Meanwhile

Pick Any Path. 3,856 Possibilities 
by Jason Shiga 
Amulet / Abrams 2010  

2010 Cybils Winner for Middle Grade Graphic Novels 

It seems like such a small decision – chocolate or vanilla ice cream? – but whichever one the reader chooses for Jimmy will send them both down one of 3,856 paths.  Some paths lead to death and the end of the world as we know it, some lead to a parallel dimension, some sort of loop back around to the beginning. Time travel is involved, and a squid (sort of). Jimmy's initial choice of flavors is what sets the story hurling toward a trio of inventions, the luck of a coin toss, and the reader's memory of an access code that alters and reshapes the story along the way. 

What would happen if you mashed up a choose-your-own-adventure (COYA) story with a graphic novel?  Meanwhile is the answer.  Everyone starts at the same place, but the choices they make along the way determine the outcome of the story.  Like the CYOA stories, many of the choices lead to death and so presents the reader with challenge of making the right choices in order to survive.  The difference is that the CYOA stories left readers with an emotional or moral dilemma on which to peg their decisions, but in Meanwhile decisions are sometimes simply a question of blind luck.  Sort of like life where the smallest of hesitations can have profound effects.  

double click to view larger

Those 3,856 paths are a bit of a technical inflation: the book does not contain that many actual stories or endings.  Where some paths diverge and follow one set of story ideas they will eventually come back to a one of a few shared end strand.  I haven't mapped the book out – I'm sure that sounds like a fun activity for some people – but if you've ever wondered what a CYOA-type book looked like mapped out, check out this link. Despite The Mystery of Chimney Rock having only 44 choices and 36 endings it does add up to a crazy-big number of "possibilities."  It's no surprise that Shiga's book plays up the numbers as he is not only a cartoonist but a mathematician.

The technique for making choices is unique and worth note. Each panel of the graphic novel has a little "tube" that connects it with the next panel in sequence.  These tubes, either by choice or by necessity of space, run off the edge of the pages and onto tabs that lead the reader to the next page. Following the tabs sends the reader backward and forward (like a time traveler, if you will) through the story, but the tubes do more than that.  By directing the reader across the page in this fashion, Shiga can place three or four separate sequences on a page that may have no connection to one another.  They are impossible for the reader to ignore (like telling a jury to forget what they have just heard) and so these extraneous panels become a tease to the reader.  Will they end up back at this page in the future?  If so, how do these panels connect?  And if the reader doesn't make it back to that page, they at least have knowledge of it, which means that once they've finished one run through the story they have seen glimpses of Jimmy's parallel lives and can be enticed back into the story to see if they can find a particular strand.  This layout, while showing all the paths along the way, makes it nearly impossible to casually flip through the book.  No single page makes any sense without knowing what comes before or after which forces the reader start from the beginning and rethink their path.

But what about the story itself?  Shiga takes the element of time travel and the reader's physical interaction with the book to explain and demonstrate the concept of infinite universes existing in parallel time. Just as the reader can flip between stories and change paths if they want to see where their decisions might have lead them, the various story lines exist in a parallel world (the book) where only the separation of pages prevents the characters from seeing "what might have been." It's the kind of a thing that will either wash right over a reader, expand their thinking about time and space, or just blow their minds. 

As a reading experience though the book can become quickly tiring.  Once you get the gist of several possibilities, once you've encountered a few endings or doubled over the same path a couple of times, you become tired of reading what is, essentially, a very short story with little character development or emotional investment. There is a certain adherence to fate in that there are a limited number of characters and locations that the story takes place in, suggesting that no matter which path the main character takes, they will eventually come to the same places and meet the same people.  Only the decisions change. In our daily lives we often fantasize about what small decision would change our lives and our experiences, and if I had a main criticism for Meanwhile it would be that for all its paths the scenery remains fairly limited.

This book is a natural for an entire generation wired into video games, who have learned through "multiple lives" that trial and error will eventually lead them to the most satisfying ending they can find.  It's a great approach for creatives and those who like a good puzzle with their reading.  Too bad our daily lives don't allow us to backtrack and explore alternate paths the same way.  At least not in this particular universe we're in.

Who Need Donuts?

Story and Pictures by Mark Alan Stamaty  
Knopf 1973     

Sam wants donuts for his birthday, more donuts than his parents could ever afford.  He wanders from his suburban home to the big city and discovers there are some things more important that donuts.  

Once Sam hits the city he finds a man named Mr. Bikferd who is a donut collector, wandering the city hunting for donuts and hauling them all over in his giant wagon.  Sam tags along helping collect donuts until one day the wagon breaks down.  Seeking help, Sam locates a woman who collects pretzels in a wagon of her own, and when Pretzel Annie and Mr. Bikferd lock eyes it's all over for the donut collector.  Sam now has a wagon full of all the donuts he could ever want... and he doesn't want them.  

Popping up throughout is a sad old woman whose prophetic announcement at the beginning of Sam's adventure – "Who needs donuts when you have love?" – finds her life in danger when the coffee company above her sad little basement apartment encounters a runaway bull and coffee spills everywhere.  But it's Sam and his donuts to the rescue, and the realization that, indeed, there are some things more important than donuts.  

Stamaty, an illustrator who for many years wrote the alternative political cartoon in the Village Voice called Washingtoon, crams so much information into his line drawings a reader could easily spend hours on each page studying what is there to find.  Absurd conversations, surreal animals, people whose fashion defies logic, there are more visual treasures to find per square inch than any other books except maybe Where's Waldo and Waldo is tame by comparison. Picture book readers of varying ages will discover different gags in the illustrations depending on experience.  Newspapers bare headlines like "Convicted Felon Receives Paragraph From Verbose Judge" probably play more to adults who would get the puns, but visual gags like a Conestoga wagon being driven by a horse in a suit who is a passenger in a convertible are accessible for all.  

(I do believe you can get an approximate sense of the experience by double clicking on the image above for a larger size.)

What does any of this have to do with the story?  Nothing.  At least on the surface.  These jam-packed illustrations serve as a parallel charm to the book's otherwise simple message that sometimes wanting something can sometimes blind you to what you already have or what you might really want.  It's no mistake that all of this takes place in a hectic city full of people who are blindly going about their business, oblivious to the wonders of the crazy world around them, including an obliviousness to love.  

Out of print for a long time, Who Needs Donuts? was reprinted in 2003 and can still be found. 

A Pet for Petunia

by Paul Schmid 
Harper  2011 

A little girl wants a pet, and she promises to take care of it and everything, but some pets just aren't meant to be...

Petunia loves skunks.  That's all you need to know.  Because when a child loves an animal at some point the question will be "Can I have one as a pet, please, pretty please?" and we all know how that goes.  Of course Petunia, and most children, learn that their ideal pet sometimes isn't s perfect as they thought.  Once confronted with the reality that her parents are right – skunks do in fact stink – Petunia accepts that her stuffed animal version is good enough until one day she encounters...

And there's the final page-turn twist.  Of course the reader is going to understand the new problem at a glance and can work out what happens next.

Schmid's illustration style is pure charm, simple conte crayon and spot watercolor in two colors, mostly purple with dabs of yellow.  The simplicity suits the story, and Petunia's expressions are easily read.  I've been a fan of Schmid's since I saw his work in The Wonder Book a while back, and I still think he has a great eye for the details in character and setting that are totally child-centric. 

I think we've all been here at one time or another.  Just a few months ago with our teen daughters we had this pleading and promising going on for some new kittens.  And as a pre-school boy myself I wanted to have a pet squirrel.  I even created a squirrel sanctuary in an empty closet under the stairs. It's interesting to consider this desire kids (and people in general) have to be caretakers of animals.  There's cuteness, and companionship, but beyond that... I don't know, I find it interesting.

As opposed to high concept picture books about pets (the previously reviewed Children Make Terrible Pets) here we have the variation on the universal concept of the unreasonable pet.  The universal concept takes common childhood experiences and explores the process of discovery for the child/main character that leads them to recognize that some pets just aren't meant to be.  Of course, most readers are familiar with the potential problem – and may have had identical experiences – and so in addition to the reassurance of the lesson learned, the universal also promises a humorous twist at the end that brings the reader back to the beginning. 

What makes this work is the comfort that is found in the universal themes.  There are no conceptual twist to wrestle with at every turn, just a simple narrative that allows the reader to place themselves easily in the mindset of Petunia. Done right, there's nothing wrong with simplicity.


Disclosure: book provided courtesy of the author.

Spork

by Kyo Maclear  
illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault  
Kids Can Press  2010   

Neither Fork nor Spoon, can the lonely Spork find acceptance in the world?  

Poor Spork.  A misfit in the cutlery tray, a one-of-a-kind in a world of deeply polar divisions. In a place were different kitchen utensils can live in harmony in the drawer this misfit simply doesn't fit in.  In an effort to fit in, to choose, Spork tries on a hat but is too round to be a spoon.  Spork tries on a crown but is too sharp to be a fork.  When it comes to the table there is no call for a Spork, it's either one thing or another that is needed, but not both.

But what's this?  Something that needs a utensil that's not too round, not to sharp? Like Goldilocks, someone needs a utensil like Spork that's just right.  It's a baby.  And having found its place Spork is now happy to be Spork.  

I have to admit, at first my reaction to the explanation that Spork was a little bit Fork and a little bit Spoon -- I saw Spork as a hermaphrodite! I know that's wrong, but I didn't immediately saw Spork as being mixed race which is clearly the message.  Kids will get it (I think) and this was another of those reminders that sometimes we have to keep our adult brains at bay.  

That said, there is a curious message here.  Spork doesn't fit in among the tableware, tries to fit in by choosing sides, and then gains acceptance only when someone outside the kitchen finds Spork useful.  I'm not sure how I feel about this.  On the one hand it could be akin to telling kids that one day they'll realize that there's a whole world out there and they'll find their place among those who will understand and accept them.  But it also feels a bit like the cavalry coming to the rescue, like there is nothing Spork does to feel comfortable with who they are until they are appreciated by something external. 

For the young, I think the "Can't we all just get along?" message is strong, and by using cutlery to tell the story it opens up the issue of multiracial image and acceptance for discussion. 

Children Make Terrible Pets

by Peter Brown 
Little, Brown & Co.  2010 

A bear finds a boy and brings him home, only to discover the truth in the book's title. 

In the storytelling industry (publishing, theatre, film) there is an undue amount of emphasis placed in promoting the idea of the "high concept" story.  The high concept is easily grasped in under 25 words (under 10 if you're really good) that is open to quite a bit of action with variations on a theme. It speaks to the universal but contains a fresh twist, gives us a hero with a big problem that, in the end, is solved to the satisfaction of our expectations (i.e. generally a happy ending). High concept stories give us a hero to root for, though not necessarily one we can identify with completely. High concept permeates storytelling media because, simply, it makes money. 

In children's books, though, high concept can be an iffy proposition. In order to be universal the story needs to be simplified, and the younger the audience the simpler the concept.  The twist has to be easily comprehended, the main character's problem not too big, the ending easily guessed or at least instantly obvious once revealed.  The best example I can think of at the moment is I'm the Biggest Thing In the Ocean by Kevin Sherry.  A simple boast as concept, repeated with humorous variation, a twist, and an ending that serves as a punchline. It taps into what is universal (kids boasting) and twists at a point where the main character (a squid) makes a sudden realization that flips his world upside down, but leaves us with his undaunted spirit in an unexpected-but-true-to-character ending. 

This sounds like a lot of hoo-ha for a picture book, but when I finally sat down to read Children Make Terrible Pets I found myself turning the last page and feeling... empty.  I spent the next couple of days thinking "And...?" without being able to put my finger on it.  That was when I realized the problem was in the concept, and that not all high concept ideas, no matter how charmingly executed, work. 

Lucy the bear is in the woods when she detects a boy hiding in the bushes nearby.  The boys squeaks, she finds him adorable, and instantly drags him home with the old twist on the "Look what I found, can I keep him, huh, huh, can I keep him?!" Mama bear of course recognizes in an instant what is the title of the book but proceeds with the "Okay, but you're responsible for him" line.  The concept is the twist on the found pet, leaving us to see how it plays out with roles reversed.  Naturally, they go as bad as expected, and Lucy must return the boy to the "wild," to his family at their house at the edge of the woods.  

There is a coda, a little twist ending, right after Lucy finally agrees with her mother that children make terrible pets.  Turn the page and Lucy is ecstatic to find an elephant standing before her, the implication being that perhaps elephants make better pets. 

Huh? 

It's a punchline, and its dissonance plays with a reader's expectations, but it doesn't fit.  A child recognizing that one animal doesn't work as a pet might naturally want to find another animal that does, one that doesn't have the same problems as the previous pet. But the humor in the concept hinged on a reversal, so in order for the twist end to work we'd need to see a double-reversal.  In theory a bear wanting an elephant as a pet could be that reversal but instead it reads as absurdity.  It would be as if reading a story about a boy who wanted a porcupine as a pet, realizing it isn't a good one, and then bringing home a space alien instead.  The lesson of what made for a terrible pet, and the reversal of he human-animal expectation, is reduced to surrealism for the sake of humor. Lucy hasn't learned a lesson, she's only learned how to set up a punchline, or rather how to set up an infinite punchline because clearly she will be able to repeat this story with every creature imaginable. 

It's easy to see why this book was published.  It is well illustrated, contains a high concept that is easy to grasp by the title (thus no need to worry about how to sell it), and playfully twists a young picture book reader's expectations.  But it's got no third act, as they say, nothing really shows character growth or fundamentally changes our understanding of what's come before.  It will certainly occupy a reader's time in a benign sort of way but it is difficult to imagine it sustaining interest over multiple readings.  This is the one down side to high concept. It doesn't reward return visits, it doesn't sustain a reader indefinitely.  For that a story needs to offer something more.

2 by Suzy Lee

 Mirror  
Seven Footer Press  2003  
Shadow  
Chronicle Books   2010  


A pair of wordless picture books with similar themes from an artist I like to think of as the Master of the Gutter.  That's a good thing, I'll explain.  

In Mirror, a sullen girl notices the mirror she is slumped near and makes a series of poses, modifying and monitoring her image.  Slowly she begins to dance with her reflection, a pas de deux of opposing joy.  Then the drifts into the mirror, literally split into two not-quite-matching halves in the book's gutter (the technical name for central fold where the pages meet the binding). Once she's crossed over her reflection is no longer interested in following.  Once she's noticed the girl becomes angry with her reflection, smashing the mirror, leaving her to return to the floor and her previously sullen state, this time without reflection.

Shadow finds our heroine in a basement where the light and her imagination see a collection of junk transform into a veritable jungle full of creatures and things with minds of their own. Slowly the transformed items -- a ladder, a vacuum, a bike -- become an elephant beneath a moon and tropical trees.  As the imagination takes hold, the original items disappear leaving only their fantasy shadows behind.  All of this takes place safely on the other side of the gutter until a wolf appears and leaps out from the imaginary and into the "real" half of the book.  The girls flees across the gutter and together with her creations they manage to scare away the wolf.  The call to dinner -- the only words I've ever seen in a Lee book -- breaks the enchantment of the imaginary and returns the basement to its collection of junk until the light goes out and from the darkness the imaginary becomes real again, this time without their creator.

I think that from the words needed to describe these books you can see what Lee's messages are : image, reflection, mirror, crossed over, light, shadow, imagination, transformation, imaginary, real, enchantment.  There's no small collection of studies to be made on the psychology of these books, but those are no longer for me to write. I've already done my time in those salt mines.  


Back when I was working on my MFA I wrote a critical essay that compared Suzy Lee's Wave (Chronicle 2008) with Mercer Mayer's A Boy, A Dog and a Frog.  In particular, I was noting how these books used the gutter as an imaginary wall between the scenes on either side that was "broken" midway to silently mark the emotional changes that took place within the narrative.  This has become Lee's territory with her books, this dance that takes place on opposite sides of the gutter that must be traversed and broken for growth to take place. (For those who insist that Wave contains a "flaw" spread where the images run into the gutter in a way that makes it seem like it was badly designed I'm going to counter-insist that you look at all her books and see how Lee has done this repeatedly and suggest that it was deliberate.)

In all the books mentioned, the gutter is a little like the border between panels in a cartoon or graphic novel.  There is a psychology of "between," the message that is conveyed in the mind of the reader when reconciling the two images.  Each side isn't simply a reflection of the other (though they are that) they are a pair of images that inform one another in progression.  Reading left to right we see each side as an A + B that yields a C of personal meaning that in turn can send us back to A to reevaluate the information and assumptions we've made previously.  It's almost like reinforcing or "proving" the theory in our minds.  We look for clues in the visuals and these contextual clues reinforce what we think, see, feel.   

Okay, that got a little heavy there, but the point is that what these books do, and do well, is train young readers the language of visual sequential storytelling.  Whether on their own or guided by parents, Lee's stories have a surface level of narrative (a girl dancing, a girl imagining shadows) and a psychological level of narrative (the emotions generated between the facing imagery) that are told through a sophisticated use of the same between-the-panels emotional editing that, if we really want to get technical here, comes straight out of the montage theory of film editing.  No, I'm not kidding.  

Climbing back up (or down) to the book level, I think it's interesting that Lee has taken the same essential idea and made two different studies from it.  Her earlier book Mirror is a darker, moodier study that seems to explore the imagination as a place of refuge from a forced punishment, a place where reflection reveals a certain truth about the girl's behavior that causes her discomfort.  Perhaps she sees she was wrong (bossy?) and this is what brings her and her fantasy crashing back down.  It's a story simply told but perhaps a bit too subtle for younger readers; older readers might simply read the images too fast and not make the connection.  

But Shadow is more playful.  It takes the same point of imagination and allows the reader in, to take flight with the main character instead of simply observing.  This could partially be the function of the book's design as well; the shadows are, naturally, upside down in orientation, begging the reader to keep flipping the book back and forth to monitor and note changes.  The interactivity makes the reader an accomplice which in turn allows for a greater emotional investment.  So while I initially thought it odd that Lee was revisiting old territory I now think that Shadow is a refinement of the earlier book.  I like them both, but Shadow is the better of the two.  

Another visual component these books share is the Rorschach ink blot element.  Not necessarily in the literal sense where you can step back and view the reflected images for some personality rendering, but in that different eyes might add different details.  It could make for an interesting exercise to have older (middle grade, or even high school) students write out what they imagine the narrative of these stories might be.  Did the girl use her basement fantasy to get over a fear of the shadows in the dark? Did the "wrong"girl come out the other side of the mirror?  As with many wordless picture books and silent sequential storytelling (Sara Varon's Robot Dreams, Shaun Tan's The Arrival), there are probably as many interpretations as their are readers

Trapped

by Michael Northrop  
Scholastic 2010

Seven kids, a week-long blizzard, does anyone even know they're still alive?  

What with recent snows in the South and along the Atlantic seacoast there's been a lot of chatter about various snowpocalypses (snowpocalypsii?) recently, but seriously, what would happen if a blizzard went on for a week and dumped over 18 feet of snow?  Would you be prepared? Do you think you could survive?  


Now, imagine you're in a high school, you're one of seven kids and one teacher who didn't get out while the roads were clear. The blizzard has made it so you have no connection with the outside world, and despite the fact that you are missing, no one has any reason to believe you're still at the school and need to be rescued. What happens then?  

This it the premise of Michael Northrop's Trapped, a taut, first-hand tale of survival among Scotty Weems and his six schoolmates who, for a variety of reasons, are trapped inside their high school at the beginning of the Blizzard to End All Blizzards.  As Scotty narrates the story from the vantage point of surviving it, he keeps the reader at arms-length from knowing exactly how it will all turn out but he isn't coy about admitting up front that not everyone makes it out alive.  

This sort of close third person narrative can be difficult to pull off, but Northrop does a good job keeping the reader in the moment as Scotty recounts the incidents which are still clearly fresh in his mind.  In fact, it would be hard not to have such memories forever burned in ones memory.  As each day brings new considerations – falling temperatures, the need for food, power outages, freezing water pipes – the teens do their best to mitigate the disaster and push ahead not knowing that unlike other storms this one just isn't going to end soon.  They live in the moment because thinking about trying to survive long-term would be both depressing and frightening.  Readers know going in how long the blizzard lasts, so like a timer on a movie bomb we have a heightened sense of when everything is going to blow, one way or another, but these kids haven't got a clue and knowing that creates a marvelous, twisted tension throughout.  

I am writing this review twenty-four hours in advance of our pending "winter weather advisory" with the projected snow amounts increasing every four hours. In New England it isn't unusual for projections to be wildly inaccurate because (and weather people will be the first to admit it) these things take on a life of their own.  A storm can stall out and roll in place under the right conditions, like a slow-motion freezing hurricane, and dump tons of snow or they can drift over the water and fall harmlessly on the ocean.  It can go both ways, you can either over-imagine the worst and stock up the larder only to have a dusting of snow, or you can assume its overblown and find yourself digging a tunnel to your sidewalk.  One thing is certain, if your projected to get a 100% chance of precipitation, it's going to happen no matter what.  

Northrop clearly understands the mindset that allows for a situation like this to occur and (with one quibbling detail not worth mentioning) buries Scotty and his friends under an avalanche of bad timing, bad luck, and bad decisions all around.  It's the sort of story that can launch a thousand "what if" conversations among readers about what they would do in similar situations, and begs the question: Can you ever be too prepared for the worst case scenario?   


(this review is cross-posted over at Guys Lit Wire today, your source for all things good in reading for guys.  No, seriously.)

Brain Jack

by Brian Falkner
Random House  2010


In a post-post-9/11 America, the most deadly threat comes from the Internet, and Sam and a small cadre of young hackers are the sole line of defense...  

Sam is a hacker, a freak, a natural.  He can code on the fly and read viruses and cut them off before they can do any damage. And like any teen boy he uses these powers for good, which is to say he and his buddy Fargas dip into a large multinational company so they can dip into their bank accounts and order up some sweet new laptops and neural headsets that allow you to jack into the Internet world through thought waves.

Seeing as this is the near dystopic future, life isn't all roses.  Terrorists have taken out Las Vegas with a nuclear weapon and Homeland Security is now on par with the CIA in terms of proactively making sure the US remains protected.  The problem is that this includes attacks via the Internet, and Sam's little cyber crime has alerted the big boys.  He thinks he's free and clear until he attends a super secret hacker's convention that in turn becomes an online meet-up on the White House servers which, in fact, is really a sting operation to catch Sam.  Once caught, it takes him only a few short weeks to figure out how to get out of the minimum security facility... and right into the arms of Homeland Security, who set the entire thing up as a sort of protracted pre-employment test.  It was the only way to find the best of the best, and Sam passed with flying colors.  It also means he either works for the government, or he returns to jail.

Once he's working for Homeland Security Sam's job is to serve as wingman for Dodge, a punk he'd encountered back at the hacker convention.  Their job is to monitor Internet traffic and sniff out potential threats.  One attack appears to destroy them one moment, and then in the next be their savior. This phantom of the Internet also removes spammers and online gaming, things many are happy to see gone.  But as they try to understand what is going on Sam senses something darker is in the works, something dangerous that involves the neuro headsets that get people addicted to being so jacked into the Internet that, like his fried Fargas, they cease to do anything but stay plugged in until they die.

And once Sam figures that out, all hell breaks loose.  Like internal civil war and mass hypnosis hell.  Families torn apart, one branch of the military against the other type of hell.  Can Sam and his friends save the country before it destroys itself?  And if he can, will Sam be destroyed in the process?

This story has fingerprints of The Matrix all over it, what with an entire world full of people jacked into a world where they can just "know" things due to the collective hive mind.  But the battle scenes with virus attacks read like air-to-air fighter jet combat, written with assured technical jargon and a very real sense that this sort of thing could be happening in our future.  Faulkner's plotting and pacing is perfect, the jogs between real world action and battle online taut, and there isn't a single page of fat or filler to be found.  Books that push beyond 200 pages have to prove themselves to me, but half way through these 350 pages I knew I was in good hands and eagerly wanted to know how Falkner was going to make this work.

It has been a long time since I picked up a book that I wanted to race to the end of, and if this isn't already optioned for a major motion picture then someone is asleep at the wheel.  That said, I hope someone in Hollywood is asleep at the wheel, because this book could so easily be ruined in the wrong hands.

As for that phantom that takes over the Internet and sets the country against itself, I believe Pogo said it best: We have met the enemy and he is us.

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.

The Boy Who Could Enter Paintings

 by Herb Valen 
illustrated by Susan Perl  
Little, Brown and Company  1968 

A boy discovers he can literally jump into paintings and interact with the people there, but his ability all mysteriously vanishes just as he's about to enter school...

Edward has grown big and strong, and can hop around on a single leg all the time without getting tired.  he spends his cold winter days in his artist-father's studio watching him paint lavish jungle scenes and his studies of famous paintings.  Then one day when his father is making tea Edward hops close to one of the paintings and discovers that he can actually jump into them.

Without telling his father of his new ability, he accompanies his father to the modern art museum when Edward continues to jump into a Goya and a Seurat, interacting with the other children in the paintings who find his appearance curious but, as kids do, accept him without question in their play.  

Then a curious thing happens.  Edward's father announces that Edward will soon be entering school and, in an final attempt to hop into his father's painting, takes a giant leap... and crashes through the solid plane of the canvas.  The joy of imagination and carefree childhood gone, his father implores him to stop hopping around, and like a good boy he stops hopping, leaving his innocence behind.  

Wow.  Talk about a harsh lesson in conformity! 

I came to this book because of the illustrator, Susan Perl.  During my childhood she was known to me primarily as the illustrator to a bunch of magazine ads for Health-tex clothing.  The ads centered around the kinds of questions kids ask – "Why is the sky blue?" "Why are some people fat and some people skinny?" – with straightforward answers that kids could understand, a fairly clever campaign for showing how a clothing company "gets" what kids are about.  Too bad one of those questions wasn't "What happens when a book tries to take away my childhood innocence?" 

Perl's style is probably best described as textural, in that she uses the same width of line to outline and contour as well shade.  They are like a cross between woodcuts and felt tipped pen illustrations and have an odd warmth to them.  Sometimes when I see her work I imagine this is what the children of an Edward Gorey drawing and a Mercer Mayer drawing would look like, if illustrations could mate and reproduce.  

As for the story, I have a hard time understanding what people were thinking about children's books in the 60s sometimes.  Was this meant to be read to younger readers as a story of comfort that childhood ends at the dawn of school, and that it's perfectly natural to "grow up" out of thinking you can hop around all day and into works of art?  Or was this intended for an emerging reader with a longing for the "simpler days" of their pre-school days, having now learned to read and wishing they were back in those days when one could simply escape into a painting?  I can't tell if this is a cynical message written by an artist about the dangers of compromising one's dreams or a celebration of childhood whimsy.  

I think this is one of those situations where the illustrations outclass the original story.

Guyku

A Year of Haiku for Boys
written by Bob Raczka
drawings by Peter H. Reynolds
Houghton Mifflin  2010

Haiku for and about boys, organized by seasons, full of the sort of things boys do. But not for haiku purists or people who want boys to really understand what haiku are really about.

Full of observations of what it means to be a boy, full of mischief and the occasional moment of tenderness, Guyku is a collection of poems that promises more than it delivers.  And, yes, what ruins it for me is the haiku itself.  

As Raczka notes at the end of the book, haiku "is a wonderful form of poetry for guys like us" because it's an observation of nature, the poems are short, and they don't take long to read.  All well and true, even the note that "a good haiku can pack a punch," but here's the thing: these aren't good haiku, not many of them at least.

Man, that sounds harsh, but the thing that makes a haiku is exactly that punch, the observation that takes everything else in the poem and sharpens the observation.  And punch is the word, because the summary observation in a haiku should come as a sort of a punchline at the end.  Or at the beginning, as a statement followed by a sort of sideways definition.  A good haiku isn't simply just ramming a scene into a 5-7-5 format and calling it profound because it fits, there has to be that break, that breath, that moment where the observation is observed.  Here is a guyku taken from the "Fall" section:

Pounding fat cattails
on a park bench near the pond,
we make a snowstorm.

It's a nice image, and one that is total "boy" in that it takes nature, finds a way to make it an amusement and creates another nature image, turning fall into an artificial winter.  It even has a comma that breaks the action from the observation at the end, but it's missing the true punch of that image, almost as if it were an afterthought and not the poets intentional focus.  As always, I have to resist the temptation to tell the author (and you, the potential reader) how it "should" have been written, but I can think of three or four different ways the emphasis could be shifted to give that snowstorm image more weight, make it stronger.  Flabby writing is what it is to my ear, and it kills my ability to enjoy what the book has set out to accomplish.

If this puddle could
talk, I think it would tell me
to splash my sister.

Again, a great boy moment – that temptation to do something naughty and the interaction with nature – and yet so much more could be done with it in haiku.  The puddle could talk, the boy could hear the puddle and debate the appropriate behavior, and all with the same outcome but with more punch. 

I've also been seeing the same problem recently with people writing in the "limerick style" while at the same time ignoring the conventions of the form, thinking a A-A-B-B-A rhyme scheme is all that's necessary.  As with some haiku, the limerick contains a "twist" ending that serves as a punchline to everything that comes before.  I think it's perfectly fine if you want to write five lines, or three lines, or if you want to follow certain poetic formats, but one should be careful calling a poem a limerick or a haiku when, in fact, they are approximations of form.

So as much as I wanted to really like the concept of Guyku I have a hard time with telling young readers that all it takes is seventeen syllables in three lines of observation about nature.  I think as a basis for teaching the form it is fine to let kids play with the basic format, but in writing for young readers we owe it to them to showcase not only the form but what is possible when done correctly. 

Rot & Ruin

by Jonathan Maberry
Simon & Schuster  2010

Deja vu?  Perhaps.  I am cross-posting this review from Guys Lit Wire today.

The zombie apocalypse has happened.  Never mind how, it just did, fourteen years ago when Benny was eighteen months old and was spirited away from his parents by his half-brother Tom before they became victims themselves.  Since then, the living have taken to enclosed cities and let the undead roam in what is now called the Rot and Ruin.

Fifteen is the age of maturity, and that means getting a part-time job in order to continue receiving rations. Benny, like many teens, doesn't really want to work, and he certainly doesn't want to take up the family business of becoming a bounty hunter of the undead.  Worse, his brother Tom is legendary, but all Benny knows ans remembers of his much-older brother is that he was a coward who ran away and left their parents to become zombies.

There are plenty of other bounty hunters though, guys like Charlie and The Hammer who told war stories of their times in the Rot and Ruin and talked up their kills in ways Tom never did. Benny could never understand why his brother never talked about work, or why Tom was so revered by town elders, but he finds out quick enough when he finally agrees to become his brother's apprentice after failing at pretty much every other job he attempts.  One trip into the Rot and Ruin changes everything Benny ever knew, or thought he knew, about what it means to be human, both living and undead.

While zombies are currently in vogue and it would seem there is little to add to canon of kill-or-be-killed, Jonathan Maberry's Rot & Ruin takes the idea of a world full of the undead and makes it a dystopia where questions of good and evil become slippery.  Is a zombie out for brains any worse than the people who use them for blood sports?  Can the dead and undead coexist in a delicate test of God's will, and what of the moral ambiguity in believing that murder is wrong but murdering zombies is okay; after all, zombies were and are still human beings, right?  And what sort of "civilized" society has been preserved when, in financial desperation, the living would subject themselves to enter a fighting ring to do combat with zombies for the entertainment of others, where a blind eye is turned away from those citizen who organize such contests?

The zombie apocalypse could stand in for anything – a plague, global thermonuclear war, or even world-wide environmental collapse.  What Maberry poses is that no matter how it comes about, how we behave afterward defines who we are as a society, and what Benny learns quickly is that his whole life he and his friends have been sheltered from the reality that the post-apocalyptic world is not a pretty place.  Whacking zombies sounds like fun until you begin to attach names and families to the undead, until you realize that the "other" you're out to kill could easily be a friend or relative.

I can't be the first person to think this, but I've been wondering about the rise of zombies in popular culture recently and in doing so came to an oddly chilling conclusion.  When monsters have become popular in our cultural entertainment they usually do so as a surrogate for some other fear.  Nuclear war and radioactive fallout gave us the mutant monsters of the 1950s.  The rise of horror films in the 1980s reinforced messages of morality at the dawn of the AIDS epidemic.  The rise of vampires has been slow and steady for some time, but dawning of zombies is more than a replacement for any trend, it seems to tap into a deeply rooted fear of something in Western culture that is dark and difficult to understand or deal with in a rational way.

Like fundamentalist terrorism.

This may have been the farthest thought from Maberry's intention with Rot & Ruin, but in showing the remains of civilization as a gated community under constant threat from brain-dead outsiders who are, by lack of choice, simply trying to survive, I can't help but see the metaphor for what we are seeing today in the world.  While the United States continues to promote and preserve its freedoms as a gated, civilized community, the rest of the world remains a threat to those very ideas simply by wanting an equal chance at the good life.  Of course, to make this analogy I would have to equate the zombies for Islamic fundamentalist terrorists out for blood, but isn't that the image we inside the gates are fed all the time by politicians and the media?  And what if, like Benny, we come to learn that these people are just that, people, and that as long as we continue to demonize them or use them for our own expendable purposes we will forever be at war.

Politics aside, its an engrossing take on the dystopic zombie apocalypse, and a solid adventure that can be enjoyed at the surface level as well.

abandoned: Mockingbird

by Katherine Erskine
Philomel / Penguin  2010

Everyone's been raving about this book.  It just got nominated from a National Book Award.  It's been on the periphery of my radar so I figured it was time to pick it up.  Twenty-five pages later it was time to put it down.

There is no worse feeling than to not like a popular book and feel, somehow, like you're defective for thinking it.  Worse if you like to think of yourself as a writer, because when you go against the grain (and then do so publicly in a place like a blog) you're almost certain to alter people's opinions of you.  Not necessarily for the better. 

Is it wrong to feel like the first-person child narrator with Aspergers is a tired trend? Is it wrong to even think of it as a trend?  Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.  The London Eye mystery.  Emma Jean Lazarus Fell Out of a Tree. Three or four other titles I've read in the last year or so whose titles I cannot remember. 

So what's my problem anyway?  Do I not want kids to read about characters who are different then themselves, to better learn and understand about differently-abled kids and to show some respect and tolerance?  Isn't calling these stories "tired" akin to saying the same thing about vampires?

Here's the deal: when I'm reading, and there is something about the narrative that continually pulls me away from the story being told, I no longer enjoy the reading experience.  Erskine's narrator is ten year old Caitlin.  As a child with Aspergers I am willing to accept that she finds a certain disconnect with the world, with an inability to read facial expression or to know how to respond to people without taking the world literally.  What I have a hard time with is a ten year old with Aspergers being all these things and yet more articulate than any ten year old I've ever met, including highly gifted ones.  I realize this conceit is necessary to give the reader a sense of what is going on while at the same time trying to put them inside the head of main character, but on every page I kept finding myself unable to suspend the disbelief.

I'd also like to see more stories told from the perspective of the friend of a child with Aspergers (or ADHD for that matter) who don't doesn't really understand what makes their friend behave the way they do but is fine with them anyway.  Sort of like the idea of having a gay character in a story where the story isn't about the character being gay, it's just who they are.  In the long run isn't that what we want from the readers, from children, to be able to recognize these differences and not have them matter in a way that causes them to be viewed as "other" than themselves?

I am not closed to the idea of revisiting this book down the road if someone can truly convince me that I can't just read the last thirty pages of this book and feel like I missed something in the middle that I haven't seen before.

Mercury

by Hope Larson 
Atheneum / Simon & Schuster  2010

A tale of gold prospecting and romance and karmic debts paid off over several generations with just a kiss of magical realism in this graphic novel. 

In the settled Canadian province of Nova Scotia the Fraser's of French Hill have settled into a life of barely sustainable farm life when the mysterious stranger Asa Curry comes calling.  He's discovered gold on the Fraser property and looks to help mine it with a share of the proceeds. In the Fraser household daughter Josey has become smitten with Asa and over time he becomes the forbidden fruit she pledges herself to.  But there's something dark about Asa that causes Josey's mother to worry that he is a harbinger of death. 

One hundred and fifty years later the Fraser house has remained in the family but has burned down, causing the current Frasers, Tara and her mother, to become displaced.  While her mother works to find a new job and get settled in a new town, Tara returns to attend high school and, with the aid of a mercury-filled pendant that's been in the family for generations, solve a mystery that connects Tara's story with Josey's.  The phoenix out of the ashes of the house fire, as it were, allows Tara and her mother the chance at a new life that was denied their ancestors.

Jumping back and forth between stories it becomes clear that Tara and Josey's stories will cross paths, but with Larson that doesn't mean it is easy to guess.  The tale of the stranger with seemingly magical (and dark) powers is not unusual for the 18th and 19th centuries, and here those elements are handled as matter-of-fact as we treat the "magic" that allows us to use cell phones today.  This is Larson territory, where the magic is real, and she leaves much for the reader to discover and define for themselves.  Crows with faces of people, "spells" that can see the future, gold-seeking pendants and yellow snake guides are blended with they typical stories of teens encountering first loves and exploring territories as mysterious to them as anything else in this world. 

Larson's pacing and scene-setting is measured and exacting – nothing moves too fast or too slow – poetically cinematic in flow.  Having the panels set in the past against black backgrounds, while the present day sections are set against traditional white space, almost seems superfluous because we can the different ages by costume, but in a black and white comic it has the effect of turning the past almost sepia.  The visual darkness takes advantage of our knowledge of the pasts limitations and shrouds them in the darkness of a time before we became "illuminated" and magic was replaced by science and logic.  Larson's magic is elemental – mercury, gold, fire – with powers we can barely contain.  How is that not like love?

Yummy

The Last Days of a Southside Shorty 
by G. Neri 
illustrated by Randy DuBurke  
Lee and Low Books  2010  

The tragic account of an act of inner city violence that briefly gripped the nation and put a young face to seriousness of the problem.   

In the spring of 1994 there was a shooting in the Roseland area of Chicago, on the city's southside. Robert "Yummy" Sandifer, age 11, out to make a name for himself in a local gang called the Black Desciples attempted to shoot rival gang memebers and killed 14 year old Shavon Dean by accident.  With the aid of the Desciples Yummy hid from police for three days but was then found shot dead by members of the gang he was trying to impress.

Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty tells the story of those last days from the perspective of a fictional narrator named Roger who, under better circumstances, might have been Yummy's friend.  In unraveling the story after the fact, Roger attempts to see Yummy's life from all perspectives, to try and understand how someone as young as him could end up both a killer and killed at such a young age.

Yummy is a true tragic character.  Neglected and beaten from an early age, parents in and out of jail, lost through the cracks in social services, Yummy is a poster child for what was (and still is) wrong with the inner cities.  He starts out shoplifting and holding up people at ATMs with a toy gun, then moves to stealing cars for members of the local gang.  These attempts to get attention and find himself a stable and safe family are almost textbook examples of how kids end up in gangs but what was so shocking to many was how young Yummy was as he ascended into gang life.  The gangs use younger kids – nicknamed shortys – to do their dirty work because they can't be tried as adults.  And there's always an endless supply of kids looking to impress the gang leaders and become "made."  The mortality rate in the socioeconomically depressed areas makes a gang member over the age of 19 is a senior citizen.  Yummy barely made it half way there.  

The ugliest side of this story was that when Yummy was on the run there were people who knew where he was and didn't really act on his behalf.  The gang only hid Yummy initially because they wanted to keep the heat of their activities.  When Yummy, acting as a scared 11 year old naturally would, calls his grandma to pick him up he gets swept up by local people who want to get rid of him as quickly as possible for fear of attention being drawn on them.  It isn't clear why the women who are keeping him "safe" until his grandma can fetch him are quick to let him go with a pair of Desciples who clearly out to clean up the mess Yummy made by driving him to a secluded location where he would later be found dead.  The implication is that the moment Yummy pulled the trigger on the gun he was officially on his own and no one would be able to save him – a chilling thought the reader gets to chew on long after they've closed the book. 

Neri isn't interested in taking sides here or pointing the figure but instead lets the various sides of the story speak for themselves, trusting the reader will understand that sometimes there is no right answer, that regardless of circumstances there is always a choice and that you need to be careful about the choices you make.

There's a grittiness to the black and white illustration in this graphic novel that both fit its dark mood and, for me at least, push the issue back into history.  And if I had any criticism it's that the story does feel pushed back in a way that might make it easier to dismiss.  Given that teen readers will barely have been born when all this originally took place it might be seen more as an historical graphic novel and not a reflection of modern times.  I think it might have been nice for there to be some back matter or a coda that tied these events to the present and perhaps made the readers feel more inclined to want to change the way things are.

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This review is cross-posted over at Guys Lit Wire today.  Guys Lit Wire, where reviews of books of interest to teen boys are posted fresh each weekday. 

Copper

 by Kazu Kibuishi
Graphix / Scholastic  2010


A collection of occasionally-connected comic strips about a boy and his dog and a very strange, strangely reminiscent world...

As a boy named Copper walks home with his dog he imagines his backpack is a jetpack that takes him zooming around the skies.  Instantly he's surrounded by other jetpack fliers... who all are dropping bombs on a city below.  The fantasy ruined the boy returned to reality and sadly walks away. This is the first adventure and typical of many of the early single-page comic strips in this collection. At first the adventures all end with Copper coming back to reality from a dream, often with clues that influenced his dreams surrounding his room.  Soon, recurring characters and situations surface.  Who is the girl trapped in a bubble in his dreams, and does she have any connection with the girl in reality who keeps lobbing drawings and mash notes at him from afar?  Soon the waking aspect of the stories disappear – is it all a dream, or an alternate universe?  Are they trapped on an island?  Where can I find a melon bread stand with doughy goodness made with love?

It has to be said: the earlier strips in this collection borrow very strongly from Windsor McKay's Little Nemo in Slumberland comic strip from a hundred yeas ago.  Not bad source material to borrow from, but I was worried in the beginning that the stories would be fancy and fantasy and derivative.  And there are other cartoon references as well, including an early tip to Charles Schulz and Charlie Brown's love of a little read-haired girl.  Or the fact that it's a boy and his – is it a beagle? –who waxes philosophically and may not be as intrepid a traveler as he seems.

After a while the one-page stories grow to several pages, some stories connect in a semi-linear fashion, all of it takes on a certain veneer of other-ness.  Kibuishi may be familiar to those who have are following his Amulet series, or the Flight collections he edits annually.  The style here is featherweight compared to his other work, and the worst on could say is that it's a nice collection.  Of comic strips, mind you, not a graphic novel; there's no through-line or coherent cohesive structure here that grants it novel status.  Perhaps down the road Kibuishi will take Copper out for a lengthier adventure and perhaps answer some of the many question left unanswered here.

Brains For Lunch

A Zombie Novel in Haiku?! 
by K. A. Holt  
illustrated by Gahan Wilson
Neal Porter / Roaring Brook Press 2010

zombied middle school  
desegregation among  
living and undead  


haiku and romance  
bullies and librarians 
imperfect but fun 

Loeb's a zombie 
smart, but he hides it from friends 
has brains, eats them, too  

cute librarian 
suggests Loeb enters contest 
reading his haiku

smitten, he agrees 
meanwhile, fends off bullies
both living and dead  

enter the girl
Siobhan, a gothic Lifer
snake oil peddler 

she defends Loeb 
seems interested in him
but Loeb has doubts

a living girl
and an undead zombie boy
is love possible? 

Loeb wins contest
has a heart-to-undead-heart 
and gets the girl 

Holt combines haiku
zombies and middle school life
(with racial tensions)

a humorous spin
of traditional school yarns
freshly presented

though not true haiku
much like this review's format
sometimes feels forced

but is zips along
short chapters, ghoulish pictures
what's not to like here?

Smile

by Raina Telgemeier 
Scholastic  2010

The memoir of the author's teen years told in graphic novel format focusing on her orthodontic adventures following a severe injury.   

Everyone has a story tell about themselves, and in theory everyone has a reason for telling that story.  We do this all the time in conversation when someone mentions a topic and our memories spark with a story, account, or anecdote that relates to the topic in question.  In theory the story of ourselves we tell is also appropriate to the situation – when told, for example, about an elderly person's death after a fall we don't automatically launch into a humorous story about that one time we fell while carrying a gallon of mustard and ended up on the floor covered in it.

The memoir is very much like the stories we tell casually.  Unlike a biography which is an attempt to get a story factually straight, or to understand better the person behind the story, the memoir is an elective tale told by the author toward a specific goal or to make a particular point.  And as with any narrative it is presumed that the point of the memoir is the natural accumulation of the episodes depicted, a sort of realization that comes from the conflicts presented.  

So we begin smiles with a sixth grade Raina who one day falls and lands on her face, accidentally knocking out her front two teeth.  For the next six years (and 200+ pages) Raina goes through an elaborate series of dental surgeries, adjustments, and reconstructions that would naturally traumatize any teen.  Her circumstances are unique in that she doesn't just need braces, she'll need to have her teeth shifted to fill the gaps, fix an overbite, and then correct for misalignment.

Along the way we learn about Raina's love of video games, her crushes on boys, her artistic temperament.  As she gets older and moves on to high school she feels herself pull away from her friends, or rather, her friends are unchanged and she's moved on.  She finds a new crowd to hang with and in the end is happy with the person she's become.

Initially Raina's friends make fun of her in various situations, mocking her for her "vampire teeth" and and for liking a younger boy, until finally Raina calls them out and walks away for disrespecting her.  This lesson in self-esteem would seem to be the main message of Smile, and not entirely inconsistent with Raina's situation, but I found myself flipping to the last page saying "And?"

As a document in the orthodontic experience Telgemeier's book could serve as an introduction to children who are wondering what they are in for (and aren't easily scared) but these experiences don't fully integrate into the rest of the story.  If the dental sections were removed the story of Raina and her life would remain coherent but the story would reveal itself to be rather weak.  In that sense Smile is like a special effects movie with a weak story constructed to justify what's on the screen.  It isn't necessarily bad, nor is it badly rendered,  but the goal of this memoir is thin at best and takes a backseat to a play-by-play on what to expect when your teeth need correcting.  I never really felt Raina's two worlds connected, and her anxieties are almost indistinguishable from the teen angst of kids who don't have such trauma, that I never really understood what the point of the story was throughout.

A more even balance between both stories, with emphasis on how the surgeries played into the character's esteem, could have made this a winner.

The Monsterologist

A Memoir in Rhyme 
Ghostwritten by Bobbi Katz 
Illustrated by Adam McCauley 
Sterling  2010  

A picture book collection of monster poems in the guise of a memoir of a monster hunter.  What's not to like? 

Every couple of years is seems we get a collection of ghoulish rhymes and monster-themed picture books, with one that stands out.  Off the top of my head the only recent one I can think of is Adam Rex's Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich, full of truly odd takes on classic movie monsters.  Bobbi Katz's The Mosterologist is this year's model.

There's little new one can say about classic monsters that hasn't been covered before except to couch them in unusual settings or framed within a larger context.  Here, Katz has "ghostwritten" a memoir of a monster hunter who records his exploits and descriptions in verse.  All the usual suspects are here: Medusa, Frankenstein's monster, Werewolves, a Kraken, but there are some lesser-knowns and a few newly minted monsters in the bunch as well.  Grendel and the Golem don't usually find as much coverage as they do here, "Bluebeard's Personal Ad" will probably fly over the heads of the kids, and the "International Zombie Survey" is a nice take on the current fascination with the living dead (it's a census form).  Making their debut are "The Verbivore" which has eaten the verbs out of a well-known macabre poem ("The Worms Crawl In"), "The Suds-Surfing Sock-Eater," and "The Compu-Monster," which are probably the two weakest poems in the bunch.

For the original monsters, perhaps the problem is that the poems have to explain what these monsters are where the other poems play of some passing familiarity of the subject.  Trolls, Count Dracula, and a cyclops show up in other stories and so don't require an explanation of what they do and why they're monsters.  Also, I have a hard time thinking of a sock eater or a verb eater as being as scary as Grendel's recipe for Danish Pastry (yes, using fresh Danes).

This is one handsome book, by the way.  The cover is embossed and designed to look like a quasi-old leather-bound book, the endpapers are facsimiles of postage stamps featuring various monsters, and the pages are collections of paper ephemera from the Monsterologist's collection with the poems laid out on them. McCauly's art is alternately loose for illustrations but at the same time the "artifacts" are well conceived and look plausible.  It's a nice mix and visually interesting without looking too cluttered or chaotic. 

So, yeah, I liked it. 

Round Robin

by Jack Kent
Prentice Hall 1982

A baby bird becomes so focused on eating it cannot fly south for the winter and is forced to walk the entire way.  In doing so there are some unintended consequences, both good and bad.

Last week when I reviewed Hoddy Doddy I felt like I wanted to give Kent another chance.  I thought maybe I was looking too closely, maybe I caught the one book of his that rubbed me wrong, and since there were plenty of books to check out I thought I'd give him another go.

Unintentionally, I think this book was ahead of its time.

Among the baby robins born there is this one who just loves to eat.  And eat.  And eventually becomes so rotund that the only way it can get around is by walking everywhere.  Come winter, when everyone else is flying south, the poor bird can only trudge along through the snow and rain.  By the time it catches up with the rest of the flock the robin is back to its normal size, slimmed by the exercise of walking. And so, in celebration, it eats.  And gets round again, just in time to fly north for the summer.  Except for the poor robin who is now faced with the prospect of having to walk all the way again. 

An analogy for our consumerist ways, a satire on the dieting mentality, or simply a foreshadowing of the obesity epidemic in the United States?  You decide. 

And you have to decide for yourself because Kent doesn't make it an issue beyond the fact that the poor bird can't fly.  The other birds don't judge robin for being what it is, so on the one hand it can be about acceptance.  Then again, if you're presenting the book to a child and telling them that people will accept you for who you are no matter what, well, that's one of those adult "lessons" that has a funny way of coming back to bite.

Once again, Kent's illustrations are simple, clean, and charming. Like cross between Charly Harper and Ed Emberly, all bold colors and simple outlines.  I'm going to give this one a thumb's up and maybe check out one more Jack Kent book to give it the two-out-of-three final verdict.

Hoddy Doddy

by Jack Kent 
Greenwillow / William Morrow 1979

Three folksy tales of the town fools in an Old World unnamed Danish town.  An interesting window onto a slightly politically incorrect beginning reader by the creator of the King Aroo comic strip. 

In a little Danish town, where these stories are all set, we see three small portraits of hoddy doddy's, or what Kent calls "foolish fellows." The first is a baker who, when told a Norwegian ship has arrived, goes to the harbor because he's never seen a Norwegian before.  When he arrives at the dock the ship is empty except for some stray lobsters that have fallen out of nets, and the baker assumes these are the Norwegians.  In the second tale, the town has learned that the enemy is approaching. In their panic to save the town clock, their most powerful possession, they dump it into the harbor where no one is likely to find it... including the townfolk.  In the last tale a town-proud miller spends his free time admiring how much better his homeland is than others. Upon hearing a contest between cuckoos of neighboring town, he decides to climb the tree and help his town's cuckoo win the contest.  For this he gets a statue erected in his honor as a town hero.

There is little denying the amount of story Kent manages to pack into these brief tales – and their illustrations take on the sort of Old World charm reminiscent of Paul Coker's work with the Rankin Bass animated holiday specials that also mined this territory – but there's something off kilter about identifying the residents from this town as being from Denmark.  The matter of fact presentation and definition of the phrase hoddy doddy makes it seem as if we are reading regional folk tales, but I've recently become aware of the phrase through The 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue in which it's defined as "all ass and no body," which itself was slang to describe short, clumsy people.

I can't presume that the late Jack Kent, whose visual work strikes a nostalgic thrum in me, was attempting to make fun of the Danes deliberately.  It may be that he'd heard the phrase and its meaning divorced from its original use and was simply using it as a peg on which to hang a set of fool's stories.  But it may also have been that its offensiveness went unnoticed until after publication, which may explain why it appears to be no longer in print but not why it's still readily available in my town library.  There's also the chance that I'm being overly sensitive, but it really jumped out at me from page one.

Had Kent not singled out "a town in Denmark" all I would have been able to talk about was his skill at condensing three vignettes into an enjoyable beginning reader with humor and an economy of language.

The Crowfield Curse

by Pat Walsh 
Chicken House / Scholastic 2010 


The arrival of a mysterious stranger to a medieval abbey draws an orphan boy into a battle between forces in the Old Magic realm searching out an angel for their own purposes.  

I'm going to ask for leniency up front for those of you better versed in fantasy.  It isn't a place I go to often so forgive any naivety or genre transgressions on my part. 

When his parents were lost to dark forces in a fire, young will was apprenticed to a nearby abbey for his upbringing.  One day while gathering wood he comes upon a hob stuck in an animal trap.  Secreting the hob back to the abbey for care two things become clear: Will has the gift of sight as few humans can see fay folk, and Brother Snail who Will brings the hob to shares this gift as well, which makes him an odd person to find in a Christian brotherhood.  While the hob mends and Will goes about his business a mysterious gentleman named Jacobus Bone arranges to spend some time at the abbey.  Though Bone is a leper the abbey could use the money he is willing to give them to be put up for a spell, and it is more than coincidence that has brought them to this part of the country; many years earlier an angel appeared to fend off an evil force, was killed, and rumored to be buried nearby.  Soon Will, the hob, Bone and his manservant Shadlock are enmeshed in a in a race to locate the angel before darker forces of the forest do and bring evil to the land. 

Now, if you were to ask me if I wanted to read a story about an orphan who lives in a medieval abbey, and who gets himself involved with Magic and fairies and the lot, I'd have probably politely said "No, thank you."  And I'll tell you, I could just as easily have put this book down twenty, thirty pages in if it weren't for one thing. 

The hob. 

Walsh doesn't exactly give a full description of the creature who gets named Brother Walter in the abbey, instead offering a more contextual impression.  A description of his red fur here, the way he curls his tail around him as he sleeps there.  By not drawing attention to the creature Walsh forces the reader to pay closer attention to the details when they appear.  I wanted to know more about Brother Walter and that desire, however slight, was enough to pull me through until the story in full took over.  There's also something about the matter-of-fact way Will reacts to seeing the hob, a creature modern readers would assume to be mythical but here treated as a "few see them" with nothing about this revelation really shocking Will that much.  The effect is of a time and place we know to be real while at the same time existing outside of our historical knowledge of those times.  The story is a nicely woven tapestry that, while covering some familiar territory with regards to good versus evil and magic, nonetheless feels fresh and would find appeal among readers who might insist they don't generally read or enjoy fantasy. 

Like me.

Jimi: Sounds Like A Rainbow

A Story of the Young Jimi Hendrix 
by Gary Golio 
illustrated by Javaka Steptoe
Clarion  2010


A picture book storyography of the 60's icon's early years told with an unusual objective that isn't obtrusive or moralistic. Or is it?  

Okay, a picture book about Jimi makes me wonder two things before I even open the book: how do you convey the sense of person who would come to change the way rock and roll was approached, and how do you deal with the fact that he died from an overdose.  On the musical front the one thing I find myself thinking is that no book is ever going to be able to fully convey the music, and this is true of jazz and country and any other genre of popular music.  And I presumed that the point of focusing on Jimi's early days was a way around dealing with, what the British might have called back then "death by misadventure."  

From and early age Jimi has got the music in him.  He's pucking out a rhythm against the rain, he's playing the mouth trumpet to amuse his friends, he's rockin' a mean air guitar to Chuck Berry and Elvis.  It's only a matter of time and fate that would land Jimi and his peripatetic father in a boarding house where the landlady's son will part with his worn guitar for five bucks.  Soon Jimi's playing songs on the radio note for note, then getting a job with bands, and finally hooking up with a low-end electric guitar and learning how to bend notes and pitch feedback.  We leave Jimi at the crest of his creative wave, ready to shower the world with his rainbow of music... then onto the back matter. 

It was while soaking in this book that the phrase bait-and-switch came to mind.  The current trend in picture book bibliographies (or storyographies, those books that don't tell a whole life but instead lean on creating a narrative tone poem) is to cover the stories that would most appeal to a young reader and then cover the bases with more complete info in the back, either to inform more curious readers or to give the adults a chance to weigh what is worth sharing to the children in their charge.  For some of these books, this back matter is a sort of "out" for playing fast and loose with the subject's story, an opportunity to lay down the facts in a straightforward if not exciting way.  But in some books, and Jimi: Sounds Like a Rainbow being one of them, this back matter offers an interesting perspective on the subject that underscore the purpose of the narrative's approach.  

First, we get a "More about Jimi Hendrix" spread that does the traditional birth-to-death overview that speaks in the specifics the storyography didn't cover.  Golio chooses to paint a picture of Jimi's childhood as a carefree series of musical encounters that spill over with color and sound, often making slight references to some of Jimi's lyrics.  There's almost a subliminal quality to the phrasing, as I imagine an impressionable reader one day hearing Jimi for the first time having a light bulb moment without realizing where it came from.  Then, as mentioned, the back matter that covers the bases in terms of where and when. 

But then Golio does an interesting thing with the author's note.  He dedicates this space to discussing Jimi's accidental overdose at the age of 27, mentioning the experimental drug use of the day, following it up with a sympathetic entreaty the problems of alcohol and substance abuse, including websites and reference books for further exploration.  Suddenly I find myself going back and seeing the narrative with new eyes.  Golio wasn't putting a gloss over the darker moments in Jimi's life, or deliberately sheltering readers from a harsh reality, he's showing readers that Jimi lived for the music and didn't hide within it.  There may be a presupposition that Jimi was abusing drugs at a time when there was widespread experimentation, and that the "emotional abuse, and depression of childhood poverty" was at play in Jimi's life, so while I applaud the frank and direct discussion of Jimi's death I'm a little put off at the thought of adults using this book as channel for opening up conversations about substance abuse.  Especially given that none of this emotional turmoil or depression are even hinted at in the narrative. 

And don't think that just because Jimi wrote a song called "Manic Depression" that he was writing autobiographically.  The phrase was given to him by his manager during a press conference and Jimi introduced the song as being about a guy who was frustrated because he wanted to make love to music.  Well, maybe that was Jimi a little bit, but he wasn't clinically depressed as far as anyone can tell. 

On the illustrations, Steptoe decides to go with collages made from layered plywood.  Yes, plywood.  In looking for a material that would mirror Jimi's music he went with wood, the same material used in the guitars Jimi manipulated for his art.  Chunky at times, rough-hewn and weathered-looking, I'm not quite sure it best conveys either the essence of Jimi or his music, but then I think there's always a problem in trying to show or express what is generally best left heard.

In the end, as Elvis Costello said (or Martin Mull, they're both credited but neither one is owning up to it) "writing about music is like dancing about architecture."  I think books about musicians ought to include music, especially so for kids.  You can't see Jimi's rainbow, you have to hear it.  Or as Jimi might have insisted, you'd have to experience it.