The Day the Cow Sneezed

by James Flora
Harcourt, Brace & World 1957
reprinted by Enchanted Lion 2010

Noted Mid-century Modern illustrator tells a shaggy dog story. Not all illustrators are meant to be seen and heard.

"I bet your cow never sneezed a hole in the schoolhouse wall," begins The Day the Cow Sneezed, and truth be told, the cow in the story didn't either. Through a chain reaction like Rube Goldberg on steroids, the cow's sneeze precipitates a series of events that leads to a number of animals on progressively larger runaway vehicles doing much mayhem to country, town, school, zoo, and carnival rides. And when it was all over, and the world neatly set to right almost as quickly as it had been destroyed, little Fletcher (the boy whose neglect allowed the cow to catch a cold in the first place) is dragged off to the barn by his ear for a little good old-fashioned country discipline by Papa.

But you know what, forget the story. Don't even read it. It's a cumulative story that builds one preposterous whopper on top of another simply to provide Flora a canvas on which to draw this wild anarchy. It's like putting up with a few minutes of boring movie expository in order to get to the explosions. I really don't have a problem sometimes with dropping the whole set-up and starting with the second act in medias res.

Without the story – whose text is a tad tedious – the story makes a perfect madcap storyboard for a cartoon. It isn't sophisticated, but it isn't really much different from any other children's book in the mid 1950s, and the bold shapes and colors Flora employs show us just how tame most attempts at a retro style really are these days.  

His influence at the time is nothing to be, ahem, sneezed at either. As the graphic designer for Columbia Records in the 40s and 50s Flora's work is iconically linked with hundreds of jazz recordings. It's a style you can recognize by sight, one that many hip parents back in the day might have been drawn to without even realizing the connection.

Having said that, it is understandable that the text might fall a little flat. Many great illustrators are able to convey good stories through images without really being able to do the same thing with text. Paul Rand was a genius of graphic design – logos for IBM, ABC, and UPS among others – but no matter how visually modern or stunning, few would call his Little 1 a great children's book. I'm not about to attempt to tar every graphic designer with the same brush and say none of them should write, but there are many, today even, who design and illustrate books they should not be writing themselves. I think sometimes illustrators are giving a pass because they can visually wow an editor that perhaps might intimidate them or make them fear they might lose a good book by suggesting that perhaps they should stick to pictures. It's hard to know for certain, and I admit I may be shooting in the dark here, but I do tend to find that the better picture books come from teams and not individuals.

Now watch, the next dozen books or so I read will completely prove me wrong.

Resistance: Book 1

written by Carla Jablonski
art by Leland Purvis
First Second 2010

This graphic novel set during the Occupation of France by the Nazis in World War II shows the work of the Resistance movement through the eyes of children who find themselves in the thick of things.

Teen Paul finds himself the man of the house when his father is taken away by the German Occupying forces. When they Germans come and take away his Jewish friend Henri's parents Paul and his younger sister concoct a plan first to hide Henri for his own safety, then find themselves recruited to help the Resistance get information into the hands of those behind the lines in Occupied Paris.


The overall treatment of the story is fairly workmanlike. A reader with any knowledge of the Nazi occupation of France won't be surprised to read about characters who defied the Germans and worked hard to defeat them underground. That teens and young children were involved doesn't feel revelatory as children have played important roles in the history (and fictions) of all revolts. The pluck of nerve of these kids is a given; anything less wouldn't provide us with the story. But it's a story that drags, a story that is either overly simplistic or overly illustrated, depending on the spread of the moment. Scenes either don't have much impact despite their importance – like the taking of Henri's parents which takes place off stage – or their impact is drawn out over several panels where they could have been better handed with a single image.

I think there's room for a graphic novel about the Resistance movement in France, and that it would make a valuable alternative for readers interested in going deeper into World War II abroad, deeper than they can in most history classes. I only wish this book, and perhaps this series (a trilogy) could be condensed into a single volume of manageable length. We'll see when its finished whether the series drags or if its merely my impatience with this first book's mise en scene for the subsequent stories.

Lost States

Lost States:
True Stories of Texlahoma, Transylvania, and Other States That Never Made It
by Michael J. Trinklein
Quirk Books 2010


What if the United States had accepted every proposal to form a new state? One really messed up flag, that's for sure!  

Growing up in Southern California it is hard not to notice that there is a simmering animosity with neighbors to the north. It isn't so much that Sacramento, the state's northern nowheresville capitol, is out of touch with the urban hipness of Los Angeles, Hollywood, and the wealthy enclaves of Santa Barbara and San Diego counties. Nor was it the hippie-centric enclaves of Santa Cruz and San Francisco who felt that the south was nothing more than water-stealing conservatives. It was the fact that California was, and is, a "destination state" that draws immigrants from all over the country, so much so that fewer than one in seven Californians is a native. Basically, the state is full of people up and down the coast who'll never agree with one another; dividing the state into factions seems like a good idea only until it comes time to discuss how to do it, at which point things fall apart.

Every state in the United States, apparently, has some version of this story. Reading Lost States: True Stories of Texlahoma, Transylvania, and Other States That Never Made It is a fun little romp through the growing pains of a young nation and the people who would mold it to their personal agendas. Some of these lost states were merely boundary squabbles latter settled by politicians, others were publicity stunts designed to attract tourists or business, and still more have been proposed as a matter of political or economic practicality like the annexation of various islands for some strategic advantage. Each of the Lost States receives a brief history of its proposal and why it failed as well as a map outlining (or in most cases approximating) it's location in relation to what state is currently in its place. Many of these proposed states are clearly the results of the early land grabs and settlements of the 19th century. The really odd and interesting stories are the ones that reveal hidden, sometimes dark, histories. American Imperialism is alive and well in the proposal for adding the island nation of Saipan to the nation (or incorporating it into Guam and making an honest state of them both). The only problem is that Saipan – a slave-trading sweatshop nation that produces a huge amount of name-brand clothing with "Made in the USA" legally attached to it – would never be allowed to told what to do by a strong democracy like Guam, much less agree to US labor laws under which it would be bound.

Odder still is the former Soviet republic of Albania actively seeking to become the fifty-first state. So eager in fact that English is an official language and when the US seeks allies for foreign intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, Albania is first to step up. While there might be some political advantage gained by having a state wedged into the Adriatic coast between Greece and Montenegro, chances are better that Russia and the European Union might see the move as an opening salvo toward world domination. As Lost States suggests, Albania courting statehood is akin to "talking about marriage on the first date. Run, America, run!"

There's a lot to be learned in this book beyond the trivial. Apparently when Texas was admitted to the Union it was allowed the provision to divide itself up into as many as four states without having to seek Congressional approval. As the book points out, this means that the area of Texas could have as many as eight senators in Washington instead of two. It seems like Governor Rick Perry should have focused his attentions on dividing his state rather than promoting succession a while back. It amazes me that provision is still on the books.


Trinklein's maps are individual and well-created for the most part. Sometimes modifying older maps, creating new maps as necessary, for anyone who loves looking at or studying maps its fun to imagine how different things would be if, say, we talked vacationing in New Sweden instead of Maryland, or went to the Grand Canyon in New Mexico, or if, somehow, No Man's Land simply remained the unclaimed panhandle of Oklahoma.

(This review is cross-posted at Guys Lit Wire today, a great resource for books of interest to teen boys and their minders.)

Old Abe, Eagle Hero

The Civil War's Most Famous Mascot
written by Patrick Young
illustrated by Anne Lee


Traditionally-told biography of a bald eagle who was a wartime mascot, which is sort of odd when you think about it.  I thought so at least. But this book has bigger fish to fry, like the fact that it's riddled with inaccuracy.

"Found" in a nest high in a tree (i.e. stolen from its home) a Native American (here called an American Indian) named Chief Sky raises a fledgling eagle and then trades it to a farmer named McCann who, though he can farm, cannot apparently fight in the war due to his leg so he sends his eagle in his stead.  Old Abe rides a standard into battle for Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry's Company C and, though he has a few close scrapes, comes out alive after over a dozen battles.  Once home, Old Abe lives out his life as a celebrity, with a two-room apartment in the state capital and tours to the Liberty Bell in 1876 for the Centennial.  

All well and good, if it didn't have so many issues that makes the book more fiction than biography.

This is what happens when you do a life-to-near-death style biography and reshape historical events in the process.  One of the problems I have with picture book biographies is when information is diluted for its intended audience who in turn come away with the wrong idea about the story.  Chief Sky, as a boy and so clearly not the adult depicted here, spent hours scoping out the tree where the eagle's nest was, and had to fend off attacks by the eagle's parents.  This is a far cry from the illustration that shows Chief Sky as an adult calmly standing with a baby bird in his hand.  The illustration and text are framed in such a way as to have you believe it was an honorable and humane undertaking, more a rescue than a kidnapping, and not the antics of a boy. 

Next we have Chief Sky trading away his bird when his tribe goes downriver to conduct business with the white settlers.  It would have been just as easy to start the story here, with Chief Sky trading the eagle away without having to whitewash its provenance, and it wouldn't have affected the story at all.  To a point.  What isn't in the story, but I learned from a very quick Internet search, was that the bird was traded away for a bushel of corn. I think that's the sort of detail a young reader would find interesting, and would make for a good point of discussion; would you trade away your pet for something, and if so, what would you be willing to trade it for?

Then later, unlike the way it's presented in the book, McCann is reported as having made several attempts to sell the adult bird, finally finding a regiment that paid McCann five dollars (or $2.50, depending on which source you use) for their mascot.  Nothing about sending the bird to war in his stead, as suggested in this text.

At this point we're barely a fourth of way into the book, and I've grown impatient about trying to sort out what is ans isn't factual, or at least what is presented in a way that a reader doesn't draw the wrong conclusions.  For example, at one point a infantryman is shot and Old Abe is described as dragging "his buddy to safety."  At most, an adult eagle is going to weigh 15 pounds and can rarely lift or carry anything above its own weight... and you want me to believe a bird dragged a man ten times its weight to safety?  A kid reads that, sees that depicted in a book, they aren't going to question it.  Why should they?  We're giving them a book and telling them it's non-fiction, meaning it really happened.  Do we want them to think we're liars?

Best tidbit also not in the story, according to Wikipedia (which, unlike this book, cites references): Old Abe was a female eagle.  I don't fault the Wisconsin soldiers for not being able to correctly sex a bird, but at the very least it could be pointed out and the pronoun "she" could be used throughout the text to indicate that, now, we know better.  It sells an audience short to say they wouldn't understand that mistake, or that they'd get confused by a masculine name on a female animal.  And it continues to perpetrate known falsehoods.  We're back to the myth of Washington chopping down the cherry tree again.

I find it odd that an author who is a science and medical writer (or his publisher for that matter) wouldn't think to include a bibliography.  There is some backmatter about bald eagles, which is nice, but nothing specifically about Old Abe that might correct some of the inaccuracies in the text.  This would be the place to explain how war stories (like eagles dragging men to safety) were sometimes exaggerated by newspapers, or how it's likely that young Abe "danced" when McCann played music because its wings were clipped and it couldn't fly away, or even how Old Abe was actually female.  Also implied with in the subtitle – the most famous Civil War mascot – is the idea that there were other mascots of the war between the states.  Like that Dadblamed Union Army Cow.  Were there others?

I've said this before (and I've written a critical thesis about it for my MFA) I think that when it comes to presenting biographies and other factual materials to younger readers, particularly readers of picture books, those books need to be accurate, thorough, and perhaps even vetted to make sure the information present or implied isn't misleading.  We do no favors to children by teaching them about something or someone new to them if what we teach them is wrong.

Booth

Written by C. C. Colbert
Illustrated by Tanitoe
First Second  2010

A graphic novel exploration of the other half of the Lincoln assassination story, of its key player John Wilkes Booth, that lacks a very crucial element: motivation.

For as much as people refer to the United States as The Great Experiment in Democracy the simple truth is that it's history is marred by a pair of gaping wounds that will never heal out of willful neglect: racism and the Civil War.  Until we can have a frank and open discussion about these rifts, and can come to a place of peace with them, the Great Experiment can never be considered a success. 

Historian Colbert presents a pastiche of the life of John Wilkes Booth in an attempt, perhaps, to show us the other side of the story surrounding Lincoln's assassination.  We first learn of the Booth acting dynasty and the rift between brothers John and Edwin standing in the shadow of their master Shakespearean father.  Edwin, the prodigal, has the talent, but John has the looks, and the brothers are equally divided in their political loyalties once the War Between the States emerges.  While Edwin is content to gain accolades for his acting, John's attentions are split between the stage and his political activities helping the South. At it's simplest, Booth presents John as a racist, separatist villain with no respect for democracy, and his particular brand of theatrical arrogance finds favor among those who would use his access to political figures via his fame for their own ends.

But why does he do it?  How do a pair of brothers raised in the same house come to be divided over their politics during one of the most contentious periods of American history? Is it that Booth identifies with the South on an emotional level – be it an inferiority complex, a sense of entitlement, or simply an adolescent break from the parental confines – or is he nothing more than a pawn in a political game of chess?  What drives the disgruntled beyond grousing and into the realm of sedition?  These are the questions Booth doesn't answer, and given the ability to use the graphic novel medium to present a fairly large canvas it doesn't seem wrong to expect something more than backroom meetings and casual philandering for a shot at starring in the role of a lifetime.  We see a surly, angry Booth but we never know why or what has pushed him to this point.  Indeed, we aren't really shown anyone's motivations beyond the most one-dimensional of explanations.

Which brings me back to the point I started with, this idea that we are a nation scarred by the things we refuse to address.  History is as full of conspiracies and plots and schemes as it is honest efforts and high-minded ideals, but these things all come about by the will of people, and people have their reasons for doing the things they do.  If we cannot discuss their reasons, and do not engage in dialog through the ages over why people were motivated to do the things they did, we risk furthering old grievances and hatreds and misunderstandings.  With a change of scenery and dialog, Booth could easily be refashioned into the story of Lee Harvey Oswald.  I'm not saying the stories are identical, but that their backgrounds are equally murky and their motivations oversimplified.  And we risk the possibility of allowing history to repeat itself with every successive generation so long as we continue to not discuss these divisive issues. 

While I applaud Booth for wanting to address the idea that history has more than one side I find it lacks the necessary depth required for comprehending a difficult time in history.

Belly Up

by Stuart Gibbs
Simon and Schuster  2010

When the recently-deceased hippo mascot of a zoo turns out to have been murdered it falls to a 12 year old boy to solve the mystery none of the adults seem to be able to, but not without the help of a girl. 

Did that sound cynical?  Huh, I wonder why.

Could it be another mystery (albeit with an unusual victim) solved by a kid where no adult seems able to get to the bottom of things?  Could it be that the boy, who is all action and no thought, absolutely could not have solved anything without the help of the girl whose father own the zoo?  Could it be because it's impossible to imagine such an immense zoo run by so many incompetent adults?

And don't get me started about ANOTHER book where the boy needs a smart girl to solve the mystery.  

I was trying to understand why this bothered me so much, why there's such a line in sand between smart kids and dumb adults in fiction, and I think it's a misreading of what kids want.  To a kid's perspective everything adults do, they way they think and behave, comes with a set of knowledge that was developed over time.  The world of a kid runs by its own rules and the conflict comes when what they think bumps against the harsh reality.  It's the struggle of trying to puzzle out the world. 

But the way this gets represented in books is that there is an external problem to be solved and only the kids care enough to take it, only the kids are smart enough to get to the bottom of things.  The adults are obstacles meant to complicate plot but not to represent a real conflict between kid-think and adult-think.

So in Belly Up, when Teddy Fitzroy decides he needs to report the FunJungle mascot, Henry the Hippo, has been murdered the police right him off with all the gruff derision of a b-movie cop.  Large Marge, the beat security guard, is physically just a mountain to outrun.  The zoo director Martin del Gato is a Snidley villain to glower (and one can imagine twirling a mustache) and make people's lives miserable because his life is miserable.  The only reason Teddy is smarter than the adults is because he is surrounded by stereotypes and not adults. 

This is no less true in Hiassen's Hoot or Sacher's Holes, though both of those books are better at this sort of game because they bother to develop characters in the process.  For Hiassen there is a dynamic between recent transplant Roy, runaway Mullet Fingers, and his bruiser of a sister Beatrice that underscores their very different personalities and upbringings.  For Sacher there is a layer of magical realism in both Stanley's family history and in locale.  Gibbs tries, I think, to give Teddy a concerned wildlife researcher for a mother that feeds the boy's desire to see justice done over a murdered hippo, but if his mother was really that concerned she would have actually done more to stop the building of this farcical zoo before it ever opened.  I don't buy the "she was promised to supervise that it was done right" argument because principled individuals are wary of too-good-to-be-true offers like this, especially from wealthy industrialists who build mammoth zoos on a whim for the sake of their young daughters. 

Gibbs does write with insider's knowledge of zoos, showing the ugly underbelly of what it means to "educate" and entertain people with exotic animals, but its not enough to pull the book out of the realm of perfect-for-TV-movie-adaptation.

Sparky

The Life and Art of Charles Schulz 
by Beverly Gherman 
Chronicle Books  2010 

A well-told and nicely-presented biography of the man who created the most loved comic strip of the 20th century. 

Reading this biography of Charles Schulz I found myself feeling as if I knew most of this story from previous sources.  I knew about his first published drawing being in a Ripley's Believe It Or Not panel, about his early drawing exercises, about the real names behind the characters names.  Here and there I found a tidbit I wasn't as clear about – that he won a Reuben award for his Peanuts strip, yes, but not that he actually accepted the award from its namesake Rube Goldberg – and the occasional detail that might have been shielded from my younger eyes in the past (divorce and remarriage weren't the kinds of things that used to be in biographies for children). 

This time, amid the narrative that gambols casually through time and not always 100% linearly, what I was most struck with was how incredibly lucky Schulz life had been.  I'm not saying he didn't have talent or skills, but for as socially awkward as he was and for as insecure he never really had to suffer.  He had his early years in the wilderness immediately following his career in the Army after WWII, but when he landed his first syndicated cartoon strip, it was Peanuts and he spent the next fifty years doing it.  After those first ten years he produced a Christmas special that became an iconic tradition.  Second probably to Mickey Mouse, Snoopy may be the the most identifiable character the world over, and the man never had a full studio or a theme park to make it happen. 

It seems impossible that Schulz could have walked any other path in his life, that he was called to do this one thing and he nailed it.  He didn't dream any of it, so he can't be said to have followed the usual "do what you love" sort of thinking we often impress upon children that leads them to long for stardom.  He had a talent, he knew the job, he sat down and executed it the best he could.

This message isn't overtly stated, and I'm not sure how much that is by design.  I think that biographies ought to strive to present information in a way that allows the reader to draw conclusions while providing a clear picture of the individual being portrayed.  Gherman does that here, and while there are probably few young readers who know the comic strip but might know the TV specials, this book could provide a perfect introduction to the man and invite further investigation.

The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys

by Scott William Carter
Simon & Schuster  2010 

Two boys hit the road in a stolen car on a journey to both run away from and confront their parental relationships.  It's practically a teenage Roger Corman film from the 1960s, except it isn't.

Sensitive artist Charlie can't believe his mom is about to marry her stiff accountant boyfriend, while at school he's being menaced by bully Leo because he dared to ask Leo's girlfriend to the prom.  He's about to take a pounding after school when Charlie's ex-best friend turned bad boy Jake pulls up in a stolen car (the principal's) and takes them on an unplanned road trip that leads to a dead kid four states away.

The book opens with Charlie explaining that he has to backtrack a few days to tell you how he ended up killing this kid, which becomes the hook that drags the reader the rest of the way.  Who is this kid that gets killed?  Why and how does he do it?  What happened during those three days that made this inevitable?  Read on, read on... 

Charlie really is a straight laced bit of worrywart, and Jake has clearly become a loose cannon since the days when the boys would pall around beaning people with water balloons.  Jake smokes, steals cars, makes out with girls casually, and generally is the sort of kid Charlie would have to be warned to stay away from.  But when Jake comes to his rescue Charlie can't shake that somewhere beneath this tough boy act is the same kid he used to call a friend.  Being weak-willed, Charlie goes for the ride as they outrun cops, hitch a ride with a suicidal girl they meet on the road, and try to make things right even in the midst of screwing things up with every turn. 

That Charlie, the "good" one of the two, manages to be the one who pulls the trigger (it's self defense, but the boys aren't in the right) underscores the point that if he were truly good he had dozens of opportunities to get out of the car and away from Jake.  Of course, Jake the "bad" one has good reasons for his actions, even if he masks them behind his arrogant braggadocio.  In the end it's a frantic, unplanned, twisted road trip of two teen boys working out their father issues and the unfinished business that broke their friendship.

The story breezes like a screenplay for a two-teens-on-the-run type of story.  It doesn't seem promising when it opens with the typical trouble-at-home, trouble-at-school scenario, but it quickly burns rubber from these scenes and turned out to be better than I had expected.  I don't know what I expected.

Maybe it has to with the title.  The Last Great Getaway would be fine of there were other getaways prior to this, but it's all one, long, single getaway so that seems misleading.  It's also pretty generic sounding, so I understand adding of the Water Balloon Boys, except for the fact that it suddenly makes the story sound a lot more juvenile than it really is.  The first half of the title could be Raymond Chandler and the second half Neil Simon.

How to Survive Middle School...

(without getting your head flushed) and Deal with an Ex-Best Friend, ... um, Girls, and a Heartbreaking Hamster
by Donna Gephart
Peachtree Press / Random House 2010 

I think the only thing the title doesn't include is the main character's love of Jon Stewart, and perhaps the fact that he isn't legally old enough to have a YouTube account... 

David Greenberg is a bit of a nebbish who wants so much to be like Jon Stewart when he grows up that he spends his free time creating a one-man TV show called Talk Time.  The show comes off like n amalgamation of different late night elements – a top six-and-a-half list, a quasi monologue, and a regular feature called "The Moment of Hammy" featuring David's pet hamster.  But just before the first day of school David and his best friend Elliot have a falling out and – because you can't have a middle grade story without a bad guy – Elliot teams up with the school bully to make Elliot's transition to middle school a nightmare.  The girl of the title is Sophie, a whipsmart, previously homeschooled girl who not only loves his videos but manages to get them a wider audience that spreads all the way to the top.  And by that I mean they get the attention of the producers of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.  In the end scores are settled, amends are made, and David might just survive middle school after all.

I've been knee deep in a fair amount of middle grade books with boy main characters lately, and I've had a difficult time reconciling these characters with real middle grade boys. It isn't that they're way off base in characterization so much as they all seem so narrowly focused.  And I don't necessarily mean self-centered (though there is a bit of that) but that their desires and behaviors are confined to a personal goal, a school-based conflict, a home-based conflict, and a resolution that comes with external aid or understanding and not entirely from within the character themselves.  I guess I'm sensing a formula, and by the looks of it I'm going to have to conclude it's a successful one in terms of getting published.

Something else that always comes to mind is that readers of this age tend to be younger than the main character by a few years.  In this case the ideal reader is going to be nine or ten years old.  So what is an older elementary school reader going to get from this reading experience?  The idea that middle school is something to fear?  That you should be career minded by the age of eleven?  That all it takes is a YouTube account and a girlfriend with a homeschool network to become famous enough to take newspaper interviews and land on national television?

I suppose the other thing that eats at me is this idea of a bully as a stock character to be overcome without addressing the actual problems or solutions of bullying in the first place.  The bully as an obstacle, entrenched as a brick wall, with no attempt to understand the reasons beyond the superficial "he has no father" or "she's just insecure."  As we've seen in the news lately, though it's hardly new, the reasons for bullying and the way students and adults deal with it is far more nuanced than some kid offering up knuckle sandwiches or adults saying "There oughta be a law."

In How to Survive Middle School... Tommy Murphy is a kid whose name screams stock character from the rafters.  If it had been written that he was born in the back of an Irish bar, I wouldn't have been surprised.  "That kid's crazy mean" David's cousin Jack warns him, and apparently that's all you need to know.  Like Checkov's maxim that a gun in the first act will be fired by the third, an off-screen bully introduced at the beginning of the story is going to be nothing but a menace throughout.

At this level the bully ceases to exist as a character and simply becomes a device.  An antagonist without a narrative arc of their own who stands out like a two-dimensional cut-out in a crowded room reduces the other characters to little more than plot devices themselves.  Yes, a main character needs obstacles to overcome, but they need to be organic to the story, they need to rise from the characters desires and not simply a road block plonked into the middle of the road.

So I guess in this roundabout way I've decided that for David Greenberg the only thing that stands between him and fame is... nothing.  Because despite his mom having run off to be a hippie beet farmer, his best friend taking sides with the cardboard bully, and being liked by a new girl to the school, all of poor David's conflicts have nothing to do with whether or not he can achieve notoriety for his videos.

City of Spies

by Susan Kim & Laurence Klavan 
artwork by Pascal Dizin 
First Second Press 2010 

This World War II espionage graphic novel set in New York is nothing short of an American cousin to Tintin, right down to the ligne claire style of artwork and youngsters in peril and adventure. 

It's 1942 and young Evelyn is getting dumped onto her NYC Aunt Lia so her dad can get married again.  Used to being left to her own, she creates the continuing comic adventures of Zirconium Man and his sidekick Scooter, who resembles Evelyn.  After a rocky start, she teams up with Tony, the super's boy, and they spend the summer searching the streets of New York for Nazi spies.  When Evelyn discovers a code template and works out its meaning, she and Tony attempt to route out the spies themselves, but they get in way over their head and find themselves hoping they've left enough of a trail that they can be saved in the nick of time. 

This doesn't even scratch the surface of what is going on in City of Spies, which is part of what makes it a rollicking adventure story.  The fact that Evelyn's family is Jewish, that they live in an ethnic neighborhood where everyone is desperately trying to cover their ethnic roots behind red, white, and blue patriotism, not only gives some great background to what wartime America was like but serves as a subtle echo to modern times where post-9/11 businesses were forced to place American flags in their windows for the same reasons.  As Evelyn and Tony discover, it's easy to see foreign agents wherever you look, and far too often it's the people who have assimilated themselves all too well who avoid suspicion.

At times I found Evelyn's comic book interludes to be a bit contrived.  They exist to give insight into how Evelyn is feeling – about being abandoned by her father, about losing her mother, about the nightmare of creeping Nazi fascism – and they rarely added enough to be worthwhile.  I was grateful at the end when her comics shifted toward an Evelyn-and-Tony team of Indiana Jones-type of adventurers, her fantasy realm now based on a cooperative friendship instead of paternalistic heroism.

The writing in brisk and well paced, with enough story for the secondary characters to move around in as well.  Dizin's art and color palate does Herge one better in presenting New York as a city with more that six colors; I don't fault Herge's limitations, he was one of the best at the time, but color processing was different 70 years ago. Would it be too much to hope for more Evelyn stories, adventures of a spunky girl in peril set in the mid-century that entertain against a historical background?  It might take a bit of jiggering (dad moves to New York so Tony could continue to be involved?) but I suspect this would hit the Tintin audience – boys and girls alike – and do very well.

Doctor Proctor's Fart Powder

by Jo Nesbo
translated from Norwegian by Tara Chace
Aladdin 2010 

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Adventures of Jack Lime

by James Leck
Kids Can Press  2010

A trio of hardboiled detective stories for the upper middle grade set.

Jack Lime is a kid people go to when they need to have problems solved.  Problems like cheating boyfriends and missing bikes and gambling rings and kidnapped... hamsters.

As with all detective stories, Lime has to wade his way through the sort of half-truths and double-crosses he's presented with, trying to reconcile what peopletell him with what he has to piece together through observation.  And as with all who meddle in the affairs of others there is a price, usually a punch to the face or the breadbasket.  Getting around the issue of doing a job for hire, Lime does what he does for the favors he can collect and use as barter down the road.  He's a lone wolf (orphaned, living with his grandmother), worldly (from big city LA to small town Iona),  who can usually solve the case but rarely gets the rewards he deserves.

Written in the first-person tough-guy voice of classic hardboiled fiction, Jack Lime is the closest I've seen to anyone grafting Raymond Chandler's Marlowe into children's literature.  Not that other's haven't tried, but those others all suffered from the strain of their own efforts to appear clever and arch.  Leck has managed to find just the right tone and though it is still an affectation of style it comes off as effortless and natural. 

And it's appropriately short.  I would have been happy for any one of these cases to be a book unto themselves, but that Leck gets three satisfying stories into 126 pages makes its case against those books that drag out a single drama for upwards of 275 pages.  Present the case, get on the job, land in some trouble, wiggle out of trouble and solve the case.  No need to get clever and drag things out endlessly.  The "crimes" are within the realm of possibility, if slightly exaggerated to match the genre, solved without the use of unbelievable talents, and doesn't pit whiz kids against idiot adults.  I think this is my new standard for what can and should be done with detective stories aimed at the older middle grade reader.

The Boys

by Jeff Newman 
Simon and Schuster  2010

A Mid-Century Modern picture book valentine to the nature of boys at play, both young and old. 


On Monday the new kid moves to town.  On Tuesday he sets out to the park with his bat and ball to mingle with the kids of his new neighborhood but can't bring himself to join in.  He shuffles over to a park bench full of a quartet of old men who don't quite understand what's up with the kid.  On Wednesday the kid goes back to the park to feed the pigeons on the bench with the old boys who feel a little awkward that the kid has adopted them as his social group.  Then on Thursday the kid arrives wearing obnoxious plaid retiree pants and his hair slicked back and the old boys realize it's time to get this kid back on track.  Suddenly the kid is the grumpy old man on the bench yelling at the obnoxious old guys who are chasing the pigeons away on their bikes and making a ruckus at the playground.  In the end it is a game of baseball that integrates the kid with his peers and gives the old men someplace else to sit than the park bench.

That all of this is done without words is a good part of its charm. The mood on these pages is easily readable at a glance, very much character driven and clearly understandable.  This ability to portray emotions and tell stories with simple illustrations is key for younger readers to understand how to "read" pictures.  This is a key value in wordless picture books because being able to decode the language of illustrations and illustrated stories is as necessary as sight reading.  It also happens to be the element I find lacking in a lot of graphic novels put out by publishers of children's books, but that's a rant for another day.  

Newman's style of watercolor - the broad brush strokes that suggest more than they define, the bold swaths of muted color - would almost fit in with the style of the independent cartoons produced by the UPA in the 40s and 50s; cartoons like Gerald McBoing Boing.  Almost, not quite.  I think there are times Newman's brush is a little too large in the scene and distracting from the more controlled character work, but it isn't a deal killer.

All Star!

Honus Wagner and the Most Famous Baseball Card Ever
by Jane Yolen
illustrated by Jim Burke
Philomel  2010

This picture book biography of the early baseball legend reads a little too much like a book report.

I've read this every day for a week now and can't quite figure out what isn't working for me.  Is it because the language and telling of the story feels flat?  Because I don't actually get a sense of what made Honus Wagner a great player, despite all the examples?  Is it because I expected more of a story behind the The Most Famous Baseball Card Ever?

The story of the Honus Wagner baseball card is that when Wagner realized the card was to be included with cigarette packages he demanded they be removed – think of the children! –  making the existing cards rare but not the rarest of collectables.  That much can be gleaned here in Yolen's telling (which, it must be noted, is only explained on one spread in the book, despite the card's promenance in the subtitle).  What isn't discussed is how a person could agree to appear on a card produced by the American Tobacco Company and not think it would be tied to the product.  Some believe the real issue was compensation, which would actually make Wagner not unlike his contemporaries.

Many have said in the past that Wagner, an all-around great player, was the greatest shortstop of all time.  But it's a funny thing about sports legends and their mythology: "greats" are not the same thing as "firsts," because they aren't as easily measurable.  Would the greatest shortstop of 1909 be as good at his position if he were on the field today?  This is the danger in idolization, where the myth can never be stripped because time has made it untouchable.  In the last 100 years there have been no less than 14 different athletes who have been dubbed "The World's Fastest Man," each new record stripping the title from all others based on measurable speed.  A runner's hall of fame might include all these men but there would be no disputing that, at the time of their achievement, they were the fastest runner documented.  Has the game of baseball, and the men who play it, changed so little in 100 years that one of its earliest participants can still hold the title of "greatest" in an area as subjective as a position on a team?

So I wonder if there is a risk in continuing to perpetrate the greatness of sports legends outside of what is factual.  In All Star! we're told Wagner played on five different teams in three states in order to make a living at baseball.  It's a throw-away bit of detail, but far more interesting that a lot of the information surrounding it.  Was this typical of a lot of players during that era, or was Wagner unique?  We don't learn that here, and this brief tidbit is left to stand in a way that suggests to a reader that this made him exceptional. Once again, the casual treatment of factual information in a picture book biography leaves open the possibility of misinformation. But he's an American legend, and we're not supposed to question (much less think about) the facts, right?

I guess my lasting impression of All Star! is that it feels very much like a journeyman effort from a well-respected author in the field of children's writing.  The story is flat, there's no real sense of what made Wagner tick beyond his love of the game, and opportunities to expand and explore what would make this biography unique are abandoned in favor of a tepid birth-to-just-before-death biography style of another century.

If I were being cynical I would say that, as the "prologue" to All Star! states, a Honus Wagner card was sold at auction in 2007 and a picture book author read about it in the paper and thought it might make for a good story.  That being the entire pitch, and the author being who she is within the industry, a publisher said "yes!" without further question and the final manuscript was tossed off after a week's worth of research.  If that isn't what happened here that's at least what it feels like.

Boom Boom Go Away

by Laura Geringer
illustrated by Bagram Ibatoulline
Atheneum 2010

"A most unusual bedtime story" the cover touts, and I have to agree: the book does everything in its power to keep kids awake and shouting at their parents to go away and leave them alone.

A little gnome sits banging away at his drum. His mother tells him it's time for bed. His response?

"Hush! / Don't spoil the rhythm / of my drum." / boom boom / "Go away" / boom boom / "Go away!"

This is followed by a succession of toys; an elf on a gong, a prince with a bassoon, a knight with bells, a robot with spoons, mermaids with harps, a bear with a horn, all adding their own particular piece to the cacophany, all telling their parents to hush and go away. At the end we see a small boy fading into his bed with the refrain, his toys scattered about on his bed, all quiet.

Inspired by a song the author's child learned at a Dalcroze music class, the song has been imagined here to be a bedtime story, but the original point of the song was teach rhythm and cadence and hardly includes actions and sounds conducive to quieting a child's mind for sleep. Indeed, I sincerely doubt the song was taught as a pre-nap exercise, and in the author's note Geringer confesses her own child repeated the opening verse over and over – mostly likely the outcome for any impressionable child. The fact that the refrain includes a bit of defiance, a hush and go away, would seem to be exactly the sort of thing adults would want to discourage not reinforce through the repetition of this text.

Ibatoulline's illustrations disappoint as well here. Where in Jane Yolan's The Scarecrow's Dance there was life and nuance here this are static, dead toys against neutral backgrounds that echo the emptiness.

Erroll

by Hannah Shaw
Knopf 2010

You expect me to believe that if a kid found a live rodent in his snack food that he'd befriend it until his mother told him to get rid of it? Seriously?

Sometimes I think I take picture books a little too seriously, a little too literally. Sometimes I forget that I have put on my picture book kid hat, a hat that sometimes sits casually on my head at a goofy angle and sometime sits tight and low and uncomfortable. It's a hat I sometimes forget I'm wearing, and at other times I toss with anger and disgust. And sometimes, when what I'm reading really puzzles me, I scratch my head and the picture book hat falls off.

The book opens with a boy named Bob finding a squirrel in his package of nuts. When the squirrel speaks in surprise, and introduces himself as Erroll, Bob figures he must be special and immediately does what he can to make Erroll comfortable in his new home. Bob does spend half a second trying to imagine how Erroll might have ended up in the package, but beyond that he's willing to accept this animal visit like a toy surprise inside his breakfast cereal.

Now, to be honest, I can partly relate. When I was in kindergarten I asked if I could create a squirrel home in the closet under the stairs that was underused. I promised to find a tree and build a nice home for it but was stumped by the questions I was asked when I was being humored: How would the squirrel get sunlight? What would it do during the day while I was at school? Where, living in a city and having never ever seen a squirrel in my life, did I plan to get a live squirrel from? Details, details. Clearly my mom wasn't buying the right kind of nuts from the store.

Eventually the squirrel causes enough havoc that mom forces Bob to release Erroll to the wild (and presumably she then goes in search of a lawyer to sue the manufacturer for nearly giving her kid rabies) leaving us with the twist at the end: What's inside the Chewy Crunchy Monkey Munchy breakfast cereal box? Whoa! You mean to tell me live animals inside packaged food are so common in this picture book world that it happens all the time! Quick! More legislation and food regulators! Think of the children, and create more jobs for the sagging economy at the same time!

Sorry, the picture book hat fell off again. I wish I could see past the casual animal-in-food-for-children element and find some sort of goofy fun in this picture book, but I can't. I can't even get into the illustrations as they are fussy and crowded with unnecessary details, occasionally with colors close to those of the main characters, making it difficult to know where to focus your eye on the page. It isn't an I Spy so much as a Where's Waldo situation, only in this case it's Where's Erroll and that's a problem.

Final nail: A little kid saying the name Erroll sounds a bit like "error," which maybe isn't far from the mark.