The Hero of Little Street

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

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

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

click image to enlarge

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

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

you probably want to see this bigger, too

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

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

Secret Circus

by Johanna Wright 
Neal Porter Books / Roaring Brook Press 
2009  

Only the mice know, and they aren't telling...

In Paris there is a circus, a very secret circus, a very tiny circus, that only the mice know about. They ride a hot air balloon to a merry-go-round long after the people have gone to bed and find their way to the circus where they snack on left-behind snacks and enjoy the show. When it's over the mice return home safe with their secret and a conspiratorial wink that begs the reader to keep the secret safe.  

Using the very simple repetition of "Only the mice know..." followed by the who, what, when, where, why, and how of the circus Wright opens up the story to the charming illustrations. For the mice this secret circus is to be the event of the season and much is made of getting there as the circus itself, which is how it is with most highly anticipated events.

The economy of text is well matched with playful paintings that have the loose feel of cartoons on canvas. Wright paints in a transparent style that gives the effect of watercolor on textured canvas, both child-like and tactile.

And...

I know this is a deceased horse to flog, but looking the illustrations I was reminded of the warmth and connection the eye makes with art made by human hands. I'm not in for bashing digital illustration but in looking through Secret Circus I couldn't stop thinking about how impossible it would be to capture the same mood in pixels. This leads me to thinking about books and the coming digital delivery devices and how much will be lost and retained in the transition. Would these illustrations maintain their charm on a digital screen? There's no reason to think they wouldn't, but with forced digital elements -- animation, pan and zoom, music and sound effect -- something would be lost. Looking at art in a museum isn't enhanced by music or shifts in lighting, and that, ultimately, s what leads me to think that books will always be with us. Artists will always take hand to medium, and despite being able to view the finished work as a digital upload we will still have that desire to see the thing in person, before us, to swim amid the subtleties in its presence.

So, yeah.

boom!

(or 70,000 light years)  
by Mark Haddon 
David Fickling / Random House 2009 

A middle grade my-teacher-is-an-alien story from the author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.  Entertaining, if strangely familiar. 

While secretly eavesdropping on their teachers, Jimbo and his friend Charlie discover that two of their teachers are, in fact, aliens from another world on the far reaches of our galaxy.  Once the aliens discover that Jimbo and Charlie know their secret, and are coming for them, the boys decide to follow the clues to a remote Scottish locale that serves as an intergalactic transport station. Finding themselves on the planet Plonk, they learn that the aliens are trying to repopulate their planet with humans (specifically sci-fi fans who find the experience cool) but are temperamental to the point of threatening to blow up Earth.  Jimbo and Charlie make their escape with the help of Jimbo's obnoxiously punk sister Becky and, returning home, save the day. 

What starts off feeling very much like Bruce Coville's My Teacher is an Alien and winds up feeling like an lost scene from Men In Black is, as can be gleaned, a goofy send-up of aliens-among-us-and-kids-save-the-day.  It was a breezy read, and one I think most middle schoolers would enjoy, particularly the boys. 

That said, I found it curious while reading the introduction (something I don't normally like to do) to hear Haddon make mention of this being a retread of an earlier published book from 1992.  Odd, because The Curious Incident was hailed (by the New Yorker, among others) as his big debut when, in fact, he had a handful of book published before that.

Oh.  His big ADULT debut.  His books for children don't count. 

I remember feeling the same about Gregory Maguire's "debut" Wicked, knowing he had scads of books nearby in the children's section.  Perhaps we've gotten away from that notion that a children's book author isn't somehow as legitimate until the "break out" into the adult consciousness, but it still chaps me a bit. 

All of that aside, Haddon does a have a way with engaging and funny characters – Jimbo's family is like the most offbeat collection of individuals from a British TV sitcom – and creates a Douglas Adams class of aliens, complete with dated disco-era catch-phrases as their primary form of communication. 

In updating the original 1992 book – with it's unpronounceable title of Gridzbi Spudvetch! – Haddon claims to have started with modernizing the technology only to have changed every sentence of the original.  I like the idea of a successful author being able to revisit an earlier work and make something new out of it.  And if I didn't have a million other things to do it could be instructive to track down a copy of the original and do a side-by-side comparison.  

By the way, I went with the Italian edition's cover (a) because I like the yellow instead of the orange that the English language editions have and (b) because it's subtitle La strana avventura sur planeta Plonk translates as "The strange adventure to planet Plonk," which I kinda like.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days

by Jeff Kinney
Amulet / Abrams 2009

The fourth book in the Wimpy Kid series continues with the misadventures of Greg Heffley trying to make it through the summer with as little effort and trauma as possible.  But if that happened there'd be no book...

After the initial blast of the first Wimpy Kid book, and the subsequent popularity, I sort of let the series go as one of those things that's good for a laugh not not, you know, something I felt obsessive about.  Like Charlie Brown and other cartoon creations, once you know who they are as characters you can pretty much guess their travails and it really becomes a question of individual limits.  I know one summer way back when I obsessively read every paperback that had the MAD magazine logo on it, followed by every Wizard of Id collection I could nab.  It's a kid thing, a summer thing, a perfectly solid way to wile away those dog days of late July and August.

Wimpy Kid Greg Heffley starts off by claiming that summer is nothing more than a three-month long guilt trip because while everyone else is outside he'd rather stay in playing video games.  Of course, everything Greg either attempts or is forced to do that takes him away from his game time supports his thinking that he'd be better off indoors and away from everyone.  Which, when you think about it, is a fairly stagnant place for a character to be; anti-social, unable to enjoy anything outside of himself, constantly finding nothing but misery about his situation.  Even his attempts to do something constructive  – start a lawn care company – is driven by his desire to make money to pay off a country club debt and nothing else.  Even when I was laying around reading comics I still had days where I schemed to make money and build massive tree forts that were structurally unsound.

Greg Heffley is a bit of a downer.

But that's what makes him work.  Kids recognize what a downer he is and laugh at him, not with him, in a way that sometimes borders on mean.  I think Kinney comes up with some great situations for mischief and misadventure, where readers can see with devilish glee what unsuspecting Greg is about to get himself into.  But after three books it isn't just wearing thin, its beginning to look like Greg might actually be suffering from sort of brain damage.  How else do you explain a character who, as the mock definition of insanity goes, keeps beating his head against the wall expecting a different result?  Maybe if the kid had something go right once in a while it would make all the other mishaps and screw-ups have more impact.

By now, these books are criticism- and review-proof.  Kids read them, and enjoy them, and despite being mislabeled as graphic novels (they aren't) are perfectly fine amusements. 

Bad News For Outlaws

The Remarkable Life of Bass Reeves,
Deputy U.S. Marshal
by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson
illustrations by R. Gregory Christie
Carolrhoda Books 2009

A picture book biography, done right, of the African American lawman who was feared in his day but nearly lost to history.

This book starts off the way many good books do, and should, especially biographies: with a solid action sequence that pulls the reader in and sets the tone of what the story that follows is about. In Bad News for Outlaws this sequence is a showdown between Reeves and Jim Webb that ends with the lawman shooting his quarry but gaining the man's respect at the same time. There's the action of a chase, a mini lesson in right and wrong, and the theme that will carry throughout that Reeves was as honest and true a man as the West ever created.

Following this scene there is a short entr'acte that demonstrates Reeves physical strength, what life was like in the Oklahoma Territory, and that he was also respected by all, good and bad, black and white. From there the story of Reeves' life runs fairly chronological, beginning when he was a Southern slave and covering his more than thirty years as a U.S Marshal. It makes for great story that even Nelson admits at the end has all the earmarks of a tall tale, though she has striven to tell it as true as possible.

To that end the facts of the story seem straightforward and difficult to imagine being doctored. There are a couple quotes attributed to "a white sharecropper" and a "sharpshooter" that I don't doubt are sourced, but the generic nature of their attribution left me a little conflicted. On the one hand, their comments help underscore Reeves' character, but at the same time when other quotes used are attributed to specific historical individuals they stand out the same as those in other biographies I've read as coming from questionable sources. It's such a minor quibble – okay, those quotes and some of the colloquial cliches that crop up – that I almost hesitate to mention them.

So why mention them?

Because far too often it seems I run into life stories that fall short, either in quality, storytelling, or accuracy, that I felt obliged to point out a solid example of a picture book biography that comes closest I've seen to being perfect. It's open, and honest, and like it's subject not beyond a minor flaw in character, but nothing that detracts from the overall effect. Handsomely illustrated as well.

The Small Adventures of Popeye and Elvis

by Barbara O'Connor
FSG 2009

A small slice of life on a backroad of South Carolina with perhaps the most passive main character I've read in a long time.

Popeye, so nick-named when a b-b gun left it's mark on his left eye, is the kind of quiet, withdrawn kid who would hunger for an adventure if he had the gumption to do so. So when a mobile home gets stuck in the gravel road in front of Popeye's house one rainy night, Popeye's heart rate nearly increases with the possibilities. The next day five kids tumble out to explore the place where they are newly struck and - does Popeye dare to disturb the universe? - an adventure is afoot. Maybe.

A boy named Elvis, about the same age as Popeye, is among the stranded clan, a fearless, cussing, adventurer of the first degree. Popeye takes Elvis to a nearby creek and together they discover small boats made of Yoohoo drink boxes with mysterious messages inside. What do the messages mean? Where are they coming from? What's further up the creek? Popeye doesn't know because he's never thought to go exploring on his own, so it falls to Elvis to drive their exploration up the river to solve the mystery. If it were up to Popeye, who marvels at every turn at Elvis's brash language and free spirit, Popeye would sit in his room and stair at a stain in the ceiling listening to a clock going tick tick tick...

In Tolstoy's world, this is a "stranger comes to town" story, and Elvis is sort of a catalyst for Popeye's sort of coming out of his shell. I say sort of because at no point does Popeye articulate what he wants beyond vague longing, and he continues to tag along with Elvis like a pathetic puppy with hardly an original thought of his own. As the adults spend days trying to dislodge the motor home - and they're about as slow to get this taken care of as an elephant in a molasses pit, a bit of authorial deus ex machina if ever there was one - there is a palpable hope in the reader that Popeye is going to break out of his shell and stop being a wimp. But the open ending doesn't suggest Popeye has really changed and that this one quiet, sad little adventure may be the highpoint of his life.

Lacking a character-driven desire or conflict, The Small Adventures of Popeye and Elvis reads like an overly long short story, a meditation on life literally off the beaten path in a world with a vague nostalgic feel to it that seems all the more sad for what it lacks. Things sort of happen, with the overall effect being "Yes, and the point of it all is...?"

Stitches

by David Small
Norton 2009

This graphic memoir about the illustrator reinforces the stereotype of the suffering artist, but does a fine job doing so.

Small recounts the major periods of his life that center around his having cancer as a child that developed to the point where he had to have glands in his neck and half his vocal chords removed. His father, a radiologist, and his emotionally closed mother created an atmosphere of silence in the house that was oppressive and forced Small and his brother to find other forms of escape. For his brother it was playing drums, for Small it was escapism through art. It isn't until the end when Small has begun to make his own life, after years of therapy, that his world opens up beyond the suffocating world of his family. As a portrait of an alienated childhood, coupled with the horror of misdiagnosis, it's a wrenching story that is also full of poignant moments.

Growing up there were always images and stories of people who suffered for their art. Comedians may be the only other profession I know of where suffering is practically a prerequisite. Sure, artists can suffer through elective poverty as well as adverse childhood circumstances, but other creatives seem only to have misery for their bread.

Graphic memoirs are curious in that they tend to present a more stark world of childhood than most fiction. I can't say this is true across the board for all memoirs though I know people who cannot or will not read fiction because it lacks this verisimiltude. What is interesting is how graphic memoirs fare with younger readers and whether they make the same distinctions or if realistic fiction is as real to them due to lack of experience.

What instantly came to mind with Stitches was Alison Bechdel's Fun Home which came out a few years ago. That book had people singing its praises right and left, and recommending it for mature teen readers (due to content issues), but it didn't work for me as a book for non-adults. I couldn't really articulate why until reading Stitches. Both stories feature closeted gay parents and the confusion of not understanding their parent's behavior until the narrator was older, but despite Small's more menacing treatment by his parents his self-portrait comes across better because he personalizes the narrative. Bechdel, a cartoonist, delivers a narrative that delivers a story but very little emotion; Small, an illustrator, conveys the emotions and deals more directly with the symbolism that comes from literally having no voice. Without understanding the child protagonist and their emotion we are left with a child's view of the adult world intended for adults to siphon meaning. Inexperienced younger readers are otherwise adrift in the experience.

I think we're still in the Wild West days of graphic novels for teens and younger readers. The medium grew up outside the world of children's publishing and has yet (if it ever will be) incorporated into the fold. Added to that, the graphic memoir is a form of creative non-fiction with its own set of rules that also tends to fall outside the purview of what is generally created specifically for children. Non-fiction for non-adults is still somewhat viewed as materials for instruction and not necessarily enjoyed in their own right. Graphic novels tend to have a higher profile because of their accessibility (i.e. they look like comics, which makes them an easier sell to kids) but I think this puts an unfair burden on them.

I also happen to believe that both Stitches and Fun House were latched onto as books suitable for a younger audience simply because their protagonists are children. Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones features a teen girls who is raped and murdered and narrating from the beyond, but this book was never marketed for younger audiences; if it had been made into a graphic novel I'm fairly certain it would have been. This is an area that deserves more discussion. We either need to open up what we consider to be acceptable material for children, or we need to stop assuming that graphic novels with children as protagonists are automatically suitable because the are "cartoons."

Norton created a dust-up last fall by submitting Stitches for consideration of the National Book Award for Young Readers. Was it because, as some suggest, because they thought they had a better "in" by not competing with novels in the adult category? Because Americans do not take graphic novels seriously as literature? Because Small is primarily known as an illustrator of children's books? No matter, it was a shrewd move for the attention it received but it further muddied the waters of what is or should be considered a graphic novel for teens.

abandoned: Any Which Wall

by Laurel Snyder
Random House 2009

Scared away by a condescending narrative voice.

It's been a while since I abandoned a book outright, but I just couldn't keep plowing through. There have been books I wanted to ditch, and others I probably should have dumped, but I've always held out to the end with that hope that maybe something toward the end would redeem the effort. But Any Which Wall just didn't give me a reason to continue beyond the first chapter.

I might have made it through the second chapter had it not been for the prologue. Over the last couple of years I have come to regard the prologue as something akin to party appetizers made from leftovers and canned cheese, heated to a greasy sheen. In almost every case they did not need to be there, and I had sudden memory pangs of skipping over the "boring" matter at the front of books I read as a kid because I was eager to get to the story.

Worse, when the prologue took on that storyteller voice, that condescending tone of a disembodied narrator speaking directly to me from the great beyond, those books were always a sign of pending boredom. Do you have a story to tell me, or are you more interested in catching me in your thrall of your magnificent storytelling cadence? From the moment I could read independently I always had that feeling that the author or storyteller didn't trust me, the reader, to get the story on my own without their hand-holding. I didn't find it quaint, or comforting, or reassuring. I always heard it like the voice of the old lady who never had kids of her own and kept trying to feed me stale, dusty ribbon candy.

And that's what Any Which Wall felt like to me. I could see what Snyder was going for, but it's just not for me. There's probably a great story in there somewhere, and some kids are really going to love this (I'm guessing they're all girls - I'd be curious to interview the boy who voluntarily read and liked this book), but for the swell of positive reviews I gleaned all I can say is that this must have hit a soft, nostalgic spot for some adults and they responded accordingly.

The Brain FInds a Leg

by Martin Chatterton
Peachtree Publishers 2009

It's a teen Holmes and Watson Down Under, with a transgendered Bond villain and animals run amok!

One day, in a fit of odd behavior, a pod of whales gang up and attack a whale watching boat on Farrago Bay, Australia killing all involved. No one knows why and the mystery was never solved.

Two years later, a new kid known as The Brain arrives with an odd demeanor about him and an uncanny ability to puzzle together facts at a glance. Before long he's buddied up with Sheldon, a local whose father owned the boat that was attacked by whales, and together they set off to solve a more recent spate of animal attacks. Playing Dr. Watson to The Brain's Holmes, Sheldon becomes integral in piecing together the mystery that not only will explain what happened to his father but how The Brain lost his parents to a freak accident while demonstrating a device that would increase the power and capacity of the human brain. Naturally there is a lone villain mastermind involved, as well as a surfer who is a spokesperson for a toothpaste company, and some truly odd behavior by the local fauna.

In a word, quirky.

This is the oddest thing I've come across in a while, and I have this itchiness in my brain that wonders if there isn't something cultural that I'm missing. If there wasn't a world full of books I wasn't dying to read I might be tempted to go back and figure out why this book sat funny with me. Not bad, but decidedly off.

Powerless

by Matthew Cody
Knopf 2009

Fish-out-of-water helps mutant teens battle evil using wits over brawn.

Daniel's new to Noble's Green, "The Safest Town on Earth," but it doesn't take him long to figure out why: the place is crawling with pre-teen superheroes who use their powers for good and not evil. And by crawling I mean half a dozen kids. And they don't know how they got their powers. And their powers disappear when they turn thirteen.

Sounds a little like Savvy in reverse.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and where there are superpowers there is super evil scheming to bring them down. And once these teen mutants (no copyright infringement intended, I'm sure) have taken ordinary, superpowerless Daniel into their confidence you just know it will fall to him and his superior intellect to do what might and force cannot.

Yawn.

I'm beginning to suspect that the reason superhero novels for kids keep getting published is that they appear high-concept, and thus easier to market than "human" stories, while at the same time playing with (tired) metaphors of good and evil, teamwork, puberty, what-have-you. But these stories are all, almost without exception, as dull as dried toast and as nutritionally empty as a withered celery stalk.

As always, if you want superhero stories, you're better off with comics.

Candor

by Pam Bachorz
Egmont 2009

How do you deal with unruly teens? Send them to live in the mind-controlled community of Candor, Florida.

Oscar's father built Candor in the wake of losing his oldest son. The town is a model community, perfect picket fences and everyone striving for greatness. To achieve this effect Oscar's father built subliminal mind control into the town's architecture, through music constantly playing and reinforcing only the messages he wants.

But Oscar's mother resented her husband's methods and left. Oscar was strong-willed and able to resist the messages long enough to teach himself how to counter-program himself and other rich kids for a price. He's helps a dozen or so kids escape and set himself up a little secret offshore bank account. He could leave any time he wants, but he'd rather help others get out while they can since he can keep up the charade without giving into the messages that totally remove his personality and turn him into a robot like the other teens.

Problems arrive in the guise of a girl, Nia, who fascinates Oscar. She's a hard case, but Oscar eventually convinces her that he's not the model citizen everyone believes and he's slowly preparing her to escape. Because he's in love with her. But Nia's parents don't feel her personality is conforming fast enough and they send her to a special room Oscar's dad has set up where she spends four days having her brain wiped clean of "bad" behavior and replaced by his extreme programming. Once out, Nia is as brainwashed as all the other kids and Oscar decides to risk everything to save her.

Author Bachorz lived in the planned community of Celebration, the "perfect" town created by the Walt Disney Company. If you've seen the Jim Carey movie The Truman Show you can picture this sort of community perfectly, because they filmed the movie there. Superimpose another movie, The Stepford Wives, on top of that and you've pretty much got Candor. Which is not to say it's a bad idea - it totally feeds into the notion teens have about their parents wanting them to be perfect little robots - but it isn't without problems.

Mostly what bothers me is that is the entire community is being fed messages, that would include adults and they wouldn't be able to argue about the treatment of their children (as they do here) because they wouldn't understand it. Oscar's dad, the staff at the hospital, all the adults are somehow immune to this subliminal messaging, and that selectivity just isn't possible in a town where the messages are 24/7. Oscar proves that deprogramming is possible, and the kids who are taken off-message do have to maintain a veneer of still being model Candor citizens for fear of being found out, but there's no sense that the adults are going through this same sort of counter-programming. Oscar's dad, who must maintain control over every aspect of the town's carefully planned existence, could not remain as analytical as he is if he weren't somehow constantly unaffected.

That this detail is never explained (either that or I blinked and I missed it) crushes the novel for me. World building in sci-fi and fantasy, including real world dystopias like Candor, live and die by their ability to not let the world outside the book take over. At every turn I was constantly finding myself pushed out of the narrative and wondering how this was possible, how these people were affected while others were not, and ultimately how a town could be built on mind control by someone without a degree in psychology and be kept secret from the outside world. This last part is most puzzling, as kids who graduate and leave Candor must do so with a pre-recorded set of "messages" to keep them in line else they will suffer from psychosis. One family is reported to have gone on vacation, forgotten their messages, and killed themselves and each other in a hotel as the programming "wore off." It all just doesn't hold up well under close scrutiny.

I ran this book by my resident 13 year old dystopia expert, and while she enjoyed it she had nothing to say about it afterward. This is unusual because most of the time she wants to talk about the Big Ideas that speculative fiction generates. When I posed the question of the adults not being influenced by the messages she had a couple of theories, but nothing that came from the book itself.

A for the idea, C- for the effort.

Sharp Shot

by Jack Higgins
with Justin Richards
Penguin / Speak 2009

Bond movies were the first place I encountered the idea of a story starting with an action sequence that was unrelated (or tangentially at best) to the rest of the story. The idea was to get the blood pumping with Bond in some perilous chase, have him come out victorious, slide into the title sequence, then into the story at hand.

It's an effective "hook" but what if you took it further. What if you opened with an action prologue set in 1990's Iraq, with British special forces getting ready to blow up a secret nuclear facility. Then jump ahead to today where one of the people from that mission shows up on the doorstep of his former team leader begging to be saved from unknown enemies, which sets off a chase that doesn't let up until the end... with a double assassination threat against two heads of state.

This is set-up for Sharp Shot, the third book in the Jack Higgins series featuring the teenage Chance twins, chips-off-the-block of their Bond-like father, John Chance.

As established in the previous books, Rich and Jade are more than up to the task of international intrigue and quick-witted action. If the plot gets stretched too the edges of credulity the pages burn at a frantic rate

Normally, if you asked me, I'd say I don't generally like these political espionage thrillers. At least not as books – I love this sort of thing as a movie. But I've read all three of the books in this series and I have to say, these things read like relentless action movies. No one is going to confuse these books with literature, but that's not the point; where's the fun of reading if every once in a while you can't just go with the fun?

(this review is also cross-posted over at Guys Lit Wire)

Superhero School

by Aaron Reynolds
illustrated by Andy Rash
Bloomsbury 2009

Leonard is excited to hear that his parents have signed him up for superhero school. After all, he has all the necessary superpowers like super strength and heat vision, and regular school was no place for him. But superhero school is full of math. Was there ever anything to drain a superhero of his strength faster than boring old mathematics?

But one day Leonard and his schoolmates arrive to find that ice zombies have seized the school and taken their teachers hostage. Its up to Leonard and his classmates – and the casual application of math – to save the day. And from that day forward Leonard never viewed math as a chore.

As tired as I am of superheroes in children's books – and I still have yet to be convinced this is a genre kids actually seek out – the blending here of math and superheroes is a slight step above the usual hero adventure. The math portions of the story aren't quite so didactic that they would turn off a reader; if anything, they could easily slip past a reader until the very end where the math portions are spelled out, and even then they can be easily glossed over. It seems doubtful to me that the picture book reader this book is intended for would have an awareness of operations like fractions and division, but it's all very simple, very benign.

On the art side of the equation, Rash's sharp and bold-outlined illustrations have just the right feel. Total geek that I am, I really like one spread in particular where images were overprinted to indicate invisibility and the reflections in a window. Whether this was part of his digital collage work or part of the printing process I don't know, but it's a nifty effect that caught my attention. I don't know how else it could be employed, but I'd like to see more of these sort of experiments in illustration.

The Great and Only Barnum

The Tremendous, Stupendous Life of Showman P.T. Barnum
by Candace Fleming
Random House 2009

Assuming you've read nothing about his life, what do you know of P.T. Barnum? That he was a huckster and a flim-flam man? That his name was the first name in three-ring circuses for a good portion of the 20th century? That he said "There's a sucker born every minute?

That's about as much as I knew – or thought I knew – going into this biography, coupled with a skepticism that was little more than a glorified snake oil salesman. Nothing like a well-written biography intended for middle grade readers (and up) to clear the air.

First, the quote: Barnum never said it, one of his competitors did, apparently cheesed that Barnum was able to corner the market on drawing a crowd. The circuses came later in his career, built from a combination of his showmanship and the desire to mix the curiosities from his "museum" with a traveling show full of animal acts and clowns. In between there was his American Museum of alleged artifacts from history (many of them fake) and the type of human curiosities generally associated with traveling freak shows.

If Barnum's life seems like the natural extension of Professor Harold Hill's fast-talking salesmanship it's clear Barnum was born for the life he led. As a boy he was successful in drawing a crowd and making money from them. And what's most surprising is how genial he seems, how he never regarded the public as the "suckers" despite the importance of making money from their gullibility. He had a genuine regard for what we would probably call low entertainment and discovered that the general public didn't mind "harmless" hoaxes.

Fleming makes this a breezy read, well-documented with a strong narrative thread, and actually fun. Makes me wish there were more biographies like this when I was a kid.

Secret Subway

The Fascinating Tales of an Amazing Feat of Engineering
by Martin W. Sandler
National Geographic 2009

This is the odd tale of a man named Alfred Ely Beach and his plan to construct the first underground transit system in New York City in the late 1800's. Well illustrated and explained, curious readers will be treated to a world full of secret digging, corrupt politicians, unwieldy inventions, and a city on the verge of collapse due to excessive crowding and manure covered streets. Nothing at all like modern times.

Beach's plan for a pneumatic tubeway is presented in great, twisty detail as he sorts out problems keeping his project secret and dealing with the corrupt Boss Tweed of the Tammany Hall political machine. Sandler presents up all the key players nicely and sets the stage for the demonstration of the city's first subway, then follows through with the political pressure that put a halt to construction of a larger system and the eventual Renaissance of the much improved system still in place today.

Although it makes a briefest attempts to set the New York subway system within the context of other subways in Europe, I think I would have liked some comparisons with other mass transit problems and solutions. The elevated trains that sprouted up before the subways are shown negatively, yet they also appeared in other cities around he same time, suggesting that ideas about mass transit weren't isolated to one particular city. Chicago and Boston, for example, managed to have their mass transit in place before New York, but there is no mention of either of these systems or how any of them influenced each other.

Also, as far as the subtitle's hyperbole, while the tale is fascinating, the engineering doesn't really come off as being particularly amazing. For a book that better lays out how a subway is engineered Joe McKendry's Beneath the Streets of Boston: Building America's First Subway is probably the way to go.

When it comes to non-fiction for kids I like to walk away feeling like I learned something, even if I'm already familiar with the topic. It's a shame of my education that I learned more about Boss Tweed than I remember learning in my AP US History class back in the day. Of course, the fault here could be in my study habits, but I have a much better picture of the political fixer now than I did before.

When You Reach Me

Rebecca Stead
Wendy Lamb / Random House 2009


I'm going to punt on the review here. People have been talking, and mostly raving, about this book for the better part of this year so I don't know that I have much to add. Because I agree, it's good, and because I think others have said pretty much what I would have said. So in the interest of not clogging the blogosphere with more arterial review plaque I'll merely add those things that are personal, that wouldn't be duplicated elsewhere (I hope).

This was the first book I've read in some time that made me want to go back and re-read it instantly. I'm not a big re-reader, mostly because there's so much out there to read and I am, generally, a slow reader. But this was not only a breezy read but a fun one, and the feeling of wanting to steep more in its mood left me running to get back on the ride.

The book feels "classic." I don't know if it's because it taps into the river of nostalgia that I believe I share with the author – growing up when books like Harriet the Spy were new – of the strong memories I import into the books 70s settings, but this book reads to me like an older title that is still fresh today. Which, obviously, is peculiar when it's a new book.

Then there's the speculative fiction element. The book has a light touch and the multiple levels of time travel – a traveler from our contemporary future goes back to the past, as viewed from that past – is really satisfying. I'm sure there are some who could pick apart some of the time travel elements, but I don't care. If there are flaws they didn't bother me.

And we need more speculative fiction for middle grade readers. Not science fiction, not fantasy, not alien invasions (cute or menacing), but solid stories that deal with real middle grade issues and at the same time play with big ideas. Trend-watching aside, I personally think this is the greatest gap in middle grade fiction: stories about Big Ideas that do not have a "trouble story" or a dystopia at their core. I don't know if Ms. Stead sees the book this way, or if she'd rather think of it as simply what it is – a great middle grade book – but I'm telling you it falls right into a giant gap in the types of books kids enjoy.

Not much of a review, I admit, but I'd been putting this off for a couple months now because I didn't know if there was anything new to add to the din of what is already out there. I have a couple books that have fallen off the shelf, so to speak, and languished unreviewed because I was unable to get a grip on how to articulate my joy or excitement with them (I think Gennifer Choldenko's If a Tree Falls at Lunch Period might be the one that haunts me most for lack of review). So for other takes on When You Reach Me you might want to check out fuse #8's review, or the 100 Scope Notes review, or maybe the teenreads.com review. This book is showing up on a lot of Best Books and awards shortlists, and well-deserved I should think. But as far as I'm concerned if it won no awards or accolades it still sits in the rare pantheon in my experience - those books that bear rereading.

Amulet, Book Two: The Stonekeeper's Curse

by Kazu Kibuishi
Scholastic 2009

Here's a problem. If you're an author of a series, you would want your readers to have such vivid memories of your previous books to be able to delve right into the new one and get their bearings instantly. But, if you were creating a strong, well-developed story and it was taking you longer than they usual book-a-year grind that most series require, you would hope the readers would not only be patient but willing to dive back and reread your earlier books as well so they can savor the newer book better.

But, if we're talking about younger readers, how long can we expect their interest to hold over time? If they have dozens of new titles coming at them all the time, and especially as the graphic novel format gains ground in publisher's catalogs, can they be expected to wait anxiously for a drama to unfold and still maintain interest? Will their tastes be the same, will the reader be the same, at the end of it all?

I'm thinking back to how Harry Potter carried an entire generation of readers over the course of a decade and how well it would have fared without a fanatical following and movies to keep interest buoyed. More recently the Wimpy Kid phenomenon holds its ground by shrewdly following what I call the Madonna Cycle; every nine months, without fail, Madonna appears in the news one way or another. Either she's released a new album, or she's adopted a child, started a new business, whatever. Madonna, better than anyone else I can think of, has mastered the art of staying in the public eye for almost 25 years. This constant draw of attention, not too often and not too far apart, is what keeps a brand alive. And ultimately, if publishers would look a little closer at this, could garner better sales for them.

I know I'm not talking about Kibuishi's fabulous follow-up to the first volume of the Amulet series, but in a way I am because it feels like forever since the first volume came out (almost two years by my clock) and I found that I was forced to go back and read the first book just to remember who the characters were and how they got there. Down the road there will be readers who will have the entire story laid out for them and can read them straight through, but reading a series as it goes, and with long stretches in between chapters, makes it difficult to keep any momentum (much lest continued interest) going. A middle grade reader may be well into high school – complete with a different set of interests – before the next installment comes out. Is that any way to retain an audience?

In this second installment, Emily discovers that the amulet's power is strong enough not only to possess her but to overtake her. Coming to terms with this power while trying to save her mother, it becomes clear that Emily's role in this parallel world is much larger than she imagined as the keeper of the stone; she is nothing short of a second coming, a savior in a world menaced by the evil Elf King. In the end it is clear that stage is set for an ultimate battle, but how long it will take and far it will go is hard to say.

Parallels between Amulet and Jeff Smith's Bone series are strong. There isn't as much humor, and unless this is a long series the characters don't have the same depth, but it plays to the same audience looking for solidly paced fantasy adventure. The illustrations are rich, almost moody, and its clear that a great deal of care is being put into this graphic novel at all levels. But if this series is planned to go beyond three volumes, then perhaps Scholastic should consider holding up the series a bit until they can roll them out on a faster schedule. Amulet is too good a graphic novel for young readers to get lost in the apathy of growing, fickle readers.

The Seems: The Lost Train if Thought

by John Hulme and Michael Wexler
Bloomsbury 2009

By all accounts I should really like this series. No, I should love it. It's got all the things I've identified as being the perfect book for boys. It has action and adventure, clever wordplay and humor, other-world fantasy with real-world consequences, a tinge of romance, political upheaval, and a teen boy working alongside a world of adults. So why do I feel like its all a big, over-calculated, relentless cheat of a series?

In this, the third book of The Seems saga, we find fourteen year old Fixer Becker Drain still doing what he does best: using his uncanny 7th sense to help locate and repair the problem areas in the world-behind-the-world known as The Seems. Figurative expression in our world are very real in The Seems. There actually is a train carrying several weeks worth of Thought that goes missing in a place known as The Middle of Nowhere. A Brainstorm is the sort of thing that has physical consequences. The Court of Public Opinion is where legal issues get hashed out. There isn't a page that isn't chock-a-block with these living idioms, always in Capital Letters to remind the reader of their actuality.

The missing Thought Train looks to be the work of the resistance group known as The Tide who are looking to shake up a new world order and give the world – both worlds, actually – a fresh start. Due to his meddling in the real world, Becker finds himself on probation within The Seems and finds himself looking for the sort of redemption that generally has fatal consequences. Saving both The Seems and The World in just the Nick of Time is inevitable, and whether Becker ends up in A Better Place (or whether or not there's any difference between A Better Place and The Seems and Heaven) is up to the reader to decide.

The series is full of itself when it comes to this sort of linguistic gymnastics, and perhaps that's what is gnawing at me. Readers need to really invest all their energies into keeping track of this alternate universe while at the same time possessing enough experiences with language and idioms to get their double meanings in an instant while whizzing through the action. Its almost too clever at times, vacillating between elitism and a massive inside joke that's too complicated to explain. Over long stretches of reading I suppose its possible for a reader to become immersed in this world that it all washes over but I never could get lost in the story because the narrative was working Too Damn Hard to remind me of its Cleverness.

Also, and this just occurred to me, the plots are built around the interaction of all these different elements in The Seems that it's easy to miss the deus ex machina element. In fact, the entire notion of The Seems is that it is both the deus and the machina. Everything is designed to go according to The Plan (the Plan being the stand-in for God, and it's all a part of the intelligent design) which created The World and The Seems (heaven and earth) as a co-dependent unit where failure in one creates the end of all. No, I didn't just catch the religious allegories – I caught them from the start – what I just realized, and what might be the itch I couldn't quite scratch, is that these stories are all solved through the mysterious hand of fate. Where there is danger and death, salvation and redemption, a battle won and lost, it's all been so carefully tooled that it could only be plausible in so artificial a world. Ultimately, if "The Plan" is to be believed, everything is predestined and preordained, and every character is a mere puppet to plot.

Character should determine plot, but here plot determines all.

At the end of The Lost Train of Thought there is an open door for the series to go two different directions, maybe three. Without saying outright this is end of a trilogy or a continuing saga the book appears poised to jump wherever demand sends it. There has been a Seems movie that's been listed as "in development" since 2007, and IMDB shows a 2010 release date for a movie with no cast or director details. While there is plenty of action and visuals to make these movies work it is difficult to know how much of the humor will be lost when the Words said by actors don't stand out the way they do on the page.

I would think, all my misgivings aside, that there are readers out there who would enjoy this, but in the end I suspect there is a very narrow band of audience for this series. It has the earmarks of science fiction but is really pure fantasy, and unless the reader is an undiscerning fan of both – and possesses the ability to catch the verbal humor – The Seems is likely to either disappoint or frustrate.

Half-Minute Horrors

edited by Susan Rich
HarperCollins 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, lots of gory fun.

Messing Around on the Monkey Bars

and other School Poems for Two Voices
by Betsy Franco
illustrated by Jessie Hart
Candlewick Press 2009

I have this thing about poetry for children. Basically, it has to either be incredibly clever or exceptionally executed and preferably it is both. Kids who read poetry for fun do so because they still have a love of language, because they haven't had poetry units that have diluted their joy of words and wordplay. And kids are smart. They can recognize good poetry even if they cannot explain why. So I tend to feel that any children's book that traffics in poetry and rhyme needs to be impeccable.

Messing Around on the Monkey Bars collects original poems intended to be read by two voices, or in some cases groups. Which means these poems are mean to be read aloud. There are instructions at the beginning for how each reader knows when to read – regular and bold for the individual voices, italic bold when both reads speak at the same time. Fairly straightforward. Then come the poems.

When reading poems aloud the reader will quickly come to rely on the cadence of help them. The sound of the words and meter will stand out more than when a reader has the chance to read at their own pace, silently hearing the poems in their head. Out loud, minor flaws and imperfections stand out; worse, they will trip up readers who expect a rhythm that isn't maintained or is inconsistent.

Most of the poems in this collection fail this cadence test. Just to test them out I had my daughters read a couple out loud. Some were okay in the beginning, then tripped them up when there was an off meter or change in the patterns, some didn't work out of the gate. Poems that are expressly meant to be read aloud shouldn't cause the readers to stumble the way these consistently did.

As for content all the poems are limited to the experience of school which I am beginning to suspect is more detrimental than good in children's poetry. Here's what I'm thinking; I'm thinking that when poetry focuses on the school experience then the experience of the reader is that poetry is about school. And if poetry is about school then there is no reason to go exploring poetry outside of school, which makes poetry a school-only activity. This in turn eventually turns off readers to poetry altogether. I also suspect that when the subject defines the poetry, when the poet is confined within the limits of the school experience in this case as Franco is, then the poems themselves suffer from this inability to explore beyond the walls of school. School and poem then become a sort of prison that the reader can feel.

Whew, that's harsh. Okay, there is one poem in this collection that, had the entire book been of this quality, would have made it an instant classic. "Anatomy Class" runs through a list of items found in a classroom pointing out their humanly-named attributes. "The chair has/arms. // The Clock,/a face." and so on. It's clever, the rhythm is just right for both reading silently and aloud, and it doesn't have the faintest whiff of feeling forced. This poem is often featured in reviews, and is reproduced on Amazon (if you're interested) which doesn't surprise me, but might surprise the unwary if they expect the rest of the book to be this good.