwieldy beneath the author's cleverness. Yes, detail and depth are impressive, but they can also bulk up a story beyond what is necessary, and especially with middle grade books. I have begun to suspect that some authors view a reader's limited reading time as a precious piece of real estate that they must occupy with as big a book as possible. Good, short books make the reader hungry for more, as I found  with The Adventures of Sir Gawain the True.

The Castaway

by James Stevenson
Greenwillow 2002

In 1937 Hubie the mouse and his family go to the movies where they see a horror film typical of the day: The Island of No Return.  Although the young mouse is clearly freaked out by the movie's tidal waves and volcanoes, Hubie tries to play it cool.  At home, a postcard arrives from Aunt Ella vacationing on Barabooda Island, which gives Hubie's family the idea to vacation there themselves.  Despite Hubie's objections, they board a dirigible for their trip and very quickly Hubie wanders off to distract himself from his fear of heights.  Falling out of the dirigible, Hubie lands on a nearly deserted island occupied by a castaway named Leo.  On Leo's island he has fashioned many things to amuse himself – a drum kit, a baseball stadium, a mini golf course – and Hubie ends up having a great time. On an ill-fated test run of Leo's new "car," Leo and Hubie fall in a river, go over a waterfall, and land safely on the dirigible.  Hubie reunites with his family and proceeds with the vacation as if he had never been gone.  Back at home his family is confused by the pictures Hubie had taken – they don't appear to be of the same island they vacationed on – and he's ready for the next family trip... to Mt. Everest? 

The rambling narrative in this hybrid picture book/comic is typical of the kind of thing one of my writing teachers used to refer to as the "one damn thing after another" sort of story.  Initially I bristled at this sort of description of a narrative because, in my scholarly MFA haze, I believed it was a possible approach to storytelling that would appeal to boys and was not bound by the hard and fast laws of Aristotlean thought.  What I've since come to understand is that the real problem with this sort of structure is that it is difficult to pull off, and as a result it is easy to declaim it as an inferior narrative device rather than confuse young writers with nuance. 

If this seems like far too heavy an approach to a children's picture book allow me to suggest that underneath the visceral "I like" and "I don't like" there are sometimes sophisticated reasons beneath what "works" and doesn't, and puzzling out what causes that rift I find useful.  In The Castaway what doesn't work is that the one-thing-after-another (which for a variety of reasons I think of as an Ovidian structure) doesn't convincingly build to it's conclusion.  In the beginning we have Hubie who is clearly afraid, and in the end we have Hubie the fearless, and in between we have a series of events that happen to him that show no shading of his changing emotional state.  It doesn't "work" because it doesn't satisfy our desire to see exactly how the character changes.  Events happening to a character don't necessarily change a character unless we can see how. Things happen just because, and we all understand how unsatisfying "just because" can be as an answer. 

Along those same lines I think Stevenson gets away with it because he can, because his stature as a children's illustrator is high enough that he can put together a story like this and not be challenged at the editorial level because the publishers can bank on his name making more sales than if an unknown were to put out a similar book.  Don't misunderstand, I genuinely like Stevenson's loose ink drawings for the same reasons I like Quintin Blake's work; both artists have a shabby gestural style that is immediately recognizable and for the most part fun. 

I wouldn't say I had high hopes going into this book, but it did surprise me that Stevenson had put out essentially a graphic novel for the picture book set before it fell into vogue and I was curious to know why it hadn't shown up on my radar before.  Now I know.  Style and concept can't carry weak execution on the narrative level. 

Alistair and Kip's Great Adventure!

by John Segal!
McElderry Books! 2008!

"Let's build a boat and travel to distant lands," says Alistair. And so they do.

Alistair cat and Kip the dog build themselves a boat and sail down river, into the bay, onto the open seas. A storm comes up, the waves crash their boat into a whale who saves them and takes them home.

"Tomorrow, let's build a plane."

The end.

The journey is a time-honored device in literature, all literature, but usually there is something transformative in the process. The dangers and desires of a journey have to have a purpose, otherwise what's the point? The Bard of Manchester once provided one of the most succinct examples of the power of journey

I was looking for a job, and then I found a job,
And heaven knows I'm miserable now.

See, the main character sets out to do something, and then he accomplishes what he set out to do, and his life has been transformed as a result. No such enlightenment here for Alistair and Kip as they merely come home determined to do the next day what they did the day before. Might as well have a story about a turtle and a donkey who go to the grocery store, eat what they bought, then plan to go to the store the next day.

Let me look at this story again, maybe I'm missing something. Do they have a magical adventure, something beyond the pale? No, they do not. You might be tempted to believe that their interaction with the whale is something, but in order for that to be the case you would have to marvel at a cat and dog's ability to build a boat and sail the ocean. But when dealing with anthropomorphic animals that stand in for humans we aren't supposed to be surprised at their abilities any more than we would stare at stranger in public adjusting their socks. Talking animals would expect nothing less from another -- the whale in this case -- than sympathy and understanding, unless it had been established in advance that whales were something to fear on their grand journey.

Do they glean anything from their experience? That whales are nice, perhaps, but is that the sum of their adventure? No, I don't find a great adventure here. Some nice watercolor work, totally ruined by variable type sizes throughout. That's about it.

I guess my problem is that I'm seeing a lot of books this season that all seem as limp as this, a story that could have been concocted by a small child. Wait, I take that back, I've heard small children tell much more involved stories. These would be the same children a simple book like this would be aimed at. So if kids are capable of longer stories why are the shelves filled with so many empty calories?

Sometimes I wonder if picture books aren't going to cause the demise of picture books.