Happy Belated Blogiversary to Me!

Oh, Holy Undies, how could I have missed my own 5th Anniversary? 

So a quick scan of the records showed that five years and nine days ago I embarked on this journey to read, write, and review books for children and young adults. What began as an exploration to better educate myself eventually led to an MFA at Vermont College and what is clearly becoming my great second act in life. I would hardly have guessed as much, but it appears that this blog and all that has come from it was the spark that ignited the tinder of my quasi midlife crisis. 


Since I didn't know it was on the horizon I haven't exactly planned anything for this celebration. Sorry, if I'd known I'd have sent our invitations and baked us all a grand and glorious gooey cake. Instead I think I'll republish my first-ever online book review of a book intended for children, something from my own childhood that made me keenly aware of a book as something other than a mere entertainment. And while you're all enjoying that I'll go look in the mirror for telltale lines of age. 


What do you think, should the blog get a face lift? Can anyone recommend any good digital plastic surgeons?

_____

Originally published October 3, 2006

The Magic Finger

by Roald Dahl 
illustrated by William Pene du Bois
41 pages Harper & Row 1966
 
This is a story of a girl with anger management issues, a story with a high sense of justice and a low tolerance for senseless violence, and the delightfully quirky world that Roald Dahl excelled at creating. The Magic Finger is a pushing, prodding, poke-in-the-eye, accusatory allegory to war via a pointed attack on the tradition of English sport hunting. In the right light, it could also be a call to vegetarianism, though I don't know that was Dahl's intent back in the mid-60's.
 
Our unnamed antagonist -- who'll I call Zak for reasons to be explained -- is the type of child who is a tempest beneath a barely calm surface. When humiliated by her teacher for spelling cat with a 'k' (and Twain had something to say about this) her boiling point is reached as fast as it takes to point her finger and turn the font of derision into a house pet. In the fantasy world of children's literature this casual power and transformation is presented as a natural occurrence, one in every classroom. Zak's abilities and her unwillingness to be trifled with are the point at which we jump to the real story.
 
Zak's neighbors, the Greggs, are a typical English hunting family proud to return from the fields with their kill, one duck a piece. The injustice of this needless killing sends Zak to seeing colors, and in her rainbow fury she turns her neighbors into duck-sized, bird-winged humanoids for the night. And because this universe needs balance (and the Gregg's need a lesson) their house is taken over with people-sized, human-armed ducks. As the humans are chased out and fired at with their own guns they quickly take to the trees and learn the obvious but valuable lesson of seeing the world from the eyes of the hunted. Come morning the world is set to rights and the Greggs set about atoning for their hunting sins while Zak goes of in search of another family that needs a lesson.
 
The joy I had discovering this shortly after it was first published left a lingering mark. In some ways I prefer this to Dahl's better-acknowledged classics James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in that it distills the lesson and entertains without unnecessary baggage.
 
Sadly, modern editions of this book no longer contain the original illustrations by du Bois, favoring instead more cartoon-y illustrations by Quintin Blake who has illustrated (or re-illustrated in this case) all of Dahl's books currently in print. This apparently was Dahl's illustrator of choice beginning with The B.F.G and presumably the earlier books were re-illustrated with his approval. One of my favorite parts of the original is the doubled page that allows you to watch the school teacher turn into a cat. There is also a multi-page spread where Zak's fury changes color but are presented in black and white ink wash that may be the result of economics (color being more expensive to print) but force readers to translate colors to emotions in a way that is more internal (and less obvious) than a similar expression in Leo Lionni's Frederick.
 
As for Zak, unless you read the original edition you won't see a little girl wearing a sailor's hat with that name on it, pointing at the reader in an homage to James Montgomery Flagg's Uncle Sam posters of the early 20th century. This closing image appropriates the iconic military recruiting image and transforms it into an accusation addressed to the reader. Is Zak attempting to teach you a lesson for your unknown sins, or is she merely warning you to beware your actions. Written and illustrated early in the Vietnam conflict the message isn't overt in Dahl's text but du Bois illustration appears to draw a connection between the senselessness of sport hunting and mindlessness of war.

Perhaps it is time to re-release the original edition.

Bubble in the Bathtub

by Jo Nesbo 
Aladdin 2011 

Nilly and Lisa are back, this time to help rescue Doctor Proctor who seems to have gotten himself trapped somewhere in time while trying to reunite with an old flame from long ago... 

When Lisa and Nilly receive a postcard from their friend Doctor Proctor (inventor of the infamous Fart Powder that was the subject of the previous book) the discover a secret message indicating that the doctor is in trouble and needs help. With the sale of a collectible postage stamp to an odd woman named Raspa who has a wooden leg with a roller skate at the end of it, the kids tell their parents they're spending the weekend at a friend's house and take off for Paris. From Oslo. With tiny Milly crammed into a carry-on bag because they only have enough money for one ticket.

Once there they find the doctor's hotel room but he is missing. Through luck, Nilly discovers that a powder he was instructed to bring along from the doctor's lab is actually a bubble bath that is the active ingredient for a time machine built out of a bathtub. The doctor's old flame Juliette shows up and explains how she and the doctor were parted many years before, and that he's gone back in time to try and change history. Suddenly everyone is traveling around through time trying to find the doctor and make sure that history doesn't get changed entirely. Napoleon, Joan of Arc, the French Revolution, the Tour de France, the Eiffel Tower, all of it may or may not be irreparably altered as Nilly, Lisa, Raspa, Juliette, and the doctor himself go zipping around in the bathtub hoping to correct, undo, and generally mess with historical events so that there can be a happy ending.

Head-spinning plot twists and preposterous time travel paradoxes?  Oh, heck yeah, but its so much fun that you either twist yourself into a pretzel trying to sort it all out or, better, you taken them for the goofy fun they are and roll with them. Nilly and Lisa understand they cannot change the past without having profound effects on the future, but some histories were just meant to be no matter what the shift in events.  When Nilly impersonates Napoleon he knows what is supposed to happen that day at Waterloo, but is all that bloodshed necessary? No, Nilly decides instead to convince the French troops to go home, pretend they suffered heavy losses, and return to their families and breakfasts. On the other side of the battle, finding the French troops gone, Wellington and company decide to pretend they won a great battle, and return home to their families with a similar story. Nilly has changed history, but the outcome is still recorded the same and no one is the wiser. And as far as the paradoxes are concerned, when Lisa helps a despondent Gustav Eiffel by sketching out an idea for a tower it's hard not to get up in the snake eating its own tail. It's the ultimate answer to the chicken-egg question: they both came first.

Nesbo has written one big, slobbery shaggy dog of a book that is hard to resist. Middle grade books that push 200 pages really need to prove themselves to me, but at 425 pages I never felt like I was being dragged along. The humor is irreverent and droll, wacky and sophisticated at the same time, it honors the spirit of adventure and the desire for nonsense in dealing with the adult world, and is one of the few books (if any?) where the central story was about kids helping two adults reunite for love.

Nesbo, Norway's (perhaps Europe's) leading adult crime novelist has taken another step toward establishing a reputation on par with Roald Dahl – the better parts at least. While his adult fiction is dark his middle grade books (there is a third not yet in translation) are the most Dahl-esque stories I have read. Evil and ugliness lurk in the adult characters, as they do in real life, but Nilly and Lisa treat them with the same aplomb any kid would in dealing with schoolyard bullies. Nilly's pluck in getting his friends out of the guillotine is as absurd as it is natural in the world Nesbo creates. If anything, Nesbo does one better than Dahl by empowering his characters with an indestructible passion and innocence.

I know people like to get excited by authors and series, and that generally isn't me. But after reading dozens and dozens of middle grade books it's genuinely exciting when someone truly "gets" what it means to be a kid and can make it funny while delivering the serious stuff amid a truly absurd adventure. I sincerely wish Nesbo a long career in both his adult and children's books, and that his books get the attention they deserve. I'm doing my part.

Doctor Proctor's Fart Powder

by Jo Nesbo
translated from Norwegian by Tara Chace
Aladdin 2010 

Proving that some humor is universal, this Norwegian import is a romp worthy of all the comparisons to Roald Dahl that I've read in other reviews.  

Tiny Nilly moves to a new neighborhood in Oslo and discovers that his neighbor, Doctor Proctor, is a bit of a nutty professor who invents wacky, seemingly useless stuff.  Like an industrial-strength fart powder that doesn't smell and can hurl a human into the atmosphere.  Enter the villains, a set of twin boys named Truls and Trym and their Hummer driving father who plot to steal the powder and sell it to NASA before the good doctor can.  And just because this sort of premise isn't weird enough there is a man-eating snake in the sewers and the problem of there being no gunpowder to set off the cannons on Norwegian Independence Day.  Oh yeah, it'll all come together in the end. 

If the subject of farting as an integral part of the narrative turns you off, if it would prevent you from enjoying a funny and engaging narrative, then that's a shame.  While I certainly don't condone gratuitous use of potty humor to engage young readers we have, for better or worse, lost those days where a story like this could be told about belching or something more innocent.  In fact if I think too hard about this there's a quite bit of The Absent Minded Professor in this story, which makes it hardly the most original idea.  But Nesbo keeps things light and, uh, airy, and fills the story with bits of the preposterous that make it genuinely funny.

Like flushing poor Nilly down a toilet so he can escape a prison cell and swim (yes, swim) through raw sewage in order to escape, but becomes swallowed by the boa that lives there.  And there's Nilly, watching as the snake's digestive juices dissolve the rubber on his shoes, accepting his fate and not the least bit frantic (maybe a little nervous)... until he notices something promising about some of the other contents in the snake's stomach.  Without giving too much away, Nilly does indeed escape and Nesbo gives this image of a snake flying out the sewer drain and flailing around the skies above Oslo's harbor like a giant balloon quickly deflating.

Nesbo has, until recently, been an award-winning writer of detective fiction in Norway and this is his first foray into children's literature.  Normally I get a hinky feeling when I hear about successful adult writers tapping the children's market because sometimes it feels like the author is trading on their name, and the publishers are simply going with a known quantity over seeking out quality.  That isn't the case here as Nesbo clearly knows how to entertain the audience with clever, goofy humor.   And I sincerely hope that the second book, Doctor Proctor and the Time Bathtub, manages to find its way to translation soon.

ALA question: Could this be a contender for the Mildred L. Batchelder award, or is it not serious enough?

Horrid Henry

by Francesca Simon
illustrated by Tony Ross
published in Great Britain
by Orion Children's Books 1994
Sourcebooks Jabberwocky 2009

Henry is a horrid little boy, and everyone says so. He's devious, mischievous, he's stubborn and prone to getting into trouble. Naturally he has a perfect brother named Peter. Peter is good, and kind, and everything Henry is not. In fact, even Henry's parents are fond of asking Henry why he can't be like Perfect Peter.

So much of what motivates Henry is ruining Perfect Peter's life any way he can.

There is the palpable undertone of Roald Dahl books here, from the at-wits-end parents who are simply worn down by Henry's antics to the illustrations that bear more than a passing resemblance to work Quintin Blake has done as Dahl's official illustrator. There are four breezy stories to each of the six Horrid Henry books either released or pending and if one doesn't look to deep they are exactly the sort of book emerging boy readers would delight in reading.

But after I put them aside for a bit and picked them back up I began to feel less easy about them. It isn't the books so much as the marketing approach the publishers have taken. Right on the cover they announce that each book contains "4 laugh-out-loud stories!" in each, the way a detergent would advertise "20% more for free!" as enticement to pick them up. No one actually measures to make sure they got that extra 20% any more than any parent or reader is going to hold the publisher to that "laugh-out-loud" claim... so then why is it there?

Then on the inside we are treated to a splash page announcing Horrid Henry as worldwide sensation, followed by three pages of testimonials from children and adults alike verifying that, indeed, Horrid Henry is not only funny but it will cure carbuncles and teach your parrot French in ten days. Well, no, it doesn't say that, but it may just as well for how hard it is trying to convince the reader that these books are, indeed, the funniest thing every to reach these far shores.

It's then that I realized that the reason they were working so hard to underscore the humor is the simple fact screaming from the title of the book: Henry truly is horrid. He's unrepentant, often unpunished, and by most accounts horrid for horrid's sake.

I've battled this demon before, the one that screams in the back of my head "What's the big deal about books where kids can revel in a character behaving badly?" It first showed up with Captain Underpants where I found the underwear jokes and absurd villains pure boy amusement. They were clever, enjoyable, and they hit young boy readers right where they stood. The problem was that these same boys couldn't and wouldn't venture beyond these titles. They had been pandered to in a way that permitted them to demand more of the same or nothing else. They became the book equivalent of watching boys set a garage on fire with a "boys will be boys" sigh attached.

I'm not saying I didn't enjoy these books (or Captain Underpants for that matter) or that I wouldn't recommend them for parents and teachers looking to engage boys in reading at a very crucial moment in their development. But I am alarmed to see publishers and adults giving up on these boys so completely that the only way to appeal to them is to engage their darker instincts and play it up as humor.

No boy is going to want to identify with Horrid Henry any more than they would Perfect Peter – and perhaps the less said about Peter's latent fey tendencies that better – but I do wonder if, in a generation or so, the only way to reach this same age group will be through some other extreme form of humor. I'm not blaming Simon for this, but I do feel the genie is out of the bottle and that nothing less will do when it comes to engaging a certain subset of reader.

Or I could be overreacting and these are perfectly benign, amusing books for the beginning reader. Maybe the prickles I feel at the back of my neck aren't connected at all.

Granny

by Anthony Horowitz
Puffin Books 1994

Really? 1994? Apparently so, though this obvious reprinting is going to benefit from the Alex Rider series in terms of getting marketing and name recognition, there is a side of Horowitz I hadn't expected and rather liked – his inner Roald Dahl.

Joe Warden and his family are on the run. Desperately they rush to the airport and take the first flight they can find that takes them as far away from their comfy British home. What sort of evil could they possibly be escaping? Wizards with designs to take over the world? Genetic mutations that threaten to devour their DNA? Mad scientists? Ghostly apparitions?

Sort of. The unspeakable evil from which they are escaping is Joe's Granny.

From this opening we flash back to the moment when Joe first begins to suspect that his dottering old granny might not exactly be as she appears. She forgets Joe's name, gives him inappropriate gifts, and seems to be losing her marbles. But when Joe's parents take a vacation and leave Joe in Granny's care it becomes clear that it has all been an act, that Granny has been laying the groundwork to extend her life and that of fellow grannies by extracting vital electrolytes... from Joe's cellular structure!

Worse, even when a violent explosion fails to fell Granny she informs that death isn't the worst thing that could happen to her: she promises to come back and haunt Joe for the rest of his days when she dies.

Desperation forces Joe to expose Granny to his parents who come to realize that Granny is, indeed, evil, and thus their frantic escape from their home in the hopes of outwitting Granny and her eventual ghost.

Horowitz runs the story at an appropriately breakneck pace, ratcheting the tension and the horror of Granny at every turn. He has tapped into Dahl's well to extract a world full of uncaring and untrustworthy adults out destroy children one way or another. It's as darkly delicious as it is funny, and exactly the sort of book a middle grade boy would devour.

I understand the appeal of the Alex Rider series for older readers, and his Diamond Brothers mystery series, but I wish he'd write more like this.

My Dad's a Birdman

by David Almond
illustrations by Polly Dunbar
Candlewick 2008

Lizzie's a bright, independent girl who gets her self up in the morning, gets dressed, makes tea and toast, and calls her dad down to breakfast. But dad drags. Dad droops. And when asked what his plans are for the day while she's at school dad announces that he's going to fly like a bird and enter the human bird competition. Suddenly we are faced with a role reversal of a responsible parent-like child and a child-like parent. What would cause this reversal only becomes obvious by the lack, and no mention of, Lizzie's mother. This is made clear a few chapters in when Lizzie's Aunt Doreen drops by to see to how Lizzie and her dad are getting along. Once she sees that dad has fashioned a set of wings for himself and has taken to eating bugs (in order to be more bird-like), and that Lizzie has taken to staying home from school to watch after her dad it becomes painfully clear that we are dealing with a great unspoken grief.

In the end Lizzie and her dad participate together in the Great Human Bird Competition, a sort of flugtag where people adorn themselves in wings and rockets and whatnot and attempt to traverse a body of water propelled under their own power. Dad's obsession with flying at first seems a bi-product of a mental break-down, but as Lizzie (and eventually her Headmaster) discover as they participate in the competition, the act of faith necessary to hurl yourself into the world is exactly what they both need in order to move ahead with their lives. Feeling more alive than before, they reconnoiter back at Aunt Doreen's for some dumplings and find themselves dancing with a new-found joy, a joy that leaves them lighter than birds and flying off the ground.

Almond has managed to dip his pen into Roald Dahl's inkwell and produce a magnificent examination of what it means to find joy after loss, for a family to find their way through the other side of the darkness no matter how odd it may look on the outside. Aunt Doreen and the Headmaster understand the situation and are keeping tabs to make sure that Lizzie and her dad don't fall to far off track, but they hang back enough to let the process run its course.

The feel of this book is what gives it the Dahl flavor in my mind. It would be hard to imagine this story in a contemporary environment without meddling government agencies and relatives who would insist on remaining in the home to assure everything was alright. Aunt Doreen makes a social call but is driven from the house by the sheer absurdity of it all, promising to return with help. The help she return with isn't the police or child protective services but the school headmaster who is more interested in joining Lizzie and her dad in their adventure rather than find fault, place a judgment, or insist on a return to normalcy. It is also in the child as the responsible one and the adults as fools that I find the spectre of Dahl lurking.

Almond can't seem to get away from the connections he makes with birds and death, and certainly there's enough mythology, symbolism, and history to support these connections. But Almond chose the bird's ability to fly to show a rising above, a phoenix-like symbolism for a family being reborn from the ashes of their sorrow. There is nothing sad or sorrowful in the book itself, the entire affair has a sense of whimsy to it, but it's all there just below the surface allowing us to how happiness and joy can re-emerge from experience.