Lands of Pleasure

The Unforgotten Coat by Frank Cottrell Boyce

2012-01-16T17:04:00.000-08:00

"And, at that moment, I felt my own ignorance spread suddenly out behind me like a pair of wings, and every single thing I didn't know was a feather on those wings. I could feel them tugging at the air, restless to be airborne."

Reading a book by Frank Cottrell Boyce feels like putting yourself in the hands of a master storyteller. It's a little bit mesmerizing, a little bit magical. He's also a writer I love to hear read out loud. The Unforgotten Coat has a lot in common with his first book, Millions, which I adored; it's funny, insightful and optimistic, has a touch of bittersweetness, characters I defy you not to fall in love with, and writing which just lifts right off the page. The Unforgotten Coat has a simpler storyline and is aimed at a younger audience than Boyce's previous works, but it's every bit as sophisticated. Polaroid photographs are used add a mysterious visual element which expands the story. (The photographs were provided by filmmakers Carl Hunter and Clare Heney, who have worked with Boyce in his other career as a screenwriter.) And speaking of photographs, I love the cover of this book. The child, the coat and the title all seem to pop at once--I find it really striking.

The Unforgotten Coat is narrated, in flashback, by Julie, who as a child went to school in the U.K. When two refugee brothers from Mongolia join her grade 6 class near the end of the school year she is instantly fascinated. Chingis, the older brother, invites her to be their "good guide" to their new country and Julie gladly takes on the role, hoping to be invited to their home, which she is sure must be full of exotic treasures, just as Chingis and his brother Nergui bring new ideas into Julie's life.

"A few weeks before, I had not known that there was any such thing as a portable bamboo palace. I hadn't even known there was such a person as Chingis Khan, who had been born with a clot of blood grasped in his fist and who had conquered nearly the entire world in hardly any time at all, sweeping over the steppe into Central Asia and right up to the very gates of Europe. I hadn't even known there was such a place as the steppe! The steppe that was flat as pavement but as wide as a sea, with nothing but grass and great bustards. Wide as a sea and I hadn't even known it was there. If there were seas of grass and woven palaces in this world, why couldn't there be demons too? And why wouldn't one of them be crouched on our doorstep on William Morris Avenue right that minute, munching a boy made of dough?"

Julie does her best, but the task of guiding the brothers safely in their new home and culture proves more difficult than she could have known. I don't want to give away the rest of the plot, although I will say it ends, like Millions, with a loss that is healed. The book was inspired by the very first class visit Boyce made after Millions was published. He met a refugee from Mongolia, a girl named Misheel who "just lit up the room".

"The other children were touchingly proud of her and told me about the time Misheel showed up to the school dance in full Mongolian costume with her elaborate headdress and fabulous robes. They knew all about Mongolia--its customs and epic landscape--because of her. Her presence massively enriched their lives...Then once day the Immigration Authorities came and snatched her and her family in the middle of the night. Misheel managed to get one call through to Sue Kendall before one of the officers grabbed her phone. And, of course, she has not been seen since...I do know that a country that authorizes its functionaries to snatch children from their beds in the middle of the night can't really be called civilized."

One of the things I admire most about this book is how dimensional Boyce has made Chingis and Nergui --they are not at all stock "exotic refugee" figures but fully realized individuals, and their world view is treated with a respect that seems to come completely naturally.

Boyce has donated this book to the Reader Organisation, which aims to transform "society's collective approach to reading by making literature accessible, available, emotionally rewarding, and fun." Hey, that's what librarians want to do too!

Beauty and the Squat Bears by Emile Bravo

2011-12-23T06:20:00.000-08:00

"Pfft! A prince, a prince...Now where am I supposed to find one of those?"

Ahh, that age-old question....

Emile Bravo is an award-winning French comic writer and illustrator whose work for older children and adults I have been drawn to for its originality and emotional depth. His Seven Squat Bears series (The Hunger of the Seven Squat Bears, Goldilocks and the Seven Squat Bears, Beauty and the Squat Bears) is his first foray into writing for younger children, and he handles the transition with panache. The Squat Bears were an instant hit in France, and it's not hard to see why. They're all clever fairy-tale mash-ups which are full of personality, funny as heck, and just right for an elementary-school audience. Beauty and the Squat Bears is my personal favourite, with its zany plot and derriere-kicking fairy godmother.

So what do I like so much about these books? First of all, I love the drawings...especially the bears. They're the straight men in these stories and their expressions are priceless. Especially when they're being grouchy and cynical.

Bravo's illustration style has been described as "clean, expressive and ironic." I think his style, which is actually quite detailed although it manages to look fresh and uncluttered, is perfect for this age group. I like the rich, saturated colours he uses. I also like how he hasn't made the bears "cute". They really are squat, rectangular almost, and it gives them a very business-like appearance. Especially when they're stalking through magic forests looking for princes to solve their princess problems.

The dialogue is snappy:

"'Ohhh! Pleeeease, let me stay with you. I'll do whatever you want...'
'Even chores?'
'Huh? I don't think so! After all, I am a princess...'
'So, what can a princess do?'
"Huh? Well, marry a prince, duh!'"

And a little later on:

"'Alas! A sorcerer put a curse on me that turned me into a bird for seven years...'
'Seven years! No way! That'll never do! I need a prince right here, right now. It's to get rid of a princess!'
'A PRINCESS?! HOLD ON, WAIT! WE CAN WORK THIS OUT!'"

I've heard that there is a fourth Squat Bear book coming out in french this year (Le Sept Ours Nains et Compagnie). Hopefully the translation will be with us soon!

Life: An Exploded Diagram by Mal Peet

2011-12-05T17:26:00.000-08:00

"I'm hoping that Life is the book that proves to be Peet's breakout book. For starters, it's got a penis on the cover. Wait, did you think that was a missile? So did I. Then I brought my ARC down to the cafeteria while I was reading. Teenagers are very fast to clue one in about suggestive covers, it turns out."
(Karen Silverman, Heavy Medal blog, School Library Journal website)

Mal Peet can't write a grocery list without winning a major award. Despite that, it's true that his name doesn't trip off the tongue of the average teen reader, at least here in Canada. He's not an easy author to get into. His writing is challenging and his themes are serious. His humour, when it's there, is cerebral and ironic. His stories are often told in flashback by adult narrators, who range from mildly world-weary to downright bitter. His endings tend towards ambiguity. There is a constant undercurrent of debate in the teen lit world about what, exactly, makes his work teen rather than adult fiction. My opinion? Life: An Exploded Diagram is teen fiction because Peet published it that way, and if he and Candlewick believe that there are enough young readers around who find a detailed exploration of the relationships between 20th-century social history, military history, and personal narrative compelling, well, more power to them. I'm sure not going to stand in the way of their optimism.

That said, however, I do think Peet's books are for older teens with lots of reading experience behind them. For one thing, the way he hangs a story together can be a little complicated. The protagonist of Life is Clem Ackroyd, who is born in chapter one as World War II draws to a close:

"Ruth Ackroyd was in the garden checking the rhubarb when the RAF Spitfire accidentally shot her chimney pot to bits. The shock of it brought the baby on three weeks early.
'I was expectun,' she'd often say, over the years. 'But I wunt expectun that.'"

Fair enough. But no sooner have we met baby Clem, who had "grown in Ruth, struggling and undiscussed" while his father was at war, than we are whisked back in time to become better acquainted with the life of his dour grandmother Win, and later, his mother Ruth and her soldier husband. They are not particularly happy people, and they live in an unsettled time. Win grows up in rural Norfolk, in a time where horses pulled plows and landowners collected rent once a year on Lady Day and celebrated the harvest with a feast for the workers. As pastoral as it sounds, it's not idyllic; Win and her family must cope with illness and poverty and their many consequences. As the years go by Peet gives us a long-term view of 20th century modernization: the farm is slowly mechanized, the family moves into a new suburban home, and the landscape of the country changes. Win's daughter Ruth marries and has a son, and that son, Clem, wins a scholarship to a fancy school and gets an education far above his station. And all of that is merely context for the heart of the story, which is Clem's intense adolescent experience of falling in love with the landowner's daughter Frankie Mortimer. After two dreary generations of emotional repression and marital disappointment, it feels like spring after a long, cold winter.

One of the things I liked best about Life: An Exploded Diagram was how Peet provided a political backdrop to his love story. As Clem and Frankie are courting, Kennedy and Khruschev are becoming embroiled in what would later be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. The way that Peet plays these two stories off of each other sharpens them both, the Missile Crisis reminding us of the fragility of life just as Clem and Frankie's love story is affirming the value of it. I'm a person whose mind normally shuts down when confronted with political history, and even when I try desperately stay tuned in all I tend to hear is "blah blah blah blah blah", so it's a tribute to Peet's excellent writing that I not only stayed wide awake during these chapters but totally understood what was going on.

Here's the publisher's book trailer:

Dead End in Norvelt by Jack Gantos

2011-10-30T15:17:00.000-07:00

"He turned and walked out of the room to prepare for his trip. I stood up and closed the door and sat on the edge of the bed feeling very different from myself. Maybe I felt like a city before it was invaded. Or a ship before it sank. Or happiness before it turned into sadness. I couldn't say exactly. But something was about to change in me."

I've never had the privilege of seeing Jack Gantos speak in person, but a colleague of mine has, and when I asked her about the experience the first thing she said was "He's not an ordinary person." Gantos, the author of the Rotten Ralph books for young readers, the extraordinary prison memoir Hole In My Life, and the Joey Pigza chapter book series about a boy going through school and life with ADHD, has built a distinguished career writing about people and situations that are at least a little off-beat. I have no problem believing that he's not an ordinary person. What I didn't realize up until now was how unusual his life circumstances have been, as well. For instance, remember his teen book Love Curse of the Rumbaughs, about the sixty-something siblings whose love for their mother was so obsessive that upon her death they taxidermied her body and kept it in their home? I thought Gantos had been watching Psycho a few too many times, but it turns out that that's a true story. The Rumbaughs are maternal relatives of Gantos, and they actually did taxidermy their dead Mom. No wonder his tone has at times been referred to as "gothic".

But there's so much more depth to Gantos as a writer than his quirky appreciation for the the outliers of society. He's a man of intelligence and intellectual passion, and of long-practiced observation, and of humour. His strengths are all on display in his latest middle-school book, Dead End In Norvelt, which is largely based on events in his own childhood.

Jack grew up in the historic town of Norvelt, Pennsylvania, a model community created during the Depression by Eleanor Roosevelt, whose idealistic presence in this book looms large. Roosevelt (after whom the town is named) planned Novelt and similar communities to be self-sufficient, running on a barter system rather than cash, with large lots for people to grow food for their families. His mother makes sure she raises enough corn each year to share with the town elderly. But by the time Jack is born, the principles the community was founded on have begun to erode.

"'Why'd you offer him fruit and pickles?' I asked, and looked up at her face which didn't look so bright and cheery. 'Doctors cost money.'
'You shouldn't be embarrassed,' Mom said, knowing that I was. 'Money can mean a lot of different things. When I was a kid we traded for everything. Nobody had any cash. If you wanted your house built, you helped someone build theirs, and then they would turn around and help you build yours. It was the same with everything. I'd give you eggs and you'd pay me in milk.'
'I don't think it works that way now,' I remarked. 'If he fixed my nose I don't think he'd want me to do brain surgery on him.'"

In the spirit of neighbour helping neighbour, Jack's mother farms him out one summer to assist Miss Volker, the elderly town nurse, who is now too arthritic to write obituaries (which she sees as a "final medical report" for the dying original town inhabitants). Miss Volker's obituaries are amazingly detailed and personal, and deliberately stuffed with both local and world history. Gradually, as Jack and Miss Volker share a number of unlikely and sometimes hilarious adventures, her passion for history and its importance starts making a lot of sense to Jack, as well as to us.

Here's the snappy publisher-produced book trailer:

And here, courtesy of the Library of Congress, is a rather long but informative talk by Gantos about his career in general and Dead End In Norvelt in particular.

I'll leave you with an endorsement by Jon Scieszka, uber-famous writer, founder of the Guys Read foundation, and the U.S. National Ambassador for Young People's Literature:

"Nobody can tell a story like Jack Gantos can. And this is a story like no other. It's funny. It's thoughtful. It's history. It's weird. But you don't need me to attempt to describe it. Get in there and start reading Gantos."

Slog's Dad by David Almond, Illustrated by Dave McKean

2011-10-17T10:59:00.000-07:00

"'They can hack your body into a hundred bits,' he'd say, 'But they cannot hack your soul.'"

It's difficult to imagine the audience for this moody, unusual story. In a way it's a typical David Almond book--mysterious, earthy, otherworldly, a little unsettling, a little wonderful. Almond's body of work is mostly composed of chapter books for the 8-12 age group, and although this story is much shorter and heavily illustrated I couldn't imagine giving it to a child younger than eight. In fact, I think Dave McKean's illustrations ramp up the creepy/sad qualities to the tale (although those are certainly not the only moods they evoke). I would say that with Slog's Dad, Almond and McKean have together created a highly original work of art for children who are mature enough to handle some emotional ambiguity.

For those of you who don't know David Almond, he's an internationally recognized British writer who has won the Whitbread Award twice, the Carnegie Medal once and has been awarded the very prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Medal by IBBY International for his lifetime achievement. His first novel, Skellig, has been adapted into a radio play by the BBC and into an Opera which was reviewed as "mysterious, eerie and enthralling" by the Guardian. For those of you who are not familiar with Dave McKean, well, what can I say? Go read The Graveyard Book, or Coraline, or The Wolves in the Walls. He's an artist/photographer/illustrator whose work tends to be matched with writing that has a certain fantastical quality. The pairing of these two here is very powerful. McKean digs into the rich emotion of Almond's story and allows us to slow down and linger over the complexity of it.

Slog's Dad is told from the point of view of Davie, whose friend Slog's father has just died of a slow, devouring illness which robbed him of his legs before it robbed him of life. Slog's Dad promised on his deathbed that he would return for a visit in the spring. Slog believes his father's promise implicitly, but Davie is more practical. For Davie, dead is dead. So when Slog sees a dirty, apparently homeless man sitting on a bench in the springtime, he believes it is his father come for the promised visit. Davie, and we as readers, resist seeing the miracle.

"Slog looked that happy as I walked towards them. He was leaning on the bloke and the bloke was leaning back on the bench grinning at the sky. Slog made a fist and face of joy when he saw me.
'It's Dad, Davie!' he said. 'See? I told you.'
I stood in front of them.
'You remember Davie, Dad,' said Slog.
The bloke looked at me. He looked nothing like the Joe Mickley I used to know. His face was filthy but it was smooth and his eyes were shining bright.
....'He looks a bit different,' said Slog. 'But that's just cos he's been...'
'Transfigured,' said the bloke.
'Aye,' said Slog. 'Transfigured. Can I show him your legs, Dad?'

Slog's Dad is about grief, hope, and, possibly, resurrection. It's also about love and how tenderly it can be bestowed upon even the most humble of us.

"Once I stood with Mam at the window and watched Mrs. Mickley stroke her husband's head and gently kiss his cheek.
'She's telling him he's going to get better,' said Mam.
We saw the smile growing on Joe Mickley's face.
'That's love,' said Mam. 'True love.'"

But Almond's vision of love and resurrection isn't typical. Cold looks, glittering eyes, twisted faces and the stink of garbage mingle uneasily with the image of a man who's gone to heaven. Almond makes it difficult for the reader to make the leap of identification from Davie's closed, doubting heart to Slog's open, accepting one. Even once we believe, we are left questioning: what manner of miracle is this? I love the ambiguity and full emotion of this story. I love how this short book made me think and feel and re-read. There's a lot of depth in this murky, marvellous tale.

Bronxwood by Coe Booth

2011-10-14T12:56:00.000-07:00

" He get a little smile on his face, like he laughing at me or something. 'I'm saying, if you don't like it at Cal place no more, you got a room right here. It's all set up for you. You could be laying in that bed tonight. But you ain't moving back in here 'less you ask me if you could. That way, both of us is gonna know the reason you back living with me is 'cause you wasn't man enough to make it on your own.'
I don't get this guy. He losing it for real.
'There's only gonna be one man in this house, Ty. And that man ain't you.'"

Boy, would I ever hate to be Tyrell. Things were bad enough when his family was living in a shelter, his Dad was in jail and his immature, do-nothing Mom was pressuring him to be the "man" of the family (in other words, steal or sell drugs to support her and his younger brother Troy). Talk about a role reversal--aren't mothers supposed to want to keep their kids out of trouble? In Bronxwood, Coe Booth returns to the characters she brought to such vivid life in her debut novel, but adds a twist--Tyrell's brother is in foster care, Tyrell himself is sharing a small apartment with his friend Cal, and his father is being released from jail and is returning to take charge of his dislocated family. The thing is, Tyrell has grown up a lot in the past year, and his father doesn't want to know about it. He wants things back to the way they were before, and Tyrell no longer fits into his family's life.

Coe Booth excels at so many things, but I think she conveys two things really well in this book. One is the sense of pressure that Tyrell feels, the way everyone expects something of him that he's not sure he wants to give. This is a kid without a lot of great options, and he knows it. His friends are drug dealers, one girl he's eyeing wants him to spend money on her that he doesn't have, and the girl he cares about even more is being groomed by a sexual predator. He's good at being a DJ but he can't afford his own equipment. He loves his brother but the foster mother in charge doesn't want him visiting. If Tyrell feels that no one has his back, it's probably because no one does. How can he become the man he wants to be with so much working against him?

I've read lots of books which put young people into dilemmas like this, only to bring in a responsible adult at the end to save the day. But not Booth. She keeps it real. No one's swooping in to help.

Coe Booth's second triumph here is in showing Tyrell finally facing his father as an adult. I think the primary relationship in Bronxwood is between Tyrell and his father, and their relationship is pretty complex. Tyrell's Dad is very much a my-way-or-the-highway kind of guy, and if he feels disrespected, he doesn't hesitate to get violent. Tyrell wants to confront his father with the consequences of his jail time, and he's frustrated by how unrepentant his father is. What Tyrell wants from his father, he's never going to get. At least Tyrell has reached the point where he can begin to separate himself from his father's bad choices. Although Tyrell isn't out of the woods yet, I think that's a sign of hope.

Read You Should: The Strange Case of Origami Yoda by Tom Angleberger

2011-10-14T11:02:00.000-07:00

"The big question: Is Origami Yoda real?
Well, of course he's real. I mean, he's a real finger puppet made out of a real piece of paper.
But I mean: Is he REAL? Does he really know things? Can he see the future? Does he use the Force?
Or is he just a hoax that fooled a whole bunch of us at McQuarrie Middle School?"

I'm kind of bummed that I wasn't the one who thought of writing a story about a Yoda finger puppet who dispenses sage advice from the hand of a grade 6 boy. With a genius premise like that, the book would practically write itself! And I mean, it's not like I don't have lots of practice in Yoda-speak, living with an eight-year-old Clone Wars expert like I do. (He even has a Yoda t-shirt that says "Read you must!" No kidding.)

If you like the Wimpy Kid funny-chapter-book-with-sketches format, you'll like Origami Yoda too. I think the reading level is slightly lower than the Wimpy Kid books, actually, but it's just as visually entertaining. The main character is Tommy, who creates a casebook around whether Origami Yoda's advice is accurate or misleading so he can decide whether or not to ask Sara to dance at the school Fun Night like Origami Yoda told him to. Harvey is the skeptic who Does Not Believe and scribbles his Unbeliever comments all over the casebook. Dwight is the creator and voice of Origami Yoda. His friends don't think much of his intellect, which is why they kind of think Origami Yoda might be for real. How could Dwight possibly come up with advice that actually works?

The sequel to Origami Yoda has just come out and it's called...wait for it...Darth Paper Strikes Back. I've just put it in Ewan's and my to-read pile. Origami Yoda comes with instructions on how to make your very own Yoda finger puppet. I am totally psyched!

And, just for fun, here's a hilarious commercial starring Darth Vader and "The Force".

May the Force be with you, friends!

Now Is The Time For Running by Michael Williams

2011-10-13T09:13:00.000-07:00

"What is worse than the sound of wood against the bones of your brother? I cannot think of anything worse than that."

This book just plain broke my heart. It's a powerful, hard story out of Zimbabwe and South Africa, but for me the location faded away after a while because the characters and events grabbed my attention so forcefully. This is the kind of book I think of when people talk about literature's power to make us understand "the other", because really, what could be more different from my life than the experience of a homeless teen refugee whose one link to "normalcy" is his love of soccer? But anyone who understands not belonging, or the strength of the love you can feel for someone you need to protect, or the way hope and fear can heighten and fuse together for people in desperate conditions will completely get this book.

Now Is The Time For Running is the story of Deo, who must flee his native village in Zimbabwe with his older brother Innocent when soldiers come to town and slaughter everyone in the name of the President.

"I am Commander Jesus. I am one of the president's men. I was once a leader of the Five Brigade. The president has sent me here because he is unhappy with how you voted in the election. Most of you know that this country was won by the barrel of the gun. There are some among you who fought in the war of liberation. I see it in your eyes. You know who you are, and you should be ashamed of your neighbors. You know what sacrifices were made for the freedom we now enjoy. Should we now let it go at the stroke of a pen? Should one just write an X and let the country go just like that? You voted wrongly at the election. You were not thinking straight. That is why the president sent me here."

Deo and Innocent escape the carnage with their lives, and are the only ones in their village to do so. But the soldiers may return, and they must not be found. Where to go? Their mother had a friend in the police force of a nearby city, but even he cannot help them--when they flee to Captain Washington's home, the soldiers are there too. Captain Washington tells them that they must escape to South Africa. Maybe they will be able to find their father there. The journey is insanely dangerous, and when they finally arrive, they find that the safe haven they have been running to is less welcoming than they could ever have imagined.

Sometimes I think it's harder to read certain types of stories as an adult than as a child, for all that children are supposed to be more sensitive. Children are also more comforted by the happy ending. But as an adult, I know how the numbers break down--the number of children in the world who are refugees or survivors of political violence (lots) versus the numbers of teen refugees who are plucked off the streets and chosen to participate in the Street Soccer World Cup (precious few). I'm not saying the ending felt fake, exactly. It just felt a little desperate, like it was worked in because nothing that might more realistically happen is going to repair the damage that has been done to lives we have come to care about. The three young men who provided Williams with background interviews for this book are still homeless and are currently living "on the streets of Cape Town, under highways, and wherever they can find shelter.". Their lives are the reality behind the fiction.

I haven't even mentioned the crux of the story, that Innocent is intellectually challenged and subject to seizures and obsessive-compulsive behavior. He's a prime target for bullying at the best of times, and not exactly easy to smuggle around.

"I once had a brother. His name was Innocent. He was a very special person and he was my best friend."

This is a great book. Read it when you're feeling strong.

God as a Teenage Boy: There Is No Dog by Meg Rosoff

2011-10-01T14:00:00.000-07:00

"The truth of this could not be denied. Bob had created the world and then simply lost interest. Since his second week of employment, he'd passed the time sleeping and playing with his wangle, while managing to ignore the existence of his creations entirely.

And was this an excuse for him to be rained with curses and loathing from all mankind? Oh no. Because here was the clever bit: Bob had designed the entire race of murderers, martyrs and thugs with a built-in propensity to worship him. You had to admire the kid. Thick as two lemons, but with flashes of brilliance so intense a person could go blind looking at him."

Anthony McGowan's Guardian review of Rosoff's latest novel suggests that "there isn't another young adult novel like There Is No Dog", and goes on to compare Rosoff's writing with Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark and Kurt Vonnegut (for "intellectual playfulness"). What There Is No Dog reminded me of was the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series; There Is No Dog is more grounded (it takes place mostly on earth, not on alien spacecraft) and more emotionally nuanced (the Hitchhiker's Guide, as I recall, is pretty much a straight-up parody). But the books share the same kind of goofy absurdist take on a some of mankind's most vexed questions (Hitchhiker contemplates the meaning of life, while Dog takes a good hard look at the world and extrapolates the nature of God).

So, God. He's a teenage boy, name of Bob. He got the job of Creator of Earth because his wacko mother won it for him in a poker game. ("Bob's credentials (non-existent) did not impress. But the general sense of exhaustion and indifference was such that no one could really be bothered to argue.") He's sloppy, lazy, immature, whiny, lacking in compassion or responsibility. He's lustier than the Rolling Stones in heat and prone to falling in and out of love dramatically and dangerously.

'Mr B remembered another girl, another time, with the face of an angel and the sweetest manners, a child's soft mouth and an expression open and trusting as a lamb. She had seen Bob for what he was, and loved him anyway. Mr B removed his spectacles, hoping to erase the vision in his head. That romance had ended with floods, tornadoes, plague, earthquakes and the girl's execution for heresy, a few weeks before her fourteenth birthday. By special order of Pope Urban II.

And, just our luck, this loser has gone and created man in his own image, "which anyone could see was one big fat recipe for disaster."

Earth's only saving grace is that Mr. B, God's administrative assistant, does care about earth and its creatures and tries his damndest to straighten out Bob's messes. (Right now he's dealing with the biblically-proportioned floods caused by Bob's trying to seduce a young girl named Lucy.) But Mr. B is nearing the end of his rope and has applied for a transfer. Who will look after creation now?

Although There Is No Dog sounds like it could be desperately cynical, in the end it isn't. Despite God's blunderings, miracles unexpectedly occur and death is cheated, at least for the moment. People have hope, and it doesn't feel empty. And it may turn out that our slacker of a God can be overthrown....

Nothing is finally resolved in this book, but then again, that's life, isn't it?

The Sky Over the Louvre by Jean-Claude Carrier and Bernar Yslaire

2011-09-26T08:03:00.000-07:00

I reviewed this gorgeous graphic book over on my work blog. If you're into art or history, go give it a read!

Level Up by Gene Luen Yang, Illustrated by Thien Pham

2011-09-19T15:22:00.000-07:00

"To provide that boy with the life he has, I've had to eat much bitterness. He must learn to do the same. How will a video game teach him to eat bitterness?"

Hmmm. Gene Luen Yang. He's one of those writers that for me can go either way. He made his reputation with American Born Chinese, the first and (so far) only graphic novel to win the Michael L. Printz award for excellence in young adult fiction. It was fresh and ingenious, and I liked it a lot. He followed up with The Eternal Smile, which got great reviews but left me cold, and Prime Baby , which I thought was clever and funny but less complex than his first book. In Level Up I think we're seeing him return to his strengths. Level Up is relevant, surprising, engaging, imaginative. Writing about the pressures of parental expectations on young people who live in our pleasure-centric culture, Yang invites readers to think about whether it is our destiny to fulfill our family's hopes and dreams, particularly if they have sacrificed their own for us.

Level Up follows the life of Dennis Ouyang, a high-schooler back in the early days of pac-man. Dennis is enthralled by this new game, and eagerly asks his father for a Nintendo Entertainment System for Christmas (he does this by taping pictures of it to his father's mirror, his newspaper, the fridge, etc.--he and his dad aren't really big on talking together). His parents, to his crushing disappointment, get him a chemistry set instead and his dad leaves notes around the house entitled "How to get into college", "The job market", and "The virtue of work". There, in a nutshell, is the heart of the story.

Dennis works hard and does well in high school to please his parents, but when his father dies just before high school graduation, Dennis immediately goes to an electronics store and gets a game system. On his way home from the funeral. Literally. He becomes a hard-core gamer, flunking out of his $10,000.00-a-year college because he is too distracted to study or attend classes. And then--a miracle!

Angels enter Dennis's life. Four adorable little floating angels who tell him that his destiny is in gastroenterology ("Great shall you be in your profession!", they earnestly proclaim). Four very bossy angels who seem to have come from his father, who bully the dean into re-admitting him to college, who get him to give away all his games and gaming systems, and who move in with him to keep him on the straight and narrow. But the road to gastroenterology is long, hard, and smelly. Does Dennis have what it takes to endure? And even if he can, should he?

What I like about Level Up (apart from the imaginative twists and turns of the story) is the multi-faceted point of view from which Yang explores this dilemna. Many books, movies, and tv shows for teens are all about living your dreams, letting your passions direct your life, and not letting anything get in your way. Yang shows both sides of the equation: how hard it is to work towards something that doesn't inspire you, but also, how practical goals can keep us from frittering away our lives.

Here's a link to an interesting interview with both Yang and illustrator Pham, and here's a link to Yang's website. And finally, here's a video of Yang and Pham talking up their book at San Diego Comic Con, and a link to a comic Yang made explaining the "secret origins" of Level Up.

And just in case you're unfamiliar with it, here's a trailer for American Born Chinese. It's worth a read too.

Happyface by Stephen Emond

2011-09-14T11:49:00.000-07:00

"Today is the day the world changed, and that is all I will say because I don't ever want to think of it again."

Happyface reminds me a lot of one of my all-time favourite picture books, Michael Rosen's Sad Book. Like the Sad Book, Happyface deals with grief that morphs (as it so easily does) into long-term depression. It also reminds me of Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian in that it is heavily illustrated with the narrator's sketches, and the illustrations do a great deal to enhance the mood of the story. There's a lot going on here visually--starting with the cover. With the book jacket on, we see a happy face, but if we look underneath, the face is sad. (Just like Quentin Blake's brilliant first-page illustration for the Sad Book).

Happyface is about an artistic guy whose family falls apart in a horrible way (how horrible it is, we don't learn until about halfway through the book because Happyface can't talk about it) which leaves him feeling deeply betrayed as well as permanently grief-ridden. Happyface and his mother move to a small apartment in a new neighbourhood where his mother drinks too much and rides a private and painful emotional roller coaster, and he goes to a new school where no one knows him. Happyface decides to reinvent himself, and at first he's pretty successful. He "slaps on a grin", gets his nickname, makes friends with the cool crowd, and starts chasing a girl who's beautiful, reads Allen Ginsberg and seems to like him back. He's fooling everyone.

Of course, eventually everything crumbles around him, because a) people start digging for the truth, and b) he starts going just a little nuts, in the way that happens when you repress such powerful feelings. He turns mean and desperate. We're not even sure we like him anymore.

Emond has chosen to give us the closure of a hopeful ending, although I really felt that this book could have gone either way. Happyface mends some rifts, particularly with his father, and vows that "my problems and failures will not stop me, nor will they dictate who I am". Frankly, the ending wasn't my favourite part. What I found fascinating was how well Emond captured the complications of functioning in a depressed state, because, let's face it, Happyface is right--grief and rage are big social turn-offs for most people, particularly if they last a long time. Sometimes the mask is what saves us.

I also found the illustrations extraordinarily engaging. They're plentiful, sometimes cartoony and sometimes more artistically rendered, and they add a lot of energy and vitality to what could otherwise have been a much more sober story. Here's an interesting article written by Connie Tsu on the Blue Rose Girls blog about the process of editing a book as visual as Happyface. Enjoy!

Mirages Don't Have Chicken Breath, Mister: The Trouble With Chickens by Doreen Cronin

2011-09-07T15:52:00.000-07:00

"There's an easy way to do a search and a hard way.
The easy way is early in the evening with a cool breeze and a steady partner.
The hard way is high noon with a crazy chicken clucking in your ear and two feather balls riding your tail.
This search was gonna go the hard way."

This easy chapter book lends itself to dramatic reading. It's a send-up of the hard-boiled detective genre; J.J., a retired search-and-rescue dog, is hired by a local chicken to find two missing chicks (he won't work for chicken feed or feathers, but she promises him a cheeseburger). There are lots of good bits to act out, like:

"I never backed down from a staring contest in my life, but her eyes were so tiny and close-set, it was making me cross-eyed."

or:

"I sucked my breath in through my nose as hard as I could. Sugar was dragged right between the two bars and stuck to my nose like a stray sock on a freshly dried towel."

(Sugar is one of the missing chicks. Just picture it. )

Jokes abound, and they're really funny. One of them involves a ransom note which contains the words "behoove", "rendezvous", and "twilight". Our sardonic narrator J.J. observes:

"I've been lowered from a helicopter, strapped to a snowmobile, and flown first-class to France to find a backcountry skier lost in the Alps.
Not once did anyone find it necessary to use the word behoove."

If I want to get a laugh out of my son now, all I have to do is tell him that it behooves him to rendezvous with me at the dinner table.

Like many of the best books for this reading level, lots of illustrations add interest to the text. Here's J.J. enjoying retirement, and J.J. in a peck (bad pun) of trouble.

Just can't trust those chickens.

Appetite for Detention by Sloane Tanen

2011-09-06T13:44:00.000-07:00

It's back-to-school time. Since my daughter's going into grade eight, I thought the time for reading her picture books was long over, but that was before I stumbled upon Appetite for Detention. Yes, she was skeptical when I offered to read her a bedtime story for old times sake, but the first ridiculous page won her over. It's the contrast between the cute little toy chicks and the angsty-ironic teen dialogue that makes the book such a laugh. Sloane Tanen has made a niche for herself creating these kinds of images with attitude, so if you like the book, check out her website.

Here are a few sample pages:

If I were in high school now, I'd tape these to my locker.

Mother Number Zero by Marjolyn Hof

2011-06-13T16:59:00.000-07:00

"I think that from the very beginning Bing was always more curious. A Chinese parasol hung from the ceiling in her room, and she owned a pair of Chinese pajamas.
'Why don't you get a Chinese tattoo?' I said.
She pointed at her butt. 'Here?'
'No!' said my mother.
'Yes, right there,' I said. 'Get a dragon.'
'But it has to be a big one,' Bing said. 'A mini dragon would be useless. You'd barely see it.'
'Big and colorful,' I said. 'So it catches your eye. Red, green and blue.'
'And yellow.' Bing said.
My mother looked relieved. 'You're overdoing it. I don't believe you anymore.'
'Overdoing it?' said Bing. 'It's my butt and I can do what I want with it.'
'It's also a little bit mine,' my mother said. 'I wiped it for years.'
'All mothers do that,' Bing said. 'That doesn't mean a thing.' "

Dutch author Marjolyn Hof's Mother Number Zero is a quiet and sensitive story about adoption. Fejzo, called Fay, is part of a Dutch family with two adopted children. His sister An Bing Wa, or Peace-Loving Ice Baby, was adopted from China, while Fejzo's mother was originally from Bosnia. He has a child-like understanding of his past:

"My mother number zero lived in Bosnia and I was in her belly. Mother number zero didn't want a baby. She couldn't take care of me and that was the reason she gave me up. Luckily she didn't give me away to somebody in her own country, because they had a war and far too many problems. She was smart enough to come to the Netherlands, and I traveled along in her belly."

Fay doesn't give too much thought to his adoption until he meets Maud, a newcomer who is very curious about Fay's birth mother. Maud thinks that Fay's birth mother might be a famous artist, since Fay himself is accomplished at drawing birds. She suggests that Fay might be able to find his mother number zero with a bit of detective work, just like on a TV show called Disappeared, where "they search for someone's father or mother and then you can see what happens." The curiosity Maud exhibits eventually stirs something within Fay, and once he begins wondering about mother number zero, he can't seem to stop.

With his parent's assistance, Fay begins to take steps to find his birth mother. Fay doesn't initially understand the difficult feelings this search may spark for both himself and his family, particularly his sister, who was found abandoned and therefore has no means of tracking her birth family. In him, the search evokes many fantasies, some exciting and some frightening.

"And mother number zero? She had gone through a war and given her kid away....Was my mother like some people who could handle it, or like others who couldn't? If she couldn't, then maybe she lived in a park somewhere too. Maybe she drank beer all day long and had a knife to kill ducks. Maybe that was the answer to the question of why she had given me away. She had gone through so much that she had turned into a bum. Maybe she was crazy. Or wounded or crippled. Maybe she didn't have a nose or only one leg or no arms."

Hof, an adoptee herself, enters Fay's inner world with tremendous empathy and understanding. As Fay's thoughts and feelings veer off in so many different directions, we feel safe knowing that he is blessed with parents who are kind and warm, and deeply connected with him. Their support and guidance on his quest helps him prepare for whatever answer will come.

The ending felt right to me, and I found it very honestly and gently handled. This is a story that is simple but never stark. Reading it feels like taking a small pilgrimage and then coming safely back home.

Num8ers: The Chaos by Rachel Ward

2011-06-04T10:29:00.000-07:00

Although I didn't review British writer Rachel Ward's debut novel Num8ers when it came out last year, I found it intense and fascinating. Num8ers takes place in a contemporary but dystopian England where a girl named Jem has a strange ability: when she looks into people's eyes she sees numbers that represent the date of that person's death. This causes a great deal of trouble for her in terms of the story, as it ultimately leads to her being mistaken for a terrorist . I thought it was an ingenious idea, though. Imagine the questions it raises: is the future preordained? If you warned someone, could you change their fate? Is there a purpose behind this ability? What is the cost to Jem of such knowledge? What makes Jem's situation more intriguing is that she can't see the date of her own death, since of course she can't look herself directly in the eye (mirrors don't work).

Num8ers: The Chaos could also be called Num8ers: The Next Generation. We are now in the year 2026, and Jem has died of cancer. Adam, her son, is living with his grandmother, with whom he often clashes. Adam has inherited his mother's ability to see death in a person's eyes, but in his case the power is intensified: he not only sees the date, he also feels the nature of the death, the emotions and the pain of the process. Because of this disturbing ability and the isolation of being so freakish, he is a troubled, angry teen. He's also scared, because after a flood takes down his mother's old home and his Nan insists they move to London, he can't help but notice that almost everyone he meets has the same death date: January 1st, 2027, and that all of these deaths are traumatic. Something terrible is going to wipe out London soon, and it's up to misfit Adam to do what he can to stop it.

I liked this book even more than Ward's first, in part because having set up the situation already, she can now make it increasingly complex. She adds another point of view, that of Sarah, a girl with big problems and a scary ability of her own. The goverment has grown even more distrustful and controlling, to the point where people are microchipped and can be tracked at all times. The stakes are higher. The ending is unexpected and riveting. But it's not only the tension and suspense that are so compelling; Ward gives her characters a lot of depth and development. This is a book with substance as well as thrills. Ward is planning a third book in the series, titled Num8ers: Infinity, which will focus on Sarah's daughter Mia, so altogether the Num8ers series will span three generations.

Shine by Lauren Myracle

2011-05-30T14:14:00.000-07:00

"What I knew was this: Once upon a time, everything changed. Now things had to change again. Someone needed to track down whoever went after Patrick, and that someone was me."

Shine is unequivocally Lauren Myracle's best book to date, and it's a huge leap forward for an author who is already extremely popular, especially among tweens and younger teens. Myracle is largely known for a style that is funny, warm, playful and consistent, a style where happy endings are virtually guaranteed. Shine is not at all like that. Instead, it's psychologically and morally probing. It's suspenseful and deeply absorbing. It's piercing and compassionate. It's nuanced and mature and very obviously written from the heart of a true artist.

Shine takes place in a small Southern town steeped in secrets, tightly-knit loyalties and below-the-surface cruelties. At the centre of the story is Cat, who has retreated into herself since her older brother's friend assaulted her at age 13. As a child, Cat's best friend was Patrick, but as a teenager she has distanced herself from him entirely, even though "losing Patrick was almost the same as losing myself." Now Patrick is in a coma after having been beaten to a bloody pulp at the late-night gas station where he works, and for Cat, this is simply too much to bear. She is consumed with the need to uncover Patrick's attacker, to "look straight into the ugliness and find out who hurt him, and...yell it from the mountaintop." The assault on Patrick is assumed to be a hate crime, since Patrick is openly gay (in fact, he is the only out person in this community, as far as I could see) and he is found with the words "Suck this, faggot" scrawled in blood across his chest and a gas pump duct-taped into his mouth.

Cat's unrelenting quest for the truth disturbs many people and places her in increasing danger. Already intelligent, she becomes almost hyper-observant and soon realizes that even people whom Patrick considered friends may have wished him harm. What I loved most about Shine was the way that Cat kept digging deeper and deeper and really thinking about the people around her, their histories and relationships and what they might or might not be capable of. Cat becomes increasingly adept at seeing beneath the surface of people, noticing the aggression and nastiness hiding underneath the friendship. Through Cat's determination and growing understanding, Myracle shows us the value and the cost of fighting intolerance.

Here's a fan-made video recommended by the author herself:

The Good, The Bad and The Barbie: A Doll's History and Her Impact on Us by Tanya Lee Stone

2011-05-21T07:02:00.000-07:00

Tanya Lee Stone's The Good, The Bad and The Barbie deserves all the love it's getting. Stone's a great writer and writes the kind of non-fiction that kids will read for fun. This book mines a rich vein since Barbie dolls have been so iconic and yet controversial in our culture. Stone gives us the history of both the doll and of the points of view surrounding the image of womanhood she represents. The two things about The Good, The Bad and The Barbie that I found most interesting were the anecdotes of how people had played with their Barbies as children, and the way various artists and film-makers have used her as creative inspiration. Did you know that there is an annual Altered Barbie Exhibition in San Francisco each year, which "includes music, films, and performance art, as well as paintings and sculpture"? Wild.

Here are some of my favourite quotes and images from the book:

"My neighbor and I always had Barbie parties together because she had a ton of them, including a princess Barbie. At least, I thought she was a princess, but it's hard to tell because she was always missing her clothes. We usually ended up marrying her and were both her wives. It's kind of funny that as a child, a polygamist, nudist, homosexual lifestyle was obviously the best one, and I doubt anyone could have convinced me otherwise."

"How did I--the daughter of a feminist and working woman, myself a future feminist...play with my Barbie? I took off all her clothes and sent her looking for love. My Barbie got around...and it wasn't just me. To walk into the bedroom of any of my Barbie-owning friends when I was little was to face a sordid truth. 'You want to play Barbie?' she would ask innocently and gesture. Off in the corner--a bucket of large-breasted, pants-less women."

"Our naked Barbie collection did not go completely unnoticed. At four, my son, who was not allowed to have a toy gun, found the treasures. When he was playing with friends, he'd grab a naked Barbie, bend her at the waist, and shoot."

Brooklyn artist Margaux Lange uses dismembered Barbie body parts to create a Plastic Body jewellery line, which has been showcased in galleries and museums.

Queen-Size Barb is an altered doll by Deborah Colotti, whose fascination with Barbies has led to a whole series of altered dolls. She says, "Rather than trying to make myself as frozen and superficial as a doll, I decided to make Barbie more like me."

I've just discovered that if you do a google image search on "altered barbie" you can come up with some pretty weird stuff. Crucified Barbie, anyone? Zombie Barbie? "Kiss" (the rock group) Barbie? How do people get these ideas, anyway?

But I must admit I quite liked this one--"Take Flight" Barbie by Christine Webb.

Paranormalcy by Kiersten White

2011-05-09T14:25:00.000-07:00

"'Wait--did you--you just yawned!' The vampire's arms, raised over his head in the classic Dracula pose, dropped to his sides. He pulled his exaggerated white fangs back behind his lips. 'What, imminent death isn't exciting enough for you?'

'Oh, stop pouting. But, really, the widow's peak? The pale skin? The black cape? Where did you even get that thing, a costume store?'

He raised himself to his full height and glared icily down at me. 'I'm going to suck the life from your pretty white neck.'

I sighed. I hate the vamp jobs. They think they're so suave. It's not enough for them to slaughter and eat you like a zombie would. No, they want it to be all sexy too..."

Paranormalcy had me glued to the pages right from the start. It's Kiersten White's first book and the beginning of a trilogy, and it's a crazy fun read. What I loved about it most was Evie, the central character. She's got a hilarious, wicked tongue on her, but she's also quite strong and perceptive. The plot is energetically paced, and the twists and turns of the story are imaginative and satisfying.

Evie is a teenage operative at the International Paranormal Containment Agency, where she has grown up (she was found, abandoned, as a baby and taken in by the IPCA when she was eight). She has the unique ability to see through paranormal glamour, so that, for example, she can see the shriveled corpse inside the hunky vampire, or the breathtaking faerie inside the human disguise. When a shapeshifter named Lend breaks into her agency and is captured, she becomes interested in what she sees underneath--he is almost invisible, like "a person made of water and a hint of light". While befriending Lend, Evie also has to deal with Reth, a faerie who wants to manipulate her in ways that she is drawn to and distrusts at the same time, and Vivian, a mysterious amoral killer who claims that Evie is her sister. When the IPCA is destroyed, Evie and Lend go on the run, and Evie discovers that she's not who she thought she was.

The only thing I don't like about this book is the cover. I can't see Evie wearing a dress like this--it's all wrong for her--and the model's face is too generically pretty and blank. The Evie in my imagination jumps off the page with her character and chutzpah. I don't think she looks like this at all.

Recovery Road by Blake Nelson

2011-05-09T11:46:00.000-07:00

"This is not going to be easy, whatever happens between us. But I let myself love him anyway. I let myself love him with all my heart. I give myself that. I tell myself I deserve it."

What struck me most when reading Blake Nelson's latest novel, Recovery Road, was the sense of truthfulness about it. There is an observant quality to this book which, considering the subject matter, is almost ruthless. I don't mean that in a sensationalistic way, because this book is anything but sensationalistic. Instead, it digs deep and grapples with the grinding struggle of recovery, the boredom and disappointment and sense of loss and ineptness that can accompany it, and the never-ending, daily choices that either support or wreck the recovery process. It's incredibly convincing.

The story opens with teenage Maddy in a halfway house for recovering addicts. She's one of the few young people there--most of her roommates are middle-aged women with lives that are alien to her. It's not entirely clear what her primary addiction is--she's definitely an alcoholic but seems to also have more than a passing acquaintance with various drugs. She's a hard partier and, according to the clinic psychiatrist, has anger issues. This opinion seems to be supported by her high school nickname, "Mad Dog Maddie", although Maddie herself dismisses it.

"She tosses her notebook on her desk. 'You know there's a saying. "If you meet three assholes in a day, you're the asshole." Do you think that could be true?'
'That I'm the asshole? No! Are you kidding me?'
She stares at me.
'No way,' I say. 'I am never the asshole.'"

Maddie's stay in the clinic is boring and uncomfortable. She makes two friends, one named Trish, who has a lot in common with Maddie but carries the additional burden of having paralyzed her best friend in a drunk driving accident. The other is Stuart, who is floundering with his life but to whom Maddie feels a strong connection. He's cute and charismatic, and he and Maddie make out a few times before Maddie's psychiatrist orders them apart (romantic relationships are against the rules in rehab). They vow to continue their relationship once they are both released, and it is the thought of this that keeps Maddie hopeful about the future.

As the story progresses, we begin to understand a few things. Maddie is very smart. Stuart, maybe not so much. Maddie has a supportive family--not perfect, but supportive. Stuart is estranged from his Mom and eventually becomes estranged from his Dad as well. Maddie has a goal--to get into a good university. Stuart's goals are not so clear.

Nelson excels at portraying the many small decisions Maddie must make to sustain her new life, and the almost robotic quality she sometimes takes on while making them. She must disengage from all of her old school friends, even if it means she hides in the library during lunch. When Stuart invites her to come live with him and his father, she turns him down, even though she's afraid of the growing distance between them. She is relentlessly driven to achieve high grades, although this has never been her priority before. She even goes to summer school. She is astute enough to realize that she needs a new focus if she is going to break her old party-girl habits, and she just pushes herself through, no matter what the cost. Stuart, meanwhile, drifts in and out of jobs, drifts over to a new girlfriend, and finally drifts back into addiction. He is, in the end, a counterpoint to Maddie's story of cautious but determined redemption.

Scumble by Ingrid Law

2011-05-02T16:57:00.000-07:00

"We had to wait until my birthday came and went. We had to see if anything exploded, caught fire, or flooded before committing to a long-haul trip across four states in the minivan. In my family, thirteenth birthdays were like time bombs, with no burning fuse or beeping countdown to tell you when to plug your ears, duck, brace yourself, or turn tail and get the hay bales out of Dodge."

Scumble is a companion to the immensely popular Newbery Honor book Savvy, about a special family whose members all develop a magical talent on their 13th birthdays. These talents, or savvys, as the families call them, are kept dead secret from the outside world and range precariously from the sublime to the ridiculous.

"My mom's side of the family had always been more than a little different. I doubted there were many people with a time-hopping great-aunt, a grandpa who shaped mountains and valleys out of land pancake-flat, and a mix of cousins who ranged from electric to mind-reading to done-gone vanished--poof! I'd even had a great-uncle who could spit hailstones like watermelon seeds, or gargle water into vapor and blow it out his ears. When Great-uncle Ferris turned thirteen, his savvy had stunned him with a sudden, sunny-colored snowstorm inside the family outhouse, toppling the small shack like an overburdened ice chest that rolled down the hill with him still inside it."

13-year-old Ledger's brand-new savvy seems more like a curse than a talent. Instead of the phenomenal running speed he had hoped for, suddenly machinery falls apart whenever he's around. His frazzled parents leave him for the summer at his Uncle Autry's ranch, where they hope he will learn to scumble, or control his savvy. ("Scumble" is a term from the visual arts, meaning to blend colours together or mute bright colours with a thin overlay of semi-opaque pigment). Ledger's summer is certainly eventful--for one thing, he catches the prying eye of thirteen-year old Sarah Jane Cabot, ace reporter for the Sundance Scuttlebut, who immediately senses a mystery surrounding Ledger and his family.   And for another, his uncle may be about to lose the ranch.   But most importantly, he discovers something unexpected about himself--he is, in fact, an artist.

There are some pretty good reasons that Savvy and Scumble have been so popular, I think. Law is so inventive, and the savvy families she writes about are a lively and intriguing bunch.   Her writing style is rooted in the American tall-tale tradition and she really makes it work. Scumble reminds me of those great Grandma Dowdel stories by Richard Peck. Everything that happens is a little unexpected, a little unbelievable, but in the end, happily, it all fits together.

Matched by Ally Condie

2011-05-02T13:19:00.000-07:00

Hard on the heels of The Hunger Games comes a whole crop of scary-future-society teen fiction, Matched being one of the more high-profile dystopian reads of the year. To me, the cover looks more like a lighter paranormal read--I think the girl in green looks like a genie in a bottle. When you read the story you realize she's meant to be a rebel in a big-brother style society. She doesn't break free on the cover or in the story, completely, either. It's hard to fight city hall.

Matched is a more subdued book than Hunger Games or the Chaos Walking trilogy by Patrick Ness, which I personally feel are the recent benchmarks for dystopian teen fiction. In Hunger Games, the point of view is squarely with people who are suffering under a cruel dictatorship and are fully aware of it. They may not feel empowered to do anything about it, necessarily, but there's no doubt in their or the reader's minds that they're being oppressed. In Matched,we are shown an extremely controlled society from the point of view of the so-called beneficiaries (if we were in the Hunger Games world, the equivalent would be the people of the Capital).

The heroine of Matched is Cassia, a young woman about to meet the spouse who is chosen for her by the Matching Department of her society. To her surprise, her match turns out to be Xander, her longtime best friend. While Xander is delighted with their match, Cassia becomes gradually less enthusiastic after seeing evidence that she may have had another match, her neighbour Ky, who cannot legally be partnered with anyone because of his low social status. Cassia and Ky begin to develop a relationship based on small, subtle acts of rebellion, such as touching each other or memorizing forbidden poetry. But even as Cassia begins to question the level of control her society exerts on her and the loss of intellectual and emotional freedom that goes with it, she is torn by the awareness that the system works well for a lot of people. Her parents are happily married and have good jobs, and the world she lives in is safe and stable.

1984, the dystopia that spoke to me when I was a teen, features an impoverishment of the English language by the government ("newspeak") in order to prevent dissent ("thoughtcrime"). Similarly, in Cassia's world, history, culture, and knowledge are continually being pruned out of existence by government workers so that only scraps of the past remain. Bureaucratic committees have selected 100 officially sanctioned poems, books, paintings, historic events, and so on to represent the whole of human creativity and memory, and knowledge of all other works is forbidden. In Matched, the poems of Dylan Thomas, particularly "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night", become symbols of all that has been lost, much as the works of Shakespeare symbolize the loss of culture in Brave New World.

But Cassia is ultimately emotionally rather than intellectually driven. Her epiphany comes when she realizes that "...the statistics the Officials give us do not matter to me. I know there are many people who are happy and I am glad for them. But this is Ky. If he is the one person who falls by the wayside while the other ninety-nine are happy and fulfilled, that is not right with me anymore." Once Cassia has decided this, however, her path is not so clear. How do you stand up to a society which provides so much, and is so good at hiding what it takes away?

Matched is apparently the first volume of a trilogy. Volume 2, Crossed, will be released in November 2011. Until then, here's an author interview with Ally Condie.

No Such Thing As Dragons by Philip Reeve

2011-05-01T19:42:00.000-07:00

A growl bubbled softly, deep in the sound box of the creature's chest. The eye it aimed at him was sulfur yellow. It opened its mouth, and its teeth were icicle white and sharp as nails and its tongue was a pink spike. As it launched itself off the crag toward him, Ansel saw the long tail lash out behind it, striped like a serpent and frilled with feathers.

Philip Reeve's new fantasy story, No Such Thing As Dragons, really reminds me of many of the classic British children's books I read in my youth, authored by writers like E. Nesbit or Frances Hodgson Burnett or Andrew Lang, writers who stretched my vocabulary not just because they wrote in a particular dialect but also because they were so highly literate themselves. You can tell by reading any of Reeve's books that his magnificent sense of imagination is firmly buttressed by an accomplished command of the language of story. He is a vigorous and skilled writer, and has given us here an adventure that would read aloud wonderfully well.

It took several hours for them to make their way around the lake to the crags on the far side. There they picked up the path that Else's father had told her of. Faint and faded, it dropped giddily down slopes of scree and shale into a steep-sided valley. Spikey crags crowned with starved-looking clumps of pine thrust out into the valley, and at their feet lay the glacier. Ansel had not quite believed it when Else and Brock talked about it--a river of ice, creeping forever down the mountain. Yet there it was, vast and cold, hatched all over with crevices and chasms, and though he could not see it moving he could hear it: the faint grinding and grumbling as it dragged its way over the rocks, and sometimes a crisp icy crack from the fractured surface.

The plot is classic and straightforward. Ansel is a 10-year-old peasant boy in a large family, who stopped being able to speak at age 7, when his mother died. His mercenary father sells him to a passing dragon-killer in need of a servant who isn't a blabbermouth. The dragon-killer is in fact a fake--he carries a crocodile skull around with him to persuade frightened villagers that he has freed them from dangerous fire-breathing wyrms. But he confides early on to a frightened Ansel, "There's really no such thing as dragons". To him, it's all a big, profitable show. Ansel's master Brock is headed for a remote village where the villagers are convinced that the dragon who lives in the nearby mountain has awakened. So great is their fear that they have dragged a village girl up the mountain and left her tied up in the frigid cold as a sacrifice to the great beast. When Ansel, Brock and a wandering priest make their way up the mountain, they discover that dragons may not be so imaginary after all.

This is the kind of fantasy that grounds itself in a sense of reality. I like the way the dragon is conceived as a natural creature, with natural behaviors related to other animals, rather than a mythological beast. Ansel is convincing as a quiet, sensitive boy in a rough world, gradually coming into is own. This is a fine addition to the canon of British fantasy adventure for young readers.

The Lover's Dictionary: A Novel by David Levithan

2011-04-27T19:51:00.000-07:00

brash, adj.
"I want you to spend the night," you said. And it was definitely your phrasing that ensured it. If you had said "Let's have sex," or "Let's go to my place," or even "I really want you," I'm not sure we would have gone quite as far as we did. But I loved the notion that the night was mine to spend, and I immediately decided to spend it on you.

David Levithan is so versatile--he's the founding editor of Scholastic's PUSH imprint, has mentored many new writers, has written his own highly acclaimed fiction for teens (including the groundbreaking LGBTQ Boy Meets Boy), and has now come out with this first book for the adult market, which I'm highlighting here because I think it will certainly cross over to his teen audience, particularly the older teens. The Lover's Dictionary is a love story, and despite its brevity it's a very intriguing read. Levithan constructs this relationship story out of words and their definitions, beginning with aberrant and ending with zenith. It's funny and romantic, yes, (no one does romantic quite like David Levithan) but also shadowed by anger, insecurity, betrayal. There's a lot of tenderness, but no sense of permanence. The relationship pictured is organic and fragile. I never lost the feeling that it was teetering on the edge of heartbreak, but the wordplay enherent in the form of the book lightens it considerably.

exacerbate, v.
"I believe your exact words were, 'You're getting too emotional.'"

The Lover's Dictionary feels very finely crafted to me, almost poetic. Each word is carefully considered yet often has an unexpected quality. Although Levithan is very out as a queer writer, the gender of the lovers in this story is subtly handled. The narrator addresses his lover as "you", and while the narrator is male, the "you" is left ambiguous. I think this gives the story a nice sense of openness and fluidity. In the end, it's the love that's the miracle, regardless of the lover's identities.

sancrosanct, adj.
The nape of your neck. Even the sound of the word nape sounds holy to me. That and the hollow of your neck, the peek of your chest that your shirt sometimes reveals. These are the stations of my quietest, most insistent desire.

Rich and Mad by William Nicholson

2011-04-15T11:47:00.000-07:00

"I've decided to fall in love," said Maddy Fisher.
Cath nodded to show she was listening, but did not look up from her magazine.
"I'm seriously serious. I'm too young to get married but I'm too old to be single. I need love."
"And sex," said Cath.
"Well, yes. But I'm not talking about a quick grope at a party. I'm talking about can't-eat can't-sleep crazy in love."
"Any idea who?" said Cath.
"Not a single clue."

It's been a long time since I've had the pleasure of reading such a convincing and absorbing chronicle of that adolescent rite of passage, first love. Nicholson's Rich and Mad is warm and thoughtful and optimistic, just like its protagonists. It's an easy book to fall into and get lost in. Nicholson is an established and respected fantasy writer who had a particular agenda with his first work of realistic fiction. I think the end result is complex yet beautifully balanced.

Rich and Mad is the story of Maddy Fisher and Rich Ross, British teens who are both rather quiet and, frankly, a bit nerdy. They're inexperienced in the field of romance and Rich, in particular, feels like a misfit. They long for love, without really knowing anyone of the opposite sex. Each of them, rather naively, becomes infatuated with someone they barely know: Rich with beautiful Grace, and Maddy with the charming and popular Joe Finnegan. Rich and Maddy become friends in the process of trying to woo their respective crushes, and when things with Grace and Joe fall apart, they support each other and gradually deeper feelings develop between them. They are kind to each other, and it is this kindness that engenders love. It's innocent and sweet, but Nicholson makes it seem natural and not sentimental.

Part of what gives Rich and Mad its depth, I think, is the way that Nicholson has contextualized this relationship. Rich and Maddy don't just experience love emotionally, they also give it a lot of thought. As Rich's feelings for Maddy are blossoming, his beloved grandmother is dying of a stroke. Maddy's antique dealer father has fallen in love with a woman far away in China and has come home to say goodbye to his wife and children in order to commit to this new relationship. Maddy's older sister and her friend Grace are struggling with abusive relationships. Rich is reading The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm and considering what it has to say. A lot of different voices are heard and a lot of different experiences are laid out here, some of them more somber than the one Nicholson is primarily developing, and each one feels quite individual.

In the final chapter, Rich and Maddy make love. Nicholson is quite descriptive here and the book jacket carries the warning "explicit content", I think mainly referring to this scene. I felt almost embarrassed reading it; I felt like I was intruding on the privacy of real people, which is not something I often feel when reading fictional accounts of sex. Nicholson captures a mood of tenderness and intimacy, and the encounter seems right and good in the context of the relationship. Rich and Maddy may not stay together forever, but what they have now is the real thing.

Hold Me Closer, Necromancer by Lish McBride

2011-04-04T17:06:00.000-07:00

I'll never be able to listen to that Elton John song the same way again. (Not that I listened to it a lot before...but now that one line has completely taken over my head...and I'm hearing it in Elton John's voice, too...oh dear lord!). After I read Hold Me Closer, Necromancer I googled the lyrics to Tiny Dancer and they're completely inane. Just begging to be reimagined.

As the titular pun demonstrates, this book is a little twisted. It's very funny, in a dry, scary, pull-no-punches sort of way. It's not afraid to go way past weird and embrace the downright bizarre, while somehow maintaining enough of a framework of normalcy (well, normalcy within the conventions of supernatural fiction--it does feature necromancers, witches, werewolves and a harbinger of death) to keep it grounded. Hold Me Closer, Necromancer is maybe not for everyone, but I sure got a kick out of it.

The story's beat-up hero is Sam (short for Samhain), a young university dropout who's eking out a living in Seattle at a burger joint with the enticing name of Plumpy's. Due to an unfortunately timed game of potato hockey (don't ask), Sam comes to the attention of a creepy alpha-necromancer named Douglas who isn't pleased to have an unknown necromancer (Sam) on his turf, even though Sam is apparently pretty low-voltage, powerwise. Sam, understandably, thinks that Douglas is a freaky madman, until Douglas sends Sam a message he can't ignore (this is where the bizarre-o-meter goes into hyperdrive). Now Sam and his motley pack of friends are racing to find out who Sam really is, what his powers are, and why he can't make them work. And when Douglas kidnaps Sam and throws him in an iron cage in a science-lab dungeon with an irate kidnapped werewolf girl, the stakes get really high.

What really makes this book work is the sharp way that McBride controls the tone, a sort of mashed-up gritty supernatural comedy noir. Sam's a great portrait of a teen drifter with a good heart, a guy who feels like a loser but ends up becoming one of the good guys as he comes into his power. If McBride writes a sequel, I'll read it in one hot second.

Now if only I could get that song out of my head...

Five Flavors of Dumb by Antony John

2011-03-24T13:45:00.000-07:00

"Could it be that after eighteen years Dad saw me that way--a poor girl struggling to be understood, who achieved self-sufficiency only by virtue of others' help?"

See, the title is kind of a joke. Dumb is the name of a hard-rock band in Anthony John's debut novel, and here the "dumb" refers to the IQ type of dumb, not the silent, uncommunicative type of dumb. (The "five flavors" refers to the bands five members.) However, Piper, the protagonist and narrator of Five Flavors, is deaf. Since her deafness developed at age 6, she can speak and lip-read, which allows her to function in the hearing world to a certain extent--she attends her neighbourhood high school, where she gets good grades and kicks the pants off the other chess club members without particularly trying. But although Piper is neither type of dumb, she is struggling with uncertainty about her future. For years her dream has been to attend Gallaudet University, a liberal-arts college for deaf students, "a place where I'd automatically fit in, instead of standing out in all the wrong ways." When her parents spend the college fund her grandparents left to her on a cochlear implant for her deaf baby sister Grace without even telling her, Piper is left with complicated feelings of frustration and powerlessness.

Wanting to stretch herself in new directions, Piper signs on as Dumb's manager, even though she can't hear a note they play. And this, for me, was when the book really came alive. Piper develops a lot of inner power on the road to shaping Dumb into a decent band--some of her challenges include the fact that the band can't play in synch, is the only hard rock band in the world with no drummer, and has no original songs. One of the guitarists is still learning to play guitar? The band spends more time arguing than practicing? The talk show host who has booked Dumb on her show is expecting an easy listening number? Piper takes it all on, and more, on the road to finding Dumb a place in garage-band rock history.

I'm sure there will be an audience for Dumb because of the deaf-heroine angle or the rock music angle, but I actually appreciated Piper's ferocious business smarts the most. John presents us with a heroine who is decisive, thinks strategically, and makes herself heard. I liked Piper a lot, and would recommend Five Flavors of Dumb to any girl thinking of engaging with the business world--it's never too soon to find yourself some inspiration!

Five Flavors of Dumb doesn't seem to have an official trailer, but I like this unofficial one, put together by the Arlington Public Library teen librarians:

Bink and Gollie by Kate DiCamillo and Alison McGhee

2011-03-12T08:59:00.000-08:00

Now, who could resist a cover like that? So fun. And fun is what this story's all about--Bink and Gollie, best buddies and partners in adventure and roller-skating.

Bink and Gollie has the look of an easy reader, with short chapters, lots of white space and illustrations on every page, but it's actually quite a vocabulary-stretcher, so in my household it worked best as a read-aloud. Kate DiCamillo is such an elegant writer, and her words just roll off the tongue. As evidenced by the cover portraits, Bink is kinda informal and very bouncy, while Gollie is considerably more calm and sophisticated, and their language certainly reflects that. Take this little exchange between the two, which takes place in a store selling multihued socks:

' "It's a sock bonanza!" said Bink.
"Indeed it is," said Gollie. "An extremely bright sock bonanza."
"I'll take this pair," said Bink.
"Bink," said Gollie, "the brightness of those socks pains me. I beg you not to purchase them."
"I can't wait to put them on," said Bink.'

Ewan and I had some hilarity with the lines:
'"Bink, I implore you, do not knock."
"What does implore mean?" asked Bink.'

(This is funniest if you give a lot of dramatic emphasis to the word "implore'.)

As usual with Candlewick, the book itself is beautifully put together, with thick glossy pages and bright expressive illustration, courtesy of Tony Fucile. Candlewick has even given it its own web site and book trailer! Bink and Gollie is the winner of the ALA's 2011 Theodore Seuss Geisel Award for most distinguished beginning reader book. Well deserved, I think.

Guyku: A Year of Haiku for Boys by Bob Raczka, Illustrated by Peter H. Reynolds

2011-02-11T09:43:00.000-08:00

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

The haiku is one of my favourite forms of poetry--I like how it captures and illuminates small moments. And Peter H. Reynolds is one of my favourite picture book creators--he hooked me with The Dot and I've loved him ever since. So you can imagine how quickly I grabbed Guyku off the new book shelf. I was not disappointed.

In his afterword, poet Bob Raczka explains why he thinks haiku is a great choice for budding young guy poets. Firstly, "a haiku is an observation of nature, and nature is a place where guys love to be." And secondly, haiku is always in the present tense, so "whatever happens in a haiku, it's happening right now. From my experience, guys are always interested in what's happening right now." I think Raczka has hit the mark with these lively and funny poems.

The Guyku website is also well worth a visit, and Raczka and Reynolds assure us that a Galku (or maybe Herku?) book will be along shortly. Can't wait!

A Few Chicklit Treats: Mostly Good Girls and Confessions of the Sullivan Sisters

2011-02-08T13:50:00.000-08:00

My two favourite girl books this month have a lot in common. They're both smart, fun, and captivating. They feature girls born to wealth and privilege, girls who are savvy, well-educated and have high aspirations. But just because they're well-dressed and ace their SATs doesn't mean we're not rooting for them--they're all strong, involving protagonists. There isn't a whiff of the typical rich girl/mean girl caricature lots of teen chick-lit indulges in here. If you're in the mood to read about girls who like and support each other despite their growing pains, you're in the right place.

Mostly Good Girls is narrated by Violet Tunis, a junior at Westfield School (an exclusive, private girl's academy) and longtime best friends with Katie Cabot. Violet is very goal-oriented and works hard to maintain her never- -quite-perfect grades. She edits the school literary magazine to boost her chances of getting into a good university. She's a straight-and-narrow kind of girl, and one of the things that draws her to Katie is Katie's slightly wild streak--Katie's into doing "projects" that seem like a good idea at the time, but end up getting them into hot water (like her plan for Violet and Katie to get rich by becoming pool sharks rather than babysitting, or her plan to offer new students a spooked-out "Harry Potter Tour" of their uptight private school). Over the course of the book, Katie starts to rebel against her over-privileged life, and Violet becomes more and more bewildered as her best friend starts to seem like a stranger.

Although the theme isn't particularly uproarious, what I found made Mostly Good Girls stand out for me was the humour. Sales fashions her book out of short, anecdotal chapters and gives Violet a wry, funny voice that kept me turning pages ("Awesome speeches, guys," I said in my last official lie as editor in chief."). One of my favourite chapters takes place at an editorial meeting for The Wisdom, the school literary magazine, where a truly awful poem about anorexia is being considered for publication. (I want to be thin/Because that means I win/...Hunger is a sin/As bad for you as a shark's fin/I would laugh and grin/If only I were thin") Violet attempts to hint that the poem, let's be honest, *totally sucks* while trying to maintain an air of impartiality. Meanwhile her staff offer kindly but obtuse critiques such as "I like the way she rhymed every line." Sales had me snorting with laughter as Violet becomes increasingly pointed about the obvious badness of the poem, which of course ends up being unanimously selected for publication. The whole scene is wickedly, deliciously funny. Mostly Good Girls is full of little scenes like this which add so much richness and personality to this story of a struggling but ultimately strong friendship.

Confessions of the Sullivan Sisters I liked for so many reasons. The plot is intricate and ingenious, and involves the matriarch of the Sullivan family (known as Almighty to her children and grandchildren) announcing that she will cut the family out of her will unless the family member who has mysteriously displeased her delivers a confession and apology in writing by New Year's Day. Norrie, Jane and Sassy each suspect that they may have aroused Almighty's displeasure (Norrie by standing up the handsome date Almighty has selected for her Cotillion and running off for a rebellious weekend in New York with her true love instead, Jane by publishing a tell-all blog called myevilfamily.com, and Sassy by killing Almighty's husband). Each writes a detailed confession in which it becomes clear that their sins are as complex as they are themselves. I'd love to have any one of these sisters as my real-life friends, which is, I think, a sign of a successful chick-lit story.

Here's a fun trailer for Mostly Good Girls:

Buddha Boy by Kathe Koja

2011-02-08T12:11:00.000-08:00

"Do you know the concept of karma? It's kind of like a circle, or cause-and-effect, like a slow-tolling bell you rang maybe a year ago, five years ago, maybe in another lifetime if you in believe that. Karma means that what you do today, and why you do it, makes you who you are forever: as if you were clay, and every thought and action left a mark in that clay, bent it, shaped it, even ruined it...but with karma there are no excuses, no explanations, no I-didn't-really-mean-it-so-can-I-have-some-more-clay. Karma takes everything you do very, very seriously."

Buddha Boy reminds me so much of Jerry Spinelli's YA classic Stargirl. It has a similar type of narrator, a regular kid who is drawn to an eccentric new student that none of his fellow students really understand. The narrator faces the same problem, whether to follow his heart and stand up for the friendship or follow the mean-spirited crowd. In both cases the title characters stand out due to their unusual creativity and willingness to act out non-mainstream ideas. Neither book ends exactly the way we want it to, and the maturation the narrators experience is the kind that comes from loss.

"So explain this, now: You wish, want, work for one thing, but instead something else happens, the thing you most dreaded, the thing you tried your best to stop. And then it turns out that what you wanted, all you wanted and more, stood hidden behind exactly what you didn't, and to get to one you had to take the other first.

Is that how life goes? Is that how life is supposed to go--like walking blindfolded and backwards to get to where you need to be? Or is it just karma, gods and lions and hungry ghosts, doing what it has to do?"

Buddha Boy is a short, thoughtful story about friendship and seeing under the surface of people. Justin is a kid who is content to be ordinary, in the middle, where "it's comfortable, it's easy, and it's safe". Buddha Boy, or Jinsen (his spiritual name, given to him by a Buddhist teacher, meaning "the fountain of God, the place where God springs up in the world") arrives in Justin's high school with his head shaved bald and a begging bowl instead of a lunch bag. Emulating a Buddhist monk, he baffles the student body and enrages the hotshot "kings of the school" with his odd appearance and pacifistic mindset. Justin and Jinsen are partnered for a class project, and Justin soon finds himself fascinated by Jinsen, his artistry and his zen view of life. The two boys form a bond which is tested as the school bullies home in on Jinsen with ever-increasing ferocity.

What I liked most about Buddha Boy, aside from the gorgeous, layered writing, was the complexity and fullness of characterization that Koja achieved while keeping her story simple. The reflective, ever-so-slightly poignant tone does nothing to diminish what Justin in the end takes from his friendship with Jinsen; the insight that inside, we're all gods, even those of us who are unaware.

My Swordhand is Singing by Marcus Sedgwick

2011-01-11T16:15:00.000-08:00

I love the title of this book--it resonates, I think, with those ancient epic poems about heroes and battles, victory and defeat, which so many cultures seem to have developed. It's a good choice for this story. Sedgwick is a strong and elegant writer who excels at transporting his readers to the past and steeping them in generous amounts of action and chilly atmosphere.

My Swordhand Is Singing is a vampire tale. It's not written in the current romantic "Bella and Edward" vein; rather, it is rooted in old Eastern European folklore in which vampires were terrifying, deeply evil, and often quite disgusting to look at. The folkloric motifs in this story are many--woodcutters, small villages surrounded by the dense wintry gloom of "Mother Forest", gypsies, magical songs and unearthly, unseen characters known as the Shadow Queen and the Winter King. The charms and defenses against vampires that feature here are equally folkloric--garlic, millet, hawthorne, nets flung into graves. An archaic ritual, the Wedding of the Dead, plays a pivotal role in the plot. Sedgwick uses these old beliefs and traditions to create a feeling of historic authenticity, albeit one where the supernatural is dark and dreadful and thrives in the shadows of the natural world.

Sedgwick's story concerns the lives of the woodcutter Tomas and his son Peter, nomads who have recently moved to a hut outside the village of Chust, where villagers view them with xenophobic suspicion. Tomas is a troubled, violent man who drinks more than he works, and who has been keeping many secrets from his son. I won't reveal exactly what they are, but they relate to his warrior past. When a plague of vampires sweeps the village and both his father and the village elders are in denial, Peter responds to try and protect his sweetheart, drawing his father into danger as well.

Sedgwick creates some striking images, such as the vampire whose tongue slices through his victim's neck, or the grave with the hole just big enough for Peter to glimpse the corpse's eye, which suddenly opens. However, the chills are nicely balanced by the wholesomeness of Peter's character, which is always humble but grows in courage, determination and maturity. This is a startling and satisfying book, an exciting story memorably told.

BioGraphic Novel Series: The 14th Dalai Lama by Tetsu Saiwai

2011-01-10T08:56:00.000-08:00

"Children are our most precious treasure. If well-informed and educated, they can preserve Tibetan culture and further develop it for a hopeful future."

The 14th Dalai Lama is exactly the type of book which inspired me to specialize, as a librarian, in literature for young people, and the type of book which continues to keep me inspired in this field. Who could not be thrilled with the opportunity to introduce the world's future generations to such a visionary world figure, presented in such an artistic and engaging manner?

The 14th Dalai Lama is a product of an independent Japanese manga studio called Emotional Content, which is producing a series of high-quality manga biographies about people the founder considers to be the true superheros of our world, people such as Ghandi, Mother Teresa, and Che Guevara. Emotional Content's founder, Eiji Han Shimizu, believes that "we can learn the value of compassion, history and philosophy through manga", and considers Emotional Content's manga biographies to be one of Japan's contributions to global political and philosophical discourse.

This book focuses on the Dalai Lama's early years, from his early childhood until his mid-twenties. These were the primary years of his training in the philosophies of Tibetan Buddhism, and were also the years of China's invasion of Tibet, with all of its attendant political ramifications. We see the beginning of the Dalai Lama's steadfast maintenance of a philosophy of non-violence, even under extreme political duress. We also see the passionate love for his country and culture that he has also maintained, even in exile. This extraordinary childhood and young adulthood is shown vividly and dramatically, and is sure to fascinate young readers interested in peace, spirituality, world politics, or the lives of great men.

Resistance Book 1 by Carla Jablonski and Leland Purvis

2011-01-09T10:38:00.000-08:00

First off, I'm really intrigued by this cover art. I think it sets us up brilliantly for what's to come. At first glance the cover seems comical, like a political cartoon--a faceless Nazi, all unknowing, about to get bonked on the helmet by some impish child's toy slingshot. But a full view (the art wraps around the back) shows us Paul Tessier, one of the child protagonists of Resistance, getting ready to release the slingshot, a look of ferocious determination on his face. His grim expression immediately sombers the mood of the image, recalling us to the truth--Paul may have a slingshot, but his target has a gun and won't hesitate to use it. He may be the biblical David to the Nazi Goliath, but the odds are heavily weighted against him. Resistance may cost Paul his life.

Resistance Book 1 is the first of a trilogy of graphic books for children set in France during the Nazi occupation. It centres around Paul and Marie Tessier, young siblings whose father is being held as a prisoner of war by the German army. When their Jewish friend Henri's parents are taken by the Nazis while he happens to be away from home, they conspire to hide him in the wine cellars of their family's vineyards. When Paul discovers that their farmhand Jacques is a member of a resistance group, he begs to join, and the group decides that Paul and Marie's youth might be an asset. The two children and their older sister end up taking a terrifying journey to Paris to reunite Henri with his rescued parents.

Resistance is a thoughtful book that reads fluidly and is full of telling detail. From the paranoid secrecy of the time to the squabbles brought on by fear and tension, it's all very believable. Paul is an artist, and his sketchbook gives us additional insight into his feelings as the story progresses. The author's note at the end reminds us not to make hasty judgments.

" Living in a country that has never been occupied...it is hard to imagine the pressures people faced. These pressures were both external (physical threats, lack of food, disappearing neighbours) and internal (fear, family loyalty, national pride, belief systems) and they influenced the choices people made. What seems obvious to us now was probably not at all obvious to anyone then...Each French citizen...had their own story, their own personal concerns to weigh, risks to assess with no idea of how things would turn out, or even what the next day would bring. Sometimes [their] choices were regrettable, sometimes noble. All were difficult."

Defiance, the second book in the Resistance trilogy, is coming out July 2011.

You by Charles Benoit

2011-01-07T10:27:00.000-08:00

"When I started You, I knew I wanted a book that had a WTF? ending (that stands for Wild, Thought-provoking Finish). I wanted readers to be, shall we say, uncomfortable with how it ends. I wanted them to get involved and figure it all out. That was the goal--to what degree I hit it is up to the reader."
Charles Benoit

Well, I think Mr. Benoit definitely hit the bulls-eye.

You is an unusual book in several ways. It's got massive reluctant-reader appeal, with its gripping opening ("You're surprised at all the blood"), tight pacing and adroit suspense. It reminds me a lot of Gentlemen, which I reviewed back in 2010. Like Gentlemen, You has a punchy literary style, draws readers into the narration with an urgency I would call relentless, and generates questions almost as fast as you can turn the pages. In short, it's that oxymoronic, almost impossible thing, a challenging easy read.

The highlight of this book for me was the narrative voice. Benoit has used a second-person narrative style, very unusual in teen fiction because it's so difficult to pull off well. He pulls it off superbly, and as a result I found that my investment and interest in the main character, with all his faults, was strong. The second-person voice also lets Benoit pose his questions quite explicitly and directly to us, the reader, blasting us out of the voyeuristic passivity which readers can sometimes let themselves be lulled into. You is in no way a passive read.

"Think.
When did it go wrong?
The break-in?
No, before that.
The party?
That was part of it, but that wasn't when it started.
Zack?
Of course, yeah, it would be easy to say it was Zack. But that's not it, is it?"

Here's a link to Charles Benoit talking about You. Enjoy!

Picture Book Roundup: What Ewan and I Are Currently Laughing Our Heads Off At

2010-12-18T11:38:00.000-08:00

A recent article in the New York Times remarks on the decline in picture book sales in 2010, and posits that parents are hurrying their kindergarten and grade 1 children into "big kid" or chapter books in order to prepare them for academia. Not in our house, mister! I love picture books (what's not to love? They have PICTURES!), and I love reading them with Ewan, my book-devouring second grader. And I don't for one second subscribe to the idea that picture books will dumb him down. In fact, I believe that the use of humour in many picture books can be way more sophisticated than in chapter books, because the interplay between text and picture is so open to dramatic possibility. And don't even get me started on vocabulary--a little soporific lettuce, anyone? So, here's a roundup of some of the smart and funny picture books Ewan and I have been kicking back with this week.

Let's start will Melanie Watt, shall we? Have I Got a Book for You! is a hilarious spoof of pushy salespeople, particularly those on T.V. infomercials. The whole story is the salesman trying to sell us the book. Talk about meta-fiction. It wouldn't work half as well without the pictures, which show us:
1) exactly how satisfied Mr. Al Foxword's previous customers are,
2) why we should buy Al's book RIGHT NOW!, and
3) what we can do with not one, but two of Al's awesome books (or how about 742 of them...to make the Book Fort you've always wanted!)

Ah, the delicious, ridiculous irony of it all....and by the way, gotta love that surprise on the last page!

Michael Ian Black's new book, A Pig Parade is a Terrible Idea, is kind of the opposite of Have I Got a Book For You! This book assumes we're sold on a crazy idea ("Like most children, you have probably thought to yourself at one time or another, I bet a pig parade would be a lot of fun.") and goes to enormous lengths to persuade us of its potential for disaster. Pigs don't march, they snuffle, and "snuffling is simply an inappropriate way to conduct yourself along a parade route.". They won't wear those snappy majorette uniforms, and they prefer sad country ballads to "good, spirited marching-band music". They also don't see the point of floats. Even pig-themed floats. And if you try explaining any of these things to a pig, "they just look at you as if you are speaking a language they do not understand." Pictures showing pigs destroying marching band instruments and wreaking havoc with snappy majorette uniforms, never mind getting their snouts stuck in the used bubble gum on city sidewalks, clearly demonstrate that this writer knows what he's talking about. Ix-nay on the Pig Parade, already!

David Bruins and Hilary Leung's Ninja Cowboy Bear Presents the Way of the Ninja is a friendship story that illustrates what can happen when one member of a group is more adventurous than the others. Ninja, cowboy and bear are friends. "When they got together it usually led to merrymaking, buffoonery and hilarity." But sometimes cowboy and bear are too sedate for rambunctious ninja. When cowboy wants to paint, ninja wants to jump on beds. When bear wants to pick flowers, ninja wants to climb trees and poke bee's nests. To ninja, a swing isn't a swing, it's a launchpad. Let's shoot for the stars! But when cowboy and bear get hurt playing with ninja, he thinks they are poor sports. How the spirited ninja learns to include his friends in his wild play makes for a story that is both funny and sweet.

And, last but definitely not least, Olivia Helps With Christmas. As in all the Olivia books, the visuals are everything. They show us every nuance of the drama, and with Olivia, we know there's got to be drama, yes? The opening spread ('Twas the day before Christmas. Olivia and her family had been out all morning, busy with last-minute shopping. Olivia was exhausted, yet there was still so much to do.") features a picture of Olivia's Mom and Dad, juggling packages, trees and children but looking pretty spry, following a bedraggled, burnt-out Olivia, who, as Ewan delightedly points out, isn't carrying one single thing! Christmas morning brings us a shot of Olivia and her two little brothers bounding downstairs, mouths open wide, beneath the dry line "noiselessly they crept down the stairs.". My very favourite page is where we learn that "Some of Santa's offerings were better than others. Pajamas. Skis! Sweater. Sled! Booties. Maracas!", with correspondingly glum and lively faces on the gift recipients. Santas of the world, listen up: sleds and maracas will trump pajamas and booties every time! 'Nuff said.

Keeper by Kathi Appelt

2010-12-15T12:32:00.000-08:00

Kathi Appelt set a very high bar for herself with her previous novel The Underneath, a richly magical tale set in the Texas bayou, which was lauded as a modern classic reminiscent of Sounder and The Yearling. In my opinion it was much more sophisticated than these older stories, although it did center similarly around the emotional lives of animals and their vulnerability to human interference. Keeper, published this year, is an equally lovely but lighter story, maintaining the depth and mystery of The Underneath but conjuring up a tone of poignancy rather than suspense and heartbreak.

Appelt is a literary writer and her style is an important part of the reading experience. It's the kind of style you either like or you don't. This is a meandering story, which moves backwards and forwards in time and follows many different points of view. The pacing is leisurely. The imagery is skilled and poetic. This is not a book to race through, but a book to wander with and enjoy. However, Appelt is not one to let her wanderings lead nowhere--she knows exactly where she is taking us. She is taking us into the heart of family, into the heart of belonging.

Keeper is a ten-year-old girl having a bad day before a blue moon. The problem is, blue moon days are rare and special, and the people Keeper loves most in the world have had dreams and wishes centered around this particular blue moon. Signe wants to make her seductive blue moon crab gumbo. Dogie wants to sing "marry me" to Signe. Mr. Beauchamp wants to see his mysterious lost love, Jack, one last time. But Keeper has ruined the gumbo, burned the gumbo pot, broken the ukelele and let the dog destroy Mr. Beauchamp's night-blooming cyrus. Overwhelmed by her problems, Keeper decides to take a boat out to the sandbar at night to meet Meggie Marie, her mermaid mother, in hopes that a mother's love can help her solve her problems. But in the dark of the night, Keeper's small boat is swept out to sea and she loses an oar. There are no mermaids sparkling around the sandbar. And despite the blue moon shining in the sky, Keeper can no longer find her way home.

This is the kind of story where we experience loss only so we can also experience the joy of being found. By the end of the story, Keeper has found her true mother, Dogie and Signe have found what they mean to each other, and Mr. Beauchamp...well, what he finds is most miraculous at all. I have to say that I took great pleasure in how matter-of-factly Appelt has woven the romance of these two old men, one with "wrinkles upon wrinkles" and one "as old as barnacles", into her tale of inclusion. The image of Mr. Beauchamp and Jacques de Mer holding hands was, for me, one of the loveliest in this whole lovely story.

The Book of Everything by Guus Kuijer

2010-12-02T15:17:00.000-08:00

"Come on, love. Come and join us", Thomas whispered.
"What did you say?" asked a familiar voice.
Thomas couldn't keep his eyes open, he was so sleepy.
"I said, 'Come on, love, come and join us,'" he murmured.
"Okay", said Jesus. The Lord sat down on the edge of Thomas's bed.

This little book came out a few years ago, and I thought it was wonderful. Every few years I start to wonder if it really is as good as I remember it, and I spend some time curled up with it again. Yes, it is just as good.

The Book of Everything was originally published in the Netherlands, where Guus Kuijer is a well established writer. I think it's one of the best examples of magic realism in children's fiction I've ever seen. The mood Kuijer conjures up is hard to describe--the themes are shadowy and threatening, and Thomas, our child protagonist, is very innocent, so we feel protective of him. At the same time, there are some fiesty, powerful characters, like Aunt Pie and Mrs. van Amersfoort, who champion the side of right. There's a sense of wonder and even humour at the unexpected occurances in the story, and just a hint of awe at the glimpses of the Divine we are privileged to see through Thomas's eyes. This is a story where the biblical merges with the supernatural to unusual and beautiful effect. As Patrice Kindl said, "this book glows".

The Book of Everything is about the disconnection that can occur between God and religion. It's about the pain that can hide in the heart of families living with abuse, the pain that mirrors the darkness of the world. It's also about bravery and the secret of happiness. It's about miracles and witchcraft. But most of all, it's about Thomas, a young boy who sees things no one else can see, a boy who wants to be happy when he grows up. A boy who all the angels in heaven are hopelessly in love with. And probably a few readers too.

Revolver by Marcus Sedgwick

2010-11-24T13:35:00.000-08:00

"One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it."
Anton Chekov

"My mother's children are not murderers."
Sig Andersson, Revolver

I'm really interested in the first lines of books. I think a strong first line sets the tone for the whole story, and I actually have a little collection in my head of favourite first lines of novels. Revolver opens with a one-line paragraph: "Even the dead tell stories." This book had me at the first sentence.

Revolver is the best frontier novel I've ever read. It's stunning, really. It reads like the kind of book that's been polished and pared down again and again and again until there is nothing left but the pure crackling light of the story. Every word counts. Chapters begin with the shortest of sentences. "How things unwind." , for example. Yet despite it's spare frame it features a dramatically tense plot, an almost visceral sense of place and time, and beautiful characterization. At the heart of this intelligent book is the working out of an implacable ethical question: is it right to shoot another to save oneself?

Revolver is alternatingly set in 1910 in Giron, a small Swedish settlement north of the Arctic circle, and Nome, Alaska, in the late 1800s (the gold rush period). Sig Andersson, a young man living with his father, stepmother, and older sister in Giron, has just discovered the icy corpse of his father, who had fallen partway through the ice while driving over a lake by dogsled. The lake Einar himself has warned his son never to cross.   Sig's sister and stepmother leave to get help from neighbours who live miles away, and Sig is left alone in the cabin with his thoughts and his father's frozen corpse. But then a stranger breaks in, a man who claims that Sig's father had cheated him out of a fortune in gold. The stranger wants the gold back, and he has a gun.

Revolver is really so perfectly plotted that I don't want to spoil the story for anyone. But the decision Sig must eventually make is whether to accept the practical philosophy of his father (" 'A gun is not a weapon"' Einar once said to Sig. 'It's an answer. It's an answer to the questions life throws at you when there's no one around to help.") or the ideals of his mother, a devoted Christian who believed in nonviolence and forgiveness. His very survival depends on what he chooses, and Sedgwick makes us feel the weight of that all the way through this gripping story.

Teen Fiction Book Trailers

2010-10-23T11:11:00.000-07:00

Here are a few book trailers that caught my fancy....

I Read Twilight (And I Liked It)

Kraken are the New Vampires

Now here's a neat official trailer for Leviathan...reminds me a bit of shadow puppetry...

A cartoon trailer for the tween graphic novel Smile:

And here are some still images.

Glimpse by Carol Lynch Williams

2010-09-17T09:46:00.000-07:00

"An edge-of-the-seat thriller written in sharp, glinting shards of words. Fantastic!"
Tim Wynne-Jones

Glimpse is an example of the verse novel at its finest. It follows the emotional trajectory of 12-year-old Hope, who one day walks in on her older sister Lizzie holding a gun, thinking about shooting herself. Lizzie ends up hospitalized with near-catatonic depression, and Hope is desperate to understand why.

The love between these sisters is beautifully realized and totally convincing. It is the light in a very dark story, because, as we slowly realize, Lizzie is being badly abused by her mother, a prostitute who is forcing Lizzie to follow in her footsteps. Hope has been kept sheltered by Lizzie, which is how her mother has been keeping Lizzie compliant (she threatens that if Lizzie tells anyone, she will press Hope into service as well). There is a strong quality of protectiveness in the relationship between the two girls, and Hope has many memories of being protected by Lizzie's extraordinary courage, which is a strong contrast to their mother's self-centeredness.

Once,
a long time ago,
Momma
took us to the river.

I was little,
just learning to swim.
Momma fastened an orange
Styrofoam bubble around
my waist to keep me afloat....

I love my babies,
Momma said.
Run into the water, Hope...

Momma was quiet a moment,
then she said,
Moccasins.
My God, they're moccasins.
Run, Hope.
Run, Liz.

The snakes must have
seen us by then. They
turned in our direction.

Momma didn't pick a thing up.
Not the umbrella,
not the towel she sat on,
Not even that sweet smelling
olive oil.

She just ran,
leaving me and Liz behind.

Wait,
Liz hollered after her.
Wait for us.
Liz grabbed
me by the hand
but all of a sudden
I couldn't even move.

Baby,
Lizzie said.
Come on.

She tried to pick me up,
but that bubble
made it hard.

Now the snakes were
on land and coming fast,
so fast,
and I couldn't move.

Come on, Liz, Hope,
Momma called.
She was a good ways away.

The rain kept coming down
all silver looking.
It ran in my eyes.

Liz!
Just leave Hope there,
Momma called.
Her voice was scared.
Leave her and run to me.

Liz grabbed the belt
of the bubble and
pulled me along,
like you might a pup
tha didn't want to follow.

Liz screamed,
Hope.

Now the snakes were so close
I could see their eyes.
One opened its mouth
and I saw the white cotton.

Run,
Liz screamed at me.
And somehow
I could move.

We ran

together.

Williams' storytelling is spare and beautiful. As glimpses of Hope's memories and observations accumulate, she begins to understand that there is a secret between their mother and Lizzie which is somehow at the root of Lizzie's despair. Williams conveys Hope's fear of learning the nature of this secret and knowing what Lizzie has gone through, and her guilt as she slowly realizes that Lizzie had been obliquely asking for help without Hope understanding. Hope in the end becomes her sister's protector, unveiling the truth through the diary which Lizzie had left for her to find and confronting their predatory mother, who flees rather than face the authorities.

Glimpse is a strong book that sometimes hurts to read, a book where home is "haunted" by bad dreams that turn out to be real. It's a page-turner which skillfully captures the point of view of a 12-year-old enmeshed in frighteningly adult situations. But there is a tenderness to this book all the same. This is the kind of book where you feel that the author cares deeply about her characters, and you're glad, because you care too. I'm glad that Williams leavened the ending with some surrogate parent figures stepping in; a kindly neighbour to foster the girls, a caring psychiatrist to help both sisters heal emotionally. I was so invested in Hope and, through her, in Lizzie, that I would have found the story unbearably bleak otherwise. It is, in the end, a story about love, about those who are capable of giving it and those who aren't. It's a story I could easily re-read many times. I won't forget it soon.

Me & Death, an Afterlife Adventure by Richard Scrimger

2010-09-02T12:40:00.000-07:00

"Do you know what a ghost is, Jim? A ghost is a guy who was a piece of crap when he was alive."
"But you weren't!" I said. "You were the bomb. I thought you were the coolest!"
"I lied, I stole, I hurt people. I let them down. I was a bad guy, Jim."
I struggled with this. "Yeah, but you were a good bad guy," I said.

Jim is a 14-year-old junior gangster who lives in Roncesvalles with his alcoholic mother and his unpleasant, sometimes crazy-seeming sister. He skips school, steals, insults his neighbours, kicks cats, and bullies a kid named Lloyd. Nothing much to like here. So who could be surprised when Jim gets hit by a car and sees the ghost of Tadeusz, who used to collect rents along Roncy "with a baseball bat", waiting to teach him what the afterlife is like for bad guys. Tadeusz kicks off a Scrooge-type reform program for Jim, complete with ghosts, visions of the past, and important life lessons. Jim's sure to emerge from his coma a changed person--or is he?

I find Scrimger as a writer is kind of hit-and-miss (as a person he's hysterical, if you get a chance to see him talk, definitely go) but this latest book is big-time wonderful. It's emotionally compelling in a way that I don't think he's ever been before. Jim's voice is so authentic. You can see that he's never been exposed to any, shall we say, alternate moral paradigms. Scrimger's writing is always funny, that's his trademark, but here it's funny in a darker and older way than in his previous books. I think Scrimger is developing a wicked gift for characterization. His ghosts are full-bodied, not flat like Dickens' are. They have backstories and afterlives of their own. And unlike Dickens' Scrooge, when Jim wakes up, he's got a lot more to do than just hand out geese and Christmas bonuses. He has some scary amends to make.

I sound like I'm doing a bit of Dickens bashing here, but I don't mean to. I love A Christmas Carol and used to re-read it every year before Christmas when I was a teen and a long time afterwards. All I'm saying is, Scrimger takes the story, runs with it and makes it his own. And I think he's done a great job.

Dragonbreath by Ursula Vernon

2010-07-29T16:03:00.000-07:00

This was better than school. The only locker for a hundred miles belonged to Davy Jones. He was still the only dragon in a crew of frogs and lizards, but now he was the terror of the seas! No one made fun of his mythical status, or he'd make them walk the plank!

There was just one problem...where was that beeping coming from?

The beeping, alas, is from Danny Dragonbreath's alarm clock, waking him from his magnificent piratical dream to the mundane reality of yet another school day. Not only is Danny always getting picked on for being the only mythical creature in his school (otherwise populated by reptiles and amphibians), but he has neglected to do his science paper on oceans, due today. Picking his nerdy best friend's brain doesn't help--all Wendell knows about the ocean is that it's big, wet, salty, and has fish in it. Danny gets a big fat red F and has to rewrite, prompting a visit to his cousin Edward the Sea Monster, who gives Danny and Wendell a guided tour of the ocean world.

Such is the plot of Dragonbreath, the first volume in a lively new series by Ursula Vernon. Dragonbreath's playful prose is complemented by many delightful pages of comic-style illustration, all done in a palette of green, black and white. The illustration reminded me a little of the Babymouse books, with its perky representations of anthropomorphized animals and their vivid imaginations. I would say that the reading level of the Dragonbreath series is just a smidgen higher than Babymouse, mostly due to the chapters of plain text. But the entertainment value of Dragonbreath is every bit as high...and that's saying something.

Ewan's favourite line: "AGGGH! The scurvy! It burns! ". Dramatic, yes?

My Favourite Cupcake Queen

2010-07-03T06:49:00.000-07:00

I just get such a kick out of the Babymouse books. I can't resist sharing this, courtesy of Unshelved, a library webcomic I also think is great. Jennifer and Matt sum it up better than I ever could:

A Little Less Dumb than I Would've Been: The Photographer by Guilbert, Lefevre, and Lemercier

2010-06-30T14:17:00.000-07:00

"It's hard to describe all that the Afghans gave us," Robert observed. "I reckon that thanks to them we're just a little less dumb than we would've been".

I don't normally review adult books here, but I'm making an exception for The Photographer, since I think it has such great "crossover potential", as we say in the biz; in other words, I think many older teens could get a lot out of it. I sure did.

The Photographer is a collaboration between Didier Lefevre, photographer, and his close friend Emmanuel Guilbert, graphic novelist. In July of 1986 Didier agreed to accompany a group of medical professionals from MSF (Doctors Without Borders) who were setting up a clinic in rural Afghanistan. His task as a photojournalist was to document the group's journey to their destination and the work of the clinic they set up. He came home to his native France three months later with four thousand photographs. Six were published that year in a French newspaper. Some of the remainder were published in Didier's 2002 photography book Voyages en Afghanistan. Many more appear throughout the remarkable pages of this book.

What this book gave me was a sense of really being shown, in the finest detail, another, very foreign, part of the world under the heightened circumstances of war. The sense of immediacy Didier's photographs give the book is really profound. In an interview, Guibert explains that The Photographer is really documenting three different things; the work that goes into photojournalism, the work of NGO medical aide groups such as Medicins Sans Frontiers, and the lives of the people in certain regions of Afghanistan at a particular moment in history. I found each thread fascinating. Much of it surprised me--for example, I was shocked at the huge task it was for the party to simply get to their destination. Because Soviet troops were controlling the roads, Didier, the doctors, and their guides walked overland for several weeks to reach the rural community they were there to treat. By "walking overland" I mean crossing mountains on foot, sometimes in the dark to avoid being fired on by Soviet planes. This was a physically gruelling experience that left Didier stripped of all his body fat. On the other hand, I was moved by the many photographs of elderly Afghani men carrying their grandchildren around on their backs and otherwise caring for their grandsons and granddaughters. These aren't images I would have expected to come out of a patriarchal Islamic culture.

Here are some parting images from Didier's camera:

Mercury by Hope Larson

2010-06-21T17:24:00.000-07:00

I've always been interested in Hope Larson's graphic books, which are so graceful and elegant and dreamily imaginative. Up until now, my favourites have been the earlier ones, Salamander Dream and Gray Horses. Despite their simplicity and lightness I find them linger-worthy. Larson's latest has a more complex, plot-driven story than her early work and is perfectly suited for tween girls who like romance, family dramas, or historical fiction but like them a little off-beat.

Mercury is deliciously shadowy and mystical, with a very strong sense of place. It's set in a small Nova Scotian community, French Hill, at two different points in history. Larson does a beautiful job of showing us the landscape of that part of the world, beginning with a gorgeous five-page sequence showing the passing of time from the 1400s onwards, and the marks that various groups of humans have left on the land that becomes French Hill. Her landscape includes some supernatural creatures which blend in with the forests and skies while adding an otherworldly dimension.

Larson shifts us back and forth between the years 1859 and 2009 as we follow the separate stories of two young teens, Josey Fraser and her modern look-alike and descendant, Tara Fraser. Josey's story involves a mysterious young man, Asa, who appears at her family farm claiming to have found gold on their land. As he becomes more involved with her and her family, Josey develops feelings for Asa. These lead lead her to clash with her mother, who views Asa with deep suspicion. Tara, meanwhile, is in conflict with her mother around the fate of the family homestead, which has burned down. Their two stories are linked not only by kinship and location but also by a secret treasure.

I loved both the writing and the visuals in this book and felt that they complemented each other perfectly. Larson is a true artist and a wonderful storyteller, all rolled up into one great package. I look forward to reading more of her work.

Beware the Brontesaurus!

2010-05-26T10:13:00.001-07:00

A Miniature World: The Night Fairy by Laura Amy Schlitz

2010-05-26T08:54:00.000-07:00

This is really a tiny treasure of a book, and it comes so beautifully wrapped. Before reading a word I was impressed by its beautiful thick glossy paper, rich shimmery blue-black endpapers, elegant typesetting, and the lovingly detailed, full-colour illustrations by British illustrator Angela Barrett. The level of craftsmanship that has gone into creating this book prepares its audience well for the special experience of reading it.

Laura Amy Schlitz, a Newbery medal winner for Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village, makes me realize just how flat and boring those popular fairy series books that girls have been reading for the past few years really are. Her writing overflows with intelligence, imagination, literary quality, and respect for its audience. I love how she uses vocabulary that is so flavourful and precise, vocabulary which I'm guessing will gently stretch a lot of children's boundaries while never overwhelming them:

"On the night of Flory's peril, she was less than three months old. It was a windy night: cool and sweet with springtime. Flory was coasting on the breeze, letting it toss her wherever it liked. She was still very tiny--as tall as an acorn--and her green wings glittered in the moonlight. A little brown bat swooped down upon her, caught her, and crunched up her wings."

One of the many things I loved about this book was its depiction of the natural world. Fairies are the only supernatural entities in this book, and Flory is actually the only fairy we ever see. A night fairy by virtue of her time of birth, she turns herself into a day creature when she loses her flight, and makes her home in the garden of a "giantess" (in the birdhouse, actually). Her life there is populated with squirrels and raccoons and hummingbirds and insects and spiders. The animals talk to her, but otherwise they stay completely in character. Flory is not altogether benevolent at first; she can be selfish and irritable, and it is interesting to see how organically her feelings develop:

"Flory felt a funny ache in her throat. She was not the kind of fairy who cried easily, and she didn't think the hummingbird cried at all. But the words "the chicks will die" made her feel queer, as if her heart were swollen and sore. She gave herself a little shake, trying to replace the queer feeling with crossness...".

Schlitz's writing contains echoes of The Secret Garden in places; doesn't that paragraph read like it could be about Mary Lennox? And in the end, Flory's wings regrow and she is at last able to fly again, just like Colin is able to walk.

Much of the fascination in The Night Fairy comes from seeing our world in miniature through Flory's perceptive eyes. It's also a treat to see how resourceful and adventurous she becomes, as the lone fairy in her environment. This would be a beautiful read-aloud or the perfect book for an imaginative child to curl up with on a summer afternoon.

Princess of the Midnight Ball by Jessica Day George

2010-05-22T12:19:00.000-07:00

Oh my gosh, what a lovely romantic book this is. I can totally see a well-worn (but still impeccably clean) copy of this sitting on a teenage Emma Pillsbury's bookshelf, right next to Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and Perrault's Fairy Tales.

Jessica Day George, author of Sun and Wind, Ice and Snow, has given us another beautifully executed and bewitching fairy-tale-turned-novel. Princess of the Midnight Ball is based on the Grimm story The Twelve Dancing Princesses, in which twelve princesses disappear nightly into a magical land below the earth with trees of silver and leaves of gold, to dance the night away. The king, their father, offers a reward of marriage to the prince who can discover why his daughters' dancing slippers are fresh each evening and worn out by morning. After various princes fail to do so, a soldier succeeds in the task with the help of a cloak of invisibility, and is rewarded with a princess and a kingdom.

George's version sticks closely to the original plot, but it's the embellishments that make it special. The soldier, Galen, is a wonderful character. Raised by a soldier father and a mother who washed the soldier's clothes, Galen has no love for battle and is glad to return to civilian life at the end of the war. He finds work as the apprentice to his uncle, Master Gardener at the Royal Palace. It's sweet to see him courting the eldest Princess, Rose, as he works among the flowers. And he knits, too! He's an interesting blend of valour and domesticity. The older princesses are well-developed characters, Princess Rose in particular. I liked how they have so much family feeling and are so protective of each other throughout the story, and how interested they are in Galen, even though he is a servant.

I always found the original Twelve Dancing Princesses to have an eerie, otherworldly mood. It's not altogether clear what kind of magic creates the opulent underground kingdom, and whether the princesses go willingly to their ball. Princess of the Midnight Ball darkens this otherwordly quality; here, the girls are trapped by a bargain their dead mother made with the fearful King Under Stone, who rules the underground land (truly an underworld) with a cold and relentless hand. They cannot speak of the curse they are under, and when they try and rebel by staying away, the sons of the King Under Stone erupt into the Palace garden and climb the Palace walls as a warning. They are menacing presences, these sons, and the story's suspense builds when the ultimate goal of the King Under Stone, to have the twelve princesses marry his twelve sons, is revealed.

The daylight world, in contrast, is downright pastoral. Although there are hints here and there of an impoverished, war-torn kingdom, the bulk of the daytime action takes place in the Palace or its lush gardens, which are so descriptively drawn you can practically smell them. The king is kindly, Galen and Rose are exceedingly well-matched, and when the King Under Stone is finally defeated, there is no doubt that our new friends will all live happily ever after.

Nothing Like You by Lauren Strasnick

2010-05-21T13:47:00.000-07:00

"Holly". The way he kept saying my name over and over made me feel so totally small. "You're not my girlfriend." You're not my girlfriend. You're not my girlfriend. It echoed in my ear. I hate you, I thought as he dragged me across the taupe-colored field to the bleachers. We ducked underneath. "Do we need to set some ground rules?...I like you, Holly, I do. But I'm not going to do all this girlfriend-boyfriend bullshit with you, okay? I already have one relationship I have to manage...What we have should be easy."

I remember a few years ago reading an article in one of our city newspapers about how the "friends with benefits" relationship trend is aging down to high schoolers and even middle schoolers, who apparently now don't bother with crushes, courting, or building relationships. According to this article, arranging with an acquaintance in one's social circle to meet for sex, rather than dating and all it entails, is now an accepted norm for some teens. This struck me as kind of bizarre and creepy at the time, not to mention prematurely jaded. After all, loving emotional bonds are one of the chief pleasures of life. And learning how to form and maintain romantic connections is widely considered to be one of the important developmental tasks of adolescence and early adulthood. Who wants to reach adulthood knowing nothing about romance?

Nothing Like You confirms my initial impression. This kind of relationship is indeed bizarre and creepy. Especially if you're in denial about being in emotional crisis, and your partner is a borderline sociopath.

The book opens with Holly, our protagonist, losing her virginity to Paul in the back seat of his stale, smelly car. She wonders " if this feels any different when you love the person or when you do it lying down on a bed.". Paul already has a girlfriend, Saskia, who is lovely and popular, and Holly knows that what she is doing with Paul isn't going to change that. But she is emotionally numb after losing her mother to cancer, and Paul's physicality somehow makes her feel less frozen.

Paul begins sneaking into Holly's bedroom several nights a week, while making the boundaries of their relationship very clear. He doesn't want to talk to, touch, or acknowledge Holly at school, or anywhere they might be seen together. No one is to know about them, especially not Saskia. It becomes more and more of a mystery to me why Holly stays with him, really, because he just gets colder and nastier as the story goes on. Meanwhile, Saskia and Holly wind up getting to know each other after being partnered for a school project, and Holly's best friend Nils, seeing how troubled Holly is, tries unsuccessfully to reach out to her.

Holly makes some pretty poor decisions in this book, and although you sense that they're really all about her grief at her mother's death, that grief is never directly addressed. There's a dingy sense of worthlessness that seems to follow her around like a cloud, and when she is outed as Paul's sexual partner and comes into school to find the word "whore" written on her locker and no one speaking to her, it simply serves to bring her outer world into correspondence with her depressing inner world.

Strasnick has written a serious book about difficult situations and complicated feelings. She's done a good job, although sometimes I did want to give Holly a good whack upside the head. All that self-destructive behavior gets a bit frustrating, and her continued "I don't know why I did that" attitude doesn't help. The ending is bittersweet but hints at the beginnings of some emotional resilience and a chance for a fresh beginning.

Advice on Dumb Boyfriends

2010-05-13T13:47:00.000-07:00

Today, John Green is giving out advice on his vlog Sparks Fly Up. Here's his response to the question: "My boyfriend says I am too smart for him, but I really like him. Should I try to act dumb?"

"I've said it before and I'll say it again. The venn diagram of boys who don't like smart girls and boys you don't want to date is a circle!"

In about three years, this goes on Katrina's wall.

Out of My Mind by Sharon Draper

2010-05-12T12:01:00.000-07:00

"Words have always swirled around me like snowflakes--each one delicate and different, each one melting untouched in my hands.
Deep within me, words pile up in huge drifts. Mountains of phrases and sentences and connected ideas. Clever expressions. Jokes. Love songs.
From the time I was really little...words were like sweet, liquid gifts, and I drank them like lemonade. I could almost taste them. They made my jumbled thoughts and feelings have substance...
Every word my parents spoke to me or about me I absorbed and kept and remembered. All of them....
I have never spoken one single word. I am almost eleven years old.

Out of My Mind did a terrific job of taking me inside the mind of a bright young girl with cerebral palsy and very limited means of communication. Melody cannot speak or control her most of her movements. To converse, she needs to point at letters on her communication board with her thumbs, one slow letter at a time. She cannot eat or drink by herself or use a toilet or bathtub independently. In school she is placed in a special needs class, where for years teachers treat her as though she were intellectually disabled.

While doing some research on Stephen Hawking, Melody discovers the Medi-talker, a computer/communication device which could give her a voice. The Medi-talker lets Melody demonstrate what her parents and caregivers had long suspected, that she is easily one of the brightest children in her school. However, Melody's dream is to actually make friends with the other students and be part of the group of "normal" kids, and her new-found communication skills don't alleviate the other student's discomfort with her physical differences. To most of her peers, Melody still seems downright strange and sometimes even repulsive. Being seen with her in public embarrasses them. When Melody competes to be on her school's Whiz Kids team, the other kids are shocked when she gets in. Being on a school team doesn't lead to the social acceptance that Melody had hoped for, and in a moment of crisis, Melody comes to understand that some people just aren't worth the struggle.

"I'm not trying to be mean--honest--but it just never occurred to me that Melody had thoughts in her head."

Draper is a talented writer and Melody's voice is very believable. Although I'm not really fond of books that set out to "teach" kids about life, I do like books that can help them empathize with difference. I think Draper has nailed that here. Because the truth is, kids like Melody aren't that weird or scary once you get to know them--it's the initial step that's hard. Draper lets us get to know Melody from a position of relative safety, but I'm betting that once readers get to know her, they won't forget. And we'll be one step closer to having that inclusive world that kids all deserve.

Possessions, Book One: Unclean Getaway by Ray Fawkes

2010-05-12T10:00:00.000-07:00

"So... what do you like to do for fun?"
"Gurgazon likes to vomit, cackle, and make things DIE!"

Ahhh, book serendipity. Even though I spend untold hours obsessively reading book reviews, some things still manage to slip past my radar. Like Unclean Getaway by graphic novel writer Ray Fawkes. But one day last week it arrived in our branch, all new and shiny, and after one look I just knew I had to take it home to Ewan. And when we sat down to read it, we laughed so hard that everyone else in the house wandered in to see what we were up to. After it was done, Ewan asked plaintively, "Do we have to take Gurgazon back to the library?". He's never said that about any book before, ever. But he's right. This one's a keeper.

Gurgazon the Unclean is a pit demon embodied as a little girl who looks a bit like a possessed muppet. She has rows of razor-sharp teeth and an unfortunate propensity for green vomit, but when her mouth is shut, she's pretty cute. As the story begins, she is captured and brought to live in the Llewellyn-Vane House for Captured Spirits and Ghostly Curiosities. While the other supernatural inhabitants (including a headless lady ghost, a poltergeist, a haunted juke box and something called the "Ice Field Lights") appear pleasantly domesticated, Gurgazon the Unclean will not be bound. She is unholdable! TREMBLE before Gurgazon! SHUDDER at Gurgazon's unholy power! Gurgazon will have her REVENGE on the world!!!!

Or maybe not.

Unclean Getaway is the chronicle of Gurgazon's increasingly frustrated attempts to escape. But the plot is a minor note. The real pleasure in Gurgazon's story is the perfectly-timed deadpan humour, from the wacky send-up of horror conventions to the way the characters all play off Gurgazon. Ewan and I especially loved Polly, the impulsive, emotional poltergeist who communicates by scrawling on the wall. She tantrums and sulks hilariously when Gurgazon rejects her offer of friendship. The Light is pretty funny as well, with his reasonableness and civility a great counterpoint to Gurgazon's raging fits.

Gurgazon: "Gurgazon will open a hell pit right here and DEVOUR you ALL!"
[PAUSE]
Light: "Listen. We're having a pretty good time carving pumpkins over there. Why not come and join us?"

Ray Fawkes gives an interesting interview about the world of Possessions here.

But remember..."Gurgazon is not entertainment! Gurgazon is your DOOM!".

Foiled by Jane Yolen and Mike Cavallaro

2010-05-06T16:38:00.000-07:00

"The story I have to tell you is not about Avery. It's about me, and fencing, and what I learned while masked. It's about defense and defenders. It's about power, and I don't mean electricity. It's about family.

Most grownups will tell you things are revealed when you take off a mask. But they're wrong, as they often are. Everything was revealed when I put my fencing mask on in Grand Central Station. Everything. "

Jane Yolen, wildly prolific and revered author of fantasy, fairy tale, poetry, myth, and picture book (Owl Moon, anyone? Or that fabulous How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight series?) has just published her debut graphic novel. As one might expect, it's a gem.

Foiled follows Aliera Carstairs, a young woman who has been fencing since childhood and draws great emotional strength and a sense of identity from the ancient sport. A whiff of the mysterious follows her through school, as Avery, a strangely beautiful new boy whose looks contrast with his odd and sometimes cold behavior, becomes her lab partner. Crows seem to follow Aliera at a discreet distance. On weekends Aliera fences and then visits her disabled cousin Caroline to immerse herself in fantasy role-playing about an imagined kingdom. "We play with more passion than it deserves. Than either of us really understood." One day Aliera's mother buys her a used foil at a garage sale, with a strange red jewel on the hilt. And when Avery asks Aliera out on a date and she brings her mask and sword into Grand Central Station, she and Avery step into a fantasy world where Aliera is the Defender of the Seelie Court in the Kingdom of Helfdon, and Avery turns out to be a creature of darkness.

Yolen is adept at hinting of fabulous worlds projecting into the ordinary, and showing teens rising to otherworldly challenges. Hers is the ancient world of faerie, with courtly laws and and deceptive glamours. Foiled maintains a tone of adventure rather than malevolence, however, making it perfect for a younger audience than, say, some of Gaiman's faerie-tinged graphic novels.

Cavallaro's art is very accessible and easy to read visually, but still quite dynamic and expressive. I especially love how the real world is drawn in black and white, reflecting Aliera's colour blindness, and the world of faerie is in vivid, eye-popping colour. It reminds me of the dichotomy between the gritty world of Kansas and the extraordinary world of Oz in The Wizard of Oz. And I like the tiny stars in Aliera's eyes on the book cover. Nice detail.

Foiled leaves lots of room for a sequel. Aliera's story is clearly just beginning. Here's hoping we see more of it soon.

Hearts at Stake by Alyxandra Harvey

2010-05-03T13:21:00.000-07:00

I'm starting to think that the reason my adolescence was so bereft of yummy, adoring, mesmerizingly sexy guys is my lack of vampire blood. Vamps clearly seem to be getting all the good action these days.

Hearts at Stake is a fine addition to the current craze for teen vampire romance. It's funny, adventurous, seductive, and has two smart, enterprising best-friend heroines. I loved the idiosyncratic chemistry and unquestioned loyalty between Solange, born to an ancient vampire family, and Lucy, her human bff. According to an ancient prophecy, Solange is destined to be the next vampire queen. Neither Solange nor the current queen is really enamoured of this idea (Solange's idea of a good time is throwing pots in her backyard ceramics studio, preferably wearing mucky jeans). In fact, Lady Natasha, the current queen, is so offended by the possibility of being dethroned by Solange that she plots to snuff out the entire Drake family to make sure the prophecy will never come to pass. Plot leads to counter-plot, and soon Solange is kidnapped and Lucy roars off to find her with Solange's rather distracting brother Nicolas. And while Nicolas and Lucy are busy hunting her down, Solange and her kidnapper Kieran are finding themselves falling for each other as well.

BTW, I like the fact that the girl on the cover is believably sixteen. I'm getting sick of covers showing twenty-two year old girls posing as fourteen-year-olds (I'm looking at you, Clique!).

Bloomsbury Kids have given us not just one but two book trailers, one for Solange, and one for Lucy:

Every Soul a Star by Wendy Mass

2010-05-03T10:53:00.000-07:00

"And as streams of light fan out behind the darkened sun like the wings of a butterfly, I realize that I never saw real beauty until now."

Let's see if I can sum up my reactions quickly.

1) Pretty good plot.
2) Pretty good characters
3) Pretty good writing style.
4) AMAZING descriptions of the night sky, what you can see in a remote campground with a telescope at night, and why people chase eclipses.

I like books that can make me see the world a bit differently. This is one of them. Now waiting for my next starry night....

"The Name's Mouse. Missile Mouse. "

2010-04-12T12:50:00.000-07:00

I really, really hope that Jake Parker's graphic novel Missile Mouse and the Star Crusher is the launch to a new series. This mouse has "winner" written all over him. He's gutsy. He's cool. He's smart. He's a secret agent. He's got a dangerous reputation, a spaceship, and enough nifty gadgets to rival James Bond. And he's in full, glorious technicolour. Really, when you're sitting down to read a bedtime story to your friendly neighbourhood action/adventure/sci-fi/superhero fan, you couldn't ask for better than this.

The plot--let's just say it involves a weapon of mass destruction. Galaxy-sized mass destruction, not just puny earth-size. The good guys and bad guys are racing to find it first. There is a kidnapped scientist involved. Missile Mouse is on the good team. That's really all we need to know.

What really makes Missile Mouse a standout piece of graphic fiction is its superb artwork. Parker's ability to express character and mood through face and body language is impressive. The characters, aliens and backdrops are all well-delineated and easy to read visually, but they also convey so much dynamic movement, and do it so smoothly. Although Missile Mouse is on one level a take-off on the spy genre and makes full use of its cliches, Parker never lets his heroes feel one-dimensional. The story is fast-paced and exciting, and the overall effect is sophisticated, lively, and lots of fun.

By the way, Missile Mouse and the Star Crusher is actually the second outing for MM. A short Missile Mouse story was featured in the graphic fiction anthology for young people Flight: Explorer, which I also highly recommend.

Here's the Missile Mouse book trailer:

Missile Mouse: The Star Crusher Book Trailer from jakeparker on Vimeo.

And Now for Something Completely Different: The Unfinished Angel by Sharon Creech

2010-04-09T13:37:00.000-07:00

After reading Dawn (see below), Sharon Creech's Unfinished Angel felt light as air. Unfinished Angel is a small, simple, lovingly written story about an untrained angel who lives in a castle in Switzerland and speaks broken English, and a girl from America who can see and talk to him. When Zola, the young girl, discovers a group of mistreated orphans hiding nearby, she informs the angel that they are his responsibility:

"Angel! You're supposed to know everything!"
I am? This is a little shock to me. No, it is a big shock. Because I am not knowing many, many things.
Zola does not look too happy with me. She says, "There are kids there, living there, in that dark and dirty and cold place. A bunch of them. Eight or ten. Maybe more. They're skinny and hungry and dirty. It is extremely tragical."
"Why are they living there?"
"Angel!" Zola holds her head in her hands as if I am giving her a very big headache. "That's what I'm asking you. You're supposed to know these things. You're supposed to fix these things."
Know and fix? How does Zola know these things? Why does she know them and I don't? I am not feeling so good.

Between them, Zola and the angel successfully rescue the orphans and make sure they are welcomed into the community. Creech's world is warm and comforting, and a lot of humour comes from the angel's exasperation at the peculiar ways of humanity. There's a bit of sadness and reality in this book, and a bit of magic too. All in all, it's a lovely, uplifting treat.

Dawn by Kevin Brooks

2010-04-09T12:50:00.000-07:00

"And tomorrow I'm going to start killing God."

There's no question that Kevin Brooks is a powerful writer. He's unafraid of taking chances, and he is relentless when writing about the darkness and squalor of the world his characters populate. His stories are brooding and violent, and feature angry or bewildered misfits with the odds stacked against them. Betrayals are par for the course, and no one comes to save you from your problems just in the nick of time. He's not for everyone, that's for sure. But for those who like that kind of unflinching stare into the heart of darkness, he's an excellent choice.

Dawn Bundy, the heroine of Brooks' latest novel, has big odds stacked against her. Her mother is an unemployed alcoholic who spends her days watching television, and her father disappeared two years previously after raping her in an orgy of alcohol and religious frenzy (while singing hymns about the blood of the lamb). Dawn has no friends and struggles with repressed memories and deep feelings of abandonment. Her closest companions are her two dogs, Jesus and Mary, named after the notoriously melancholy and violent band Jesus and Mary Chain, to which Dawn listens incessantly. She also loves and feels protective of her barely-functional mother. She blames a local Christian sect for taking her father away from her, and fantasizes about killing God, although as she sadly admits early on, "there is no God. He doesn't exist. Which is why it's going to be kind of difficult to kill him."

Into this bleak world Brooks throws two schoolmates who enter Dawn's life with suspicious agendas and a dangerous mobster just out of jail who believes the family owes him money. Dawn is in way over her head, and we expect to see her situation spiral disasterously out of control, which it does. But not at all in the way that I thought it would.

And then, miraculously, Brooks leaves Dawn at the end in a state of inner grace. Love, forgiveness and healing prove to be within her reach, and they transform her. It's not a happy ending, exactly, but at least she has the inner resources to sustain herself as she faces her difficult situation. And how incredible is that, that Brooks can make us feel that Dawn has somehow saved herself even as her world falls apart? It's a testament to his ability to create literature that is soulful and unnerving at the same time.

The Emergent Reader's Laughapalooza: I Am Going! by Mo Willems

2010-03-29T17:27:00.000-07:00

Ewan's sense of humour is very theatrical these days. And he is proudly learning to read all by himself. These two attributes converge to make Mo Willem's Elephant and Piggie Beginning Reader series the go-to books in our house right now. I've become such a fan of this series over the past few years that I'm really starting to wonder if perhaps Mo, although widely known and wildly loved for his many picture books (among them Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! and Knuffle Bunny) may in fact be at his very best when writing for this audience. Because let's face it, learning to read is hard and can feel like a big struggle for many kids. But Elephant and Piggie books are all so full of life and drama and just pure spot-on hilarity, they turn the drudgery of deciphering text into a laughapalooza (I just made that word up).

Willem's latest Elephant and Piggie offering, I Am Going! begins when Piggie, who is hanging out with her friend Elephant, tells him that she is going. Elephant panics. (See the book cover.) Piggie is his best friend! She cannot go! He won't let her! As he becomes increasingly hysterical ("Go tomorrow! Go next week! Go next month! GO NEXT YEAR!!!" he wails), and then sulky (fine, he decides, he'll go too! Watch him go! Look at him--he's going! Piggie's not the only one who can go!) he forgets to ask the big question--where the heck is Piggie going, anyway?

Hmmm. It turns out she's going to lunch.

Oh.

Now Ewan's swanning around the house shouting "I WON'T LET YOU GO!" and "GO TOMORROW! GO NEXT WEEK!..."et cetera, et cetera. And then laughing like crazy. I'm sure people who don't know Elephant and Piggie think he's being very strange. But Ewan, Mo and I, we're in on the joke. And we love it.

Here's Mo, admitting that Elephant and Piggie are his favourite characters:

The Total Tragedy of a Girl Named Hamlet by Erin Dionne

2010-03-27T12:59:00.000-07:00

This is the first book I've read by Erin Dionne, and it reminded me a lot of books by Lisa Yee, especially the Millicent Min series. (That's a compliment, by the way.) I definitely think this book would appeal to Yee fans, although it could be read by kids who are slightly older as well.

Hamlet Kennedy's parents are a) Shakespeare fanatics and b) oblivious to the possibility that if you name your daughter "Hamlet" she will likely get a lot of grief from her fellow eighth graders. That's around the level of angst Hamlet has to deal with--social anxiety triggered by things like her genius seven year old sister being placed in eighth grade with her, and being afraid that her best friend has a crush on her, and not wanting to play the role of Puck in the "Shakespeare Celebration" at school because she's kind of saturated by the Bard at home. When her parents come to her school in full Elizabethan costume, and get her classmates to march around the room to a tambourine and chanting in iambic pentameter, well, you can just imagine. It's all frustrating and embarrassing, and to Hamlet it seems like a Very Big Deal. But like Yee, Dionne puts in lots of positive counterpoints; Hamlet and her sister Desdemona really do care about each other, her friends are goofy but nice, the crush thing turns out to be a misunderstanding, and her parents become more aware of their "embarrassment potential" by the end and adjust their behavior accordingly. Although, personally, I never worry too much about embarrassing my daughter. I figure that's my perogative as a Mom.

By the way, thanks to my daughter, I can tell that the sneakers Hamlet is wearing are Converse. I know because we just shelled out for exactly the same pair for Katrina (in lemon yellow rather than turquoise). So really, her parents can't really be that out of it.

The Value of Children's Books

2010-03-26T09:01:00.000-07:00

"I'd argue that great children's books and a rich experience of visual storytelling prepare kids for every future, digital or otherwise."

As more and more of our culture's visionaries predict The Demise of the Book, Pixie Stix Kids Pix explains the obvious; what we stand to lose if reading great books falls out of cultural favour. I loved this article--read it here.

Me, Myself and Ike by K.L. Denman

2010-03-24T14:08:00.000-07:00

I think what makes Me, Myself and Ike special is how, despite treating a very dark, even tragic subject, adolescent schizophrenia, seriously and well, it manages to read so easily. I read this book effortlessly in under three hours, but I thought about it for the rest of the day. This book is very accessible to younger teens and tweens, but isn't at all dumbed down. I believed it utterly.

Me, Myself and Ike follows the mental deterioration of a good kid. Christopher, or Kit, our first person narrator, has had a happy life, with a warm family, a talent for basketball, a few good friends and a girlfriend he cares about. But when we meet him, these good relationships are mostly memories. The only friend in Kit's life now is Ike, a nasty person who pops around when no one else is there and whom Kit often seems afraid of. When Kit sees a documentary on Otzi the prehistoric Iceman, Ike somehow convinces him that the only way he can make his life worthwhile is to become a modern day iceman, allowing himself to freeze in the mountains for the benefit of future generations of scientists. Kit quickly becomes increasingly paranoid and delusional as he prepares himself for his death. We soon realize that Ike is a product of Kit's mental illness, and fortunately Kit's plan to become the Iceman of the Future is thwarted by his brother, who manages to find and save him at the last minute. Kit ends up hospitalized and talking to a psychiatrist. We don't know for sure that Kit's mind can become healthy again, but we are left hoping for the best.

Denman approaches the character of Kit with immense empathy and respect. Kit isn't at all alien or scary, although there are times when we are afraid for him. I love how Denman has humanized the face of such an isolating disease, and made us relate to Kit so fully even as we see that he is not well. For many of us, schizophrenics are those dirty people on the street, asking for change, muttering to themselves and occasionally striking out violently. Denham shows us a person who has schizophrenia, rather than a schizophrenic who used to be a person. Me, Myself and Ike is a great read for thoughtful people, tweens on up.

Hate List by Jennifer Brown

2010-03-24T12:14:00.000-07:00

Reading Jennifer Brown's striking debut novel Hate List made me understand something about the way I read teen fiction. I read it like a parent. Even while part of me is getting in to the teen protagonist's mind and experience, another part is keeping a close eye on the parent/child dynamic and how it affects the storyline, even when that's not the primary thrust of the plot. After all, when the adults, with all of their supposed maturity and life experience, can't cope with their teen's life, what's going to save that kid from sinking? We parents are always being told that we will only be influential with and important to our children up to a certain age, and then their peers will take over as primary influences. But what I'm inferring from the teen fiction that I've read lately is that parents are still foundational in teen lives. Good news for the real-life me. Sometimes scary for the reader me.

I must admit that the parents in Hate List have a doozy of a parenting situation on their hands. Part of what Jennifer Brown does so spectacularly in this book is to set up an almost impossible situation, one that leaves both teens and adults reeling. She then makes the teens instrumental in hauling themselves out of the wreckage and taking the first step forward, while the older generation is still flailing. It's slow and painful, and not all the teens can do it. But it's compelling to watch, and Brown makes both the success and failure of it feel convincing.

Hate List is told from the point of view of Valerie Leftman, a high school senior returning to school after being wounded by a bullet in the leg. The bullet was fired by her boyfriend Nick in the school cafeteria, during a rampage which left a number of students and one teacher dead or critically injured. Valerie's boyfriend shot her, perhaps by accident, as she thrust herself between him and one of his intended victims.

Valerie and Nick were a target for school bullies. Nick chose his shooting victims from their "Hate List", a notebook Valerie kept recording the names of everyone who had been abusive or annoying to them. Valerie and Nick often talked about wishing these people were dead, although Valerie had no idea that Nick was serious about putting those thoughts into action. And despite what he has done, Valerie can't think of Nick, who killed himself that day as well, as a villain. She mourns him and misses him desperately. How can she do that after he killed all those people and devastated so many families? To what extent does she share responsibility for the carnage that occured? Is she a victim, a villain or a hero? You can bet that everyone in this book has an opinion on the subject--and it's not always what Valerie expects.

What I liked best about Hate List was watching Valerie lurch back into that school where it seems like everyone now hates her and blames her. I liked the wary and unexpected collaboration she forms with Jessica, the girl she took the bullet for. I liked how brave Valerie was, and how scared, all at the same time. And I liked how head-on Hate List tackles a big question--is it possible to eradicate hate from our lives?

Here's the moody and kinda haunting book trailer:

Creature ABC by Andrew Zuckerman

2010-03-18T08:01:00.000-07:00

Librarian, blogger and book reviewer Adrienne Furness once titled a blog post "A is for Alphabet, B is for Boring..." and I knew exactly what she meant. They're out there by the zillions and jillions and squillions, those alphabet books, and either they're all the same ("x is for xylophone, z is for zipper") or they become so complicated trying to be different that young kids can't understand them--and older kids know their letters already, thank you very much, and can get mighty insulted when offered an ABC book. It's hard to kick some life into this exhausted genre, and many ABC books end up seeming blatantly pedagogical. Creature ABC is a magnificent exception to this glut of dull, copycat ABCs. This book is GENIUS! Simple, crisp, focused, fascinatingly detailed. Andrew Zuckerman approaches his ABCs with freshness and sophistication and pure artistry. It's a book I'd look at even if I didn't have kids, and yet it's clear on every page that he's got his audience firmly in mind. You could read this book to a two-year-old, no problem. And they'd want to read it again.

I could spend hours staring at Zuckerman's photo of an elephant's foot. I've truly never seen any image like it, anywhere. It makes me feel like I'm seeing an elephant for the first time ever. You can see the cracks and scratches in it's toenails, the remarkable contrasting of mottled skin colours, the weird surface texture. Parts of the skin look reptilian, with dense bumpy scales. Other clumps stick out like the papillae on a tongue. Zuckerman lets you see each short, coarse hair sticking out of the leg and foot, each wrinkle and bump in the skin. He even lets you see the effect of weight and gravity on this huge creature, with the clean white background emphasizing the foot's sturdy shape. It's almost sculptural. There is a definite sense of drama throughout this book, with many shots highlighting motion or expression. Shape and texture are everywhere. The cumulative effect is brilliantly arresting.

Zuckerman has kept the text to a minimum, with each letter presented in large black type (in both capital and lowercase) on one page and the name of the animal in the same large clear type on the next. This layout allows him two photographs per letter, and it also allows the child the pleasure of guessing at the name of the animal in the picture before the page is turned and the word is finally presented.

Coincidentally, this week I read an article in Horn Book Magazine by Leonard Marcus entitled "Click! Photography as Picture Book Art". Marcus opens with the provocative statement, "It's not by chance that the Caldecott Medal has never gone to a photographically illustrated book." He posits that, despite some brilliant photography-based children's books by the likes of, say, Tana Hoban or Walter Wick, the children's book community still sees photography more as craft than art. I'm wondering if Creature ABC will be the book to finally break through that glass ceiling.

Andrew Zuckerman's website is well worth a visit, and really expresses his artistic vision. Enjoy.

Love is Hell by: Melissa Marr, Scott Westerfield, Justine Larbalestier, Gabrielle Zevin, and Laurie Faria Stolarz

2010-03-11T10:58:00.000-08:00

Doesn't that cover just scream R*O*M*A*N*C*E?

This collection of short stories by some of the most uber-cool names in teen fiction today has a bit of a misleading title. None of the stories actually take place in H-E-double-toothpicks, as my mother used to call it. They all, however, have a strong supernatural component (with one exception, Westerfield's story "Stupid Perfect World", which is science fiction all the way). Short story anthologies can be a bit dodgy, but this is a really solid collection with consistently smart and entertaining writing.

I came away with two special favourites. The first was the aforementioned "Stupid Perfect World", which takes place in a high school class the distant future. The class is called "Scarcity Class", and it is a sort of modified history class-what life was like before modern technology.

"It wasn't a real course with grades and everything, so only the most pathetic meekers worked hard at it. The rest of us just showed up and tried not to fall asleep. Nobody wanted to fail, of course, because that meant repeating: another long semester of watching all those olden-day people starving and being diseased. At least regular History has battles; Scarcity was just depressing."

For their term projects, everyone in the class has to pick an obsolete physical condition and live with it for two weeks. Things like hunger, cancer, river blindness, the common cold. Going for the unusual, our protagonist, Kieran, chooses sleep. Real REM sleep, every single night for two whole weeks.

"When I got home, I asked Dad if I could synthesize a bed for my room. He immediately put on his serious face and sat me down.
'Sixteen is too young to have a bed in your room, Kieran. Remember when we talked about this, how a little bioframe tweak can make those feelings less...persistent?'
I groaned. 'This isn't about that, Dad...It's for a school project.'
He laughed too hard in a really embarassing way, actually slapping his thigh. 'Nice try, buddy.'"

So, how does sleeping four hours a night on a pile of coats in his bedroom lead Kieran to true love? Read the book to find out!

My other favourite story was Melissa Marr's "Love Struck". A modern selkie story where the selkie is male and his human companion, Alana, is a city-dwelling, college-bound teenager, it has an intriguing premise and an unusually unexpected and satisfying ending. Like "Love Struck", for the most part, the stories in Love is Hell should warm reader's hearts.

Goth Girl Rising by Barry Lyga

2010-03-10T11:55:00.000-08:00

"Handle you? God, Kyra--no one can handle you! I certainly can't. I'm surprised anyone could!"

In The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl, Barry Lyga first introduced us to the prickly Goth Girl, a heroine who managed to be both kick-ass and damaged at the same time--sort of like Xena, Warrior Princess would be if she had childhood traumas and a stormy family life. (Actually, maybe she did--I never watched her show.) Goth Girl Rising continues Kyra's story, beginning from her release from the psychiatric hospital that her father committed her to because she was suicidal. I'm so glad Lyga wrote this sequel because, well, unresolved endings are sophisticated and all, but sometimes you just love the characters so much you don't want to let them go until you know they've got what it takes to get through life. For me, Goth Girl is like that. I want to know that she's going to be okay, because Lyga wrote her so well I'm half-convinced she's real.

I'm fascinated by Goth Girl's anger. She is a young woman truly full of rage--rage at her mother for dying, at her father for living, at Fanboy for going incommunicado while she was hospitalized, and at her friend Jecca for making out with her in private but never in public. She loves her rage. She feeds it and strokes it and credits it for keeping her strong in the face of her mother's death and the subsequent unravelling of her life and family. Goth Girl is so gutsy and outspoken that she'll say just about anything to just about anyone, and when she's revved up on rage, it's like fights on the old Batman TV show. KAPOW! BAM! ZOWIE! She's not one to repress, that's for sure. She's not one to forgive, either. It's a strange kind of thrill to see grown adults--particularly her teachers and principal-crumple up as she rolls all over them. And to wonder, incredulously, just how far she will go to get the revenge she thinks Fanboy deserves. Her father, I just felt sorry for.

Goth Girl Rising is so satisfying, of course, because Lyga finally takes her beyond that rage and into understanding. He needs to, really, because the truth is that Kyra is still suicidal sometimes, that with all of her anger she's alienated and in deep pain. Her anger is a double-edged sword, bolstering her sense of purpose and direction but blocking her ability to heal. When Kyra drops her constant anger, in a funny way she seems more emotionally honest. Not that the anger was dishonest--it was real enough--but it wasn't letting anything else through. It's a sign of Lyga's excellence as a writer that we care so much about such an angry kid. Lyga never treats Goth Girl with anything less than complete respect.

Here's a link to a Goth Girl interview with Barry Lyga. I like his answer to the question of how he manages, as a man, to write the character of a teen girl so convincingly. Does he have an inner Goth Girl? No, apparently, he just has a lot of women friends, "and when they talk to me, I listen to them." Right on, Barry!

Meet Ed, Ned, Ted and Bob, Those Rhyming Dust Bunnies!

2010-03-04T13:34:00.000-08:00

"Bob, no..."LOOK OUT! HERE COMES A BIG SCARY MONSTER WITH A BROOM!"does not rhyme with anything, really. "

Man, those rhyming dust bunnies, they get me every time!

Jan Thomas is a writer I will always read with anticipation. Her books are so perfect for storytimes, for one thing. No one ever stops paying attention half way through. The illustrations are always strongly coloured and a bit goofy and wild, but contained within strong black lines that make everything clear and easy to see. They're so eye-catching. She's also got a great sense of comic timing for young children. I love how she introduces a joke and lets it build and build, and then, whammo! Everyone's rolling in the aisles.

Actually, both Rhyming Dust Bunnies and it's brand new sequel, Here Comes the Big, Mean Dust Bunny! play off of the same joke. Ed, Ned, and Ted like to "rhyme...all the time!" Bob's the odd guy out. When Ted asks his friends what rhymes with "car", Ed and Ned suggest "jar" and "tar". Bob suggests "LOOK!" and is gently corrected. ("No, Bob..."LOOK!" does not rhyme with car!") Of course, at the end of the story it turns out that Bob has not been playing the game at all, but is anxiously on the lookout for danger. The multi-hued dust bunnies flee the broom just in the nick of time.

In Here Comes the Big, Mean Dust Bunny a new dust bunny, the traditional dustlike grey (but with rather untraditional, monster-like sharp teeth) joins in the game. But the Big Mean Dust Bunny turns out to be not so nice (surprise, surprise), chasing and sitting on Ed, Ned and company. Finally the cat sits on HIM! (Look at that. He is flat. Like a mat. Drat that cat!) The others save him and he is reformed. ("My face feels weird." "It's called a SMILE!")

Thomas emphasizes the rhyming words by presenting them in brightly coloured font. Bob's non-rhyming words are coloured differently, to emphasize, as Sesame Street would say, that One of These Things Is Not Like the Others. These books could be considered especially educational for preschoolers, since rhyming is one of the ways that young children learn about language. With Thomas and her dust bunnies, learning is FUN!

My Mommy is in America and She Met Buffalo Bill by Jean Regnaud and Emile Bravo

2010-03-04T12:42:00.000-08:00

It's kind of interesting to see how libraries catalogue certain books. My Mommy is in America...was originally published in France as a juvenile book. In France it has won several children's book awards. It's now been translated into several different languages, including English, and is travelling the world. My library system in Canada has placed it in the adult graphic book section, where kids are never going to find it. What's going on with that? Are Canadian kids really so much less sophisticated than their French counterparts? And if that's so, shouldn't we be bringing them more of this great stuff, not hiding it from them?

My Mommy is in America...gives you a child's viewpoint that feels just so authentic. It's artful in the subtle way it conveys deep and unnamed emotions. It's moving, but never indulgent. Small moments of pleasure and even humour counterpoint the understated sadness.

The story follows the life of young Jean during his kindergarten year. Its emotional arc deals with the confusion Jean feels around his absent mother. He hasn't seen her in a long time. His businesslike father has told him that Mommy has gone on a long trip. But why doesn't she write or call, and when will she be back? When he and his brother visit their grandparents, their grandparent's friends all look at them sadly and moan "poor things!" and "how sad!". Jean is embarrassed by being different than the other kids who all have Mommies living with them, and afraid that he is starting to forget what his Mommy was really like.

Jean becomes even more confused when his neighbour, Michele, first swears him to secrecy and then starts reading him postcards from around the world that she claims come from Jean's Mommy! In the end it is Michele who vengefully tells Jean the truth about his Mommy's disappearance during a quarrel in which she also tells Jean that there is no Father Christmas. Jean runs back to his house sobbing, but can't tell anyone about his loss of innocence. The code of silence in his household is too strong.

In the end, I tell myself that Mommy is like Father Christmas... I'm too old now to believe in her.

Here's a sample of Bravo's beautiful artwork, which complements the story perfectly.

A Blast From the Past: Melvin Monster by John Stanley

2010-02-27T13:23:00.000-08:00

Any fan of retro comics has gotta love Drawn and Quarterly's reprint of the first three Melvin Monster comic books. Part of The John Stanley Library series, this book reflects Drawn and Quarterly's high production values. The cover is elegantly textured, the pages are sewn in, the paper is thick and smooth. You get the feeling that this book is meant for collectors, not kids. But I'm not one to let that stop me--I took this beauty home to Ewan last night and we read the whole thing in one sitting, at his insistence. And big sister Katrina was hanging around listening in, too.

What a hoot! Here's the back blurb:

"Melvin is a good little monster boy who just wants to be helpful, go to school, and do as he's told--all things that are forbidden in the town of Monsterville. His days are spent trying to avoid getting eaten by his pet crocodile Cleopatra and tricking the local teacher witch, Miss McGargoyle, into accepting him into The Little Black Schoolhouse. Everything he does disappoints his parents, Baddy and Mummy! And it only gets worse when the monster collector discovers poor little Melvin."

It sounds like it could be a bit cutesy but it's not at all. My favourite character is Melvin's guardian demon, Damon, who is frankly a bit of a prima donna. The eternally optimistic and hungry Cleopatra is great too. And the only word for Melvin himself is irrepressible. Here are some samples:

By the way, I never realized how prolific a writer John Stanley was. Not only did he create Melvin, but he also wrote the long-running Little Lulu series and the Nancy and Sluggo cartoons, as well as writing scripts for many other famous characters. Genius. Sheer, inexhaustible genius.

Never Too Much Supernatural Romance: Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater

2010-02-24T08:54:00.000-08:00

I have been a follower of Kaleb Nation's quirky blog TwilightGuy for about a year now. Today I popped in and found out that he's just launched ShiverGuy, a new blog which will give us a male perspective on reading Shiver. I'm looking forward to hearing his thoughts.

I can see why Shiver has been so frequently compared to Twilight. It's a romance between a quiet high school girl and a haunting, tormented werewolf. It touches all the same chords. And, as Kaleb pointed out, it's popularity is snowballing much like Twilight's did. However, to me it stands very much apart from all the Twilight wannabees in the teen book world right now. Shiver is truly a book that stands on its own merits and would have found a rapt audience even without Twilight paving the way.

I found Shiver to be a more introspective book than the adrenaline-charged Twilight. Stiefvater's writing style is quiet and poetic. The language is so beautiful I found myself re-reading certain passages just to linger over the sound and imagery. The care Stiefvater obviously takes with the craft of writing is mirrored by her character Sam, the werewolf love interest in Shiver, who introduces Grace to the poetry of Rilke and writes love songs for her.

Stiefvater's characterization is subtle and interesting. Sam and Grace tell their stories in alternating chapters, and their relationship feels intimate in a way that I don't often experience when reading teen fiction. Heroes and villains are equally humanized by the end of Shiver. Stiefvater's depiction of the wolf world is just as complex. In many ways Sam and his pack seem more attuned to the natural world than Meyer's werewolves, and it calls to them more inevitably. It is wrenching to watch Sam fight for his humanity, and fascinating to see how some of the other werewolves adapt to and even embrace their cycles of change.

There is one scene in Shiver that I found truly disturbing, involving Sam's parents and his memories of their violence towards him when, as a young child, he first became a wolf. This scene, which is recalled twice, makes me hesitant to recommend this book to the tween crowd who lapped up Twilight. I think Shiver is a more mature story, for a slightly older audience.

Here is a link to Stiefvater's beautifully created trailer video for Shiver. (She's an artist and musician, too--a ridiculous amount of talent for one person to have.) I think it captures the mood of the book. Enjoy.

Smile by Raina Telgemeier

2010-02-22T12:28:00.000-08:00

Graphic novelist Raina Telgemeier is creating quite a niche for herself writing smart, funny, relatable stories for the tween girl crowd. Katrina and I both zoomed through her adaptations of the Babysitter's Club series, which were so much fun. Her latest book, Smile, is written in very much the same style, but as an added bonus, is in colour!

Unlike BSC, Smile is based on Raina's own life. Specifically, it begins when she loses two front teeth in a fall, and ends several years (and many dental visits) later. It is a saga of false teeth and braces. Gum surgery also rears its ugly head. It's also about family, friends and boys. It's about looking weird just when how you look starts to matter to you. In other words, the stuff of normal, everyday, middle-class girl life.

The world of teen fiction can be intense, but Smile feels like a breath of fresh air. It's light, understanding and makes you laugh. Often. At things you might have gone through yourself. Like Bill Watterson, Jules Feiffer or Jeff Smith, Raina Telgemeier has a gift.

Hamlet and Ophelia: A Novel by John Marsden

2010-02-18T10:51:00.000-08:00

"What the fuck do you want?"

(Hamlet)

Australian teen writer John Marsden gives us a masterfully in-your-face prose retelling of Shakespeare's Hamlet. I haven't read the original version for a few decades now, so I can't comment on how precisely Marsden's version follows it, but all the main plot points are certainly represented (murder, ghost, procrastination, madness, and a surfeit of gruesome deaths). Marsden's retelling is very accessible, but he's also made this story hot. This is a Hamlet who prowls around the castle at twilight watching women undress, and an Ophelia who imagines what Hamlet looks like naked, and moans and writhes in her bed at night. Hamlet's relationship with Ophelia is highly sexually charged, but also highly frustrated (something many teen readers will no doubt sympathize with).

And yes, something is still rotten in the state of Denmark. Treachery, corruption, and decay abound. Marsden captures the right brooding, moody atmosphere, seething with undercurrents of repressed emotion. He closely adapts much of Shakespeare's original wordplay, which adds richness to the reading experience. The juxtapositioning of these passages with Marsden's own highly contemporary style jolts the reader and adds to the story's edgy quality.

"There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio, or in mine, but somehow we are expected to make it all intelligible, to carve statues from air and books from bark. It is too much. This is the proper work of gods and we are not gods, indeed all of our human errors come from the vain belief that we are."

"Here's your ball," Horatio said.

I'd Really Like to Eat a Child by Sylviane Donnio

2010-02-17T07:32:00.001-08:00

The blog Seven Impossible Things turned me on to Dorothee de Monfreid, picture book illustrator, a few weeks ago, and I'm glad. I took I'd Really Like to Eat a Child home to Ewan (age 6) and it was a big hit with us both.

This droll book has fun with two common picture book tropes--finicky eating and comparative sizes. Achilles is a young crocodile whose parents are trying to get him to eat a banana for breakfast. Nothing doing. Today he wants to eat a child. His parents try to talk him out of this crazy notion ("What an idea, my little Achilles!...children don't grow on banana trees, only bananas do, and that's what I have for breakfast!") and even bake him a big, yummy chocolate cake to distract him, but Achilles is steadfast. It's child or nothing.

As a stubborn, hungry Achilles wanders down to the riverfront, teeth gleaming, he spots a child! What he doesn't figure out is that this kid is about four times his size, so when he bares his teeth and goes "raah!", his intended victim playfully catches him by the tail and gives him a tickle. Coochie coochie coo! How undignified. Undeterred, Achilles escapes and decides to go eat the bananas so he can grow...and when he's big, then he will eat a child!

I love characters with ambition. Hilarious.

This book was originally published in France under the title Je mangerais bien un enfant.

How to Say Goodbye in Robot by Natalie Standiford

2010-02-12T08:13:00.000-08:00

"See that guy?" Anne pointed out a schlub sporting a cardigan and shaggy sideburns. At his side stood a surprisingly perky brunette. "That's Clayton. He's the head of the Neurobiology department. His wife is a bed stylist."...

"What's a bed stylist?" I asked.

"She works for homewares, when they shoot their catalogues," Anne said. "Her whole, entire career consists of arranging the beds so they're artfully crumpled in the pictures. Like someone just had great sex in them."

"That's her job?"

"Yeah."

"For real."

"Yeah."

We snickered...

Well, I just want to know why no one told me this job existed when I was thinking about my career options!

Actually, the bed stylist is pretty typical of the characters we meet in How to Say Goodbye in Robot. "Quirky" is a word that comes up a lot when people are describing this book. I mean, look at the telephone on the cover. What teen in their right minds would be using a phone like that? Oddball teens, that's who. Teens who don't fit in with the crowd. Loners who are disparaged by their families and peers with names like "ghost boy" and "robot girl". Unlikely friends who communicate with each other partly via a late-night talk radio show on an oldies station. Where we, incidentally, get to know plenty of quirky old folks too.

It's Myrna. I believe in ghosts, Herb. I swear to God, one night when my late husband was in the hospital, not recuperating from his third and fatal heart attack, I was lying alone in my bed, and the ghost of Elvis came to comfort me. I use the word comfort as a euphemism, Herb. I'm sure all the ladies out there know what I'm talking about...

But I digress.

What makes How to Say Goodbye in Robot so real and good is that layered under its quirks and irony is an understated sadness. The story captures the complicated friendship of high school students Beatrice (robot girl) and Jonah (ghost boy). These two aren't very experienced at having friends; Jonah in particular hasn't made a new friend since third grade when his mother and twin brother were killed in a car accident and he withdrew from the world in grief. Somehow, Bea and Jonah find sympathetic spirits in each other. Ultimately, though, their closeness isn't nearly enough to save Jonah when he undergoes another devastating loss. In the end he simply disappears, leaving robot girl haunted by his absence.

I must admit the ending made me cry.

Standiford writes just beautifully here. The helplessness of loss is evoked so well. The family dynamics are heartbreaking. Relationships are broken; some heal, others don't. Even treasured friendships can be fragile.

Someday, I tell myself, the memories will fade away. Catso will just be a toy. A lock of white hair won't make me jump. I'll stare at the picture of the boy in the Casper mask, struggling to remember why I loved him.

That's how I imagine it, anyway.

Girl Power?: The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart

2010-02-03T11:37:00.000-08:00

Matthew had called her harmless. Harmless. And being with him made Frankie feel squashed into a box--a box where she was expected to be sweet and sensitive (but not oversensitive); a box for young and pretty girls who were not as bright or powerful as their boyfriends. A box for people who were not forces to be reckoned with.

Frankie wanted to be a force.

Frankie Landau-Banks has a mind like a steel trap. She comes from a monied family and is getting an excellent education at an ivy-league private boarding school called Alabaster High. She has also, very suddenly and recently, turned pretty. Pretty enough to attract a popular, handsome and affectionate boyfriend. Life should be good, no?

Well, actually, no. Frankie is dissatisfied. Very dissatisfied. She loves her boyfriend Matthew but realizes early on that he, as she puts it, underestimates her. Worse, he excludes her from significant parts of his social and intellectual life (such as it is). When Frankie realizes that he and his coterie of male friends are part of a secret club that her father had once belonged to, the Loyal Order of the Basset Hounds, she rebels against being left out of the old boy's network-in- the-making. Inspired by her class in "Cities, Art and Protest" and her reading of Michel Foucault (I told you she had a good brain) she decides to infiltrate the group. This is when the story really gets cooking.

Frankie manages to wrest control of the Loyal Order from its Alpha Dog, anonymously taking on a brilliant and utterly subversive leadership role. She also manages to locate the Society's secret and long-missing Disreputable History of the Loyal Order of the Basset Hounds by decoding the clues in the Society's oath of allegiance. She organizes a spectacular series of pranks and protests which Matthew and his friends obediently carry out, never suspecting who they are taking orders from. And she leads the real Alpha Dog on an increasingly frantic search to see who has usurped his identity.

This book has been described by some as a girl-power comedy, but I didn't read it quite that way. I found Matthew's reaction when he discovers in the end what Frankie has done quite ugly. In fact, I felt all along that Matthew was all wrong for Frankie. He was never going to "get" her, and he never really wants to. The misogyny these boys display without ever realizing it (or being called on it, until Frankie comes around), is unsettlingly convincing. In a comedy they would learn their lesson, but here they remain unchanged. Only Frankie grows in this story.

Complicated Deceptions: Liar by Justine Larbalestier

2010-02-03T07:36:00.000-08:00

I was born with a light covering of fur.
After three days it had all fallen off, but the damage was done. My mother stopped trusting my father because it was a family condition he had not told her about. One of many omissions and lies.
My father is a liar and so am I.
But I'm going to stop. I have to stop.
I will tell you my story and I will tell it straight. No lies, no omissions.
That's my promise.
This time I truly mean it.

I've just finished reading Liar and I have to stop and catch my breath. Justine Larbalestier's latest book is freaking amazing!

First of all, there's the intricately crafted plot. Presented to us by Micah, our narrator, in three sections:

1) Telling the Truth
2) Telling the True Truth, and
3) The Actual Real Truth

Each section circles back on the others, adding layers of detail which confuse and alter the storyline until it resembles a kaleidescope. This is a story in which anything is possible, but nothing is certain. And when I say anything is possible, I mean anything. Is Micah a compulsive liar, or is she crazy? Why do her parents reject her? Is she a killer? Is she actually human, or is she something else altogether? Not to give anything away, but let me just say that the more Micah's story accretes, the more bizarre and riveting it gets. Micah may be the ultimate unreliable narrator, but she gets under your skin all the same.

Then there are all the rich themes. Truth versus fantasy. Identity. The complications of the female body. Sexuality and its link to the feral. Guilt. The uneasy relationship between love and aggression. This book takes them all on superbly, darkly, entertainingly. And the ending is so satisfyingly open.

This is what I thought would happen. This is what could have happened. This is what did happen.

Gentlemen by Michael Northrop

2010-01-27T10:23:00.001-08:00

"Unbelievable," I said, and I'd chosen that word special."

When I first saw this book I thought the cover shot was of a boy putting on a hoodie. But something didn't seem quite right--I looked again, and I realized. It's a body bag this kid is disappearing into. Holy creepy covers, batman!

I predict this gritty story will find many fans. It's the kind of book that a reluctant reader will be racing to finish, but a literate reader will find equally absorbing. That's quite a feat for this first-time novelist. I wouldn't be surprised if Gentlemen received serious attention from award committees this year.

The narrative voice is a standout. Micheal (his parents didn't spell it correctly on the birth certificate) is a tough teenage character who hangs out with "hard cases" and sees school as time stuck behind a desk waiting for a diploma. Although not academically inclined, he is very astute, and I got sucked right into his point of view. When one of his group of four friends goes missing after an outburst at school and their English teacher begins an imaginative series of lessons on Crime and Punishment, Micheal actually starts reading the book, and it disturbs him. Micheal begins to wonder if Tommy is dead rather than disappeared, and if his English teacher is the killer.

This book takes a long hard look at friendship and the formation of personal ethics. It's intelligent and driven, as suspenseful as Hitchcock at his best, and compelling right up to the end. Despite the dark places Gentlemen took me to, I never tired of being inside teen Micheal's head. Michael Northrop is now officially on my author radar.

"A Boschean Delight": Half World by Hiromi Goto

2009-10-14T17:15:00.000-07:00

"Half World is Boschean delight a la Goto: a magical, madcap, and deliciously creepy tale of tribulations, terror and triumph; a girl-power adventure in screaming jelly-toned colours"

Nalo Hopkinson

First of all, I am in love with Gillian Tamaki's incredible cover for this book. I can't even display the whole thing--it wraps around the back and also around the inside flaps--but it's so artful and rich. Tamaki's work has always seemed to me to have an echo of those elegant old japanese wood-blocks, but done with a modern aesthetic and energy. Her cover captures the psychology of the book, with its mirroring imagery and its folkloric elements (the crow and rat helpers who help the heroine navigate the dark dangers of her quest, the shabby girl who is transformed in a magical moment). Tamaki has also illustrated the interior of Half World with a series of eerie black-and-white drawings which suit the story beautifully.

It is fitting that the cover art for Half World packs such a punch, since Goto's text is so vividly visual and even sensual in a grotesque, surrealist kind of way. Early on there are references to the work of Frida Khalo, Escher, and Hieronymous Bosch, in particular the painting depicting the bizarre and disturbing Hell in the tryptich The Garden of Earthly Delights. A modern rendition of Bosch's Hell, Half World, is the landscape for the bulk of the story's action.

Melanie Tamaki, the story's heroine, lives in the Realm of Flesh (our earth) but does not know that she was actually conceived in Half World, a stepping stone between the Realm of Flesh and the Realm of Spirit. Half World is where we go after death, to work through our earthly traumas and arrive in the Realm of Spirit peaceful and purified. However, the cosmos is out of order and each of the realms is degenerating; Half World in particular has become a nightmare, with people endlessly reliving their worst moments, those strong enough to extend their cycle becoming psychologically twisted and losing their humanity. Cruelty and depravity abound, particularly in the form of a malevolent and powerful being called Mr. Glueskin. When Mr. Glueskin summons Melanie's mother back to Half World after 14 years on earth, Melanie follows in a terrifying attempt to rescue her. Accompanied by animal helpers (crows and a jade rat amulet which can come to life) Melanie finds that she has a power herself; after all, she is alive in a way that the suffering denizens of Half World are not, and as a living being, is capable of making choices that can change the future. As befits a dark fairy tale quest, Melanie's final choice of compassion has healing magic powerful enough to restore balance to the three broken realms.

Goto's writing is exciting, inventive, full of peril, and, to quote Hopkinson again, "deliciously creepy". The fantastical elements are grounded by serious themes of self-sacrifice and courage in the face of evil. This is a book that should appeal to fans of Neil Gaiman or Charles de Lint, both of whom have given Goto rave reviews. I've also seen it compared to the film Pan's Labyrinth. And, for such a "deliciously creepy" book, the ending is wonderfully redemptive. Perfect for teens who like their spines chilled just a little.

Let's Do Nothing! by Tony Fucile

2009-09-25T12:49:00.000-07:00

This book is a blast. I can't wait to try it out for a school-age storytime. Let's Do Nothing involves two very active boys who find that they can't turn off their imaginations, even when they try to sit still. The pictures are absolutely hilarious--check out the page where Frankie tries to Do Nothing by imagining that he is the Empire State Building, "Tall. Heavy. You've been sitting still for years and years. No silly pigeon or puny dog could rattle the likes of you, O Majestic One.". And then King Kong starts climbing up, and ...wait for it...does he rescue Fay Wray? No! He puts on Frankie's glasses and makes a goofy, big-eyed face! Now that is what I call seeing the world from a child's point of view.

The book trailer does a good job of capturing the spirit of the book. Take a look:

Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco X. Stork

2009-09-21T12:45:00.000-07:00

"Shot with spiritualism, laced with love, and fraught with conundrums, this book, like Marcelo himself, surprises."

Booklist

What a brilliant past few years it's been for teen fiction. It feels like the quality of writing for teens is absolutely exploding right now, accelerating at a pace that seems as heightened as technology. Marcelo in the Real World definitely fits right into this upward trend. It's a work of real literature, thematically complex, emotionally nuanced, and highly engrossing. What really sets Marcelo and the Real World apart for me is the narrative voice. Marcelo is such an unusual and pleasing narrator; thoughtful, observant, highly idiosyncratic . His rich inner life includes a deep interest in religion, "internal music" which only he can experience, and a love of working with horses. Marcelo is on the autism spectrum, which gives his thoughts a slight formal quality that I liked.

In a way, this is a loss of innocence story. Marcelo has a happy and successful life, going to a special school where his specific needs are accomodated and he can work with the horses he loves. His mother is an understanding and nurturing presence in his life. His father, however, wants him to move outside his comfort zone and begin to function in "the real world", and he arranges for Marcelo to have a summer job in his law firm's mail room. The summer does indeed challenge Marcelo in ways that he (or his father) had not foreseen. He experiences great moral confusion, and also experiences envy, longing, and compassion for the first time. He makes strong connections with some people, while others try to manipulate him. And he is given the gift of "the truth"--an understanding of the ethical ambiguity of his father's world that he did not have before.

This would make a great discussion book for a teen book club, since so many good questions could be drawn out of it. Marcelo's a pleasure to get to know, and I think he makes the "real world" of fiction a more interesting place.

Words to My Life's Song by Ashley Bryan

2009-09-10T13:19:00.000-07:00

Ashley Bryan's Words to My Life's Song made me catch my breath with its flat-out beauty. Not only because it is lavishly illustrated with Bryan's own art, although this certainly adds to the stun factor. But Words is the kind of lovingly designed book where everything, from the photography to the illustration to the layout and even the creative use of typeface, feels meticulously crafted and gorgeously inviting. It seems like the book's text is not so much being illustrated as it is being enveloped in the visual. Bryan has been a presence in the field of children's book illustration for many years now, but somehow I had never before appreciated the full impact of his body of work. It is now clear to me that Bryan's contribution to children's book illustration can stand alongside the best artists in that field. This is a book I want in my own library so I can read it over and over, and absorb its spirit on a regular basis.

Words to My Life's Song describes Bryan's artistic education and influences, beginning from an early age. We learn that he "published" his first books in kindergarten as part of a class project ("I got hugs, kisses and applause from family and friends for these books. The teacher called these 'rave reviews'..."). His parents encouraged his artistic interests, brought home paper for him, and sent him to free community art classes. As an adult he attended the Cooper Union School of Art and Engineering, and later, drafted into the U.S. army and sent to work the dockyards in Glasgow, he attended Glasgow School of Art part-time. After the war he completed his art studies at Cooper Union, then, troubled by his war experiences, sought answers doing a philosophy degree at Columbia University. Still later he studied landscape painting and fresco in Maine, then spent several years in France and Germany learning languages at University and developing his painting on his own.

His introduction to the publishing world came in 1962, when an editor at Atheneum books visited his studio in the Bronx and was impressed by the books Bryan had illustrated as art projects, and especially by the variety of styles at his disposal. And lucky for us that she made that visit, since Bryan has been illustrating and writing for Atheneum pretty much non-stop ever since, to our great benefit.

There is a sense of graciousness in Bryan's telling of his life's story. Incidents which in another person might have inspired bitterness, such as poverty or racism, are acknowleged but not dwelt on. Instead, Bryan's life story is filled with a sense of good fortune, generosity, and joy in creation. One of my favourite children's book blogs, Seven Impossible Things, asks the authors and illustrators they interview which three people they would most like to share a glass of rich red wine with, if they had anyone alive to pick from. If I were asked that question, Ashley Bryan would be my first pick, easy.

King of the Screwups by K.L. Going

2009-09-02T10:23:00.000-07:00

"Give it a rest, Allan," Pete says. I'm not trying to be anybody's father, and if your son happens to be looking for one, maybe you should ask yourself why that is."

Dad laughs.

"If my son happens to be looking for one, I don't think he's going to find it in a cross-dressing disc jockey who lives in a trailer park."

Well, you never know...

K.L. Going wrote a book a few years ago that just knocked my socks off. Fat Kid Rules the World, it was called, and I remember reading it on the subway and snorting with laughter, so much that people around me broke the ignore-each-other subway etiquette and actually asked what I was reading. This book felt so fresh to me. I loved the fat ungainly narrator with his loser life and his outsider's point of view. He spent the book nurturing his inner Eeyore, but still, it was madly engaging and I fell for him hard. On the strength of my beloved Fat Kid, I went on to read Going's next three novels, which all disappointed me (just me, mind you. They were all well reviewed, but somehow I found they lacked the flavour of her debut). With King of the Screwups, however, Going has gotten my attention once more.

One of the things I think she does best is write oddball characters, get down deep into them, and make them real. Not just real, but worthwhile. She really makes you root for her good guys, no matter what their problems. In King of the Screwups, it's not really the protagonist who's a screwup, although he has certainly been brainwashed into thinking he is. No, it's his parents who are the losers in this story. Behind their successful worldly facades, they are too wrapped up in themselves to really do the hard work of parenting. Liam believes he is letting them down, but really, from my point of view, they are the ones with the problem. And I say "they" deliberately because, even though Liam's Mom is a much more sympathetic character than his cold-hearted Dad, when push comes to shove she chooses to turn her back on her son. The really sad part of this story is that Liam loves his parents so much, both of them, and trusts them too. It breaks my heart. The arc of the journey, for Liam, is not just figuring out what his strengths are, but also tearing down that curtain behind which his Dad is hiding and bellowing "I AM OZ, THE GREAT AND POWERFUL! BECOME LIKE ME OR BE FOREVER BANISHED FROM MY SIGHT!". And trying to get his Mom to step up to the plate like an adult and do her job, which is being a parent. To him. Not to her husband, needy as he is. His turn is over now. Time to grow up.

The other thing I think Going does best is be funny. And despite the serious subject matter, King of the Screwups is a very successful comedy. Liam's Dad kicks him out of the house by chapter 2, so despite the massive room he takes up in Liam's brain, he's not actually around much. Liam ends up living in his gay glam-rock uncle's small-town trailer home. "Aunt Pete" is a great character, flamboyant, comfortable with himself, a bit out of his depth with Liam at times but definitely capable of giving him love and support. If anyone can turn Liam's life around, it's Pete. I loved watching it happen, and I loved the band mates who pitch in to help. King of the Screwups is a book that I'd like to see a sequel to--I've grown attached to Liam and his new family, and now that he's beginning to blossom, I'd love to see how far he can go.

At Forty-Five, I'm Finally Ready: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

2009-08-26T12:52:00.001-07:00

My parents gave me my own copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a child. This was actually unusual for them--they gave me remarkably few books considering what a ravenous reader I was. I was a real library kid.

The irony was that, at age 9, Huck totally stumped me. I read some of it--I was the kind of kid who would read a cereal box if there wasn't a book in front of me--but I didn't like it. It made me feel uncomfortable. I didn't know how to process it, and I really couldn't relate to Huck. I mean, Tom Sawyer, sure, he acted wild, but I knew he was a regular kid underneath, and that Becky Thatcher would eventually tame him even if Aunt Polly couldn't. But Huck lived on riverboats and in forests, didn't wash, had a seriously evil father, and seemed unlikely to become a banker or a lawyer when he grew up. I was the kind of kid who would have begged the Widow Douglas to take me in and civilize me if I were in Huck's shoes, but Huck rejected civilization to the end. What's more, he saw through it, or partly did, or should have, in ways that I wasn't ready for. His life was edgy, and I was scared to live it, even vicariously.

It's taken me quite a while to return to Huck, but this summer at the cottage my husband read it aloud to me over the course of two weeks. And it was so wonderful--we were intensely engaged and it provoked much discussion and emotion between us. There were times when the tension ran so high I couldn't listen any more, and other times when I wouldn't let Doug stop reading. I loved the outrageously brilliant language and the sense of place and Twain's ability to be so side-splittingly funny but also so dark and daring. There is a sense of innovation that comes through fresh and strong, even though Huckleberry Finn is over a hundred and twenty years old. This is definitely a book which rewards reading aloud, especially by a reader who is good with dialect and expression.

But what kept us both glued to the book and kept it alive for us afterwards was the way Huck's story was twined in with Jim, the runaway slave. Jim unsettles everything and turns what might be a "boy's own" style adventure into something real and serious. Jim is the vehicle for Huck's growth but also shows us Huck's limits. Their relationship is complicated and I, as a modern reader, often felt that Huck was letting Jim down in ways he didn't seem to even understand. The episodes where Huck would end up leaving Jim alone on the raft (or worse) without a thought for days or even weeks at a time drove me insane. Likewise the nightmare fact that their trip wasn't taking them in the direction that Jim needed to go to attain his goal of freedom, and Huck wasn't doing much about it. The times when Huck considered turning Jim in to the authorities felt like real threats to me as well. As much as Huck and Jim are companions, Huck just never seemed intellectually capable of challenging the idea of slavery as a social institution. So frustrating! But there is a genuine closeness between them despite all this, and I found it moving how Jim slowly lets Huck know more about his inner life, his wife and children and how constantly they are in his thoughts.

Reading it now, I understand why this was over my head thirty-five years ago. I'm left wondering--is this really a children's book?

Jerk, California by Jonathan Friesen

2009-08-20T12:11:00.000-07:00

"Heaven laughs at me every day."

Jerk, California is a debut novel for Jonathan Friesen, and one of the books I read over my recent vacation. It was a great holiday read, with an interesting hook (a narrator with Tourette Syndrome), and a vacation-appropriate road trip plot. To me, this book had a really masculine feel--not in a "macho" sense, exactly, but in a more philosophical, "what makes one a man" sense, which I think is one of the interesting questions of our time. There is a strength to this book and to its protagonist Jack, and it is a pleasure to watch that strength unfold. Jerk, California is a quest story that digs deeper than the where-can-I-find-some-self-esteem journey that many teen books take us on. Jack's journey is about character.

Jerk, California tells the story of 17-year-old Sam Carrier, a young man with Tourette Syndrome who feels like, and is generally treated as, a freak. Sam, with his twitches and jerks and occasional bouts of spontaneous cursing (usually at the worst possible time) is incredibly self-conscious and pessimistic about himself in terms of relationships--any relationships, not just romantic ones. Sam's father James died in an accident when Sam was a baby, and his mother, perhaps the only person on earth who loves him, nevertheless fails to protect him from his nasty obsessive-compulsive stepfather Bill. Sam's self-loathing comes largely from Bill's and his classmates' jeering reactions to his Tourettes but also from the stories he has been told about his dead father, who, according to his stepfather, was a worthless, womanizing alcoholic who wouldn't even hold his infant son.

Everything begins to change for Sam the day he leaves home to work for George, a master gardener and his late father's best friend. George insists that Sam's real name is Jack Keegan (Bill had changed Jack's name when he entered their family--can you say "control freak"?) and he wants Jack to hear a different version of his family past. George dies, but before he does, he plans a road trip where Jack can meet some of his father's friends and finally his grandmother, who lives in Jerk, California. Jack takes the trip along with a young woman, Naomi, who has some tough problems of her own to work out and needs some thinking time.

I love how Friesen peopled his book with such strongly drawn and believable characters. Not just Jack, whose head we truly enter, but so many minor characters feel very real. Jack's stepfather is a horrid person who beats his wife and spews bile at Jack on a daily basis, but Jack carries around two childhood memories of this man's kindness to him, and these small memories help us, and Jack, see Bill in a more complex way. James turns out to have been a loving family man, a fact that proves tremendously healing for Jack. In fact, one of the few things I found difficult to accept in this book was how Jack's mother could have chosen two such opposite men to marry--James, with his kindness, strength, and principles, and Bill, with his petty mind and explosive temper. You'd think that her relationships with James would have made her quicker to blow the whistle on Old Bill. When she finally does leave, baby son in tow, Bill is finally seen as the real failure in terms of manhood. As Jack finally realizes, Bill is "all lies".

Jerk, California makes me want to read more Friesen. I'll be waiting in line for the next book.

Hanging Out with the Dream King: Conversations with Neil Gaiman and His Collaborators

2009-08-17T11:09:00.001-07:00

I've suspected for a long time now that one of the chief pleasures of being a creative person must be getting to work with other creative types. This book of interviews confirms my suspicion. Joseph McCabe has assembled an extremely readable and comprehensive look at Gaiman's body of work and working style based on interviews with twenty-seven artists, writers and musicians that Gaiman has collaborated with over the span of his career. Some, such as Tori Amos, Terry Pratchett, or Dave McKean, are widely known, while others are more obscure (such as Todd Klein, who has lettered many of Gaiman's comics). Taken together, they present an intelligent, detailed, generously illustrated, and intimate portrait of Gaiman's literary legacy-in-the-making.

I predict this is both the first and last time a book on my blog gets to claim this honour, but Hanging Out with the Dream King was nominated in its year of release (2005) for both the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild Award.

Could I be going Goth?

Swim the Fly; or, How to See Your First Real Live Naked Girl

2009-08-01T12:23:00.001-07:00

There's something wonderfully cinematic about Swim the Fly. I'm seeing teen movie written all over this. Perhaps it's not surprising since Don Calame, new to writing novels, has a previous career as a screenwriter. Like Melvin Burgess's notorious Doing It, this is sort of a romantic comedy. But guy-style. And with some major embarrassment thrown in.

Swim the Fly is the story of three best friends with a long-standing tradition of challenging themselves each summer to reach a group goal. This summer, their goal is "to see a real live naked girl for the first time". Since they are too young to get into a strip club and none of them has ever had a date, it's not immediately obvious just how this is going to happen for them. Let's just say their progressive attempts to succeed get more and more ridiculous, and when they finally reach their goal, it's hilarious. I've never seen reality crash into fantasy quite so hard.

The book's title refers to another challenge the book's narrator, Matt, sets for himself, which is to swim the 100-yard butterfly against the girl of his dream's buff ex-boyfriend. To impress her, natch. Never mind that he's the worst swimmer on his team, the ex-boyfriend is solid muscle, and the butterfly is a killer stroke. Never mind that the girl of his dreams is an airhead who keeps calling him Mark instead of Matt. Never mind that his coach never seems to do any actual coaching...well, you get the picture. Wouldn't be a challenge if it were easy, right?

Along with being so funny, this book is affectionate and warm. The characters are convincing, and we really like them, even when they do dumb things. And they grow, but we don't get hit over the head with their "life lessons". It's all kept light and lively. I think I'd go so far as to say that this is my favourite summer romance of this year. And I'm not even a teen boy.