The Chicken of the Family

by Mary Amato
illustrated by Delphine Durand
Putnam 2008

It is the sacred duty of the eldest child to deviously taunt the youngest sibling. If one can do so with the aid of middle siblings, all the better. It is equally the duty of the youngest sibling to both believe the most gullible lies delivered by the oldest sibling and find an equally clever, but innocent, way to get their revenge.

And so we have The Chicken of the Family.

Henrietta is woken from her sleep and told by her oldest sister Kim that she isn't really a member of the family, she is a chicken, acquired from the farm down the road. Middle sister Claire's job is to go along with the joke, the support of two people saying the same thing giving the statement the weight of truth. Henrietta doesn't believe it's true until she wakes up in the morning and finds an egg in her bed and a couple of feathers on the floor.

Certain now that she is truly a chicken she runs away, down the road to the farm where she takes her rightful place in the chicken yard. Henrietta has no qualms adjusting to her new life as a chicken, scratching and taking a dust bath and playing follow the leader.

Kim and Claire arrive with a directive from their parents to admit their prank and bring Henrietta home. The only problem is that Henrietta is enjoying herself too much, feels she really is a chicken, and refuses to follow. Exasperated, Kim decides to call for back-up from her parents but Claire has decided to stay -- she's broken away from her sister's scheme after seeing what fun it is to be a chicken. Henrietta and Claire do trundle on home just in time to see their older sister getting chewed out for causing this fiasco.

"Sometimes it's good to be a chicken."

Indeed, sometimes embracing your gullibility is no different than embracing what makes you unique. Accepting what her sisters have told her, Henrietta is free to discover what it means to be different. She knows she's not a chicken on some level, just as she doesn't run away to get her sister in trouble, but along the way she's learned something about herself, about another culture (if you will), and about the things others will do to control you.

Yes, this is a deeper reading that a light and fluffy picture book deserves, but it's true: sometimes it is good to be a chicken.

Trainstop

by Barbara Lehman
Houghton Mifflin 2008

On a train trip between cityscapes young girls watches as her view in a black tunnel is replaced by a vibrant countryside. When the train is flagged down mysteriously the girl notices she is the only one on the train who isn't asleep. Stepping off the train she finds a group of people gathered around a tree where a person and their plane have become lodged. What isn't apparent until she reaches the tree is that the people are all tiny, as if the remained frozen the height they were from her train window perspective. While the people are as real as the girl, the plane in the tree is one of those balsa wood planes with a rubber band powering the propeller. Once she has rescued the tiny pilot she returns to the train and resumes her ride home, out the of the fantasy and out of the tunnel, back to the city where she lives.

Out in front of her townhouse, standing in her stone yard, she looks up and sees the rescued pilot and a co-pilot flying toward her. They come with a gift of thanks, a small seedling for an apple tree that is planted in the crack in her stone yard. As a parting shot the girl sits on her stoop admiring her now-grown tree while all over the city other trees have begun sprouting up, no doubt from kindred daydreaming souls looking to return nature to the cities.

Lehman set herself an impossible bar with The Red Book a few years back and, unfairly perhaps, everything since has been measured against that amazing snake-eating-its-tale fantasy. If the impression -- mine at least -- was that her subsequent books (Museum Trip, Rainstorm) were increasingly weaker attempts to capture lighting in a bottle, Trainstop manages to stand apart from the others, on its own and with very sturdy legs. As with her previous books Lehman mines the theme of a child's daydream world, but here the idea of an fantasy taking place while the rest of the world sleeps, coupled with the message of bringing nature back to the cities, is perhaps the strongest, most direct message delivered yet. Where in previous books the children imagine or discover worlds for their own purposes and keeping, Trainstop gives us a child looking to share her fantasy with the world. It's almost a subtle environmental message, a quiet Lorax making a last call on those with eyes and ears enough to still listen.

For those unfamiliar with Lehman's work, the book is as wordless as her previous books, filled with the same thick-outlined ligne claire illustrations that are her trademark. Probably the simplest of her picture books to date, but no less engaging. I think what I'd really like to see is what Lehman can do with the long-form: graphic novels. Her sense of pacing, her imagination, I think make her an ideal candidate for an extended fantasy romp a la Sara Varon's Robot Dreams or, on a more picture book level, Regis Faller's The Adventures of Polo.

I can hope, can't I?

Hogwash

by Arthur Geisert
Walter Lorraine / Houghton Mifflin 2008

The children in Pig Village trek up the hill to wallow in the official mud hole. After their frolic they move on to the paint yard where colored liquid is dispensed onto the ground for a more vibrant wallow. As their playtime comes to an end the parents of Pig Village meet them to help supervise their collective bathing in a large agitation tub, followed by being hung out to dry on long clothes lines, and then it's all back to Pig Village, one and all.

Yes, it's wash day in hog land, or Hogwash, as the play-on-words title suggests. And as a synonym for nonsense there's probably no better title for the goings on here. Geisert's wordless picture books (not a graphic novel, mind you) traffic in these silent movies concerning the goings on of anthropomorphic pigs. He produces color etchings for illustrations, a process that renders lines a little rougher than most drawings, here giving the artwork a fussy sort of distance from being too clean.

I have to admit, there's a certain quality to Geisert's books that leave me cold, and it might be the lack of warmth in his art that counteracts the whimsy. I wasn't as impressed with his previous book Oops! because it attempted to slow down a situation -- a house falling apart -- into a book-length set of stills that made a dynamic situation stagnant. At least with Hogwash there is more of a linear narrative, and on the whole I enjoyed it.

This time around I did find one illustration that caused me to wonder about the scale of the pigs in this land. At the point where the piglets are being sent to line dry there is a wind-driven motor made with two magnets that looks like a child's science project. It's the most basic motor that can be made, and it's hooked to a power coil that appears to be copper wire wound around a wooden thread spool. Backing up, looking at the communal bath, their water is heated in what looks like a giant tea pot -- or is it a normal sized teapot?

Are these miniature pigs? Toys? If they are to this scale, these pigs would be about a quarter of an inch tall. I thought that could be an interesting reveal to first give you a world of unusual pigs and then to show you that they're smaller than insects, a world within a world as it were.

It's fun, I liked it, I just wasn't as wowed as some people get over Geisert's books.

Throwing Hollywood a Bone

I don't generally run news items but I stumbled onto this in the Hollywood Reporter. While I can see why Warner Bros might be interested in adapting Jeff Smith's Bone Chronicles I can't imagine any justice being done unless they give it Lord of the Rings treatment, i.e. a trio of movies and not a 90 minute cartoon.

We can hope, right? It is the season of hope, after all. Movie watchers demand change, too!

Delicious

The Art and Life of Wayne Thiebaud
Susan Goldman Rubin
Chronicle Books 2007

A book so luscious you want to lick it, that's my blurb for this one.

For those unfamiliar of artist Wayne Thiebaud, of any age from middle grade up, this is a great introduction. Better, it explains Thiebaud's growth as an artist and the circuitous route he took to get there, working as a commercial artist, in department stores, drawing cartoons for Disney, and farthest from his thinking was the fine art paintings that have been his claim to fame. What I like about this gentle message of an artist discovering himself is that while he always knew he wanted to do art he wasn't forced to make a decision before he was ready. As he was mentored by individual artists and made his living as a working artist he gained a lot of experience that would later become useful as a painter.

I think there are a lot of creative souls in the schools who know they want to do something with the arts but don't really understand how one figures this out. When I was in high school the idea of working as an artist, of making a living, meant what was called commercial art which primarily meant advertising art. If a high school student said they wanted to be an artist that's what was on offer, that was all anyone really understood about art. If a guidance counselor could have suggested how I could channel my interests in photography and graphics into, say, book design or children's books I think my life would have been very different. If someone could have put this book into my hand, showing me how a fine artist found his footing and did some artful floundering along the way, my life would have taken another very different direction.

So, yeah, I hold some real high hopes that this book finds some middle grade and teen readers who are interested in what the life of an artist looks like.

The book itself is beautifully put together. Chronicle really gets it right, with practically each spread featuring one of Theibaud's luscious cakes, tempting candies, or angular intersections faced with text in white set against an ever changing compliment of backgrounds. The paintings influence the color palate which, by design, give this book an appropriately artistic tone. Honest, just pick this book up and leaf through and ask yourself why all books on art can't look this good.

The gals (can call you guys that?) over at 7Imp did a much better job covering this book that I seem to be able to manage right now. Check out their review and then check this book out.

An A to Z Treasure Hunt

written and illustrated by Alice Melvin
Tate Publishing UK 2007

The English alphabet is only 26 letters. There's only so much you can do with an alphabet book. Not that people haven't found ways to make an alphabet book informative (Eating the Alphabet by Lois Ehrlet), thematic (C is for Caboose, about trains, and A is for Astronaut, about space, both by Chronicle Books), and they can certainly be entertainingly clever (Sendak's Alligators All Around). The world of alphabet books even includes non-alphabet books like Seuss's On Beyond Zebra and Tony DiTerlizzi's G is For One Gzonk. So with so many good (and bad) alphabet books it does take something to stand out from the pack.

Let me hold off one second more before talking about the book at hand. I have to say that I have twice tried to pick up the Steve Martin-Roz Chast The Alphabet from A to Y With Bonus Letter Z! -- twice, I tell you! -- and I have yet to finish it. Somewhere along the way I find myself wondering if there's a scientific name for belly button lint, what our pets think when they see us changing our clothes, that sort of thing. I can't tell if it's intended for kids or adults, I can't get into it, I can't help wondering if it's one of those extended New Yorker gags that sounds funny as a concept but could never be executed.

So today I stumble onto this slim little paperback and wonder if the hunt of the title makes it one of those I-Spot sort of books. Before I can open it I can tell the paper is nicer that I expected, with French flaps decorated with little men using semaphore to initiate (in the front) and conclude (in the back) the hunt.

Wait a minute, who published this? Tate? Like the museum in England? Sure enough. What's a museum doing printing an alphabet book?

I'll tell you what they're doing, they're making an interactive craft book out of the alphabet. F is for flag, and sure enough there are three strands zipping across the page but only two have little triangle flags running along them. The third strand is blank and on the bottom of the page the reader is suggested to find some scrap fabric and make little flags to glue into the book! L is for leaf, which asks you to collect an autumn leaf (don't harm a living tree) and add it to the page. Buttons are collected to decorate the tops of cupcakes. Your portrait (photo or drawn) is requested to fill in another illustration. A goose's egg requires glitter and glue. A snake would like some sequins for it's scales. The King requires a playing card to complete the royalty. Every page is a small craft project that reinforces the alphabet illustration, but it also allows each book to become an artifact unique the owner. It's fun, simple, almost Montessori in its approach. Color me impressed.

It's certainly the kind of thing a museum would publish because, on one hand, it's totally impractical. Once you start adding things to this book it will become lumpy, will shed bits of glitter and whatnot, and the binding is really too tightly glued to allow for opening flat without falling apart. In fact, this may be another of those books that ultimately works better for adults because I was instantly thinking about how, instead of using real buttons and playing cards, I could use magazine photos and color photocopies of real objects to make collages out of each page. Maybe this is a good project for an artistic teen to take on over the summer as a holiday gift for a younger relative. Even if you don't ultimately agree that it's a great book you have to admit there has to be something to an alphabet book that sets the mind in motion like this.

I don't know where you're going to find this... Powell's maybe? I doubt the library is going to want to circulte such a participatory book. Perhaps the children's section of a museum store. It's worth a gander.

Oops!

Poems by Alan Katz
Drawings by Edward Koren
Margaret K. McElderry / Simon & Schuster 2008

Okay, once again just to make sure we're all on the same page: do not give your book a title that can be used against you in a review. You would think editors would be the first to understand the rules of making a book review-proof. Of course, it's also a good idea to make sure the content followed the same rules, not just the title.

Katz is no Shel Silverstein (he's not even Jack Prelutsky), but so much about this book feels like that's what the guilty parties were trying for. It's 179 pages of short, silly poetry accompanied by line drawings is squarely aimed at those who have worn out their copies of Where the Sidewalk Ends and It's Raining Pigs and Noodles.

All the usual topics are covered -- too much TV, failing grades, turns of phrases, wordplay -- but so much of it falls flat. Rhymes and near-rhymes have the feel of having being culled from a reference book with the rest of the poem built awkwardly around them. There are ways to break the meter within a poem, and then there are just broken feet. And some of these poems seemed designed to deliver a punchline but don't have the substance to prop them up. I think there's a picture-book's-worth of poems here that are good -- maybe a couple dozen or so -- and the rest reads like contractual filler.

I know kids in their poetry phase can't ever get enough of the humorous verse, and this will easily break up the monotony of rereading the same six or seven books for this crowd, but I don't suspect it will get the same level of repeat readings.

Question: where are the women poets who write volumes of humorous poetry? Is nonsense considered the province of male poets, and is this why boys stop reading poetry?

about those teenage boys...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Lie For a Living

Anthony Shugaar
(The International Spy Museum)
National Geographic 2006

I spotted this on the non-fiction shelf in my local library teen room and thought "Yeah, that's a book a teen boy would pick up." Being a few decades removed I can still tap into my inner teen boy. I picked it up without a seconds worth of hesitation.

But what a disappointment.

It's a smartly designed book, very contemporary graphics, layout and typeface, very much in step with what attracts a younger reader. It's also in keeping with the style of the International Spy Museum in Washington D.C. which is very interactive and modern as single-subject museums go.

After a brief intro about the long history of international spying we jump into chapters where spies are grouped by like: those who did it for the money, master spies, double agents, femmes fatales, and so on. Each of the spies get a full page photo or illustration and one-to-three pages about their lives as spies. And there are a lot of spies in this book. Easily half I've never heard of, most are single-page treatments (generally the non-Americans get short shrift) and they read like much longer entries that have been edited to within an inch of their lives. Many of the bios assume a large amount of understood history -- for example the bio of Allen Dulles, first civilian head of the CIA, assumes knowledge of The Bay of Pigs invasion and why it failed.

While the format of short bios on the subject of spying makes attractive reading for boys, and there's a lot of background stuffed into the pages, the book overall serves as little more than a jumping off point for further investigation in other books. Books, it should be noted, which aren't listed in the back of the book; the bibliography, such as it is, suggests books for further reading from which some of the information was drawn but it is woefully inadequate for a book that handles its information so loosely.

I've been to The International Spy Museum and they do a nifty thing where you pick up a dossier for a spy when you enter, follow their progress along the way through the exhibits, and in the end learn their ultimate fate. It ties the exhibits together, gives you a narrative to hold onto, makes you pay closer attention than you might if you were merely drifting through the space. It's too bad they couldn't bring some of that innovation to this book.

A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever

written and illustrated by Marla Frazee
Harcourt 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

What To Do About Alice?

How Alice Roosevelt Broke the Rules, Charmed the World, and Drove Her Father Teddy Crazy!
by Barbara Kerley
illustrated by Edwin Fotherignham
Scholastic 2008

Yes, a picture book biography about Teddy Roosevelt's tomboy daughter "running riot" in and out of the White House around the turn of the century.

“I can be president of the United States, or I can control Alice." And so it is that while Teddy is attempting to lead the nation his daughter is rough-housing with boys and giving herself an education from all the books at her disposal. Being the independent spirit she is doesn't keep her from being a goodwill ambassador for her father -- though she apparently had the same pressrelated issues that follow celebrities these days -- eventually "settling down" with a fine congressman and being wed in the White House.

Barbara Kerley's name would have been enough for me to pick this up, having enjoyed her middle grade novel Greetings From Planet Earth last year, but the real draw for me are the illustrations by Edwin Fotheringham. For a decade now I've been catching the man's spot and poster illustrations and have always been left wanting more. With his self-described blotty lines his style goes beyond a retro mid-century modern -- the man's work is a living time warp,
it's the real deal, you could take most of his work and drop it into magazines in the 1950s and not know they came from the future.

That said, only about half the illustrations in this book work. I don't know if it as editorial input or if his heart wasn't into some of the spreads, but there are pages that feel a little lifeless compared to the vibrancy of others. I feel bad even mentioning it because Fotheringham's weakest illustrations best a lot of other illustrators top work in picture books these days but given this is his picture book debut I really wanted his work to knock it out of the park. I really want the rest of the world to see what I see. Not that he's having any trouble getting work...

The story itself is a tidy biography of a colorful, spunky girl who happens to have been real. I like this trend of spunky girl characters, and having a real-life character is only better. Much of what Papa Teddy sees as running riot most children and parents today would just call "childhood." This familiarity of behavior makes it accessible to kids now who might find it amusing that what is normal was once considered bad. Alice may have been rambunctious, but it would have been wrong to stifle her, and thankfully Teddy was too broken up by the loss of the girl's mother, his first wife, to discipline the life out of her. A quiet lesson in there for parents, I should think.

I think this is a great book. Double duty for Women's History Month and President's Day

Fancy Nancy: Bonjour Butterfly

also: Fancy Nancy and The Boy From Paris &
Fancy Nancy at the Museum
all by Jane O'Connor
illustrated by Robin Preiss Glasser
HarperCollins 2008

What began as a cute picture book for the pink-and-sparkly girly-girl set is now officially a brand, a series, and an inferior product. This, the third Fancy Nancy book, was released the same day as two I-Can-Read titles that are trading on the Fancy Nancy name and familiarity to rake in more bucks from the market.

Let's deal with the picture book for a moment. Nancy and her best friend Bree are all about the butterflies. They're typically obsessed with them to the point that Bree is going to make her birthday a butterfly party. They plan a cake, make invitations, get their outfits ready...

Oh, no! Mom suddenly realized that it her parent's 50th anniversary on the same day! Fancy Nancy is going to have to go to her grandparent's party instead. And so she has to go and tell her friend Bree the bad news.

Up to this point the book has been pretty clunky in its exposition. It doesn't feel like a story so much as little two-page set pieces for Nancy and Bree to pose in. But when we get to the spread where Nancy is apologizing to Bree we get an interesting illustration. The text says Bree is devastated by the news but it's Nancy falling all over herself, doubled over in tears. Bree has a look that says "Yeah, like you really care. This is just like you, Nancy, you big self-centered fake!" Is this a mistake in the illustration or is Bree really just pissed that she's being dumped from the story half way.

That's right, now we have an entirely different book on our hands. Bree is history.

Nancy mopes her way through the house, stops talking to people, and generally shows off just how much a brat she really is. And her parents put up with it. They get to the grandparent's place and no sooner is she off the train but suddenly it's as if she'd never been upset. The party is great and afterward they go to a butterfly exhibit at the zoo and, wow! This wasn't such a bad trip after all!

Does Nancy call Bree on her birthday? Does she find something perfectly fancy and butterfly-like to bring back to her friend? No, Nancy finds a butterfly whose color matches the color of her proposed party outfit and thinks it's the grandest of them all.

Selfish brat.

The writing is bad, the story changes midway, and what's with all the dropping of French words and phrases anyway? Well, that, my friends, has everything to do with the Fancy Nancy Brand I-Can-Read Title Fancy Nancy and the Boy From Paris. See, in order to keep the gravy train rolling they need to milk everything fancy for all it's worth. A few French words here and there might let a girl believe she's got some fanciness to her, but now we've got a real live Parisian boy to help her build her fanciness quotient. But wait, he's just a boy, and maybe he isn't so fancy after all. I mean, he likes books about cowboys, and he isn't at all interested in all things fancy. Oh well, lesson leanred. Next!

Fancy Nancy at the Museum allows our Francofile snob to get a little kulchur and some more excuses to work in her French vocabulary. In a lot of ways these beginning readers read a bit more like outlines for possible picture books and don't stand up to the same quality (in my opinion) as many other books in this series. Again, it all feels a little too calculated to be genuine. I'm not necessarily going to fault the parties involved for wanting to make a buck, but when the only way to do it drags down what little good you had before then perhaps it's time to put on the brakes and take stock. Yes, there is a market for girly-girls, girls who like pink and purple and dressing up and sparkles. But character alone can't carry an empty plot, and there's more to fancy than borrowing some French and reinforcing snobbish stereotypes.

The first, and to a lesser extend the second, Fancy Nancy picture books gave us a girl whose fanciness was a fancy of imagination. She would dress up for a dinner out, and teach her family how to be fancy, and in the end her fanciness gave her a dose of humility. Or she would covet a fancy dog, and then take care of a fancy dog, only to learn that fanciness isn't always the best quality to look for. Nicely put lessons in both. What I'm seeing now is a girl forcing the world into her fancy box and when it doesn't fit, oh well. The lesson of Bonjour Butterfly is lost on me -- is it "dump your friends when something fancier comes along?" And as for the beginning reader books, is it really such a good idea to be dropping French words onto those readers who my be having a hard enough time with English?

I hope sales on these books tank. I hope Harper takes a long, hard look at what they are doing with Fancy Nancy and either back off or find a way to return to the quality and the original spirit of the first book.

I never thought I'd see the day I'd be using the words "quality" and "original" in the same sentence as the words Fancy Nancy.

Stormy Night

by Michele Lemieux
Kids Can Press 1999

I love the serendipity of libraries. Yes, there is a lot of order, a lot of things in their proper place, but what they provide is the opportunity to discover something you never knew you were looking for.

Like this book.

On a stormy night a girl goes to bed but is unable to sleep. "I can't sleep! Too many questions are buzzing through my head." Indeed, in short order our restless narrator is wondering where infinity ends and what you would find on the other side of a hole in the universe. Over the course of the 240 pages deep philosophical questions -- the kinds kids ask -- are mingled with the offbeat and occasionally silly, one to a page facing a black and while illustration. This is no light read, nor is it an intimidating romp through some of the deeper inquiries about life on earth.

It also provides no answers, just whimisical illustrations to match the question at hand. For example, "And hell -- does it exist?" is matched with a peek at the top of the stairs down into a basement where the shadows of familiar items take on the ominous appearance of demons. as the storm rages through the night the questions get darker, but as morning comes, with the light come the bigger, more open questions -- What of we could live forever, and know all of life's mysteries.

My library had this shelved among the hardcover middle grade books. It's exactly the sort of book I enjoyed stumbling across as a young reader and I was secretly thrilled when my youngest took an interest in it after glancing at a couple of pages. This is the way to address the questioning nature of philosophy with children. Just be prepared to be confronted with a lot of follow-up questions.

Cybils 08

The awards are up, a valentine for kidlit from the bloggers who love them. It's nice to see a number of books I actually read made it. You can read my take on the non-fiction picture book award winner, Lightship, as well as the middle grade fiction winner, A Crooked Kind of Perfect.

The Awards are over here.

You should see what this chucklehead has to say about the graphic novels. Sheesh!

Rumble Fish

by S. E. Hinton
Delacorte 1975

Did I really reread this? Did I need to? Man, this thing didn't age well.

Rusty-James thinks he's the the world on a string. Kid brother to the infamous Motorcycle Boy, RJ walks around honestly believe he has his older brother's smarts, looks and charisma to run the gangs of their midwest town. But RJ isn't any of those things, and where his brother used the gangs as a creative foil for his twisted genius, and then moved to disband them, RJ thinks he's inherited some sort of crown that allows him to be cock of the walk.

Motorcycle Boy left to see the sea, to expand his horizons, but two weeks later he's back. He saves RJ from a knife fight (probably not the first time he's bailed out the kid) and spends his days reading and drifting off into a half-deaf semi-trance. There's a local cop who doesn't like Moto Boy and threats all around that one of these days he's going to bring him down because the young punks in town look up to him. It doesn't matter which side you're on, when you see the Buddha on the road, kill it.

The book is framed with RJ on a beach in California running into an old friend Stevie from back in the day. They've both escaped the confines of their small town lives -- Stevie went to school and was planning on becoming a teacher, RJ fresh from the reformatory has finally made it to the beach his older brother never saw. In talking to Stevie RJ is forced to remember and relive those last days five years earlier when his brother was gunned down while setting free the animals in the pet shop. It was a last, desperate act of a person who was so smart he "could have done anything, but nothing interested him" as his drunken father points out. The curse of the big fish in the little pond (or in this case, the Siamese fighting fish in a separated tank). At the end, once RJ has recalled it all he tries desperately to forget. But he cannot, and that's the burden he carries.

Okay, aside from the dated references and slang, two things really stand out: first, the movie Francis Ford Coppola made out of this book is both brilliant and such a brilliant adaptation of this story that it practically eclipses it in relevance; second, are there any kids out there who are going to care about RJ enough to want to finish this book?

Seriously, RJ is a tragic figure in that he hasn't got a clue but he gives the reader all the clues they need to know that he's an idiot. The Motorcycle Boy is only mythic in the way he's viewed by his little brother; aside from being a pacifist with a death wish it's hard to get the read on his genius everyone else sees in him. As a picture of gang life in Tulsa the thing reads like a throwback to West Side Story, only without any social commentary. It's difficult to understand why this book has premained popular -- unless it's because it's short, has entered the YA cannon, and reluctant boy readers will read anything that has fighting as it's focal point.

That said, the movie that Coppola made out of this film almost justifies the book's continued existence. I could talk about this film for days because what FFC did was locate the horrible truth that lay at the heart of the book, that is the secret heart of all stagnant life in America. The movie is about time, wasted time, stopped time, putting in time, doing time, passing time, all the problems an active soul encounters when there is nothing but time. Rusty James feels his time has come, the Motorcycle Boy has come to the end of his time, and everyone else is traped in time but is too blind to notice. Coppola makes all this time with time-lapse photography of clouds passing, clocks that speed up, a giant clock face on a truck with no hands on it... one could argue that it isn't subtle, but it's so artfully shot (in black and white, to match the Moto Boy's colorblindness) and poetically rendered that it plays like a running gag in a city that time seems to have forgotten.

I never thought much of the book until I saw the movie, saw what was possible with Hinton's blank canvas, and now I canot read the book with those images burned into my head.
Movies can certainly color a reader's impression of a book they haven't read, but it takes one hell of a movie to supplant all previous images if the book was read first. I'm not about to suggest that the book shouldn't be read, despite my misgivings after this recent read, but I wonder if it's passed its relevancy phase and is moving on into period piece curio.

I know there are plenty of good books turned into good movies, and good books turned into bad movies, but are there any other films out there that turn sub-par books into cinematic masterpieces?

A Taste of Colored Water

written and illustrated by Matt Faulkner
Simon and Schuster 2008

LuLu and Jelly can't believe that Abbey saw a fountain in town that bubbled colored water; they have to see this for themselves. When their Uncle Jack needs to make a run into town the kids beg to go with so they can investigate.

Oh, but this is the Deep South, and it's mid 1960's, and the town is crowded with freedom riders and picket-carrying activists and officers of the peace wearing gas masks and toting vicious attack dogs.

Yeah, way to make childhood innocence serve an educational purpose there, Faulkner.

I think there's a valid premise in showing kids having to face certain adult realities and misinterpreting the world they find themselves in. Kids know it's not polite to stare but the first time they encounter, say, a legless war veteran or someone with palsy they actually have to make hard connections and cement the memories that make the concept relevant. Likewise, any child raised ignorant of segregation and racial bias isn't going to understand a concept like a sign over a fountain that says "colored" until they see it all in context.

What Faulkner is attempting here is a dual lesson on segregation with a dash of Civil Rights Movement. While the town is in chaos, the kids wander off to investigate the fountain, leaving the ensuing riot to play in the background, just off-stage. A sheltered country kid (and these kids are pretty dang sheltered) going into town is going to be more enraptured by the hubbub and leave the fountain to another time. Something big is happening in this town with buses and protesters and police everywhere and we're supposed to accept that these kids would rather run up a hill to see what color the water is that comes from the bubbler?

Then, as LuLu and Jelly discover the fountain is no different than any other drinking fountain (except for the word colored hanging on a sign above it), they witness the protesters (what they call a parade) getting hosed by the fire department and they finally (!) feel moved to the point of shouting and feeling dizzy. (I guess there's no guilt quite like latent white childhood guilt to make a point about race relations in this country.) Finally a cop with an attack dog tells them they need to leave and off they run to the safety of their Uncle Jack who's worried about where them dang kids ran off to.

Honestly, I think there is a genuine story here in the innocence of childhood and in not understanding the segregated ways of adults. But in order for a child to understand what's at play here you have to explain to them (or assume they already know) the use of the term colored, the contentiousness of the Civil Rights Movement in the south, and then explain why no adult in the end of the story bothers to explain to LuLu and Jelly what it was they witnessed. With the exception of discovering that colored water is exactly the same as regular "white" water (duh) the kids ain't haven't learned themselves nothing.

In the lengthy afterword (note to publishers: if a picture book requires a lengthy afterword for the adults edification, or to filter and share with children, then the message of your book has failed) Faulkner explains how this book didn't come from his own experience, having grown up in a Northern town. He goes on to speculate about how his child-self might have questioned his Southern world as filtered through his growing Northern consciousness. It's as if he's saying "I wasn't one of these kids, but if I were I would have done things differently, I'd have asked some hard questions!" The fault in this thinking -- which ultimately explains the lack of understanding that informs the book - is that if Faulkner had grown up with these kids in the sticks he wouldn't have had his fancy Northern knowing that would have allowed for such questioning. Short of saying he knows what it's like to be black person during the 1960s because he was once excluded from a game of dodgeball as a kid, I think Faulkner's afterword turns a slightly flawed book into an arrogant reductionist view of a crucial problem in this nation's history.

I didn't start this review hating this book, but now I do.

Altogether, One at a Time

by E. L. Konigsburg
illustrations by Gail E. Haley, Mercer Mayer, Gary Parker and Laurel Schindelman
Atheneum 1971

I would have hated this book as a kid. I would never have picked it up. I would have started the first story and felt alienated by the language of it, an almost disjointed voice. I would have jumped around and looked at the illustrations for the stories and would have walked away, never to give the book a second chance.

In this collection of four stories we see kids being kids, and not always nice ones. A boy invites an odd (read: dyslexic) kid to his sleepover party at his mother's urging and comes to hate that boy more because his best friend actually likes the kid; Another boy who spends his time with his grandmother when his parents are away shows his insensitivity when a cloud-covered meteor shower triggers sorrowful regret in his elder that he doesn't immediately comprehend; A girl in fat camp is shown how to achieve her inner beauty with the aide of a counselor who is in fact a ghost; A mother tells her daughter of what it was like being bused to school and how in dealing with the prejudice she encountered began to see herself as an artist.

I find Kongsburg voice to be very stilted in these stories even as an adult but like where they go and that I'm not always sure where she's headed. The clues were all there in the fat camp story and yet I missed that it was a ghost story until the very end. Actually I began to think there was something supernatural when she kept talking about this treasure trapped inside a blob of plastic -- I thought it might have been her heart -- but by the time things started to reveal themselves it was over. The thing is, as an adult I think these stories are great for opening up young reader's minds to question behavior and the morality of what is right and wrong. I an also see an adult trying to convince a skeptical kid to read these stories and watching them squirm just as I would have when I was in my middle school years.

This question of audience is coming up more and more for me lately. In a recent workshop we referred to there being a problem with gatekeepers, the adults in publishing who make the decisions and have to be appeased before the writing can even reach it's target audience. It came up because we were reviewing a story that contained what some felt were inappropriate images and ideas that others felt would have been happily accepted by kids. If the adult gatekeepers are pre-censoring stories because they are afraid of the possible backlash or wish to impose their own moral thinking onto a story, that's a bad thing for writers. In some ways what I liked about these Konigsburg stories was the exact moral ambiguity that I saw others actively attempt to shut down. We have come dangerously close to the edge totalitarianism when one side takes the moral high ground and the other side shrugs it off.

I may come back to these stories in a few days and see if my feelings still hold. At least I can say they make me want to reread them.

Interesting note on the cover shown here: This is the most recent edition available from Aladdin back in 1998. What's curious is that on my first edition copy the illustrations on the cover are the same except for that one on the bottom of the girl in the golden braids. On the original cover they use the mirror of that illustration that shows the story's protagonist, a black girl. Did the folks at the Aladdin imprint think it would smack of tokenism to keep the black protagonist on the cover, or were they trying not to scare off too many potential white customers? The collection is due to be reissued sometime this year as I understand it, here's hoping they're going back to the original cover.

Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

by Judy Blume
original Penguin edition 1972

Where's the struggle, and what's the resolution of that conflict? What does Peter want, exactly? Is Peter even the main character? Everything I learned last week in lectures and workshops is turned upside down! Grad school has ruined reading for me!

Okay, I'm calm now. But it is an interesting, if serendipitous, choice for me at this time. These collected stories of title character Peter and his younger brother nicknamed Fudge do have a connecting thread throughout, which is a turtle named Dribble that Peter wins at a birthday party on the first page. It would be tempting to make a case that the turtle is the main character for the book but that would be silly. It's Peter's story by virtue of his narration, his view of the world, but it's almost entirely the exploits of Fudge that makes Peter the "nothing" of the title, the ignored older brother. It's an interesting cheat because all Peter wants is the same fawning attention his brother receives but but only gets when Fudge has (again) done something to mess up his life. Peter never solves his own problems and in the end his only growth as a character is that he's come to acknowledge that his baby brother's exploits occasionally net him unasked-for benefits.

Those who care about spoilers, bail out now, I'm about to talk about the ending. Not that it matters because it isn't like it's any sort of real resolution, but to be fair to those who like their surprises...

The book opens and closes with a pet, the turtle Peter wins at a birthday party and the replacement for that turtle who is lost when Fudge swallows it. When Peter gets a puppy its with the wink of humorous understanding that he isn't likely to lose the dog to his brother's gastronomic misadventures, but what the hell sort of a consolation is that? This kid Fudge has knocked out his own teeth by flying off the monkey bars and cut his own hair with -- and Peter makes a point of this -- a pair of very sharp scissors stored under a bed. Hello! This kid may find he can't swallow a puppy but that doesn't mean he isn't potentially a lethal vivisectionist.

But back to the dog. Peter has never mentioned wanting a dog, never really wanted anything but to have his brother not mess up his life, and all we see time and again are a pair of loving parents who don't freak out (which is good) but can't seem to reign in the terror of tiny town. And for all Peter has to put up with he's given a puppy for companionship. After all he's endured throughout the book Peter is essentially told "we love you, but we've got our hands full with your maniacal brother so here's a puppy to give your the companionship we can't give you."

Anyway, structurally it was interesting to see how one could fashion a book out of connected stories, essentially a dual character study of a rambunctious snot and his nothing of an older brother. And that poor tortured turtle.

Little Golden Book Favorites

Goodnight, Little Bear (1961)
Chipmunk's ABC (1963)
The Bunny Book (1955)
by Richard Scarry
Golden Books 2008

At first blush there isn't really much one can say about these classic picture books featuring early Richard Scarry artwork. The stories themselves are practically ur-picture book archetypes: the little bear that won't go to bed and "hides" on his father's shoulders; a basic animal ABC book; an exploration between parent and child about what a bunny will be when it grows up. But then, another look and we see that two of the three stories feature a father prominently in a nurturing role. Why does that stand out to me?

These thoughts are quickly replaced by the art. Staring at these anthropomorphic woodland creatures I can't help but think how awkward they look. They're stiff, almost as if Richard Scarry didn't know how to draw animals doing human things.

No, wait. Richard Scarry knows exactly how to draw animals and in putting them into human clothes he has captured the true awkwardness of the situation. Just as a house pet looks ridiculous when forced into baby clothes or doll accessories, the animals in Richard Scarry's world look as if they are happily playing along but clearly not cut out to be handling knives or riding bikes and whatnot. In a way, Scarry has preserved some of the animal dignity by recognizing that they aren't human. Though he has forced them into human clothes, homes and situations he has not negated their animal nature to make them more human.

Suddenly I am aware that modern animal picture book illustrations go out of their way to give the animals more of human fluidity in their movements, more of what animators call an "action line" in their stances, and less anything even resembling animal anatomy. Compare these happy little Scarry animals...














With the pose of this friendly little bear, one of the four food groups in Emily Gravett's Orange Pear Apple Bear.



Let me state right here that Gravett's book is pure genius, using only five words (four of them in the title) to riff on color, shape and size, so I don't mean to suggest that I find fault with it. But Gravett's bear throughout holds the sort of contrapposto perfected by masters of the Renaissance and contains no resemblance to a real bear at all aside from it's most characteristic of shapes. It's as if there is a human being trapped inside Gravett's bear, while the Scarry animals are as stiff as a taxidermist's diorama. Look again at the small mouse above attempting two-handed to cut that cheese and compare it with the cocked ease of that bear who has skillfully just pealed that orange.

Sometimes I wonder about the use of animals as human stand-ins in picture books. Have studies been done to show that children better connect with animals in picture books -- there are a LOT of animal books out there! Do we use animals to teach them about creatures in the world, or are they a calculated way around the thorny issue of racial representation and the possible cost in sales through alienation? Have children become so desensitized to the novelty of walking-talking animals that they now expect them to look and behave human instead of a playful-if-accurate representation?

I think it might be interesting to see if smaller children can tell the difference, or have a marked preference, in the various styles of illustration or if an animal in clothes is an animal in clothes no matter how stiff.

The Race of the Century

"retold" and "illustrated" by Barry Downard
Simon & Schuster

Put. The Photoshop. Down.

Seriously, this is one of the most atrociously illustrated books I've seen in a stretch.

Retelling the Aesop Tortoise and Hare fable what we have goes beyond the usual anthropomorphic animals, it actually grafts human features like eyes, lips, hair and teeth onto the animals to create a creepy Island of Dr. Moreau Special Animal Olympics. Tortoise remains on all fours with his toffee brown eyes and toothy grin but hare has his rabbit head and tale plopped onto the toned body of an aerobics instructor. Equally disturbing is the fact that the images are rendered in a spectrum of gray-muted colors resembling the mystery meat platter from an industrial cafeteria.

Grotesque.