Are You a Horse?

by Andy Rash
Arthur Levine / Scholastic
2009

Our in the old West, cowboy Roy receives a new saddle as a birthday present. "What is this thing?" Roy asks, and he's instructed to 1. Find a horse and 2. Enjoy the ride. Roy is one clueless cowboy to not recognize a saddle, and he continues his clueless way through the picture book asking every animal, vegetable, and mineral he sees if they are horse. The absurdity is compounded by the impossible (a crab? a sloth? a zebra?) until Roy finds what he's looking for. With a final page turn readers are given the twist that is a natural combination of Roy's cluelessness and the reader's natural assumptions.

Are You a Horse? is saved in that final page turn. Up until then it has meandered its way across the pages like an updated version of Are You My Mother? and despite reinforcement on every page that Roy is as dense as black hole the reader is never clued in that Roy's instructions aren't specific enough. I seriously almost wrote this book off as derivative and unfunny until that last page, and then recognized the rewards of seeing a book through to the end (hey, it's only a picture book, no need to abandon it) and chuckled (sort of) at my own blind spot.

Having watched new readers page through picture books it would be easy for them to skip along and think they know what's happening without actually reading it first (on their own, kids will often read a book's pictures first, then go back and read the text) and on the visual level the story works just as well. Where most pages are full-bleed illustrations, the page with the sloth is drawn out across the spread in a series of panels that slow the visual reader down to appreciate the sloth's slow response.

My one lingering question – and this is mostly a personal question and nothing to fault the book necessarily – is how and why cowboys endure as lasting icons of the imagination. It's an era full of images that seem isolated from the rest of the world, almost like a fantasy world or the fanciful imagining of a pirate's life. Growing up, I remember thinking that the whole world went through an Old West phase, that somehow people went from dark suits and stove-top hats of Lincoln's day, to wearing chaps, then back to suits in the same way that the disco era's polyester leisure suits briefly supplanted traditional sartorial styles on either side.

But what is it about this particular era in American history that fascinates so? Why don't we see picture books set in, say, the Jazz Age or even the beloved Disco Days? What makes the West so special, what sets it apart and gives it appeal? Is it simply that so much of its imagery is iconic? The hats and the boots, the cactus and the unspoiled prairies? But then, couldn't we convey similar messages set during the Flower Power days with long hair and bare feet and psychedelia?

Sometimes I wonder whether these icons and images persist because we keep feeding them to children, or whether there's something larger that children would be drawn to without the extra reinforcement.

Getting the Girl

by Marcus Zusak
Arthur Levine / Scholastic 2003

Cameron is a multiple anomaly in the world of teen fiction about boys. He's sensitive, quiet, sweet, poetic, searching, and longs for a girl beyond his reach. I take that back, Cameron reads like the cliche of a sensitive teen boy caught in the shadow of his older brothers and the rough-and-tumble streets of his working class neighborhood. As Cameron drifts along from scene to scene, it is quickly clear that what he longs for and deserves he will get, and the title confirms the inevitable.

So the question is, if we learn all this quickly going in, what's to hold us long enough to care?

Zusak's language. But just barely.

The only way Zusak can pull this off is by having a main character insightful and erudite enough to convey what would be beyond the scope of most teens his age. He presents himself as awkward, but it's the shambling awkward of a teen who hasn't realized he's a king in disguise. The reader sees (and is supposed to) that Cameron is worthy of so much more than his current station in life, and all he really wants is Octavia, the one girl his older brother Ruben has cast aside (as he is wont to do every couple of weeks). But like a pauper sage, Cameron must spend time living the horrible doubt of an artist, looking at his working class dead-end family and wondering if he's good enough for something more.

All along the way we see Cameron's poetic notes that he takes, an attempt to capture an emotional photograph of each transition as he experiences it. His father lives for the gruntwork of plumbing, his brother for occasional fight that has made him top of the trash heap, his sister the secretive photographer who may be his spiritual equal, and through it all Cameron serves as Frederick, Leo Leoni's picture book mouse whose gifts only bloom in the dead of an emotional winter, when it may be that he's lost the girl for good. The old Yiddish expression is that sometimes people need a story more than food; for Cameron, his words are food that keep his soul alive.

And the metaphors. I have author Varian Johnson to thank for pointing these out at a recent lecture at VCFA. Water, water, everywhere, and Cameron is there to swim in it, drown in it, ebb and flow with it. But the water is Zusak's/Cameron's metaphor for his desire, his lust, his longing and hopes. Octavia is the ocean he longs to swim in, to touch and be consumed by. It is compelling because Zusak manages to keep making references to water without downing the reader in the obvious. The metaphor is clearly Cameron's, and its in these moments that Zusak succeeds.

But when a book so clearly telegraphs its message early on and shows no hint at veering off track, then both me and the teenage boy inside me begin to get antsy. The pacing is so deliberate that it frustrates, and Cameron's poetic notes verge on the precious. With few scenes and sparse-but-poetic handling this book's 250 pages could be cut in half and not miss a thing. The first-person narration so eloquent in its observations they make actual prose-poems in Cameron's hand inserted between the chapters redundant. There is a perfect novella – the size and shape of which would attract more boy readers – trapped in this conventional-length novel, one I would have been hard-pressed to find fault with. But as is the story drags, the inevitable seems less a prize for having been held at arms-length for far too long.

Bobby Vs. Girls (Accidentally)

by Lisa Yee
illustrations by Dan Santat
Arthur A. Levine / Scholastic Books 2009

Bobby and Holly are friends and have been for some time, they just aren't friends in front of other kids. Because everyone knows that boys and girls cannot be friends, Bobby and Holly have tried to keep their private friendship separate from their school freinds, but things get complicated (and confusing for Bobby) when Holly aligns herself with queen bee Jillian and begins to actively hate Bobby. Or so she'd have everyone believe.

For Bobby's part, he does what you'd expect a fourth grader to do, which is to bumble his way through misadventures that threaten both his friendship with Holly and his standing as a boy in the gender roles that the kids feed into. The centerpiece of the story is election for student council representative that pits boys against girls, specifically Bobby against Holly. Amid the boy/girl tension Bobby also has his former football star turned stay-at-home dad embarrassing him, he gets himself stuck to a tree on a field trip to a botanical garden, and then there's that run-in with static cling involving underwear stuck to his shirt. Also, Bobby longs for a dog, but he's allergic to fur, so he tries to teach his pet goldfish to do tricks to compensate.

Good stuff for the younger middle grade set, and a good starting point for discussions about boy/girl friendships. It does end with a note of hope that boys and girls can be friends but it won't be an easy road ahead.