jack the castaway

by Lisa Doan
Darby Creek / Lerner  2014

Smart kid, dumb parents, and a menacing whale shark! What more could a kid want from a book? 


Jack is a sheltered kid on the cusp of puberty living with his Aunt Julia safely in Pennsylvania. Or at least he was living safely until his Aunt met with misfortune and Jack was forced to call his world-traveling parents home from their latest scheme, panning for gold in the Amazon. Jack's parents are everything Jack isn't: reckless, thoughtless, careless dreamers with no grounding in reality. Since abandoning Jack with his Aunt they have gone from one dead-end business to another but now they are forced back to raise a son who has more sense than they do collectively.

So begins Lisa Doan's Jack the Castaway, the first in a series aimed squarely at the emerging, struggling, or reluctant middle grade reader looking for an adventure series with humor and a sturdy story. Playing off the trope of kids being smarter than the adults that surround them, Doan has amped up this discord by giving Jack all the typical traits of a worry-wort adult and made his parents the equivalent of hyperactive teens. Where his parents wouldn't never even think of making a list or a plan before setting out on an adventure, Jack prefers the logical order of his life and would rather spend his time in school. Reunited as a family, Jack's parents think it only natural to bring their risk-adverse son with them to a tropical island where they intend to open a snorkeling enterprise, despite having no experience. But before long Jack finds himself alone on the water, then shipwrecked on a tropical island and... is that a shark keeping watch on him from the shore?

There are many ways a story like this could go wrong, but Doan keeps a fine balance between humor and adventure, particularly when dealing with Jack's brief experience alone on a tropical island. Where many readers might find the prospect of being alone to do nothing, away from the school and responsibilities that Jack craves, it's Jack's practicality that allows him to stay calm and survive. Where Jack errs on the side of caution the reader is allowed to guess that he is overreacting, removing any real danger that would otherwise make the story too dark.

And while I wouldn't say I was much like Jack when I was young I will confess that he and I share a certain blood-chilling close encounter with a large, benign sea creature. Both Jack and I survived to laugh about it in retrospect.

There's a lot of summer reading out there that kids are having foisted on them, and while much of it is good I strongly believe that there's room for lighter, well-crafted fare. I realize this might skew a bit younger than most of what lands on Guys Lit Wire but sometimes boys need to catch the reading bug at a younger age to ensure they continue into the goods we reviewers dig up for the older teens. Put Jack the Castaway in the back seat on a long road trip and see if it isn't devoured in one single gulp.


This review also appeared at Guys Lit Wire, in case you thought you saw it somewhere else.

Also, as a matter of full disclosure, I received a review copy of this book from the author who, like myself, is a graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts' Writing for Children and Young Adults program. If you find this troubling, email me, I'll be more than happy to put your mind at ease. 
~d.e.

The Skeleton Pirate

by David Lucas
Candlewick Press 2012

The unbeaten Skeleton Pirate who refuses to accept defeat is beaten not once but twice in this quirky picture book.

The Skeleton Pirate knows one thing: that he will never be beaten, and will fight to the, uh, death to prove it. But when a band of pirates chains him up and throws him over board... he still will not accept defeat. rescued by a Mermaid he is free for but a moment when they are both swallowed by a whale. Still refusing to accept his plight the Mermaid has a plan to help them get out of the whale, which succeeds, and sends them both sailing into a golden sunset on a gold-filled ship made of gold, where the Skeleton Pirate looks into those Mermaiden eyes and accepts he has finally been beaten... by love!

While the title might sound on the scary side, younger readers aren't going to be put off by the stylized Skeleton Pirate Lucas has created. Looking for all the world like he might actually be made of balsa wood, he's so far from reality that no child would even consider asking the really big "adult" questions like: Why does he only wear pants? and; "If he's a skeleton, isn't he already dead?" and; "Why is he so cranky?" In truth, I missed the biggest clue of all on the title page where the Skeleton Pirate appears to be emerging from the wreckage of his own ship. Not to read too deeply here, the Skeleton Pirate is a lost soul doing the only thing he knew how to do until something (or rather, someone) came along to show him the truth.

Love beats fighting, any day.

Lucas is very crafty in not letting the romance show up until the final image and gives up a goofy tale in the process. Lucas has a thing for whales, and the sea, and this time around his watercolor palate feels much bolder. I'm a fan.

if you want to see a whale

words by julie fogliano
pictures by erin e. stead.
roaring brook press 2013

a very old school picture book
poetic in word and image

now this is what i’m talking about.

the title is the premise
a set of instructions for what you need to do
in order to see a whale

it starts with a window
and quickly moves to a landscape
of the mind
the text and instructions
more of a tone poem
told legato

you must look closely
and rule out those things that aren’t a whale
avoid the distractions
stay alert to the possibilities

and then
when you have done all that
as if by magic
you will see a whale

the text
all lower-case and sans punctuation
reinforces the poetic quality

he illustrations of
a boy
and his dog
and the world of his imagination
are often set against sparse
monochromatic backgrounds
that allow for the focus
on unspoken elements in the text

and there are whales throughout
if you look for them
which is what the picture book
is all about~

seeing and making connections
with what is and isn’t there

i hate to use the word
perfect 
but even the size of the book

a manageable seven-by-nine inches

not only fits the hands of smaller explorers
but echoes the picture books of old
like the original sendak-krauss collaborations

it reminds us
that small readers
don’t require larger pages
to get lost in
and
that bigger
doesn’t always mean
better

even if it’s a book about
spotting a whale

Moby Dick

Chasing the Great White Whale  
by Eric Kimmel
illustrated by Andrew Glass 
Feiwel & Friends 2012 

Finally! A version of Melville's classic I can actually finish! In one sitting! With pictures even! 

So, up front, I'm no fan of Moby Dick. I have tried and tried and simply cannot traverse the literary muck and mire of Melville's meandering meditation. I get about 60 or 70 pages in and I start to entertain notions of gnawing off my own leg. Then I realize I can put the book down and walk away, and I do. I have done this five or six times now and I just. cannot. read it.

What does it say about me that I love this picture book adaptation, told in well-crafted rhyme, with its details artfully smeared across the illustrations? Does it say I'm lazy, or that I have no patience, or is it simply that I find this to be the most accessible, tastefully done adaptation from classic literature I've seen in picture book form in a long time.

Yeah, you're right, it's probably a combination of all those things. 

Looking at it from the perspective of the intended audience, a child with an interest in pirates or sailing or whales, this book probably stands out above many others simply because the main characters are neither children or animal stand-ins. It's a curious thing that we tend to think a picture book as something that reflects the child or their world when, outside of books, their interest extends far beyond those small world limitations. I often wonder if we don't do children a disservice by presenting them books where adults are non-existent or merely two-dimensional foils for a child-like fantasy. How can we expect children to know how to interact with adults if they are constantly told adults are inconsequential?

This book doesn't address this issue, but it does faithfully (in its own way) hold true to Melville's tale (I know it, I just haven't read it) of Ishmael setting out on a whaling vessel with an obsessed captain, the lone survivor to tell the tale to the reader. There's just enough in the verse and images to get a feel for the grittiness of life on the seas once-upon-a-day, the adventure and the peril, and that hint of madness that you can sense even before you've learned the name for it. Kids see plenty of adults, and their behavior scares them, so perhaps they recognize more of the adult world than we give them credit for.

Kimmel and Glass don't shy away from this madness, or death for that matter. Ahab, his eyes wide, holds aloft the dubbloon he offers for the first man who sights the whale, drawn from a perspective both low and foreshortened so that he appears to be coming toward the reader. It's that in-your-face, impossible-to-ignore obsession that reads exactly as it should without belaboring the point in the text. And to an unfamiliar reader, the mention of Queequeg's coffin must seems like a random and bizarre detail until it becomes a de facto life raft when the ship has been smashed to bits. It registers as dark humor, that coffin as a life preserver, and the kind that introduces the picture book reader to the concept of foreshadowing and irony as part of their visual literacy. 

To be honest, when I first heard about this, I scoffed. I thought, What next, Anna Karenina? Sinclair's The Jungle? But after chuckling at the first couple pages I realized I was more interested in this telling than I ever was with the original.

That's the power of a good picture book: it can make you like something you thought you'd hate.

Whale

by David Lucas
Knopf 2007
(Andersen Press, UK 2006)

Huh?

A frolicking whale accidentally beaches himself atop a port town in the night, waking the townfolk. As they climb on top of the the whale they begin to wonder what to do about the situation. Seeing as the whale is too large to be moved a suggestion is made (and agreed upon by the whale itself) that it should be hacked up for a stew.

"No!" shouts young Joe, the first to discover the whale outside his bedroom window.

Soon everyone is asking the wisest of the wise -- an owl -- what should be done. The owl suggests asking the winds, who in turn ask the sun and moon, who in turn as the stars for a solution (it's all verbal, there are no pictures of all this asking, unfortunately). Finally word comes back that they townfolk are to sing the rain song.

"But that never works!" Nonetheless they sing it.

Soon the rains come and flood the town, sending the whale back into the sea. It also totally floods the town away. A grateful whale begins singing a song himself, a fish song, and soon all sorts of marine life come to shore with shells and pearls and shiny pebbles to rebuild the town much prettier than before. With everyone happy the whale departs promising to come back some day.

This is the second book of Lucas' I've read (of three, see Nutmeg for my other take) and it's clear to me that his sense of picture book storytelling is "unusual." That's one of them code words, like the way "interesting" when used for art generally means "I don't like it." It isn't that I don't like Lucas' books -- no, I want to like them -- but they always end with me feeling like something is missing. The problem is in trying to figure out what is missing because his stories tend to operate in their own worlds and by their own rules, with little in the way of clues to help impose some sense of order.

In this story our main character, beside the whale, is a boy named Joe. We learn nothing about Joe other than he doesn't want to see the whale destroyed. That's not much in the way of character, and he has so little else to say or do in this book, so why even give him a name at all? And the whale, so quick to give up and allow the townfolk to hack him into a stew... what's up with that? Sending the owl on a mission to find the answer is fine but, as I mentioned, the asking up the chain-of-command is all verbal and fits on a single spread.

It's odd, if you look at the book without reading the words you can almost piece together a story on your own. It makes me wonder if Lucas doesn't actually do this, write the story after the illustrations are finished. That doesn't sound likely, but it might explain the quirkiness of what is written.

Lucas has a nice watercolor and pen-bleed style and a very identifiable style. His books are fun to look at and it's apparent that he likes stories set near water. All that's missing are stories that transcend "unusual" and become "unique."