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.

Black Juice

by Margo Lanagan
HarperCollins 2004

Having been given a number of "warnings" about the intensity of Lanagan's most recent book, Tender Morsels, I decided to get a better sense of her writing through one of her short story collections first.

I wish someone had warned me about this collection as well.

Lanagan is an intense writer of dark, emotional, human fantasy worlds. There are echoes of older cultures and languages buried deep in these worlds, a sense not so much as coming from another planet but as if reading reports from undiscovered country. It is the type of fiction that reads like literary reportage from a past frontier transported through time. Like something forbidden, these stories are a black juice indeed.

The collection opens with "Singing Down My Sister," a strange description of a ritual that involves sending a woman out into the center of a lake of tar. Knowing Lanagan hails from Australia, and having grown up with the tar pits of LA, it wasn't too illogical a step for me to imagine a sort of hybrid Aboriginal culture that appeared to be redressing some sort of wrong through an old, odd cleansing process involving tar. But no, this is clearly something else as the event at hand is actually an execution, a slow death in front of an audience with a wake built in. Equally fascinating and disconcerting, the effect is how I would imagine it to be watching surgery being performed on myself while fully conscious.

Short story collections by their nature must start off strong and bold. They must open with a story full of promise for the rest of the collection yet not be so strong as to let the reader down along the way. Reading "Singing Down My Sister" it almost feels intimidating to continue with the rest of the book. If the rest of the book is anywhere near this intense it might be impossible to finish.

Fortunately, the book wasn't impossible to finish. Unfortunately the rest of the book was equally intense.

Each of the stories contained so completely build their worlds – unique and richly textured worlds at that – this it is possible for each story to sustain its own book. "Red Nose Day" delves into a dark world full of professional clowns and the hitmen who kill them, with more than a hint of allegory aimed at the Catholic church. "The House of Many" posits a clash of parallel worlds that fluidly includes a Middle Ages cult surrounded by a more contemporary society rich with cars and candy. Demonic angels that help children break free of oppressive adults. Queens who prefer the company of dancing gypsies to their own kingdoms. Lanagan plucks the familiar image and icon and from our consciousness and folds them deftly into something new, a magical literary origami.

I think the warning I would have wanted was more in the form of advice. I think these stories should be savored slowly, with a lot of space between them. Perhaps as ways of cleansing the palate between other books. One after another, the power in these stories makes reentry into the world difficult. Better to dip into these waters with some reserve.

Whether this has helped me to better enter the world of Tender Morsels has yet to be determined. As it stands, I feel richer for the diversion.

The Best American Comics 2008

Lynda Barry, editor
Houghton Mifflin 2008

I'm cross-posting at Guys Lit Wire today.

I have this problem with Summer Reading lists that are doled out by schools. Basically, they suck. They suck the joy of reading right down to the marrow and attempt to equate vacation time with extended education. Either schools should go year-round and quit the pretense or Summer Reading lists need to lighten up. Spend the Summer returning fun the the reading quotient, there'll be plenty of time starting in September for reading the Serious, the Dry, the Meaningful to be analyzed within inches of their pulpy lives.

I've got plenty of suggestions for alternate Summer Reading but today I want to talk about comics, and specifically The Best American Comics of 2008. I've actually wanted to talk about this for months but teetered on the edge of deciding whether or not the collection is appropriate. It's that whole chicken v. egg thing of whether or not some graphic imagery and story elements are appropriate for teens or if they're already seeing them in other places (like movies and TV) and there's little harm involved in comics that do the same thing.

Murder, sex, and drugs are involved, but these are topics often touched on in Young Adult literature. The difference is that when they appear in comics there's this feeling that somehow minors are being corrupted, that "comics" equals "funny" or "humorous" and that anything more is some grand betrayal of morals.


Editor Lynda Berry mentions in her introduction that "If this book had been in my house when I was a kid, I would have found a way to read it in secret." This is exactly what I would have done as a kid, and it got me wondering if that still isn't the best way to discover a world of comics beyond superheroes and other ridiculous over-muscled, tights-wearing vigilantes. On the other hand, shouldn't we have evolved in our thinking that kids shouldn't have to discover these things in secret? Sure, the thrill of doing something forbidden is lost, as is the wonderment that comes with discovery, but comics already have a hard enough time (though it's getting better) with acceptance that maybe that secret reading should be secret no longer.

For anyone who grew up, as I did, looking forward to the comics in the alternative weekly papers, and those who have kept tabs with small press and alternative comics, there are few surprises here. Matt Groening, Nick Bertozzi, Kaz, Jaime Hernandez, Seth, Alison Bechdel, Rick Geary, Chris Ware, Derf... the line-up reads like a brief history of 80s and 90s comics history, and the fact that these folks are still around (and perhaps to some extent largely unknown) may make a larger point about comics history in America. The fact that one "mainstream" comic was chosen - a Batman: Year 100 excerpt was chosen and pulled at the last minute by its publisher makes another point about this collection: there's still a Wild West frontier in comics.

With a wide range of styles and subject matter, the comics Barry has chosen are incredibly strong. Usually with collections like this the pieces I like are outweighed by the number I don't, but here I found only two duds and a couple of marginal pieces and the rest were solid. Subjects cover everything from the opening comic where fratricide is played as a casual punchline to the horrors of the war in Iraq from a journalist to kids playing war and discovering girlie magazines while "invading" a homeless encampment. The four panel strip format flips it's wig with surreality, the Tortoise and the Hare becomes a battle between a rock-steady drummer on the one hand and a party-hearty type on the other, a pair of nocturnal ragamuffins spending the night building a tower of boxes to play hopscotch on, young woman tries to help a drug addict, a man is sanguine about losing his love to a suicidal cult, Cupid's assistant takes over for a day and has cats mating with dogs (literally) in no time... there's something for (and possibly to offend) every sensibility, though that isn't it's purpose.

To those who have felt the short story is dead, I propose that the short story is alive and well in the form of comics. Even as stand-alone excepts from larger works, these stories deliver – not so much a punchline but a promise of a satisfying resolution.

There is always that danger that one person's "best" is another person's worst, but omnibus collections like The Best American Comics series (previous editions edited by Harvey Pekar and Chris Ware) and Flight (now in it's fifth volume, edited by Kazu Kibuishi) are a great ways to sample what's out there and explore the possibilities of storytelling that don't involve nefarious villains plotting to take over the world.

Lynda Barry's advice for how to approach the book is one I wish more adults would encourage in collections. She suggests opening the book to find something of interest – as a kid she would have tried to zoom in on swear words or crazy pictures – and start reading from there. Jump around, find what interests, read in pieces, not all at once. Linear is highly overrated and constricting, not unlike a lot of educational thinking about Summer Reading.

Lighten up and enjoy the experience.


Books mentioned:

The Best American Comics 2008
edited by Lynda Barry
Houghton Mifflin

The Best American Comics 2007
edited by Chris Ware
Houghton Mifflin

The Best American Comics 2006
edited by Harvey Pekar and Anne Elizabeth Moore
Houghton Mifflin

Flight, volumes 1 through 5
edited by Kazu Kibuishi
Villard Books

Batman: Year 100
Paul Pope
DC Comics

Carter FInally Gets It, part two

by Brent Crawford
Hyperion 2009

In a phrase: strangely compelling meets fiercely flawed.

Will Carter, freshman, has Attention Deficit Disorder (or so he says) and the pressing desire to no longer be a virgin. He's got his sights set on Amber Lee, the untouchable hottie, but it appears he's destined to hook up with the previously chubby Abby who's body spent the summer moving all her baby fat to her chest.

Because Carter has ADD he finds himself easily distracted. It doesn't prevent him from joining the football team. Or being one of the area's top swimmers. Or from trying out and landing the lead in the school musical, all because his particular ADD requires Carter to maintain focus.

Along the way Carter and his crew find themselves at parties where houses are routinely destroyed by drink kids, cars are driven wildly by drunk teenage occupants, and are physically menaced by older psychopathic teens among the general population at school.

Oh, did I mention Carter has ADD?

Let me get this off my chest right now. Carter saying he has ADD doesn't make it so. He has problems staying on track, occasionally has to write things down on his hand, makes a lot of unfiltered comments that lead to hurt feelings... but it reads more like average teenage boy to me, not ADD. Additionally, Carter and his friends refer to friends, enemies, and each other as retards and faggots just as often as Carter calls himself ADD. In my experience, kids will adopt an affectation or self-diagnose themselves as a way of communicating to others that, what might seem like unusual behavior is in fact them working out who they are. A kid who refers to himself as psychotic or demented isn't necessarily either of those things, and what we look for in determining whether these characters are truly what they say they are in fiction is through their behavior.

So as Carter claims his disorder his behavior does not support this. His school has culled some of the more violent kids and placed them in special classes where their violence can be modified, and you would suspect the school would have learning specialists as well for kids with disabilities, but Carter has regular classes and goes about his life with everyone treating him normally. That isn't a bad thing, except that very little of Carter's issues are specific to ADD. He has difficulty with behaving or saying appropriate things, but hormones and dietary issues could just as easily be the cause. At one point later in the book, Carter is instructing his best friend EJ on how to pick up girls, a lesson his older sister has given him out of a shred of kindness and perhaps a recognition that her kid brother is a little different. When he tells EJ to ask questions and act disinterested, his best friend takes this instruction literally and combines the two to ask insulting questions of a girl who runs away in tears. Isolated from the rest of the book, a reader would assume EJ was the kid with problems, not Carter.

Putting that aside, I nearly gave up on this book a half dozen times. What starts as a series of vignettes about freshman life eventually begins to coalesce around a hundred pages in. It's around this time that I realized that Carter Finally Gets It is a boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl story trapped beneath all the excess baggage of a modern YA novel. The problem is, the story only works because of these excesses. If Carter and his nemesis Andre weren't both on the football team and the swim team, if Andre didn't steal Abby away from Carter, if Carter and Abby didn't wind up as leads opposite one another in the school play... man, that's a lot of 'ifs' piled up there.

Additionally, I'd hate to assume so calculated a move, but this and a few other books I've seen this season seem to rely on horny, raunchy boys to appeal to its audience. The argument that "this is how kids talk today" doesn't work here. Hanging around and listening to a bunch of teens talking at a pizza joint may be authentic, but it doesn't actually provide us any insight into their personalities. Aside from verite reportage, steeping a story in the language of teens without making each voice equally unique smacks of a certain level of pandering. Also, don't we have enough problems with boys objectifying and badmouthing girls based on looks? Do we really need books to be so "authentic" that they continue to perpetrate and reinforce chauvinistic behavior?

You would think after all this that I would hate Carter Finally Gets It, but I don't. There is a level of bumbling boy comedy here that I really enjoyed, that haplessness that is the providence of teen boys who just haven't yet figured out how clueless they are. Scenes of Carter riding everywhere on his bike because he's too young to drive slayed me for a variety of personal reasons, not the least of which was because of how close to home they hit. And the cruelty of girls who use the unwitting Carter as a foil for getting around watchful parents is a priceless bit of chicanery that Carter, unfortunately, deserves.

Like I said, I could have dumped this anywhere along the way in the first hundred pages – and that's an awful lot to ask of a reader to go along with – but following that I had a hard time stopping. As flawed as it is compelling, the book should neutralize itself but somehow manages to tip the scales toward readability.

Others have found this LMAO funny and don't seem to have the same problems I have with the book, so proceed accordingly.

Carter Finally Gets It, part one

by Brent Crawford
Hyperion 2009

It depends on what the meaning of the words 'it' is.

Tomorrow, part two: A more in-depth look.

DInosaur Versus Bedtime

by Bob Shea
Hyperion 2009

Roar! I am a dinosaur! ROAR! Nothing can stop me!

A pile of leaves, a playground slide, a bowl of spaghetti, all met with the little dinosaur's fearlessness and a mighty trio of roars as this simple picture book progresses toward the ultimate showdown against bedtime. Following each battle "Dinosaur wins!" sets up the reader for the turn when baby dinosaur meets his match.

Shea's use of playful, childlike illustrations, bold colors and collages, and expressive typeface give this simple story the extra edge it needs. It's a bedtime book that honors and recognizes that settling in for the night doesn't begin quiet, just as baby dinosaur's day begins with yelling and action and progresses toward the inevitable.

I am not a huge fan of the bedtime book as a rule. For the most part they are books designed to calm and prepare a child for bedtime, they serve as child modification devices for adults. There are books for children about grieving, books about potty training and books to explain "issues" like bullying and divorce. This need to find a book to explain or frame specific situations on behalf of adults creates an illusion that books have all the answers, that unpleasant business can be handled with a book, and trains young minds to view reading a book with skepticism. Like medicine, where is the joy of reading if it's presented as an aid to a symptom. Stories should be told for the joy of the story, not as a means to an end.

Shea's book takes the bedtime book and turns it on its head. Instead of quiet good-nights to items in the room or lullabies from animal mommies to their babes we have a rambunctious baby, a dinosaur baby, roaring right and left, fighting and defeating inanimate foes. The subversion in this is that young readers are easily lulled into thinking this books will end in a victorious dinosaur winning against bedtime. But after a bath and brushing of teeth the roars get quieter and even dinosaur can't win against sleep. And the lesson: even raucous dinosaurs need their sleep.

And so, for his second birthday, my nephew is getting Dinosaur Vs. Bedtime, as well as Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus and The Nutshell Library.

Literacy wins!

Destroy All Cars

by Blake Nelson
Scholastic 2009

There's a lot about this book I really, really like, and a lot of stuff that bugs me.

James Hoff is a self-righteous, pessimistic seventeen year old who believes Americans consume too much. Cars, in particular, make him angry, but the entirety of consumer culture sends him ranting. Being a hormonal seventeen year old boy, vain outsider or not, he's still interested in girls. In particular there's his obsession with Sadie, his ex-girlfriend of the previous year, a do-gooder who is politically active where James is all talk. James' bile-filled tirades against Sadie ring false because they are, and when he's finally finished floundering around manages to rekindle their affair briefly before they both decide to move on with their new "adult" lives.

Throughout the book, James includes journal entries and essays for his English teacher that cover his views on the world as well as his personal life. When he isn't ranting about the destruction of the planet, he's talking about nature, about what it means to be a teen, about friends and family, about the superiority of Oslo, all from the same ill-informed place that most of his adolescent brooding comes from. A classic smart-mouthed dumb ass.

Stories like this told in first person – where the reader has to read a little between the lines to get what the main character is really saying – require a deft use of character voice. The tone and pitch have to be perfect, otherwise the spell is broken and the reader becomes frustrated or disillusioned or just plain bored. I don't really like this character of James up front, then just as I start to see what his game is and like him a little I begin to feel a little bored with him. It takes a little too long for the love stories to fall into place, and James' essays tend to belabor their point beyond their intended humor. It feels like if it could just be tightened up a wee bit it would be perfect. Maybe about forty pages too long. And a few more teeth in its bite.

Another thing that sort of ruins it for me is the environmental angle being played for humor without any conviction. The kids in the story who are attempting to make a difference or finding effective ways to protest "larger issues" are derided by James and shown to be less deserving success than our disingenuous cynical narrator. Teens probably know the types, and laugh, but what are they laughing at exactly? The shallow big mouth loner kid gets the girl (a few, actually), and he eventually has a last-chapter awakening that lends his previous posturing credence, which seems to suggest that the kids doing things in earnest somehow don't deserve the same thing.

Almost a little like a conservative writing a farce about liberals that liberals laugh at without realizing they're being skewered. Only it's teens and their causes and their sex lives being lampooned, and they're probably laughing at themselves without realizing it.

For those who care, there's sex involved. Talked about, engaged in, and I don't really have a problem with it... except here I do. I know James and his friends are seventeen, and that real seventeen year olds are engaged in sex, but the characters involved here all feel too young. And by young I mean immature. It's the opposite of the problem TV shows and movies have where they use 25 year olds to play teens; here these characters read, talk and behave like they're years younger then they are. The dialog is genuine, it reads authentically, but it reads like smart seventh graders and not average eleventh graders.

Destroy All Cars is a teen romance aimed at boys that deftly uses a pro-environment message as a delivery device. The heart on the cover should be the giveaway, but for boys that don't catch that they might find themselves enjoying the little slice of romantic confusion that Nelson has put together.

Tales from Outer Suburbia

written and illustrated
by Shaun Tan
Scholastic 2009

I've been wanting to write about this since before it came out. Life gets in the way, and books get shuffled further down piles, and suddenly a person finds themselves thinking "Wait, didn't I already review that?"

Following Tan previous books to these shores, The Arrival, I know there was a lot of anticipation over how Tan would follow-up his genre-bending stranger-in-a-strange land tale. Well the answer is that he did it by creating fifteen entirely new strange lands, or perhaps they're all an extension of the same strange land, but clearly this Outer Suburbia is proof that there are multiple world in his creative universe.

The problem with coming late to the review party is that it's difficult to find something to say that hasn't already been covered. Nonetheless, I'll give it a go and see what surfaces.

Tan's Outer Suburbia is a place where the unusual isn't. An over-sized water buffalo occupies and empty lot at the end of the street, silently dispensing advice with the point of his hoof. A pair of brothers set out to the edge of the map to see if, indeed, the world continued beyond what was on the page or if it dropped off into an abyss. In keeping up with the arms race the government places missiles in every citizen's backyard, for them to take care of, though over time they have become pizza ovens and tool sheds through disuse. It's a familiar world and alien at the same time, a place a little odd from the outside looking in. Then again, one culture's norms are another one's peculiarities, and so who are we to judge?

Sometimes this absurdity has its darker side. "The Undertow" appears to be another absurd story about the mysterious appearance of a dugong on a suburban lawn. As a rescue is underway the occupants of the house are too busy shouting at one another to notice the commotion outside at first. Only their son seems to know what the creature is, but no one can fathom how it got there. Once the dugong is rescued the neighborhood returns to normal. The parents in the house shouting and throwing things at one another fail to realize their sun has remained outside to lie on the lawn looking up at the starts, hoping his parents never realize he is outside yet waiting for their inevitable verbal abuse. Instead, the story ends with them coming out to silently carry their son back into the house.

I single out this story because, for me, this is the heart of this collection. Though I doubt this was Tan's intent, all these stories could be the fabrication of this one boy's imagination. His escape from his outer suburban nightmare is an inner retreat. True, many of these stories are too complicated to be part of the inner life of a boy who feels trapped in an abusive family situation, so then the story feels like an allegory of suburban angst, that displacement that allows people to accept the absurd as part of their daily lives. The stories we tell ourselves to remain calm and grounded, sometimes these are no less absurd than a foreign exchange student who looks to be extraterrestrial and is the size of a tea cup.

On a more practical level, Tan once again confuses me with his intended audience. This picture book has stories too long and too complex for most picture book readers, so I have to conclude that the book is intended for older readers who are not afraid to read a book with color illustrations on nearly every other page. In some ways this book is a throwback to another time, when the picture book was not limited to the beginning reader. I am thinking on my beloved copy of Dahl's The Magic Finger which was originally published in picture book format with illustrations but currently exists as a more conventional paperback intended for middle grade audiences. I always believed that the Dahl conversion was partly a concession to keep picture books "simple" and move the books with more story up as reading levels and abilities shrank. That is, the audience is being held back from more complex stories, and if Tan wasn't also the illustrator of this book I could totally see it sitting on the shelves with middle grade titles.

Unlike some illustrators whose picture books seem aimed at an adult audience, Tan's book is clearly meant to appeal to a younger reader. It is refreshing to see speculative fiction and fantasy done so well that it appears more literary, and Tan's visuals alternate between his unique pen and ink to a rich pastel and forced-perspective compositions that recount the work of artist Wayne Thibaud. It has the strange effect of quietly drawing attention to the quality and care of the presentation on all levels, and underscores just how weak and careless other picture books are in comparison.

Tales from Outer Suburbia reads like a modern The Twilight Zone for kids. That's a Rod Serling reference two days in a row, but what the heck. You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension - a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You've just crossed over into...

Outer Suburbia

It's a gorgeous book, a haunting book, a playful book, the kind of book that invites repeat readings and delivers new insights as a reader gets older and becomes more experienced with the world.

The Curse of the Campfire Weenies

and Other Warped and Creepy Tales
by David Lubar
Tom Doherty / 2007

Why have I waited two years to review this book? I think it was because it got lost in one of the many piles of books, later to be hidden during moving. But part of me wonders if I didn't deliberately and subconsciously hide this book away. Because I was embarrassed? Because I was offended? Insulted? None of these.

It's because I was inspired. This was one of a handful of books I've read in the past couple of years that opened up a trap door in my brain that leads directly to the unfiltered twelve year old me. Long packaged away safely as a memory, as a slave to selective revelation, this book seems to know where the the cage is weakest and can be exploited. A few stories in and suddenly I'm back in my sleeping bag at Camp Slauson, BSA, up late at night making up ridiculous stories of monsters and unexplainable phenomena.

Lubar's Weenie series are full of the kind of campfire tall tales and horror stories you might expect if Rod Serling and Bob Hope could be reincarnated as a single being. They are damned odd, amusing, and full of twists that only the mother of a pretzel or a yogi could enjoy.

No, I take that back. They're exactly the kind of story a middle grade boy enjoys, and with a half dozen titles in the series there are dozens of them to jump into.

Tales like the boys who dare each other to grab for mud from the bottom of the "bottomless" lake, only to have one of them discover that the farther down you dive the closer you get to the surface... of another world, full of alien tentacled creatures. Then there's the story of the robot with limited memory who is perpetually faced with cleaning "his" room, being turned off and on only for that purpose, trapped forever in doing what he "knows" needs to be done. Or the story of the maniacal wood chipper with a one track mind once it's had a taste of human blood.

Many of these stories are under five pages long, some are barely two pages. Lubar knows his reader isn't interested in anything but "the good parts" and it makes for quick, enjoyable reading. Lubar might not be a household name the way some authors are, but I bet his books are better circulated and well-worn compared to some.

The Great Piratical Rumbustification

& The Librarian and the Robbers
by Margaret Mahy
with pictures by Quentin Blake
Godine 1986
originally published in the UK 1978

Two books worth of story crammed into 63 magical pages, full of robbers tricked by librarians and retired pirates who know how to party and revive the joys of boyhood (while paying the bills). No impossibly articulate child protagonists with clearly defined goals or desires, no rhyme or reason, just a pair of stories cut from the same cloth as books by Willaim Stieg and Roald Dahl.

In the first story, it is spring and the retired, land-locked pirates are restless. They long for a Pirate Party but the sign in the sky informing them of a pending party is not there. The problem is that a pirate party must be stolen.

Next we see the Terrapin family, having moved up from their cramped flat to a spacious house. The three Terrapin boys have been promised that with a bigger house came opportunities for adventurous behavior, but father's overwhelming dread at purchasing a house beyond their means has soured things.

It is only natural that these two parties be united, and when the adult Terrapins call the Mother Goose Baby-sitting service it should be no surprise that they are assigned an ex-pirate as a sitter. Fears of qualifications quelled, the boys find their sitter deserving, and with this the boys are off. Sitter Orpheus Clinker sends up the announcement that he has found a suitable location, and a Pirate Party proceeds to take place at the Terrapin's.

Father Terrapin is at a big, important dinner but he senses something wrong, something taking place elsewhere that is more fun. There appears to be some great rumpus taking place in the part of town near his house, and how he wishes he was there. Leaving the important dinner as soon as he can possibly escape he returns home to find a Pirate Party well under way. Once over his initial indignation, Father Terrapin falls in and enjoys the Pirate Party, after which he is richly rewarded by the pirates and never has to worry about his financial situation ever again.

& & & & &

Our second story in this double-feature finds a band of woods-living robbers who have come upon the idea of stealing the town librarian for ransom. Her warning that she has recently spent time with children infected with measles goes unheeded and soon all the robbers but one, the Chief Robber, are sick. Allowed to return to the library for a reference book to heal the sick robbers the librarian returns with books to read. Having never been read to, or taught how to read, she begins with Peter Rabbit and proceeds to give them a classic education in children's literature.

Eventually everyone forget about the ransom and the librarian returns to work. One day the Chief Robber dashes into the library to escape being apprehended by police. With quick thinking the librarian shelves the Chief Robber and refuses to turn him over to the police without a library card. Of course, once the officer has left the librarian slyly checks the robber out for herself and prevents the officer from coming back and apprehending him for the indefinite future. Saved, the Chief Robber continues with his initial task: checking books out for the other robbers because now they have insatiable reading habit.

One day an earthquake brings down all the books in the library, burying the librarian. Chief Robber and his fellow robbers join the police and other citizens in saving the librarian. Chief Robber admits to liking the librarian and they marry on the condition that they all give up robbing. The Chief Robber even becomes the head children's librarian in perhaps the most rambunctious branch any library has ever seen.

* * * * *

I can understand some of why this book was withdrawn from my town library and put on the 25 cent shelf in the sales alcove. It is hard to imagine any book today would be published where a babysitter requires rum as part of his services, and that he carries a bottle large enough in his coat pocket to cause him to list to one side when he walks. And I'm not sure what to make of an adult male, upon meeting three young boys, exclaiming how he likes the cut of their jibs. Indeed, this very slang expression is the sort of thing that caused me to snort out loud.

But we are talking about pirates here, and removing rum and salty pirate talk (within reason) is like drawing cows without udders or exchanging water for soda in stories because we don't want to scar or unduly influence young minds. This political correctness has its place at times, but not here.

And these are stories about adults primarily, adults behaving like children at times but adults nonetheless. It's as if we don't expect children to identify with anyone except protagonists their own age, but so often these child protagonists are forced to carry the weight of stories and messages beyond their years. The idea of fun seems no longer the province of adults or kids in children's books anymore. Do we think that kids won't understand or identify with a parent character longing for the carefree days before bills and important dinner? Do we feel that they'll reject a book because it includes a romance between an unlikely duo, one half of which is a librarian?

Also, I admire the amount of ground covered despite the brevity of the text. The Great Piratical Rumbustification is told in thirteen chapters, many of them fewer than three full pages. I know this is a hallmark of books aimed at readers who are still gaining fluency, but I'll take a dozen well-crafted books like this any day to a sprawling attempt to build the chapter book into something more substantial from fewer parts.

Readers who appreciate the absurd humor of The Twits or Flat Stanley or the books of Daniel Pinkwater will be rewarded.

the 5 minute anti-review

And Then Everything Unraveled
by Jennifer Sturman
Point / Scholastic 2009

This is going to be a totally unfair review. It is based entirely on the premise that, as a reader, I have the right to abandon a book that doesn't interest me and not feel guilty. It's also based on instinct, the same instinct that allows employers to know within ten seconds whether or not they will hire and individual for a job. It's about experience and preference and, fair or not, no less valid.

And I'm going to take as long to discuss this book as I did reading it.

Delia Truesdale can't believe it's only been a few weeks since the story she is about to recount took place. Her mother has "left for Antarctica with one of her environmental groups," leaving Delia with her semi secret surfing in the care of the housekeeper in her Silicon Valley home. Delia's friends, what few she has, are all tech geeks who are already wheeler-dealers and inventors. Dad is not in the picture, victim of freak accident. The car of the person who runs her mother's business affairs is in the driveway when she gets home. Bad news: Mom's ship has disappeared, no word on survivors. Mom must be... but no, Delia refuses to believe her mother is dead.

And we aren't even at page five.

I don't need anymore. The rule of a book that starts off like this is that any teen who refuses to believe their parent is dead is right. The rest of the book will concern the main character on a journey of discovery that will prove them right. Not having friends means she'll make some along the way (including a romantic interest) and will solve the mystery on her own. Naturally there will be obstacles along the way, including those close to her she is supposed to trust. Happy ending all around, and nothing will ever be the same again.

As proof, I jump from the first five pages to the last chapter, in this case the last three pages. Mystery is wrapping up. Kisses, and the promise of many more, from a boy named Quinn. Almost obligatory Shakespeare reference to Romeo and Juliet. Mother is safe in Chile. Trio of bad guys mentioned, indicating conspiracy, including aforementioned person who helped run her mother's company. And the story ends at the point where Delia can finally take a breath and recap it for the reader.

I don't care about this character before her mother disappears, I don't know the mother enough to care about her disappearance, and so I don't care enough to read everything between those opening pages and the last paragraph. I don't necessarily believe you need to go deep with character development before you can launch an adventure story, or a mystery, but you must engage the reader, you must give them something they can latch onto, something they can care about that will make them want to know what is going on in those 238 other pages in between. Unless, of course, you're writing formula for teens accustomed to artificial television drams with the attention span of a noodle.

Personally, I think teens deserve more respect from their reading material than that.

Did I get it right? In hunting down a cover image I landed on Scholastic's page for the book and missed only one element:

But Delia's still sent to New York to live with her two aunts - a downtown bohemian and an uptown ice queen.

And in case that's not bad enough, she also has to deal with a snooty new school and trying not to fall for the wrong guy.

Okay, I should have seen that: fish out of water, something to compare against a cardboard cutout of Silicon Valley. Other then that, I could have written the blurb for this book without having read it.

Sad, really. The book comes out in July.

For You and No One Else

by Edward van de Vendel
illustrated by Martijn van der Linden
Lemniscaat / Boyds Mills 2009

When I first entered the world of children's publishing I heard the term "European" tossed around in reference to some picture books. I had never heard the term before, never even thought about picture books as something that could be continentally differentiated, and yet from the moment I heard the term I knew exactly what it meant.

And here we have an example.

Buck the deer (or perhaps a reindeer) is out terrorizing birds in a forest one day when he stumbles on a seven leaf clover. Immediately he shares his new-found marvel with his friend Sparkleheart. Sparkle is impressed, so much so that he leads Buck to a field full of seven leaf clovers. Then, taking a cue from his friend, Sparkle goes around presenting every doe he can find with a special clover, for them and no one else. Depressed that his special gift for his friend was not special, and that his gift of friendship was used as a ploy to gain the affection of others, Buck trundles off and collapses in a fit of depression. That is when he sees, right in front of him, a true marvel: a clover with twelve leaves. This inspires Buck to give Sparkle the clover as a gift, shouting "YES! YES! YES! FOR YOU AND NO ONE ELSE!"

The end.

Okay, so maybe when I'm lukewarm to a book I can be less than charitable, but the plot summary isn't really that off the mark. Even accounting for differences in cultures and nuances in translation this is the story conveyed in the illustrations. This leaves me with the ultimate take-away question: what is the real story here? Is it that your friends will betray your affections callously, but you should continue to love them nonetheless? The jacket flap is a little more kind:

What do you do when you find a seven-leaf clover? Well, you give it to your best friend, of course.

Sometimes, though, best friends forget to be thoughtful in return.

Is that really it? Is it really a case of Sparkelheart being forgetful, or are we really dealing with a relationship between a giving and a taking personality? Sparkle doesn't merely give away Buck's gift, he uses Buck's action as a basis for going around trying to dupe all the females of the woods. Sparkle is an opportunist, a player, a user, and though it is admirable that Buck is going to stick with his friend there isn't any sense that Buck has changed at all in the end.

This is The Giving Tree problem in a sense, yes? Buck is like the tree in that it give unconditionally and Sparkleheart (asinine name, I must finally say) is the boy who takes and takes and gives nothing in return.

The art... in this small format picture book we have some very simple black and white scratchboard-type illustrations that are both playful and odd. The deer seem to have human legs in pants, with bodies of fabric that indicate gender (boys are square and girls are dress-shaped). It's the angularity of the images that make this feel less "American kid friendly" to me - it just doesn't have the requisite "cute" that the market tends to demand. Mind you, this isn't necessarily a bad thing to me, but it does give the book a bit of it's distance; it trades away its warmth for its uniqueness.

Technically, it's not a bad book, it just doesn't appeal. And I doubt it will be remembered - much less treasured - after its initial reading.

The Best of Stuntology

Pranks, Tricks & Challenges to Amuse & Annoy Your Friends
written and drawn by master trickster
Sam Bartlett
Workman 2008

While I recognize that April is National Poetry Month it also happens to be the month that begins with one of my favorite non-holiday holidays: April Fool's Day. Is there anything more delicious than planning and pulling off that perfect prank, that preposterous practical joke? It seems such a shame that there's only one day a year dedicated to (mostly) good-natured frivolity; after all, they repackage Halloween candy as Christmas candy, and as Easter candy, and even in "fall colors."

But I think the problem is that it can be difficult to come up with the perfect stunt to pull off in a given situation. Putting a vacuum cleaner under someone's bed and waking them up with it instead of an alarm clock (as I did this year) doesn't work at a party, and similarly you can't pin a glass of water to the ceiling with your elderly aunt the way you could with younger sibling. Wouldn't it be great if someone could collect hundreds of these sorts of things, illustrate them in an amusing cartoon format, and present them in one volume with an index so you could look up the exact stunt you are looking for when you need it?

Ta da! I present you with Sam Bartlett's collection, The Best of Stuntology. Like the subtitle says, 304 pranks, tricks and challenges to amuse and annoy your friends.

I think the word "friends" is key here because you really ought to know who your audience is before performing some of these nifty little numbers. Some people have a lower tolerance for the absurd, where others just don't appreciate humor at their expense. It's too bad, because I do think at times like the world has lost it's sense of humor, and if only people could laugh (and laugh at themselves) more then maybe things would be alright. Then again, I'm not so sure how I'd feel if someone convinced me to try and catch a quarter in a funnel tucked into my waistband so they could pour a drink down my pants when I wasn't looking. I'd like to think I would laugh if someone could convince me to draw a moose with my eyes closed and tricked me into sticking my finger into peanut butter when I got to the "tail."

But Stuntology is more than pranks, as its name implies, and there are plenty of stunts that don't embarrass or otherwise deliberately set out to cause grief or hard feelings. Many, in fact, are participatory fun. One can, for example, engage in a conversation where each side only gets to say two words per sentence. Good fun. Not easy. Takes practice. Or you could dealing with some other annoying aspects of life via stunts. Say you've got a telemarketer on the phone and you can get past your immediate response to just hang up. Why not tuck your tongue between your teeth and lower lip and attempt to have a conversation until the person who called gives up in frustration?

One of the great things about this collection is the portability of the stunts. Of the stunts that require props, few involve items not commonly found around the house. It is entirely possible to keep a mental storeroom of a dozen or so stunts that you can perform at parties or while visiting other people's houses. No need to buy fancy gewgaws at the joke or hobby shop (or online), simply show up and become the life of the party!

The pranks are single-page mini comics and Bartlett's illustration style has a playful naive quality, filled with rubbery pranksters and patsies who convey the full range of emotions. And without being explicit, one can gather from the response of the cartoon victims what a prankster or stuntologist can expect - no claims of "but I didn't realize you'd get upset" will be accepted.

all the wrong people have self-esteem

an inappropriate book for young ladies*
(*or, frankly, anybody else)
by laurie rosenwald
bloomsbury 2008

when rosenwald's first book came out, and to name but just a few: RED YELLOW GREEN BLUE, i snatched it up because i had this funny feeling it wouldn't be around long. her picture book of colors, made of jaunty rhymes and bold collage graphics, was a feast for those hip to, well, bold graphics. but it wasn't exactly kid-friendly. granted, there were parents who didn't feel their children required fluffy bunnies and simplified illustrations with big bold print to teach them their hues of blues and millions of vermilions, but beyond the occasional stocking at some modern art museum gift shops, this was a tough sell.

then back i january i saw rosewald's new book on the counter of a book store half way across the room and knew i'd want it. i didn't even care about what was inside (though later i did) and merely flipped through the book quickly to get a sense of it.

whoa. this is no picture book. oh, no, this is no free to be you and me. no, this is about dealing with angst. tween and teen angst. girlie angst, with a dash of empowerment and a dip of the playfully absurd, but still very much angsty.

there's a lot of potential for pissing off adults in this book. playing against her bold graphics, rosenwald tosses out observations, confessions, examinations, and exercises designed to challenge and confront the complacency in the world young girls (and boys) find themselves in. the two page spread on "where babies really come from" probably won't surprise as many teens as it would the parents of those teens who would prefer to believe their children are still to young to hear these things. the various elements that challenge body image, well, we could certainly use more of those, and the anecdotes like the one about getting kicked out of yoga class are certain to sound familiar to anyone who has found the seriousness of some situations to be ridiculous.


but occasionally rosenwald kicks out a little rant that borders on intolerance, which seems at odds with her intent. like the tear she goes on against those self-identifying as victims of peanut allergies. i'm going to give her points for bringing up a topic that i think has much deeper roots -- environmental illnesses that are only treated as symptoms without ever divining the cause -- and for taking on the victim mentality, but to suggest that people with peanut allergies should either "die or, you know, whatever. deal with it." misses an opportunity to make a reasoned case about the real problems. in some ways her approach mirrors the ill-formed thought processes of teens who in their own arrogant ways believe they understand the world as few others can -- a sort of my-way-or-you're-an-ignoramus kind of world view.

all the wrong people have self-esteem is brash and brassy, a book that's not afraid to stick its neck out, and the kind of book that would be right for certain teens. i'm just afraid that the teens this book would appeal to either don't have self-esteem problems or would find the confrontational nature of some sections of the book off-putting. an interesting experiment that succeeds as much as it fails.

Kin

The Good Neighbors, Book 1
by Holly Black and Ted Naifeh
Scholastic Graphix 2008

The set-up for this graphic novel is about as generic as you an get: mopey teenage Rue's mother has disappeared and her father is suspected of murder. Of course, like every teen novel where a parent is accused of murder, the teenage protagonist knows it can't be so, and in searching out the truth that other inept adults cannot fathom (and adults always have to be clueless for this type of story to work) discovers a family truth, a secret buried and kept from our teen hero who is coming to terms with who they are in the world.

Now, since this is author Holly Black's world that hidden element needs to be something a little more... fantastical, shall we say? So the truth is that Rue's mother is a faerie, and her disappearance has to do with a betrayal by her father that has sent her back into the faerie realm. Rue now has to navigate finding her place in two worlds, and all sorts of mortal and immortal conflicts must be quelled. Eventually.

I don't think I can say flat out that fantasy is not my thing, but I can say that I'm a little tired of vampires (or vampyres), and this reminds me of nothing less than a vampire story swapped out with faeries (or fairies). I suppose there are those deeply invested in the milieu who will berate me for failing to appreciate the subtleties between these two worlds, but here all I can see is another story of "otherness" that pits a halfling between parallel worlds. With the waning of vampires (who took over when interest in boy wizards dropped off) we're seeing the crest of other fantasy elements vying to take over, and faeries are going to have it out with zombies in the very near future of YA literature. I suspect the unicorn contingent (and I mean brutish, violent unicorns, not those My Pretty Pony poseurs) will no doubt follow.

Personal preference aside, I never cared for Rue, never felt like I could relate to her. Maybe it was a double-blind on my part -- a brooding girl AND a faerie halfling -- but whatever, Black never gave me a well rounded portrait of a character I could latch onto. I didn't buy the handling of the murder, or her father's arrest, or their family "friend" who may be at the root of why Rue's mother disappeared. Never mind Rue's ability to go unseen and the fact that her invisibility and disappearance seems to go unnoticed by others around her, or that her friends are flatter than the pages they're drawn on.

Visually, the illustrations felt stiff. It's something I'm noticing more and more, perhaps it's always been there and I'm just now seeing it, but it feels like graphic novels aimed at teens are drawn in a very lifeless way. I find myself looking for the traditional action lines in the characters and the compositions, something that givens them life. A still from a Bugs Bunny cartoon is more expressive, and in the end with graphic novels aren't visuals half your story? If you want a reader (okay, me) to buy into a fantasy world you're going to have to convince me that it's something more that shrouded bunches of trees and creeping ivy. It has to live and breath under its own rules, but it has to express some sort of movement. Even the cheap-o animation of the 1950s had some of the best and expressive backgrounds created in the history of cartoons. You can't tell me it's impossible to achieve the same effects in a black and white graphic novel fifty years later.

Oh yeah, this book lingers in the back of my throat like acid reflux.

As this was one of the finalists for the Cybils in the YA graphic novel category I felt like I really had to make sure I put all these emotional responses at bay and come to terms with whether or not I felt it best represented what was available this past year. The most compelling reason I felt it didn't deserve the win was that the story really is only the first part of a larger story. Too many untied threads, to much left up in the air, ultimately not a stand-alone title. It's unfortunate that every year series titles are pushed through the Cybils because invariably the consensus is that they don't hold up against stand-alone titles and take up space in the final panel that could really make for more of a contest and less a process of elimination.

In the end it hardly mattered, the judges were near unanimous in their decision on Emiko Superstar.

Piano Starts Here

The Young Art Tatum
by Robert Andrew Parker
Schwartz & Wade / Random House 2008

This year's winner of the American Library Association's Schneider Family Book Award is a picture book biography of legendary jazz pianist Art Tatum' early days. It follows Tatum as a young prodigy who can barely reach the keys of the family piano up to his days as a young man when he starts to make a name for himself and move out into the world on his own. Rendered in Parker's loose watercolor illustrations, the book has the cozy feel of American nostalgia, the warm fuzzies of a bygone childhood era free of strife and fear.

That isn't entirely a sarcastic summary, but there are may things about this book that stick in my craw the wrong way.

Let's talk about first-person for a moment. The book opens with Tatum introducing us to the house he was born in, to his father the mechanic and his mother the church singer, and the room where the piano is located. In these first four pages author Parker accompanies narrator Tatum's tour of his early days in simple language and images that are placed on the page like snapshots in a photo album. The initial feeling is that of sitting in the room looking at the images as Tatum stands over your shoulder explaining what you're looking at.

But then there's a shift, and a young Tatum is shown on tip-toe plunking away at that piano as he explains in the text how one day he just started playing. His mother enjoys his etudes than suggests he go outside and play while there's still light.

But because of my bad eyes, day and night, dark and light, don't really matter to me.

Because Tatum had cataracts in his eyes from an early age, was blind in one eye and could barely see out the other. That information isn't in the text, and coming five pages in on the picture book I'm suddenly struck with the question: How could Tatum be narrating what I'm looking at if he can't even see himself? If day and night mean nothing to him, how can this narrator explain that I'm looking at the house he was born in. And with a young Tatum's appearance in the illustrations we jump out of the detached viewpoint and into a more observational mode. It's an odd shift, and this change of perspective goes toward a lot of my confusion over this book.

Only in childen's books do we see stared reviews for biographies written in the first person; in the adult world we call his "historical fiction" no matter how well researched. To have Parker, speaking in Tatum's voice, describing to us what Tatum himself could not have seen calls to question a great deal of authenticity. We are being shown the world through Tatum's eyes, which is a pretty good feat for a nearly blind man.

Now I'm an adult (by age at least) and I can tell when to send up the flashing warning signs, but the young readers this book is aimed at aren't necessarily going to have the same abilities to question what they are being shown. They'll understand the difference between an illustration and an photo of a house, but not that the first-person voice is a construct of an author to tell a story. It may be accurate to a degree, but not factual in the sense we would normally expect from a biography.

I jump to the back of the book at this point, hoping to find that the author is quoting Tatum from his own autobiography. Nope. Parker lists over half a dozen titles, only one specifically about Tatum, and leaves us no clue as to whether or not he's paraphrasing other's research or rephrasing Tatum's own words for the audience. I'm on guard now.

Two pages later Tatum talks about a summer night being too hot to turn on the lights, about playing the piano while the neighborhood kids go around catching lightning bugs in bottles. For a kid who can barely see I find it curious that from his distanced perch inside the house, at night, he can see their jars grow lighter as they continue to catch the luminous insects. I've seen my share of lightning bugs, and I'm having a hard time believing a nearly blind boy can see the glow of these bugs growing from a distance.

I get what Parker is doing, He's showing us a slice of Tatum's early days, about how he was segregated from a normal childhood, listing the titles of songs he did (or might have) played on the piano during those years. But what does Tatum think about this, how does he feel? Does he wish he were out there running around, or has he found such a home and refuge in music that he no longer misses these magical moments. The image on the page isn't even of Tatum but of silhouettes black against the dark blue of night catching little flecks of gold. This is as it would look to normally sighted children, this magical nighttime scene, and the absence of Tatum from the illustration suggests his point of view. It becomes as deceptive as the authenticity of the narrative, it makes the cautious reader wary of every depiction. If nothing else the image and words convey an emotional weight that might not be accurate or honest. A reader could walk away from this book imagining Tatum happily playing the piano on a summer's eve, enjoying the magical glow of jars full of lightning bugs when the truth could be the exact opposite.

The story proceeds with some more troubling undertones that might escape a younger reader. Tatum's father and a friend take the boy to a nearby bar where he performs songs he has learned by ear. There are coins stuffed in the boy's pockets and late at night they have to sneak in so as not to wake Tatum's sleeping mother. Clearly what Tatum's father is doing wouldn't meet with his mother's approval, and in fact might be more exploitative that the text lets on. Even if he didn't object -- and many young boys might have found it exciting to perform in bars for adults -- we still have no idea what Tatum thinks about any of this. Did he resent these clandestine performances, did he suspect his father taking a cut of the money, would his mother have put a stop to it if she found out? It was as if Parker, in showing us the world through Tatum's eyes, has extrapolated the boy's blindness to include his thoughts and feelings.

Another curious omission comes between Tatum's barroom days and his performance on local radio. During that time Tatum attended a school for the blind and was given structured musical training. As depicted in the book Parker would have the reader believe that Tatum merely progressed to larger and larger venues. Even if Tatum's developed his unique style on his own it is impossible to know how much of an influence this musical training had on him. Even if he rejected what he learned -- and that he learned it from another visually impaired black musician named Overton Rainey -- his style would be informed by what he learned or rejected.

Yes, a picture book is limited, and concessions need to be made, stories need to be condensed for the audience. But for a book set in the 1920's and 30's I would think that readers would be interested to know that there were schools for the blind with instructors who were African American. And speaking of history, I think I'd like to know that this story took place in the Toledo of the 1920's and 30's; without and real points of reference this story could have been set in the rural parts of the South during the 1960's. Both eras might seem long ago and far away to today's readers, but there's a world of difference between the two and there's no reason for the reader to be kept in the dark.

The American Library Association says "The Schneider Family Book Awards honor an author or illustrator for a book that embodies an artistic expression of the disability experience for child and adolescent audiences." I'm left wondering if the "artistic expression" of Tatum's experience, as depicted by Parker, trumps the authentic emotional aspects of the subject's life. I question whether young Art Tatum's life as warm and, as depicted by Parker, innocently carefree, and if that's really an honest expression of the disability experience.

Emiko Superstar

by Mariko Tamaki
illustrated by Steve Rolston
Minx / DC 2008

When DC Comics decided to launch its line of graphic novels aimed at teen girls I thought they were on to something, especially when I saw that they'd taken on YA author Cecil Castellucci for their inaugural title, The Plain Janes. It was an awkward start, as the pacing of that first title seemed a bit off, but the story had heart and its heart was in the right place. I had hope for them.

But subsequent releases didn't hold up for me, and it didn't help that the stories were written by guys. Should that make any difference? No, but in the world of YA -- the target market -- it takes a fairly sophisticated male author to capture female characters believably, and if that's your target market you really need to pay attention to what they want. So the fact that Minx closed shop at the end of 2008 wasn't really a surprise to me in the end. Their tag line was "Your life. Your books. How novel." How ironic, really.

Finishing Emiko Superstar I can't help wonder if Minx would still be around if this had been their second offering, and if they had bothered to collect a bunch of female voices to carry their line. On the face of it the story isn't really any different than any other teen tale of self-discovery -- male or female -- but its the strength of the voice and character that really works here.

Emiko is going through that summer when something momentous happens that changes her life forever. Having lost her corporate coffee shop job, Emiko lands a babysitting job with some neighbors while at the same time accidentally discovering an underground scene full of performance artists called the Factory. Emiko the shy and timid is nonetheless Emiko the searcher and she investigates this scene full of freaks, totally mesmerized by the star performer, Poppy. While trying to get up the nerve to perform at the Factory, Emi discovers that the wife of the couple she is babysitting for is keeping a secret diary. Using some of her grandmother's clothes from the 1960s, and selecting bits of the diary, she becomes a poet-performer mining trapped suburban housewife angst. As Emi's star rises Poppy's falls, and the attention of the Factory's "curator" leads to a shuttering of the scene. Emi realizes that she's found a window into her true self, and by the end of summer knows is only a question of discovering the rest of her untapped talents.

Getting back to this idea of gender, this story could have been told through either a boy or a girl protagonist, but the fact that it's a girl emerging from her own geeky shadow is less typical. Admittedly, it would be more adventurous to have all the genders reversed and to see a female impresario playing favorites with a bevy of boy toys, but that would also be less realistic. Girls seeking attention and self-expression fall into the hands of those who will best exploit them, which all too often are men, and what's nice here is that Emi is shown uncomfortable and yet just strong enough to resist the negative aspects where others do not.

I've already written an obituary on Minx, and I still think that current business models neither can take the time to develop a brand, or to gather the roster necessary to make it fly before declaring it a failed product. Note to other publishers: girls are still not being served.

* * * *

I wrote this before the finalists were announced for the Cybil Awards graphic novel category. Once they were announced I was bound by my role as a judge not to publish this review for fear of showing favoritism. It turns out I wasn't alone in feeling that Emiko Superstar was a worthy title: it has won this year's Cybil for Graphic Novels in the YA category.

For the full list of winners check out the Cybils website.

A Balloon for a Blunderbuss

written by Alastair Ried, illustrated by Bob Gill
Harper 1961 / Reissued by Phaidon 2008

One of those strange things about the publishing industry I'll never understand: Why would they let something like this slip out of print and out of their hands? Things being what they are, it's sad to see the short-sightedness of ignoring your history and your backlist.

Based on the simple premise of "what would you trade me for this" a butterfly is offered up, and through a series of trades -- for wishbone, a wishbone for a flag, a flag for a straw hat -- finally is traded for an island and everything on it. Of course, when asked to see the butterfly in hand it flies to freedom, proving that some things cannot be possessed, much less traded.

The simplicity of the idea is matched by Gill's graphics, isolated images in thick, inky lines and filed in with a single spot color, occasionally two at the most. Gill, who is a major influence in graphic design (and, oddly, also co-created Beatlemania for Broadway) understands a concept seemingly lost in today's picture books: less is more. While I agree that modern printing has permitted any number of miraculous picture books to be produced, I sometimes feel like gazing at a wall of picture books in a bookstore these days is the equivalent of staring at the signage of Times Square at night when what one wants is a cup of tea in a zen garden.




There's a lot of similarity with the travel picture books of Miroslav Sasek, both in illustration and simplicty.

Simple stories, simply told, simply illustrated. No fancy digital manipulations, no full page bleeds, no extraneous cleverness or in-jokes or asides scattered throughout the illustrations. The book isn't trying to compete with movies or video games or the presumption that a reader needs to be inundated with images to hold their attention.

Simple works.

I understand Phaidon has reprinted another Gill title, What Colour is Your World, and has also reprinted Tomi Ungerer's The Three Robbers. They may be onto something.

I Like You

by Sandol Stoddard Warbug
illustrated by Jacqueline Chwast
Houghton Mifflin 1965

My wife likes to say I have a sticky brain. This is a fairly accurate description of my proclivity to spout lots of useless bits of cultural flotsam that I can recall at a moment's notice. I can, for example, sing jingles from television commercials that haven't aired in over 35 years without the crutch of revisiting them on YouTube. I can, with the briefest of information, recall the actors or titles of movies as people try to describe them. I am horrible at the stuff I was supposed to learn in school, but I often get the obscure questions correct in Trivial Pursuit.

Years ago I came across a single panel cartoon -- reprinted in an issue of Utne magazine, if I'm not mistaken -- that made me laugh with a sort of recognition that could have sunk my spirits if it caught me on the wrong day. In it, a portly gentleman is among a handful of people in a movie theatre, staring at the screen in horror. The caption (approximately): "Roger suddenly realizes that one of his treasured childhood memories is actually a scene from a movie." I took this to be Roger Ebert, Pulitzer Prize winning movie critic, and I knew all too well how that felt. So many times as an adult, revisiting old movies I might only have caught a glimpse of on television growing up, I have scenes come rushing back like a sudden gale force wind. It is, indeed, an odd thing when a memory from childhood presents itself and demands recognition.

So for years I have been using the phrase "goofus on the roofus" as a term of endearment for those who have behaved silly. Certainly with my girls, though I have done it to friends as well. In my mind the full phrase was always "goofus on the roofus, hollering your head off" and, when the situation called for it, I would use the whole line. I cannot recall specifics, but I have no doubt I have referred to at least one individual in Berkeley (known by many as The Hate Man) precisely this way. Something to do with his daily ritual of standing on the roof of his apartment building, in full view of my dorm room, naked, shouting at the sun in some ritualistic fashion.

Recently, I dropped by my local children's book store and saw I Like You sitting on the counter. I'm not generally convinced that impulse items placed by the check-out counter are really deserving of the space, but there was something about this book that caused me to pick it up. It had that look about it that said "Remember me?" and so I had to find out whether it was, indeed, another treasured childhood memory coming back to claim it's rightful place. I used the time-honored tradition of the Random Page Test, and this is what I landed on:



"I am a goofus on the roofus
Hollering my head off
You are one too"
(sorry for the bad scan)

Another gap in my past bridged.

The 1960s seemed like a time when children's books were not only finding their legs, but really testing the boundaries of their freedom. Nonsense and imagination took the place of linear narrative in a way that seemed to reflect the restless nature of a post-war, baby boomer childhood. There are glimmers of this in Ruth Krauss's Open House for Butterflies and Remy Charlip's Arm in Arm, collections of prose-poems and story-etts and snippets of the kind of nonsense that resonates with a playground sensibility.

Warburg opens with the declarative "I like you / And I know why" and proceeds to explain all the reasons why. Many of the reasons are as intimate as being able to share secrets, or share feelings, and they aren't always positive. "I like you because if I am mad at you / Then you are mad at me too // It's awful when the other person isn't // Phooey." And the book continues with this examination of friendship until finally concluding, with the only true response to such a query, "I guess I just like you // Because I like you."

Chwast's illustrations have that loose, spontaneous quality of having quickly captured a moment, almost as if they were taken from a sketchbook. With each page the subjects change so that there is no particular individual serving as the "I" throughout; boys and girls, men and women, young and old, and all the various combinations, each used to help illustrate the quasi universal elements that build a friendship. I say quasi because, unfortunately, the book suffers that lack of diversity that would come a few years down the line in children's books. Everyone depicted is clearly of European descent (or an animal). I wish Chwast had been more forward thinking and given us just a bit of the old UN casting here. It would have gone a long way toward promoting not just the ideas of friendship, but that these things are universal across the spectrum and the sort of things that bring us together.

Still, it fills in yet another gap in my endless quest to rebuild the library of my youth and explain one of my more curious expression. I'll continue to call people goofuses on the roofuses when warranted, only now I'll know where it came from.

(For those reading comments, I don't normally go back and revise posts once "published" - I prefer to stand here warts and all - but this time the gaff Mr. Florian pointed out didn't sit well with me. I only mention it so the comment makes sense.)

My Name is Georgia

a portrait
by Jeanette Winter
Harcourt 1998

Out of the darkness I emerge, and the next few weeks are going to be heavy with picture book biographies and graphic novels. Not that any of you are keeping tabs, just what I've been soaking in for the past couple of weeks while visiting the island of Incommunicado.

For this intimate look at the painter Georgia O'Keeffe, Winter has chosen to tell not so much a life story as a sort of emotional growth of an artist. We do get the requisite facts of her life as a person -- birth, death, early childhood -- but most of what Winter has built this book on are the words that O'Keeffe uses to express her feelings. What emerges isn't so much a description of how art spoke to her, but how she seemed to be answering a calling that was difficult to articulate outside of her art. The distance was always calling me, O'Keeffe says, and Winter uses these moments to build an emotional arc to a story that shows us the inner life of an artist.

Aside from the opening and closing images that plainly state O'Keeffe's dates of birth and death, the book is told in a first-person viewpoint. To achieve this, Winter has taken select phrases quoted from various biographies about O'Keeffe and built narrative bridges to fill in the gaps that otherwise would have been described by traditional biographers. Winter sets the stage and situations and then allows O'Keeffe's words to fill in the feelings surrounding them.

I went to the Texas plains,
the Wild West of my childhood books.
...you have never seen SKY--
It is wonderful.

Rather than break the flow of the narrative with quotes or attributions, Winter simply offsets O'Keeffe's quotes in italics. For the younger reader these statements probably read more as emphasis, but for older readers (and adults) this serves as an elegant solution to the dilemma that arises when a picture book author writes about someone else in the first person.

It's an interesting point (and one I have been exploring a lot lately, so it's likely to show up again) that nowhere else but in children's books do we find biographies written in first-person narration. Any adult author that dared to write about an historical personage in the first person, their book would be labeled as fiction, but here and in many others like this the Library of Congress has categorized this book in the traditional non-fiction category of Biography.

In carefully choosing O'Keeffe's words Winter is able to present the reader with a sense of how the artist thought and felt. Whether or not this is an accurate portrait it would take an art historian to sort out, and taken by themselves I'm not so sure I would draw the same conclusions on character that is implied here in this book. But Winter is smart in calling this a portrait and not a biography, understanding the artist's use of the word to mean "a likeness" with all the leeway it provides. An artist, painting a portrait, has the delicate task of finding the best way to represent their subject while at the same time inserting their own style to the process. I have no doubt that Winter has "painted" a portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe, but is it an accurate one?

As Winter portrays O'Keeffe, she is a woman driven by the landscape, compelled to paint it, to find her peace within it, to commune with this space in an almost religious sense. It isn't hard to believe this was what O'Keeffe was like, what she felt, and it's a fairly sophisticated idea to communicate to a picture book audience. Where the biography is lacking in he type of information one might look for in a report -- why she made the decisions to move to New York, her relationship with the photographer Alfred Steiglitz, how old she was at any of these ventures -- Winter does manage to convey a sense of time passing and the emotional growth of the artist.

As for the illustrations Winter has said she wanted to give her impression of O'Keeffe's work and in this area I feel she falls flat. Winter's style is unique in and of itself and I am sure I could recognize any illustration from any book of hers on sight. O'Keeffe painted small things very large to make people notice them (as is pointed out in the text itself) but Winter paints the large things very small, surrounding her images on each page with a lot of white space. O'Keeffe was drawn to the large openness, the faraway she calls it, but here it looks so contained, so tiny.

Still, for a biography that looks at first blush to be very slight, this book is contains a great deal that is felt more than it tells.