Planet Tad

by Tim Carvell
HarperCollins 2012

Emmy-Award winning head writer for The Daily Show! and contributor to MAD Magazine! attempts to write a middle grade book!

There are five levels of humor:
Hilarious – laughs so hard the belly aches, the eyes water
Funny – consistent laughter, often pointed and insightful, occasionally absurd
Amusing – good for the occasional laugh-out-loud (IRL not fake LOLs)
Smirkworthy – a solid effort that misses the target, but forgiveable
Trying Too Hard – rock bottom, unfunny, unimaginative, lazy

Sure, some of these are modifiable with adjectives like uproarious and riotous and mildly, but these are five points on a scale as exponential as the Richter scale is for earthquakes. There are degrees of Funny that lead up to Hilarious and down to Amusing, but there is a percipitous drop from Smirkworthy to Trying Too Hard. And when you reach rock bottom there has to be a point where the intended audience is left wondering: why can't they see this isn't working?

Planet Tad is Trying Too Hard to be funny.

Understand, humor is hard to pull off. There are rules for establishing a situation that appears to be normal, setting a trap of expectation that creates tension that anticipates humor, then springing an unexpected curve that relieves that tension with a release of laughter. Sometimes you have to lay down a lot of groundwork before a joke can payoff, but doing so makes the humor that much stronger. It also sometimes helps to let the audience know what to expect – give them a small taste – so they will follow you along until the jokes pay out.

Where Planet Tad falters is right at the beginning when Tad explains he has five resolutions for the new year: start a blog (which this book is a chronicle of), finish seventh grade, get girls to notice him, do an ollie on a skateboard, and begin shaving. Is any of that funny, even to a twelve year old kid? It is possible to make those things funny down the road, but there's nothing inherently funny in the list itself, and presuming this is what Tad's exploits are going to be about, well, why bother? What would be funny?

What if Tad instead decided to give himself Hemingway's list of things you must do to be a man – plant a tree, fight a bull, write a novel, and father a child. Two of these could already be incorporated into Planet Tad: he's already writing a novel via these blog posts, and at one point as part of a lesson on sexual responsibility Tad and a girl have to share custody of an egg for a week without breaking it. In an effort to end the week with an egg in tact Tad boils it, only to be discovered at the end of the week when it rolls off the teacher's desk. He boiled their kid, ha ha. How much funnier than what's in this book would it be if Tad took his "fathering" instincts to their (il)logical conclusions, trying to hatch an infertile egg, or truly becoming paternal during the week to the point where he defends his "son's" honor in a fight because someone made fun of him? Carvell sells his readers short by setting his sights too low, and the result is that the humor doesn't evoke sympathy, cringing anticipation, or even a true moment where you can laugh inwardly.

The point here isn't to rewrite Carvell's book, but to underscore just how badly he missed the mark. The meandering blog posts sound authentic in the way that kids would simply record their life events and move on, but the list of resolutions is barely thread enough to string it al together and even Tad himself seems to only casually remember what he's set out to do. The gags themselves also play out too fast, with set-up and resolution happening within a few pages. Where marketing for the book touts this as being squarely aimed at the Wimpy Kid crowd those intended readers will be sorely disappointed that Carvell can't pull off what Kinney did with jokes that were set up pages and pages earlier that delivered their punchlines when a reader least expected it. Wimpy Kid's humor was droll, dry, and delivered with expert timing; Planet Tad rushes the humor (what little it has) so fast and moves on to the next gag that readers might not even realize there was a punchline to the gag at all.

Fortunatley, kids are smart, and when faced with Trying Too Hard humor they know when to say "Why can't they see this isn't working?"

And then they'll move on to better, funnier books.

The Fourth Stall

by Chris Rylander 
Walden Pond Press / Harper Collins  2011 

Mac's the guy you go to when you need a problem solved, but when a gambling ring muscles in on his territory has Mac finally come to a problem too big to solve?  

Mac is the go-to guy when you got a problem that needs fixing.  Need tickets to an R rated film when you're only in sixth grade?  Mac's your guy. And through a combination of traded favors and cold hard cash there is very little Mac can't fix.  He's a sixth grade wiseguy with integrity, and honest, and he and his friend Vince have built quite a nice little business for themselves in the fourth stall of the East Wing boy's room.  But that all goes south when a third grader comes in for protection from a gambling racket run by a legendary kid named Staples who is looking to muscle in on Mac's territory.  Piece by piece, Mac's quiet little empire falls apart as Staples puts the financial squeeze on kids and sends in his high school thugs to do the dirty work.  

On top of all this is Mac's best friend and business manager, Vince. Together they've built the business and have been saving up so that when (not if) the Cubs go to the World Series they'll have enough to buy the tickets.  But there are some problems with the books and all fingers point to Vince.  It's beginning to look like Mac has a mole in his operation, confirmed when he spots Vince taking money from... Staples?  Worse, someone has broken into Mac's room and taken all his business's assets, thousands of dollars worth.  Just when it looks like he's going to have to fold up shop and join Staples, Mac makes a discovery that gives him just enough leverage that might allow him to regain his business and send Staples packing for good.  

I think somewhere along the way every middle grade boy has had a fantasy of running some great moneymaking business, and probably out of school if not a vacant stall in a bathroom. They are grandiose schemes built on the fine American notion that if you build it, they will come, never realizing they needed it before. Mac's services provide easy answers to generally easy questions but with some complicated twists. Mac has hired muscle – a loose conglomeration of the school's bullies who can be bought for a price – and the school has a genuine problem with gambling on school sports, athletes who are willing to throw games, and bookies putting the screws on kids who are too young to understand what they're really getting themselves into.  It is the playground made hyper-real, the natural extension of the acceleration of childhood. Like a New Yorker cartoon with kids speaking and behaving as adults, only with a lot more malice involved.  

Rylander gets that childhood is a violent mirror of the adult world, and that kids choosing to emulate that world will make the same, and worse, decisions when confronted with trouble. Suspicions will be built on the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence, trusts will be misplaced, character motives will not always seem as clear-cut as they are presented. Mac and Vince grew up together in a poor trailer park, but while Mac's family made it out to relative security things aren't so easy for Vince, and the unspoken tension grows throughout. Vince, it turns out, may have more in common with the super bully Staples which causes Mac to do some serious soul searching (and old fashioned gumshoe work) to better understand their common motivations. The emotional landscape of boys is rich in The Fourth Stall, with plenty of moral ambiguity to cause a careful reader to double-back on their assumptions the same way Mac is forced to throughout the investigations. There is a final confrontation that is inevitable but interesting an open resolution regarding Staples that suggests not all crimes stories are so neatly tied up as they are on TV or in movies.

I keep thinking there has to be a name for this appropriation of adult genres into children's books; taking hard boiled detective, or in this case the gangster-crime boss drama, and layering the stories over a school setting. Odder still, they seem to be winking to an adult audience in doing so, giving a knowing nod to those who would get the book's cultural references. The Forth Stall has a cover that clearly references the book jackets and movie posters for The Godfather. Is a middle school kid going to get the reference?

I only mention it because of the trend within family-centered movies to include references to keep adult chaperones engaged. You have a greater chance of parents spreading the word to other parents, or their willingness to take kids to the movie (and later buying DVDs) if they felt the movie truly had deeper layers for all audiences. This is a smart marketing strategy, and with animation there is a long tradition of making stories accessible, but I wonder if this is really the best approach for books aimed primarily at middle school readers.  Is the idea that the stories will feel more sophisticated and thus "trick" kids into thinking they're reading a more mature book? I think kids are smarter than that, and maybe this is over-thinking. Maybe it's just as savvy a marketing choice to design a book cover with an adult buyer in mind, it makes it easier to sell to a parent of a boy to send a visual cue that says "this book is like a middle grade gangster story, your boy will love it." It may also be savvy of an author to write a book that will entertain an adult agent and editor as a step toward getting published. I've often wondered what would get published if kids were the gatekeepers.  

Despite my general misgivings about longer middle grade books, The Fourth Stall justifies its length with action and a quick-paced story.  I don't know if the book is series-worthy, but I'd be very interested to see what Rylander does next.

The Wonder Book

by Amy Krouse Rosenthal
drawings by Paul Schmid 
HarperCollins 2010


A fine collection of illustrations, accompanied by an okay set of poems. 

I admit, sometimes I come to books from odd directions, especially illustrated books.  A good deal of my life has been dedicated to a number of visual arts and occasionally that is the greater draw for me.  I'll forgive weak content over strong visuals, and sometimes I'll even miss the weak content.  Not here, though. 

Paul Schmid is an illustrator I would hire to do spots drawings for my mythical magazine I hope to one day start.  His black and white line drawings do echo Silverstein, but there's often more than meets the eye.  They have a childlike whimsy and an innocence about them, his characters all blobby and bendy and spindly at the same time.  And there are the odd details that beg you to dig further, to look back at the text, and find the invisible connecting thread between them.  Yes, I'm talking here about the elephant on the page.  Literally. 

Too bad I hid a boot.

Rosenthal's palendrome is nothing new – I have it in at least two other books I own – so it falls to Schmid to give us a new reading with his picture.  And what do we have?  A small boy in a striped shirt (or old fashioned one-piece bathing suit) holding a shovel and a pail and wearing only one rain boot.  Cute, but that's not all.  Flanking the boy on either side are a pair of elephant rear ends, both facing the boy.  For a boy who looks primed to try and shovel several pounds of maneuer into a two pint bucket it is, indeed, too bad his is minus a boot. 

Not every illustration contains such quiet gems, but then the poems don't always exactly inspire more than a literal representation.  Which is not to say this is a terrible collection, but it is a weaker one for the effort.  I think it is far too easy with poems for children to go for the rhyme or the unusual without actually stretching the imagination.  When I look at poems for children  – especially humorous poetry – I am looking for something that would make both me and the reader wonder how a mind could come up with such images, such quirkiness.  Puns and palindromes and the recasting of nursery rhymes are fine, but lacking a theme or the spark of something truly unique the collection becomes pedestrian. 

This little piggy played the stock market
This little piggy loved a gnome
This little piggy was a toast thief
This little piggy loved a nun
(And the French little piggy went Oui Oui Oui all the way home)

This is the sort of thing writing students toss off to keep the juices flowing, a game of Tweak the Familiar.  It dosen't really satisfy as nonsense because it doesn't take enough of a risk to differentiate itself from the original or stand out on its own.  

The lasting effect of this collection was that when it was over I had to start over again because I couldn't remember a single poem.  But the illustrations were fun.  

Half-Minute Horrors

edited by Susan Rich
HarperCollins 2009

Billed as a "collection of instant frights from the world's most astonishing authors and artists," Half-Minute Horrors lives up to its title by presenting super-short sudden fiction to middle grade readers who like a little creepiness. Just a little, not too much. A set-up, some sort of mystery, and an unsettling cliffhanger of an ending are the norm here, almost all of them short enough to read in the promised half a minute.

And when I say a little creepiness that doesn't mean they can't be somewhat disturbing. There are implications of cannibalism, creatures laying in wait to swallow you whole, disembodied hands that come calling while you sleep... but all stopped right at the moment of impact so that the reader can quickly turn the page if necessary. Because the engagement is so short there isn't enough time to plant too strong a mental picture to disturb. Yeah, if you think about some of these stories long enough they can really delve into truly terrifying territory, but the reader interested in horror is going to feel cheated if the author or the story pulls its punch too much or too quickly. Many of these stories plant their final, fatal twist in the last line for maximum impact so that even the seemingly odd story suddenly can turn on a dime.

There are also some illustrated stories - I hesitate to call them comics, but some do take that format - which perform the graphic equivilent of their narrative counterparts. Perhaps only "Worms" by Lane Smith, a visually retelling of the gory old rhyme "The worms go in, the worms go out..." goes the furthest with its graphic depiction of life pre- and post-humus. Still, all good creepy fun.

One of the things this book reminded me of was a series of books I had as a boy called "One Minute Mysteries" which would set the reader up with a drawing room situation and some details that would allow a reader to guess what had happened. Only I could never guess correctly and instead of enjoying the mystery I found the books frustrating because they made me feel stupid. I suppose the idea of a minute mystery was meant for boys like me who (at the time) were struggling with reading, but that book sent me the wrong direction. Perhaps the lack of character and emotion was the problem, but I never really got into the mystery genre as a result.

There's no similar problem here with Half-Minute Horrors because the stories clearly spell out the (pending) doom, leaving the reader to invest as much emotion as their own fears permit. The various authors are all top-notch – M.T. Anderson, Adam Rex, Sarah Weeks, Holly Black, Jack Gantos, Jon Scieszka, Avi, and Lauren Myracle to name but a scant few –and include some generally regarded as adult writers, like Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Lethem, delivering on a wide variety of themes.

I realize this comes too late to incorporate into Halloween lesson plans, but I would hope that the audience for this kind of thing sees this as more of an evergreen title. I think for the reluctant reader the ability to whiz through dozens of stories at one sitting will make the book feel much shorter than its 130 pages, and for other readers the shortness of these stories can serve as a sort of palate cleanser between much larger books, a sampler platter of ghoulish delights.

Yuk, did I just write that last semi-blurb-worthy sentence?

Anyway, lots of gory fun.

Harry and Horsie

by Katie Van Camp
pictures by Lincoln Agnew
Balzer+Bray / HarperCollins 2009

Here we have the promise of some truly bold retro graphics marred by a weak text with the faint whiff of celebrity, second-hand by-association celebrity at that.

Late at night, while she should be sleeping, Harry sneaks out of bed and grabs his Bubble Blooper down, a 50s space gun that shoots large bloopy bubbles. The bubble are large an sturdy enough to pick up toys from Harry's room and send them airborne. But when a bubble takes Harry's stuffed Horsie it's superhero Harry on his rocket into deep space for a rescue.

The star here isn't Harry but the art, that look like a cross between block prints four-color offset comics. Seriously, if I could, there are a few pages in here I'd love to own prints of and have framed. They certainly don't suffer from a lack of 264 digital color process, with bold blue-black outlines and deft use of spot color.

The story? Eh.

Van Camp holds the distinction of being the former nanny of a boy named Harry who really does have a Horsie and happens to be the son of Late Night impresario David Letterman. Yeah, that's the second-hand celebrity connection. The story itself is fairly light – typical hero-to-the-rescue night-journey stuff – with no real peril, no real growth involved. It isn't necessarily a bad story, but the art is much stronger that the text and that only highlights the disparity.

The Hating Book

by Charlotte Zolotow
pictures by Ben Shecter
HarperCollins 1969

Another book that has the familiarity of being from my childhood, though I'm not really certain I actually did read this before. It feels familiar, which is to say that it taps the same areas of nostalgia that other books from the late 60s and early 70s leave me feeling.

I hate hate hated my friend.

The book opens with this line, and clearly this hate will be examined and ultimately resolved. The girl who utters this statement feels she has been and is repeatedly snubbed be hr best friend and cites a number of examples of proof. Her mother suggests early on that she ask her best friend what the problem is, but the girl simply comes up with a bunch of probable reasons that reinforce her negative thinking. In the end she finally does ask and her friend mirrors her feelings, that their mutual hate was borne of mutual misunderstanding.

The feelings are natural and well-centered in a child's mindset, and the resolution is fine, I only wish that the solution hadn't been fed to the girl by her mother. That the mother makes the suggestion at the beginning is fine, but she repeats the suggestion twice more (the rule of threes) and so finally she does it. So we go from hate-hate-hate to sudden recognition of misunderstanding with little reason or understanding in the transition. And while children do suddenly change and shift allegiances and friendships there is little sense of a lesson learned in the process. Perhaps this book can provide an avenue for that reflection.

The book is very reminiscent of the the Janice Udry and Maurice Sendak book Let's be Enemies which I think might be the better of the two in dealing with the idea of children processing negative emotions. They both come from the same decade, the golden age of the 1960s, and make for a nice matched set of boys and girls dealing with gender-based relationships.

The Trouble Begins at 8

A Life of Mark Twain in the Wild, Wild West
by Sid Fleischman
Greenwillow / HarperCollins 2008

Mark Twain was a self-made man. Fleishman acknowledges this when he beings this biography of the writer's early years by laying his birth date as some time in the fall of 1865. This, of course, is around the time that the man from Hannibal, Missouri officially used the pen name Mark Twain while writing travelogues during the California Gold Rush. For this point Fleishman backtracks a bit to sketch in the life of Sam Clemens up to that moment he became Mark Twain and then continues forward from there to when Twain first became famous as a humorist on the lecture circuit.

It's an entertaining and breezy read though at times it falls flat in the telling. It seems at times that Fleishman is attempting to give the text a folksy patina, perhaps an homage in imitation to Twain's narrative style, but it seems long-winded at best and feels unsourced at worst. Not that Fleishman hasn't done his research and claimed his sources - no, no, it's all there in the appendices - but that the narrative flourishes almost beg challenge.

Still, Sam felt himself to have entered a paradise of solitude and untouched scenery and deliverance from care. The greatest human achievement to behold was the breathless glimpse of the lone and unarmed Pony Express rider, carrying mail through Indian country on his eight-day dash across eighteen hundred miles of the wild West to Sacramento.

The young boy in me reading that passage says "Oh, come on!" while the adult me wonders whether it was Twain who found the Pony Express the greatest human achievement or Fleishman editorializing in his own breathless text. Yes, there's a lot of text like that, and were Twain's life any less entertaining the book would immediately bog down in the swirl of it all.

Still, for the middle grader reader looking for a little more depth than most biographies on Twain aimed at their level, or for the younger reader reading up, this is a serviceable overview of how Twain came to be Twain.

The Great Powers Outage

The Extraordinary Adventures of Ordinary Boy, Book 3
by William Boniface
HarperCollins 2008

What happens when you take a juvenile comic book storyline, one that would typically be 32 pages in length, pretend it's a title worthy of "prestige" dimensions of 72 pages, then convert it into a middle grade narrative that lasts for nearly 350 pages?

I don't want to talk about this book, I want to put a call out there to teachers and librarians: how many kids are asking for books about superheroes? How many out there are so vested in this series that they've been anxiously awaiting the third installment? I want a sense of the numbers of reader actively seeking this book out and not just plopped into their hands when they are at their wits end for what to recommend for a boy into superheroes.

I mean, wouldn't it be better to not pretend that this is better than having them read comics? Isn't it an admission of failure in publishing that they feel they have to compete with comics on this level?

Okay, I'll say this much about the book. Having read all three books in the series I could see maybe - maybe - the foundation for a TV cartoon series. But it would be half-hour episodes befitting their storylines and not padded to three-hour long endurance marathons. This series would benefit from some serious rejiggering. Pull these stories down to under a hundred pages and focus on the series readers. Quit clogging the middle grade shelves with pulp just because you can, HarperCollins.

Splat the Cat

by Rob Scotton
HarperCollins 2008

I'm going to open with what was originally my closing paragraph. You can decide whether to read further after that.

Note to Publishers and Art Departments everywhere: you never look like greater fools than when you don't have any faith in your books and feel the need to use cover space for advertising copy. It doesn't matter if it's front or back cover, picture book or YA, the minute you sell off the book's real estate you have admitted a lack of confidence and a savvy buying public can smell your desperation.

-------

The National Lampoon, in its heyday back in the late 1970s, used to have a feature in its Photo Funnies section called "Worlds God Never Made," or something similar. Readers would send in snapshots of various businesses that had the word 'world" somewhere in its name, like Chemical World or World of Chicken. It would never cease to amaze me how many people thought they were being clever by naming their business something-world when in fact, the reach and influence of their world scarcely reached across the city limits.

Over time, though, the humor wanes. In a world full of worlds, the idea of yet another world with it's cheap-o plastic yellow sign (always yellow) and its flickering fluorescent bulbs has lost as much of its humorous capital as it does its ginormous placement in the pantheon of large businesses.

Equally, I find that books or movies that lay claim to being "the next (fill in the blank)" or "from the bestselling author of..." are generally trying to sell me the idea that the creator's previous efforts were something so great that I would blindly take on their next creation as brilliant with nary a second thought to its quality. Oddly, in a majority of these cases, I am being sold a familiarity with some other object or product I only know of by reputation. "From the producers of..." tacked at the beginning of a movie title I did not see as a way of proving the pedigree of a another movie I probably won't see is only designed to wedge me into catching the more recent film out of a sense of consumer guilt. Well, I missed that last one, and the ads said it was good, so maybe I better see this one to find out what all the fuss is about. In the end, with so much out there laying claim to some measure of quality we're supposed to all fall in line with -- is there a cultural consensus about anything in this country anymore? -- the idea of quality by association might as well have the word 'world' tacked onto it.

From the director of Psycho comes Frenzy World!

It extends into the world of children's books, and with Splat the Cat I find myself not liking it even before I open the damn thing. Right there under the author's name, on the cover of a book intended for pre-school and pre-reading children are the words "Bestselling Author of Russell the Sheep and Russell and the Lost Treasure." Well, with a one-two combination like that we might just be talking about the next book to top the bestseller list for several months running.

Except we're not.

There's a world of people out there who, surely, this sort of thing must work for. But why? Is it that they loved Russell the Sheep so much but couldn't be bothered to remember the author's name? Could it be that in a world where chain bookstores don't bother to train their staff to handsell children's books that publishers must turn their covers into advertisements for themselves? No kid is going to be sold by this tag line (and if they are then there's something unfortunate about that child's upbringing) and no adult making an informed, conscientious decision about buying a child a book is going to be sold by this attempt to cash in on another set of titles.

After all, if the book cannot sell itself, there's already a problem.

I suppose I ought to actually talk about the book now. The only problem is that everything I've discussed is far more interesting.

Splat is a stand-in for every kid nervous about his first day of school. Splat resists going, comes up with every excuse he can think of to keep from going, finds himself in a class full of new cat friends, and in the end can't wait to go back the next day. That's it in a catnap. Owning a pet mouse, and bringing it to school in his lunch for security, poses the possibility for tension when the teacher informs them that chasing mice is what cats do. But all is diffused when the mouse helps them get to their milk locked in the closet.

Bestselling author of Russell the Sheep? Bestselling? Really? This is supposed to convince me that my thoughts of mediocrity are somehow wrong or misplaced?

I think more than anything what turns me off the most is how much the artwork reminds me of the sort of thing normally found on one of the "edgier" imprints at Hallmark Cards. You know, slick and stylized and not cute little bunnies or soft-focus flowers, art only in the sense of being very workmanlike. There's a sterility to it that makes me feel certain that, if properly shredded, it would prevent a litter box from smelling for weeks.

It's sad when a book causes me to worry about the precious resources being used in its creation. When I start thinking I should go out and plant a replacement tree I get a more than a little disheartened with publishing. A picture book shouldn't make me feel this way; this book does.

A Joker and a Jack

Uncle Shelby's Zoo: Don't Bump the Glump! and Other Fantasies
by Shel Silverstein
originally published by HMH Publications Inc. (Playboy) 1963
HarperCollins 2008









My Dog May Be a Genius
by Jack Prelutsky
HarperCollins / Greenwillow 2008













In these waning days of his tenure as Children's Poet Laureate, Jack Prelutsky and his publishers (who also happen to be Silverstien's publisher) give us another of his larger poetry omnibuses. For as much as I like to pick away at Prelutsky I have to give the man credit for his consistency and his ability to deliver the exact tone of poem that children like to read over and over.

There's hardly any subject new under the sun when it comes to topics for poetry but "A Letter From Camp" sounds a bit too close to Allen Sherman's "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah" for my comfort. And then there's "The Underwater Marching Band" which had a cadence that, I swear, made me start humming along with Sandra Boynton's (of all people) "The Uninvited Loud Precision Band."

Rife with puns and wordplay, fart jokes and concrete poems, Prelutsky provides an ample smorgasbord for young palates.

I Thought I Saw

I thought I saw BBBBBBBBBBB
dive down into the CCCCCCC.
Could I believe my own II?
I'm not so sure, I'm not YY.

That would be eleven bees, seven seas, two eyes, too wise. As we say around the house; pretty clever, toilet lever.

Then he's got stuff that comes off like a cross between Hilaire Belloc Greek wrestling with Ogden Nash in front of the hearth, with a tip o' the hat to William Stieg's CDB:

A Bear is Not Disposed

A bear is not disposed
to dressing up in clothes,
not even underwear,
A bear likes being bare.

Indeed. Emphasize any one word in that last line like an actor's exercise for a variety of meanings.

* * *

Shel Silverstein was his own dog, so to speak. His early years were spent drawing cartoons of army life, as well as writing and drawing his observations for Playboy magazine. He also wrote lyrics to something like 800 songs that were recorded by people as diverse as Johnny Cash ("A Boy Named Sue"), The Irish Rovers ("The Unicorn"), and Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show ("The Cover of the Rolling Stone").

I point this out because I want to show off how much I know about Uncle Shelby. No! Wait! I point this out because there's something about the spirit of Shel Silverstien that comes though most of his work, that sense of the absurd married to the real. I say most of his work because occasionally that spirit is missing, for whatever reason, and in the case of the reissue of Don't Bump the Glump! I feel the spirit has left the building.

Of course, the spirit did leave the building in 1999 when Silverstein died, and I half-suspect this book wouldn't have been reissued if he were still with us. Maybe I'm wrong, because his Evil Eye enterprise renewed the copyright. It isn't that it's bad, but it feels early, like a man working out his style, and doing so on Playboy's payroll.

Most of what we have are short little poems about imaginary beasties, each with its own little watercolor illustration to go with. One that hit me like a ton of bricks is the following. I could have sworn I've actually heard a recoding of Uncle Shelby playing his guitar and singing to this. Is this a buried childhood memory, or something my synapses concocted on their own.

Slithergadee

The Slithergadee has crawled out of the sea.
He may catch the others, but he won't catch me.
No you won't catch me, old Slitherdagee
You mat catch the others, but you wo---

From the man who wrote the song "I Got Stoned and I Missed It" and was posthumously admitted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2002. Thanks, Shel

* * *

Check out the Poetry Friday round-up this week over at A Wrung Sponge.

Fancy Nancy: Bonjour Butterfly

also: Fancy Nancy and The Boy From Paris &
Fancy Nancy at the Museum
all by Jane O'Connor
illustrated by Robin Preiss Glasser
HarperCollins 2008

What began as a cute picture book for the pink-and-sparkly girly-girl set is now officially a brand, a series, and an inferior product. This, the third Fancy Nancy book, was released the same day as two I-Can-Read titles that are trading on the Fancy Nancy name and familiarity to rake in more bucks from the market.

Let's deal with the picture book for a moment. Nancy and her best friend Bree are all about the butterflies. They're typically obsessed with them to the point that Bree is going to make her birthday a butterfly party. They plan a cake, make invitations, get their outfits ready...

Oh, no! Mom suddenly realized that it her parent's 50th anniversary on the same day! Fancy Nancy is going to have to go to her grandparent's party instead. And so she has to go and tell her friend Bree the bad news.

Up to this point the book has been pretty clunky in its exposition. It doesn't feel like a story so much as little two-page set pieces for Nancy and Bree to pose in. But when we get to the spread where Nancy is apologizing to Bree we get an interesting illustration. The text says Bree is devastated by the news but it's Nancy falling all over herself, doubled over in tears. Bree has a look that says "Yeah, like you really care. This is just like you, Nancy, you big self-centered fake!" Is this a mistake in the illustration or is Bree really just pissed that she's being dumped from the story half way.

That's right, now we have an entirely different book on our hands. Bree is history.

Nancy mopes her way through the house, stops talking to people, and generally shows off just how much a brat she really is. And her parents put up with it. They get to the grandparent's place and no sooner is she off the train but suddenly it's as if she'd never been upset. The party is great and afterward they go to a butterfly exhibit at the zoo and, wow! This wasn't such a bad trip after all!

Does Nancy call Bree on her birthday? Does she find something perfectly fancy and butterfly-like to bring back to her friend? No, Nancy finds a butterfly whose color matches the color of her proposed party outfit and thinks it's the grandest of them all.

Selfish brat.

The writing is bad, the story changes midway, and what's with all the dropping of French words and phrases anyway? Well, that, my friends, has everything to do with the Fancy Nancy Brand I-Can-Read Title Fancy Nancy and the Boy From Paris. See, in order to keep the gravy train rolling they need to milk everything fancy for all it's worth. A few French words here and there might let a girl believe she's got some fanciness to her, but now we've got a real live Parisian boy to help her build her fanciness quotient. But wait, he's just a boy, and maybe he isn't so fancy after all. I mean, he likes books about cowboys, and he isn't at all interested in all things fancy. Oh well, lesson leanred. Next!

Fancy Nancy at the Museum allows our Francofile snob to get a little kulchur and some more excuses to work in her French vocabulary. In a lot of ways these beginning readers read a bit more like outlines for possible picture books and don't stand up to the same quality (in my opinion) as many other books in this series. Again, it all feels a little too calculated to be genuine. I'm not necessarily going to fault the parties involved for wanting to make a buck, but when the only way to do it drags down what little good you had before then perhaps it's time to put on the brakes and take stock. Yes, there is a market for girly-girls, girls who like pink and purple and dressing up and sparkles. But character alone can't carry an empty plot, and there's more to fancy than borrowing some French and reinforcing snobbish stereotypes.

The first, and to a lesser extend the second, Fancy Nancy picture books gave us a girl whose fanciness was a fancy of imagination. She would dress up for a dinner out, and teach her family how to be fancy, and in the end her fanciness gave her a dose of humility. Or she would covet a fancy dog, and then take care of a fancy dog, only to learn that fanciness isn't always the best quality to look for. Nicely put lessons in both. What I'm seeing now is a girl forcing the world into her fancy box and when it doesn't fit, oh well. The lesson of Bonjour Butterfly is lost on me -- is it "dump your friends when something fancier comes along?" And as for the beginning reader books, is it really such a good idea to be dropping French words onto those readers who my be having a hard enough time with English?

I hope sales on these books tank. I hope Harper takes a long, hard look at what they are doing with Fancy Nancy and either back off or find a way to return to the quality and the original spirit of the first book.

I never thought I'd see the day I'd be using the words "quality" and "original" in the same sentence as the words Fancy Nancy.

The Daring Book for Girls

Andrea J. Buchanan &
Miriam Peskowitz
illustrated by Alexis Seabrush
Collins / HarperCollins 2007

The girls had to wait a while but it's finally here. With a clear debt paid up front to the creators of The Dangerous Book for Boys, here we have a collection of things to know and do for girls to help them be as equally rounded in their informal educations as the boys.

I've already seen some backlash against this book in places where, sadly, brains tend not to be engaged. The crux is this: boys got a book that was "dangerous" while girls only get "daring," implying in this that while boys are risk-takers girls are merely flirting with the edges of what is considered taboo. The reality is that a boy is more likely to pick up a book with the word dangerous on its cover and read it and feel subversive for the act of actually reading poetry and learning how to make a secret ink out of urine. And girls? They like to play Truth or Dare and don't somehow feel less subversive than if the game were entitled Truth or Danger. In fact what girls consider daring would, to a boy, be considered dangerous. For adults to get caught up in the wording of the title, well, just shows how little they understand what appeals to children.

Another concern was that there should be an omnibus book for KIDS as opposed to ones specific for each gender. Wrong! You may as well call something like that The Big Bright, Shiny Book of Ever So Much FUN! for Lucky Little Girls and Boys! and watch that book collect dust on every shelf it touches. Boys and girls like their distinctions, they revel in them, and when they want some dirt on what the other is like they want to be able to find it in one convenient location. Just because it says "for boys" or "for girls" doesn't mean the other can't appreciate it. In fact, both The Daring... and The Dangerous... book features a section on the opposite sex which would appeal to the curiosity of both. Manuals for scoping out the enemy, always good reading.

A paltry sampling from the table of contents:

• Rules for Basketball
• Lemon powered clock
• Palm reading
• Every girl's toolbox
• 14 games of tag
• 5 karate moves
• Daring Spanish girls
• Joan of Arc
• Four square
• Pirates (female)
• How to tie a Sari
• Building a campfire
• Playing hearts and gin
• Clubhouses and forts
• Putting up your hair with a pencil
• How to be a spy
• How to paddle a canoe
• Cleopatra
• Math tricks
• Boys
• Public speaking
• Hiking
• Telling ghost stories
• The Periodic Table of elements
• and so on

Definitely some girly things there, but plenty of things a boy could get into, just as girls could get into some of the boys things. Girly or boyish, these books are handsome editions that don't deserve the crappy knock-offs and gag books that have sprouted up around them.

These two books combined would make an excellent edition to any family library. Perfect for casual grazing, rainy days, bored afternoons and, with the proper adult attitudes, a more complete education. Those who fret over the words in the title or some of the contents would do best to get out of the way of their children and have them prove that you raised them right by letting them explore what's on offer.

One Beastly Beast: Two Aliens, Three Inventors, Four Fantastic Tales

by Garth Nix
HarperCollins 2007

In his introduction Nix introduces us to a lucky boy who loved to read all kinds of stories, especially ones with monsters and adventures and all sorts of fantastical things. He then explains that he was that boy, and that when he writes he likes to write the sort of things he'd like to read.

This book was written for that boy.

This collection brings together four shorter stories of children -- two boys and two girls -- who each have their own sort of fantastical adventures.

* * * * *

That's as much as I wrote before I went on holiday, followed by some notes intended to help me remember the stories so I could flesh out the review later. In the interest of showing you the very thought process behind a review, a sort of armature for the way my brain works, and out of sheer laziness I've decided to leave my notes raw and unedited for all the world to see.

story 1. puns: rats, pirates (pie rats), pirate videos, worm holes, bread-seeking cheese

story 2. princess, bloody beast (her pet pig) eaten by robot monster created by aunt

story 3. orphaned inventor boy wards off pirates, wizard and alien adopters until his time traveling parents can retrieve him

story 4. girl with big brain, talks to sea serpent blinded by harbor lights, turning girls into penguins

If all that doesn't spark some sort of interest, well, then I guess I couldn't blame you. All I can say, as a reader and reviewer, if you know Garth Nix then you can trust he has a much better way with words than I do. These stories are entirely and thoroughly enjoyable, a perfect mix for antsy middle grade readers looking for something shorter.

Phooey!

by Marc Rosenthal
HarperCollins 2007

Exactly.

There's an old adage that care should be taken when choosing a title that can instantly sum up someone's opinion.

Using the "nothing ever happens around here" idea we see a boy kick-the-can dejectedly through town while endless calamity takes place behind his back. At the very end something does happen that makes him change his mind. To be honest, the exercise it took to get there left me underwhelmed, to the point that I don't remember what happened and don't have the energy to go back and find out.

This kind of gag is old in the comics world, classic versions of which were presented in MAD magazine in the 1950's by artists like Harvey Kurtzman and Basil Wolverton. The unstructured layouts across the spreads in this book had me longing for the borders of a traditional comic book precisely because it was the anarchy contained within the panels that made the gags funny. Having all the action scattered around the pages diffuses the energy; you wind up seeing things happening separate from the boy, not necessarily in proximity to him. The fact that they're all connected in a Rube Goldberg-esque hodgepodge doesn't really track. Thus making it easily forgettable. Did an elephant get hit in the face with a pie? Why did the the man fall out of the window? Who's chasing whom? And why is this girl just following along and not pointing things out to the boy, since she can clearly see what he is missing?

So many questions, so little desire to follow them up.

Memo to Acquisitions Re: Superhero Fiction

Stop. Immediately.

Hollywood may be awash in all sorts of superheros, spies and pirates but attempting to ride their gravy train in publishing has been a huge mistake. And from the looks of the titles in my review stack there are many editors who just don't get it, especially with the superhero stuff.

I am referring to stories about the boy (always a boy) whose powers are lesser, or non-existent, yet another underdog defeating the cardboard adult villain who has never been successfully felled by other adult superheroes. Or those series where the superhero is a sidekick who tells us flat out that were it not for his (always his) intervention the main hero would not have triumphed in the end.

While we're at it, why do these books always tell us how they will end in advance? Are you afraid that the reader will abandon the book unless they know up front how it will end? And once they know, what on earth could be the reason for wanting to actually continue?

No, they are not humorous. No matter how many references to butts or flatulence or belching or body odor. The witty repartee is more hackneyed than the worst Hollywood movie, far from being clever or witty, farther still from being humorous. Dav Pilkey "got away with it" because he was performing a meta parody on the superhero, comics and gross-out prankster boy genres. Dav Pilkey's Captain Underpants series is clever despite it's potty humor not because of it. Dav Pilkey gets it and he gets it right.

Listen, I can understand that you want to try and capitalize on the latest trends in pop culture, and competing with Hollywood is a major factor. But if you do not fully understand what they are doing you can't begin to hope to catch a glimmer of that lightning in a bottle. Hollywood didn't pluck random screenplays out of the slush pile, or purchase pitches from some hot new talent with a well-connected agent, they went with franchise material that's several decades old. They hired name actors and screenwriters and directors with proven records and sank tons of money, time and pre-production into making them blockbusters out the gate.

But where's the money in purchasing someone else's franchise? Why would any book publisher actively attempt a novel form of a comic book character that already exists in a printed format? They wouldn't, which puts you, publishers and editors, at a disadvantage when it comes to the genre. How, then, to capitalize (as we are capitalists here, yes?) on the superhero genre without looking derivative?

You don't. Spandex-clad superheroes have their place and appeal but it isn't in fiction, otherwise why didn't it originate there? The popular comic superhero has been with us since the 1930's but only in recent years have we seen original fiction concerning caped crusaders that didn't previously exist. This isn't a question of a dormant, untapped market, it's a simple fact that superhero fiction doesn't work. It doesn't work because the artifice of the world it inhabits begs for visuals, and once you begin to introduce visuals you might as well be making a graphic novel or a straight-up comic book.

So do us a favor, Dear Acquisitions Person: If you (or your boss, house, or division) are clamoring to try and capture the superhero market, and you find a worthy manuscript, push like you've never pushed before to have it converted into a graphic novel. If that makes you uncomfortable, if you don't think it'll work in an illustrated format, if it's just too long or you can't imagine the market for such a book, then perhaps it doesn't work as fiction either. If you (your boss, house, or division) are not committed to doing comic-formatted works, then perhaps you shouldn't be pushing the superhero genre.

Personal note to the geniuses at HarperCollins Children's Books:


What possessed you to make a "storybook" version of the new Spider-man 3 movie? The film is rated PG-13, the text of the book talks about "acing college classes" and job security and sexual jealousy and revenge, and yet you think this is appropriate for kids as young as 3 years old? For you I say: Double-plus Stop.

Roger, The Jolly Pirate

by Brett Helquist
HarperCollins 2004

Recently arrived in paperback, this is a fine chantey of a picture book that tells the humorous tale of the Roger the Pirate and his namesake flag.

Roger the pirate isn't very good at being a pirate -- not knowing his starboard from his larboard, bad at looting and all -- but he is good at being happy. When there's serious pirating to be done the captain sends Roger below decks so that Roger won't be in the way... or perhaps embarrass the crew in front of the ships they're marauding. In particular, the captain doesn't need Roger in the way while they do battle with their sworn enemy, the Admiral.

One day Roger decides to do something nice to his fellow pirates, to get them to appreciate him more: He decides to bake a cake. First a little bit of this powder that looks like flour, then a little bit of this and that, all stuffed into this thing that looks like a pot. It's hard to see locked belowdecks so Roger doesn't realize that the cake mix he's about to set a fire under is actually gunpowder on a cannon.

Boom.

Roger appears topside covered in a white powder and frantic to explain he was only tyring to do some good. The Admiral's men take one look at Roger and assume he's an undead ghost come back to take their souls. The Admiral himself gives the order to abandon ship and to Roger's stunned surprise the crew truly are pleased with him. In his honor they make the famous flag of the grinning skull and crossbones that becomes that universal symbol of pirating, the Jolly Roger.

This cheery little tale is, of course, a fiction, but Helquist does a nice job of giving the story weight by adding a song at the end that tells the same tale to what appears to be the tune "What Do You Do With a Drunken Sailor." Yeah! Get the kids singing sea chanties and dancing a hornpipe!

I'm sorry I missed this book when it was first released as it's a fine example of what good illustration -- children's books or otherwise -- is all about. Extreme close-ups and cinematic angles make this great for read-aloud audiences, and the story does breeze along. I'm sure it's just a coincidence, but there are a couple of times I could have sworn Helquist included the teen aged Hook (from his cover illustration for the book Capt. Hook by J.V. Hart) among the pirate crew. Nice touch if it's true.

The only thing that saddens me is catching this after writing about Natalie Babbitt's Jack Plank Tells Tales and feeling like there's a bit of a similarity in the story of a pirate who is too happy to stay with pirates. I'm not suggesting either author copied the other, and the audiences for the two books is different, but I always feel uncomfortable when suddenly it seems like everyone had the same great idea at the same time. I'm sure neither of these authors is the first to write about "The Reluctant Pirate."

The OK Book

by Amy Krause Rosenthal &
Tom Lichtenfeld
Kook Productions/
HarperCollins 2007

1970's pop psychology took this long to filter down into picture books?

The letters OK are tilted to one side to represent a child who introduces us to all the things they are "okay" at. Despite making mistakes within the illustrations the text confidently declares that they are still okay:

An okay pancake flipper (though it lands on its head);

An okay kite flyer (while it's stuck in a tree);

An okay swimmer (sticking a cautious toe in the water at the edge of the shore);

"One day, I'll grow up and be really excellent at something...
...but I sure am having fun figuring it out."

It's difficult to take a self-esteem book to task for its earnestness, but a part of me feels that learning these sorts of lessons from books -- rather than through more effective approaches like parenting and example -- removes a certain layer of responsibility. It provides adults a false sense of fulfilled obligation, that by introducing the concept of being "okay for the time being" through a book absolves those adults from further interaction or reinforcement. Perhaps as a preschool tool for introducing children to the topic as a jumping-off point for discussion it's okay, though the repetition of the text could prove tedious.

But perfectly for okay parents who might need the reminders.

Pictures From Our Vacation

by Lynne Rae Perkins
Greenwillow/ HarperCollins 2007

We were going to our family farm. No one lived at the farm anymore, but our grandparents were spending the summer there and we were going to visit them...

It's a two day trip to the family farm and just before they leave mom gives her children instant cameras and a blank notebook to record their vacation. The first shot is an accident, a picture of feet taken while trying to figure out how the camera works.

Heading out of town our narrator, the girl, imagines what their motel will be like that first night, followed by vivid plans for her own dream-style motel. Her dream motel includes a pool, an azure oasis in the heartland. She is naturally disappointed when they arrive at the motel and find the pool has no water in it at all. A photo documents this disappointment.

At the farm they settle in and dig out an old badminton set with warped rackets. They aren't long into the game when they are chased inside by the rain. A photo of a warped racket is taken.

The rain lasts for days on end, forcing games of cards and drawing, silent reading and building towers from playing cards. No pictures are taken.

When the weather clears they take a day trip to a nearby lake. They get lost along the way (trying to find one of dad's childhood shortcuts) and then stop at a large Native American earthwork, a snake mound along the river. A picture is taken next to the mound that looks like nothing more than a grassy knoll in the photo.

They reach the lake finally, just as it starts to rain again. No photo.

They attend a memorial service for a great aunt who was something of a free-spirited adventurer in her day. Afterward many people gather at the old farm house, distant cousins and friends, where they feast and play and spend the night together. "I didn't take any pictures that day," the girl says.

Finally it's time to return home. She takes out her notebook and looks at the pictures. "These don't remind me that much of our vacation," she says. Her father suggests that putting a person in the photos makes them more interesting, gives something to focus on. But mom gets it right when she opines that perhaps they were having too much fun to take better pictures.

As picture books go, it's a wordy one, not the kind a lap-sitter would sit still for. No, this belongs to that special class of picture book that has fallen somewhat out of favor, the long-form picture book intended for older independent readers. This kind of picture book was what I was weened on in the days before beginning readers was a market and snack series filled the gap between Syd Hoff and Dr. Seuss and the books of Roald Dahl and Jerome Beatty.

Long-form isn't just about more words than what most current picture books contain, but also in pacing, in the leisurely feel of the story getting around to its points. The long-form picture book isn't just a story, it's an illustrated short story, and like its grown-up versions it is about a specific moment of discovery told with a certain amount of economy.

Words and pictures work together to tell two different stories of the same events. Perkins is careful in making sure to alternate between scenes of broad overviews and smaller moments, sometimes illustrating ideas only barely hinted at in the texts (like memories) or not even mentioned in the text at all (the quiet activities during the rain). The insets of the photos the kids take are exactly the sort of snapshots kids would take when their brains are telling them to record a moment for posterity but haven't the experience to know how to capture those moments. It's no surprise that their notebooks are filled with images that don't even hint at the vacation's activities, a gentle lesson in living life as opposed to recording it obsessively.

There are some scrap-bookers out there who might benefit from this message.

Perkins gouache illustrations catch the bright colors of summer, the saturation of our memories of summers past, shimmering luminescent pieces of frozen time. I'm still not quite sure what reader this book is best for, but for the right reader this is a gem.

Casey Back At Bat

by Dan Gutman
paintings by Steve Johnson & Lou Fancher
HarperCollins 2007


















In days of old Ernest Thayer told
Of Casey at the Bat,
How the Mudville team pinned their winning dreams
On a player whose efforts fell flat.

Now Gutman stands to try his hand
And picks up ol' Mudville's tale.
But on page one, line three, as you can see
Is where I say poor Gutman fails.

I'm sure you've heard of Casey, the baseball world sensation,
whose famous strikeout lost a game and stunned a hopeful nation.
Well, if you think that tale was sad, sit down, let's have a chat,
and I'll tell you a story I call Casey Back at Bat

The problem here I think is clear:
We know how it all turns out.
Mighty Casey swings, the ball takes wing,
The game ends in a rout.

Where Dan Gutman missed is all in the twist
(Though some might call it mirth):
With Casey on deck, the baseball connects
and sails... around the Earth?

But, no, that's not all! This hurling ball
Speeds through both time and space.
And in repose, the Sphinx's own nose
Is knocked right off of it's face.

Astronauts it has seen, Pisa tower leans,
Scared dinos make themselves disappear.
We've forgotten just why this amazing pop fly
Orbits this terrestrial sphere.

Finally Casey and crew 'round the diamond they flew
As the story returns to the game,
While the ball in the sky that's in everyone's eye
Is now caught, so the ending's the same.

Where Thayer once hit with poetical grit
His love of the game showed no doubt;
Similar joy can't be found in this critical ground--
Mighty Gutman has struck out