Going Underground

by Susan Vaught  
Bloomsbury 2011

Three years after a school incident turns him into a felon, can Del find love and a life outside the graveyard where he works?  

Yeah, I said graveyard.

Del is seventeen, and digging graves isn't just the only job he can find that doesn't do background checks, but it gives him plenty of time to think about how he got here. With a parole officer checking to make sure he tries to get into a college, and a therapist helping him sort out his issues, you would think Del was a hellion who had gone on a murderous spree.  

His crime: sexting with his girlfriend when they were fourteen.  

At the time of the original incident Del was a straight-A kid, an athlete, with a good future ahead of him. And when he and his girlfriend sent each other pictures of themselves naked they thought, well, they thought they were being responsible by doing that instead of having sex. Turns out they probably should have had sex, because according to the law his girlfriend was under the age of consent (a few weeks shy of her fourteenth birthday) and that made what Del did a sex crime. As in, sex offender. As in, on your permanent record for decades.  

For three years since Del, more than any of his friends, have had to deal with the taint of this offense. Del wasn't the only one participating in sexting. At an overnight event on school grounds Del and his friends were talking about the images their girlfriends had sent them when they had their cell phones confiscated. The teachers who took the phones saw the images and, by law, reported what they found to the police. The next thing they knew they were at the police station being questioned. Despite Del's parents, and his girlfreind's parents, refusal to press charges in favor of dealing with it themselves it was the local DA who was going to use this case, and Del, as an example. In the fallout, his girlfreind's parents decided to move away from the town in protest, Del's friends kept their distance, and Del was reduced to the pariah status of a predatory sex offender.  

And, again, all because the kids thought they were being responsible by sending each other naked photos of themselves instead of having sex.  

Del does manage to find a new girlfriend who doesn't think what he did was wrong, and he does manage to find a college willing to take a chance on a kid willing to be frank and open about his situation, but the central questions about whether what Del and the other kids was right or wrong is one the reader can mull over and discuss with friends.

Vaught's style is breezy and unobtrusive, it gets the job done without being preachy and without fully taking the stand that what Del did was okay. The story does lean toward the idea that prosecuting minors as sex offenders is harsh and underscores how much damage can be done to teens in an effort to  "crack down" on bad behavior through excessive legislation. It would probably make a good stating point for a lively classroom discussion, though in places where it would probably be beneficial the book will no doubt be offensive to some adults and get a school or teacher in trouble for using it as a legitimate classroom tool.

Mister Creecher

by Chris Priestley
Bloomsbury 2011

The creature walks the streets of London, with the Artful Dodger, hunting down the mad doctor!  No, Boris Karloff does not make an appearance.

The scene is London, 1918, and there in the darkened, fog-damp streets is Billy, pickpocket and petty thief. Billy starts off in a spot of trouble with the local thugs when is hide is saved by an enormous monster of a man who Billy comes to call Mister Creecher. An odd and uneasy bond develops between them as Mr. C convinces him to come along on a bloody (literally) little trip to the country in search of the true monster, the man who made Mr C what he is, one Doctor Victor Frankenstein. While in the country Billy sees a bucolic side of life, something better than being a street rat, and he pretends to be a poet to win a young lady's affection. Ah, but the good Doctor has his eye set on creating a new creature, a companion for Mr C if you will, and suddenly all paths converge in a way that sends Billy back to the comforts of London's rough and tumble street. It's there that he'll start to go by his grown name of Bill... Bill Sikes.

What? How did Dickens end up in all this?

For a new take on Frankenstein's monster this is an interesting idea, the blending of two fictional characters in one setting. But if you have a familiarity with Frankenstein and Oliver Twist it's hard to see the mash-up without your thoughts getting trapped in a corner of literary logic. How could these two worlds exist at the same time? Worse, I found while reading that I was starting to hear bits of the musical Oliver! play in my mind while scenes played out like an old 1930s movie staring Boris Karloff. Which is to say that Priestley does a good job catching the mood but the mood in this book feels borrowed at every turn. I did like that Creecher was articulate, almost aristocratic in bearing, and he makes an interesting "mentor" if we are to believe that this particular Billy will become, in manner at least, like his Dickensian namesake.

So for the idea in general, I like, but I don't know that it's going to stick with me over time.

Calamity Jack

written by Shannon and Dean Hale
illustrated by Nathan Hale
Bloomsbury 2010

Sequel to the graphic novel Rapunzel' Revenge, this time following the backstory and continuing adventures of Jack, skewering fairy tales along the way. 
 
Having helped Rapunzel escape, Jack's intention is to bring her back to his home city of Shyport and make restitution for the mess he's left behind.  And what a mess.  There's a reason this boy is nicknamed Calamity, and you know it's bad when even your family members wish you away so as to stop harming them in the process. 

As this is a world based on fairy tales, we learn that Jack is none other than Beanstalk Jack, with perhaps a bit of Jack-be-nimble thrown in to account for his days as a petty thief.  As the tale goes, Jack discovers the Giant in the sky – here, he's a wealthy Baron living in a floating penthouse – wherein an uncooperative golden goose is kept.  The Giant also brings his own special flour to be used by Jack's mother in her bakery to make bread.  One guess what the Giant grinds to make that flour.  Liberating the goose infuriates the Giant but Jack leaves town with a price on his head without thinking about the consequences of his actions. 

This is the backstory that leads up to Repunzel's Revenge, and serves as the introduction to Jack's return.  Hoping to show off his old town Jack finds much has changed.  The town is menaced by massive ants who destroy the town (or at least specifically targeted places in town) only to be driven off by the Giant's army.  Shyport looks like a cross between three different London's: steampunk, Dickensian, and WII.  And all of this chaos brought on by Jack's misadventure many years previous. Naturally, it's up to Jack (with the help of Rapunzel and some friends from his previous life) to set things right. 

Hinted at in the first book, and played up here, there is a romantic element between Jack and Rapunzel.  It's never really been a secret to anyone but Jack, including readers, and there's a bit of his bumbling that makes me reach the edge of that place where I want to shout "Oh, just kiss her already!"  With their budding romance at the end, and their flying off into the moonrise in a zeppelin chased by the Jabberwocky, it seems as if there will certainly be a third book in this graphic novel series.

As a follow-up to Rapunzel's Revenge this book does a nice job filling Jack's past while bringing both characters forward in a continuation of their adventures together.  It does occasionally suffer the problem inherent in many comics of bringing readers up to speed with a sort of "origins story" but with some minor reservations the sequel is as strong as its predecessor. 

And on a side note, while a certain series concerning Hunger and Games has been anxiously awaited in this house by a certain teen, this was the book my tween daughter could not wait for me to put into her hands at the beginning of summer vacation.  She could not (or would not) explain why she wanted to read it so badly, only that she was willing to even clean her room and do her own laundry in order to read it.  For what it's worth.

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 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.

all the wrong people have self-esteem

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

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

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

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

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


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

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