"The Name's Mouse. Missile Mouse. "

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

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

"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

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

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

"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

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.