the 5 minute anti-review

And Then Everything Unraveled
by Jennifer Sturman
Point / Scholastic 2009

This is going to be a totally unfair review. It is based entirely on the premise that, as a reader, I have the right to abandon a book that doesn't interest me and not feel guilty. It's also based on instinct, the same instinct that allows employers to know within ten seconds whether or not they will hire and individual for a job. It's about experience and preference and, fair or not, no less valid.

And I'm going to take as long to discuss this book as I did reading it.

Delia Truesdale can't believe it's only been a few weeks since the story she is about to recount took place. Her mother has "left for Antarctica with one of her environmental groups," leaving Delia with her semi secret surfing in the care of the housekeeper in her Silicon Valley home. Delia's friends, what few she has, are all tech geeks who are already wheeler-dealers and inventors. Dad is not in the picture, victim of freak accident. The car of the person who runs her mother's business affairs is in the driveway when she gets home. Bad news: Mom's ship has disappeared, no word on survivors. Mom must be... but no, Delia refuses to believe her mother is dead.

And we aren't even at page five.

I don't need anymore. The rule of a book that starts off like this is that any teen who refuses to believe their parent is dead is right. The rest of the book will concern the main character on a journey of discovery that will prove them right. Not having friends means she'll make some along the way (including a romantic interest) and will solve the mystery on her own. Naturally there will be obstacles along the way, including those close to her she is supposed to trust. Happy ending all around, and nothing will ever be the same again.

As proof, I jump from the first five pages to the last chapter, in this case the last three pages. Mystery is wrapping up. Kisses, and the promise of many more, from a boy named Quinn. Almost obligatory Shakespeare reference to Romeo and Juliet. Mother is safe in Chile. Trio of bad guys mentioned, indicating conspiracy, including aforementioned person who helped run her mother's company. And the story ends at the point where Delia can finally take a breath and recap it for the reader.

I don't care about this character before her mother disappears, I don't know the mother enough to care about her disappearance, and so I don't care enough to read everything between those opening pages and the last paragraph. I don't necessarily believe you need to go deep with character development before you can launch an adventure story, or a mystery, but you must engage the reader, you must give them something they can latch onto, something they can care about that will make them want to know what is going on in those 238 other pages in between. Unless, of course, you're writing formula for teens accustomed to artificial television drams with the attention span of a noodle.

Personally, I think teens deserve more respect from their reading material than that.

Did I get it right? In hunting down a cover image I landed on Scholastic's page for the book and missed only one element:

But Delia's still sent to New York to live with her two aunts - a downtown bohemian and an uptown ice queen.

And in case that's not bad enough, she also has to deal with a snooty new school and trying not to fall for the wrong guy.

Okay, I should have seen that: fish out of water, something to compare against a cardboard cutout of Silicon Valley. Other then that, I could have written the blurb for this book without having read it.

Sad, really. The book comes out in July.

For You and No One Else

by Edward van de Vendel
illustrated by Martijn van der Linden
Lemniscaat / Boyds Mills 2009

When I first entered the world of children's publishing I heard the term "European" tossed around in reference to some picture books. I had never heard the term before, never even thought about picture books as something that could be continentally differentiated, and yet from the moment I heard the term I knew exactly what it meant.

And here we have an example.

Buck the deer (or perhaps a reindeer) is out terrorizing birds in a forest one day when he stumbles on a seven leaf clover. Immediately he shares his new-found marvel with his friend Sparkleheart. Sparkle is impressed, so much so that he leads Buck to a field full of seven leaf clovers. Then, taking a cue from his friend, Sparkle goes around presenting every doe he can find with a special clover, for them and no one else. Depressed that his special gift for his friend was not special, and that his gift of friendship was used as a ploy to gain the affection of others, Buck trundles off and collapses in a fit of depression. That is when he sees, right in front of him, a true marvel: a clover with twelve leaves. This inspires Buck to give Sparkle the clover as a gift, shouting "YES! YES! YES! FOR YOU AND NO ONE ELSE!"

The end.

Okay, so maybe when I'm lukewarm to a book I can be less than charitable, but the plot summary isn't really that off the mark. Even accounting for differences in cultures and nuances in translation this is the story conveyed in the illustrations. This leaves me with the ultimate take-away question: what is the real story here? Is it that your friends will betray your affections callously, but you should continue to love them nonetheless? The jacket flap is a little more kind:

What do you do when you find a seven-leaf clover? Well, you give it to your best friend, of course.

Sometimes, though, best friends forget to be thoughtful in return.

Is that really it? Is it really a case of Sparkelheart being forgetful, or are we really dealing with a relationship between a giving and a taking personality? Sparkle doesn't merely give away Buck's gift, he uses Buck's action as a basis for going around trying to dupe all the females of the woods. Sparkle is an opportunist, a player, a user, and though it is admirable that Buck is going to stick with his friend there isn't any sense that Buck has changed at all in the end.

This is The Giving Tree problem in a sense, yes? Buck is like the tree in that it give unconditionally and Sparkleheart (asinine name, I must finally say) is the boy who takes and takes and gives nothing in return.

The art... in this small format picture book we have some very simple black and white scratchboard-type illustrations that are both playful and odd. The deer seem to have human legs in pants, with bodies of fabric that indicate gender (boys are square and girls are dress-shaped). It's the angularity of the images that make this feel less "American kid friendly" to me - it just doesn't have the requisite "cute" that the market tends to demand. Mind you, this isn't necessarily a bad thing to me, but it does give the book a bit of it's distance; it trades away its warmth for its uniqueness.

Technically, it's not a bad book, it just doesn't appeal. And I doubt it will be remembered - much less treasured - after its initial reading.

The Best of Stuntology

Pranks, Tricks & Challenges to Amuse & Annoy Your Friends
written and drawn by master trickster
Sam Bartlett
Workman 2008

While I recognize that April is National Poetry Month it also happens to be the month that begins with one of my favorite non-holiday holidays: April Fool's Day. Is there anything more delicious than planning and pulling off that perfect prank, that preposterous practical joke? It seems such a shame that there's only one day a year dedicated to (mostly) good-natured frivolity; after all, they repackage Halloween candy as Christmas candy, and as Easter candy, and even in "fall colors."

But I think the problem is that it can be difficult to come up with the perfect stunt to pull off in a given situation. Putting a vacuum cleaner under someone's bed and waking them up with it instead of an alarm clock (as I did this year) doesn't work at a party, and similarly you can't pin a glass of water to the ceiling with your elderly aunt the way you could with younger sibling. Wouldn't it be great if someone could collect hundreds of these sorts of things, illustrate them in an amusing cartoon format, and present them in one volume with an index so you could look up the exact stunt you are looking for when you need it?

Ta da! I present you with Sam Bartlett's collection, The Best of Stuntology. Like the subtitle says, 304 pranks, tricks and challenges to amuse and annoy your friends.

I think the word "friends" is key here because you really ought to know who your audience is before performing some of these nifty little numbers. Some people have a lower tolerance for the absurd, where others just don't appreciate humor at their expense. It's too bad, because I do think at times like the world has lost it's sense of humor, and if only people could laugh (and laugh at themselves) more then maybe things would be alright. Then again, I'm not so sure how I'd feel if someone convinced me to try and catch a quarter in a funnel tucked into my waistband so they could pour a drink down my pants when I wasn't looking. I'd like to think I would laugh if someone could convince me to draw a moose with my eyes closed and tricked me into sticking my finger into peanut butter when I got to the "tail."

But Stuntology is more than pranks, as its name implies, and there are plenty of stunts that don't embarrass or otherwise deliberately set out to cause grief or hard feelings. Many, in fact, are participatory fun. One can, for example, engage in a conversation where each side only gets to say two words per sentence. Good fun. Not easy. Takes practice. Or you could dealing with some other annoying aspects of life via stunts. Say you've got a telemarketer on the phone and you can get past your immediate response to just hang up. Why not tuck your tongue between your teeth and lower lip and attempt to have a conversation until the person who called gives up in frustration?

One of the great things about this collection is the portability of the stunts. Of the stunts that require props, few involve items not commonly found around the house. It is entirely possible to keep a mental storeroom of a dozen or so stunts that you can perform at parties or while visiting other people's houses. No need to buy fancy gewgaws at the joke or hobby shop (or online), simply show up and become the life of the party!

The pranks are single-page mini comics and Bartlett's illustration style has a playful naive quality, filled with rubbery pranksters and patsies who convey the full range of emotions. And without being explicit, one can gather from the response of the cartoon victims what a prankster or stuntologist can expect - no claims of "but I didn't realize you'd get upset" will be accepted.

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.

Kin

The Good Neighbors, Book 1
by Holly Black and Ted Naifeh
Scholastic Graphix 2008

The set-up for this graphic novel is about as generic as you an get: mopey teenage Rue's mother has disappeared and her father is suspected of murder. Of course, like every teen novel where a parent is accused of murder, the teenage protagonist knows it can't be so, and in searching out the truth that other inept adults cannot fathom (and adults always have to be clueless for this type of story to work) discovers a family truth, a secret buried and kept from our teen hero who is coming to terms with who they are in the world.

Now, since this is author Holly Black's world that hidden element needs to be something a little more... fantastical, shall we say? So the truth is that Rue's mother is a faerie, and her disappearance has to do with a betrayal by her father that has sent her back into the faerie realm. Rue now has to navigate finding her place in two worlds, and all sorts of mortal and immortal conflicts must be quelled. Eventually.

I don't think I can say flat out that fantasy is not my thing, but I can say that I'm a little tired of vampires (or vampyres), and this reminds me of nothing less than a vampire story swapped out with faeries (or fairies). I suppose there are those deeply invested in the milieu who will berate me for failing to appreciate the subtleties between these two worlds, but here all I can see is another story of "otherness" that pits a halfling between parallel worlds. With the waning of vampires (who took over when interest in boy wizards dropped off) we're seeing the crest of other fantasy elements vying to take over, and faeries are going to have it out with zombies in the very near future of YA literature. I suspect the unicorn contingent (and I mean brutish, violent unicorns, not those My Pretty Pony poseurs) will no doubt follow.

Personal preference aside, I never cared for Rue, never felt like I could relate to her. Maybe it was a double-blind on my part -- a brooding girl AND a faerie halfling -- but whatever, Black never gave me a well rounded portrait of a character I could latch onto. I didn't buy the handling of the murder, or her father's arrest, or their family "friend" who may be at the root of why Rue's mother disappeared. Never mind Rue's ability to go unseen and the fact that her invisibility and disappearance seems to go unnoticed by others around her, or that her friends are flatter than the pages they're drawn on.

Visually, the illustrations felt stiff. It's something I'm noticing more and more, perhaps it's always been there and I'm just now seeing it, but it feels like graphic novels aimed at teens are drawn in a very lifeless way. I find myself looking for the traditional action lines in the characters and the compositions, something that givens them life. A still from a Bugs Bunny cartoon is more expressive, and in the end with graphic novels aren't visuals half your story? If you want a reader (okay, me) to buy into a fantasy world you're going to have to convince me that it's something more that shrouded bunches of trees and creeping ivy. It has to live and breath under its own rules, but it has to express some sort of movement. Even the cheap-o animation of the 1950s had some of the best and expressive backgrounds created in the history of cartoons. You can't tell me it's impossible to achieve the same effects in a black and white graphic novel fifty years later.

Oh yeah, this book lingers in the back of my throat like acid reflux.

As this was one of the finalists for the Cybils in the YA graphic novel category I felt like I really had to make sure I put all these emotional responses at bay and come to terms with whether or not I felt it best represented what was available this past year. The most compelling reason I felt it didn't deserve the win was that the story really is only the first part of a larger story. Too many untied threads, to much left up in the air, ultimately not a stand-alone title. It's unfortunate that every year series titles are pushed through the Cybils because invariably the consensus is that they don't hold up against stand-alone titles and take up space in the final panel that could really make for more of a contest and less a process of elimination.

In the end it hardly mattered, the judges were near unanimous in their decision on Emiko Superstar.

Piano Starts Here

The Young Art Tatum
by Robert Andrew Parker
Schwartz & Wade / Random House 2008

This year's winner of the American Library Association's Schneider Family Book Award is a picture book biography of legendary jazz pianist Art Tatum' early days. It follows Tatum as a young prodigy who can barely reach the keys of the family piano up to his days as a young man when he starts to make a name for himself and move out into the world on his own. Rendered in Parker's loose watercolor illustrations, the book has the cozy feel of American nostalgia, the warm fuzzies of a bygone childhood era free of strife and fear.

That isn't entirely a sarcastic summary, but there are may things about this book that stick in my craw the wrong way.

Let's talk about first-person for a moment. The book opens with Tatum introducing us to the house he was born in, to his father the mechanic and his mother the church singer, and the room where the piano is located. In these first four pages author Parker accompanies narrator Tatum's tour of his early days in simple language and images that are placed on the page like snapshots in a photo album. The initial feeling is that of sitting in the room looking at the images as Tatum stands over your shoulder explaining what you're looking at.

But then there's a shift, and a young Tatum is shown on tip-toe plunking away at that piano as he explains in the text how one day he just started playing. His mother enjoys his etudes than suggests he go outside and play while there's still light.

But because of my bad eyes, day and night, dark and light, don't really matter to me.

Because Tatum had cataracts in his eyes from an early age, was blind in one eye and could barely see out the other. That information isn't in the text, and coming five pages in on the picture book I'm suddenly struck with the question: How could Tatum be narrating what I'm looking at if he can't even see himself? If day and night mean nothing to him, how can this narrator explain that I'm looking at the house he was born in. And with a young Tatum's appearance in the illustrations we jump out of the detached viewpoint and into a more observational mode. It's an odd shift, and this change of perspective goes toward a lot of my confusion over this book.

Only in childen's books do we see stared reviews for biographies written in the first person; in the adult world we call his "historical fiction" no matter how well researched. To have Parker, speaking in Tatum's voice, describing to us what Tatum himself could not have seen calls to question a great deal of authenticity. We are being shown the world through Tatum's eyes, which is a pretty good feat for a nearly blind man.

Now I'm an adult (by age at least) and I can tell when to send up the flashing warning signs, but the young readers this book is aimed at aren't necessarily going to have the same abilities to question what they are being shown. They'll understand the difference between an illustration and an photo of a house, but not that the first-person voice is a construct of an author to tell a story. It may be accurate to a degree, but not factual in the sense we would normally expect from a biography.

I jump to the back of the book at this point, hoping to find that the author is quoting Tatum from his own autobiography. Nope. Parker lists over half a dozen titles, only one specifically about Tatum, and leaves us no clue as to whether or not he's paraphrasing other's research or rephrasing Tatum's own words for the audience. I'm on guard now.

Two pages later Tatum talks about a summer night being too hot to turn on the lights, about playing the piano while the neighborhood kids go around catching lightning bugs in bottles. For a kid who can barely see I find it curious that from his distanced perch inside the house, at night, he can see their jars grow lighter as they continue to catch the luminous insects. I've seen my share of lightning bugs, and I'm having a hard time believing a nearly blind boy can see the glow of these bugs growing from a distance.

I get what Parker is doing, He's showing us a slice of Tatum's early days, about how he was segregated from a normal childhood, listing the titles of songs he did (or might have) played on the piano during those years. But what does Tatum think about this, how does he feel? Does he wish he were out there running around, or has he found such a home and refuge in music that he no longer misses these magical moments. The image on the page isn't even of Tatum but of silhouettes black against the dark blue of night catching little flecks of gold. This is as it would look to normally sighted children, this magical nighttime scene, and the absence of Tatum from the illustration suggests his point of view. It becomes as deceptive as the authenticity of the narrative, it makes the cautious reader wary of every depiction. If nothing else the image and words convey an emotional weight that might not be accurate or honest. A reader could walk away from this book imagining Tatum happily playing the piano on a summer's eve, enjoying the magical glow of jars full of lightning bugs when the truth could be the exact opposite.

The story proceeds with some more troubling undertones that might escape a younger reader. Tatum's father and a friend take the boy to a nearby bar where he performs songs he has learned by ear. There are coins stuffed in the boy's pockets and late at night they have to sneak in so as not to wake Tatum's sleeping mother. Clearly what Tatum's father is doing wouldn't meet with his mother's approval, and in fact might be more exploitative that the text lets on. Even if he didn't object -- and many young boys might have found it exciting to perform in bars for adults -- we still have no idea what Tatum thinks about any of this. Did he resent these clandestine performances, did he suspect his father taking a cut of the money, would his mother have put a stop to it if she found out? It was as if Parker, in showing us the world through Tatum's eyes, has extrapolated the boy's blindness to include his thoughts and feelings.

Another curious omission comes between Tatum's barroom days and his performance on local radio. During that time Tatum attended a school for the blind and was given structured musical training. As depicted in the book Parker would have the reader believe that Tatum merely progressed to larger and larger venues. Even if Tatum's developed his unique style on his own it is impossible to know how much of an influence this musical training had on him. Even if he rejected what he learned -- and that he learned it from another visually impaired black musician named Overton Rainey -- his style would be informed by what he learned or rejected.

Yes, a picture book is limited, and concessions need to be made, stories need to be condensed for the audience. But for a book set in the 1920's and 30's I would think that readers would be interested to know that there were schools for the blind with instructors who were African American. And speaking of history, I think I'd like to know that this story took place in the Toledo of the 1920's and 30's; without and real points of reference this story could have been set in the rural parts of the South during the 1960's. Both eras might seem long ago and far away to today's readers, but there's a world of difference between the two and there's no reason for the reader to be kept in the dark.

The American Library Association says "The Schneider Family Book Awards honor an author or illustrator for a book that embodies an artistic expression of the disability experience for child and adolescent audiences." I'm left wondering if the "artistic expression" of Tatum's experience, as depicted by Parker, trumps the authentic emotional aspects of the subject's life. I question whether young Art Tatum's life as warm and, as depicted by Parker, innocently carefree, and if that's really an honest expression of the disability experience.

Emiko Superstar

by Mariko Tamaki
illustrated by Steve Rolston
Minx / DC 2008

When DC Comics decided to launch its line of graphic novels aimed at teen girls I thought they were on to something, especially when I saw that they'd taken on YA author Cecil Castellucci for their inaugural title, The Plain Janes. It was an awkward start, as the pacing of that first title seemed a bit off, but the story had heart and its heart was in the right place. I had hope for them.

But subsequent releases didn't hold up for me, and it didn't help that the stories were written by guys. Should that make any difference? No, but in the world of YA -- the target market -- it takes a fairly sophisticated male author to capture female characters believably, and if that's your target market you really need to pay attention to what they want. So the fact that Minx closed shop at the end of 2008 wasn't really a surprise to me in the end. Their tag line was "Your life. Your books. How novel." How ironic, really.

Finishing Emiko Superstar I can't help wonder if Minx would still be around if this had been their second offering, and if they had bothered to collect a bunch of female voices to carry their line. On the face of it the story isn't really any different than any other teen tale of self-discovery -- male or female -- but its the strength of the voice and character that really works here.

Emiko is going through that summer when something momentous happens that changes her life forever. Having lost her corporate coffee shop job, Emiko lands a babysitting job with some neighbors while at the same time accidentally discovering an underground scene full of performance artists called the Factory. Emiko the shy and timid is nonetheless Emiko the searcher and she investigates this scene full of freaks, totally mesmerized by the star performer, Poppy. While trying to get up the nerve to perform at the Factory, Emi discovers that the wife of the couple she is babysitting for is keeping a secret diary. Using some of her grandmother's clothes from the 1960s, and selecting bits of the diary, she becomes a poet-performer mining trapped suburban housewife angst. As Emi's star rises Poppy's falls, and the attention of the Factory's "curator" leads to a shuttering of the scene. Emi realizes that she's found a window into her true self, and by the end of summer knows is only a question of discovering the rest of her untapped talents.

Getting back to this idea of gender, this story could have been told through either a boy or a girl protagonist, but the fact that it's a girl emerging from her own geeky shadow is less typical. Admittedly, it would be more adventurous to have all the genders reversed and to see a female impresario playing favorites with a bevy of boy toys, but that would also be less realistic. Girls seeking attention and self-expression fall into the hands of those who will best exploit them, which all too often are men, and what's nice here is that Emi is shown uncomfortable and yet just strong enough to resist the negative aspects where others do not.

I've already written an obituary on Minx, and I still think that current business models neither can take the time to develop a brand, or to gather the roster necessary to make it fly before declaring it a failed product. Note to other publishers: girls are still not being served.

* * * *

I wrote this before the finalists were announced for the Cybil Awards graphic novel category. Once they were announced I was bound by my role as a judge not to publish this review for fear of showing favoritism. It turns out I wasn't alone in feeling that Emiko Superstar was a worthy title: it has won this year's Cybil for Graphic Novels in the YA category.

For the full list of winners check out the Cybils website.

A Balloon for a Blunderbuss

written by Alastair Ried, illustrated by Bob Gill
Harper 1961 / Reissued by Phaidon 2008

One of those strange things about the publishing industry I'll never understand: Why would they let something like this slip out of print and out of their hands? Things being what they are, it's sad to see the short-sightedness of ignoring your history and your backlist.

Based on the simple premise of "what would you trade me for this" a butterfly is offered up, and through a series of trades -- for wishbone, a wishbone for a flag, a flag for a straw hat -- finally is traded for an island and everything on it. Of course, when asked to see the butterfly in hand it flies to freedom, proving that some things cannot be possessed, much less traded.

The simplicity of the idea is matched by Gill's graphics, isolated images in thick, inky lines and filed in with a single spot color, occasionally two at the most. Gill, who is a major influence in graphic design (and, oddly, also co-created Beatlemania for Broadway) understands a concept seemingly lost in today's picture books: less is more. While I agree that modern printing has permitted any number of miraculous picture books to be produced, I sometimes feel like gazing at a wall of picture books in a bookstore these days is the equivalent of staring at the signage of Times Square at night when what one wants is a cup of tea in a zen garden.




There's a lot of similarity with the travel picture books of Miroslav Sasek, both in illustration and simplicty.

Simple stories, simply told, simply illustrated. No fancy digital manipulations, no full page bleeds, no extraneous cleverness or in-jokes or asides scattered throughout the illustrations. The book isn't trying to compete with movies or video games or the presumption that a reader needs to be inundated with images to hold their attention.

Simple works.

I understand Phaidon has reprinted another Gill title, What Colour is Your World, and has also reprinted Tomi Ungerer's The Three Robbers. They may be onto something.

I Like You

by Sandol Stoddard Warbug
illustrated by Jacqueline Chwast
Houghton Mifflin 1965

My wife likes to say I have a sticky brain. This is a fairly accurate description of my proclivity to spout lots of useless bits of cultural flotsam that I can recall at a moment's notice. I can, for example, sing jingles from television commercials that haven't aired in over 35 years without the crutch of revisiting them on YouTube. I can, with the briefest of information, recall the actors or titles of movies as people try to describe them. I am horrible at the stuff I was supposed to learn in school, but I often get the obscure questions correct in Trivial Pursuit.

Years ago I came across a single panel cartoon -- reprinted in an issue of Utne magazine, if I'm not mistaken -- that made me laugh with a sort of recognition that could have sunk my spirits if it caught me on the wrong day. In it, a portly gentleman is among a handful of people in a movie theatre, staring at the screen in horror. The caption (approximately): "Roger suddenly realizes that one of his treasured childhood memories is actually a scene from a movie." I took this to be Roger Ebert, Pulitzer Prize winning movie critic, and I knew all too well how that felt. So many times as an adult, revisiting old movies I might only have caught a glimpse of on television growing up, I have scenes come rushing back like a sudden gale force wind. It is, indeed, an odd thing when a memory from childhood presents itself and demands recognition.

So for years I have been using the phrase "goofus on the roofus" as a term of endearment for those who have behaved silly. Certainly with my girls, though I have done it to friends as well. In my mind the full phrase was always "goofus on the roofus, hollering your head off" and, when the situation called for it, I would use the whole line. I cannot recall specifics, but I have no doubt I have referred to at least one individual in Berkeley (known by many as The Hate Man) precisely this way. Something to do with his daily ritual of standing on the roof of his apartment building, in full view of my dorm room, naked, shouting at the sun in some ritualistic fashion.

Recently, I dropped by my local children's book store and saw I Like You sitting on the counter. I'm not generally convinced that impulse items placed by the check-out counter are really deserving of the space, but there was something about this book that caused me to pick it up. It had that look about it that said "Remember me?" and so I had to find out whether it was, indeed, another treasured childhood memory coming back to claim it's rightful place. I used the time-honored tradition of the Random Page Test, and this is what I landed on:



"I am a goofus on the roofus
Hollering my head off
You are one too"
(sorry for the bad scan)

Another gap in my past bridged.

The 1960s seemed like a time when children's books were not only finding their legs, but really testing the boundaries of their freedom. Nonsense and imagination took the place of linear narrative in a way that seemed to reflect the restless nature of a post-war, baby boomer childhood. There are glimmers of this in Ruth Krauss's Open House for Butterflies and Remy Charlip's Arm in Arm, collections of prose-poems and story-etts and snippets of the kind of nonsense that resonates with a playground sensibility.

Warburg opens with the declarative "I like you / And I know why" and proceeds to explain all the reasons why. Many of the reasons are as intimate as being able to share secrets, or share feelings, and they aren't always positive. "I like you because if I am mad at you / Then you are mad at me too // It's awful when the other person isn't // Phooey." And the book continues with this examination of friendship until finally concluding, with the only true response to such a query, "I guess I just like you // Because I like you."

Chwast's illustrations have that loose, spontaneous quality of having quickly captured a moment, almost as if they were taken from a sketchbook. With each page the subjects change so that there is no particular individual serving as the "I" throughout; boys and girls, men and women, young and old, and all the various combinations, each used to help illustrate the quasi universal elements that build a friendship. I say quasi because, unfortunately, the book suffers that lack of diversity that would come a few years down the line in children's books. Everyone depicted is clearly of European descent (or an animal). I wish Chwast had been more forward thinking and given us just a bit of the old UN casting here. It would have gone a long way toward promoting not just the ideas of friendship, but that these things are universal across the spectrum and the sort of things that bring us together.

Still, it fills in yet another gap in my endless quest to rebuild the library of my youth and explain one of my more curious expression. I'll continue to call people goofuses on the roofuses when warranted, only now I'll know where it came from.

(For those reading comments, I don't normally go back and revise posts once "published" - I prefer to stand here warts and all - but this time the gaff Mr. Florian pointed out didn't sit well with me. I only mention it so the comment makes sense.)

My Name is Georgia

a portrait
by Jeanette Winter
Harcourt 1998

Out of the darkness I emerge, and the next few weeks are going to be heavy with picture book biographies and graphic novels. Not that any of you are keeping tabs, just what I've been soaking in for the past couple of weeks while visiting the island of Incommunicado.

For this intimate look at the painter Georgia O'Keeffe, Winter has chosen to tell not so much a life story as a sort of emotional growth of an artist. We do get the requisite facts of her life as a person -- birth, death, early childhood -- but most of what Winter has built this book on are the words that O'Keeffe uses to express her feelings. What emerges isn't so much a description of how art spoke to her, but how she seemed to be answering a calling that was difficult to articulate outside of her art. The distance was always calling me, O'Keeffe says, and Winter uses these moments to build an emotional arc to a story that shows us the inner life of an artist.

Aside from the opening and closing images that plainly state O'Keeffe's dates of birth and death, the book is told in a first-person viewpoint. To achieve this, Winter has taken select phrases quoted from various biographies about O'Keeffe and built narrative bridges to fill in the gaps that otherwise would have been described by traditional biographers. Winter sets the stage and situations and then allows O'Keeffe's words to fill in the feelings surrounding them.

I went to the Texas plains,
the Wild West of my childhood books.
...you have never seen SKY--
It is wonderful.

Rather than break the flow of the narrative with quotes or attributions, Winter simply offsets O'Keeffe's quotes in italics. For the younger reader these statements probably read more as emphasis, but for older readers (and adults) this serves as an elegant solution to the dilemma that arises when a picture book author writes about someone else in the first person.

It's an interesting point (and one I have been exploring a lot lately, so it's likely to show up again) that nowhere else but in children's books do we find biographies written in first-person narration. Any adult author that dared to write about an historical personage in the first person, their book would be labeled as fiction, but here and in many others like this the Library of Congress has categorized this book in the traditional non-fiction category of Biography.

In carefully choosing O'Keeffe's words Winter is able to present the reader with a sense of how the artist thought and felt. Whether or not this is an accurate portrait it would take an art historian to sort out, and taken by themselves I'm not so sure I would draw the same conclusions on character that is implied here in this book. But Winter is smart in calling this a portrait and not a biography, understanding the artist's use of the word to mean "a likeness" with all the leeway it provides. An artist, painting a portrait, has the delicate task of finding the best way to represent their subject while at the same time inserting their own style to the process. I have no doubt that Winter has "painted" a portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe, but is it an accurate one?

As Winter portrays O'Keeffe, she is a woman driven by the landscape, compelled to paint it, to find her peace within it, to commune with this space in an almost religious sense. It isn't hard to believe this was what O'Keeffe was like, what she felt, and it's a fairly sophisticated idea to communicate to a picture book audience. Where the biography is lacking in he type of information one might look for in a report -- why she made the decisions to move to New York, her relationship with the photographer Alfred Steiglitz, how old she was at any of these ventures -- Winter does manage to convey a sense of time passing and the emotional growth of the artist.

As for the illustrations Winter has said she wanted to give her impression of O'Keeffe's work and in this area I feel she falls flat. Winter's style is unique in and of itself and I am sure I could recognize any illustration from any book of hers on sight. O'Keeffe painted small things very large to make people notice them (as is pointed out in the text itself) but Winter paints the large things very small, surrounding her images on each page with a lot of white space. O'Keeffe was drawn to the large openness, the faraway she calls it, but here it looks so contained, so tiny.

Still, for a biography that looks at first blush to be very slight, this book is contains a great deal that is felt more than it tells.

The Robot and the Bluebird

by David Lucas
FSG 2008

Author David Lucas makes some pretty unusual books. The stories are like jigsaw puzzles of optical illusions: everything seems to be in place but the overall impression undulates in a way that makes you blink. If you've encountered Nutmeg or Whale or Halibut Jackson then you know what I'm talking about.

Unusual isn't a bad thing, though it sometimes can lead to head-scratching. No, just to be clear, I'd rather wade through more unusual picture books and try to sort out their logic any day rather than trip merrily down the same well-worn path many other books follow. In The Robot and the Bluebird we don't find the most original of themes -- a useless object/person finding new use/companionship in an unexpected encounter -- so much as a sort of quiet meditation on usefulness and appreciation.

Robot is introduced to us as having a broken heart. readers understand that what is broken are his internal mechanisms, but the story is built around the idea of what it means to have a heart in the emotional sense. Of course, when a thing is broken it is discarded, and so Robot is relegated to a garbage heap to rust our his days. One day a bluebird, late in migrating, chances to nest in Robot's chest, giving him the sensation of once again having a heart. Too tired to continue on it's way, Robot completes the bluebird's migration while carrying it along. Robot exhausts his last bit of energy while telling the bluebird that "you'll always have a place in my heart." Frozen forever, other birds come seeking refuge in and around Robot's remains.

This could so easily have gone corny, or ham-fisted, but somehow Lucas manages to pull it off. I can only attribute this to the watercolor illustrations that give the metal Robot its warmth and strength and delicacy. Some of these illustrations make me want to tear apart m copy of the book and frame them.

I almost think the book works without the story, without the words, as a sort of silent movie that had a narrative attached to it. It's a little thin on its own to simply have its words removed, but as with Where the Wild Things Are so much of the story is in the illustrations after the initial set-up. I think that with a little less words and a little more story this could have been a classic. As it is, it's very, very good.

Timbuktu

by Paul Auster
adapted and illustrated by
Julia Goschke
Penguin 2008

Wow. It isn't often you come across a miscalculation this severe.

First, I love Paul Auster's writing. I'm surprised to encounter people who don't know anything he's done. He writes for adults, so it isn't like I'm talking about some obscure children's author when I mention him to people.

But Auster didn't write this book. This is a picture book adaptation of his novel of the same name that tells Timbuktu's story from his own unique point of view. That is to say, Timbuktu is a dog, and his story is a meditation on what it means to be a modern dog in the city.

Here's the question I have: who thought this would make a good picture book for children. This came out under Penguin's Young Reader's Group imprint, so clearly they view this as a picture book. But what is the audience for a dog's existential meditation on life and, ultimately, death. Not just any death, the death of a dog longing to reunite with his old master, a homeless man. A dog death by playing a game with traffic. Unless I missed something, this is dog death by suicide.

I'll grant, there is a fairly strong history of books for children dealing with dogs that die, so much so that it's become a sort of joke. But a picture book? And I know there are books for younger readers aimed at helping them cope with the loss of a pet or other loved one. But a picture book where the dog chooses to play in traffic? Under other circumstances I also might have questioned the idea of a picture book that featured a dog getting neutered, but here that seems like a minor detail.

Okay, let's drop the ending for a moment and look at this as a story. We open with Timbuktu, called Mr. Bones here, observing that the homeless man who is his owner isn't long for the world. With a look his owner sends him packing, knowing he'll do better on his own, on the streets, than in the clutches of the authorities. So the story starts with a hint of death on the streets, just as it ends.

Next Mr. Timbuktu Bones goes in search of a new owner. I think. See, the text isn't really clear in that sense. It doesn't really have the kind of a story you follow so much as you kinda guess at it. This aimlessness works a whole lot better in novels than it does in picture books, let me tell you. So after a dashed hope with a few owners he somehow finds himself a new home with a family and some sort of provisional arrangement. I don't know, this is equally unclear. Next, the aforementioned neutering and some sort of rural retreat that may be a home for rescued dogs, a kennel for the terminally ill, or some sort of dog heaven. See, it's just not easy to grasp, and I'm a reasonably intelligent adult. Imagine trying to do all this with a lap sitter or a new reader.

Take that back, you can't do this with a new reader because the vocabulary is beyond them. Even as a read-aloud you'd have to spend fifteen minutes per page explaining the text, and then the images, and then the stream of questions that would result. But why is he now with that man on the subway? What is the doctor doing to him and why is he licking his private parts? Isn't it wrong for a dog to play around cars like that?

I think there's a place on a special shelf for this. It's wedged between the picture book adaptation of Sarte's No Exit and Beckett's picture book adaptation (96 pages!) of Waiting for Godot. Well out of reach of children.

Poetry Friday: The Piano Has Been Drinking

Afansy Fet, Russian poet
Christina Rossetti, English poet
Margaret Cho, Korean-American comedienne
J. J. Cale, American songwriter
James Lee Burke, American mystery author
Joan Didion, American author
Sony Boy WIlliamson, blues musician
Calvin Trillin, American author
Josh Malihabadi, Urdu poet of India and Pakistan
Walt Disney, American filmmaker
Fritz Lang, Austrian film director
Martin Van Buren, 8th American president

What most of these folks have in common is that they're all pretty good with words and images. It's something I hope to have in common with them as well one day, besides sharing a birthday. Which is today.

But for my birthday I wanted to share the wordsmithery of another Sagittarius, a Mr. Thomas Alan Waits, whose birthday is actually on the 7th. That's okay, we'll make him an honorary fifth-of, if he'll have us.

I like this because as each item and person is mentioned it's as if they have been brought to life in some surreal claymation nightmare of after-hours broke-down seedy nightclub reverie.

the piano has been drinking (not me)

The piano has been drinking
my necktie is asleep
and the combo went back to New York
the jukebox has to take a leak
and the carpet needs a haircut
and the spotlight looks like a prison break
cause the telephone is out of cigarettes
and the balcony is on the make
and the piano has been drinking
the piano has been drinking

and the menus are all freezing
and the light man's blind in one eye
and he can't see out of the other
and the piano-tuner's got a hearing aid
and he showed up with his mother
And the piano has been drinking
the piano has been drinking

cause the bouncer is a Sumo wrestler
cream-puff casper milktoast
and the owner is a mental midget
with the I.Q. of a fencepost
cause the piano has been drinking
the piano has been drinking...

and you can't find your waitress
with a Geiger counter
and she hates you and your friends
and you just can't get served
without her

and the box-office is drooling
and the bar stools are on fire
and the newspapers were fooling
and the ash-trays have retired
and the piano has been drinking
the piano has been drinking
the piano has been drinking
not me, not me, not me, not me, not me

From the album Small Change 1976.

Poetry Friday is over at Mommy's Favorite Children's Books this week.

Knuckleheads

by Joan Holub
illustrated by Michael Slack
Chronicle Books 2008

Oh, I get it. The character's heads are all made from hands. Knuckleheads.

No, wait. I don't get it. Aside from all the obvious punning around -- Thumbelina is really a thumb. Handerella in love with the handsome Finger Prints -- why do this? Remove the gags and what you are left with is a second-rate attempt at retelling fairy tales the way Jon Scieszka did over a decade ago with The Stinky Cheese Man. Hold up, let me look at this again.

Nope, didn't work for me a second time. Or a third.

I think the problem is that it's trying too hard to be clever when it should be focusing that attention on making all that cleverness entertaining. If you want to use puns and wordplay to tell a story you can't neglect the fact that you still have a story to tell. Merely hanging verbal gymnastics on truly tired fairy tales isn't enough(and, really, at this point kids probably know more about classic fairy tales then have actually read the originals), you need to apply that same creativity to the stories themselves.

The reason The Stinky Cheese Man works is because it is a reinvention of the story. You could make an entire collection of fairy tale updates using pigs and call it "The Gingerbread Ham and Other Curly Tails" and it might appear clever (Huh, I just made that up! That was easy! I should write a children's book!) but if it's just the original story in a pig suit, well, what's the point? You see what I'm saying?

Yes, Knuckleheads is chock full of cleverness, probably more cleverness per page than any number of books out there right now. It just doesn't entertain as a collection of stories. If this had been a collection of illustrated puns that were thematically linked I wouldn't have any qualms. It's the unnecessary layer of fairy tales forced to lend some legitimacy to the proceedings that doesn't work.

Listen, kids don't always need a story. Sometimes they like jokes and wordplay for their own sake. When they go to the park and play they don't always need rules, or have to have elaborate equipment to have fun. Sometimes they play for the sake of playing. What's wrong with that in picture books every now and then?

The Trouble Begins at 8

A Life of Mark Twain in the Wild, Wild West
by Sid Fleischman
Greenwillow / HarperCollins 2008

Mark Twain was a self-made man. Fleishman acknowledges this when he beings this biography of the writer's early years by laying his birth date as some time in the fall of 1865. This, of course, is around the time that the man from Hannibal, Missouri officially used the pen name Mark Twain while writing travelogues during the California Gold Rush. For this point Fleishman backtracks a bit to sketch in the life of Sam Clemens up to that moment he became Mark Twain and then continues forward from there to when Twain first became famous as a humorist on the lecture circuit.

It's an entertaining and breezy read though at times it falls flat in the telling. It seems at times that Fleishman is attempting to give the text a folksy patina, perhaps an homage in imitation to Twain's narrative style, but it seems long-winded at best and feels unsourced at worst. Not that Fleishman hasn't done his research and claimed his sources - no, no, it's all there in the appendices - but that the narrative flourishes almost beg challenge.

Still, Sam felt himself to have entered a paradise of solitude and untouched scenery and deliverance from care. The greatest human achievement to behold was the breathless glimpse of the lone and unarmed Pony Express rider, carrying mail through Indian country on his eight-day dash across eighteen hundred miles of the wild West to Sacramento.

The young boy in me reading that passage says "Oh, come on!" while the adult me wonders whether it was Twain who found the Pony Express the greatest human achievement or Fleishman editorializing in his own breathless text. Yes, there's a lot of text like that, and were Twain's life any less entertaining the book would immediately bog down in the swirl of it all.

Still, for the middle grader reader looking for a little more depth than most biographies on Twain aimed at their level, or for the younger reader reading up, this is a serviceable overview of how Twain came to be Twain.

My Letter to the World

And Other Poems
by Emily Dickinson
with illustrations by Isabelle Arsenault
Kids Can Press 2008

It would take a very specific type of young reader to recommend this book, but for the receptive this is a gorgeous introduction to the world of Emily Dickinson.

In this slim volume from the Visions of Poetry Series by Kids Can Press we are given seven of Miss Emily's better known poems. The poems are short but spread across several pages each to better shift the illustrations to fit the mood. In this way they almost read like a collection of short illustrated stories.

As the poems have no titles, the careful reader learns that a new poem has started because the first word is set in an aqueous blue handscript with the rest of the text set in type. It can take a poem or two to understand what is going on -- especially since there's no way of knowing how long a poem will continue -- but it does have an odd way of extending the poem, lengthening the experience, forcing a reader to slow down and savor the word and illustrations.

Admittedly, I felt a little unsettled by the way the poems were broken up until I got into the rhythm. When you have seen these poems presented whole on a single page, to then see them pulled apart methodically over a few pages can be disorienting. I wasn't comfortable with what was happening until I realized that I shouldn't want to feel comfortable. This discomfort forced me to see the poems anew. What a lovely experience.

Taken as a whole, this collection feels a bit... dark. This is Miss Emily's territory, and probably another of those situations where these poems would not be published for children to read (much less illustrated so handsomely) if they were written today. Must protect the children, think of the children!

And so:

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

It's Poetry Friday. Check out more over at Under the Covers.

Adele and Simon in America

by Barbara McClintock
Francis Foster Books / FSG 2008

I'm not generally a huge fan of an excellent stand-alone picture book gaining a sequel but I'm going to give this one a pass because I love McClintock's illustrations.

Adele and Simon, those two early 20th century Parisian children, have traveled to America to see the country by train with their aunt. As with their previous outing, Simon is continually losing personal items as he goes, begging the reader to find the missing items among the details in the drawings. Sort of like a Where's Waldo? situation but with much finer art.

McClintock captures a certain nostalgia in her illustrations that recall Windsor McCay's "Little Nemo" cartoons, or a mid-century rendition of turn-of-the-century. The fine lines of her drawings are reminiscent of hand-painted etchings, full of fussy detailing. A true mid-century picture book would have been one or maybe two spot colors, not a full spectrum watercolor, so in that sense they are richer in tone and value. It's what I love, that mix of classic storybook style with modern print quality.

Alas, the story here is a bit clunky as a mechanism for getting Adele and Simon around the various parts of the United States, but it's all an excuse for the pretty pictures and the opportunity for kids to play hide-and-seek with Simon's lost items. If there was a way to do these books without words I think I might be in heaven. Why should David Wiesner corner the market on wordless picture books and get all the awards?

It doesn't have the fresh appeal or the natural simplicity of the original Adele and Simon, but you could do a whole lot worse in picture books these days, and many do.

The Great Powers Outage

The Extraordinary Adventures of Ordinary Boy, Book 3
by William Boniface
HarperCollins 2008

What happens when you take a juvenile comic book storyline, one that would typically be 32 pages in length, pretend it's a title worthy of "prestige" dimensions of 72 pages, then convert it into a middle grade narrative that lasts for nearly 350 pages?

I don't want to talk about this book, I want to put a call out there to teachers and librarians: how many kids are asking for books about superheroes? How many out there are so vested in this series that they've been anxiously awaiting the third installment? I want a sense of the numbers of reader actively seeking this book out and not just plopped into their hands when they are at their wits end for what to recommend for a boy into superheroes.

I mean, wouldn't it be better to not pretend that this is better than having them read comics? Isn't it an admission of failure in publishing that they feel they have to compete with comics on this level?

Okay, I'll say this much about the book. Having read all three books in the series I could see maybe - maybe - the foundation for a TV cartoon series. But it would be half-hour episodes befitting their storylines and not padded to three-hour long endurance marathons. This series would benefit from some serious rejiggering. Pull these stories down to under a hundred pages and focus on the series readers. Quit clogging the middle grade shelves with pulp just because you can, HarperCollins.

Eddie, Incorporated

by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
Atheneum 1980

Everybody in Eddie's family is in business or on their way. His father runs a produce market and his mother bakes goods sold in the store. His older brother Roger worked in a shoe store with eyes on a management position. His other brother Joseph is a whiz with numbers with plans to become a banker, always with a calculator in hand, figuring out the interest on any sum being discussed.

Eddie didn't have a job, or prospects, or even the slightest idea about what to do to earn money. But he wanted a job, and not just any old job: Eddie wanted to be the boss and own his own business. After a visit with his tinkerer neighbor Mr. Clemmons, Eddie learns that if you can find a problem or a need you can build a business around it. Looking at his littered neighborhood Eddie decides to start an aluminum can collection business, and he brings his friends Dink and Elizabeth in as partners.

The can business seems to be going along well, but once they factor in their costs and divide the money Eddie and his friends realize they're making pennies a day and decide to fold their business. Eddie tries to invent a shoe deodorizer with disastrous results, a lawn service no one wants, starts up a local newsletter which requires more effort than it's worth, and eventually devises a benign protection racket at his middle school to prevent sixth graders from being hazed by eighth graders. Along the way Eddie and his friends learn about advertising, profits and losses, writing up business plans and contracts - everything a budding entrepreneur would need to know in order to set up shop. In the end Eddie creates a babysitter agency that acts as an intermediary between sitters and families in need, collecting fees from both sides for their efforts. In true entrepreneurial fashion Eddie discovers the joys of being his own boss, and that there are ways to earn money from the efforts of others.

I have to say, I love stories that show kids how the business world works and I wish there were more of them. Stories about kids setting up a business to make money are fine, but what I'd like to see are more of the nitty-gritty, the nuts and bolts of what it means beyond "let's set up a lemonade stand and make a few dollars we can spend down at the candy store." Eddie doesn't just want a job, or a few quick bucks, he wants to be a boss and own his own business. Eddie doesn't have dreams about what he'll do with all the money he'll make, he's more concerned with making his businesses be both practical and profitable. He doesn't want to work for someone else but he's not lazy, Eddie works harder at making his businesses work than he would running deliveries for his father.

As usual, Naylor nails the middle grade world with its own sense of logic and independence. It's an older book, looks like it was last printed in 1985, which makes it a library find. My copy actually was a library find, a library discard sale book, which would indicate that it's lost favor with contemporary readers. Probably because it's the original printing and the illustrations by Blanche Sims give it a dated feel. I like the drawings, but I'm not a kid. With minor adjustments in dollar amounts (adjusted for inflation, of course) and fresh illustrations I think this is still a relevant title for budding executives.

Knucklehead

Tall Tales & Mostly True Stories About Growing Up Scieszka
by Jon Scieszka
Viking 2008

I totally dig that Jon Scieszka had the kind of wigged-out childhood that makes for good kid biographies, but I would hate to see the report some kid would write using this as their source material. Or maybe I wouldn't hate it. Maybe it's what some poor unsuspecting teacher deserves.

In 38 brief and amusing chapters the author of The Stinky Cheese Man and our current National Ambassador of Young People's Literature by the Library of Congress digs up the kind of family dirt that most people try to hide. From pee fights, to fundraising in order to name starving pagan babies in Africa, to threatening to have younger brothers hauled away for misbehaving -- this book is chock-full of all the things that naturally occur in a household of five boys.

This book hardly needs any recommendation. Boys who know the name Scieszka will pick it up and know what to expect. Mostly. If they haven't done similar things recounted in this book they probably thought them. And if they never thought them, then this book will inspire them. Word of mouth will ensure that boys pass this along and read these impossible to forget stories.

Reading, getting boys to read. A steady of diet of this stuff would kill anyone, but boys deserve a treat everyone once in a while. Oh, and for the adult boys out there who might have forgotten what it was like to be 8 or 10 or 12 years old, I'm sure there are a few memories kindled by these accounts.

As for these stories being either tall tales or "mostly true" all I can say is, having once been a boy, a disclaimer like that was probably some editor's idea. I can't imagine any true boy denying any of this as anything but the whole truth.

My Father's Son

by Terri Fields
Roaring Brook Press 2008

The only thing missing from the front of this book is an exploding gold medallion with the words RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES! printed in bold red letters.

One day as Kevin Windor is watching TV he sees a news bulletin: The notorious DB25 serial killer has been apprehended. What Kevin sees on the screen, though, is his own father being escorted away by police. It can't be, Kevin says in shock, he knows his dad is innocent!

Already Fields has lost me. Without establishing that Kevin's dad is (or might be) a good father I have to take Kevin's emotional, determined word that his dad isn't the killer. That means that Fields wants me to either take a stance against the main character -- essentially lumping me with all the local citizens who have seen the news reports and leveled guilt on Kevin's dad -- or I have to have faith that Kevin's unwavering and naive support of his father will be justified in the end. In the later case, since I have to correctly guess the end of the story in order to be sympathetic to Kevin, what's the point of reading further? Happy ending, story over.

Constructed like the worst sensationalist television drama, Kevin moves through the accusation and his father's unwillingness to tell the truth (despite the fact that it would support his innocence) like a clueless teen whose knowledge of the law and the real world came exclusively from watching cop shows. Bad ones, with corny stilted dialog. When he goes to confront his father's lawyer Kevin seriously believes that if he could only talk to his dad and hear directly from his that he's innocent that everything will be okay. Then when his dad cuts off communication and says he's going to plead guilty -- to a string of murders, mind you -- Fields has upped the ante in manipulative absurdity.

Unless Kevin's dad truly was guilty of the crimes he's accused of, and the story is an examination of what it feels like to be the child of such notoriety and parental deception, the only reason to have Kevin crusade on his father's behalf is to show how a trial-by-media and guilt-by-association brings out the worst in people, the worst in society. Rather than letting the reader into what Kevin feels it's as if Fields wants to hold up a mirror and accuse the reader of being no better than the people who shun Kevin and his mother.

Now, if Fields were instead using Kevin to serve as a detective to prove his father's guilt (with his father's knowledge and cooperation) we might have had a reasonable mystery story here. There'd still be the son-of-a-serial-killer stigma involved, but it would serve as an adversity for Kevin to battle with emotionally. But that's not the book Fields wrote, and in the worst tea cozy mystery tradition she has dad explain everything to Kevin in the end, a tidy little summary delivered in the best tell-don't-show fashion.

My Father's Son is episode of Jerry Springer turned into an ABC After School Special. It's high concept, lowbrow entertainment. Minus the entertainment.

Poetry Friday: 3 by Christina Rossetti

taken from
Poems
An Early-Start Preschool Reader
illustrated by Victor Lazzaro
Wonder Books 1965

I haven't yet been able to get into Proust, but I can dig where he's coming from. I think we all know too well how easy a little thing can trigger deeply buried remembrances. Having grown up in the post-war capitalist republic that I did, many of my memories are associated with commercial things: Board games and television commercials, music and books.

Many of the books of my childhood did not survive the punishment they took in our household. If I didn't destroy them through a lack of care then they eventually disintegrated in the hands of my younger sibling. As a result, there are countless books I have read but do not remember until chance brings them back into my adult consciousness.

Our local library has a nook just inside the entrance where they hold a year-round sale to benefit the friends of the library. As the library sells off profitable donations and purges its shelves of unread books, the stock of what's available varies almost daily and a frequent scavenger can stumble across some treasures. This week I spotted a small square book that I nearly ignored. It looked too old, too old-fashioned, to hold my interest. But a second glance, and something about the cover design, made me look inside.

In typical 1960's style the book contained line drawings with a single spot color of brown. Flip, flip, and here it was, the image of a child in a rain poncho on cobblestones, and I was back at El Rincon Elementary School. The poem that accompanied the picture, "The Rain" by Robert Louis Stevenson, was more than vaguely familiar. It was as if it had been tattooed along the edges of my reptile brain, the fingers of memory running over the raised edges of those words in darkness. Though not this exact copy, I have held this book in my hands, once, long ago. Whether it was mine or not, I owned this book.

I paid the twenty-five cents for the book and took it home without looking any further inside. Luck, fate, or karma had returned this book to me, another piece of my childhood regained, another fragment of memory restored, another piece of the puzzle that is me put back into place.

A collection of shorter poems based on nature, the book contains two anonymous poems, three by Robert Louis Stevenson, one my Alfred Lord Tennyson, and three by Christina Rossetti. At first I was surprised to see the authors names in a preschool book, then I began to wonder about the unfamiliar name, Rossetti. Was she someone hired by Wonder Books to fill out the slim volume?

No.

We'll have to save an examination of Christina Rossetti for another day, but it turns out she was an English poet who wrote romantic, devotional, and children's poetry. She bears some investigation as it appears she was a proto-feminist who did such things as volunteer at a home for prostitutes while writing children's poems. Fascinating. She also shares my birthday, along with Joan Didion and Walt Disney. Odd company, indeed.

For today I'm featuring the three poems from this crazy sliver of my childhood. Care for a madeleine?

The Clouds

White sheep, white sheep
On a blue hill.
When the wind stops
You stand still.


The Wind

Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I.
But when the trees bough down
their heads,
The wind is passing by.


The Clouds

Boats sail on the rivers,
Ships sail on the seas
But clouds that sail across
the sky
Are prettier far than these.

The Poetry Friday round-up is being hosted today by Yat-Yee Chong.

The Spectacular Now

by Tim Tharp
Knopf 2008

(cross-posting today at Guys Lit Wire)

It's an odd, almost unsettling experience to finish reading a book, fire up the internet to see what sort of buzz the book has, and then discover that almost simultaneously the book was just named as a finalist for the National Book Award. That's exactly what happened a few weeks back, in one of those moments when you wonder if the universe is trying to tell you something important.

Cue eerie music.

Sutter Keely is a charmer. A senior without a care, he is an unrepentant alcoholic living in the now, willing to embrace the weird. The only problem is that his beautiful fat girlfriend Cassidy is getting tired of his shtick. He's late and constantly drinking Seagam's and 7-Up; he's fun but irresponsible; he's a good time at parties but he's selfish. When the last straw comes and Cassidy finally dumps him Sutter figures she'll eventually come back around to his wannabe Dean Martin swagger.

The problem is that Cassidy is looking down the road at life beyond high school and Sutter isn't there. And not just Cassidy, all of Sutter's friends seem intent on trying to figure out what comes next. After years of floating without a care Sutter doesn't see the big deal, or the need to plan beyond his current buzz. So when Cassidy shows how serious she is by picking up with a new boyfriend, Sutter redirects his energies toward hooking up his best friend Ricky with a girl of his own.

Wallowing drunk, he is found passed out on a lawn early one morning by Aimee, one of those withdrawn girls everyone walks all over. Taking her on as his own special project to help her grow a spine and realize her inner self, Sutter finds himself promising to take her to the prom, officially declaring her his girlfriend, and knowingly leads her on in an effort to build self esteem. But Aimee isn't like the other girls he's dated, willing to hang out with a party boy until it's no longer fun. Aimee has fallen in love -- deep, hard, and seriously -- and slowly begins to entangle Sutter into her plans and dreams, into their combined future together. She could be the girl Sutter has always needed, the one he never realizes he'd always wanted, a girl who could change him for the better.

If Sutter doesn't first succeed in dragging her into his own dead-end spiral.

Will Sutter reform, confront his deadbeat father and clean up his drinking? Or will Aimee become his sloppy, drunken sidekick, the girl who abandons her dreams of college and NASA to stay by the side of the only guy that has ever bothered to give her the time of day?

Up until the final pages there's no way of knowing how this is going to turn out. Tharp does a nice job of having the characters remain true to themselves in such a way that every meeting is a quiet trial of wills. When Cassidy continues to get together with Sutter on Thursday afternoons after they break up -- and with the full knowledge of their new dating partners -- Cassidy makes no bones about the fact that she will probably always be drawn to Sutter's bad boy antics but cannot let him back into her life as anything more than a buddy. This suits Sutter just fine, but his unspoken longing for Cassidy seeps in and pushes him that much farther along. He's like a comet that gains velocity in her orbit, then spins wildly out into the universe seemingly with a lack of control, but he's always drawn back into her gravitational orbit when he reaches the outer limits with Aimee.

Tharp pulls a nifty trick in giving us the portrait of a charming young drunk well on his way toward becoming a pathetic one. But he doesn't judge -- Sutter's friends are more than willing to do that, and they do it with a large dose of tough love despite the apparent futility of their gestures. There were moments when I was almost afraid Tharp was romanticizing teen alcoholism in trying to present a realistic portrait, but Sutter's own aimlessness undermines anything remotely cool about being drunk. It plays as humor when Sutter goes to his sister's house for dinner and nearly sets himself on fire when he tries to secretly smoke a joint in her closet, but Sutter's empty apologies and quick judgments about his family members make the laughter ring hollow.

I wasn't as impressed with Tharp's last outing, The Knights of Hill Country, because there was something about it that felt stale. This time out Tharp returns to his Oklahoma soil with an approach that feels slightly on edge. Not edgy, but teetering at the brink of excess and charm -- much like its main character. It is unflinching in its handing of teen drinking, almost casual, but equally sober about what sort of dead end that leads to.

I don't think it's necessarily undeserving the National Book Award, but given the competition I'm having a hard time seeing this pull through as the winner. Then again, perhaps the universe was indeed trying to tell me something. We'll find out soon enough.