The Skeleton Pirate

by David Lucas
Candlewick Press 2012

The unbeaten Skeleton Pirate who refuses to accept defeat is beaten not once but twice in this quirky picture book.

The Skeleton Pirate knows one thing: that he will never be beaten, and will fight to the, uh, death to prove it. But when a band of pirates chains him up and throws him over board... he still will not accept defeat. rescued by a Mermaid he is free for but a moment when they are both swallowed by a whale. Still refusing to accept his plight the Mermaid has a plan to help them get out of the whale, which succeeds, and sends them both sailing into a golden sunset on a gold-filled ship made of gold, where the Skeleton Pirate looks into those Mermaiden eyes and accepts he has finally been beaten... by love!

While the title might sound on the scary side, younger readers aren't going to be put off by the stylized Skeleton Pirate Lucas has created. Looking for all the world like he might actually be made of balsa wood, he's so far from reality that no child would even consider asking the really big "adult" questions like: Why does he only wear pants? and; "If he's a skeleton, isn't he already dead?" and; "Why is he so cranky?" In truth, I missed the biggest clue of all on the title page where the Skeleton Pirate appears to be emerging from the wreckage of his own ship. Not to read too deeply here, the Skeleton Pirate is a lost soul doing the only thing he knew how to do until something (or rather, someone) came along to show him the truth.

Love beats fighting, any day.

Lucas is very crafty in not letting the romance show up until the final image and gives up a goofy tale in the process. Lucas has a thing for whales, and the sea, and this time around his watercolor palate feels much bolder. I'm a fan.

13 Days of Halloween: Zombie in Love

Zombie in Love
by Kelly DiPucchio
illustrated by Scott Campbell 
Atheneum Books 2011  

A picture book about a zombie looking for love?  

Mortimer is, to be blunt, a bit clueless. He's looking for love in all the wrong places, scaring the pants off too many faces.  Does he not realize he's a zombie? Does he not understand that the living fear the living dead? In the end, it takes a personal ad (talk about a dead end) to bring Mortimer the one girl who cab return his putrefied affections. At a prom.

Granted, it's got cute moments, but its one of those picture books that make me wonder who the audience is: goth teens looking for a cute Valentine's Day gift? Tweens caught between being too old to trick-or-treat but still clinging to their younger days with newly jaundiced perspectives? Elementary school kids who are already fretting about finding a date for the prom?

The story feels too sophisticated for newly independent readers, full of too much mushy love stuff or too much gore-filled humor, and honestly just seems out of place among other picture books. It's like a zombie-themed valentine on steroids. 

I have to say, I was pleased to see a cheerful zombie picture book, but I wished it had been about something other than finding a mate. That's Frankenstein's territory.

A Wrinkle in Time

The Graphic Novel
by Madeleine L'Engle
adaptation by Hope Larson
FSG 2012

The classic middle grade book gets a solid graphic novel treatment by award winning artist Hope Larson.

The weird thing about graphic novel adaptations is that they tend to be much longer than their source material, and they rarely convey all the details and explanations in their retelling. Graphic novels conceived as graphic novels from the beginning work to condense story where adaptations, it seems, look to open up narrative, alternately speeding along the story and slowing it down at the same time. There's a certain elasticity of time and events involved.

Could there be a better-suited book for a graphic novel treatment than A Wrinkle in Time?

Meg is an odd duck, rendered here like your typical unruly tomboyish nerd girl. Impatient and impulsive, she doesn't fit in even among her family; her mother has beauty that she envies, her twin bothers the model of normality, and her baby brother Charles is a precocious clairvoyant mistaken by those around him as a moron. Her father? Mysteriously away, subject of much gossip, though truly gone in a way the local townfolk could never conceive (much less believe) if they knew the truth.

Charles is in contact with some old ladies who live in a house in the woods most consider haunted. Mrs. Whatsit at first seems like a doddering old fool, her companion Mrs. Who speaking often in quotation, and eventually the occasionally unfocused apparition Mrs Which presents, taking the form of a Halloween witch. Together, these tree form a trinity of Star Sisters who serve as prophets, guides, and guardians for the journey about to come. A classmate of Meg's, the sensitive outsider Calvin who is better at passing as normal, finds himself drawn to the haunted house in the woods and once united with Charles and Meg they are informed that they can help bring Meg and Charles's father but that the mission involves some peril.

as always, click image to enlarge

Traveling the wrinkles in time, the sextet make it across the galaxy to the planet Camazotz where a cloud of evil is holding the kid's father as a prisoner. This evil has grown and crept across the galaxy, threatening to force the inhabitants of other planets to succumb to fear and remain orderly and obedient. This evil is controlled by IT, rendered as little more than a massive brain sitting on a pedestal in a protected tower. Utilizing their wits and few tools left them by the Star Sisters they rescue Meg's father but at the expense of losing Charles in the process. They regroup at a safe distance and discuss options for rescuing Charles, where Meg finally comes to realize that this is her destiny, and enters a final confrontation with IT using as her weapon the one thing IT wants but IT doesn't have.

I'm going to admit right here that I am as old as this book, and that I read it when it was less than a decade old. I have vague memories of images from that initial reading that have, over time, merged with images from episodes of The Twilight Zone and The Prisoner, bits and pieces from other science fiction stories (Bradbury and Clarke most likely), and special effect from the occasional badly produced movies that would end up on TV in the afternoons on weekends. Which is to say that the material read fresh to me while at the same time oddly derivative. But more startling to me was the complete mash-up of Cold War fear, Orwellian dystopia, post-war mythology, and a solid dose of budding New Age religious thinking. None of this is negative or unwelcome, as I was suddenly aware of how tame and safe a lot of middle grade fiction is these days by comparison. Talking time travel as if it were as easy as breathing, quoting classic scholars and thinkers, lumping artists and religious icons together as visionaries who have tried to explain the unexplainable... after a while it was a little like the articulation of thoughts from someone gloriously tripping on LSD. Again, not a bad thing, but odd all the same.

I applaud Larson for taking on a classic that, like movies made from books, will no doubt disappoint those who have set ideas of what the characters look like or how certain elements should be rendered. It's also no small feat to take on the telling of a story that has as its base the notion of time travel without any real explanation for how it is possible. Merely referring to "the tesseract" and giving a basic description of how travel across the fifth dimension could easily lose a reader, but the story is carried along by the strong-willed personality of Meg and her through-line desire of finding and rescuing her father.

As excited as I was to get my hands on this I had a little bit of graphic novel adaptation remorse after finishing it – I probably should have reread the original novel first and made a true comparison. But I've thought this over and decided that as much as I'd like to think of graphic novels as gateways to reading in general I sincerely doubt a majority of readers are going to read both: unlike book-to-film interest there is little evidence of a similar graphic-novel-to-book conversion taking place. We can debate and discuss this all we want, but the reality is what it is, when a kid finishes a book they don't generally go hunting down the graphic novel adaptation, and vice versa.

With that thought in mind I am glad there is this second, and perhaps slightly more accessible, graphic novel version of A Wrinkle in Time out there. It provides more opportunities to open up young minds and getting their heads wrapped around the notion of time travel and just what intangible is truly the most powerful weapon in the universe. Besides reading, of course.

Habibi

by Craig Thompson
Pantheon 2011

A sprawling, epic graphic novel of love and... no. Just love. But also a lot more.

Chance throws together Dodola and Zam, a pair of child slaves, and theres is an intricate story of love, admiration, and survival. It's a love that survives all the worst things that can happen to lost and forgotten children, and it is a love that seems to span thousands of years at the same time. It is an almost unwieldy story that falters adventurously where most storytellers would probably play safe, and it rewards the reader with something that feels as old-world authentic and modern at the same time.

The story begins when nine-year-old Dodola is sold as a bride to a scribe, a man old enough to be her father. Despite the forced consummation of their marriage he isn't entirely a brute and in short order begins to teach Dodola how to write. Yes, in the beginning was the word, and the word lead to the Qur'an, and to stories. These stories come to calm young Zam, a slave whom she saves and raises like a younger brother. They also save Dodola in the same way they saved Shahrazad when captured into the sultan's harem, they serve as a comfort to her when locked in jail and when she hovers near-death and is being nursed back to health by a grown Zam. Throughout the bonds of love that weave through the stories also wend through Dodola's and Zam's lives as they are separated and long for each other.

It might be easier to explain a book like Habibi if it had a traditional narrative structure but Thompson has chosen to bite of quite a huge chunk of landscape. Arabic stories and the stories of the Qur'an make their way into adventures and parables that could have come from the Arabian Nights tales. Actual religious stories and texts are part of the fabric, as is a fair deal of unashamed carnal humanity, and though it doesn't bother me in context I would be remiss in not mentioning in a review that there's quite a bit of nudity and violence in Habibi. Just like life, which I'm going to assume was part of Thompson's intent.

As a fan of Thompson's tale of first love, Blankets, I was cautious not to read too much about Habibi before I could see it for myself. But I had gleaned that some find issue with his western appropriation of Arabic stories and tropes. I am not learned enough in these areas to gauge those assessments, but I could see where a caution might go up when considering the perpetration of stereotypes and cultural biases. But I have read non-western religious texts, and the Arabian Knights tales, and creation myths enough to know that at the very least Habibi reflects much of what has been written before. Does the current global political situation make us more sensitive to these images and stories? Perhaps, but wouldn't a discussion as opposed to a condemnation be a good thing?



Habibi is strictly for teens, mature ones at that. In addition to the nudity and frank discussion of sex and reproduction the violence includes rape, voluntary castration and torture. There is also, very carefully worked into the story, an historical progression where the story seems to begin several hundred years ago but ends in the modern era. The implication that the more things change the more they stay the same may bother some, suggesting the middle east hasn't changed in a thousand years or so, but as we've seen a reactionary turn to old values cropping up perhaps we shouldn't shoot the messenger here.  Habibi is an accomplished work of art and graphic narrative that at the very least should raise the bar for what can be done with the medium.

Marly's Ghost

by David Levithan
with spot illustrations by Brian Selznick
Dial 2006

The premise sounds less than promising: Take Dickens' A Christmas Carol and update it to present day, change the holiday to Valentine's Day, and turn Scrooge into a 16 year old boy hardened and embittered against all things romantic after having lost the love of his life.

(Spoilers, such as they are, follow).

Marly is the young girl Ben (short for Ebenezer) has lost to an unnamed cancer, the chains binding her to the living are a charm bracelet filled with memories and mementos her Ben holds so dear they keep both of them from moving on. The three spirits who visit Ben are of Valentine's Day's past, present and future giving him glimpses into who he was, is and could be. The diminutive waif Tiny Tim here becomes a gay couple, Tiny and Tim, who first feel the brunt of Ben's anger and frustration only to see him turn and become their biggest supporters.

It's quite a feat to update Dickens and make it relevant to a teen audience and the effort here is admirable, if flawed. The book calls itself a remix as opposed to a retelling because Levithan has attempted to retain as much of Dickens's original text and dialog wherever appropriate. The effect is that the narrative is woven with odd little bits that never quite seem to mesh with the story being told. There's almost a sense of the archaic in some of the speech, particularly when Ben communicates with the spirits.

I'm also a little confused about the message. Is it that Ben shouldn't grieve the loss, or simply that he's gone too far in wallowing in his grief. With Dickens it is understood that Scrooge had hardened himself over a great many years and his heart hardened over so that his conversion required divine intervention. But the idea here is that Ben has succumbed so quickly that it appears no one has tried to provide the boy any sort of grief counseling at all. Granted, it removes the story from it's flow to look too deeply beyond the simplicity of its origins but it also distracts from the believability of Ben's conversion to suggest that all he needs is an extra-terrestrial reminder of what he's become (and a glimpse at being dead by age 19) to send him to the other side of the emotional spectrum. I'm not a big advocate of psychotherapudic pharmaceuticals but a low dose and a little counseling would have helped Ben a whole better than his conversion into an exuberant pro-love apostle out to spread the good word.

When I was a teen and reading rock and roll criticism seriously there was a review for something that the critic derided snidely as "perfect for 14 year olds in love". Well, I was 14 at the time, in love, and didn't understand why that was such a bad thing. This would have been the perfect book for me back then.