Just Disgusting

by Andy Griffiths   with illustrations by Terry Denton  
Scholastic  

"From the Best-Selling Author of The Day My Butt Went Psycho..." 'nuff said.  

In researching about the types of books boys like to read I came up with a short list of elements that, when included, would increase a reader's interest. Most of the things writers are taught have to do with craft elements – subtext, metaphor, desire lines, character development, plotting and pacing, etc – which may make for fine literature but aren't the sort of things boys care about when they want to read.

Want to read.

See, for me the battle for the mind of boy readers is getting them to want to read and worrying about content and context much later. And if getting them to the point where they want to read means giving them a longer leash on junk reading, so be it. In fact, where curricula moves students from reading for fun toward reading for meaning at around the fourth grade I think the goal posts should be moved and those concepts introduced in the second half of sixth grade. Let them read for fun for a few more years and I think you'll have a larger group of stronger readers among the student body. Boys and girls could continue to read whatever interested them, none of the books currently taught would be abandoned, all I'm suggesting is a couple extra years to let boys get a better footing with reading and toward wanting to read.  

That said, here is a fine piece of junk reading that boys will enjoy, one of a series. It's got everything a boy could hope for in a book: short stories, outrageous humor, exportable imagery, plenty of action, a good dose of cartoon violence, and no pretensions about being art or literary. What the books in this series lack in subtlety they make up for in sheer gross-out entertainment value. There is no way any teacher or parent is going to recommend these books to the boys in their charge, and boys know it, which is also part of their appeal.

Of these, Just Disgusting is my favorite, mostly because it seems the most chaotic. It opens with a list of "101 Really Disgusting Things" many of which will be featured in the book, though some are just there for the extreme gross-out factor. You put two or more boys in a room and ask them to come up with a list of things they find disgusting and this would be pretty close. And this is the charm (?) and brilliance (!) of what Griffiths is about, because he seems to be able to access those moments when boys are totally unguarded and uncensored. Most adults would agree that many of the things on the list are, truly, disgusting, but the difference between adults and kids is that we no longer talk about such things, but not kids. For the middle school reader much of this is still fresh territory and a valuable currency during recess and on the playground.  

Sometimes the stories drag, but only because they follow the beating-a-dead-horse rule of schoolyard storytelling. The internal editor in my adult head was thinking of all sorts of ways to shorten the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure parody of "Cake of Doom" or the annoying sibling story "Shut Up!" but to do so would remove their authenticity. In precisely the same way that adults quickly tie of the way children will drag out something they find amusing, these stories seem almost designed to serve as adult repellent.  

Coupled with these stories are the spot illustrations that are all over the margins and threaten to crowd out the text, or at least overshadow it. In the same way that MAD magazine includes the "marginal" art of Sergio Aragones, the Just books include short comic strips, illustrations of key points in the text, flipbooks in the corners, and in the case of "Two Brown Blobs" a full comic representation of a story set in a bathtub (use your imagination about those blobs, and you'll be right). Even the page numbers have a bit of story running through them as they are surrounded by a duck who goes through some pretty unusual and, yes, disgusting tribulations of his own. All this visual anarchy might seem a distraction, but it's the sort of distraction that gives the weaker reader a chance to pause without putting the book down, which encourages them further to keep reading. 

Other books in the series speak for themselves: Just Annoying, Just Joking, Just Shocking, Just Crazy, Just Wacky, Just Stupid, all featuring tales of Andy, his sister Jen, their parents, and Andy's friend Danny who is nowhere near as smart as Andy. And Andy is pretty smart, Andy Griffith that is. He knows the territory and he knows how to mine it. Author of The Cat on the Mat Is Flat in addition to The Day My Butt Went Psycho and other series, Griffiths is the perfect go-to author for boys who have graduated from Captain Underpants and don't mind a little more story than picture in their diets...

If the adults are willing to let them read for pleasure.

Beat the Band

by Don Calame
Candlewick Press 2010

(This review is being cross-posted at Guys Lit Wire today, for those of you keeping score at home.)

There is no phrase that jolts my skeptical meter into the red faster than "laugh-out-loud funny." When a movie is described this way its almost guaranteed not to make me laugh, but it's worse when this line is used in books because it's so rare that I laugh out loud even when something is truly funny.  For something to be funny enough that I laugh out loud while reading it I have to be caught off guard, I have to not see the joke coming.

I actually found myself laughing out loud more than a couple times while reading Beat the Band, Don Calame's follow-up to last year's Swim the Fly.

As part of a semester-long project in Health class, Cooper is paired up with the notorious "Hot Dog" Helen which instantly lowers his cool cred at school. Worse, their topic is on contraceptives and STDs.  Coop's brilliant solution: enter the school's Battle of the Bands competition so he can rock his way back to cool and bury his lowered social standing. Problem: he hasn't told his buddies he's entered them into the competition, never mind that none of them can play an instrument.

I wandered into Beat the Band cautiously; I didn't really like Swim the Fly, and I was worried when the boys started talking about their goal of "rounding the bases" with a girl. I just didn't want to read a story about boys on an empty conquest, and I really didn't want a story that was a typical "girls are people with feelings, too" moral clinging to the bottom of it's shoes. Fairly quickly though the story shifts to the semester project, and the pairings among students, and this urgency Cooper has to get Helen and her undeserved reputation from sticking to him, and things looked up.

True to "boy" thinking, Cooper's idea is pure inanity, and there's no way its going to go the way he imagines.  These self-made scenarios can be tricky territory for an author is they don't really grok the delusions boys will invent to follow-through on their schemes. And for the humor to work there has to be something more than uncomfortable scenarios, there has to be a certain ratcheting-up of the situations, things have to go one (logical, yet unexpected) step beyond.

The moment I gave in and went along for the rest of the ride comes in a scene involving Cooper, his dad, a pair of beer bottles, and some condoms.  As if scenes between fathers and sons cannot already be awkward without condoms this one soldiers on for a few uncomfortable pages before a left-field interruption that I probably should have seen coming, but didn't, and so I proceeded to laugh.  Out loud. And long enough that I had to take a moment before continuing forward.

Calame gets it.  He knows that boys will get themselves worked up over stupid things, will invent elaborate solutions to problems they invented, and will, in due course, come to see what's below the surface in their social worlds. They'll enter Battle of the Band contests and recruit the class pariah as their singer and it won't even matter whether they've won or not in the end.  Screenwriter Calame knows how to end a teen comedy on a happy note and, as cheesy as that can be, somehow it seems alright after everything else that's happened.

Oh, and for those wondering, the title of this post is the name of Cooper's band.  Despite of the fact it would be deceptive, I almost wish that were the title of the book.

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.

Mudshark

by Gary Paulsen
Wendy Lamb Books / Random House
2009

Is it me, or does Gary Paulsen seem to be ripping through a very fertile period? These past few years he's released, it seems, two or three books a year and they always slip in under the radar where I find out about them by accident.

I was actually trying to remember the title of a book of his I read and liked and came across this as I was scanning the shelves. Being in the mood for a light read, and with a promising flap summary, I took the bait.

Lyle Williams is Mudshark, a kid we are told is cool. Cool not so much because he is hip but because his demeanor is calm and detached. When things go missing or problems need to be solved everyone – including adults at school – know to go to Mudshark. So notorious that the day someone tags his locker with a sign proclaiming the Mudshark Detective Agency he simply smiles in acknowledgment.

Small problems plaque Mudshark's fellow students - misplaced gym shoes and lost homework folders - but with his keen eye and memory he is able to resolve cases quickly. Larger problems loom as chalkboard erasers go missing, foul odors come from the faculty lounge, and a gerbil has escaped is cage and at large. Complicating matters is a new school pet, a parrot, who appears to possess a psychic ability that threatens Mudshark's place as the school mystery solver. In the end, Mudshark must debunk the parrot, find the missing erasers, and tie up every other mystery in order to retain his title, and his cool factor.

Paulsen's pacing is odd. The book seems to meander for the first 38 pages (out of 83) as he sets up all the bits and pieces that will eventually come together in the end. They almost read like vignettes, and yet when the story finally kicks in there isn't a sense that everything actually is tied together, or that it ever will. It isn't that Paulsen is being crafty, its this feeling that none of it matters. The only clear conflict is that Mudshark is going to be replaced by a parrot, and solving that mystery almost gets lost in the shuffle.

The mystery to me is why people aren't more upset with Mudshark for his abilities. He is able to find lost items and answer mysteries only because he witnesses them. Which begs the question: if you see a kid drop his homework folder, why not tell him he dropped it? Why wait until he realizes its missing and then play at being a detective when really all you're doing is withholding information until it makes you look good? To that end Mudshark isn't cool, he's manipulative and his powers rely entirely on luck, not skill.

Withholding information is key, because Paulsen does that as well. The mysteries presented cannot be solved by the reader (or at least by a smart reader) they can only be solved when Paulsen/Mudshark explain them. Setting up all these careful mysteries at the beginning leaves the reader hoping there's a great puzzle to be solved, but then before clues can be revealed the mystery is solved. Highly unsatisfying.

Paulsen does write with a breezy clarity that makes him a first choice for reluctant boy readers, but this wouldn't be one of my first choices.

Horrid Henry

by Francesca Simon
illustrated by Tony Ross
published in Great Britain
by Orion Children's Books 1994
Sourcebooks Jabberwocky 2009

Henry is a horrid little boy, and everyone says so. He's devious, mischievous, he's stubborn and prone to getting into trouble. Naturally he has a perfect brother named Peter. Peter is good, and kind, and everything Henry is not. In fact, even Henry's parents are fond of asking Henry why he can't be like Perfect Peter.

So much of what motivates Henry is ruining Perfect Peter's life any way he can.

There is the palpable undertone of Roald Dahl books here, from the at-wits-end parents who are simply worn down by Henry's antics to the illustrations that bear more than a passing resemblance to work Quintin Blake has done as Dahl's official illustrator. There are four breezy stories to each of the six Horrid Henry books either released or pending and if one doesn't look to deep they are exactly the sort of book emerging boy readers would delight in reading.

But after I put them aside for a bit and picked them back up I began to feel less easy about them. It isn't the books so much as the marketing approach the publishers have taken. Right on the cover they announce that each book contains "4 laugh-out-loud stories!" in each, the way a detergent would advertise "20% more for free!" as enticement to pick them up. No one actually measures to make sure they got that extra 20% any more than any parent or reader is going to hold the publisher to that "laugh-out-loud" claim... so then why is it there?

Then on the inside we are treated to a splash page announcing Horrid Henry as worldwide sensation, followed by three pages of testimonials from children and adults alike verifying that, indeed, Horrid Henry is not only funny but it will cure carbuncles and teach your parrot French in ten days. Well, no, it doesn't say that, but it may just as well for how hard it is trying to convince the reader that these books are, indeed, the funniest thing every to reach these far shores.

It's then that I realized that the reason they were working so hard to underscore the humor is the simple fact screaming from the title of the book: Henry truly is horrid. He's unrepentant, often unpunished, and by most accounts horrid for horrid's sake.

I've battled this demon before, the one that screams in the back of my head "What's the big deal about books where kids can revel in a character behaving badly?" It first showed up with Captain Underpants where I found the underwear jokes and absurd villains pure boy amusement. They were clever, enjoyable, and they hit young boy readers right where they stood. The problem was that these same boys couldn't and wouldn't venture beyond these titles. They had been pandered to in a way that permitted them to demand more of the same or nothing else. They became the book equivalent of watching boys set a garage on fire with a "boys will be boys" sigh attached.

I'm not saying I didn't enjoy these books (or Captain Underpants for that matter) or that I wouldn't recommend them for parents and teachers looking to engage boys in reading at a very crucial moment in their development. But I am alarmed to see publishers and adults giving up on these boys so completely that the only way to appeal to them is to engage their darker instincts and play it up as humor.

No boy is going to want to identify with Horrid Henry any more than they would Perfect Peter – and perhaps the less said about Peter's latent fey tendencies that better – but I do wonder if, in a generation or so, the only way to reach this same age group will be through some other extreme form of humor. I'm not blaming Simon for this, but I do feel the genie is out of the bottle and that nothing less will do when it comes to engaging a certain subset of reader.

Or I could be overreacting and these are perfectly benign, amusing books for the beginning reader. Maybe the prickles I feel at the back of my neck aren't connected at all.

Big Plans

by Bob Shea
illustrated by Lane Smith
Hyperion 2008

He's got big plans! Big plans (he says)! Over and over and over...

Last year author Shea gave us some New Socks to play with, and they were good. Just the one image of that a chicken, with glasses, using a sock as a phone was enough for me. That's how kids are, that's how they play, I'm good. I think that for a certain age level picture books ought to try and capture that sense of childlike whimsy (claiming they're the biggest thing in the ocean, for example) and New Socks did it.

Shea's back, tugging illustrator Lane Smith for the ride, and things don't roll so smoothly. We start with a boy facing the corner of his classroom, obviously on punishment, the chalkboard full of all the "I will not's" he's most likely committed. From this single opening spread we learn that this boy rolls his eyes, schemes, laughs when others speak, isn't nice, proves the teacher wrong, considers himself the boss of the class, and announces that what he says goes.

I hate this kid.

I hate this kid so much that everything that follows better show me in some way that he is charming or in some other ways undeserving of this punishment in the corner, otherwise this book is really going to piss me off.

This book pissed me off.

He's got big plans, he announces, and he screams these words in 240 point type across most of the book. He's going to shout at the yes-men in the boardroom, take on the mayor, verbally assault the president. He's going to wear a skunk as a hat (because the only thing that stinks worse is this kid's attitude) and march all over the world shouting down everyone and everything else with his big plans. He's going to take over a losing football team (with his yes-man mynah bird) because losing is not part of his big plans. He'll order people to do this and that, and when he goes to the moon he'll order the rocks be moved so they can be read from Earth announcing his big plans.

And in the last spread we see that all his planning and scheming were a direct result of all the things surrounding him in the time out corner. There's a map of the moon and a book of presidents, and his snide little smirk that says "Yeah, they can put me in the corner, but I'll show them one day."

I never want that kid to leave the corner.

You know how it is when you get an email from someone who doesn't realize that writing in all caps reads like shouting? This book feels just like that, only worse. It's a bossy kid with a microphone hooked up to the Who's loudspeaker system shouting about his big plans at 160 decibels ten feet from your face. Did it have to be so loud, Lane? Couldn't the kid be less of a schmuck and more of a dreamer? Couldn't there be something in this kid that would make us want to root for him to take over the country and fly to the moon and be the star football player?

Not cute, not endearing, and please, let no one read this to boys at story hour unless they want an army of bossy boys shouting down adults and thinking they own the world, or a dozen time-out corners in need of occupants.

NYC dystopia x2

Today, I am cross-posting with Guys Lit Wire, the blog for books aimed at teen boys.

dys·to·pi·a –noun. a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding.

Well, there's plenty of that going around in a pair of books I'm featuring today, both of them set in New York City but written 40 years apart from one another.

First up is the dead and the gone, Susan Beth Pfeffer's sequel to Life As We Knew It. As with the previous book, the events that follow occur after an asteroid has hit the moon, knocking it out of its former orbit. Where Life As We Knew It was set in rural Pennsylvania and followed closely the struggle for survival as seen from a teen girl's perspective, the dead and the gone shows us how events unraveled through the eyes of Alex Morales, a seventeen year old boy living in Manhattan.

Alex is the second-eldest of the Morales children, his older brother Carlos is a Marine stationed on the West Coast. Alex's mom is a nurse on night duty when the book begins, possibly on her way home. His father is in Puerto Rico attending the funeral of Alex's grandmother. At home, Alex's two younger sisters wait for him to return from his night job working at a pizza parlor. The news of the asteroid's collision course is peripheral at best; most people are listening to the baseball game.

Unraveled is the best way to describe events that follow. As the shifting of the moon has profound effects on the planet's delicate ecosystem, tides have flooded the subways and knocked out all satellite transmissions. Quickly Alex moves into survival mode in order to protect his sisters and keep the family together. When his sisters ask about the safety of their missing parents Alex reassures them without hesitation that everything will be okay. Alex is as pragmatic as he is protective, shunting his emotions in order to assure their survival.

Where events felt more ominous in Pfeffer's previous exploration of this disaster scenario, here in New York City the events that unfold seem merely to hasten the inevitable. As the food shortages and flu epidemic spread, as the rich get out of town and the poor are trapped on an island left for dead, New York comes to represent the ultimate failure of the urban model of living, an unsustainable wasteland. Alex casually learns to lie and steal and, in the end, manage to get himself and one of his sisters successfully out of New York and toward a promise of a new life further inland.

Recently released for its 40th anniversary, Harry Harrison's Make Room! Make Room! gives us another version of the Big Apple in decay. The events are no less ecological, though the cause is man-made this time.

It's the future, the end of the millennium. You'll have to forgive a book written in the 1960's for getting the future of 1999 wrong, though in many ways the book does correctly understand some of the probelms we're facing today. Harrison's premise was that the US was unconcerned with population control and that short-sidedness led to a planet where the population outstripped its resources. Greenhouse gases have ruined rich agricultural farmland, food and water is scarce, New York city is under a constant heat wave. As Harrison paints it, only the date of this scenario might be wrong as we may still be headed in this direction under global warming.

I have to break the review here to interject that this book was nothing like I had remembered it to be. I had this strange sense of double deja vu because there are familiar elements in the story that echoed both a movie adaptation of this book and the sudden realization that my disappointment was the same I felt when I first read this book as a teen. The movie was Soylent Green, and the disappointment I felt then as now was that there is no such thing as Soylent Green in the book. That is to say, if you've seen the movie and you think you know what the book is about, you don't.

Harrison tells the story of a police detective named Andy Rusch who happens to land on a case of murder that was a crime of opportunity. The problem is that the corrupt politicos believe there's something deeper going on and Andy's forced to continue to follow through on the investigation beyond when it should have been dropped. There's a girl involved, a gangster's moll, who takes up with Andy once she's out of her meal ticket. And darting through the story is the thug on the lam who shows us the seamier underside of a New York Harbor clogged with decommissioned Liberty Ships used as emergency housing for the world's refugees.

What Harrison has done is graft a noirish crime story onto a New York City that has collapsed under the weight of its population. It's a dirty, ugly world with rationed water, no electricity, a black market for produce and meat, and corruption at every level of government. Where the dead and the gone gives us the quick death of NYC Make Room! Make Room! gives us the tail end of the long, slow demise. Both versions, as written, are equally plausible portraits of a city in decay.

But in a head-to-head grudge match it's Pfeffer's book hands down as the better read. Pfeffer's book continues to draw out the disaster in diary format, one day at a time, inviting the reader to put themselves in Alex's shoes in deciding whether or not he's made the right decisions. the dead and the gone deals somewhat flatly with Alex as a protector of his sisters and there is little for him emotionally. Harrison's book has a more balanced emotional story at it's heart with Andy questioning love and what it means to live in this rotten world, but in imagining the worst aspects of his world into our future he retained some ugly racial and sexist stereotypes that, while "authentic" for a reader back in 1966, detract from the story.

the dead and the gone
by Susan Beth Pfeffer
Harcourt Children's Books 2008

Life As We Knew It
by Susan Beth Pfeffer
Harcourt Children's Books 2006

Make Room! Make Room!
by Harry Harrison
Tor Books 2008

Little Boy

by Alison McGhee
illustrated by Peter Reynolds
Atheneum / Simon 2008

This Father's Day, when a Hallmark just won't cut it but $20 seems like too much to spend, why not give this little gem?

Generously borrowing from William Carlos William's poem "The Red Wheelbarrow," each of the rhymed sections in this picture book begins with the phrase "Little Boy, so much depends on..." to inventory the innocent mischief, imaginative play, and rituals of what it means to be a boy. All that and a big cardboard box. Reynolds illustrations are as precious as McGhee's cadences are measured, which is to say they are calculated with great care.

This is the father-and-son companion to Someday, the book about the mother-daughter bond that reads like a snake eating its own tail. With both books I can't imagine what sort of child they are intended for. Grown children? Adults with children who want an American Greeting Card memory of a time that never really existed except in a post-martini haze? Seriously, with Little Boy I can see maybe half a reading of this before the little boy being read to wants to go find a cardboard box of his own to play with rather than finish this non-story.

Beyond that, the book is a keepsake, a contemporary Norman Rockwell portrait of boyhood. Grandparents will love it, so might some parents, but it's not for children.

about those teenage boys...

While I sincerely doubt many of you, my fine readers, get all of your kidlit news from Yours Truly it may be possible that the following bit of news has escaped your attention in the kidlit blogosphere.

Guys Lit Wire, a new site launching in June, promises to provide you with everything you need to know in the world of literature for teenage boys. Colleen of Chasing Ray has been been spearheading the effort which she described on her blog yesterday thusly:

There will be book recommendations, author interviews, literary commentary, a rant or two (I'm sure) and lots of other good stuff. The goal is to cover a ton of different types of books from across the literary spectrum so we can become a good resource to actual teenagers as well as anyone seeking to find books for teen boys. (And if the girls want to visit we are happy to have them, but boys are our target audience.)

I am happy to announce -- nay, honored and privileged -- to be participating in this new blog and sincerely hope I can hold up my end when it comes to adding my voice to the community. I haven't got a clue what I'm going to debut with but that deadline's behind a few others I have for school right now so it can remain fuzzy. But I promise you, it will be brilliant. Both my post and the new blog!

Right now the group is shy a few contributors, and we could really use a few more guys. C'mon, out of 21 of us there are only 3 males reading and writing about books for teens? That can't be right, can it? Consider this a call to action. If you or someone you know wants in contact Colleen directly (colleen(at)chasingray(dot)com). And if you'd rather just support the effort please feel free to pass this news along to others.

For my part, if any of you have ideas or suggestions of some teen-boy-reading topic you'd like to see me mangle address, feel free to get in touch via comments. Let me know if you'd rather communicate off-blog as well and we'll make it happen.

I'll keep you posted as June 1st looms.

A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever

written and illustrated by Marla Frazee
Harcourt 2008

James and his friend Eamon are going to Nature Camp for a week. It's a day camp near Eamon's grandparent's beach front house where the boys spend their week. If you want to see what they did at camp all you need to read are the endpapers which are snapshots of their time at camp. Their best week ever happened at Bill and Pam's (Eamon's grandparent's) house.

Bill's a nice old guy who has traveled the world, loves penguins, and wants to talk about Antarctica all the time. The boys couldn't care less. Pam's cooking is better than anything the boys get at home, but probably because all she serves them is banana waffles. The boys stay in the basement, sleep on an inflatable mattress that serves as a fort, a trampoline, and a couch for their video game playing. They wear the same shorts all week long.

James and Eamon are boys, true boys, marginally overseen by adults, living the summer that boys dream of. Their week over, the boys look out over the ocean at night, feeling something they can't articulate. But they know what to do: they collect driftwood, small rocks and mussel shells and assemble a miniature Antarctica complete with penguins on the deck. They hug Pam and Bill and hope they can go to Nature Camp again soon.

Frazee knows boys. At the very least she knows these boys, and she knows that with boys everything is indirect. Bill asks them if they want to go see the penguin exhibit at the zoo, they boys say they'll think about it, and then they run away. They aren't trying to be rude, they're just boys doing what boys do, which is run away from conflict. I don't have a problem with this, because Frazee presents this with the same carefree attitude that boys bring with them. At the very end of their week when the boys don't know how to address their feelings of sorrow they do what boys do best: they build things, the express their feeling physically.

I'm on the fence between calling this a good picture book and a great picture book. It's heart is in the right place, the humor is dry and authentic, but I'm left feeling like their best week ever needed a little more of an anchor, maybe one or two more activities to solidify their week. Their days are taken up with Nature Camp -- which is never shown, and I'm fine with that -- but I wish they'd had more time at Pam and Bill's to build or create or invent some week-long project that could mirror the building of their summer friendship.

Will boys like it? Probably. Will they get it? Maybe. Does it matter? Nope.

The Cat on the Mat is Flat

by Andy Griffiths
illustrations by Terry Denton
Feiwel and Friends 2007
(Pan Macmillan, AU 2006)

"From the author of The Day My Butt Went Psycho!"

This book is just screaming for that kind of attention.

Take one part Dr. Seuss, one part Edward Lear, place in a blender with a dash of Dav Pilkey and a bit of Cartoon Network juice, pulse until the blender begins to smoke and then breathe the fumes deeply until you get a little dizzy... and then you, too, can author a book like this.

I like this book. I was once a boy. Some things just don't leave you no matter how old you get, like anarchic juvenile nonsense humor. It's got pigs on rocket-powered logs. It's got boys who repeatedly roll down a hill until they are sick and dizzy and landing smelly swill. It's got glue-dispensing kangaroos. It's got yaks. I rest my case.

No! It's also got those beginning reader rhyme patterns that Seuss made famous half a century ago. It's meant for tweens but reads like a baby book and that's a good part of it's humor; it lets an accomplished reader take stock of where they were as readers not so long ago and allows them to enjoy the satire. It is not sophisticated by any means, but instead is meant to be read as pure joy. It's a piece of candy eaten in secret between meals.

Here's are summaries of two chapters, taken from Andy Griffith's website:

Ed and Ted and Ted’s Dog Fred
In which Fred and Ted and Ted’s dog Fred do quite a lot of things that rhyme with ‘ed’.

Duck in a Truck in the Muck
In which Chuck the Duck gets his ice-cream truck stuck in muck and Buck the Duck attempts to help him get it unstuck with the aid of the muck sucker upper on his muck-sucking truck.

Yup, it's all like that.

Since the Australian cover contains a panel carton of a cat getting whacked by a rat with a bat I'm guessing the American version will be somewhat more tame -- can't be selling that sort of violence to children up front. Too bad, because I think you'd really galvanize armies of boys who would jump at this. What am I saying is, one smart pup is going to ferret this book out at the library and word-of-mouth is going to have the entire sixth grade reading this book in the same weekend across the country. One Friday they're all be yawning over the ancient hoopla over Pottermaina and the following Monday they'll all be quoting entire sections of the book to one another the way kids did after watching Monty Python or the original Saturday Night Live.

Or not.

Probably a good idea to check it out anyway, just in case.

Update: In a bit of syncronicity rarely seen here at the excelsior file, Fuse #8 has featured Andy Griffiths on her blog today!

The Dangerous Book for Boys

by Conn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden
HarperCollins 2007

Do not be fooled into believing this is a cute title appended to a harmless book. This book is for boys and it is dangerous. Here is your proof, from the tiny type on the copyright page:

Note to parents: This book contains a number of activities which may be dangerous if not done exactly as directed or which may be inappropriate for young children. All of the activities should be carried out under adult supervision only. The authors and publishers expressly disclaim liability for any injury or damages that may result from engaging in the activities contained in this book.

In other words: If you have a boy, be a parent and raise them in ways that make legal disclaimers like this unnecessary.

Seriously though, boys by their very nature are curious and like to explore their world on their own terms. Yes, parental supervision is good, but so is a boy who knows how to cautiously explore the edges of his abilities. It can be a great thing for a boy and a parent to bond over, say, the building of a tree house or a go-cart but it is a greater joy for a boy to go out and learn how to master his own world.

This book is an update of the kind of American Boy's Handy Book that was published at the turn of the century, and much of what is in here wouldn't have been out of place a hundred years ago. Here's a sampling from the table of contents:

• The seven wonders of the ancient world
• Five knots every boy should know
• Making a bow and arrow
• Famous battles
• U.S. Naval flag codes
• Navajo code talker's dictionary
• Understanding grammar
• Girls
• Making cloth fireproof
• Secret inks
• Navigation
• The Declaration of Independence
• Dog tricks
• Coin tricks
• Seven poems every boy should know
• How to play poker
• A brief history of artillery
• The Ten Commandments
• Common trees
• Five pen-and-paper games
• The game of chess
• Books every boy should read
• growing sunflowers

That these topics are and have been of interest to boys speaks to their evergreen nature. Did I mention that was a partial list?

I have a couple of favorite little things about this book. First, it begins with a list of essential items a boy should have. A pocket knife is first, and the book is modern enough to point out that pocket knives can still be carried on checked luggage at the airport. A little further down the list a pencil and paper are recommended in case "...you see a crime and want to write down a license plate number or a description... or a shopping list." Just that someone out there is planting the seed of a child always having something to write on is enough to help spawn a more literate generation, or at least one that copies down the latest fart jokes they've heard.

A little further down the list is a magnifying glass "for general interest. Can also be used to start a fire." Exactly. Don't pretend we don't know why boys love these essential tools. Sure, the could try to make flameproof cloth and then try to burn it with a magnifying glass. They might even lob off one of their fingers in the process with a pocket knife. But, again, there is little to fear if they have been raised properly.

I have to admit, I was a little surprised by the selection of poems every boy should know. Most of these I was forced to memorize in the 7th grade and I can't say it was always a pleasant experience. Following each poem there is a paragraph explaining the poem and it's importance and provide an opportunity to help round out a boy's street education with something a little more refined. The poems?

IF by Kipling
Ozymandias by Shelley
Selections from Song of Myself by Whitman
Invictus by Henley
Vitae Lampada by Newbolt
The Road Not Taken by Frost
Sea-Fever by Masefield

Pretty deadly stuff for boys, perhaps even dangerous, no? Personally I'd have liked to see maybe a Robert Service poem, or something with a little swash and buckle. I have buried in the archives a book entitled Songs of Men and there's some sea chanteys and other rugged bits of verse that would have easily fit it. Maybe a cowboy ballad.

When my girls are a little older I'm probably going to let them have a go at this book as well. We'll build a tree house and make bows and arrows and catch bugs in old jars. After all, what might be dangerous for boys is perfectly harmless in the hands of a girl. That's probably the best way I can spin that.

Every Friday

by Dan Yaccarino
Henry Holt 2007

Every Friday and boy and his dad trundle down to the diner in town to have breakfast together. Rain or shine, they stop and window shop along the way (each of the boys has their favorite shop window, toys for each), waving at shopkeepers and strangers along the clean city streets. Once at the diner they order breakfast ("Let me guess, pancakes" says the waitron) and talk and continue their people-watching. Their ritual complete the boy cannot wait until next week to do it all again.

Yaccarino explains in a note at the front of the book that it is based on a routine he and his son follow. I suspect the actual event is more substantial than the slim story treatment it is given because we are given only the outward appearances of the ritual. As an idea the author encourages, taking a child out for a special ritual like a weekly breakfast can be a great thing. I only wish it were more possible than the mere suggestion that parents try to do the same. I think of all the families I know, how difficult it is just to get everyone out the door and on their way in the morning, and I don't think I know a single family who could add such a ritual. The sheer logistics of it, the amount of extra time it would take in the morning, isn't practical. And forget it if you have more than one child and have to deal with the parity issue. Even saying it like that makes me feel like I'm a bad parent for not figuring out a way to add an extra hour or so to the morning routine. What parent wants to feel like that after reading a book?

Logistics aside, the idea of hanging out with a parent over breakfast talking and people watching would have greatly benefited from a little more show and a little less tell. What do the boy and his father talk about? What have they learned about the regulars they see on their walks each week, what sort of things do they see while people watching? It's all very well and good to talk a good game but sometimes you need to see how the game is played, especially with kids. Modalities of learning and all that.

Visually it hearkens back to a sort of 1950's nostalgia that is difficult to replicate today. Valiant effort but it left me wanting.

If

A Fathers Advice to His Son
by Rudyard Kipling
photographs by Charles R. Smith, Jr.
Atheneum/Simon and Schuster 2007

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you...

It's hard to read these opening lines of the familiar Kipling poem without hearing the voice of a manic Dennis Hopper as a wigged out photographer in the movie Apocalypse Now.

Moving beyond that what struck me is just how accessible the original poem is in terms of laying down an almost Buddhist philosophy about how one should move through the world with humility, grace and compassion while still remaining strong.

To that end I find what photographer Smith sets out to do admirable but I find the final result a letdown.

Every passage in the book is illustrated with a saturated boiled-grain photograph of boys at play in various sports. The overall effect, as suggested in the tacked-on subtitle (to underscore Kiplin's intent, for those who cannot be bothered to read to the end of the poem), is to offer a strong, guiding father's advice to a son in relation to his becoming a better athlete, as opposed to being a better person. That's my take-away.

And that's where I take issue. It may be that we could use more poetry-spouting fathers on the sidelines giving their sons a larger picture of the world vis-a-vis lessons they can learn through sports, but why do we need to perpetrate the issue of the father-son bond as being sports related?

Page after page, sport after sport, the images connect only in the mind of the individual because the text doesn't support the concepts presented specifically as sports-based. The weakest example may be of a shot taken from behind (we do not see the faces of the boys at sport) of a boy taking aim at a target at an archery range, accompanied by the text

If you can think-- and not make thoughts your aim

Well, you have to take the "aim" part literally to connect with the image, but that's not what Kipling is saying, is it? He's talking about active thinking, about rational thought-based behavior, that one should not use thinking for thought's sake. This is good advice, but how does it relate to a boy taking aim with an arrow? How is a boy supposed to interpret that concept when the illustration suggests such a literal idea?

There are more like that, more literal illustrations, and they raise my hackles. Can we not teach these concepts to boys, father to sons, with examples that include the arts and sciences? When we "meet with Triumph and Disaster/And treat those two imposters just the same" can we not suggest that Community Service in the face of, say, a Hurricane-devastated area would serve as a better example of how to live in the world rather than show a soccer team huddled together?

I suppose I should be grateful anyone is considering father-to-son poetry at all these days, or that someone finds Kipling worth introducing to kids. I just wish we could get over the whole idea that the only way to captivate boys' attentions is through sports.

Boys and Books

I know these waters aren't easily forded, but today a couple of ideas came together and gave birth to an interesting idea. To me at least.

First up, this article in the Boston Globe (registration may be required) starts off talking about Flying Point Press and their work toward bringing non-fiction to 10 to 15 year old boys. Despite their deal with the devil in working with Sterling it seems like they're doing admirable work in giving boys something to read that isn't fantasy.

I have to admit, shortly after fourth grade I drifted away from Harriet the Spy and Island of the Blue Dolphins and began reading things like The Guinness Book of World Records, books on magic and a variety of things from Martin Gardner like Perplexing Puzzles and Tantalizing Teasers. I picked up a strange book put out by Reader's Digest that was a sort of hodge-podge of puzzles, stories, histories and biographies that included a telling of a cross-country road race and the tragical history if the Hindenburg. And when I wasn't reading I was tearing apart my old Schwinn Stingray, hacking the seat and the handlebars with a hand saw and inventing (though I didn't realize what I was doing) the first lowrider bike in my neighborhood. I took an old rollerskate apart and attached the wheels to a two-by-four in an attempt to create a five person skateboard. I found some wagon wheels and boards and hammered them together to make a very rickety, dangerously fun tow-cart (I grew up in the flats of Los Angeles, any sort of a downhill racer would have to be towed by someone on a bike).

Did I miss out on some vital book reading at the time? Maybe. Did my reading actually slide onto the back burner for a few years? Sure. But I wasn't really finding anything at the time pulling at me. Fantasy novels and realistic fiction couldn't do for me what an afternoon tinkering in the garage with some neighborhood kids could. I would check out books from the library on slot car racing but was always disappointed they never explained the science, or better yet, how to make your own. I wanted action! And the non-fiction that was out there (like the Random House Landmark Books series being brought back by the previously-mentioned Flying Point Press for example) just didn't really strike me as exciting enough.

Then today, at work, all of this came flooding back to me. A woman came in looking for something for a boy who loves tearing things apart and building something new with them. He's down in the basement tearing apart old computers and toaster ovens and whatnot and could really use something that shows him how things work.

Oh, and he's just about to turn 7 and isn't a strong reader yet.

There were a couple of things to recommend, like Cool Stuff and How It Works, which gives x-ray schematics of things like iPods and high-tech sneakers and shows their various mechanisms. Very cool even for adults. And, naturally, the classic in the field, The New Way Things Work by David Macaulay. But even as I'm looking through the books on science fair projects and lamenting the cost-prohibitive "cookbooks" from the San Francisco Exploritorium I'm thinking This kid doesn't need these books, he needs to learn how to read schematic drawings for electronics!

One thing leads to another (in my head) and I start envisioning a whole new imprint somewhere of books for boys that shows them how to perform basic electronic wiring and soldering so they can hack a Roomba and turn it into a battle robot. I'm, not making that up, people are doing it all over the place. O'Reilly, a publisher of books primarily on computer technology, also has a magazine called Make that basically is a teen and tween boy's dream. They also have a website and a blog where you can learn things; like how to make a Leyden Jar (an early form of capacitor/battery) from at 35mm film canister; how to make a simple, elegant vase out of an old light bulb; how to turn ordinary matchbox cars into dangerous rockets on wheels... just a random sampling of things I've seen.

Next, my head fills with those days when every family garage had lots of old, dead electronic devices that our dads salvaged with the intention of fixing, or at the least tore apart for the hardware. Basic power and hand tools on simple, often hand-made, cluttered work benches vied for space among soldering irons, baby jars filled with capacitors, coils of colored wires and strange parts from motors and toys awaiting a new life. In those post-war days it would be unheard of to see household appliances on the street on trash day; they'd disappear into the garage and be recycled into something new. Nowadays who has the time and space for all that?

Boys.

They see the gadgets in Bond Movies and read about them in the Stormbreaker series and try not to act excited when they say "cool." They'll take their Lego's and build not just a catapult but a serious trebuchet, armed with little balloons filled with paint aimed at an old wall to test both the distance and the beauty of their handiwork. Their parents are tossing out old laptops and cell phones and they're hammering them open, trying to figure out how to repurpose the guts for their own ends.

I could never pull something like this together, but someone ought to create a series of books aimed at these lost boys aimed to harness the spirit that moves them and the materials surrounding them. 7 cool things you can make from old transistor radios. 5 electronic projects from things you can scrounge for next to nothing. Not a huge omnibus project, but small books with low price points, big on illustrations and easy on the text, a resource series aimed at getting boys who are into tearing apart and building things. This is the world of Popular Mechanics scaled down, but if they were done as instructive narratives, in an appealing graphic format, with perhaps a bit of history or biography built in, I think it could be a winner.

A doesn't necessarily follow B in this case, I don't pretend to imagine such a series of books will draw boys into reading more non-fiction, but it seems like there's a huge gulf in books aimed at these boys that could be filled in a variety of ways. And maybe a few grown boys who might still like to get into the garage now and then and see just how to resuscitate the mechanics from old toys.