The Rain Puddle

by Adelaide Holl   
pictures by Roger Duvoisin
Lothrop, Lee & Shepard 1965

The barnyard is once again astir when the little red hen convinces the other animals that a puddle contains their drowned doppelgangers!

Coming across a puddle a plump hen catches sight of her reflection and assumes that another bird has fallen and needs rescuing. One by one the hen convinces the cow, sheep, pig, turkey, horse and others that their reflections are others who have fallen in. And as they rush about trying to find help the puddle dries up and they all assume the trapped animals were freed and part of the melee. Once it is over only an owl sitting on a branch above it all chuckles to himself.

Falling squarely in the tradition of dumb animals who apparently drink water to survive but cannot fathom their own reflection without resorting to illogical panic, the one upside of this book are the illustrations by Duvoisin. The use of the blank white page to serve as the puddle, drawn from a high, almost flat plane, is simplicity at its most brilliant. He's taken the artist's ability to see that the water doesn't need to be represented, only the reflection, and in that the white highlight and forced perspective are best represented by white space. It's almost zen, this absence-as-presence, and really the only reason to read this book.


Aw, that sounded harsh. I don't mean to imply that the story itself is entirely without merit, except that if it were more traditionally rendered there is little to distinguish it from countless other similar fables. With the reflections beneath a translucent blue water – as we might imagine water to be represented in a traditional illustration – we lose the power of the negative space and the sense of how brilliant and realistic the reflections are for the animals. The simple eloquence of the illustrations compensates for the busy cut-a-cuts! gobble-obble-obbles! mooo-mooos! and oink-oinks! cluttering the text.

Perhaps okay for lap-sitters if you run across a copy at the library, but a must for illustrators looking to learn at the feet of a master.

Planet Tad

by Tim Carvell
HarperCollins 2012

Emmy-Award winning head writer for The Daily Show! and contributor to MAD Magazine! attempts to write a middle grade book!

There are five levels of humor:
Hilarious – laughs so hard the belly aches, the eyes water
Funny – consistent laughter, often pointed and insightful, occasionally absurd
Amusing – good for the occasional laugh-out-loud (IRL not fake LOLs)
Smirkworthy – a solid effort that misses the target, but forgiveable
Trying Too Hard – rock bottom, unfunny, unimaginative, lazy

Sure, some of these are modifiable with adjectives like uproarious and riotous and mildly, but these are five points on a scale as exponential as the Richter scale is for earthquakes. There are degrees of Funny that lead up to Hilarious and down to Amusing, but there is a percipitous drop from Smirkworthy to Trying Too Hard. And when you reach rock bottom there has to be a point where the intended audience is left wondering: why can't they see this isn't working?

Planet Tad is Trying Too Hard to be funny.

Understand, humor is hard to pull off. There are rules for establishing a situation that appears to be normal, setting a trap of expectation that creates tension that anticipates humor, then springing an unexpected curve that relieves that tension with a release of laughter. Sometimes you have to lay down a lot of groundwork before a joke can payoff, but doing so makes the humor that much stronger. It also sometimes helps to let the audience know what to expect – give them a small taste – so they will follow you along until the jokes pay out.

Where Planet Tad falters is right at the beginning when Tad explains he has five resolutions for the new year: start a blog (which this book is a chronicle of), finish seventh grade, get girls to notice him, do an ollie on a skateboard, and begin shaving. Is any of that funny, even to a twelve year old kid? It is possible to make those things funny down the road, but there's nothing inherently funny in the list itself, and presuming this is what Tad's exploits are going to be about, well, why bother? What would be funny?

What if Tad instead decided to give himself Hemingway's list of things you must do to be a man – plant a tree, fight a bull, write a novel, and father a child. Two of these could already be incorporated into Planet Tad: he's already writing a novel via these blog posts, and at one point as part of a lesson on sexual responsibility Tad and a girl have to share custody of an egg for a week without breaking it. In an effort to end the week with an egg in tact Tad boils it, only to be discovered at the end of the week when it rolls off the teacher's desk. He boiled their kid, ha ha. How much funnier than what's in this book would it be if Tad took his "fathering" instincts to their (il)logical conclusions, trying to hatch an infertile egg, or truly becoming paternal during the week to the point where he defends his "son's" honor in a fight because someone made fun of him? Carvell sells his readers short by setting his sights too low, and the result is that the humor doesn't evoke sympathy, cringing anticipation, or even a true moment where you can laugh inwardly.

The point here isn't to rewrite Carvell's book, but to underscore just how badly he missed the mark. The meandering blog posts sound authentic in the way that kids would simply record their life events and move on, but the list of resolutions is barely thread enough to string it al together and even Tad himself seems to only casually remember what he's set out to do. The gags themselves also play out too fast, with set-up and resolution happening within a few pages. Where marketing for the book touts this as being squarely aimed at the Wimpy Kid crowd those intended readers will be sorely disappointed that Carvell can't pull off what Kinney did with jokes that were set up pages and pages earlier that delivered their punchlines when a reader least expected it. Wimpy Kid's humor was droll, dry, and delivered with expert timing; Planet Tad rushes the humor (what little it has) so fast and moves on to the next gag that readers might not even realize there was a punchline to the gag at all.

Fortunatley, kids are smart, and when faced with Trying Too Hard humor they know when to say "Why can't they see this isn't working?"

And then they'll move on to better, funnier books.

The Eleventh Plague

by Jeff Hirsch
Scholastic 2011

I'm going to pose a seemingly nonsensical riddle worthy of the Mad Hatter: How are good dystopian novels like gangster films from the 1930s?

In a future very near to us war has broken out between the US and China, where biological weapons were used to unleash virus that brought about a world-wide pandemic and plague. In a distant future, sixteen years after the war, chaos reigns as small enclaves of survivors eek out primitive lives as society tries to pull itself back together. Small bands of scavengers brave the wilds sifting through the detritus of shopping malls and downed aircraft looking for anything of value to trade for food or necessities. America, it seems, is little more than pockets of feudal communities clinging tenaciously to the way things were with roving bands of ex-military slave traders looking to trade the only commodity left on the planet. This is the backdrop against which The Eleventh Plague by Jeff Hirsch begins.

For his entire sixteen years all Stephen has known is the nomadic life under the direction of his ex-Marine grandfather, and the book opens with Stephen and his dad burying the patriarch who like millions before him has succumbed to the plague. There is a sense of being relieved of a burden while at the same time being set adrift. Stephen and his father will continue as they have, as scavengers looking to trade for sustenance, but is that really all they want from life?

Holed up in an abandoned plane during a storm, Stephen and his dad encounter a group of slavers with some newly caught slaves. Their moral compasses properly set, they attempt to free the slaves but are barely able to flee for their own lives. During the escape Stephen's father is injured and falls into a coma, and while nursing him he is taken by what he believes are a rival band of slavers. Instead he is taken to the town of Settler's Landing where, for the first time, Stephen catches a glimpse of what life was like before he was born.

Unlike some of the other encampments of survivors trying to make their way in the new world, Settler's Landing is engaged on returning things to as close to normal as possible. They farm, the have a school for children, kids play baseball, and they all live in homes that were clearly part of a gated community before things went bad. They are shut off from the rest of the world and doing just fine, but Stephen's life has taught him to be wary of strangers even as they have the medicine and knowledge to keep his dad from dying. Slowly Stephen accepts his place in the community, drawn to another orphan, Jenny, a Chinese girl who has a chip on her shoulder as big as they come. It is Jenny the misfit outsider who shows Stephen some of the cracks in the facade of Settler's Landing, and its her wild anti-authoritarian mischief that spins the story into it's second act examination of whether mankind is simply doomed to destroy itself.

When I first was aware of this book last fall I gave it a glance and then put it aside. It felt a little too much like well-trod territory. Then recently I overheard someone in a bookstore rhapsodize over it because "it has a positive, hopeful ending."

That got me thinking: don't all good dystopias have this sense, this need, for a cathartic ending?

The question then is: what, exactly, is a "good" or hopeful ending for a story about how human civilization has brought itself to the brink of extinction? Is it a return to the old, comfortable world we currently live in or the promise of something new learned from the ashes of the old?

I think this may be the most valuable point of conversation for teens about these dystopias they are drawn to – what exactly is it that gives them more comfort, and ending where the world will turn back to where it was, or a world that has learned and will move forward? In some ways I think this is a trick question, because in order to accept that this bleak future will bring about change is to suggest that everything the way it is now is entirely (or nearly so) wrong. And yet, with the glimmer of hope on the horizon, there isn't really a concrete sense of what that next step would be. It's like belling the cat to say "all we have to do to change things is..." but if we're so smart then why can't we change things without nearly annihilating civilization?

But I have an alternate theory about why people are drawn to these dark futures, and it mirrors a time of great anxiety in American history where stories of crime and violence engaged the imaginations of movie-going audiences of that era. Let's look back at the question I opened with.

The answer to the riddle about dystopias and gangster films lies in what people want from their narrative entertainment, be it movies, TV, or books. In the 1920s and 30s during the depression and prohibition there was a rise in the gangster movie, films that seemed to celebrate the lives of notorious criminals and fictitious public enemies. At a time when people had so little beyond their economic anxieties, there was some satisfaction in watching the stories of people bold enough to take what they wanted, by any means of force necessary. Audiences rooted for these "bad guys" as they moved from one murderous exploit to another... but only up to a point. In the end, the gangster had to die. He had to. There was no way for an audience to reconcile rooting for the bad and feeling good about it unless there was a cathartic moment of justice in the end. It was okay to ride along on the sideboards of those big cars while people were being tommy-gunned so long as we knew that the world would be put to right in the end.

And this is where I think we are with modern dystopian novels. The economy is in the dumps, wages have stagnated while corporate profits have boomed, we're actually in worse times economically than during the Great Depression, so we need some sort of diversion that makes us feel better at the end of the day. Our current anxieties about the world demand some sort of outlet. We need to see the world worse than it currently is in order to feel like things aren't so bad, and like a gangster movie, readers want to delve into these dark futures but only if they can emerge with a sense that things are not as bad as they seem. They want to emerge from the book and find some comfort in the world they currently live in, not worry about how to change it. If these dystopias truly were suggesting a global change was necessary they would set about showing readers a road map out of our current path toward these dark places, but they do not. To do so would risk becoming pedantic on the safe side and propaganda on the extreme.

People didn't leave gangster movies wanting to take up a sub machine gun to shoot up the town, just as kids who read dystopic novels don't put down the book feeling a sense of nihilistic hopelessness. This idea of these books being to "dark" comes from adult denial of just how dark the world looks to kids at the moment. Historically, teens have always felt the older generations have screwed things up and should just get the hell out of their way. So if you think a dark work of fiction is more detrimental to a child's mind than, say, our current divisive political climate or the profits-over-people mindset of big business, then, as the hippies used to say, you're part of the problem.

Fix the world and the books will fix themselves.

This review is cross-posted today with Guys Lit Wire, home to all things teen boy readers might like. 

More

by I. C. Springman
illustrated by Brian Lies
Houghton Mifflin, 2012

It's Hoarders for the picture book set! A thieving magpie collects and collects until... well, as they say, less is more.

One of the oddest thing about reviewing  picture books is that it often takes more words to describe them than it does to read them. Quite simply we have the story of a bird with a propensity for stealing colorful, shiny things and bringing them back to his tree where they accumulate until, finally, the weight of everything sends it all tumbling to the ground. At last the blackbird is forced to accept that only a small number of things is the right amount.

For a book to illustrate the concepts of more, less, too much, and enough, More is a beautiful vehicle. The paintings have the studied care of detail painted into them yet the layout is simple enough to stay focused on the action. But from the perspective of narrative I am bothered by the mouse (or mice, as there are more than one) that acts as the blackbird's external voice or reason. I've thought about this for a while now and what I think bothers me is the dissonance between the illustrations and the cartoon-like behavior of the mice. If the illustrations were more comic the dynamic might have made more sense, but as it is the realism of the blackbird against the imploring nature of his tree-bound rodent friend reads a little like a National Geographic documentary with Disney characters animated into the proceedings.  

But I do like the message of learning to do with less, and imagine many a parent will appreciate having some ammunition against young lap-sitters who might be tempted by commercial culture to want more and more and more.

Now if it didn't have Jiminy Field Mouse and his moral tacked onto it...  

The Golden Ass of Lucius Apuleius

Adapted from the Latin by M. D. Usher
Illustrations by T. Motley
David R. Godine 2011

Ah, the good old days of Ancient Rome, where a reckless traveler manages to turn himself into an ass – literally, a donkey – and survive to tell the unbelievable tale to his traveling companions.

First, for those who know the original tale and might have some concerns, Usher's adaptation is cleaned up enough for slightly raunchy middle grade tastes while keeping the overall plot in tact. For those new to the story Lucius, the narrator, comes across another pair of travelers on the road to Thessaly who are deep in a heated argument. It appears one, an 11 year old boy named Prudentius, has a fantastic story and the other insists he is a liar. Lucius is asked to listen to the tale and decide whether he believes it, and if he does he will agree to put the pair up for the night at an inn. Lucius's curiosity is piqued, and he agrees to the terms.

In very short order we hear of a magic ointment that can turn a person into an animal, and without a moment's hesitation Prudentius becomes an ass only to learn that the ointment is meant for nighttime use. In order to undo the spell he must eat rose petals, but before he can find them he is discovered and treated as the ass he is, forced to eat hay and live the life of a beast of burden. From here it is one event after another, where Prudentius the ass is sold, beaten by a mean boy, stolen by thieves, all the while maintaining his human capacity for human thought and feeling but only able to bray. At last Prudentius is restored to human form (deus ex machina through the assistance of the goddess Isis herself) and he is a changed man – changed in that he was a man originally but Isis has turned him into a boy with all his year's wisdom in tact. The tale ends with the travelers arriving at their destination and Lucius concedes that, though fantastic, he believes the story and prepares to uphold his end of the bargain. There might even be a story he can write in all this...

Excised from this retelling but in the original is the elaborate tale-within-a-tale of Cupid and Psyche. Though this additional story might have accounted for the passing of time along the road it does divert attention away from the primary storyline. What is interesting is that this change underscores how the focus on Prudentius's tale of becoming an ass ambles along through a series of unpredictable events. This isn't the narrative tradition we now expect which is character and goal driven. Okay, it is, because he does set out initially to find roses to relieve him of the magic, but he just as quickly is willing to give up hopes of being human when he finds a way to turn his transformation into an asset. In the end the story manages to come full circle but has the hero taken a journey or were we treated to a series of Chaucer-like tales of life in Ancient Rome connected by a donkey? Or perhaps these are closer to the tales of Sheheraazade, tales told to achieve a means to an end, loosely connected by the teller right down to the nesting of stories within stories.

Purists may be upset with some of the liberties Usher has taken with the text – turning Lucius into a man hearing the tale rather than being the focus of the adventures, softening the ribald nature of the story – but I think there is something to be said for providing younger readers an introduction to the tale they might pick it up again some day. Outside of college-prep Latin or AP Literature classes I don't believe The Golden Ass is in the general curriculum, and that's too bad.

What Vermont classics professor Usher manages in 96 pages is to make the first complete novel from antiquity accessible to a modern audience. Boys especially, the quick-witted ones with a taste for wordplay, will enjoy the text's unsubtle uses of the word ass, and all readers will enjoy the occasional illustrations by Motley that accompany moments in the story. There probably isn't much beyond this to recommend to readers who enjoy The Golden Ass and would hunger for more – unlike fans of Greek mythology being able to turn to a variety of stories ancient and modern – but there's enough here to counter any argument that ancient history is boring.

The Hero of Little Street

by Gregory Rogers  
Allen & Unwin, Austrailia 2009
Roaring Brook, US 2012

The Boy, who previously met the Bard and the Bear and battled a Midsummer Knight, takes "readers" on another adventure, this time through the world of Vermeer.

The Boy, out titular hero, is kicking around when a soccer ball appears. One swift kick and the ball lands in a fountain, and the bully boys who were previously playing with the ball are none too happy. They chase the Boy to take refuge in an art museum where he finds himself joined by a dog from one painting, helps a musician in another painting, and is let out into the world of Flemish masters through Vermeer's "Little Street." When his canine companion is taken from him the Boy tracks him down to a basement butchery where hundreds of dogs have been captured and caged. After making a daring escape the Boy and the dogs return to the "real" world where they meet up with the bully boys again. The Boy gets the last laugh as the newly freed dogs chase the bullies down as a favor to their new master, and the Boy continues on to another day and another adventure.  

click image to enlarge

That Rogers does all this without words in a comic-framed format is only half the marvel, his real strength comes in the ability to make the real and the fantasy imaginings slip fluidly in and out. When the dog slips out of Jan Van Eyck "The Arnolfini Wedding" the reader doesn't question it any more than the Boy does, it simply happened and is part of the world. As it is the world Roger's Boy inhabits has the feel of another time and place where time and technology play no part. It adds a sense of timelessness about the whole affair, a story of a boy and a chase and a series of adventures.

And it was while thinking about the story in this light that I realized this is where picture books are more liberal than their wordier counterparts up the literacy line. A picture book has the advantage of being like a short story where there may be a one-up change in the main character's position of predicament from the beginning of the story, but no need for there to be the sort of emotional or plot development necessary for traditional narratives.  I mean, I suppose I could find a three act narrative in The Hero of Little Street – act one: hero chased by bullies; act two: in the museum world; act three: return of the hero triumphant – but in the end it feels more like a cumulative series of adventures in the mode of the Odyssey. Four of five more of these Boy books by Rogers and they could be bundled together into an epic tale of their own.

you probably want to see this bigger, too

The last lingering element that was hard to place was Rogers visual language. It is a comic format but something keeps me from calling it a graphic novel. It isn't simply length, there's something that taps into something I couldn't place for a long time until I studied the poses of the characters, their lines of action while standing still, their contrapposto if you will. One thing computers haven't managed yet is the ability to search for sense connections beyond words, those memory senses of image and smell and touch that can't be entered as a search term. In the end I finally made the connection: Sergio Aragones, the "marginal" artist from MAD magazine whose linguine-legged people and wordless comics are echoed in Rogers' storytelling. The actual influence may not be there at all, but the fluidity of moving through these visual ideas is there, it's a shared vocabulary of images. I think if you know both artists works it's easy to see the connection, even if they are only distant cousins half a world apart.

As a final thought, based on a conversation I had yesterday, one of the great things about picture books like this without words is that it allows "readers" to provide their own dialog, their own interpretation of the story. It's malleable or it can become firmly fixed, but in keeping with the "picture worth a thousand words" Rogers books contain millions of words... but no text.

how supporting ballou sr high school library will make you a magician

You may be thinking that magic is an illusion, a slight of hand, a trick. That's not the kind of magic I have in mind though.

I'm talking about a type of magic that you see when a face lights up. It's a magic I used to live for as a teacher and one I continue to relish as a parent. It's a magic of a moment when someone receives a gift that transcends the physical. It's the Ah-ha!, the joy of surprise, the connection of finding something that speaks to you and let you know that you are not alone in the world. 

I'm talking about the magic of a book.

And I'm asking you to consider becoming a magician, an agent of change that will get books to kids so they can experience that magic.

Each year the blog Guys Lit Wire, which I contribute to, puts together a book fair for a worthy cause, someplace in need of a little outside help. This year we are headed back to Ballou Sr High School in Washington DC because, as much as we were able to help them last year, they are still deep in need when it comes to books.

You can read the whole deal here at Guys Lit Wire. Read the background, click on the link of books, make a purchase. It's pretty straightforward but here's how I like to think about it:

Somewhere out there is a book. It was written by an author with the hopes of one day reaching a reader. One day that book finds its reader and the reader is astounded: it's as if the author wrote the book specifically for them, is speaking directly to them. But in between there is a missing piece of magic, that midwifery that delivers the book to the reader. 

You will never know how you changed a reader's life or even that you did, but never knowing, never being sure, that's the territory shared by magic and faith. 

Go. 

Be a magician.

Spread the word, help others become magicians. 

Stickman Odyssey

Book One: An Epic Doodle (2011)
Book Two: The Wrath of Zozimos (2012)
by Christopher Ford
Philomel

Homer's epic tale reduced to stick figures and plenty of diversions from the classic poem, not that contemporary readers will mind (if they even notice).

If you are a deep and reverent reader of The Odyssey, you should probably just leave now. This graphic novel retelling simply isn't for you.

But if you're a kid who knows little to nothing about classic Greek tales this could do for you what countless hours of watching Rocky and Bulwinkle's Fractured Fairy Tales did for your (grand)parent's generation in terms of learning the tales of the Brothers Grimm, or the way Bugs Bunny cartoons taught generations about classical music and opera.

In short, Stickman Odyssey is a satyric romp through Ancient Greece, where a modern sensibility and simple-but-expressive stick figures poke fun at the often serious (and preposterous) adventures Zozimos.

Plot? It's as episodic and rambling as they come. It begins with a stormy sea and Zozimos calling out for help from the heavens. Out of the sky comes a giant fountain pen to draw Zoimos a raft to safety, where he cries out his thanks for Athena. From this brief encounter we know pretty much all we need to know for the duration. Our hero, far from home, is on a quest to return to the land of his birth, Sticatha, where as an infant he barely escaped the usurper queen before she had a chance to turn him into a crow as she did with his siblings. Raised by his Uncle Nestor, a General of the Royal Army, Zozimos was raised far away and trained as a warrior so that he may one day return and reclaim the crown that was once his father's.

From there, it's the usual. Quests that lead to certain doom somehow thwarted by clever thinking, evil creatures at the command of powerful sorcerers with fatal flaws that make them easily disposed of, the occasional bit of magic that allows for the impossible to happen. Essentially, all the fantastic part of these epic tales fold nicely into a comic narrative where instead of stretching credulity they become a never-ending series of deus ex machina punchlines.

While I have been fond of the series First Second has been putting out of full-blown superhero-style illustrated tales of the Greek gods, there is something satisfying about these doodles and the boom-boom-boom aspect of their shortcut storytelling.

It's got Golems and Hermit frogs and magic boats and hairy eyeball spiders and a cheating Sphinx and a romance straight out of Star Wars (er, maybe its the other way around)...

Good fun, and maybe, as with other culture satires, as good a place as any to get a sense of the classics before one day discovering where the stories came from.

Tales for Very Picky Eaters

by Josh Schnieder  
Clarion Books 2011  

Five short tales for beginning readers utilizing reverse psychology. This might backfire for some kids. Like me.  

Know a picky eater? Sure you do. And when it comes to getting them to eat the things we want them to sometimes a little creativity is called for. When James decides that broccoli is disgusting (without even trying it?) he asks for something else. His father offers him pre-chewed gum, dirt, and a sweaty sock. James decides that the broccoli doesn't sound so bad.

I'm not doing the book justice here. It's really very cute and, for a beginning reader, a good mixture of readability mixed with some challenging vocabulary, all in good fun.

There's a troll in the basement whose feelings would be hurt if James doesn't eat the mushroom lasagna. There's a list of the exaggerated effects -- rubbery bones from lack of calcium -- from not drinking milk. There's the ever-growing oatmeal that must be consumed to keep it at bay, else it will take over the house.  Finally come the eggs, the slimy, runny eggs. James guesses a bunch of crazy reasons why he needs to eat them but dad simply suggests he should try them because he might like them. He does.

And they were still hot.

No, wait.

So two thoughts about Tales For Very Picky Eaters, and they really don't have any effect on what I think. Mostly.

 First, I was that kid who would try reverse psychology on adults as a kid. I was once separated from a friend for talking and given my own desk as punishment. I loved that! I made my punishment look like so much fun that other kids began trying to get in trouble so they could get their own desks. Eventually our teacher, Mrs. Bridges, had to create a new row for us misfits.

Second, and this might be a little more germane to the book, I was under the impression that we were moving away from trying to force kids to eat foods? Obviously I'm not saying (and no one else is) that kids should have soda and cake all the time but that their bodies will decide what they need and will come around to eating better in time provided the options were available. Kid doesn't like broccoli, fine, find out what vegetable they do like and give it to them all the time. Then when they ask for something else you can introduce that and build a repertory menu.

Do I think kids will enjoy reading this collection of humorous tales surrounding one of the Great Child-Adult Divides? Naturally they will, and most will probably be able to substitute a food and their own reasons for why they need to eat them. But there is the potential for backlash, especially with any parent who has used similar tactics, for a reader to suddenly realize that the stories they've been told are just that, stories, and the next time they are fed okra or lima beans or something else they have problems with they may just entrench themselves deeper.

Soldier Bear

by Bibi Dumon Tak

spot illustrations by Philip Hopman

translated from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson

Eerdmans Books edition 2011

A cgarette-eating, beer-drinking, ammunition-carrying bear? Only warfare could create a story so improbable.

During World War II as Russia and Germany fight to claim Poland for their own the citizens caught in the middle are taken as prisoners in their own country, forced to flee to neighboring Iran. Among these escaped expatriates are Stanislav and Peter, a pair of inseparable friends who agree to join the British in the fight to help reclaim their homeland. One day while stopped along the road they spy a starving young boy with nothing to trade the soldiers but a small sack containing a bear cub. A cute little bear cub, who so totally entrances Peter that he trades a pocket knife, some cash, and tin of meat for it. None of the soldiers of the 2nd Polish Corps would imagine that this cute little pet would become not just a mascot but a source of comfort and a valuable comrade in the fight.

Once weened from milk the bear they named Voytek, "smiling warrior" in Polish, quickly adapts to his surroundings and behave much like a small child in the camp. Voytek prefers to sleep with Peter instead of his little makeshift bed, he bothers the cook for scraps, and learns how to give himself showers in the heat of the Palestinian desert where they are based before moving closer to the front. When scolded or scared Voytek covers his eyes with his paws and rocks back and forth, and when the soldiers become melancholy he knows to stand on his hind legs and place a reassuring arm on a man's shoulders. Raised around men Voytek learns how to behave as a man, as much as a bear can without betraying his nature. Granted, the soldiers introduce the bear to beer, which he loves and can be bribed with, and he mimics the soldiers smoking by stealing their lit cigarettes and eating them, but he also pitches in and carries ammunition when its time to work, earning Voytek an official designation as a Private in the 2nd Polish Corps.

There is something decidedly old school about Soldier Bear, an innocent absurdity that feeds into the wartime images we have of people doing and performing extraordinary tasks in the face of adversity. The connection with nature, a bear in this case, in the face of something as unnatural as life during wartime keeps the men of the 2nd Polish Corps grounded. All around them humanity is focused on so much destruction and yet here are soldiers chasing a bear, two dogs, and a monkey that they have also adopted around the camp as they wreak havoc. And when a winter snow quiets the war it is the animals who remind the soldiers about the joys of life by frolicking and starting a snowball fight that involves the entire camp. Ironic, that the link these men have to their humanity comes from the antics of a bear who was raised by soldiers in adversity.

photo from the Polish Institute, not from the book

Written in a clean style with a deceptive simplicity, Soldier Bear has the feel of a high-interest title aimed at reluctant readers without talking down to any. As a collection of vignettes, we follow Voytek's story with the 2nd Polish Corps for the five years until the moment after the war when his minders must return home and leave their friend and comrade behind. Though the parting is bittersweet, we learn in the Afterword that Voytek lived happily in the Edinburgh Zoo for another 15 years, which isn't bad for a bear who served during the war, drank beer, and was fond of eating lit cigarettes.

In thinking about it after the fact, the story is remarkable, but completely sidesteps the moral implications of these soldiers deciding to take care of a bear cub over the boy who owned him. A bear cub in the wild without its mother probably wouldn't have survived – indeed, I suspect the only reason the boy has the cub in the first place is because something happened to the bear's mother – but what about the boy, and what of his mother? Why not take the boy as a mascot, feed him and make him an honorary soldier? Is it not entirely possible that Peter and his friends saved the bear at the expense of the boy's own life?

Nonetheless, Soldier Bear was this year's winner of the Mildred L. Batchelder Award for “the most outstanding children’s book originally published in a language other than English in a country other than the United States, and subsequently translated into English for publication in the United States.” A worthy winner, to be sure, but there is nothing "foreign" about the reading experience.

[This review is also cross-posted over at Guys Lit Wire today, your home for books of interest to guys, by some of the best bloggers in the business.]

Zita the Spacegirl

by Ben Hatke  

First Second  2011   

Sucked into a portal through another dimension, Zita must rescue her friend and find a way home before the world she is on is destroyed. Oh, but it's so much more fun then all that! 

Winner of this year's Cybil Award for Best Middle Grade Graphic Novel.

While playing one day Zita and her friend Joseph discover a small crater with a small device at it's center, a device with an irresistible red button to push. Joseph the worrywart thinks they should report their discovery but Zita's all for adventure and with a mighty THOOM! a portal opens before them. Before they have any time to react a gob of tentacles emerge from the portal, grab Joseph, and then the portal closes. Collecting herself from fear and guilt, Zita decides she must rescue Joseph, and with another push of the button...   

Zita lands in a parallel world where the inhabitants are either trying to escape or prepare for the destruction of the planet within three days. The clock is ticking, Zita has to find her friend then find her way home, but not without a sci-fi heroes journey that includes magicians, robots, giant rats, and some monstery looking aliens, all of varying temperaments and trustworthiness. in the end when all the threads come together it looks like either Zita or Joseph can return through the portal but not both. Adventurous Zita understand that if one of them is likely to find an alternate way home it will be her, and with that resolved and a small band of new friends Zita is poised to begin a series of new adventures.   

click to enbiggen

Zita the Spacegirl is, honestly, the most satisfying middle grade graphic novel in the past year. I might not have read everything, and I might be forgetting something along the way that could have held its own against Zita, but if anything else was that good you'd think I'd remember. Is it Shakespeare? Heck nah. Is it fun? Yup. Perhaps not at the same level as Jeff Smith's Bone series, but in that general ballpark in terms of visual fluency and story pacing. If Hatke can manage to tease a mythology out of this parallel world and give Zita a sense of destiny and depth then I'll be really excited to see how the story plays out in future editions. 

Of the other finalists in the Cybils graphic novel category Zita the Spacegirl was the best paced, most engaging, and free of the problems that sank its co-nominees. From my perspective Dan Santant's Sidekicks felt slight (and sadly predictable) by comparison, Selznick's Wonderstruck and the collection Nursery Rhyme Comics both suffered from inappropriate categorization that might have made them winners elsewhere (middle grade fiction on the former, picture book for the latter), and Barry Deutsch's Hereville includes some unique problems that deserves a review all its own.

Something that came up when the judges were deciding on how to word this selection for the Cybils was whether or not to mention the book's boy-friendliness. I was against saying anything official for the award because it wasn't really a criteria for discussion nor was it a deciding factor. While I do believe that there are things writers can do to make books more boy-friendly I am also firmly in the camp that believes boys can, and should, be encouraged to read everything no mater the gender of the main character. Some books, like Zita the Spacegirl, make this an easier proposition however.

Me... Jane

by Patrick McDonnell  
Little Brown  2011  

A picture book biography that's more picture book than biography. And that's not a bad thing.  

A little girl named Jane is given a stuffed chimpanzee which she names Jubilee. She treasure Jubilee and takes him with her wherever her boundless curiosity leads. Together they climb trees and observe chickens and take a full interest in all the natural sciences a girl can explore in her own yard. Through the books she reads she dreams of far away places and helping animals in the jungles. And at the end of the day when she tucks Jubilee into bed with her she dreams all these things, and when she wakes up she is Dr. Jane Goodall, living among the primates of Africa, her dream come true.  

While there are biographies for all ages I would propose that the trickiest is the picture book biography. There is an old tradition of birth-to-death biography that attempts to use childhood as a sort of blueprint for explaining how events shaped the subject as an adult but this isn't without problems. Occasionally a subject's life doesn't have a cohesive progression where life elements can be tied together to tell a story. This will lead to a loose buffet of events that forward a narrative agenda but do disservice to the overall accuracy. Another approach is to appeal to the younger reader through telling the subject's story of who they were as young people, assuming a reader will automatically be more interested in the character of the subject by seeing them as youngsters. The problem with this slice-of-life approach is that the facts need to be molded to match the perception of the adult as a subject. A middle grade biography of Ben Franklin might include his industry, his bent toward invention, and the cruelty he experienced as a journeyman working for his older brother while neatly skirting the issue of his being a runaway or attempting to steal his best friend's girl because these muddy our preconceptions of how a founding father should have behaved.  

Huh, how did I get all the way up here on this soap box?

In Me... Jane what we get, technically, is a slice-of-life biography of a girl who loves zoology. McDonnell captures Jane's carefree childhood in a way that is free of period detail which makes it feel universal. There are subtle clues that Jane's story reflects back to an older time – broken text (Old Bookman?) printed over faint images from the 19th and early 20th century books Jane would have read – but the effect is almost too subtle to register. It give the story a different feel but not necessarily a sense of events taking place at an earlier time. This isn't really a problem, just not as effective as I think it was intended.

In the end the two things I'm going to take away from this book will be McDonnell's depiction of Jubilee and the ending where the story jumps from young Jane going to bed to dream and the reality of her dream come true. There is a certain talent required to make a stuffed animal come to life in a drawing which I don't think every artist or illustrator can do. I don't know if this will somehow revoke my MFA but Winnie the Pooh and all his friends always looks to me like a diorama of paper doll cutouts. I don't care how old you are, if you want to buy into the stuffed animal as a living, breathing creature then you have to find a way to convey that sense of life while remaining true to the nature of an expressionless doll. I've always loved, for example, how Bill Waterson managed to draw Calvin's companion Hobbes as both a lifeless toy and a vibrant tiger. Waterson's conceit was that we could see both the adult and the child's view of Hobbes, how that tiger knew when to play possum and how to deliver a punchline when no one else was around to hear it. McDonnell, on the other hand, finds ways to pose Jubilee that he appears to exhibit expressions and life without defying the physical laws that make up a stuffed chimp. Jubilee's permanent smile can appear focused, inquisitive, and expressive simply by the way he is placed within the scene. He becomes more than a companion, he becomes a reflection of Jane's innocence and wonder, and is really a brilliant little detail I think a lot of young illustrators could learn from.  

The ending, the jump from young Jane to contemporary Jane, wakes us from her illustrated childhood to a full color photo which, in doing, wakes us from the dreamtime of Jane's childhood dream into a "dreams come true" reality. It's an effective, judicious use of a single photo to underscore the link between childhood and adulthood without belaboring the point. In doing so McDonnell also manages to take a slice-of-life biography and turn it, with two flips of a page, into a near-full-life story by simply suggesting that the details between point A and B are inconsequential. And they are, as they should be, to a picture book audience.  

Although I'm late to the party on this review, I understand now why people were abuzz when this came out.

Blackout

by John Rocco  
Disney / Hyperion 2011

On a hot summer night New York City encounters a blackout, bringing out the best in people. A far cry from the blackouts a few decades back!  

All the little girl (or long-haired boy) wants to do is play a board game with her family. His/her sister is too busy talking on the phone. His/her dad is up to his elbows in oven mitts in the kitchen. His/her mom is on the computer, all of them too busy for a game. Then the lights go out, everywhere. Without electricity the boy/girl is frightened but soon realizes there is nothing to be afraid of. They head to the roof where they discover the stars, almost always obscured by city light, as well as people bringing their hot summer lives to the rooftops. They head down to the streets where others are taking advantage of free ice cream and opened fire hydrants. In a single moment the city is turned from sweltering misery into a massive block party.  

When the lights come back on everyone returns to their normal lives, but not everyone: keeping the spirit of the blackout alive the little boy/girl's family leaves the lights off and plays a board game together by candlelight.  

There is a grand tradition in picture books to address and capitalize on childhood fears. Being afraid of the dark is common, but by focusing on a blackout this fear becomes much larger. After all, a child afraid of the dark can be placated by a nightlight or an open door with hallway light streaming through. But to have an entire metropolitan area go to totally dark could seem like the end of the world. Rocco minimizes the fear by highlighting all the better parts of what can happen in this scenario -- after all, if a blackout meant the neighborhood ice cream shop starts giving away ice cream, as happens here, how bad could things be? In fact, given the positive experience I could see some readers anxiously awaiting summer for the hope of free ice cream and game night with the family. Also, if the book gives some parents pause in considering the need for an emergency kit, all the better to be prepared.  

As with a true blackout there is also a sense of out-of-sight, out-of-mind involved here. The particular block in Brooklyn depicted here will likely enjoy a much better blackout experience than those neighborhoods that might be more economically depressed. But then, with the blackout, who would know? Televisions wouldn't be transmitting reports and aside from a few battery powered radios (do people own radios anymore?) the blackout people experienced would be the only blackout people would know.  

I don't fault Rocco for giving us a rosy picture of a blackout, or for the message that younger readers should not be scared of such things. My only hope would be that it doesn't take this book, or a similar event, to trigger a family to consider more quality time or better appreciate the stars obscured overhead.

Worlds Afire

by Paul B. Janeczko  
Candlewick 2004  

A circus tent. A catastrophic fire. The voices of those who were there, victim and witness, their stories in verse.  

On the afternoon of July 6, 1944 a fire broke out at the Ringling Brother's Circus while in performance in Hartford, Connecticut. The tent canvas had been waterproofed with paraffin and gasoline, a combination that turned the entire circus effectively into "one huge candle / just waiting for a light." No one knows how it began but once the tent caught fire it was only a matter of moments before it was engulfed in flame. 500 were injured and 167 people died, and Janeczko has chosen to let the voices of the people involved tell the story from their own perspective.  

Janeczko leaves it up to the reader to pick up the clues within each poem to guess who survived. The poems are separated by three parts, or acts if you will. Part 1 gives us what people were thinking and doing just before the circus. Some were excited kids, some were circus performers getting everything ready, and piece by piece, line by line, we get little details that anticipate the disaster to come. Part 2 deals with the disaster itself. What it was like to be dealing with large cats when the fire broke out and people were running everywhere. What it looked like from under the bleachers by a kid who was collecting the change that fell out of people's pockets, how he was able to cut a hole in the side of the tent with a pocket knife and escape. Part 3 covers the sober aftermath as survivors and townspeople come to grips with the horror. A soldier anxious for active duty overseas finds working morgue detail more gruesome than the war he is about to head into.  

With an economy of image and detail Janeczko delivers a portrait as alluring and ephemeral as a flickering flame.  There's a very Spoon River Anthology feel to the book, with its ghostly echoes of people from the past reliving a single day – a single, horrific day – in the gentle breeze of a summer day that changed, defined, or took their lives.

Going Underground

by Susan Vaught  
Bloomsbury 2011

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

Yeah, I said graveyard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guantanamo Boy

by Anna Perera
Albert Whitman   2011

On a family vacation to Pakistan sis months after 9/11 a teen boy is picked up as an enemy combatant and taken to Guantanamo Bay where he is tortured, all the while wondering how he got there...

This is one of those stories you want to like, want to be able to recommend, have a hard time not putting too many eggs into your basket of hope, because it's a solid idea that just dies on the page.

Khalid is a typical Pakistani-British teen boy. Okay, maybe not entirely typical, he does seem a bit naive, but down the road he's just one of his mates when it comes to soccer and all. And like many a teen boy everywhere he's very much into online gaming, particularly with his worldly cousin Tariq. When Khalid's grandmother dies his parents decide they are going to visit the family in Pakistan during Easter break. Form there it's a drawn out hop, skip, and a jump before Khalid finds himself in a wrong-place-wrong-time situation and he's in Gitmo wondering why and how he got there.

This book was a slog unlike any I've endured in some time. If I didn't already agree with the politics of the detention center at Guantanamo – or rather, if I didn't agree that Gitmo was and is a terrible violation of human rights with little to justify it – I couldn't have managed past the first chapter. Written in a stilted and distancing first-person, with characters that fall flat and a plot that has to be sifted from the silt of information this book is crammed with, I kept hoping that soon, soon, it would turn a corner and pry my eyelids open. I know there's a good, and important, book in here somewhere, but it would take a team of gifted surgeons to find it.

So this story is out there, still, waiting for someone to tell it so that young readers can see what's really been going on in the name of The War on Terror. This book simply isn't it though.

Shelter

by Harlan Coben
A Mickey Bolitar Novel
Putnam  2011

When his girlfriend goes missing, and no one else seems to notice or care, Mickey begins to dig around and finds himself caught up in a web of... human sex trafficking!

His dad is dead, his mom is in rehab, his girlfriend of three weeks has gone missing, and the neighborhood crazy lady has scared the pants off Mickey... all in the first sentence of this mystery. The details will come in short order, but what is clear from the very beginning is that Coben isn't pulling any punches when it comes to ratcheting up the tension in what looks to be the promising beginning of a new mystery series for YA readers.

Mickey isn't some kid who starts out with aspirations to become a detective or with any particular skill-sets that tip of he's something special, he's just a typical kid who's been forced to bum around the world with his parents while they did their various humanitarian missions. But with his dad killed (under not-so-accidental conditions as Mickey will learn) and his mother in rehab over the loss, Mickey's been foisted onto his uncle in his dad's old home town where the family name draws ire in some quarters. Being the new kid, befriending the heavy goth girl because he's the only one with some decency, finding himself with a nerdy sidekick, and not taking any crap from the bully-jocks sets Mickey up for the reluctant anti-hero mold, but things don't start rolling until his girlfriend of three weeks – also a new kid in town – goes missing without a trace. With a little deviousness, and a lot of chutzpah, Mickey suddenly discovers that no one in the town is who they seem, not even his parents.

That Coben takes us from local to global by making the mystery at the heart of the story about human sex trafficking is, I think, a bold recognition that teen readers looking for mystery stories don't talk down to them while maintaining their human scale. There's real danger involved as kids are dealing with scary gun-toting adults but there are no unbelievable super-heroics and no sense that the story elements are really that far-fetched. It also doesn't hurt that Coben knows how to dump twist after twist into the story, including turns that you had no right to expect out of the middle of nowhere. It reads faster than a lot of adult beach reads and is twice as smart.

In the recent trend of adult writers who dip into writing for middle grade and YA, Coben is the first I've read who really seems to understand the value in creating books that build an audience base. Just because you like Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson books or Lemony Snicket doesn't mean you're going to like those author's adult books. Even Elmore Leonard, who I thought would make a perfect crossover writer, didn't get it, but Coben does. It's a smart move, because any teen who likes this can probably jump to Coben's adult titles pretty quickly.

This is how you do a YA to adult crossover.

Mister Creecher

by Chris Priestley
Bloomsbury 2011

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

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

What? How did Dickens end up in all this?

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

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

Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor

Story and drawings by Mervyn Peake 
Originally published in Country Life magazine 1939
published in book form by Macmillian 1967
reprinted by Candlewick 2001

The Captain and his oddball crew settle in on an uncharted island where they encounter a creature the color of butter and then... do nothing?  

The good Captain is a bruiser who has run through his share of crew. His ship, The Black Tiger, has lost many a men to sharks and the plank leaving only five bizarre scallywags for company. One day they spot an uncharted island and go to investigate, finding among the unusual flora and fauna a pan-like creature the color of butter. "Just exactly the sort I've been wanting!" the Captain says cryptically. Entranced, the Captain quickly spends all his time looking at, doting on, dancing with, and generally hanging out with the Yellow Creature, so much so that the crew are reduced to doing little more than acting as servants or a bored audience. The Captain is so happy with his new life on the island that he finally decides to give up pirating for good. His crew (presumably with the ship) have long departed, and to this day the Captain and his Yellow Creature are there on their island, eating exotic fruit and watching the sun set and dancing hornpipes whenever they please.

he looked like this

It's near impossible to explain this picture book's weird vibe. Peake's illustration style in this book is like a whimsical version of the stuff Basil Wolverton was producing for MAD magazine in the 1950s. With exaggerated, elongated facial features and preposterously proportioned bodies, Captain Slaughterboard and his crew are beyond misfits, beyond human, perhaps only one evolutionary rung above the fantastical creatures of Edward Lear. In addition, Peake's handwritten text give the book the feel of a journal or an illustrated captain's log.



As for the story itself, my modern reader's brain wants to know a whole lot more about what Peake's intentions were. The Captain has clearly been running through men in search of something, seeking out some unknown something that has driven him at the expense of others. But then when he finds the Yellow Creature the effect is identical to that of falling into a blind, fawning love. The Creature's coy, almost fay expressions seem to acknowledge the Captain's stirrings and perhaps indicate the feelings are mutual.

Is this crazy? A story about a pirate captain at the end of his career finally deciding to retire on a remote, deserted island and setting up home with an exotic native?

l'après-midi d'un faune?

Alright, I'm going to set my adult goggles aside and try to look at this again. We've got a rough pirate captain driving what little of his crew he has to find some new thing, something never before seen or imagined. Finding the Yellow Creature and his island the Captain has finally found what he was looking for, but the crew comes to realize that this is not what they signed up for, and they depart. The crew sails off into the sunset (unseen, they simply disappear from the book half way through) and the Captain spends his sunset years happily in his island paradise. What's wrong with that?


By modern standards, what's wrong is that there's no real character development and little plot conflict to speak of. The Yellow Creature is an enigma. There's almost something menacing about his silence and manner, with facial expressions that can be read as innocent or seductive or duplicitous, and understanding his intentions might confuse younger readers.

Or maybe not. Kids don't question an owl and a pussycat sailing to far away lands and getting married by a pig, they don't think twice about forests full of bears who live in houses and sleep in beds and eat porridge, and pirates are simply cool.

Another curiosity no longer in print, though still available in libraries and worth a peek.

Nursery Rhyme Comics

edited by Chris Duffy
introduction by Leonard S. Marcus
First Second  2011


Fifty timeless rhymes! From fifty celebrated cartoonists! At least forty-nine excellent classic nursery rhymes in a cartoon format!

There are a number of ways to approach nursery rhymes. You can either take them at their most surface story level. You can interpret them literally or figuratively or historically. You could also enjoy them strictly for their sound, for the way they roll with linguistic cadences. And with subjects like animals behaving oddly or inanimate objects coming to life or simply reveling in the absurdity of fairy tale-like imagery it is easy to see why nursery rhymes endure: they are wide open to interpretation and imagination.

Mother Goose and other nursery rhyme collections tend toward the cute, or the sweet, or at the very least, non-threatening. Most collections settle for a single image or two that illustrates some element of the story and leaves the rest out. For the truly young the story and the image become linked, forever lodged without explanation or the desire to even understand. It's a marvelous and sometimes bizarre thing to plant in a young mind the image of a Jack and a Jill tumbling head-first down a hill simply for doing their chores.

Enter sequential storytelling.

Sequential visual narratives strive to tell a story not only in the pictures but between the panels. Like picture books, they extend the characters and the narrative from one to the next, each panel like a page unto itself, each transition like a page turn. Structurally, comics and graphic novels make for great transitional narrative for readers as they are dialog driven and tend to build scene upon scene. Add nonsensical nursery rhymes and the interpretation of cartoonists and you've got quite a wild ride.

How many times have you heard or read Humpty Dumpty? How does it end? It ends in tragedy, like Shakespeare, inevitable and unchangeable. Ah, but cartoons have a long history of the punchline, the change-up at the end, a twist that turns everything on its ear. What if the Egg Man fell, cracked open, and out sprang a half dozen smaller versions of himself? This is precisely what Gilbert Hernandez does in his retelling, and in doing so transforms the familiar into the new.

In other rhymes the narrative is subverted for a parallel story not even hinted at in the original. Little Boy Blue remains a farm boy shirking his duties, but here the barnyard animals are the ones who are featured. Bob Flynn has the sheep in meadow throwing Frisbees, and the reason no one is willing to wake him is because the animals have a pretty good poker game going on.

On the historical front, leave it David Macaulay to turn London Bridge into a lesson about all the different architectural forms the bridge has taken in its time. From rickety wood to stone and steel, Macaulay manages to erase the notion that the rhyme is only suited for playground games where some unlucky sod gets caught in the gated arms of classmates (usually some boy trapped between two girls).

The collection of cartoonists involved is fantastic. Personal faves include Jules Feiffer, Eleanor Davis, Craig Thompson, Sara Varon, Marc Rosenthal, Kate Beaton, Tony Millionaire... a collection too numerous to mention. Most I have encountered somewhere along the way, either in alternative comics or picture books or graphic novels, and with the exception of a single artist whose style I just don't care for I find them all to be equally suited to the task.

For most families with children I would say this shouldn't be the first or only collection of nursery rhymes. But for those who might want a second book this might make a great addition for the family with a new reader looking to read nursery rhymes to younger siblings. It'll make them the hip and cool kid who introduces their kid brothers and sisters into the joys of reading, storytelling, and the slightly subversive world of comics.